{"collection":"myth-cosmogony","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_49493/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_49493","id":"gutenberg_49493","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49493","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Mythology, Legends & Folklore","Category: Poetry","English literature -- 20th century","English poetry -- 20th century"],"text":"BY THE SAME AUTHOR\n                                 LIMBO\n\n\n\n\n                               =L E D A=\n                            BY ALDOUS HUXLEY\n\n\n                                NEW YORK\n                        GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY\n\n\n\n\n                         _All rights reserved_\n\n\n\n\n                            C O N T E N T S\n\n\n           LEDA                                              1\n           THE BIRTH OF GOD                                 19\n           ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH                               21\n           SYMPATHY                                         22\n           MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM                  23\n           FROM THE PILLAR                                  24\n           JONAH                                            25\n           VARIATIONS ON A THEME                            26\n           A MELODY BY SCARLATTI                            27\n           A SUNSET                                         28\n           LIFE AND ART                                     30\n           FIRST PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG                         31\n           SECOND PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG                        32\n           FIFTH PHILOSOPHERS SONG                          33\n           NINTH PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG                         34\n           MORNING SCENE                                    36\n           VERREY\u2019S                                         37\n           FRASCATI\u2019S                                       38\n           FATIGUE                                          39\n           THE MERRY-GO-ROUND                               40\n           BACK STREETS                                     41\n           LAST THINGS                                      42\n           GOTHIC                                           43\n           EVENING PARTY                                    44\n           BEAUTY                                           45\n           SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT                 55\n\n\n\n\n    L E D A\n      LEDA\n  BROWN and bright as an agate, mountain-cool,\n  Eurotas singing slips from pool to pool;\n  Down rocky gullies; through the cavernous pines\n  And chestnut groves; down where the terraced vines\n  And gardens overhang; through valleys grey\n  With olive trees, into a soundless bay\n  Of the \u00c6gean. Silent and asleep\n  Lie those pools now: but where they dream most deep,\n  Men sometimes see ripples of shining hair\n  And the young grace of bodies pale and bare,\n  Shimmering far down\u2014the ghosts these mirrors hold\n  Of all the beauty they beheld of old,\n  White limbs and heavenly eyes and the hair\u2019s river of gold,\n  For once these banks were peopled: Spartan girls\n  Loosed here their maiden girdles and their curls,\n  And stooping o\u2019er the level water stole\n  His darling mirror from the sun through whole\n  Rapturous hours of gazing.\n                                  The first star\n  Of all this milky constellation, far\n  Lovelier than any nymph of wood or green,\n  Was she whom Tyndarus had made his queen\n  For her sheer beauty and subtly moving grace\u2014\n  Leda, the fairest of our mortal race.\n\n  Hymen had lit his torches but one week\n  About her bed (and still o\u2019er her young cheek\n  Passed rosy shadows of those thoughts that sped\n  Across her mind, still virgin, still unwed,\n  For all her body was her own no more),\n  When Leda with her maidens to the shore\n  Of bright Eurotas came, to escape the heat\n  Of summer noon in waters coolly sweet.\n  By a brown pool which opened smooth and clear\n  Below the wrinkled water of a weir\n  They sat them down under an old fir-tree\n  To rest: and to the laughing melody\n  Of their sweet speech the river\u2019s rippling bore\n  A liquid burden, while the sun did pour\n  Pure colour out of heaven upon the earth.\n  The meadows seethed with the incessant mirth\n  Of grasshoppers, seen only when they flew\n  Their curves of scarlet or sudden dazzling blue.\n  Within the fir-tree\u2019s round of unpierced shade\n  The maidens sat with laughter and talk, or played,\n  Gravely intent, their game of knuckle-bones;\n  Or tossed from hand to hand the old dry cones\n  Littered about the tree. And one did sing\n  A ballad of some far-off Spartan king,\n  Who took a wife, but left her, well-away!\n  Slain by his foes upon their wedding-day.\n  \u201cThat was a piteous story,\u201d Leda sighed,\n  \u201cTo be a widow ere she was a bride.\u201d\n  \u201cBetter,\u201d said one, \u201cto live a virgin life\n  Alone, and never know the name of wife\n  And bear the ugly burden of a child\n  And have great pain by it. Let me live wild,\n  A bird untamed by man!\u201d \u201cNay,\u201d cried another,\n  \u201cI would be wife, if I should not be mother.\n  Cypris I honour; let the vulgar pay\n  Their gross vows to Lucina when they pray.\n  Our finer spirits would be blunted quite\n  By bestial teeming; but Love\u2019s rare delight\n  Wings the rapt soul towards Olympus\u2019 height.\u201d\n  \u201cDelight?\u201d cried Leda. \u201cLove to me has brought\n  Nothing but pain and a world of shameful thought.\n  When they say love is sweet, the poets lie;\n  \u2019Tis but a trick to catch poor maidens by.\n  What are their boasted pleasures? I am queen\n  To the most royal king the world has seen;\n  Therefore I should, if any woman might,\n  Know at its full that exquisite delight.\n  Yet these few days since I was made a wife\n  Have held more bitterness than all my life,\n  While I was yet a child.\u201d The great bright tears\n  Slipped through her lashes. \u201cOh, my childish years!\n  Years that were all my own, too sadly few,\n  When I was happy\u2014and yet never knew\n  How happy till to-day!\u201d Her maidens came\n  About her as she wept, whispering her name,\n  Leda, sweet Leda, with a hundred dear\n  Caressing words to soothe her heavy cheer.\n  At last she started up with a fierce pride\n  Upon her face. \u201cI am a queen,\u201d she cried,\n  \u201cBut had forgotten it a while; and you,\n  Wenches of mine, you were forgetful too.\n  Undress me. We would bathe ourself.\u201d So proud\n  A queen she stood, that all her maidens bowed\n  In trembling fear and scarcely dared approach\n  To do her bidding. But at last the brooch\n  Pinned at her shoulder is undone, the wide\n  Girdle of silk beneath her breasts untied;\n  The tunic falls about her feet, and she\n  Steps from the crocus folds of drapery,\n  Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.\n  God-like she stood; then broke into a run,\n  Leaping and laughing in the light, as though\n  Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow\n  Of generous blood and fire that to remain\n  Too long in statued queenliness were pain\n  To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.\n  She ran, easily bounding, like a boy,\n  Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.\n  Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest,\n  If that might be, when she was never less,\n  Moving or still, than perfect loveliness.\n  At last, with cheeks afire and heaving flank,\n  She checked her race, and on the river\u2019s bank\n  Stood looking down at her own echoed shape\n  And at the fish that, aimlessly agape,\n  Hung midway up their heaven of flawless glass,\n  Like angels waiting for eternity to pass.\n  Leda drew breath and plunged; her gasping cry\n  Splashed up; the water circled brokenly\n  Out from that pearly shudder of dipped limbs;\n  The glittering pool laughed up its flowery brims,\n  And everything, save the poor fish, rejoiced:\n  Their idiot contemplation of the Moist,\n  The Cold, the Watery, was in a trice\n  Ended when Leda broke their crystal paradise.\n\n  Jove in his high Olympian chamber lay\n  Hugely supine, striving to charm away\n  In sleep the long, intolerable noon.\n  But heedless Morpheus still withheld his boon,\n  And Jove upon his silk-pavilioned bed\n  Tossed wrathful and awake. His fevered head\n  Swarmed with a thousand fancies, which forecast\n  Delights to be, or savoured pleasures past.\n  Closing his eyes, he saw his eagle swift,\n  Headlong as his own thunder, stoop and lift\n  On pinions upward labouring the prize\n  Of beauty ravished for the envious skies.\n  He saw again that bright, adulterous pair,\n  Trapped by the limping husband unaware,\n  Fast in each other\u2019s arms, and faster in the snare\u2014\n  And laughed remembering. Sometimes his thought\n  Went wandering over the earth and sought\n  Familiar places\u2014temples by the sea,\n  Cities and islands; here a sacred tree\n  And there a cavern of shy nymphs.\n                                    He rolled\n  About his bed, in many a rich fold\n  Crumpling his Babylonian coverlet,\n  And yawned and stretched. The smell of his own sweat\n  Brought back to mind his Libyan desert-fane\n  Of mottled granite, with its endless train\n  Of pilgrim camels, reeking towards the sky\n  Ammonian incense to his horn\u00e8d deity;\n  The while their masters worshipped, offering\n  Huge teeth of ivory, while some would bring\n  Their Ethiop wives\u2014sleek wineskins of black silk,\n  Jellied and huge from drinking asses\u2019 milk\n  Through years of tropical idleness, to pray\n  For offspring (whom he ever sent away\n  With prayers unanswered, lest their ebon race\n  Might breed and blacken the earth\u2019s comely face).\n  Noon pressed on him a hotter, heavier weight.\n  O Love in Idleness! how celibate\n  He felt! Libido like a nemesis\n  Scourged him with itching memories of bliss.\n  The satin of imagined skin was sleek\n  And supply warm against his lips and cheek,\n  And deep within soft hair\u2019s dishevelled dusk\n  His eyelids fluttered; like a flowery musk\n  The scent of a young body seemed to float\n  Faintly about him, close and yet remote\u2014\n  For perfume and the essence of music dwell\n  In other worlds among the asphodel\n  Of unembodied life. Then all had flown;\n  His dream had melted. In his bed, alone,\n  Jove sweating lay and moaned, and longed in vain\n  To still the pulses of his burning pain.\n  In sheer despair at last he leapt from bed,\n  Opened the window and thrust forth his head\n  Into Olympian ether. One fierce frown\n  Rifted the clouds, and he was looking down\n  Into a gulf of azure calm; the rack\n  Seethed round about, tempestuously black;\n  But the god\u2019s eye could hold its angry thunders back.\n  There lay the world, down through the chasm\u00e9d blue,\n  Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view;\n  And in the midst, bright as a summer\u2019s day\n  At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay;\n  And Ocean round the world\u2019s dim fringes tossed\n  His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost;\n  And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea\n  Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily.\n  And \u2019twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land,\n  Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand,\n  And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow\n  And the white, changeless silences of snow;\n  While here and there towns, like a living eye\n  Unclosed on earth\u2019s blind face, towards the sky\n  Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight\n  Of his fair earth gave him but small delight\n  Now in his restlessness: its beauty could\n  Do nought to quench the fever in his blood.