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Table of Contents | |
Section | Page |
Start of eBook | 1 |
Title: The Heptalogia | 1 |
THE HEPTALOGIA | 1 |
SWINBURNE’S POETICAL WORKS | 1 |
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN | 1 |
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN | 1 |
THE HEPTALOGIA | 1 |
JOHN JONES’S WIFE 375 | 1 |
THE PERSON OF THE HOUSE 400 | 1 |
SONNET FOR A PICTURE 421 | 1 |
SPECIMENS OF MODERN POETS | 1 |
OR | 1 |
A CAP WITH SEVEN BELLS | 2 |
JOHN JONES’S WIFE | 2 |
I | 2 |
I | 2 |
II | 2 |
III | 2 |
IV | 3 |
V | 3 |
VI | 3 |
VII | 3 |
II | 3 |
I | 3 |
II | 3 |
III | 3 |
IV | 3 |
V | 3 |
III | 3 |
I | 3 |
II | 4 |
III | 4 |
IV | 4 |
V | 4 |
VI | 4 |
VII | 4 |
VIII | 4 |
IX | 4 |
X | 4 |
XI | 5 |
XII | 5 |
XIII | 5 |
XIV | 5 |
XV | 5 |
XVI | 5 |
XVII | 5 |
XVIII | 5 |
XIX | 5 |
XX | 6 |
XXI | 6 |
XXII | 6 |
XXIII | 6 |
XXIV | 6 |
XXV | 6 |
XXVI | 6 |
XXVII | 6 |
IV | 7 |
I | 7 |
II | 7 |
III | 7 |
IV | 7 |
V | 7 |
VI | 7 |
VII | 7 |
VIII | 7 |
IX | 7 |
X | 8 |
XI | 8 |
XII | 8 |
XIII | 8 |
V | 8 |
I | 8 |
II | 8 |
III | 8 |
IV | 8 |
V | 8 |
VI | 9 |
VII | 9 |
VIII | 9 |
IX | 9 |
THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE | 9 |
THE PERSON OF THE HOUSE | 10 |
THE ACCOMPANIMENTS | 10 |
THE KID | 10 |
I | 11 |
II | 11 |
III | 11 |
IDYL CCCLXVI | 11 |
LAST WORDS OF A SEVENTH-RATE POET | 12 |
SONNET FOR A PICTURE | 19 |
NEPHELIDIA | 19 |
Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne
Release Date: April 19, 2006 [EBook #18210]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK the Heptalogia ***
Produced by Paul Murray, Diane Monico, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
By Algernon Charles Swinburne
Taken from the collected poetical works
of Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Vol. V
I. POEMS AND BALLADS (First Series).
II. Songs before Sunrise, and songs of two Nations.
III. Poems and ballads (Second
and Third Series), and songs of the
SPRINGTIDES.
IV. TRISTRAM of LYONESSE, the tale
of BALEN, ATALANTA in CALYDON,
Erechtheus.
V. Studies in song, A century
of ROUNDELS, sonnets on English
dramatic
poets,
the Heptalogia, etc.
VI. A midsummer Holiday, ASTROPHEL, A Channel passage and other poems.
THE HEPTALOGIA
By
Algernon Charles Swinburne
1917
First printed (Chatto), 1904
Reprinted 1904, ’09, ’10, ’12
(Heinemann), 1917
London: William Heinemann, 1917
* * * * *
THE HIGHER PANTHEISM IN A NUTSHELL 373
THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE 396
LAST WORDS OF A SEVENTH-RATE POET 406
NEPHELIDIA 422
* * * * *
THE HEPTALOGIA
THE SEVEN AGAINST SENSE
THE HIGHER PANTHEISM IN A NUTSHELL
One, who is not, we see: but one, whom we see
not, is:
Surely this is not that: but that is assuredly
this.
What, and wherefore, and whence? for under is over
and under:
If thunder could be without lightning, lightning could
be without thunder.
Doubt is faith in the main: but faith, on the
whole, is doubt:
We cannot believe by proof: but could we believe
without?
Why, and whither, and how? for barley and rye are
not clover:
Neither are straight lines curves: yet over is
under and over.
Two and two may be four: but four and four are
not eight:
Fate and God may be twain: but God is the same
thing as fate.
Ask a man what he thinks, and get from a man what
he feels:
God, once caught in the fact, shows you a fair pair
of heels.
Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which
is which:
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk
in a ditch.
More is the whole than a part: but half is more
than the whole:
Clearly, the soul is the body: but is not the
body the soul?
One and two are not one: but one and nothing
is two:
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be
true.
Once the mastodon was: pterodactyls were common
as cocks:
Then the mammoth was God: now is He a prize ox.
Parallels all things are: yet many of these are
askew:
You are certainly I: but certainly I am not you.
Springs the rock from the plain, shoots the stream
from the rock:
Cocks exist for the hen: but hens exist for the
cock.
God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not,
we see:
Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take
it, is dee.
* * * * *
AT THE PIANO
Love me and leave me; what love bids retrieve me?
can June’s fist
grasp May?
Leave me and love me; hopes eyed once above me like
spring’s sprouts
decay;
Fall as the snow falls, when summer leaves grow false—cards
packed
for storm’s play!
Nay, say Decay’s self be but last May’s
elf, wing shifted, eye sheathed—
Changeling in April’s crib rocked, who lets
’scape rills locked fast
since frost breathed—
Skin cast (think!) adder-like, now bloom bursts bladder-like,—bloom
frost bequeathed?
Ah, how can fear sit and hear as love hears it grief’s
heart’s cracked
grate’s screech?
Chance lets the gate sway that opens on hate’s
way and shews on shame’s
beach
Crouched like an imp sly change watch sweet love’s
shrimps lie, a
toothful in each.
Time feels his tooth slip on husks wet from Truth’s
lip, which drops
them and grins—
Shells where no throb stirs of life left in lobsters
since joy thrilled
their fins—
Hues of the prawn’s tail or comb that makes
dawn stale, so red for our
sins!
Years blind and deaf use the soul’s joys as
refuse, heart’s peace as
manure,
Reared whence, next June’s rose shall bloom
where our moons rose last
year, just as pure:
Moons’ ends match roses’ ends: men
by beasts’ noses’ ends mete sin’s
stink’s cure.
Leaves love last year smelt now feel dead love’s
tears melt—flies
caught in time’s mesh!
Salt are the dews in which new time breeds new sin,
brews blood and
stews flesh;
Next year may see dead more germs than this weeded
and reared them
afresh.
Old times left perish, there’s new time to cherish;
life just shifts
its tune;
As, when the day dies, earth, half afraid, eyes the
growth of the moon;
Love me and save me, take me or waive me; death takes
one so soon!
BY THE CLIFF
Is it daytime (guess),
You that feed my soul
To excess
With that light in those eyes
And those curls drawn like a scroll
In that round grave guise?
No or yes?
Oh, the end, I’d say!
Such a foolish thing
(Pure girls’ play!)
As a mere mute heart,
Was it worth a kiss, a ring,
This? for two must part—
Not to-day.
Look, the whole sand crawls,
Hums, a heaving hive,
Scrapes and scrawls—
Such a buzz and burst!
Here just one thing’s not alive,
One that was at first—
But life palls.
Yes, my heart, I know,
Just my heart’s stone dead—
Yes, just so.
Sick with heat, those worms
Drop down scorched and overfed—
No more need of germs!
Let them go.
Yes, but you now, look,
You, the rouged stage female
With a crook,
Chalked Arcadian sham,
You that made my soul’s sleep’s
dream ail—
Your soul fit to damn?
Shut the book.
ON THE SANDS
There was nothing at all in the case (conceive)
But love; being love, it was not (understand)
Such a thing as the years let fall (believe)
Like the rope’s coil dropt from
a fisherman’s hand
When the boat’s hauled up—“by
your leave!”
So—well! How that crab writhes—leg
after leg
Drawn, as a worm draws ring upon ring
Gradually, not gladly! Chicken or egg,
Is it more than the ransom (say) of a
king
(Take my meaning at least) that I beg?
Not so! You were ready to learn, I think,
What the world said! “He loves
you too well (suppose)
For such leanings! These poets, their love’s
mere ink—
Like a flower, their flame flashes—a
rosebud, blows—
Then it all drops down at a wink!
“Ah, the instance! A curl of a blossomless
vine
The vinedresser passing it sickens to
see
And mutters ’Much hope (under God) of His wine
From the branch and the bark of a barren
tree
Spring reared not, and winter lets pine—
“’His wine that should glorify (saith
He) the cup
That a man beholding (not tasting) might
say
“Pour out life at a draught, drain it dry, drink
it up,
Give this one thing, and huddle the rest
away—
Save the bitch, and be hanged to the pup!”
