The wiles of the Earthbound (Ah, the fine young man,
The hot young man whose kisses tasted sweet
To our new postulant!) Madam, I beg you!
You have mistaken the room; no, next door sleeps
A lusty bagman, he’s the man to embrace you
And welcome you with every brisk refinement
Of passion. But while you rumple his sheets,
The innocent and unhappy eyes of Rachel
Bewilder me – Oh then in spite of Faith
I am cast down – You nuns, but if I needed,
As I no longer need, I’d challenge you
To contest of hard praying, one against all.
I could wrest Rachel back even to this bed
To-night. But Faith, and Prayer that’s born of Faith
Find her slow mind impediment to their power,
So I resign her – Agatha, do your worst.
The wisest course of Love? Yes, maidenhead.
For me? Love’s Sacrifice? It was not love.
The Broken Heart? Not mine. I’ll say no more
Than mere goodbye. Go, get you to your nunnery,
And out the candle! Darkness absolute
Surrounds me, sleepy mother of good children
Who drowse and drowse and cry not for the sun,
Content and wisest of their generation.
I AM THE STAR OF MORNING
I am the Star of Morning poised between
The dead night and the coming of the sun,
Yet neither relic of the dark nor pointing
The angry day to come. My virtue is
My own, a mild light, an enduring courage;
And the remembering ancient tribe of birds
Sing blithest at my showing; only Man
Sleeps on and stirs rebellious in his sleep.
Lucifer, Lucifer, am I, millstone-crushed
Between conflicting powers of doubleness,
By envious Night lost in her myriad more
Counterfeit glints, in day-time quite overwhelmed
By tyrant blazing of the warrior sun.
Yet some, my prophets who at midnight held me
Fixedly framed in their observant glass,
By daylight also, sinking well-shafts deep
For water and for coolness of pure thought,
Gaze up and far above them see me shining,
Me, single natured, without gender, one,
The only spark of Godhead unresolved.
Mock Beggar Hall
(1924)
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS
King George, still powder-grimed from Dettingen,
Called in thick tones: ‘My Lord, fetch ink and pen.
I’ll write a threatening note in my own hand.
This Chinese potentate must understand
That Britons have a boundless fame to brag.
No insult shall defile our glorious flag.
Two Bristol ships at Hankow fetching tea,
Boarded and robbed, at wharfside as they lay,
Of a costly cargo? Ha, Sir! Let me boast
My fleet stands ready to bombard your coast.
If meek apologies be not forthcoming
My fusiliers must through Pekin go drumming.
You shall eat dirt, d’ye hear, you knavish fellow,
Or we must tan your hide a deeper yellow.
Ten ships shall yearly visit your chief ports
With mirrors, beads, and clothing of all sorts,
Carrying decorum to your savage parts
With civilization, learning and the arts.
But if so much as a rattle’s robbed or broke
Your Chinese territory flies up in smoke.
You then, beware! Signed, GEORGIUS REX. So, so.
Our Foreign Minister sends this. Take it, go!’
The Foreign Minister, reading the piece through,
Swore by his wig, why, this would never do.
‘Our Sovereign trips on all the finer points
Of English speech, confuses, blurs, disjoints.
To send this note, ’s blood, it were most unwise.
Suppose it intercepted by French spies?
“La langue du roi…” (I hear their mocking tone)
“Dunce-cap instead of crown, dunce-stool for throne!”
Why, even in China, men would laugh to read
This halting, odd, mis-spelt, improbable screed.
But stay! Our Sovereign we would surely please,
Translating him his Note into Chinese.
Li-Chung will do’t, then there can be no call
To pawn our honour with the original.’
Li-Chung, the Bond Street tea-man with meek eyes
Performed the service, showing no surprise,
Though inwardly enraged and jealous for
The sacred majesty of his Emperor…
How faithful his translation, who can say?
George signed it readily, and it reached Cathay.
The Emperor from his Summer terraces
Claps hands for ink and sable paint-brushes
And writes with care a special declaration
To the Loyal Governor of the British Nation,
Commiserating with that luckless one
By seas exiled from his Imperial Sun
On such outcast and pariah-like condition:
‘We note the abject tone of your petition
And sorry excuses for your impudence
In thus soliciting our Magnificence,
Then, though we cannot in the atlas hit on
A Chinese province (or sub-province) Britain,
We graciously will none the less allow
Ten yearly junks to harbour at Hankow
With skins, blubber, oil or suchlike pelting stuff –
Indeed five junk-loads would be quite enough.
Formal permission signed, YOUR GOD. So, so.
Our Foreign Minister sends this. Take it! Go!’