\n  Desire lends sharpness to his searching eyes;\n  Over the world his focused passion flies\n  Quicker than chasing sunlight on a day\n  Of storm and golden April. Far away\n  He sees the tranquil rivers of the East,\n  Mirrors of many a strange barbaric feast,\n  Where un-Hellenic dancing-girls contort\n  Their yellow limbs, and gibbering masks make sport\n  Under the moons of many-coloured light\n  That swing their lantern-fruitage in the night\n  Of overarching trees. To him it seems\n  An alien world, peopled by insane dreams.\n  But these are nothing to the monstrous shapes\u2014\n  Not men so much as bastardy of apes\u2014\n  That meet his eyes in Africa. Between\n  Leaves of grey fungoid pulp and poisonous green,\n  White eyes from black and browless faces stare.\n  Dryads with star-flowers in their woolly hair\n  Dance to the flaccid clapping of their own\n  Black dangling dugs through forests overgrown,\n  Platted with writhing creepers. Horrified,\n  He sees them how they leap and dance, or glide,\n  Glimpse after black glimpse of a satin skin,\n  Among unthinkable flowers, to pause and grin\n  Out through a trellis of suppurating lips,\n  Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips\n  And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes\n  Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes\n  Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh . . .\n                                        He turns\n  Northward his sickened sight. The desert burns\n  All life away. Here in the fork\u00e9d shade\n  Of twin-humped towering dromedaries laid,\n  A few gaunt folk are sleeping: fierce they seem\n  Even in sleep, and restless as they dream.\n  He would be fearful of a desert bride\n  As of a brown asp at his sleeping side,\n  Fearful of her white teeth and cunning arts.\n  Further, yet further, to the ultimate parts\n  Of the wide earth he looks, where Britons go\n  Painted among their swamps, and through the snow\n  Huge hairy snuffling beasts pursue their prey\u2014\n  Fierce men, as hairy and as huge as they.\n\n  Bewildered furrows deepen the Thunderer\u2019s scowl;\n  This world so vast, so variously foul\u2014\n  Who can have made its ugliness? In what\n  Revolting fancy were the Forms begot\n  Of all these monsters? What strange deity\u2014\n  So barbarously not a Greek!\u2014was he\n  Who could mismake such beings in his own\n  Distorted image. Nay, the Greeks alone\n  Were men; in Greece alone were bodies fair,\n  Minds comely. In that all-but-island there,\n  Cleaving the blue sea with its promontories,\n  Lies the world\u2019s hope, the seed of all the glories\n  That are to be; there, too, must surely live\n  She who alone can medicinably give\n  Ease with her beauty to the Thunderer\u2019s pain.\n  Downwards he bends his fiery eyes again,\n  Glaring on Hellas. Like a beam of light,\n  His intent glances touch the mountain height\n  With passing flame and probe the valleys deep,\n  Rift the dense forest and the age-old sleep\n  Of vaulted antres on whose pebbly floor\n  Gallop the loud-hoofed Centaurs; and the roar\n  Of more than human shouting underground\n  Pulses in living palpable waves of sound\n  From wall to wall, until it rumbles out\n  Into the air; and at that hollow shout\n  That seems an utterance of the whole vast hill,\n  The shepherds cease their laughter and are still.\n  Cities asleep under the noonday sky\n  Stir at the passage of his burning eye;\n  And in their huts the startled peasants blink\n  At the swift flash that bursts through every chink\n  Of wattled walls, hearkening in fearful wonder\n  Through lengthened seconds for the crash of thunder\u2014\n  Which follows not: they are the more afraid.\n  Jove seeks amain. Many a country maid,\n  Whose sandalled feet pass down familiar ways\n  Among the olives, but whose spirit strays\n  Through lovelier lands of fancy, suddenly\n  Starts broad awake out of her dream to see\n  A light that is not of the sun, a light\n  Darted by living eyes, consciously bright;\n  She sees and feels it like a subtle flame\n  Mantling her limbs with fear and maiden shame\n  And strange desire. Longing and terrified,\n  She hides her face, like a new-wedded bride\n  Who feels rough hands that seize and hold her fast;\n  And swooning falls. The terrible light has passed;\n  She wakes; the sun still shines, the olive trees\n  Tremble to whispering silver in the breeze\n  And all is as it was, save she alone\n  In whose dazed eyes this deathless light has shone:\n  For never, never from this day forth will she\n  In earth\u2019s poor passion find felicity,\n  Or love of mortal man. A god\u2019s desire\n  Has seared her soul; nought but the same strong fire\n  Can kindle the dead ash to life again,\n  And all her years will be a lonely pain.\n\n  Many a thousand had he looked upon,\n  Thousands of mortals, young and old; but none\u2014\n  Virgin, or young ephebus, or the flower\n  Of womanhood culled in its full-blown hour\u2014\n  Could please the Thunderer\u2019s sight or touch his mind;\n  The longed-for loveliness was yet to find.\n  Had beauty fled, and was there nothing fair\n  Under the moon? The fury of despair\n  Raged in the breast of heaven\u2019s Almighty Lord;\n  He gnashed his foamy teeth and rolled and roared\n  In bull-like agony. Then a great calm\n  Descended on him: cool and healing balm\n  Touched his immortal fury. He had spied\n  Young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side.\n\n  Even as she broke the river\u2019s smooth expanse,\n  Leda was conscious of that hungry glance,\n  And knew it for an eye of fearful power\n  That did so hot and thunderously lour,\n  She knew not whence, on her frail nakedness.\n  Jove\u2019s heart held but one thought: he must possess\n  That perfect form or die\u2014possess or die.\n  Unheeded prayers and supplications fly,\n  Thick as a flock of birds, about his ears,\n  And smoke of incense rises; but he hears\n  Nought but the soft falls of that melody\n  Which is the speech of Leda; he can see\n  Nought but that almost spiritual grace\n  Which is her body, and that heavenly face\n  Where gay, sweet thoughts shine through, and eyes are bright\n  With purity and the soul\u2019s inward light.\n  Have her he must: the teasel-fingered burr\n  Sticks not so fast in a wild beast\u2019s tangled fur\n  As that insistent longing in the soul\n  Of mighty Jove. Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole\n  Vast universe was blotted from his thought\n  And nought remained but Leda\u2019s laughter, nought\n  But Leda\u2019s eyes. Magnified by his lust,\n  She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must . . .\n  His spirit worked; how should he gain his end\n  With most deliciousness? What better friend,\n  What counsellor more subtle could he find\n  Than lovely Aphrodite, ever kind\n  To hapless lovers, ever cunning, too,\n  In all the tortuous ways of love to do\n  And plan the best? To Paphos then! His will\n  And act were one; and straight, invisible,\n  He stood in Paphos, breathing the languid air\n  By Aphrodite\u2019s couch. O heavenly fair\n  She was, and smooth and marvellously young!\n  On Tyrian silk she lay, and purple hung\n  About her bed in folds of fluted light\n  And shadow, dark as wine. Two doves, more white\n  Even than the white hand on the purple lying\n  Like a pale flower wearily dropped, were flying\n  With wings that made an odoriferous stir,\n  Dropping faint dews of bakkaris and myrrh,\n  Musk and the soul of sweet flowers cunningly\n  Ravished from transient petals as they die.\n  Two stripling cupids on her either hand\n  Stood near with winnowing plumes and gently fanned\n  Her hot, love-fevered cheeks and eyelids burning.\n  Another, crouched at the bed\u2019s foot, was turning\n  A mass of scattered parchments\u2014vows or plaints\n  Or glad triumphant thanks which Venus\u2019 saints,\n  Martyrs and heroes, on her altars strewed\n  With bitterest tears or gifts of gratitude.\n  From the pile heaped at Aphrodite\u2019s feet\n  The boy would take a leaf, and in his sweet,\n  Clear voice would read what mortal tongues can tell\n  In stammering verse of those ineffable\n  Pleasures and pains of love, heaven and uttermost hell.\n  Jove hidden stood and heard him read these lines\n  Of votive thanks\u2014\n      Cypris, this little silver lamp to thee\n        I dedicate.\n      It was my fellow-watcher, shared with me\n      Those swift, short hours, when raised above my fate\n      In Sphenura\u2019s white arms I drank\n        Of immortality.\n  \u201cA pretty lamp, and I will have it placed\n  Beside the narrow bed of some too chaste\n  Sister of virgin Artemis, to be\n  A night-long witness of her cruelty.\n  Read me another, boy,\u201d and Venus bent\n  Her ear to listen to this short lament.\n      Cypris, Cypris, I am betrayed!\n      Under the same wide mantle laid\n      I found them, faithless, shameless pair!\n      Making love with tangled hair.\n  \u201cAlas,\u201d the goddess cried, \u201cnor god, nor man,\n  Nor medicinable balm, nor magic can\n  Cast out the demon jealousy, whose breath\n  Withers the rose of life, save only time and death.\u201d\n  Another sheet he took and read again.\n      Farewell to love, and hail the long, slow pain\n      Of memory that backward turns to joy.\n      O I have danced enough and enough sung;\n      My feet shall be still now and my voice mute;\n      Thine are these withered wreaths, this Lydian flute,\n        Cypris; I once was young.\n  And pi\u00eatous Aphrodite wept to think\n  How fadingly upon death\u2019s very brink\n  Beauty and love take hands for one short kiss\u2014\n  And then the wreaths are dust, the bright-eyed bliss\n  Perished, and the flute still. \u201cRead on, read on.\u201d\n  But ere the page could start, a lightning shone\n  Suddenly through the room, and they were \u2019ware\n  Of some great terrible presence looming there.\n  And it took shape\u2014huge limbs, whose every line\n  A symbol was of power and strength divine,\n  And it was Jove.\n                   \u201cDaughter, I come,\u201d said he,\n  \u201cFor counsel in a case that touches me\n  Close, to the very life.\u201d And he straightway\n  Told her of all his restlessness that day\n  And of his sight of Leda, and how great\n  Was his desire. And so in close debate\n  Sat the two gods, planning their rape; while she,\n  Who was to be their victim, joyously\n  Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill\n  And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill\n  And every fear and all, save only this:\n  That she was young, and it was perfect bliss\n  To be alive where suns so goldenly shine,\n  And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,\n  And the cicadas sing from morn till night,\n  And rivers run so cool and pure and bright . . .\n  Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay\n  In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away\n  The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine\n  As those old images of the gods that shine\n  With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years\n  By the touching lips of countless worshippers,\n  Her body was; and the sun\u2019s golden heat\n  Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet\n  And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew\n  The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,\n  Far hills and the faint fringes of the sky\n  Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,\n  And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill\n  Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until\n  A listener might wonder if they cried\n  In his own head or in the world outside.