“‘Let it rot then!’ which saying,
he leaves it—we’ll guess,
Feels (if the sap move at all) thus much—
Yearns, and would blossom, would quicken no less,
Bud at an eye’s glance, flower at
a touch—
‘Die, perhaps, would you not, for her?’—’Yes!’
“Note the hitch there! That’s piteous—so
much being done,
(He’ll think some day, your lover)
so little to do!
Such infinite days to wear out, once begun!
Since the hand its glove holds, and the
footsole its shoe—
Overhead too there’s always the sun!”
Oh, no doubt they had said so, your friends—been
profuse
Of good counsel, wise hints—“where
the trap lurks, walk warily—
Squeeze the fruit to the core ere you count on the
juice!
For the graft may fail, shift, wax, change
colour, wane, vary, lie—”
You were cautious, God knows—to what use?
This crab’s wiser, it strikes me—no
twist but implies life—
Not a curl but’s so fit you could
find none fitter—
For the brute from its brutehood looks up thus and
eyes life—
Stoop your soul down and listen, you’ll
hear it twitter,
Laughing lightly,—my crab’s life’s
the wise life!
Those who’ve read S. T. Coleridge remember how
Sammy sighs
To his pensive (I think he says) Sara—“most
soothing-sweet”—
Crab’s bulk’s less (look!) than man’s—yet
(quoth Cancer) I am my size,
And my bulk’s girth contents me!
Man’s maw (see?) craves two things—
wheat
And flesh likewise—man’s gluttonous—damn
his eyes!
Crab’s content with crab’s provender:
crab’s love, if soothing,
Is no sweeter than pincers are soft—and
a new sickle
Cuts no sharper than crab’s claws nip, keen
as boar’s toothing!
Yet crab’s love’s no less
fervent than bard’s, if less musical—
’Tis a new thing I’d lilt—but
a true thing.
Old songs tell us, of all drinks for Englishmen fighting,
ale’s
Out and out best: salt water contents
crab, it seems to me,
Though pugnacious as sailors, and skilled to steer
right in gales
That craze pilots, if slow to sing—“Sleep’st
thou? thou dream’st
o’ me!”
In such love-strains as mine—or a nightingale’s.
Ah, now, look you—tail foremost, the beast
sets seaward—
The sea draws it, sand sucks it—he’s
wise, my crab!
From the napkin out jumps his one talent—good
steward,
Just judge! So a man shirks the smile
or the stab,
And sets his sail duly to leeward!
Trust me? Hardly! I bid you not lean (remark)
On my spirit, your spirit—my
flesh, your flesh—
Hold my hand, and tread safe through the horrible
dark—
Quench my soul as with sprinklings of
snow, then refresh
With some blast of new bellows the spark!
By no means! This were easy (men tell me) to
say—
“Give her all, throw your chance
up, fall back on her heart!”
(Say my friends) “she must change! after night
follows day—”
No such fool! I am safe set in hell,
for my part—
So let heaven do the worst now he may!
What they bid me? Well, this, nothing more—“Tell
her this—
’You are mine, I yours, though the
whole world fail—
Though things are not, I know there is one thing which
is—
Though the oars break, there’s hope
for us yet—hoist the sail!
Oh, your heart! what’s the heart? but your kiss!’
“Then she breaks, she drops down, she lies flat
at your feet—
Take her then!” Well, I knew it—what
fools are men!
Take the bee by her horns, will your honey prove sweet?
Sweet is grass—will you pasture
your cows in a fen?
Oh, if contraries could but once meet!
Love you call it? Some twitch in the moon’s
face (observe),
Wet blink of her eyelid, tear dropt about
dewfall,
Cheek flushed or obscured—does it make
the sky swerve?
Fetch the test, work the question to rags,
bring to proof all—
Find what souls want and bodies deserve!
Ah, we know you! Your soul works to infinite
ends,
Frets, uses life up for death’s
sake, takes pains,
Flings down love’s self—“but
you, bear me witness, my friends!
Have I lost spring? count up (see) the
winter’s fresh gains!
Is the shrub spoilt? the pine’s hair impends!”
