WAUGH’S FEELING FOR Diana was one of the deepest of his life. He had got to know her when he was not yet the success he so quickly became and at a time when he was deeply bruised emotionally. He was also suffering from grievous loss of self-esteem at the break-up of his marriage after so short a time and his wife’s humiliating preference for another man. All these factors, coupled with Diana’s beauty, charm and flattering, restorative interest in himself and his work, made her for a time the centre of his life. Medical and social opinion both held that pregnant women should lead restful, home-based lives and during her pregnancy she had depended heavily on Waugh’s company.
After Jonathan’s birth, she was like a prisoner released, flinging herself back into the world of parties, friends and outings. At first there was no apparent change in their relationship and Waugh’s diary shows that he still saw both Guinnesses constantly. He played a successful April Fool trick on Diana, ringing her up early in the morning and cajoling her to appear in the role of policewoman at ‘a matinée in aid of the Divorce Law Reform League’. He was one of the godfathers when Jonathan was christened on 11 April, when he met Randolph Churchill for the first time – Diana had wanted to deck the baby in long black lace trousers, but had been persuaded to choose an orthodox christening robe instead. And when, after luncheon with Eddie March, Evelyn went with Diana to see a mask done of herself he was delighted when she promised him a white and gold plaster copy (the mask was never completed).
That spring there were still frequent references in his diary to lunching at ‘Buck St’ and he himself was host at a luncheon at the Ritz for the Guinnesses, Nancy, Georgia and Sacheverell Sitwell and Cecil Beaton, after which he drove down to Pool Place with Diana and a friend. ‘Her dog Pilgrim made smells all the way,’ he recorded. The party went back up to London by train on Tuesday, and Waugh again lunched with the Guinnesses at Buckingham Street, after which Bryan took him to see 10 Grosvenor Place. He went home to change, then returned to dine at Buckingham Street, after which they went to see Ruth Draper and on to supper at the Savoy Grill.
But it was the last patch of cloudless sky. ‘Full of people we knew,’ Waugh had written of their supper at the Savoy Grill and ‘people’ were, in fact, what came between him and Diana. That summer, there was hardly a ball or party to which the Guinnesses did not go. Diana seized every opportunity to go out, when she was not entertaining at home. She lunched with Bryan every day he was working, usually at the Savoy (‘So handy for the Temple,’ said Bryan). The flock of friends swooped down again on Buckingham Street – the Acton brothers, Osbert Sitwell, the Yorkes, the Lambs, Robert Byron, Cela Keppel and her brother Derek, Diana and Randolph Churchill, Emerald Cunard, the Mitfords’ great family friend Mrs Hammersley – all welcomed joyously by Diana.
Waugh found himself no longer her exclusive confidant. His jealousy and moroseness quickly began to colour his attitude: when he gave Diana an elegant Briggs umbrella for her birthday, his growing disenchantment made him write spuriously in his diary that she broke it the next day – in fact, she used it for years until it was eventually stolen. When he came to a supper party a fortnight later he had a fight with Randolph Churchill in the servants’ hall.
The friendship unravelled rapidly and, to Diana, mysteriously. On 5 July, Waugh drove with Bryan to Pool Place, where Diana and Nancy joined them. ‘Diana and I quarrelled at luncheon,’ wrote Waugh in his diary. ‘We bathed. Diana and I quarrelled at dinner and after dinner. Next day I decided to leave. Quarrelled with Diana again and left.’ Four days later, at Cecil Beaton’s cocktail party, he did not speak to her but merely wished her goodbye as he left; on the 17th, at John Sutro’s musical party, he avoided her again, sitting in the garden with Bryan and drinking ‘a great deal of champagne’. Diana, he recorded, ‘was friendly and reproachful-looking’.
That night he sent her a note on his blue writing paper with its curved capital E at the top: ‘Dearest Diana, When I got back last night I wrote you two long letters and tore them up. All I tried to say was that I must have seemed unfriendly lately and I am sorry. Please believe it was only because I was puzzled and ill at ease with myself. More later, saying we are all right. Don’t bother to answer. Evelyn.’