\n  Sometimes she shut her eyelids, and wrapped round\n  In a red darkness, with the muffled sound\n  And throb of blood beating within her brain,\n  Savoured intensely to the verge of pain\n  Her own young life, hoarded it up behind\n  Her shuttered lids, until, too long confined,\n  It burst them open and her prisoned soul\n  Flew forth and took possession of the whole\n  Exquisite world about her and was made\n  A part of it. Meanwhile her maidens played,\n  Singing an ancient song of death and birth,\n  Seed-time and harvest, old as the grey earth,\n  And moving to their music in a dance\n  As immemorial. A numbing trance\n  Came gradually over her, as though\n  Flake after downy-feathered flake of snow\n  Had muffled all her senses, drifting deep\n  And warm and quiet.\n\n                        From this all-but sleep\n  She started into life again; the sky\n  Was full of a strange tumult suddenly\u2014\n  Beating of mighty wings and shrill-voiced fear\n  And the hoarse scream of rapine following near.\n  In the high windlessness above her flew,\n  Dazzlingly white on the untroubled blue,\n  A splendid swan, with outstretched neck and wing\n  Spread fathom wide, and closely following\n  An eagle, tawny and black. This god-like pair\n  Circled and swooped through the calm of upper air,\n  The eagle striking and the white swan still\n  \u2019Scaping as though by happy miracle\n  The imminent talons. For the twentieth time\n  The furious hunter stooped, to miss and climb\n  A mounting spiral into the height again.\n  He hung there poised, eyeing the grassy plain\n  Far, far beneath, where the girls\u2019 upturned faces\n  Were like white flowers that bloom in open places\n  Among the scarcely budded woods. And they\n  Breathlessly watched and waited; long he lay,\n  Becalmed upon that tideless sea of light,\n  While the great swan with slow and creaking flight\n  Went slanting down towards safety, where the stream\n  Shines through the trees below, with glance and gleam\n  Of blue aerial eyes that seem to give\n  Sense to the sightless earth and make it live.\n  The ponderous wings beat on and no pursuit:\n  Stiff as the painted kite that guards the fruit,\n  Afloat o\u2019er orchards ripe, the eagle yet\n  Hung as at anchor, seeming to forget\n  His uncaught prey, his rage unsatisfied.\n  Still, quiet, dead . . . and then the quickest-eyed\n  Had lost him. Like a star unsphered, a stone\n  Dropped from the vault of heaven, a javelin thrown,\n  He swooped upon his prey. Down, down he came,\n  And through his plumes with a noise of wind-blown flame\n  Loud roared the air. From Leda\u2019s lips a cry\n  Broke, and she hid her face\u2014she could not see him die,\n  Her lovely, hapless swan.\n                            Ah, had she heard,\n  Even as the eagle hurtled past, the word\n  That treacherous pair exchanged. \u201cPeace,\u201d cried the swan;\n  \u201cPeace, daughter. All my strength will soon be gone,\n  Wasted in tedious flying, ere I come\n  Where my desire hath set its only home.\u201d\n  \u201cGo,\u201d said the eagle, \u201cI have played my part,\n  Roused pity for your plight in Leda\u2019s heart\n  (Pity the mother of voluptuousness).\n  Go, father Jove; be happy; for success\n  Attends this moment.\u201d\n                        On the queen\u2019s numbed sense\n  Fell a glad shout that ended sick suspense,\n  Bidding her lift once more towards the light\n  Her eyes, by pity closed against a sight\n  Of blood and death\u2014her eyes, how happy now\n  To see the swan still safe, while far below,\n  Brought by the force of his eluded stroke\n  So near to earth that with his wings he woke\n  A gust whose sudden silvery motion stirred\n  The meadow grass, struggled the sombre bird\n  Of rage and rapine. Loud his scream and hoarse\n  With baffled fury as he urged his course\n  Upwards again on threshing pinions wide.\n  But the fair swan, not daring to abide\n  This last assault, dropped with the speed of fear\n  Towards the river. Like a winged spear,\n  Outstretching his long neck, rigid and straight,\n  Aimed at where Leda on the bank did wait\n  With open arms and kind, uplifted eyes\n  And voice of tender pity, down he flies.\n  Nearer, nearer, terribly swift, he sped\n  Directly at the queen; then widely spread\n  Resisting wings, and breaking his descent\n  \u2019Gainst his own wind, all speed and fury spent,\n  The great swan fluttered slowly down to rest\n  And sweet security on Leda\u2019s breast.\n  Menacingly the eagle wheeled above her;\n  But Leda, like a noble-hearted lover\n  Keeping his child-beloved from tyrannous harm,\n  Stood o\u2019er the swan and, with one slender arm\n  Imperiously lifted, waved away\n  The savage foe, still hungry for his prey.\n  Baffled at last, he mounted out of sight\n  And the sky was void\u2014save for a single white\n  Swan\u2019s feather moulted from a harassed wing\n  That down, down, with a rhythmic balancing\n  From side to side dropped sleeping on the air.\n  Down, slowly down over that dazzling pair,\n  Whose different grace in union was a birth\n  Of unimagined beauty on the earth:\n  So lovely that the maidens standing round\n  Dared scarcely look. Couched on the flowery ground\n  Young Leda lay, and to her side did press\n  The swan\u2019s proud-arching opulent loveliness,\n  Stroking the snow-soft plumage of his breast\n  With fingers slowly drawn, themselves caressed\n  By the warm softness where they lingered, loth\n  To break away. Sometimes against their growth\n  Ruffling the feathers inlaid like little scales\n  On his sleek neck, the pointed finger-nails\n  Rasped on the warm, dry, puckered skin beneath;\n  And feeling it she shuddered, and her teeth\n  Grated on edge; for there was something strange\n  And snake-like in the touch. He, in exchange,\n  Gave back to her, stretching his eager neck,\n  For every kiss a little amorous peck;\n  Rubbing his silver head on her gold tresses,\n  And with the nip of horny dry caresses\n  Leaving upon her young white breast and cheek\n  And arms the red print of his playful beak.\n  Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim\n  Austerity of virginal flank and limb\n  His curved and florid beauty, till she felt\n  That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt\n  The bones and marrow of her strength away.\n  One lifted arm bent o\u2019er her brow, she lay\n  With limbs relaxed, scarce breathing, deathly still;\n  Save when a quick, involuntary thrill\n  Shook her sometimes with passing shudderings,\n  As though some hand had plucked the aching strings\n  Of life itself, tense with expectancy.\n  And over her the swan shook slowly free\n  The folded glory of his wings, and made\n  A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade\n  To be her veil and keep her from the shame\n  Of naked light and the sun\u2019s noonday flame.\n\n  Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.\n  Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry\n  Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,\n  Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again.\n\n\n\n\n                            THE BIRTH OF GOD\n\n      NIGHT is a void about me; I lie alone;\n      And water drips, like an idiot clicking his tongue,\n      Senselessly, ceaselessly, endlessly drips\n      Into the waiting silence, grown\n      Emptier for this small inhuman sound.\n      My love is gone, my love who is tender and young.\n      O smooth warm body! O passionate lips!\n      I have stretched forth hands in the dark and nothing found:\n      The silence is huge as the sky\u2014I lie alone\u2014\n      My narrow room, a darkness that knows no bound.\n\n      How shall I fill this measureless\n      Deep void that the taking away\n      Of a child\u2019s slim beauty has made?\n      Slender she is and small, but the loneliness\n      She has left is a night no stars allay,\n      And I am cold and afraid.\n\n      Long, long ago, cut off from the wolfish pack,\n      From the warm, immediate touch of friends and mate,\n      Lost and alone, alone in the utter black\n      Of a forest night, some far-off, beast-like man,\n      Cowed by the cold indifferent hate\n      Of the northern silence, crouched in fear,\n      When through his bleared and suffering mind\n      A sudden tremor of comfort ran,\n      And the void was filled by a rushing wind,\n      And he breathed a sense of something friendly and near,\n      And in privation the life of God began.\n\n      Love, from your loss shall a god be born to fill\n      The emptiness, where once you were,\n      With friendly knowledge and more than a lover\u2019s will\n      To ease despair?\n      Shall I feed longing with what it hungers after,\n      Seeing in earth and sea and air\n      A lover\u2019s smiles, hearing a lover\u2019s laughter,\n      Feeling love everywhere?\n\n      The night drags on. Darkness and silence grow,\n      And with them my desire has grown,\n      My bitter need. Alas, I know,\n      I know that here I lie alone.\n\n\n\n\n                           ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH\n\n  BENEATH the sunlight and blue of all-but Autumn\n    The grass sleeps goldenly; woodland and distant hill\n  Shine through the gauzy air in a dust of golden pollen,\n    And even the glittering leaves are almost still.\n\n  Scattered on the grass, like a ragman\u2019s bundles carelessly dropped,\n    Men sleep outstretched or, sprawling, bask in the sun;\n  Here glows a woman\u2019s bright dress and here a child is sitting,\n    And I lie down and am one of the sleepers, one\n\n  Like the rest of this tumbled crowd. Do they all, I wonder,\n    Feel anguish grow with the calm day\u2019s slow decline,\n  Longing, as I, for a shattering wind, a passion\n    Of bodily pain to be the soul\u2019s anodyne?\n\n\n\n\n                                SYMPATHY\n\n            THE irony of being two . . . !\n            Grey eyes, wide open suddenly,\n            Regard me and enquire; I see a face\n            Grave and unquiet in tenderness.\n            Heart-rending question of women\u2014never answered:\n            \u201cTell me, tell me, what are you thinking of?\u201d\n            Oh, the pain and foolishness of love!\n            What can I do but make my old grimace,\n            Ending it with a kiss, as I always do?\n\n\n\n\n                    MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM\n\n              DIAPHENIA, drunk with sleep,\n              Drunk with pleasure, drunk with fatigue,\n              Feels her Corydon\u2019s fingers creep\u2014\n              Ring-finger, middle finger, index, thumb\u2014\n              Strummingly over the smooth sleek drum\n              Of her thorax.\n                              Meanwhile H\u00e4ndel\u2019s Gigue\n              Turns in Corydon\u2019s absent mind\n              To Yakka-Hoola.\n                                She can find\n              No difference in the thrilling touch\n              Of one who, now, in everything\n              Is God-like. \u201cWas there ever such\n              Passion as ours?\u201d\n                                  His pianoing\n              Gives place to simple arithmetic\u2019s\n              Simplest constatations:\u2014six\n              Letters in Gneiss and three in Gnu:\n              Luncheon to-day cost three and two;\n              In a year\u2014he couldn\u2019t calculate\n              Three-sixty-five times thirty-eight,\n              Figuring with printless fingers on\n              Her living parchment.\n                                          \u201cCorydon!\n              I faint, faint, faint at your dear touch.\n              Say, is it possible . . . to love too much?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n                            FROM THE PILLAR\n\n                  SIMEON, the withered stylite,\n                    Sat gloomily looking down\n                  Upon each roof and skylight\n                    In all the seething town.