What, you’d say—“Mark how God
works! Years crowd, time wears thin,
Earth keeps good yet, the sun goes on,
stars hold their own,
And you’ll change, climb past sight of the world,
shift your skin,
Never heeding how life moans—’more
flesh now, less bone!’
For that cheek’s worn waste outline (death’s
grin)
“Pleads with time still—’what
good if I lose this? but see—’”
(There’s the crab gone!) “’I
said, “Though earth sinks,"’” (you
perceive?
Ah, true, back there!) your soul now—“’"yet
some vein might be
(Could one find it alive in the heart’s
core’s pulse, cleave
Through the life-springs where “you” melts
in “me")—
“’"Some true vein of the absolute soul,
which survives
All that flesh runs to waste through”—and
lo, this fails!
Here’s death close on us! One life? a million
of lives!
Why choose one sail to watch of these
infinite sails?
Time’s a tennis-play? thank you, no, fives!
“‘Stop life’s ball then!’
Such folly! melt earth down for that,
Till the pure ore eludes you and leaves
you raw scoriae?
Pish, the vein’s wrong!” But you, friends—come,
what were you at
When God spat you out suddenly? what was
the story He
Cut short thus, the growth He laid flat?
Wait! the crab’s twice alive, mark! Oh,
worthy, your soul,
Of strange ends, great results, novel
labours! Take note,
I reject this for one! (ay, now, straight to the hole!
Safe in sand there—your skirts
smooth out all as they float!)
I, shirk drinking through flaws in the bowl?
Or suppose now that rock’s cleft—grim,
scored to the quick,
As a man’s face kept fighting all
life through gets scored,
Mossed and marked with grey purulent leprosies, sick,
Flat and foul as man’s life here
(be swift with your sword—
Cut the soul out, stuck fast where thorns prick!)
—Say it let the rock’s heart out,
its meaning, the thing
All was made for, devised, ruled out gradually,
planned—
Ah, that sea-shell, perhaps—since it lies,
such a ring
Of pure colour, a cup full of sunbeams,
to stand
(Say, in Lent) at the priest’s hand—(no
king!)
Blame the cleft then? Praise rather! So—just
a chance gone!
Had you said—“Save the
seed and secure souls in flower”—
Ah, how time laughs, years palpitate, pro grapples
con,
Till one day you shrug shoulders—“Well,
gone, the good hour!”
Till one night—“Is God off now? or
on?”
UP THE SPOUT
Hi! Just you drop that! Stop, I say!
Shirk work, think slink off, twist friend’s
wrist?
Where that spined sand’s lined band’s
the bay—
Lined blind with true sea’s blue,
as due—
Promising—not to pay?
For the sea’s debt leaves wet the sand;
Burst worst fate’s weights in one
burst gun?
A man’s own yacht, blown—What? off
land?
Tack back, or veer round here, then—queer!
Reef points, though—understand?
I’m blest if I do. Sigh? be blowed!
Love’s doves make break life’s
ropes, eh? Tropes!
Faith’s brig, baulked, sides caulked, rides
at road;
Hope’s gropes befogged, storm-dogged
and bogged—
Clogged, water-logged, her load!
Stowed, by Jove, right and tight, away!
No show now how best plough sea’s
brow,
Wrinkling—breeze quick, tease thick, ere
day,
Clear sheer wave’s sheen of green,
I mean,
With twinkling wrinkles—eh?
Sea sprinkles winkles, tinkles light
Shells’ bells—boy’s
joys that hap to snap!
It’s just sea’s fun, breeze done, to spite
God’s rods that scourge her surge,
I’d urge—
Not proper, is it—quite?
See, fore and aft, life’s craft undone!
Crank plank, split spritsail—mark,
sea’s lark!
That grey cold sea’s old sprees, begun
When men lay dark i’ the ark, no
spark,
All water—just God’s fun!
Not bright, at best, his jest to these
Seemed—screamed, shrieked,
wreaked on kin for sin!
When for mirth’s yell earth’s knell seemed
please
Some dumb new grim great whim in him
Made Jews take chalk for cheese.
Could God’s rods bruise God’s Jews?
Their jowls
Bobbed, sobbed, gaped, aped the plaice
in face:
None heard, ’tis odds, his—God’s—folk’s
howls.
Now, how must I apply, to try
This hookiest-beaked of owls?
Well, I suppose God knows—I don’t.