The Foreign Minister, reading the piece through,
Swore by his pigtail, this would never do.
‘Our Emperor neglects the niceties,
Indeed the major rules, of Court Chinese.
Our iron-helmed Manchu God in battle’s shock
Or warrior council sits as firm as rock,
But as for drafting edict, Note or letter…
My six-year-old could do as well, aye, better.
Can I permit my Sovereign’s reputation
To sink even in a heathen’s estimation?
I’ll tactfully propose it more correct
To send this note in British dialect.
Ned Gunn the boxing-teacher at Nanking
Will soon translate the odd fantastic thing.’
Ned Gunn, a stolid sailor with bold eyes,
Performed the service, showing no surprise
Though, loyal to the death, he felt his gorge
Mount at this insult to victorious George.
His English version (which he owned was free)
The Emperor signed, frowned, sent oversea.
George read the note, puffed out his cheeks, began:
‘He takes his medicine like a sensible man,
Apologizes humbly, swears to behave
With fawning loyalty of dog or slave,
Sadly admits his colour far from white
And trusts this missive is not impolite,
Longs for our British cargoes rich and strange,
Has only trash to offer in exchange.
“May your Red, White and Blue still rule the main
And countless Dettingens be fought again!
God Save the King! Kow Tow! Success to barter.”’
George swore: ‘We must reward him with the Garter.’
HEMLOCK
(Fragment of a late-Greek satire, probably Gadarene,
here for the first time done into English)
Socrates on the seventh day
Sneezed and stretched and went his way,
/> Then stood bare-headed in the sun
Till seven times seventy days had run.
An equal count of days from these
The exiled Alcibiades
Beheld him in the Chersonese
Yet spectre-faint: the Master said
Plainly, that, far from striking dead,
The hemlock acting inwardly
Gave him invisibility
And life prolonged ten thousand years
With such discerning eyes, with ears
So tuned by music of the Spheres,
He could see through brick and stone,
Could hear the unborn infant groan,
Could catch the plotting, piece by piece,
In Persian courts against fair Greece,
Yea, read the yet unspoken mind
Of Aethiopes or men of Ind.
The Athenian Thirty he forgave
Who thought to end him in his grave
And ‘Athens’ genius I shall be,’
He said, ‘While Athens follows me.’
All this and more did Socrates
Unfold to Alcibiades,
Then slowly disappeared from sight,
Bald head and beard and mantle white.
But Alcibiades for hate
Of his own Athenian state
Until his deathbed gasp concealed
The wondrous message thus revealed.
So Socrates walks here to-day,
In Porch and School and Agorâ
He watches us, all jealousy,
While we exchange our sophistry
Discoursing his philosophy,
He frowns when we omit his mode
Dialecticè – truth’s only road –
He prods us with a touch like ice
If ever falsely we premise,
He weeps glad tears of sacred scent
When we prevail in argument
Against some un-Greek jack-in-the-box
Defending a new paradox –
We kneel to clasp thy phantom knees,
Mouthpiece of wisdom, Socrates,
And while we work thy god-like will
Athens shall be Athens still!
Scepticos heard this popular
Figment in the spice-bazaar,
And good Pisteuon started, shocked
To see the way his neighbour mocked,
Grimacing that ‘this Platonism
Is meshed in sentimentalism,
Encouraging such absolute
Value for a dissolute
Mulberry-nosed philosopher
(A very Plague of Athens, sir)
That if his system is to thrive
They must assume him still alive,
Spying demoniac, brushing them
With his unseen garment’s hem.
Of all religious forms,’ said he,
‘I most detest Necrophily.
Now too the enthusiastic kind
Will so get Hemlock on their mind,
They’ll drink small potions on the sly
And gradually stiffening, die,
To stalk among us afterwards
Flaunting invisible rewards.
A phantom hierarchy, friend,
That is the logical and only end.’
FULL MOON
As I walked out that sultry night,
I heard the stroke of One.
The moon, attained to her full height,
Stood beaming like the sun:
She exorcized the ghostly wheat
To mute assent in love’s defeat,
Whose tryst had now begun.
The fields lay sick beneath my tread,
A tedious owlet cried,
A nightingale above my head
With this or that replied –
Like man and wife who nightly keep
Inconsequent debate in sleep
As they dream side by side.
Your phantom wore the moon’s cold mask,
My phantom wore the same;
Forgetful of the feverish task
In hope of which they came,
Each image held the other’s eyes
And watched a grey distraction rise
To cloud the eager flame –
To cloud the eager flame of love,
To fog the shining gate;
They held the tyrannous queen above
Sole mover of their fate,
They glared as marble statues glare
Across the tessellated stair
Or down the halls of state.