\n\n                  And in every upper chamber,\n                    On roofs, where the orange flowers\n                  Make weary men remember\n                    The perfume of long-dead hours,\n\n                  He saw the wine-drenched riot\n                    Of harlots and human beasts,\n                  And how celestial quiet\n                    Was shattered by their feasts.\n\n                  The steam of fetid vices\n                    From a thousand lupanars,\n                  Like smoke of sacrifices,\n                    Reeked up to the heedless stars.\n\n                  And the saint from his high fastness\n                    Of purity apart\n                  Cursed them and their unchasteness,\n                    And envied them in his heart.\n\n\n\n\n                                 JONAH\n\n             A CREAM of phosphorescent light\n             Floats on the wash that to and fro\n             Slides round his feet\u2014enough to show\n             Many a pendulous stalactite\n             Of naked mucus, whorls and wreaths\n             And huge festoons of mottled tripes\n             And smaller palpitating pipes\n             Through which a yeasty liquor seethes.\n\n             Seated upon the convex mound\n             Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays\n             And sings his canticles and hymns,\n             Making the hollow vault resound\n             God\u2019s goodness and mysterious ways,\n             Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.\n\n\n\n\n                         VARIATIONS ON A THEME\n\n           SWAN, Swan,\n           Yesterday you were\n           The whitest of things in this dark winter.\n           To-day the snow has made of your plumes\n           An unwashed pocket handkercher,\n           An unwashed pocket handkercher . . .\n           \u201cLancashire, to Lancashire!\u201d\u2014\n           Tune of the antique trains long ago:\n           Each summer holiday a milestone\n           Backwards, backwards:\u2014\n           Tenby, Barmouth, and year by year\n           All the different hues of the sea,\n           Blue, green and blue.\n           But on this river of muddy jade\n           There swims a yellow swan,\n           And along the bank the snow lies dazzlingly white.\n\n\n\n\n                         A MELODY BY SCARLATTI\n\n                HOW clear under the trees,\n                How softly the music flows,\n                Rippling from one still pool to another\n                Into the lake of silence.\n\n\n\n\n                                A SUNSET\n\n          OVER against the triumph and the close\u2014\n            Amber and green and rose\u2014\n              Of this short day,\n          The pale ghost of the moon grows living-bright\n            Once more, as the last light\n              Ebbs slowly away.\n          Darkening the fringes of these western glories\n            The black phantasmagories\n              Of cloud advance\n          With noiseless footing\u2014vague and villainous shapes,\n            Wrapped in their ragged fustian capes,\n              Of some grotesque romance.\n          But overhead where, like a pool between\n            Dark rocks, the sky is green\n              And clear and deep,\n          Floats windlessly a cloud, with curving breast\n            Flushed by the fiery west,\n              In god-like sleep . . .\n          And in my mind opens a sudden door\n            That lets me see once more\n              A little room\n          With night beyond the window, chill and damp,\n            And one green-lighted lamp\n              Tempering the gloom,\n          While here within, close to me, touching me\n            (Even the memory\n              Of my desire\n          Shakes me like fear), you sit with scattered hair;\n            And all your body bare\n              Before the fire\n          Is lapped about with rosy flame. . . . But still,\n            Here on the lonely hill,\n              I walk alone;\n          Silvery green is the moon\u2019s lamp overhead,\n            The cloud sleeps warm and red,\n              And you are gone.\n\n\n\n\n                              LIFE AND ART\n\n              YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure;\n                You laugh with the bountiful earth\n              In its richness of summer treasure:\n                Where now are your flowers and your mirth?\n              Petals and cadenced laughter,\n                Each in a dying fall,\n              Droop out of life; and after\n                Is nothing; they were all.\n\n              But we from the death of roses\n                That three suns perfume and gild\n              With a kiss, till the fourth discloses\n                A withered wreath, have distilled\n              The fulness of one rare phial,\n                Whose nimble life shall outrun\n              The circling shadow on the dial,\n                Outlast the tyrannous sun.\n\n\n\n\n                        FIRST PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG\n\n               A POOR degenerate from the ape,\n               Whose hands are four, whose tail\u2019s a limb,\n               I contemplate my flaccid shape\n               And know I may not rival him,\n\n               Save with my mind\u2014a nimbler beast\n               Possessing a thousand sinewy tails,\n               A thousand hands, with which it scales,\n               Greedy of luscious truth, the greased\n\n               Poles and the coco palms of thought,\n               Thrids easily through the mangrove maze\n               Of metaphysics, walks the taut\n               Frail dangerous liana ways\n\n               That link across wide gulfs remote\n               Analogies between tree and tree;\n               Outruns the hare, outhops the goat;\n               Mind fabulous, mind sublime and free!\n\n               But oh, the sound of simian mirth!\n               Mind, issued from the monkey\u2019s womb,\n               Is still umbilical to earth,\n               Earth its home and earth its tomb.\n\n\n\n\n                       SECOND PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG\n\n            IF, O my Lesbia, I should commit,\n            Not fornication, dear, but suicide,\n            My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)\n            Would drift face upwards on the oily tide\n            With the other garbage, till it putrefied.\n\n            But you, if all your lovers\u2019 frozen hearts\n            Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown\u2014\n            Your maiden modesty would float face down,\n            And men would weep upon your hinder parts.\n\n            \u2019Tis the Lord\u2019s doing. Marvellous is the plan\n            By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.\n            One law He made for woman, one for man:\n            We bow the head and do not understand.\n\n\n\n\n                        FIFTH PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG\n\n            A MILLION million spermatozoa,\n              All of them alive:\n            Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah\n              Dare hope to survive.\n\n            And among that billion minus one\n              Might have chanced to be\n            Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne\u2014\n              But the One was Me.\n\n            Shame to have ousted your betters thus,\n              Taking ark while the others remained outside!\n            Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,\n              If you\u2019d quietly died!\n\n\n\n\n                        NINTH PHILOSOPHER\u2019S SONG\n\n           GOD\u2019S in His Heaven: He never issues\n             (Wise Man!) to visit this world of ours.\n           Unchecked the cancer gnaws our tissues,\n             Stops to lick chops and then again devours.\n\n           Those find, who most delight to roam\n             \u2019Mid castles of remotest Spain,\n           That there\u2019s, thank Heaven, no place like home;\n             So they set out upon their travels again.\n\n           Beauty for some provides escape,\n             Who gain a happiness in eyeing\n           The gorgeous buttocks of the ape\n             Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.\n\n           And some to better worlds than this\n             Mount up on wings as frail and misty\n           As passion\u2019s all-too-transient kiss\n             (Though afterwards\u2014oh, _omne animal triste_!)\n\n           But I, too rational by half\n             To live but where I bodily am.\n           Can only do my best to laugh.\n             Can only sip my misery dram by dram.\n\n           While happier mortals take to drink,\n             A dolorous dipsomaniac,\n           Fuddled with grief I sit and think,\n             Looking upon the bile when it is black.\n\n           Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor!\n             We\u2019ll pledge our Empire vast across the flood:\n           For Blood, as all men know, than Water\u2019s thicker,\n             But water\u2019s wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.\n\n\n\n\n                             MORNING SCENE\n\n               LIGHT through the latticed blind\n               Spans the dim intermediate space\n               With parallels of luminous dust\n               To gild a nuptial couch, where Goya\u2019s mind\n               Conceived those agonising hands, that hair\n               Scattered, and half a sunlit bosom bare,\n               And, imminently above them, a red face\n               Fixed in the imbecile earnestness of lust.\n\n\n\n\n                                VERREY\u2019S\n\n                 HERE, every winter\u2019s night at eight,\n                 Epicurus lies in state,\n                 Two candles at his head and two\n                 Candles at his feet. A few\n                 Choice spirits watch beneath the vault\n                 Of his dim chapel, where default\n                 Of music fills the pregnant air\n                 With subtler requiem and prayer\n                 Than ever an organ wrought with notes\n                 Spouted from its tubal throats.\n                 Black Ethiopia\u2019s Holy Child,\n                 The Cradled Bottle, breathes its mild\n                 Meek spirit on the ravished nose,\n                 The palate and the tongue of those\n                 Who piously partake with me\n                 Of this funereal agape.\n\n\n\n\n                               FRASCATI\u2019S\n\n              BUBBLE-BREASTED swells the dome\n              Of this my spiritual home,\n              From whose nave the chandelier,\n              Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.\n              We in the round balcony sit,\n              Lean o\u2019er and look into the pit\n              Where feed the human bears beneath,\n              Champing with their gilded teeth.\n              What negroid holiday makes free\n              With such priapic revelry?\n              What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?\n              What gods like wooden stalagmites?\n              What steam of blood or kidney pie?\n              What blasts of Bantu melody?\n              Ragtime. . . . But when the wearied Band\n              Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.\n              And there we sit in blissful calm,\n              Quietly sweating palm to palm.\n\n\n\n\n                                FATIGUE\n\nTHE mind has lost its Aristotelian elegance of shape: there is only a\ndarkness where bubbles and inconsequent balloons float up to burst their\nluminous cheeks and vanish.\n\nA woman with a basket on her head: a Chinese lantern quite askew: the\nvague bright bulging of chemists\u2019 window bottles; and then in my ears\nthe distant noise of a great river of people. And phrases, phrases\u2014\n\nIt is only a question of saddle-bags,\n\nStane Street and Gondibert,\n\nFoals in Iceland (or was it Foals in aspic?).