He did, however, write the catalogue for the Bruno Hat Show, which took place at ‘Buck St’ on 23 July. This hoax had evolved during one of the Pool Place weekends earlier that summer, its moving spirit Bryan’s Oxford friend Brian Howard. Howard, tall, good-looking, witty, malicious, homosexual, alcoholic, later to be the model for the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited, spent most of his life going to parties, gossiping and devising elaborate practical jokes that in their planning, wardrobe requirements and execution were akin to a one-night theatre performance. The Bruno Hat show was a prime example.
Bruno Hat was supposedly an unknown artist whose ‘very good paintings in the modern French style’ had been discovered by Bryan Guinness in the back room of the general store in Pool Place’s local village of Climping. The story, as leaked through Lady Eleanor Smith’s gossip column in the Sunday Dispatch, was that Hat was the son by a German of the woman who owned the store.
For the purposes of the exhibition, Hat was played by Tom Mitford, just back from Germany and virtually bilingual. Though his bright blue Mitford eyes were hidden behind dark glasses and he was smoking a thin, foreign-looking cheroot, his disguise of black wig and long black moustaches sat oddly against his fair skin. Bruno Hat’s pictures, painted by Brian Howard on cork bathmats and framed in rope, were ‘daring’ in subject and treatment – one was a distorted impression of a couple getting out of a bath, another, ‘The Adoration of the Magi’, showed matchstick figures worshipping a geometric Mary holding a circular Jesus. To the disappointment of Howard, who had secretly been hoping to be ‘discovered’ as the new Magritte, only one picture was bought – by Lytton Strachey and then only as a kindly gesture towards Diana. The mysterious Hat, sitting in a wheelchair in a corner of the Buckingham Street drawing room, grumbled in a heavy German accent to friends and connoisseurs alike about the unwanted publicity he was getting. Next morning the press was full of the hoax. As a practical joke it was highly successful; on a personal level it was the last time Diana and Waugh spoke to each other on anything like intimate terms.
The final break came immediately afterwards, when Waugh refused to stay at Knockmaroon that August, giving as his reason his dislike of the other people asked – many of whom were his close friends. Diana was bitterly hurt, realising, without knowing why, that he no longer wished to be her friend, let alone her intimate. Thirty-six years later, a month before his death, he explained his behaviour:
You ask why our friendship petered out. The explanation is very discreditable to me. Pure jealousy. You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your bed but I wanted you to myself as especial confidante and comrade. After Jonathan’s birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn’t compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth.
One legacy of that intense, disparate friendship was the bestowal of Debo’s nickname for Diana on the second beautiful, golden-haired and blue-eyed Diana in Waugh’s life, Lady Diana Cooper. Since she was four, Debo had called her older sister Honks, as did some of Diana Guinness’s friends. When Diana Cooper got to know Waugh, whom she had met at one of Emerald Cunard’s vast luncheon parties, she would ask him about his friend ‘Lady Honks’. Because the two Dianas shared the same Christian name, and because Waugh thought the idea of Diana Cooper, this beauty so accustomed to worship, being called Honks so irresistibly funny, he transferred the name to her with enthusiasm.
That spring Colonel Guinness had decided that the young Guinnesses should have a country house of their own. Diana’s occasional teasing remark that she and Bryan ought to build a futuristic steel and glass tower ‘for the view’ beside Pool Place, an idea which horrified Lady Evelyn, may have had something to do with it; more seriously, Walter Guinness believed, as he told his son, ‘It is not a good plan for families to live on top of one another.’
One of the first houses they looked at was Biddesden, an exquisite Queen Anne house near Andover. They loved it at first sight and they had friends in Wiltshire: the Byron family lived in Savernake Forest; Henry Lamb and his second wife, Pansy Pakenham, sister of Bryan’s school friend Frank, lived at Coombe Bissett; Diana’s new friend Lytton Strachey was a few miles away at Ham Spray. It was close enough to London for Bryan’s work, but stood solitary in a lovely valley. It was perfect, but the price, which included a 200-acre farm, was almost twice what Colonel Guinness had given them. Fortunately the owner, Mrs Fothergill, was equally convinced that they would be the right owners for Biddesden. When, after finding no other house to measure up to it, they approached her agents again, she halved her price, saying she wanted the Guinnesses to have it.
