Chapters

Argument with the Sunday Times

(Vermeer’s allegory of painting)

You call her Fame. But Fame is the egg cooking

Coyly with swish of greasy skirts and the bubble

Of yellow eye in a dead pan,

Spitting with ardour and odour for a famished rabble

Who want no deodorants, napkins, nor, at bottom, any trouble.

Fame is the proto-bird without organs, looking

Into cantankerous bowels of man.

Whereas she has paced with considered dignities

Along the terrace of girlhood, weighing some vision

Beyond the convent doors,

Has a tender knowing smile for the pale intimation

Of will-o’-the-wisp, the blue cavernous jittery passion.

That massive Book yet lures her lowered eyes

Upon time’s tessellated fens and floors.

Trumpet or Serpent in that fine right hand?

This is a militant scene which outflanks the civil

Thus-and-thus of the lute.

Trust her maidenly plainsong to unravel

All fugal serpentine loves of caitiff evil

Whose baton writhes, vexed and gutless as the wind,

Over Idea and ocean, the articulate.

Love gears in us that cruel pang to be one,

By electrical impulse, gene—it cannot matter:

Love hails her counterpart,

Her being, in our souls that so strangely flutter

From the very fingers of God. There is no fetter

Upon this Within: the painter humps monstrous dawn

To his narrow human childbed of art.

But here is no pang. One huge loutish molecule,

Innocent of cell-form, in baggy breeches,

Keeps house with ultimate form.

Granted, some jovial atom of him lurches