Alba
WHEN the nightingale to his mate
 Sings day-long and night late
 My love and I keep state
 In bower,
 In flower,
 ’Till the watchman on the tower
 Cry:
 “Up! Thou rascal, Rise,
 I see the white
 Light
 And the night
 Flies.”

I

Compleynt of a gentleman who has been waiting outside for some time

O PLASMATOUR and true celestial light,
 Lord powerful, engirdled all with might,
 Give my good-fellow aid in fools’ despite
 Who stirs not forth this night,
 And day comes on.
“Sst! my good fellow, art awake or sleeping?
 Sleep thou no more. I see the star upleaping
 That hath the dawn in keeping,
 And day comes on!
“Hi! Harry, hear me, for I sing aright
 Sleep not thou now, I hear the bird in flight
 That plaineth of the going of the night,
 And day comes on!
“Come now! Old swenkin! Rise up, from thy bed,
 I see the signs upon the welkin spread,
 If thou come not, the cost be on thy head.
 And day comes on!
“And here I am since going down of sun,
 And pray to God that is St. Mary’s son,
 To bring thee safe back, my companion.
 And day comes on.
“And thou out here beneath the porch of stone
 Badest me to see that a good watch was done,
 And now thou’lt none of me, and wilt have none
 Of song of mine.”
(Bass voice from within.)
“Wait, my good fellow. For such joy I take
 With her venust and noblest to my make
 To hold embraced, and will not her forsake
 For yammer of the cuckold,
 Though day break.”
 (Girart Bornello.)

II

Avril
WHEN the springtime is sweet
 And the birds repeat
 Their new song in the leaves,
 ’Tis meet
 A man go where he will.
But from where my heart is set
 No message I get;
 My heart all wakes and grieves;
 Defeat
 Or luck, I must have my fill.
Our love comes out
 Like the branch that turns about
 On the top of the hawthorne,
 With frost and hail at night
 Suffers despite
 ’Till the sun come, and the green leaf on the bough.
I remember the young day
 When we set strife away,
 And she gave me such gesning,
 Her love and her ring:
 God grant I die not by any man’s stroke
 ’Till I have my hand ’neath her cloak.
I care not for their clamour
 Who have come between me and my charmer,
 For I know how words run loose,
 Big talk and little use.
 Spoilers of pleasure,
 We take their measure.
 (Guilhem de Peitieu.)

III

Descant on a Theme by Cerclamon

WHEN the sweet air goes bitter,
 And the cold birds twitter
 Where the leaf falls from the twig,
 I sough and sing
 that Love goes out
 Leaving me no power to hold him.
Of love I have naught
 Save troubles and sad thought,
 And nothing is grievous
 as I desirous,
 Wanting only what
 No man can get or has got.
With the noblest that stands in men’s sight,
 If all the world be in despite
 I care not a glove.
 Where my love is, there is a glitter of sun;
 God give me life, and let my course run
 ’Till I have her I love
 To lie with and prove.
I do not live, nor cure me,
 Nor feel my ache—great as it is,
 For love will give
 me no respite,
 Nor do I know when I turn left or right
 nor when I go out.
 For in her is all my delight
 And all that can save me.
I shake and burn and quiver
 From love, awake and in swevyn,
 Such fear I have she deliver
 me not from pain,
 Who know not how to ask her;
 Who can not.
 Two years, three years I seek
 And though I fear to speak out,
 Still she must know it.
If she won’t have me now, Death is my portion,
 Would I had died that day
 I came into her sway.
 God! How softly this kills!
 When her love look steals on me.
 Killed me she has, I know not how it was,
 For I would not look on a woman.
Joy I have none, if she make me not mad
 Or set me quiet, or bid me chatter.
 Good is it to me if she flout
 Or turn me inside out, and about.
 My ill doth she turn sweet.
 How swift it is.
 For I am traist and loose,
 I am true, or a liar,
 All vile, or all gentle,
 Or shaking between,
 as she desire,
 I, Cerclamon, sorry and glad,
 The man whom love had
 and has ever;
 Alas! who’er it please or pain,
 She can me retain.
I am gone from one joy,
 From one I loved never so much,
 She by one touch
 Reft me away;
 So doth bewilder me
 I can not say my say
 nor my desire,
 And when she looks on me
 It seems to me
 I lose all wit and sense.
The noblest girls men love
 ’Gainst her I prize not as a glove
 Worn and old.
 Though the whole world run rack
 And go dark with cloud,
 Light is
 Where she stands,
 And a clamour loud
 in my ears.

