The Heptalogia Part 4

No more flutes in this world for me now, dear! trombones.

III

All that youth once denied and made mouths at, age owns.

Facts put fangs out and bite us; life stings and grows viperous; And time's fugues are a hubbub of meaningless tones.

Once we followed the piper; now why not the piper us?

Love, grown grey, plays mere solos; we want antiphones.

IV

And we sharpen our wits up with pa.s.sions for hones, Melt down loadstars for magnets, use women for whetstones, Learn to bear with dead calms by remembering cyclones, Snap strings short with sharp thumbnails, till silence begets tones, Burn our souls out, s.h.i.+ft spirits, turn skins and change zones;

V

Then the heart, when all's done with, wakes, whimpers, intones Some lost fragment of tune it thought sweet ere it grew sick; (Is it life that disclaims this, or death that disowns?) Mere dead metal, scrawled bars--ah, one touch, you make music!

Love's worth saving, youth doubts, but experience depones.

VI

In the darkness (right d.i.c.kens) of Tom-All-Alone's Or the Morgue out in Paris, where tragedy centuples Life's effects by Death's algebra, Shakespeare (Malone's) Might have said sleep was murdered--new scholiasts have sent you pills To purge text of him! Bread? give me--Scottice--scones!

VII

Think, what use, when youth's saddle galls bay's back or roan's, To seek chords on love's keys to strike, other than his chords?

There's an error joy winks at and grief half condones, Or life's counterpoint grates the C major of discords-- 'Tis man's choice 'twixt s.l.u.ts rose-crowned and queens age dethrones.

VIII

I for instance might groan as a bag-pipe groans, Give the flesh of my heart for sharp sorrows to flagellate, Grief might grind my cheeks down, age make sticks of my bones, (Though a queen drowned in tears must be worth more than Madge elate)[1]

Rose might turn burdock, and pine-apples cones;

IX

My skin might change to a pitiful crone's, My lips to a lizard's, my hair to weed, My features, in fact, to a series of loans; Thus much is conceded; now, you, concede You would hardly salute me by choice, John Jones?

[Footnote 1: First edition:-- And my face bear his brand--mine, that once bore Love's badge elate!]

THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE

Said a poet to a woodlouse--"Thou art certainly my brother; I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole; And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene s.m.u.t and smother, In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.

"Yea," the poet said, "I smell thee by some pa.s.sive divination, I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house; What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic pa.s.sion, Had the aeons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.

"The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion, Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test; Through a s.h.i.+ver of the senses comes a resonance of question, And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best."

"Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of awe stick To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight: Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch of solar caustic, On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate."

"Notwithstanding which, O poet," spake the woodlouse, very blandly, "I am likewise the created,--I the equipoise of thee; I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.

"I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences, And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush: Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches, And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

"I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings, Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee: And earth's soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs, Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.

"And I sacrifice, a Levite--and I palpitate, a poet;-- Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things?

Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic; Earth's worst sp.a.w.n, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me! I have wings.

"Ah, men's poets! men's conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like, And the world's wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod: We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight, And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet to G.o.d.

"For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles, Till a G.o.ds.h.i.+ne, bluely winnowed through the sieve of thunderstorms, s.h.i.+mmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels; And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.

"Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us; Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right and steer wrong?

For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos, Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.

"Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through humanitarian pa.s.sion See that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism; Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration, Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.

"Pa.s.s, O poet, retransfigured! G.o.d, the psychometric rhapsode, Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars that blink; All eternities hang round him like an old man's clothes collapsed, While he makes his mundane music--AND HE WILL NOT STOP, I THINK."

THE PERSON OF THE HOUSE

IDYL CCCLXVI

THE ACCOMPANIMENTS

1. THE MONTHLY NURSE 2. THE CAUDLE 3. THE SENTENCES

THE KID

1. THE MONTHLY NURSE

The sickly airs had died of damp; Through huddling leaves the holy chime Flagged; I, expecting Mrs. Gamp, Thought--"Will the woman come in time?"