\n\nAs that small reddish devil turns away with an insolent jut of his\nhindquarters, I become aware that his curling pug\u2019s tail is an electric\nbell-push. But that does not disquiet me so much as the sight of all\nthese polished statues twinkling with high lights and all of them\ngrotesque and all of them colossal.\n\n\n\n\n                           THE MERRY-GO-ROUND\n\nTHE machine is ready to start. The symbolic beasts grow resty,\ncurveting where they stand at their places in the great blue circle of\nthe year. The Showman\u2019s voice rings out. \u201cMontez, mesdames et messieurs,\nmontez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. You will take the Scorpion.\nYours, madame, is the Goat. As for you there, blackguard boy, you must\nbe content with the Fishes. I have allotted you the Virgin,\nmademoiselle.\u201d . . . \u201cPolisson!\u201d \u201cPardon, pardon. Evidemment, c\u2019est le\nSagittaire qu\u2019on demande. Oh\u00e9, les dards! The rest must take what comes.\nThe Twins shall counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away\nwe go, away.\u201d\n\nHa, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the\nintoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings. . . .\nsphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound\nof winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving,\nsinging . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever\nwhirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.\n\nBut I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout,\nand there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as\nhe ground, and grinding eternally. And when I perceived that he was the\nauthor of all our speed and that the music was of his making, that\neverything depended on his grinding wheel, I thought I would like to get\noff. But we were going too fast.\n\n\n\n\n                              BACK STREETS\n\nBACK streets, gutters of stagnating darkness where men breathe\nsomething that is not so much air as a kind of rarefied slime. . . . I\nlook back down the tunnelled darkness of a drain to where, at the mouth,\na broader, windier water-way glitters with the gay speed and motion of\nsunlit life. But around all is dimly rotting; and the inhabitants are\nthose squamous, phosphorescent creatures that darkness and decay beget.\nLittle men, sheathed tightly in clothes of an exaggeratedly fashionable\ncheapness, hurry along the pavements, jaunty and at the same time\nfurtive. There is a thin layer of slime over all of them. And then there\nare the eyes of the women, with their hard glitter that is only of the\nsurface. They see acutely, but in a glassy, superficial way, taking in\nthe objects round them no more than my western windows retain the\nimprint of the sunset that enriches them.\n\nBack streets, exhalations of a difficulty puberty, I once lived on the\nfringes of them.\n\n\n\n\n                              LAST THINGS\n\nTHERE have been visions, dark in the minds of men, death and\ncorruption dancing across the secular abyss that separates eternity from\ntime to where sits the ineluctable judge, waiting, waiting through the\nages, and ponders all his predestinated decrees. There will be judgment,\nand each, in an agony of shame, reluctant yet compelled, will turn his\nown accuser. For\n\n                         Tunc tua gesta noxia\n                         Secreta quoque turpia\n                         Videbunt mille millia\n                         Virorum circumstantia.\n\nThere under the unwinking gaze of all the legions of just men made\nperfect, the poor prisoner will uncover each dirty secret of his heart,\nwill act over again each shameful scene of his life. And those eyes of\nsaints and angels will shine impassively down upon his beastliness, and\nto him, as he looks at their steady brilliance, they will seem a million\nof little blazing loopholes slotted in the walls of hell.\n\nHildebert, this was your vision as you brooded over death and judgment,\nhell and heaven, in your cloister, a thousand years ago. Do you not envy\nus our peace of mind who know not four ultimates, but only one? For whom\nthe first of the Last Things is also the last\u2014us, whom death\nannihilates with all our shame and all our folly, leaving no trace\nbehind.\n\n\n\n\n                                 GOTHIC\n\nSHARP spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling\nbells. Reckless, breakneck, head over heels down an airy spiral of\nstairs run the bells. \u201cUpon Paul\u2019s steeple stands a tree.\u201d\n\nUp again and then once more to the bottom, two steps at a time. \u201cAs full\nof apples as can be.\u201d\n\nUp again and down again: centuries of climbing have not worn the crystal\nsmoothness of the degrees.\n\nAlong the bellying clouds the little boys of London Town come running,\nrunning as best they may, seeing that at every step they sink ankle-deep\nthrough the woolly surface into the black heart of thunder beneath.\n\nThe apples on the trees are swaying in the wind, rocking to the clamour\nof bells. The leaves are of bright green copper, and rattle together\nwith a scaly sound. At the roots of the tree sit four gargoyles playing\na little serious game with dice. The hunch-backed ape has won from the\nmanticore that crooked French crown with a hole in it which the\nmanticore got from the friar with the strawberry nose; he had it in turn\nas an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there,\nthrough the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the great\nchurch is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst\nof dark tempestuous seas.\n\n\n\n\n                             EVENING PARTY\n\n\u201cSANS Espoir, sans Espoir . . .\u201d sang the lady while the piano\nlaboriously opened its box of old sardines in treacle. One detected\nptomaine in the syrup.\n\nSans Espoir . . . I thought of the rhymes\u2014soir, nonchaloir,\nreposoir\u2014the dying falls of a symbolism grown sadly suicidal before the\nbroad Flemish back of the singer, the dewlaps of her audience. Sans\nEspoir. The listeners wore the frozen rapture of those who gaze upon the\nuplifted Host.\n\nCatching one another\u2019s eye, we had a simultaneous vision of pews, of\nhyenas and hysteria.\n\nThree candles were burning. They behaved like English aristocrats in a\nFrench novel\u2014perfectly, impassively. I tried to imitate their\nmilordliness.\n\nOne of the candles flickered, snickered. Was it a draught or was it\nlaughter?\n\nFlickering, snickering\u2014candles, you betrayed me. I had to laugh too.\n\n\n\n\n                                 BEAUTY\n                                   I\n\nTHERE is a sea somewhere\u2014whether in the lampless crypts of the earth,\nor among sunlit islands, or that which is an unfathomable and terrifying\nquestion between the archipelagos of stars\u2014there is a sea (and perhaps\nits tides have filled those green transparent pools that glint like eyes\nin a spring storm-cloud) which is for ever troubled and in travail\u2014a\nbubbling and a heaving up of waters as though for the birth of a\nfountain.\n\nThe sick and the crippled lie along the brims in expectation of the\nmiracle. And at last, at last . . .\n\nA funnel of white water is twisted up and so stands, straight and still\nby the very speed of its motion.\n\nIt drinks the light; slowly it is infused with colour, rose and\nmother-of-pearl. Slowly it takes shape, a heavenly body.\n\nO dazzling Anadyomene!\n\nThe flakes of foam break into white birds about her head, fall again in\na soft avalanche of flowers. Perpetual miracle, beauty endlessly born.\n\n\n\n\n                                   II\n\nSTEAMERS, in all your travelling have you trailed the meshes of your\nlong expiring white nets across this sea, or dipped in it your sliding\nrail, or balanced your shadow far far down upon its glass-green sand?\nOr, forgetting the preoccupations of commerce and the well-oiled\npredestination of your machinery, did you ever put in at the real\nPaphos?\n\n\n\n\n                                  III\n\nIN the city of Troy, whither our Argonautical voyages had carried us,\nwe found Helen and that lamentable Cressid who was to Chaucer the\nfeminine paradox, untenably fantastic but so devastatingly actual, the\ncrystal ideal\u2014flawed; and to Shakespeare the inevitable trull, flayed\nto show her physiological machinery and the logical conclusion of every\nthe most heartrendingly ingenuous gesture of maidenhood. (But, bless\nyou! our gorge doesn\u2019t rise. We are cynically well up in the damning\nTheory of woman, which makes it all the more amusing to watch ourselves\nin the ecstatic practice of her. Unforeseen perversity.)\n\nFabulous Helen! At her firm breasts they used to mould delicate drinking\ncups which made the sourest vinegar richly poisonous.\n\nThe geometry of her body had utterly outwitted Euclid, and the\nPhilosophers were baffled by curves of a subtlety infinitely more\nelusive and Eleusinian than the most oracular speculations of\nParmenides. They did their best to make a coherent system out of the\nincompatible, but empirically established, facts of her. Time, for\ninstance, was abolished within the circle of her arms. \u201cIt is eternity\nwhen her lips touch me,\u201d Paris had remarked. And yet this same Paris was\nmanifestly and notoriously falling into a decline, had lost whatever\nsense or beauty he once possessed, together with his memory and all\nskill in the nine arts which are memory\u2019s daughters. How was it then,\nthese perplexed philosophers wondered, that she could at one and the\nsame moment give eternity like a goddess, while she was vampiring away\nwith that divine thirsty mouth of hers the last dregs of a poor mortal\nlife? They sought an insufficient refuge in Heraclitus\u2019 theory of\nopposites.\n\nMeanwhile Troilus was always to be found at sunset, pacing up and down\nthe walls by the western gate\u2014quite mad. At dusk the Greek camp-fires\nwould blossom along Xanthus banks\u2014one after another, a myriad lights\ndancing in the dark.\n\n        As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,\n        O\u2019er heaven\u2019s pure azure spreads her something light.\n\nHe would repeat the simile to himself, but could never remember the\ncorrect epithets. Not that they mattered\u2014any more than anything else.\n\n\n\n\n                                   IV\n\nTHERE are fine cities in the world\u2014Manhattan, Ecbatana and\nHecatompylus\u2014but this city of Troy is the most fabulous of them all.\nRome was seven hills of butcher\u2019s meat, Athens an abstraction of marble,\nin Alexandria the steam of kidney-puddings revolted the c\u0153nobites,\ndarkness and size render London inappreciable, Paris is full of\nsparrows, the snow lies gritty on Berlin, Moscow has no verisimilitude,\nall the East is peopled by masks and apes and larv\u00e6. But this city of\nTroy is most of all real and fabulous with its charnel beauty.\n\n\u201cIs not Helen the end of our search\u2014paradisal little World, symbol and\nepitome of the Great? Dawn sleeps in the transparent shadow of roses\nwithin her ear. The stainless candour of infinity\u2014far-off peaks in\nsummer and the Milky Way\u2014has taken marvellous form in her. The Little\nWorld has its meteors, too, comets and shadowy clouds of hair, stars at\nwhose glance men go planet-struck. Meteors\u2014yes, and history it has. The\npast is still alive in the fragrance of her hair, and her young body\nbreathes forth memories as old as the beginning of life\u2014Eros first of\ngods. In her is the goal. I rest here with Helen.\u201d\n\n\u201cFool,\u201d I said, \u201cquote your Faustus. I go further.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n                                   V\n\nFURTHER\u2014but a hundred Liliputian tethers prevent me, the white nerves\nwhich tie soul to skin. And the whole air is aching with epidermical\nmagnetism.