IV

Vergier
 In orchard under the hawthorne
 She has her lover till morn,
 Till the traist man cry out to warn
 Them. God how swift the night,
 And day comes on.
O Plasmatour, that thou end not the night,
 Nor take my belovéd from my sight,
 Nor I, nor tower-man, look on daylight,
 ’Fore God, How swift the night,
 And day comes on.
“Lovely thou art, to hold me close and kisst,
 Now cry the birds out, in the meadow mist,
 Despite the cuckold, do thou as thou list,
 So swiftly goes the night
 And day comes on.
“My pretty boy, make we our play again
 Here in the orchard where the birds complain,
 ’Till the traist watcher his song unrein,
 Ah God! How swift the night
 And day comes on.”
“Out of the wind that blows from her,
 That dancing and gentle is and Thereby pleasanter,
 Have I drunk a draught, sweeter than scent of myrrh.
 Ah God! How swift the night.
 And day comes on.”
Venust the lady, and none lovelier,
 For her great beauty, many men look on her,
 Out of my love will her heart not stir.
 By God, how swift the night.
 And day comes on.

V

Canzon
 I ONLY, and who elrische pain support
 Know out love’s heart o’erborne by overlove,
 For my desire that is so firm and straight
 And unchanged since I found her in my sight
 And unturned since she came within my glance,
 That far from her my speech springs up aflame;
 Near her comes not. So press the words to arrest it.
I am blind to others, and their retort
 I hear not. In her alone, I see, move,
 Wonder.... And jest not. And the words dilate
 Not truth; but mouth speaks not the heart outright:
 I could not walk roads, flats, dales, hills, by chance,
 To find charm’s sum within one single frame
 As God hath set in her t’assay and test it.
And I have passed in many a goodly court
 To find in hers more charm than rumour thereof ...
 In solely hers. Measure and sense to mate,
 Youth and beauty learned in all delight,
 Gentrice did nurse her up, and so advance
 Her fair beyond all reach of evil fame,
 To clear her worth, no shadow hath oppresst it.
Her contact flats not out, falls not off short....
 Let her, I pray, guess out the sense hereof
 For never will it stand in open prate
 Until my inner heart stand in daylight,
 So that heart pools him when her eyes entrance,
 As never doth the Rhone, fulled and untame,
 Pool, where the freshest tumult hurl to crest it.
Flimsy another’s joy, false and distort,
 No paregale that she springs not above ...
 Her love-touch by none other mensurate.
 To have it not? Alas! Though the pains bite
 Deep, torture is but galzeardy and dance,
 For in my thought my lust hath touched his aim.
 God! Shall I get no more! No fact to best it!
No delight I, from now, in dance or sport,
 Nor will these toys a tinkle of pleasure prove,
 Compared to her, whom no loud profligate
 Shall leak abroad how much she makes my right.
 Is this too much? If she count not mischance
 What I have said, then no. But if she blame,
 Then tear ye out the tongue that hath expresst it.
The song begs you: Count not this speech ill chance,
 But if you count the song worth your acclaim,
 Arnaut cares lyt who praise or who contest it.
 (Arnaut Daniel, a. d. about 1190.)

MOEURS CONTEMPORAINES

I

1

Mr. Styrax
 MR. HECATOMB STYRAX, the owner of a large estate
 and of large muscles,
 A “blue” and a climber of mountains, has married
 at the age of 28,
 He being at that age a virgin,
 The term “virgo” being made male in mediaeval latinity;
 His ineptitudes
 Have driven his wife from one religious excess to another.
 She has abandoned the vicar
 For he was lacking in vehemence;
 She is now the high-priestess
 Of a modern and ethical cult,
 And even now Mr. Styrax
 Does not believe in aesthetics.

2

His brother has taken to gipsies,
 But the son-in-law of Mr. H. Styrax
 Objects to perfumed cigarettes.
 In the parlance of Niccolo Macchiavelli,
 “Thus things proceed in their circle”;
 And thus the empire is maintained.

