Vocat aestus in umbram
Nemesianus Es. IV.
E. P. Ode pour l'lection de son spulchre
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate1 the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain the sublime
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage2 country, out of date;
Bent resolutely3 on wringing4 lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout5 for factitious bait:
Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie
Caught in the unsTOPped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate6 isles;
Observed the elegance7 of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by the march of events,
He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses8' diadem9.
II.
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic10 grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase11!
The age demanded chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the sculpture of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants13 the mousseline of cosplay,
The pianola replaces
Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign14 throughout our days.
Even the Christian15 beauty
Defects -- after Samothrace;
We see to kalon
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave16 or an eunuch
To rule over us.
A bright Apollo,
tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon,
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon?
IV.
These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro12 domo, in any case ..
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter17, in imagination,
learning later ...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor ..
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars18 in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench19 confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies20.
V.
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered21 books.
Yeux Glauques
Gladstone was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced
Kings Treasuries; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Ftid Buchanan lifted up his voice
When that faun's head of hers
Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate, they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts22 out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face,
Questing and passive ....
Ah, poor Jenny's case ...
Bewildered that a world
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero's
Adulteries.
Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma
Among the pickled ftuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion23 of the
Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson died
By falling from a high stool in a pub ...
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the auTOPsy24, privately25 performed --
Tissue preserved -- the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image impartially26 imbued
With raptures27 for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke28 the author of The Dorian Mood,
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
Brennbaum.
The sky-like limpid29 eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats30 to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum The Impeccable.
Mr. Nixon
In the cream gilded31 cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me kindly32, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. Consider
Carefully the reviewer.
I was as poor as you are;
When I began I got, of course,
Advance on royalties33, fifty at first, said Mr. Nixon,
Follow me, and take a column,
Even if you have to work free.
Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
I rose in eighteen months;
The hardest nut I had to crack
Was Dr. Dundas.
I never mentioned a man but with the view
Of selling my own works.
The tip's a good one, as for literature
It gives no man a sinecure34.
And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
* * *
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it.
X.
Beneath the sagging35 roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid, uncelebrated,
At last from the world's welter
Nature receives him,
With a placid36 and uneducated mistress
He exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress37.
The haven38 from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch39.
XI.
Conservatrix of Milsien
Habits of mind and feeling,
Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, Milsian is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her
Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.
XII.
Daphne with her thighs40 in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy hands, --
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await The Lady Valentine's commands,
Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely41 the fashion
To stimulate42, in her,
A durable43 passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,
A modulation44 toward the theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and comforter.
* * *
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
Which the highest cultures have nourished
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded45 the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
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