Time’s crimes mark dark men’s
types, in stripes
Broad as fen’s lands men’s hands were
wont
Leave grieve unploughed, though proud
and loud
With birds’ words—No! he won’t!
One never should think good impossible.
Eh? say I’d hide this Jew’s
oil’s cruse—
His shop might hold bright gold, engrossible
By spy—spring’s air takes
there no care
To wave the heath-flower’s glossy bell!
But gold bells chime in time there, coined—
Gold! Old Sphinx winks there—“Read
my screed!”
Doctrine Jews learn, use, burn for, joined
(Through new craft’s stealth) with
health and wealth—
At once all three purloined!
I rose with dawn, to pawn, no doubt,
(Miss this chance, glance untried aside?)
John’s shirt, my—no! Ay, so—the
lout!
Let yet the door gape, store on floor
And not a soul about?
Such men lay traps, perhaps—and I’m
Weak—meek—mild—child
of woe, you know!
But theft, I doubt, my lout calls crime.
Shrink? Think! Love’s
dawn in pawn—you spawn
Of Jewry! Just in time!
OFF THE PIER
One last glance at these sands and stones!
Time goes past men, and lives to his liking,
Steals, and ruins, and sometimes atones.
Why should he be king, though, and why
not I king?
There now, that wind, like a swarm of sick drones!
Is it heaven or mere earth (come!) that moves so and
moans?
Oh, I knew, when you loved me, my soul
was in flowerage—
Now the frost comes; from prime, though, I watched
through to nones,
Read love’s litanies over—his
age was not our age!
No more flutes in this world for me now, dear! trombones.
All that youth once denied and made mouths at, age
owns.
Facts put fangs out and bite us; life
stings and grows viperous;
And time’s fugues are a hubbub of meaningless
tones.
Once we followed the piper; now why not
the piper us?
Love, grown grey, plays mere solos; we want antiphones.
And we sharpen our wits up with passions for hones,
Melt down loadstars for magnets, use women
for whetstones,
Learn to bear with dead calms by remembering cyclones,
Snap strings short with sharp thumbnails,
till silence begets tones,
Burn our souls out, shift spirits, turn skins and
change zones;
Then the heart, when all’s done with, wakes,
whimpers, intones
Some lost fragment of tune it thought
sweet ere it grew sick;
(Is it life that disclaims this, or death that disowns?)
Mere dead metal, scrawled bars—ah,
one touch, you make music!
Love’s worth saving, youth doubts, but experience
depones.
In the darkness (right Dickens) of Tom-All-Alone’s
Or the Morgue out in Paris, where tragedy
centuples
Life’s effects by Death’s algebra, Shakespeare
(Malone’s)
Might have said sleep was murdered—new
scholiasts have sent you pills
To purge text of him! Bread? give me—Scottice—scones!
Think, what use, when youth’s saddle galls bay’s
back or roan’s,
To seek chords on love’s keys to
strike, other than his chords?
There’s an error joy winks at and grief half
condones,
Or life’s counterpoint grates the
C major of discords—
’Tis man’s choice ’twixt sluts rose-crowned
and queens age dethrones.
I for instance might groan as a bag-pipe groans,
Give the flesh of my heart for sharp sorrows
to flagellate,
Grief might grind my cheeks down, age make sticks
of my bones,
(Though a queen drowned in tears must
be worth more than Madge elate)[1]
Rose might turn burdock, and pine-apples cones;
My skin might change to a pitiful crone’s,
My lips to a lizard’s, my hair to
weed,
My features, in fact, to a series of loans;
Thus much is conceded; now, you, concede
You would hardly salute me by choice, John Jones?
[Footnote 1: First edition:— And my face bear his brand—mine, that once bore Love’s badge elate!]
* * * * *
Said a poet to a woodlouse—“Thou
art certainly my brother;
I discern in thee the markings of the
fingers of the Whole;
And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut
and smother,
In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions
of a soul.
“Yea,” the poet said, “I smell thee
by some passive divination,
I am satisfied with insight of the measure
of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic
passion,
Had the aeons thought of making thee a
man, and me a louse.
“The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption
and digestion,
Food and famine, health and sickness,
I can scrutinize and test;
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of
question,
And by proof of balanced answer I decide
that I am best.”
“Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain
kind of awe stick
To the skirts of contemplation, cramped
with nympholeptic weight:
Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch
of solar caustic,
On the forehead of his spirit feels the
footprint of a Fate.”