Anyone seeing Biddesden would understand their delight at securing it. It is a large and beautiful house of faded brick, the numerous windows of its fac,ade decorated by the unknown architect with military trophies and other ornaments. It was built in 1711 for General Webb, one of Marlborough’s commanders. Webb did not get on with Marlborough and when, in 1708, he succeeded in routing a French force three times the size of his own, one of Marlborough’s favourites, Major-General Cadogan, was given the credit. The Tory Party took up Webb’s cause and when, as a result of his action, the beleaguered town of Lille surrendered, Webb was given one of its large bells, cast in 1660. He hung it in a specially built crenellated clock tower beside his new home.
When the Guinnesses first saw it, creepers covered the exquisite wrought-iron gate and honeysuckle, vines and old-fashioned roses clambered up the south front. A flight of stone steps led down on to the sloping lawn, high walls of ancient, rosy brick concealed a ravishing garden.
It was the first house on which Diana placed her stamp. In her bedroom, the five huge windows looking out on to the terrace were curtained in creamy satin, the satin curtains of her four-poster bed with its Prince of Wales feathers were lined with oyster and the long mirrors between the windows reflected eighteenth-century chairs covered in white and oyster damask.
Many of her friends had a hand in the embellishment of Biddesden. Bloomsbury architect George Kennedy designed a gazebo, the niches in its walls filled by portraits of three muses by the mosaicist Boris Anrep – Diana can still be seen there as Erato.fn1 The sculptor Stephen Tomlin, husband of Lytton Strachey’s niece Julia (a former flame of Bryan’s), made a lead figure as a centrepiece for the garden; Diana had the gates and doors of the farm buildings painted a deep, bright, near-cobalt blue.
Diana had also found her feet in the management of a house. She acquired a good cook, Mrs Mackintosh (always known as Mrs Mack), already with a sizeable repertoire of her own, and introduced the simple, delicious food that Sydney had offered at Asthall and Swinbrook, though without her parents’ strictness at mealtimes – the elderly parlourmaid, May, who now came down to Biddesden, often joined in the conversation.
What neither of the Guinnesses was told was that Biddesden was haunted. Locally this was well known and was perhaps a factor in Mrs Fothergill’s decision to drop her price so dramatically. Only four years earlier, Major J.G.W. Clark of the 16/ 5th Lancers, who had won an MC and bar in the First World War, had rented it while his regiment was stationed at Tidworth – to be driven out after a week by the ghosts. When, in 1944, Bryan met George Clark, by then a Lieutenant-General and former commander of the Cavalry Division, the General was notably reluctant to speak of his Biddesden experiences.
It was true that Mrs Fothergill had carefully explained that the portrait of General Webb on his cavalry charger which hung in the hall should never be moved. It went with the house, she told them; if it was removed, Webb’s ghost would ride up and down the stairs until his portrait was returned to its original position. Bryan and Diana duly left the picture in situ and hooves were never heard on the stairs. But there were other disquieting manifestations. At night footsteps could be heard pacing up and down the terrace outside Diana’s bedroom windows. When Bryan was away in London she would lie terrified and unable to sleep as she listened to the steady sounds of an invisible walker. Eventually she told Lytton, who raised both hands in a gesture of despairing amazement. ‘I had hoped,’ he said in his most swooping tones, ‘that the age of reason had dawned.’ From then on, she determined, with some success, to treat the footsteps as a harmless acoustic joke.
Some felt the haunting even more strongly. Visitors who had slept in unaffected rooms pooh-poohed the whole thing; others refused to come again. John Betjeman would have been one of these, had he not been in love with Pam – after the tenant of the Biddesden dairy farm had left, Bryan offered its management to Pam, who was still wretched after the breaking of her engagement to Oliver Watney. During the three months it took to prepare a cottage on the estate for her, she lived at Biddesden. Pam was deeply affected by the Biddesden hauntings, as she had been at Asthall.
The bedroom allotted to her was above the two-storey-high hall and overlooked the drive. She experienced the Biddesden ghost the first evening she was alone in the house, Diana and Bryan having gone to London. By ten o’clock the two housemaids had already gone to bed and Pam put the dogs – Diana’s Irish wolfhound Pilgrim and Bryan’s dachshund – out for a run. Almost immediately, they came rushing in, howling. Scared, but still without thinking of anything supernatural, she left the wolfhound downstairs and took the dachshund up with her to her bedroom for company. She undressed and got into bed, but instead of falling asleep straight away as she usually did after a day’s hard work on the farm, she became aware of an unseen, malevolent presence, standing over and behind her at the head of the bed. Sleep was impossible. Too terrified to move or turn round, she heard the clock in the tower on top of the house strike every hour. ‘The ghost never left me,’ she recalled later. ‘I lay rigid, with the dog shivering in its basket. It was the other side of the room, but it shook so much you could feel the vibrations through the floorboards.’
