‘Ira brevis, longa est pietas, recidiva voluptas;
Et cum posse perit, mens tamen una manet.’
MAXIMIAN.
Now I have come to reason
And cast my schoolboy clout,
Disorder I see is without,1
And the mind must sweat a poison2
Keener than Thessaly’s brew;
A pus that, discharged not thence,
Gangrenes the vital sense
And makes disorder true.
It is certain we shall attain
No life till we stamp on all
Life the tetragonal
Pure symmetry of brain.
I felt, in my scorning
Of common poet’s talk,
As arrogant as the hawk
When he mounts above the morning.
‘Behold man’s droll appearance,
Faith wriggling upon his hooks,
Chin-deep in Eternal Flux
Angling for reassurance!’
I care not if he retorts –
‘Of all that labour and wive
And worship, who would give
A fiddlestick for these thoughts
That sluggishly yaw and bend,
Fat strings of barges drawn
By a tug they have never seen
And never will comprehend?’
I sit in a wood and stare
Up at untroubled branches
Locked together and staunch as
Though girders of the air:
And think, the first wind rising
Will crack that intricate crown
And let the daylight down.
But there is naught surprising
Can explode the single mind: –
Let figs from thistles fall
Or stars from their pedestal,
This architecture will stand.
Come, soul, let us not fight
Like cynical Chinee
Beneath umbrella, nor wish to trade
Upon neutrality.
For the mind must cope with
All elements or none –
Bask in dust along with weevils,
Or criticise the sun.
Look, where cloud squadrons are
Stampeded by the wind,
A boy’s kite sits as calm as Minos
If the string be sound:
But if there are no hands
To keep the cable tense
And no eyes to mark a flaw in it,
What use the difference
Between a gust that twitters
Along the wainscot at dawn
And a burly wind playing the zany
In fields of barleycorn?
The time has gone when we
Could sprawl at ease between
Light and darkness, and deduce
Omnipotence from our Mean.
For us the Gregorian
Example of those eyes
That risked hell’s blight and heaven’s blinding
But dared not compromise.
That afternoon we lay on Lillington Common
The land wallowed around us in the sunlight;
But finding all things my strenuous sense included
Ciphers new-copied by the indefinite sunlight,
I fell once more under the shadow of my Sphinx.
The aimlessness of buttercup and beetle
So pestered me, I would have cried surrender
To the fossil certitudes of Tom, Dick, and Harry,
Had I known how or believed that such a surrender
Could fashion aught but a dead Sphinx from the live Sphinx.
Later we lit a fire, and the hedge of darkness –
Garnished with not a nightingale nor a glow-worm –
Sprang up like the beanstalk by which our Jack aspired
once.
Then, though each star seemed little as a glow-worm
Perched on Leviathan’s flank, and equally terrible
My tenure of this plateau that sloped on all sides
Into annihilation – yet was I lord of
Something: for, seeing the fall of a burnt-out faggot
Make all the night sag down, I became lord of
Light’s interplay – stoker of an old parable.
Come up, Methuselah,
You doddering superman!
Give me an instant realized
And I’ll outdo your span.
In that one moment of evening
When roses are most red
I can fold back the firmament,
I can put time to bed.
Abraham, stint your tally
Of concubines and cattle!
Give place to me – capitalist
In more intrinsic metal.
I have a lover of flesh
And a lover that is a sprite:
To-day I lie down with finite,
To-morrow with infinite.
That one is a constant
And suffers no eclipse,
Though I feel sun and moon burning
Together on her lips.
This one is a constant,
But she’s not kind at all;
She raddles her gown with my despairs
And paints her lip with gall.
My lover of flesh is wild,
And willing to kiss again;
She is the potency of earth
When woods exhale the rain.
My lover of air, like Artemis
Spectrally embraced,
Shuns the daylight that twists her smile
To mineral distaste.
Twin poles energic, they
Stand fast and generate
This spark that crackles in the void
As between fate and fate.
My love is a tower.
Standing up in her
I parley with planets
And the casual wind.
Arcturus may grind
Against our wall: – he whets
A tropic appetite,
And decorates our night.
‘What happier place
For Johnny Head-in-Air,
Who never would hear
Time mumbling at the base?’
I will not hear, for she’s
My real Antipodes,
And our ingrowing loves
Shall meet below earth’s spine
And there shall intertwine,
Though Babel falls above.
Time, we allow, destroys
All aërial toys:
But to assail love’s heart
He has no strategy,
Unless he suck up the sea
And pull the earth apart.
Dismayed by the monstrous credibility
Of all antinomies, I climbed the fells
To Easedale Tarn. Could I be child again
And grip those skirts of cloud the matriarch sky
Draggled on mere and hillside?… (‘So the dog
Returns to his vomit,’ you protest. Well only
The dog can tell what virtue lies in his vomit.)
Sleep on, you fells and profound dales: there’s no
Material wind or rain can insulate
The mind against its own forked speculation,
When once that storm sets in: and then the flash
That bleakly enlightens a few sour acres leaves but
A more Egyptian darkness whence it came.3
Mountains are the musicians; they despise
Their audience: but the wind is a popular preacher
And takes more from his audience than he gives them.
How can I wear the clouds, who feel each mountain
Yearn from its flinty marrow to abdicate
Sublimity and globe-trot with the wind?
By Easedale Tarn, where I sought a comforter,
I found a gospel sterner than repentance.
Prophetic earth, you need no lumber of logic
Who point your arguments alike with a primrose
And a sick sheep coughing among the stones:
And I have only words; yet must they both
Outsoar the mountain and lap up the wind.
Few things can more inflame
This far too combative heart
Than the intellectual Quixotes of the age
Prattling of abstract art.
No one would deny it –
But for a blind man’s passion
Cassandra had been no more than a draggle-skirt,
Helen a ten-year fashion.
Yet had there not been one hostess
Ever whose arms waylaid
Like the tough bramble a princeling’s journey, or
At the least no peasant maid
Redressing with rude heat
Nature’s primeval wrong,
Epic had slumbered on beneath his blindness
And Helen lacked her song.
(So the antique balloon
Wobbles with no defence
Against the void but a grapnel that hops and ploughs
Through the landscape of sense.)
Phrase-making, dress-making –
Distinction’s hard to find;
For thought must play the mannequin, strut in phrase,
Or gape with the ruck: and mind,
Like body, from covering gets
Most adequate display.
Yet time trundles this one to the rag-and-bone man,
While that other may
Reverberate all along
Man’s craggy circumstance –
Naked enough to keep its dignity
Though it eye God askance.