\n\nFurther, further. But Troy is the birthplace of my homesickness. Troy is\nmore than a patriotism, for it is built of my very flesh; the\nremembrance of it is a fire that sticks and tears when I would pull it\noff.\n\nBut further. One last look at Troilus where he stands by the western\ngate, staring over the plain. Further. When I have learnt the truth, I\nwill return and build a new palace with domes less ominously like\nbreasts, and there I will invent a safer Helen and a less paradoxical\nCressid, and my harem will be a library for enlightenment.\n\n\n\n\n                                   VI\n\nHERE are pagodas of diminishing bells. The leopard sleeps in the depth\nof his rosy cavern, and when he breathes it is a smell of irresistible\nsweetness; in the bestiaries he is the symbol of Christ in His\nsepulchre.\n\nThis listening conch has collected all the rumours of pantheism; the dew\nin this veined cup is the sacrament of nature, while these pale\nthuribles worship in the dark with yellow lamps and incense.\n\nEverywhere alchemical profusion\u2014the golden mintage of glades and\nripples, vigils of passion enriched with silver under the fingers of the\nmoon; everywhere lavishness, colour, music; the smoothness of machinery,\nincredible and fantastic ingenuities. God has lost his half-hunter in\nthe desert.\n\nBut we have not come to worship among these Gothic beeches, for all\ntheir pillars and the lace-work of their green windows. We are looking\nfor other things than churches.\n\n\n\n\n                                  VII\n\nTREES, the half-fossilised exuberances of a passionate life, petrified\nfountains of intemperance\u2014with their abolition begins the realm of\nreason.\n\nGeometry, lines and planes, smooth edges, the ordered horror of\nperspectives. In this country there are pavements bright and sleek as\nwater. The walls are precipices to which giants have nailed a perpetual\ncataract of marble. The fringes of the sky are scalloped with a pattern\nof domes and minarets. At night, too, the down-struck lamps are pyramids\nof phantom green and the perfect circle they make upon the pavement is\nmagical.\n\nLook over the parapet of the Acropolis. The bridges go dizzily down on\ntheir swaying catenaries, the gull\u2019s flight chained fast. The walls drop\nclear into the valley, all the millions of basalt blocks calcined into a\nsingle red monolith, fluted with thirstily shining organ pipes, which\nseem for ever wet. There are no crevices for moss and toadflax, and even\nthe claws of the yellow lichen slip on its polished flanks.\n\nThe valley is all paved and inlaid with rivers of steel. No trees, for\nthey have been abolished.\n\n\u201cGlorious unnature,\u201d cries the watcher at the parapet. His voice\nlaunches into the abyss, following the curve of the bridges. \u201cGlorious\nunnature. We have triumphed.\u201d\n\nBut his laughter as it descends is like a flight of broken steps.\n\n\n\n\n                                  VIII\n\nLET us abandon ourselves to Time, which is beauty\u2019s essence. We live\namong the perpetual degenerations of apotheoses. Sunset dissolves into\nsoft grey snow and the deep ocean of midnight, boundless as\nforgetfulness or some yet undiscovered Pacific, contracts into the green\npuddle of the dawn. The flowers burn to dust with their own brightness.\nOn the banks of ancient rivers stand the pitiful stumps of huge towers\nand the ghosts of dead men straining to return into life. The woods are\nfull of the smell of transience. Beauty, then, is that moment of descent\nwhen apotheosis tilts its wings downwards into the gulf. The ends of the\ncurve lose themselves parabolically somewhere in infinity. Our\nsentimental eyes see only the middle section of this degeneration,\nknowing neither the upper nor the lower extremes, which some have\nthought to meet, godhead and annihilation.\n\nOld Curiosity Shops! If I have said \u201cMortality is beauty,\u201d it was a\nweakness. The sense of time is a symptom of an\u00e6mia of the soul, through\nwhich flows angelic ichor. We must escape from the dust of the shop.\n\nCloistered darkness and sleep offer us their lotuses. Not to perceive\nwhere all is ugly, eaten into by the syphilis of time,\nheart-sickening\u2014this is beauty; not to desire where death is the only\nconsummation\u2014wisdom.\n\nNight is a measureless deep silence: daybreak brings back the f\u0153tid\ngutters of the town. O supreme beauty of a night that knows no\nlimitations\u2014stars or the jagged edges of cock-crowing. Desperate, my\nmind has desired it: never my blood, whose pulse is a rhythm of the\nworld.\n\nAt the other extreme, Beatrice lacks solidity, is as unresponsive to\nyour kisses as mathematics. She too is an oubliette, not a way of life;\nan oubliette that, admittedly, shoots you upwards into light, not down\nto death; but it comes to the same thing in the end.\n\nWhat, then, is the common measure? To take the world as it is, but\nmetaphorically, informing the chaos of nature with a soul, qualifying\ntransience with eternity.\n\nWhen flowers are thoughts, and lonely poplars fountains of aspiring\nlonging; when our actions are the poem of which all geographies and\narchitectures and every science and all the unclassed individual odds\nand ends are the words, when even Helen\u2019s white voluptuousness matches\nsome candour of the soul\u2014then it will have been found, the permanent\nand living loveliness.\n\nIt is not a far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only\nwhen the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent; it is not a birth of\nrare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state\npermission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic,\na way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medi\u00e6val in its\nimplication with the very threads of life. I desire no Paphian cloister\nof pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating,\ndrinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery;\nreading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more\nsubtly, sometimes perhaps creating.\n\nArduous search for one who is chained by his desires to dead carcases,\nwhose eyes are dimmed with tears by the slow heart-breaking twilights\nfull of old family ghosts laid in lavender, whose despair cries out for\nopiate and anodyne, craving gross sleep or a place on the airy\nunsupported pinnacles which hang in the sterile upper chambers of ether.\n\nVentre \u00e0 terre, head in air\u2014your centaurs are your only poets. Their\nhoofs strike sparks from the flints and they see both very near and\nimmensely far.\n\n\n\n\n                    SOLES OCCIDERE ET REDIRE POSSUNT\n                                FOREWORD\n\nJOHN RIDLEY, the subject of this poem, was killed in February 1918.\n\u201cIf I should perish,\u201d he wrote to me only five weeks before his death,\n\u201cif I should perish\u2014and one isn\u2019t exactly a \u2019good life\u2019 at the\nmoment\u2014I wish you\u2019d write something about me. It isn\u2019t vanity (for I\nknow you\u2019ll do me, if anything, rather less than justice!), not vanity,\nI repeat; but that queer irrational desire one has for immortality of\nany kind, however short and precarious\u2014for frankly, my dear, I doubt\nwhether your verses will be so very much more perennial than brass.\nStill, they\u2019ll be something. One can\u2019t, of course, believe in any\n_au-del\u00e0_ for one\u2019s personal self; one would have first to believe in\nsome kind of a friendly god. And as for being a spiritualist spook, one\nof those wretched beings who seem to spend their eternity in trying to\ncommunicate with the earth by a single telephone, where the number is\nalways engaged, and the line chronically out of order\u2014well, all I can\nsay is, Heaven preserve me from such a future life. No, my only hope is\nyou\u2014and a damned poor guarantee for eternity. Don\u2019t make of me a khaki\nimage, I beg. I\u2019d rather you simply said of me, as Erasmus did of his\nbrother, \u2018Strenuus compotor, nec scortator ignavus.\u2019 I sincerely hope,\nof course, that you won\u2019t have to write the thing at all\u2014hope not, but\nhave very little doubt you will. Good-bye.\u201d\n\nThe following poem is a tentative and provisional attempt to comply with\nhis request. Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that\ninstability of mind \u201cproduced by the mental conflict forced upon man by\nhis sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience\non the other\u201d (I quote from Mr. Trotter\u2019s memorable work on Herd\nInstinct), that characteristic instability which makes adolescence so\nfeebly sceptical, so inefficient, so profoundly unhappy. I have fished\nup a single day from Ridley\u2019s forgotten existence. It has a bedraggled\nair in the sunlight, this poor wisp of Lethean weed. Fortunately,\nhowever, it will soon be allowed to drop back into the water, where we\nshall all, in due course, join it. \u201cThe greater part must be content to\nbe as though they had not been.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n        I\n  BETWEEN the drawing of the blind\n  And being aware of yet another day\n  There came to him behind\n  Close, pregnant eyelids, like a flame of blue,\n  Intense, untroubled by the wind,\n  A Mediterranean bay,\n  Bearing a brazen beak and foamless oars\n  To where, marmoreally smooth and bright,\n  The steps soar up in one pure flight\n  From the sea\u2019s edge to the palace doors,\n  That have shut, have shut their valves of bronze\u2014\n  And the windows too are lifeless eyes.\n\n  The galley grated on the stone;\n  He stepped out\u2014and was alone:\n  No white-sailed hopes, no clouds, nor swans\n  To shatter the ocean\u2019s calm, to break the sky\u2019s.\n\n  Up the slow stairs:\n                        Did he know it was a dream?\n  First one foot up, then the other foot,\n  Shuddering like a mandrake root\n  That hears the truffle-dog at work\n  And draws a breath to scream;\n  To moan, to scream.\n                            The gates swing wide,\n  And it is coolly dark inside,\n  And corridors stretch out and out,\n  Joining the ceilings to their floors,\n  And parallels ring wedding bells\n  And through a hundred thousand doors\n  Perspective has abolished doubt.\n\n  But one of the doors was shut,\n  And behind it the subtlest lutanist\n  Was shaking a broken necklace of tinkling notes,\n  And somehow it was feminine music.\n  Strange exultant fear of desire, when hearts\n  Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch\u2014\n  And woke among his familiar books and pictures;\n\n  Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.\n  Thursday. Wasn\u2019t he lunching at his aunt\u2019s?\n  Distressing circumstance.\n  But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,\n  Which was some consolation. What a chin!\n  Civilized ten thousand years, and still\n  No better way than rasping a pale mask\n  With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:\n  Repulsive task!\n  And the more odious for being quotidian.\n  If one should live till eighty-five . . .\n  And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?\n\n  But that lute, playing across his dream . . .\n  Quick drops breaking the sleep of the water-wheel,\n  Song and ebbing whisper of a summer stream,\n  Music\u2019s endless inconsequence that would reveal\n  To souls that listened for it, the all\n  Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose,\n  Could it but find the magical fall\n  That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . . .\n  And why so feminine? But one could feel\n  The unseen woman sitting there behind\n  The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal\n  To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath\n  The libraries and parlours of the mind.\n  If only one were rational, if only\n  At least one had the illusion of being so . . .