“Notwithstanding which, O poet,” spake
the woodlouse, very blandly,
“I am likewise the created,—I
the equipoise of thee;
I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand
lie
The inane of measured ages that were embryos
of me.
“I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with
consequences,
And the air I breathe is coloured with
apocalyptic blush:
Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,
And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick
leagues of human slush.
“I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic
surgings,
Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through
a spongious kind of blee:
And earth’s soul yawns disembowelled of her
pancreatic organs,
Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt
catalepsy.
“And I sacrifice, a Levite—and I
palpitate, a poet;—
Can I close dead ears against the rush
and resonance of things?
Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of
the heroic;
Earth’s worst spawn, you said, and
cursed me? look! approve me! I
have wings.
“Ah, men’s poets! men’s conventions
crust you round and swathe you
mist-like,
And the world’s wheels grind your
spirits down the dust ye overtrod:
We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the
Christlight,
And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and
our skunk smells sweet to God.
“For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand
vital handles,
Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through
the sieve of thunderstorms,
Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet
of angels;
And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs,
being worms.
“Friends, your nature underlies us and your
pulses overplay us;
Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can
ye sing right and steer wrong?
For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,
Must be kneaded into drastics as material
for a song.
“Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through
humanitarian passion
See that monochrome a despot through a
democratic prism;
Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,
Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but
a stronger-smelling chrism.
“Pass, O poet, retransfigured! God, the
psychometric rhapsode,
Fills with fiery rhythms the silence,
stings the dark with stars
that blink;
All eternities hang round him like an old man’s
clothes collapsed,
While he makes his mundane music—and
he will not stop, I think.”
* * * * *
IDYL CCCLXVI
1. The monthly nurse 2. The caudle 3. The sentences
1. The monthly nurse
The sickly airs had died of damp;
Through huddling leaves the holy chime
Flagged; I, expecting Mrs. Gamp,
Thought—“Will the woman
come in time?”
Upstairs I knew the matron bed
Held her whose name confirms all joy
To me; and tremblingly I said,
“Ah! will it be a girl or boy?”
And, soothed, my fluttering doubts began
To sift the pleasantness of things;
Developing the unshapen man,
An eagle baffled of his wings;
Considering, next, how fair the state
And large the license that sublimes
A nineteenth-century female fate—
Sweet cause that thralls my liberal rhymes!
And Chastities and colder Shames,
Decorums mute and marvellous,
And fair Behaviour that reclaims
All fancies grown erroneous,
Moved round me musing, till my choice
Faltered. A female in a wig
Stood by me, and a drouthy voice
Announced her—Mrs. Betsy Prig.
2. The caudle
Sweet Love that sways the reeling years,
The crown and chief of certitudes,
For whose calm eyes and modest ears
Time writes the rule and text of prudes—
That, surpliced, stoops a nuptial head,
Nor chooses to live blindly free,
But, with all pulses quieted,
Plays tunes of domesticity—
That Love I sing of and have sung
And mean to sing till Death yawn sheer,
He rules the music of my tongue,
Stills it or quickens, there or here.
I say but this: as we went up
I heard the Monthly give a sniff
And “if the big dog makes the pup—”
She murmured—then repeated
“if!”
The caudle on a slab was placed;
She snuffed it, snorting loud and long;
I fled—I would not stop to taste—
And dreamed all night of things gone wrong.
3. The sentences
Abortive Love is half a sin;
But Love’s abortions dearer far
Than wheels without an axle-pin
Or life without a married star.
My rules are hard to understand
For him whom sensual rules depress;
A bandbox in a midwife’s hand
May hold a costlier bridal dress.
“I like her not; in fact I loathe;
Bugs hath she brought from London beds.”
Friend! wouldst thou rather bear their growth
Or have a baby with two heads?
THE KID
My spirit, in the doorway’s pause,
Fluttered with fancies in my breast;
Obsequious to all decent laws,
I felt exceedingly distressed.
I knew it rude to enter there
With Mrs. V. in such a state;
And, ’neath a magisterial air,
Felt actually indelicate.
I knew the nurse began to grin;
I turned to greet my Love. Said she—
“Confound your modesty, come in!
—What shall we call the darling,
V.?”
(There are so many charming names!
Girls’—Peg, Moll, Doll,
Fan, Kate, Blanche, Bab:
Boys’—Mahershahal-hashbaz, James,
Luke, Nick, Dick, Mark, Aminadab.)