Occasionally, the manifestations took the form of people talking outside Pam’s door, so realistically that the first time it happened she said to the maids the following morning, ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk outside my bedroom,’ to be met by their vehement denials. Sympathetically, Bryan and Diana suggested she move to another room and here she had untroubled nights. Only when she had to sleep for a night in Diana’s bedroom, and again in a small room on the other side of the house, was she troubled again by the supernatural.
Bryan, who was not affected by the haunting, loved Biddesden, not only for its beauty but for the fact that he had Diana to himself there except for weekend visitors – and she, for her part, absorbed by her new baby and the embellishment of her beautiful new house, was contented.
The Guinnesses’ life soon settled into a routine. On the days that Bryan did not go to London he wrote, aiming at 1,000 words before lunch so that he was free for the rest of the day. His chambers specialised in commercial cases of great complexity in which he was neither interested nor expert, but he enjoyed calling in at the nearby Fleet Street offices of the London Mercury for a chat with the writer Alan Pryce-Jones or the Mercury’s editor, J.C. Squire, who frequently printed his poems.
Bryan was perfectly happy with this life of writing, riding and pottering about. Often, when John Betjeman was staying, Bryan would accompany ‘Betj’ and Pam on their visits to old churches; often, too, Betj would persuade ‘Miss Pam’, as he always called her, to drive him about on Salisbury Plain or to Marlborough, where he would show her his classroom, or he would bicycle with her to matins in Appleshaw. ‘My thoughts when they are not with you are with Pamela Mitford – I hope I am not a bore,’ he wrote to Bryan after one of his many proposals to Pam. In the evenings there would be communal games, Bryan’s conjuring tricks and, after dinner, hymn singing, which both Diana and John Betjeman loved (they had to wait until the port was being passed round, as May the parlourmaid refused to remain in the room while they behaved in such a fashion).
Lovers, absent, choke with sighing:
Their minds grow dark with groping fears
Their hearts are wrenched with smothered crying:
Their eyes burn full of frozen tears
wrote the lovesick Bryan when parted from Diana on a visit to the Guinness hop farm at Bodiam. But this did not exactly describe Diana’s feelings.
Once at Biddesden, the friendship with Lytton Strachey was consolidated. Lytton had dined with the Guinnesses several times in London and accepted Diana’s invitation to Knockmaroon that August (‘Do come and stay here . . . It is icy cold and there is nothing to do but go to the Abbey Theatre and see sickening Irish plays’), arriving in a suit of orange tweed (‘Oh dear me! my new tweeds were far too loud’), a visit which induced in him only modified rapture. Along with the other members of the house party, he was taken to a ball at Viceregal Lodge, up a mountain, to the Dublin National Gallery and endlessly to the theatre – until one evening, Diana, who had had enough of these jaunts, swept out in the middle of a performance with the whole party at her heels.
‘How, oh how to say how much I enjoyed every moment of my visit and how, how, oh how, to thank you for your angelic kindness. I only hope my occasional vagaries didn’t infuriate you,’ wrote Lytton afterwards, signing himself ‘Your devoué’. He responded to the Irish visit by inviting Diana and Bryan to stay at Ham Spray. As old friends were the only people ever asked to stay there, it was a signal mark of favour and Diana was, for once, acutely nervous. Lytton was rather an alarming person, whose extreme shyness added to the impression of intellectual hauteur felt even by those close to him. More than that, Ham Spray meant Carrington (the painter Dora Carrington, always known as Carrington). And Carrington, as everyone knew, was besottedly in love with Lytton. Diana, far more beautiful and, though very much a disciple, better able to meet Lytton on his own literary ground, might be seen as a rival worshipper at the shrine. In addition, Diana’s natural manner with Lytton, teasing, admiring and rather flirtatious, was not calculated to inspire immediate confidence in a woman who lived only for this one man.