\n\n  Nine o\u2019clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!\n  He wept to think of all those single beds,\n  Those desperate night-long solitudes,\n  Those mental Salons full of nudes.\n  Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.\n  Eight thousand nights alone\u2014minus, perhaps,\n  Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.\n    Five little bits of heaven\n    (Tum-de-rum, de-rum, de-rum),\n  Five little bits of Heaven and one that was a lapse,\n  High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly\n  In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the\n  (Like infants\u2019 impoliteness, a terrible infant\u2019s brightness),\n  And he would shut his eyes so as not to see\n  His own hot blushes calling him a swine.\n  Atrocious memory! For memory should be\n  Of things secure and dead, being past,\n  Not living and disquieting. At last\n  He threw the nightmare of his blankets off.\n\n  Cloudy ammonia, camels in your bath:\n  The earth hath bubbles as the water hath:\n  He was not of them, too, too solidly\n  Always himself. What foam of kissing lips,\n  Pouting, parting with the ghost of the seven sips\n  One smacks for hiccoughs!\n                              Pitiable to be\n  Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.\n\n  There was his scar, a panel of old rose\n  Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;\n  Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,\n  Permanent souvenir of the Great War.\n  One of God\u2019s jokes, typically good,\n  That wound of his. How perfect that he should\n  Have suffered it for\u2014what?\n\n\n\n\n        II\n  OH, the dear front page of the _Times_!\n  Chronicle of essential history:\n  Marriage, birth, and the sly mysteriousness\n  Of lovers\u2019 greetings, of lovers\u2019 meetings,\n  And dirty death, impartially paid\n  To courage and the old decayed.\n  But nobody had been born to-day,\n  Nobody married that he knew,\n  Nobody died and nobody even killed;\n    He felt a little aggrieved\u2014\n    Nobody even killed.\n  But, to make up: \u201cTuesday, Colchester train:\n  Wanted Brown Eyes\u2019 address, with a view to meeting again.\u201d\n  Dear Brown Eyes, it had been nice of her\n  To talk so friendly to a lonely traveller!\n    Why is it nobody ever talks to me?\n\n  And now, here was a letter from Helen.\n  Better to open it rather than thus\n  Dwell in a long muse and maze\n  Over the scrawled address and the postmark,\n  Staring stupidly.\n  Love\u2014was there no escape?\n  Was it always there, always there?\n  The same huge and dominant shape,\n  Like Windsor Castle leaning over the plain;\n  And the letter a vista cut through the musing forest,\n  At the end the old Round Tower,\n  Singing its refrain:\n  Here we are, here we are, here we are again!\n\n  The life so short, so vast love\u2019s science and art,\n  So many conditions of felicity.\n    \u201cDarling, will you become a part\n    Of my poor physiology?\n    And, my beloved, may I have\n    The latchkey of your history?\n    And while this corpse is what it is\n    Dear, we must share geographies.\u201d\n  So many conditions of felicity.\n  And now time was a widening gulf and space,\n  A fixed between, and fate still kept them apart.\n  Her voice quite gone; distance had blurred her face.\n  The life so short, so vast love\u2019s science and art.\n\n  So many conditions\u2014and yet, once,\n  Four whole days,\n  Four short days of perishing time,\n  They had fulfilled them all.\n  But that was long ago, ah! long ago,\n  Like the last horse bus, or the Christmas pantomime,\n  Or the Bells, oh, the Bells, of Edgar Allan Poe.\n\n\n\n\n        III\n  \u201cHELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose,\n  That you exist somewhere in space, who knows?\n  Somewhere in time, perhaps, arrives this morning,\n  Reminding me with a note of Lutheran warning\n  That faith\u2019s the test, not works. Works!\u2014any fool\n  Can do them if he tries to; but what school\n  Can teach one to credit the ridiculous,\n  The palpably non-existent? So with us,\n  Votaries of the copulative cult,\n  In this affair of love, _quicumque vult_,\n  Whoever would be saved, must love without\n  Adjunct of sense or reason, must not doubt\n  Although the deity be far removed,\n  Remote, invisible; who is not loved\n  Best by voluptuous works, but by the faith\n  That lives in absence and the body\u2019s death.\n  I have no faith, and even in love remain\n  Agnostic. Are you here? The fact is plain,\n  Constated by the heavenly vision of you,\n  Maybe by the mouth\u2019s warm touch; and that I love you,\n  I then most surely know, most painfully.\n  But now you\u2019ve robbed the temple, leaving me\n  A poor invisibility to adore,\n  Now that, alas, you\u2019re vanished, gone . . . no more;\n  You take my drift. I only ask your leave\n  To be a little unfaithful\u2014not to you,\n  My dear, to whom I was and will be true,\n  But to your absence. Hence no cause to grieve;\n  For absence may be cheated of a kiss\u2014\n  Lightly and laughing\u2014with no prejudice\n  To the so longed-for presence, which some day\n  Will crown the presence of\n                            Le Vostre J.\n  (As dear unhappy Troilus would say).\u201d\n\n\n\n\n        IV\n  OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains!\n  Words, words and words.\n  A birth of rhymes and the strangest,\n  The most unlikely superf\u0153tations\u2014\n  New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun,\n  New worlds glimpsed through the window of a word\n  That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque.\n  All the muses buzzing in his head.\n  Autobiography crystallised under his pen, thus:\n\n    \u201cWhen I was young enough not to know youth,\n    I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine\n    Among stiff trees. Before me naked Truth\n    Creaked on her intellectual legs, divine\n    In being inhuman, and was never caught\n    By all my speed; for she could outrun thought.\n\n    Now I am old enough to know I am young,\n    I chase more plastic beauties, but inspire\n    Life in their clay, purity in their dung\n    With the creative breath of my desire.\n    And utter truth is now made manifest\n    When on a certain sleeping face and breast\n\n    The moonlight dreams and silver chords are strung,\n    And a god\u2019s hand touches the aching lyre.\u201d\n    He read it through: a pretty, clinquant thing,\n    Like bright spontaneous bird-song in the spring,\n    Instinct with instinct, full of dewy freshness.\n    Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;\n    If he chose to\u2014but it was too much trouble,\n    And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,\n    Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned\n    In pleasant seas . . . to rise again and find\n    One o\u2019clock struck and his unshaven face\n    Still like a record in a musical box,\n    And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury.\n\n\n\n\n        V\n        I.\n  THE Open Sesame of \u201cMaster John,\u201d\n  And then the broad silk bosom of Aunt Loo.\n  \u201cDear John, this is a pleasure. How are you?\u201d\n  \u201cWell, thanks. Where\u2019s Uncle Will?\u201d \u201cYour uncle\u2019s gone\n  To Bath for his lumbago. He gets on\n  As well as anyone can hope to do\n  At his age\u2014for you know he\u2019s seventy-two;\n  But still, he does his bit. He sits upon\n\n  The local Tribunal at home, and takes\n  Parties of wounded soldiers out in brakes\n  To see the country. And three times a week\n  He still goes up to business in the City;\n  And then, sometimes, at night he has to speak\n  In Village Halls for the War Aims Committee.\u201d\n\n        II.\n  \u201cWell, have you any news about the war?\n  What do they say in France?\u201d \u201cI daren\u2019t repeat\n  The things they say.\u201d \u201cYou see we\u2019ve got some meat\n  For you, dear John. Really, I think before\n  To-day I\u2019ve had no lamb this year. We score\n  By getting decent vegetables to eat,\n  Sent up from home. This is a good receipt:\n  The touch of garlic makes it. Have some more.\n\n  Poor Tom was wounded on the twenty-third;\n  Did you know that? And just to-day I heard\n  News from your uncle that his nephew James\n  Is dead\u2014Matilda\u2019s eldest boy.\u201d \u201cI knew\n  One of those boys, but I\u2019m so bad at names.\n  Mine had red hair.\u201d \u201cOh, now, that must be Hugh.\u201d\n\n        III.\n  \u201cColonel McGillicuddy came to dine\n  Quietly here, a night or two ago.\n  He\u2019s on the Staff and very much in the know\n  About all sorts of things. His special line\n  Is Tanks. He says we\u2019ve got a new design\n  Of super-Tank, with big guns, that can go\n  (I think he said) at thirty miles or so\n  An hour. That ought to make them whine\n\n  For peace. He also said, if I remember,\n  That the war couldn\u2019t last beyond September,\n  Because the Germans\u2019 trucks were wearing out\n  And couldn\u2019t be replaced. I only hope\n  It\u2019s true. You know your uncle has no doubt\n  That the whole thing was plotted by the Pope . . .\u201d\n\n  \u201c. . . Good-bye, dear John. We _have_ had a nice talk.\n  You must soon come again. Good-bye, good-bye. . . .\u201d\n\n  He tottered forth, full of the melancholy\n  That comes of surfeit, and began to walk\n  Slowly towards Oxford Street. The brazen sky\n  Burned overhead. Beneath his feet the stones\n  Were a grey incandescence, and his bones\n  Melted within him, and his bowels yearned.\n\n\n\n\n        VI\n  THE crowd, the crowd\u2014oh, he could almost cry\n  To see those myriad faces hurrying by,\n  And each a strong tower rooted in the past\n  On dark unknown foundations, each made fast\n  With locks nobody knew the secret of,\n  No key could open: save that perhaps love\n  Might push the bars half back and just peep in\u2014\n  And see strange sights, it may be. But for him\n  They were locked donjons, every window bright\n  With beckoning mystery; and then, Good Night!\n  The lamp was out, they were passed, they were gone\n  For ever . . . ever. And one might have been\n  The hero or the friend long sought, and one\n  Was the loveliest face his eyes had ever seen,\n  (Vanished as soon) and he went lonely on.\n\n  Then in a sudden fearful vision he saw\n  The whole world spread before him\u2014a vast sphere\n  Of seething atoms moving to one law:\n  \u201cBe individual. Approach, draw near,\n  Yes, even touch: but never join, never be\n  Other than your own selves eternally.\u201d\n  And there are tangents, tangents of thought that aim\n  Out through the gaps between the patterned stars\n  At some fantastic dream without a name\n  That like the moon shining through prison bars,\n  Visits the mind with madness. So they fly,\n  Those soaring tangents, till the first jet tires,\n  Failing, faltering half-way up the sky,\n  And breaks\u2014poor slender fountain that aspires\n  Against the whole strength of the heavy earth\n  Within whose womb, darkly, it took birth.\n\n  Oh, how remote he walked along the street,\n  Jostling with other lumps of human meat!\n\n  He was so tired. The caf\u00e9 doors invite.\n  Caverned within them, still lingers the night\n  In shadowy coolness, soothing the seared sight.\n  He sat there smoking, soulless and wholly crass,\n  Sunk to the eyes in the warm sodden morass\n  Of his own guts, wearily, wearily\n  Ruminating visions of mortality\u2014\n  Memento Moris from the pink alcove,\n  Nightmare oppressiveness of profane love.\n  Cesspool within, and without him he could see\n  Nothing but mounds of flesh and harlotry.\n  Like a half-pricked bubble pendulous in space,\n  The buttered leatheriness of a Jew\u2019s face\n  Looms through cigar-smoke; red and ghastly white,\n  Death\u2019s-head women fascinate the sight.\n  It was the nightmare of a corpse. Dead, dead . . .\n  Oh, to wake up, to live again! he fled\n  From that foul place and from himself.