Lo, as the acorn to the oak,
As well-heads to the river’s height,
As to the chicken the moist yolk,
As to high noon the day’s first
white—
Such is the baby to the man.
There, straddling one red arm and leg,
Lay my last work, in length a span,
Half hatched, and conscious of the egg.
A creditable child, I hoped;
And half a score of joys to be
Through sunny lengths of prospect sloped
Smooth to the bland futurity.
O, fate surpassing other dooms,
O, hope above all wrecks of time!
O, light that fills all vanquished glooms,
O, silent song o’ermastering rhyme!
I covered either little foot,
I drew the strings about its waist;
Pink as the unshell’d inner fruit,
But barely decent, hardly chaste,
Its nudity had startled me;
But when the petticoats were on,
“I know,” I said; “its name shall
be
Paul Cyril Athanasius John.”
“Why,” said my wife, “the child’s
a girl.”
My brain swooned, sick with failing sense;
With all perception in a whirl,
How could I tell the difference?
“Nay,” smiled the nurse, “the child’s
a boy.”
And all my soul was soothed to hear
That so it was: then startled Joy
Mocked Sorrow with a doubtful tear.
And I was glad as one who sees
For sensual optics things unmeet:
As purity makes passion freeze,
So faith warns science off her beat.
Blessed are they that have not seen,
And yet, not seeing, have believed:
To walk by faith, as preached the Dean,
And not by sight, have I achieved.
Let love, that does not look, believe;
Let knowledge, that believes not, look:
Truth pins her trust on falsehood’s sleeve,
While reason blunders by the book.
Then Mrs. Prig addressed me thus;
“Sir, if you’ll be advised
by me,
You’ll leave the blessed babe to us;
It’s my belief he wants his tea.”
* * * * *
Bill, I feel far from quite right—if not
further: already the pill
Seems, if I may say so, to bubble inside me.
A poet’s heart, Bill,
Is a sort of a thing that is made of the tenderest
young bloom on a fruit.
You may pass me the mixture at once, if you please—and
I’ll thank you
to boot
For that poem—and then for the julep.
This really is damnable stuff!
(Not the poem, of course.) Do you snivel, old friend?
well, it’s nasty
enough,
But I think I can stand it—I think so—ay,
Bill, and I could were it
worse.
But I’ll tell you a thing that I can’t
and I won’t. ’Tis the old, old
curse—
The gall of the gold-fruited Eden, the lure of the
angels that fell.
’Tis the core of the fruit snake-spotted in
the hush of the shadows of
hell,
Where a lost man sits with his head drawn down, and
a weight on his eyes.
I should like—on my soul, I
should like—to remember—but somehow
I
can’t—
If the lady whose love has reduced me to this was
the niece or the aunt. But whichever it was,
I feel sure, when I published my lays of last year
(You remember their title—The Tramp—only
seven-and-sixpence—not dear), I sent her
a copy (perhaps her tears fell on the title-page—yes—
I should like to imagine she wept)—and the
Bride of Bulgaria (MS.) I forwarded with it.
The lyrics, no doubt, she found bitter—and
sweet; But the Bride she rejected, you know, with
expressions I will not repeat. Well—she
did no more than all publishers did. Though my
prospects were
marred,
I can pity and pardon them. Blindness, mere blindness!
And yet it was hard. For a poet, Bill, is a blossom—a
bird—a billow—a breeze—
A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among
trees. And a bard who is also the pet of patricians
and dowagers doubly can Express his contempt for canaille
in his fables where beasts are
republican.
Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness for men so
deficient in ton I cannot but feel it was cruel—I
cannot but think it was wrong. I with the heat
of my heart still burning against all bars As the
fire of the dawn, so to speak, in the blanched blank
brows of
the stars—
I with my tremulous lips made pale by musical breath—
I with the shade in my eyes that was left by the kisses
of Death— (For Death came near me in youth,
and touched my face with his face, And put in my lips
the songs that belong to a desolate place—
Desolate truly, my heart and my lips, till her kiss
filled them up!) I with my soul like wine poured out
with my flesh for the cup— It was hard
for me—it was hard—Bill, Bill,
you great owl, was it not? For the day creeps
in like a Fate: and I think my grand passion is
rot: And I dreamily seem to perceive, by the
light of a life’s dream done, The lotion at
six, and the mixture at ten, and the draught before
one.