Carrington, by contrast, wore simple clothes and her fair hair was cut in a thick bob, with a heavy fringe behind which she hid when shy – and she was often shy. She had many of the mannerisms of a little girl, with her quiet diffidence, her habit of standing with her toes turned in and her head bent on one side, deferring constantly to Lytton in her soft voice. But her charm, though indefinable, was immense; many men had fallen in love with her.
The Ham Spray ménage consisted of four people: Lytton Strachey, Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, and Frances Marshall (Ralph’s lover and later his wife). They lived by the principles of simplicity and – as it would now be called – ‘greenness’ which Bloomsbury held in common with the earlier disciples of William Morris. Carrington did most of the cooking at Ham Spray, serving plain country dishes based on homegrown materials. The jellies, the jams, the fresh currant bread and even the wines were homemade; there was farm butter and honey in the comb. One of her specialities was rabbit pie, for which even the rabbits had been home shot. Carrington, who had a touch of the gamekeeper in her, would pot rabbits or pheasants on the Ham Spray lawn from her bedroom window with an old gun of Ralph’s. ‘Just as I was getting into bed, I looked out for the last time on the moonlighted lawn and there was my enemy the rabbit, who all this week has eaten up my lettuces and cabbages, so I knelt at the open window and shot him,’ was how she described one such episode to Gerald Brenan.
Manners were equally simple. No one, for instance, bothered to say goodnight, they simply got up and went to bed. Lytton would tell some witty, acid story or suddenly shoot out some disconcerting remark in his extraordinary voice. Or, rising from lunch, he would play an arpeggio with his long, elegant fingers along the edge of the table, a performance so deft in its physical wit that it reduced most who saw it to shaking uncontrollably with laughter.
Diana and Bryan’s first visit to this unconventional ménage nearly ended in disaster. They had been given the best spare room, with its pale coral walls and large fourposter bed, and Carrington had prepared one of her celebrated rabbit pies for supper. That night, Diana developed sudden and acute gastritis. At four a.m. a doctor had to be called out from Hungerford, while Bryan and Carrington hovered anxiously nearby. Her raging temperature took forty-eight hours to abate and after that she had to stay in bed for another two days. As everyone had eaten the same food and no one else was affected, many of the Strachey circle thought that Carrington had tried to poison her. But it was during those two days in bed that Diana became friends with Carrington, who, guiltily conscious that she might have caused her guest’s illness and anxious to do what she could to make amends, was constantly at her side.
After this, there were frequent comings and goings between the two houses, often for the walks or picnics that both Lytton and Carrington loved. Sometimes Carrington would ride over on her white pony and go out riding with Bryan on one of the Biddesden horses (‘I had a lovely ride on Goldielocks and went some grand gallops’). There was a further link when Frances Marshall’s best friend turned out to be Julia Strachey, whom Diana on meeting found to be instantly sympathique.
To those at Ham Spray, the Guinnesses seemed a golden couple, beautiful and very much in love. They laughed, they held hands, they made plans for the future. Around them was an aura of youth and happiness in which both Lytton – already flattered that such a handsome and clever young woman should like him so much – and Carrington basked. That Diana was infinitely stronger than Bryan passed them by completely.
That autumn the Guinnesses’ travels continued. They made the annual pilgrimage to Venice customary in their circle. (‘Nearly all of them are politicians and very boring and nice,’ wrote Diana to Lytton. ‘They are rowdy in the water and hit one another about.’) They went to Greece and to Constantinople, where they lunched with the Ambassador, Sir George Clerk, who as a young man had ridden in Rotten Row with Diana’s grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles. Life was so enjoyable that when, just after Christmas, Diana realised that she was pregnant again, it was not an altogether welcome discovery. ‘Of course we’d have had you one day, darling,’ she later told her second son Desmond (born on 8 September 1931), ‘but not just then.’