\n\n\n\n\n        VII\n  TWIN domes of the Alhambra,\n  Veiled tenderness of the sky above the Square:\n  He sat him down in the gardens, under the trees,\n  And in the dust, with the point of his umbrella,\n  Drew pictures of the crosses we have to bear.\n\n  The poor may starve, the sick have horrible pains\u2014\n  But there are pale eyes even in the London planes.\n\n  Men may make war and money, mischief and love\u2014\n  But about us are colours and the sky above.\n\n  Yes, here, where the golden domes ring clear,\n  And the planes patiently, hopefully renew\n  Their green refrain from year to year\n  To the dim spring burden of London\u2019s husky blue,\n  Here he could see the folly of it. How?\n  Confine a boundless possible within\n  The prison of an ineluctable Now?\n  Go slave to pain, woo forth original sin\n  Out of her lair\u2014and all by a foolish Act?\n  Madness! But now, Wordsworth of Leicester Square,\n  He\u2019d learnt his lesson, learnt by the mere fact\n  Of the place existing, so finely unaware\n  Of syphilis and the restless in and out\n  Of public lavatories, and evening shout\n  Of winners and disasters, races and war.\n\n  Troubles come thick enough. Why call for more\n  By suiting action to the divine Word?\n  His spleen was chronic, true; but he preferred\n  Its subtle agony to the brute force\n  That tugged the barbs of deep-anchored remorse.\n  The sunlight wrapped folds of soft golden silk\n  About him, and the air was warm as milk\n  Against his skin. Long sitting still had made\n  Cramped soreness such a pleasure, he was afraid\n  To shift his tortured limbs, lest he should mar\n  Life\u2019s evenness. London\u2019s noise from afar\n  Smoothed out its harshness to soothe his thoughts asleep,\n  Sound that made silence much more calm and deep.\n  The domes of gold, the leaves, emerald bright,\n  Were intense, piercing arrows of delight.\n  He did not think; thought was a shallow thing\n  To his deep sense of life, of mere being.\n  He looked at his hand, lying there on his knee,\n  The blue veins branching, the tendons cunningly\n  Dancing like jacks in a piano if he shook\n  A knot-boned finger. Only to look and look,\n  Till he knew it, each hair and every pore\u2014\n  It seemed enough: what need of anything more?\n  Thought, a blind alley; action, which at best\n  Is cudgelling water that goes back to rest\n  As soon as you give over your violences.\n  No, wisdom culls the flowers of the five senses,\n  Savouring the secret sweetness they afford:\n  Instead of which he had a Medical Board\n  Next week, and they would pass him fit. Good Lord!\n\n  Well, let all pass.\n                    But one must outdo fate,\n  Wear clothes more modish than the fashion, run\n  Faster than time, not merely stand and wait;\n  Do in a flash what cannot be undone\n  Through ten eternities. Predestinate?\n  So would God be\u2014that is, if there were one:\n  General epidemic which spoils nobody\u2019s fun.\n  Action, action! Quickly rise and do\n  The most irreparable things; beget,\n  In one brief consummation of the will,\n  Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.\n  Action! This was no time for sitting still.\n\n  He crushed his hat down over his eyes\n  And walked with a stamp to symbolise\n  Action, action\u2014left, right, left;\n  Planting his feet with a slabby beat,\n  Taking strange Procrustean steps,\n  Lengthened, shortened to avoid\n  Touching the lines between the stones\u2014\n  A thing which makes God so annoyed.\n\n  Action, action! First of all\n  He spent three pounds he couldn\u2019t afford\n  In buying a book he didn\u2019t want,\n  For the mere sake of having been\n  Irrevocably extravagant.\n  Then feeling very bold, he pressed\n  The bell of a chance house; it might\n  Disclose some New Arabian Night\n  Behind its grimy husk, who knows?\n  The seconds passed; all was dead.\n  Arrogantly he rang once more.\n  His heart thumped on sheer silence; but at last\n  There was a shuffling; something behind the door\n  Became approaching panic, and he fled.\n\n\n\n\n        VIII\n  \u201cMISERY,\u201d he said, \u201cto have no chin,\n  Nothing but brains and sex and taste:\n  Only omissively to sin,\n  Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.\n\n  But when the war is over,\n  I will go to the East and plant\n  Tea and rubber, and make much money.\n  I will eat the black sweat of niggers\n  And flagellate them with whips.\n  I shall be enormously myself,\n    Incarnate Chin.\u201d\n\n  The anguish of thinking ill of oneself\n  (St. Paul\u2019s religion, poignant beyond words)\n  Turns ere you know it to faint minor thirds\n  Before the ritualistic pomps of the world\u2014\n  The glass-grey silver of rivers, silken skies unfurled,\n  Urim and Thummim of dawn and sun-setting,\n  And the lawn sleeves of a great episcopal cloud,\n  Matins of song and vesperal murmuring,\n  Incense of night-long flowers and earth new-ploughed;\n  All beauties of sweetness and all that shine or sing.\n  Conscience is smoothed by beauty\u2019s subtle fingers\n  Into voluptuousness, where nothing lingers\n  Of bitterness, saving a sorrow that is\n  Rather a languor than a sense of pain.\n\n  So, from the tunnel of St. Martin\u2019s Lane\n  Sailing into the open Square, he felt\n  His self-reproach, his good resolutions melt\n  Into an ecstasy, gentle as balm,\n  Before the spire, etched black and white on the calm\n  Of a pale windless sky, St. Martin\u2019s spire,\n  And the shadows sleeping beneath the portico\n  And the crowd hurrying, ceaselessly, to and fro.\n  Alas, the bleached and slender tower that aches\n  Upon the gauzy sky, where blueness breaks\n  Into sweet hoarseness, veiled with love and tender\n  As the dove\u2019s voice alone in the woods: too slender,\n  Too finely pencilled\u2014black and bleaching white\n  On smoky mist, too clear in the keen light\n  Of utmost summer: and oh! the lives that pass\n  In one swift stream of colour, too, too bright,\n  Too swift\u2014and all the lives unknown,\n                                Alone.\n                                    Alas. . . .\n\n  A truce to summer and beauty and the pain\n  Of being too consciously alive among\n  The things that pass and the things that remain,\n  (Oh, equal sadness!) the pain of being young.\n\n  Truce, truce. . . . Once again he fled;\u2014\n  All his life, it seemed, was a flight;\u2014\n  Fled and found\n  Sanctuary in a cinema house.\n  Huge faces loomed and burst,\n  Like bubbles in a black wind.\n  He shut his eyes on them and in a little\n  Slept; slept, while the pictures\n  Passed and returned, passed once more and returned.\n  And he, like God in the midst of the wheeling world,\n  Slept on; and when he woke it was eight o\u2019clock.\n  Jenny? Revenge is sweet; he will have kept\n    Dear Jenny waiting.\n\n\n\n\n        IX\n  TALL straight poplars stand in a meadow;\n  The wind and sun caress them, dappling\n  The deep green grass with shine and shadow;\n  And a little apart one slender sapling\n  Sways in the wind and almost seems\n  Conscious of its own supple grace,\n  And shakes its twin-hued leaves and gleams\n  With silvery laughter, filling the place\n  Where it stands with a sudden flash of human\n  Beauty and grace; till from her tree\n  Steps forth the dryad, now turned woman,\n  And sways to meet him. It is she.\n\n  Food and drink, food and drink:\n  Olives as firm and sleek and green\n  As the breasts of a sea god\u2019s daughter,\n  Swimming far down where the corpses sink\n  Through the dense shadowy water.\n  Silver and black on flank and back,\n  The glossy sardine mourns its head.\n  The red anchovy and the beetroot red,\n  With carrots, build a gorgeous stair\u2014\n  Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair\u2014\n  And the green pallor of the salad round\n  Sharpens their clarion sound.\n    De lady take hors d\u2019\u0153uvres? and de gentleman too?\n    Per due! Due! Echo answers: Du\u2019 . . .\n   \u201cSo, Jenny, you\u2019ve found another Perfect Man.\u201d\n  \u201cPerfect, perhaps; but not so sweet as you,\n  Not such a baby.\u201d \u201cMe? A baby. Why,\n  I am older than the rocks on which I sit. . . .\u201d\n    Oh, how delightful, talking about oneself!\n\n  Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,\n  And wine\u2019s strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:\n  Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live.\n  What though the mind still think that one thing\u2019s vicious\n  More than another? If the thought can give\n  This wine\u2019s rich savour to our laughing kiss,\n  Let us preserve the Christian prejudice.\n  Oh, there are shynesses and silences,\n  Shynesses and silences!\n  But luckily God also gave us wine.\n\n  \u201cJenny, adorable\u2014\u201d (what draws the line\n  At the mere word \u201clove\u201d?) \u201chas anyone the right\n  To look so lovely as you look to-night,\n  To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?\u201d\n  But candidly, he wondered, do I care?\n\n  He heard her voice and himself spoke,\n  But like faint light through a cloud of smoke,\n  There came, unreal and far away,\n  Mere sounds utterly empty\u2014like the drone\n  Of prayers, _crambe repetita_, prayers and praise,\n  Long, long ago, in the old School Chapel days;\n  Senseless, but so intrusive on one\u2019s own\n  Interior life one couldn\u2019t even think . . .\n\n  O sweet, rare, perilous, retchy drink!\n  Another glass . . .\n\n\n\n\n        X\n  HOW cool is the moonless summer night, how sweet\n  After the noise and the dizzy choking heat!\n  The bloodless lamps look down upon their own\n  Green image in the polished roadway thrown,\n  And onward and out of sight the great road runs,\n  Smooth and dark as a river of calm bronze.\n\n  Freedom and widening space: his life expands,\n  Ready, it seems, to burst the iron bands\n  Of self, to fuse with other lives and be\n  Not one but the world, no longer \u201cI\u201d but \u201cShe.\u201d\n\n  See, like the dolorous memory\n  Of happy times in misery,\n  An aged hansom fills the street\n  With the superannuated beat\n  Of hollow hoofs and bells that chime\n  Out of another quieter time.\n\n  \u201cGood-night,\u201d the last kiss, \u201cand God bless you, my dear.\u201d\n  So, she was gone, she who had been so near,\n  So breathing-warm\u2014soft mouth and hands and hair\u2014\n  A moment since. Had she been really there,\n  Close at his side, and had he kissed her? It seemed\n  Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed\n  And talked about at breakfast, being a bore:\n  Improbable, unsubstantial, dim, yet more\n  Real than the rest of life; real as the blaze\n  Of a sudden-seen picture, as the lightning phrase\n  With which the poet-gods strangely create\n  Their brief bright world beyond the reach of fate.\n  Yet he could wonder now if he had kissed\n  Her or his own loved thoughts. Did she exist\n  Now she was history and safely stowed\n  Down in the past? There (with a conscious smile),\n  There let her rest eternal. And meanwhile,\n  Lamp-fringed towards meeting parallels, the road\n  Stretched out and out, and the old weary horse,\n  Come from the past, went jogging his homeward course\n  Uphill through time to some demoded place,\n  On ghostly hoofs back to the safe Has-Been:\u2014\n  But fact returns insistent as remorse;\n  Uphill towards Hampstead, back to the year of grace\n  Nineteen hundred and seventeen.\n\n\n\n\n        XI\n  BETWEEN the drawing of the blind\n    And being aware of yet another day . . .\n\n              PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH\n\n\n\n\n                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES\n\n\nMisspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.\n\nInconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained.\n\nA cover was created for this eBook.\n\n[The end of _Leda_, by Aldous Huxley.]","title":"Leda","tradition":"myth-cosmogony","translated_text":null,"word_count":14109}