II

Clara
 AT sixteen she was a potential celebrity
 With a distaste for caresses.
 She now writes to me from a convent;
 Her life is obscure and troubled;
 Her second husband will not divorce her;
 Her mind is, as ever, uncultivated,
 And no issue presents itself.
 She does not desire her children,
 Or any more children.
 Her ambition is vague and indefinite,
 She will neither stay in, nor come out.

III

Soirée
 UPON learning that the mother wrote verses,
 And that the father wrote verses,
 And that the youngest son was in a publisher’s office,
 And that the friend of the second daughter
 was undergoing a novel,
 The young American pilgrim
 Exclaimed:
 “This is a darn’d clever bunch!”

IV

Sketch 48 b. II
 AT the age of 27
 Its home mail is still opened by its maternal parent
 And its office mail may be opened by
 its parent of the opposite gender.
 It is an officer,
 and a gentleman,
 and an architect.

V

1

“Nodier raconte ...”
 AT a friend of my wife’s there is a photograph,
 A faded, pale, brownish photograph,
 Of the times when the sleeves were large,
 Silk, stiff and large above the lacertus,
 That is, the upper arm,
 And décolleté....
 It is a lady,
 She sits at a harp,
 Playing,
And by her left foot, in a basket,
 Is an infant, aged about 14 months,
 The infant beams at the parent,
 The parent re-beams at its offspring.
 The basket is lined with satin,
 There is a satin-like bow on the harp.

2

And in the home of the novelist
 There is a satin-like bow on an harp.
You enter and pass hall after hall,
 Conservatory follows conservatory,
 Lilies lift their white symbolical cups,
 Whence their symbolical pollen has been excerpted,
 Near them I noticed an harp
 And the blue satin ribbon,
 And the copy of “Hatha Yoga”
 And the neat piles of unopened, unopening books,
And she spoke to me of the monarch,
 And of the purity of her soul.

VI

Stele
 AFTER years of continence
 he hurled himself into a sea of six women.
 Now, quenched as the brand of Meleagar,
 he lies by the poluphloisboious sea-coast.
παραἀ ΘῘνα Πολοϕλοίσβοιο Θαλἀσσης.
Siste Viator.

VII

I Vecchii
 THEY will come no more,
 The old men with beautiful manners.
Il était comme un tout petit garçon
 With his blouse full of apples
 And sticking out all the way round;
 Blagueur! “Con gli occhi onesti e tardi,”
And he said:
 “Oh! Abelard,” as if the topic
 Were much too abstruse for his comprehension,
 And he talked about “the Great Mary,”
 And said: “Mr. Pound is shocked at my levity,”
 When it turned out he meant Mrs. Ward.
And the other was rather like my bust by Gaudier,
 Or like a real Texas colonel,
 He said: “Why flay dead horses?
 “There was once a man called Voltaire.”
And he said they used to cheer Verdi,
 In Rome, after the opera,
 And the guards couldn’t stop them,
And that was an anagram for Vittorio
 Emanuele Re D’ Italia,
 And the guards couldn’t stop them.
Old men with beautiful manners,
 Sitting in the Row of a morning;
 Walking on the Chelsea Embankment.

VIII

Ritratto
 AND she said:
 “You remember Mr. Lowell,
 “He was your ambassador here?”
 And I said: “That was before I arrived.”
 And she said:
 “He stomped into my bedroom....
 (By that time she had got on to Browning.)
 “ ... stomped into my bedroom....
 “And said: ‘Do I,
 “ ‘I ask you, Do I
 “ ‘Care too much for society dinners?’
 “And I wouldn’t say that he didn’t.
 “Shelley used to live in this house.”
She was a very old lady,
 I never saw her again.

HUGH SELWYN MAUBERLEY

(LIFE AND CONTACTS)

“Vocat æstus in umbram”
 Nemesianus Ec. IV.

ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE

I

FOR three years, out of key with his time,
 He strove to resuscitate 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 savage country, out of date;
 Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
 Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
Ἵδυεν λάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὃς’ ἐνἰ Τροίη
 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 obstinate isles;
 Observed the elegance 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 Muses’ diadem.