However, if it had not been ‘just then’, Desmond’s birth might never have happened. Bryan, even more deeply in love with his young wife, was thrilled at the thought – as he saw it – of the second in a large nursery. But the first cracks were already appearing beneath the surface of the marriage and Bryan’s cloying devotion was beginning to get on Diana’s nerves. By now he was at home much more as his career at the Bar had virtually come to an end: his clerk – no doubt influenced by the daily lunches at the Savoy – gave the few briefs available for junior barristers to hungrier members of the chambers, saying, ‘Mr Guinness doesn’t need three guineas.’ Under the same roof all day long, with fewer distractions in the shape of friends endlessly dropping in, what Diana saw as Bryan’s intense possessiveness became more apparent – and more infuriating to someone for whom a degree of privacy had always been essential.
From Bryan’s point of view, love meant being with the person you loved – and the more you loved, the more you wanted to be together. His romantic, idealistic nature inclined him to worship and Diana was his goddess. They were, he believed, each other’s ‘Elective Affinities’, though as he wrote later, ‘You may always have felt more elected than electing,’ an underlying insecurity that caused him to want her with him every moment of the day and, if not, to know exactly where she was.
Diana found his attitude claustrophobic. Though she recognised, and always would, his sweetness and goodness, his misty sentimentality irritated her, his considerable poetic talent did not move her and his whimsicality was antipathetic to her astringent Mitford humour. In the two and a half years since their marriage the strength of her own character had emerged and, in the words of one friend, ‘she walked all over him’. Her taste too had developed and her literary, artistic and musical knowledge was infinitely greater and more sophisticated; she regarded her husband’s love of what she thought of as the provinciality of Irish life as another proof that in matters aesthetic he, as she put it, liked pottery where she preferred porcelain.
All this, however, would have been bearable but for the stifling constraints on her personal freedom. There were constant quarrels as she attempted to fight her way free from the blanket of his possessiveness, followed by remorseful reconciliations when she was overcome by guilt at being horrible to someone so sweet-natured.
To the rest of the world, they still presented the picture of the perfect couple with close family bonds. Bryan, who loved her sisters, encouraged her to ask them to stay. Carrington described a luncheon party at Biddesden in 1931 in glowing terms. ‘There we found three sisters and Mama Redesdale. The little sisters were ravishingly beautiful, and another of 16 [Unity] very marvellous and Grecian.’
When separated by physical distance, Diana became as loving as even Bryan could wish. She spent most of August, the last full month of her pregnancy, in London. She was uncomfortable and unhappy. The heat oppressed her and her marriage had increasingly begun to chafe her, despite her love for Bryan, who was away touring Austria with her brother Tom. She had become very conscious of the country’s deepening economic crisis and particularly of the miseries of the distressed areas with their high rate of unemployment. ‘You mustn’t talk about having no one to love you, because you have got someone who does love you so much, and the few paltry hundreds of miles between us mustn’t be allowed to make any difference,’ Bryan wrote on 10 August and, two days later, ‘I lie awake thinking and worrying about you.’ Typically, though, his letter is a screed of forty pages to her crisp two sides of writing paper.
At the end of August Bryan returned. He and Diana settled in Buckingham Street to await the birth, whiling away the time by nightly visits to the theatre. Diana’s first labour pains began while they were watching the play Late Night Final, but she found it so exciting (‘as good as E. Wallace’) that she ignored them until the end of the performance. At seven the following morning, Desmond was born. ‘I don’t know why I have [called him Desmond],’ she wrote to Lytton, ‘only Bryan wanted such queer names he read in a book of them like for example Diggery. I thought it sounds like the comic man in Shakespeare, perhaps a gravedigger.’
The baby’s arrival seemed to solder the weak seams in the marriage and life went on much as before, studded with parties, people and family events. When Colonel Guinness returned from his long voyage to find that Ramsay MacDonald, whom he could not stand, had become Prime Minister he retired, accepting a peerage to become the first Baron Moyne (motto: Noli Judicare).
Diana began leaving Biddesdon to go up to London as often as she could. Beneath all her loving gestures, her good resolutions, her knowledge that her marriage could not, as she later wrote, be described in any other terms than perfect, lay one poignant, ineluctable truth. It had been foreshadowed by Bryan, in his poem ‘Love’s Isolation’. Written two years earlier, at the height of their mutual happiness, it expressed the fear that had always lain beneath his longing.
My touch may not unlock
The movement of your mind
For secret is the clock
Wherein your thoughts unwind . . .
I see into your sight
But oh, I cannot find
A way into the light
Of yourself who lies behind . . .
fn1 The muse of lyric poetry