The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems Part 4

PRIVATE PROPERTY

All fly--yet who is misanthrope?-- The actual men and things that pa.s.s Jostling, to wither as the gra.s.s So soon: and (be it heaven's hope, Or poetry's kaleidoscope, Or love or wine, at feast, at ma.s.s) Each owns a paradise of gla.s.s Where never a yearning heliotrope Pursues the sun's ascent or slope; For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was.

Like fauns embossed in our domain, We look abroad, and our calm eyes Mark how the goatish G.o.ds of pain Revel; and if by grim surprise They break into our paradise, Patient we build its beauty up again.

REVELATION

At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx, I taste a strange apocalypse: Your subtle taper finger-tips Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks, I know the wiles and each iynx That brought me pa.s.sionate to your lips: I know you bare as laughter strips Your charnel beauty; yet my spirit drinks

Pure knowledge from this tainted well, And now hears voices yet unheard Within it, and without it sees That world of which the poets tell Their vision in the stammered word Of those that wake from piercing ecstasies.

MINOAN PORCELAIN

Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze All imperturbable do not Even make pretences to regard The justing absence of her stays, Where many a Tyrian gallipot Excites desire with spilth of nard.

The bistred rims above the fard Of cheeks as red as bergamot Attest that no shamefaced delays Will clog fulfilment, nor r.e.t.a.r.d Full payment of the Cyprian's praise Down to the last remorseful jot.

Hail priestess of we know not what Strange cult of Mycenean days!

THE DECAMERON

Noon with a depth of shadow beneath the trees Shakes in the heat, quivers to the sound of lutes: Half shaded, half sunlit, a great bowl of fruits Glistens purple and golden: the flasks of wine Cool in their panniers of snow: silks m.u.f.fle and s.h.i.+ne: Dim velvet, where through the leaves a sunbeam shoots, Rifts in a pane of scarlet: fingers tapping the roots Keep languid time to the music's soft slow decline.

Suddenly from the gate rises up a cry, Hideous broken laughter, scarce human in sound; Gaunt clawed hands, thrust through the bars despairingly, Clutch fast at the scented air, while on the ground Lie the poor plague-stricken carrions, who have found Strength to crawl forth and curse the suns.h.i.+ne and die.

IN UNCERTAINTY TO A LADY

I am not one of those who sip, Like a quotidian bock, Cheap idylls from a languid lip Prepared to yawn or mock.

I wait the indubitable word, The great Unconscious Cue.

Has it been spoken and unheard?

Spoken, perhaps, by you ...?

c.r.a.pULOUS IMPRESSION

(To J.S.)

Still life, still life ... the high-lights s.h.i.+ne Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wine Stands firmly solid in the gla.s.ses, Smooth yellow ice, through which there pa.s.ses The lamp's bright pencil of down-struck light.

The fruits metallically gleam, Globey in their heaped-up bowl, And there are faces against the night Of the outer room--faces that seem Part of this still, still life ... they've lost their soul.

And amongst these frozen faces you smiled, Surprised, surprisingly, like a child: And out of the frozen welter of sound Your voice came quietly, quietly.

"What about G.o.d?" you said. "I have found Much to be said for Totality.

All, I take it, is G.o.d: G.o.d's all-- This bottle, for instance ..." I recall, Dimly, that you took G.o.d by the neck-- G.o.d-in-the-bottle--and pushed Him across: But I, without a moment's loss Moved G.o.d-in-the-salt in front and shouted: "Check!"

THE LIFE THEORETIC

While I have been fumbling over books And thinking about G.o.d and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women.

They have brazen faces like battering-rams.

But I who think about books and such-- I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling, And the women palsy me with fear.

But when it comes to fumbling over books And thinking about G.o.d and the Devil and all, Why, there I am.

But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it, Perhaps, perhaps ... G.o.d knows.

COMPLAINT OF A POET MANQUe

We judge by appearance merely: If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

So I grew the hair so long on my head That my mother wouldn't know me, Till a woman in a night-club said, As I was pa.s.sing by, "Hullo, here comes Salome ..."

I looked in the dirty gilt-edged gla.s.s, And, oh Salome; there I was-- Positively jewelled, half a vampire, With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire Over the brink of the crag of sense, Looking down from perilous eminence Into a gulf of windy night.

And there's straw in my tempestuous hair, And I'm not a poet: but never despair!

I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.

SOCIAL AMENITIES

I am getting on well with this anecdote, When suddenly I recall The many times I have told it of old, And all the worked-up phrases, and the dying fall Of voice, well timed in the crisis, the note Of mock-heroic ingeniously struck-- The whole thing sticks in my throat, And my face all tingles and p.r.i.c.ks with shame For myself and my hearers.

These are the social pleasures, my G.o.d!