Yes—I feel rather better.
Man’s life is a mull, at the best;
And the patent perturbator pills are like bullets
of lead in my chest. When a man’s whole
spirit is like the lost Pleiad, a blown-out star,
Is there comfort in Holloway, Bill? is there hope of
salvation in Parr? True, most things work to
their end—and an end that the shroud overlaps.
Under lace, under silk, under gold, sir, the skirt
of a winding-sheet
flaps—
Which explains, if you think of it, Bill, why I can’t,
though my soul
thereon broodeth,
Quite make out if I loved Lady Tamar as much as I
loved Lady Judith. Yet her dress was of violet
velvet, her hair was hyacinth-hued, And her ankles—no
matter. A face where the music of every mood
Was touched by the tremulous fingers of passionate
feeling, and made Strange melodies, scornful, but
sweeter than strings whereon sorrow has
played
To enrapture the hearing of mirth when his garland
of blossom and green Turns to lead on the anguished
’Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted
kind of a midnight, I know;
You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar
A. Poe? It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter
of old Lord St. Giles, Who inspired those delectable
strains, and rewarded her bard with her
smiles.
There are tasters who’ve sipped of Castalia,
who don’t look on my
brew as the brew:
There are fools who can’t think why the names
of my heroines of title
should always be Hebrew.
‘Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, “Noo,
dinna ye fash wi’
Apollo, mon;
Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad—look
at David and
Solomon.
And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang,” said
that high-born young
man, “—tickles
The lug” (he meant ear) “of the reader—to
throw in a touch of the
Canticles.”
So I versified half of The Preacher—it
took me a week, working slowly.
Bah!
You don’t half know the sex, Bill—they
like it. And what if her name
was Aholibah?
I recited her charms, in conjunction with those of
a girl at the cafe, In a poem I published in
collaboration with Templeton (Taffy). There are
prudes in a world full of envy—and some
of them thought it
too strong
To compare an earl’s daughter by name with a
girl at a French restaurant. I regarded
her, though, with the chivalrous eyes of a knight-errant
on
quest;
I may say I don’t know that I ever felt prouder,
old friend, of a conquest. And when I’ve
been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing
who
knew it; I
Thank my stars I’m as free from mock-modesty,
friend, as from vulgar
fatuity.
I can’t say if my spirit retains—for
the subject appears to me misty—any
tie
To such associations as Poesy weaves round the records
of Christianity. There are bards—I
may be one myself—who delight in their skill
to unlock
a lip’s
Rosy secrets by kisses and whispers of texts from
the charming Apocalypse. It was thus that I won,
by such biblical pills of poetical manna, From two
elders—Sir Seth and Lord Isaac—the
liking of Lady Susanna. But I left her—a
woman to me is no more than a match, sir, at tennis
is— When I heard she’d gone off with
my valet, and burnt my rhymed version
of Genesis.
You may see by my shortness of speech that my time’s
JAM SATIS.
Specimen from the speaker’s original poems.
Come into the orchard, Anne,
For the dark owl, Night, has fled,
And Phosphor slumbers, as well as he can
With a daffodil sky for a bed:
And the musk of the roses perplexes a man,
And the pimpernel muddles his head.
* * * * *
That nose is out of drawing. With a gasp,
She pants upon the passionate lips that
ache
With the red drain of her own mouth, and
make
A monochord of colour. Like an asp,
One lithe lock wriggles in his rutilant grasp.
Her bosom is an oven of myrrh, to bake
Love’s white warm shewbread to a
browner cake.
The lock his fingers clench has burst its hasp.
The legs are absolutely abominable.
Ah! what keen overgust of wild-eyed woes
Flags in that bosom, flushes in that nose?
Nay! Death sets riddles for desire to spell,
Responsive. What red hem earth’s
passion sews,
But may be ravenously unripped in hell?
* * * * *
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through
a notable nimbus
of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower
that flickers with fear
of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean
from a marvel of mystic
miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our
blushes that thicken and threaten
with throbs through the throat?
Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal
of an actor’s appalled
agitation,
Fainter with fear of the fires of the
future than pale with the promise
of pride in the past;
Flushed with the famishing fullness of fever that
reddens with radiance
of rathe recreation,
Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that
gleam through the gloom of
the gloaming when ghosts go
aghast?
Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous
touch on the
temples of terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with