And now warm earth was Arctic sea,
Each breath came dagger-keen;
Two bergs of glinting ice were we,
The broad moon sailed between;
There swam the mermaids, tailed and finned,
And love went by upon the wind
As though it had not been.
MYRRHINA
Ambergris from John Whale’s moans,
Pearls from Jane Oyster’s groans
Who knew no beauty:
Groaning Oyster, moaning Whale,
Myrrhina thinks a merry tale,
Confident in her beauty.
Yet must Myrrhina pay the fee
If she would wear old misery
To enhance her beauty,
Twined at her throat, sweet on her dress
Exhaling innocent carelessness
Of all but maiden beauty.
A pang for every several pang
That round her neck in clusters hang
Of seeming beauty,
Despair for John’s uncouth despair
Breathed from her dancing yellow hair –
The Nessus-robe that beauties wear
Burning away their beauty.
Now must Myrrhina groaning say
She knew not there were bills to pay
For simple beauty,
But pay she must, and on the nail,
Giddied with tears, distraught, death-pale,
Jane Oyster’s debt and John the Whale.
This done, there’s room for beauty.
TWIN SOULS
The hermit on his pillar top
Shuddering lean and bare;
The glutton in his rowdy-shop
With velvet clothes to wear.
The hermit with his finger-nails
Growing through his palms;
The glutton in his swallow-tails
Humming hell-fire psalms.
Glutton: ‘By day I am a glutton,
But (this is my complaint)
In dreams I groan upon your stone
A parched and giddy saint.’
Hermit: ‘By day I am a hermit,
But (this is my complaint)
In dreams a glutton of beef and mutton
Kissing powder and paint.’
Then each began to say and see,
Which cut him like a knife,
‘Visions of dark are more to me
Than this my waking life.’
Glutton: ‘My body is feeble and fat,
My head has never been strong,
If I were to stand on your pillar
I doubt I would stand for long.
‘Heigh me! I am growing old
And gone too far on my way,
In dreams of midnight, bold,
But a coward at break of day.’
Hermit: ‘My body is feeble and thin,
My head has never been strong,
If I were to drink in your manner
I doubt I would drink for long.
‘My eyes are a frosted glass,
My fists are clenched like buckles:
Could I please your saucy lass
With a hand that is only knuckles?’
The glutton on his pillar top
Shuddering cold and bare,
The hermit in his rowdy-shop
Groaning hot despair,
They died and they are buried,
Both on the Easter Day,
Now joined as one in spirit,
Who li
ved apart in clay.
THE NORTH WINDOW
When the chapel is lit and sonorous with ploughmen’s praise,
When matron and child crouch low to the Lord of Days,
When the windows are shields of greyness all about,
For the glowing lamps within and the storm without;
On this Eve of All Souls (suicides too have souls)
The damned to the Northward rise from their tablets and scrolls,
With infants unbaptized that lie without ease,
With women betrayed, their mothers, who murdered these,
They make them a furious chapel of wind and gloom
With, Southward, one stained window The Hour of Doom
Lit up by the lamp of the righteous beaming through
With the scene reversed, and the legend backwards too,
Displaying in scarlet and gold the Creator who damns
Who has thrust on His Left the bleating sheep and the lambs,
Who has fixed on His Right the goats and kids accursed,
With Omega : Alpha restoring the last as first:
Then the psalms to God that issue hence or thence
Ring blasphemy each to the other’s Omnipotence.
ATTERCOP: THE ALL-WISE SPIDER
James derided Walter,
Twisting him a halter
Of argument and synthesis,
‘Hang yourself, Poet, in this.’
Walter, whistling on a reed
‘Sweet Melancholy’, took no heed;
He lolled against a finger-post,
Preening Fancy’s pinion,
He summoned bogle, elf and ghost
With other trivial sprites that most
Resent the sour dominion
Of James, renowned philosopher;
He clothed each airy minion
With cobwebs, with gossamer,
He bade them cast in bonfire flames
All the writings of this James
To smoke with yon green rubbish, sir!
Myself, not bound by James’ view
Nor Walter’s, in a vision saw these two
Like trapped and weakening flies
In toils of the same hoary net;
I seemed to hear ancestral cries
Buzzing ‘To our All-Wise, Omnivorous
Attercop glowering over us,
Whose table we have set
With blood and bones and sweat.’
These old cries echo plainly yet
Though James sits calmer now
Composed, with spectacles on brow,
Explaining why and how,
Telling on the fingers of his hands
And seldom losing count, the strands
Of intricate silk entangling both his feet.
He points ‘Here this and that web meet,
Yet, I surmise,
A different combination might arise