II

THE age demanded an image
 Of its accelerated grimace,
 Something for the modern stage,
 Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
 Of the inward gaze;
 Better mendacities
 Than the classics in paraphrase!
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.
 Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
 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 outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty
 Defects—after Samothrace;
 We see τὀ καλόν
 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 knave or an eunuch
 To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
 τίν’ ἀνδρα, τίν’ ήρωά, τίνα θεὀν,
 Shall I place a tin wreath upon!

IV

THESE fought in any case,
 and some believing, pro 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 slaughter, 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 liars 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, trench confessions,
 laughter out of dead bellies.

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 battered books.

YEUX GLAUQUES

GLADSTONE was still respected,
 When John Ruskin produced
 “Kings’ Treasuries”; Swinburne
 And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid 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 darts 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’; DISFEÇEMI
MAREMMA”

AMONG the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,
 Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,
 I found the last scion 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 (Lionel) died
 By falling from a high stool in a pub ...
But showed no trace of alcohol
 At the autopsy, privately performed—
 Tissue preserved—the pure mind
 Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
 Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued
 With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
 So spoke 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 limpid eyes,
 The circular infant’s face,
 The stiffness from spats 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 gilded cabin of his steam yacht
 Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, 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 royalties, 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 sinecure.
“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 sagging roof
 The stylist has taken shelter,
 Unpaid, uncelebrated,
 At last from the world’s welter
Nature receives him,
 With a placid and uneducated mistress
 He exercises his talents
 And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
 Leaks through its thatch;
 He offers succulent cooking;
 The door has a creaking latch.

XI

CONSERVATRIX of Milésien”
 Habits of mind and feeling,
 Possibly. But in Ealing
 With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, “Milésian” is an exaggeration.
 No instinct has survived in her
 Older than those her grandmother
 Told her would fit her station.

XII

DAPHNE with her thighs 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 precisely the fashion
 To stimulate, in her,
 A durable 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 modulation 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 superseded the cultivation
 Of Pierian roses.

ENVOI (1919)

GO, dumb-born book,
 Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;
 Hadst thou but song
 As thou hast subjects known,
 Then were there cause in thee that should condone
 Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
 And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
 Such treasure in the air,
 Reeking naught else but that her graces give
 Life to the moment,
 I would bid them live
 As roses might, in magic amber laid,
 Red overwrought with orange and all made
 One substance and one colour
 Braving time.
Tell her that goes
 With song upon her lips
 But sings not out the song, nor knows
 The maker of it, some other mouth,
 May be as fair as hers,
 Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
 When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
 Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
 Till change hath broken down
 All things save Beauty alone.

1920 (MAUBERLEY)

I

TURNED from the “eau-forte
 Par Jaquemart”
 To the strait head
 Of Messalina:
“His true Penelope
 Was Flaubert,”
 And his tool
 The engraver’s.
Firmness,
 Not the full smile,
 His art, but an art
 In profile;
Colourless
 Pier Francesca,
 Pisanello lacking the skill
 To forge Achaia.

II

“Qu’est ce qu’ils savent de l’amour, et
 qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre?
S’ils ne comprennent pas la poèsie,
 s’ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu’est ce
 qu’ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion
 en comparaison avec laquelle la rose
 est grossière et le parfum des violettes un
 tonnerre?” CAID ALI
For three years, diabolus in the scale,
 He drank ambrosia,
 All passes, ANANGKE prevails,
 Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
 Amid her galaxies,
 NUKTIS AGALMA
 . . . . . . . . . .
Drifted ... drifted precipitate,
 Asking time to be rid of....
 Of his bewilderment; to designate
 His new found orchid....
To be certain ... certain ...
 (Amid ærial flowers) ... time for arrangements—
 Drifted on
 To the final estrangement;
 Unable in the supervening blankness
 To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff
 Until he found his seive....
 Ultimately, his seismograph:
—Given that is his “fundamental passion”
 This urge to convey the relation
 Of eye-lid and cheek-bone
 By verbal manifestations;
To present the series
 Of curious heads in medallion—
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
 The wide-banded irises
 And botticellian sprays implied
 In their diastasis;
Which anæsthesis, noted a year late,
 And weighed, revealed his great affect,
 (Orchid), mandate
 Of Eros, a retrospect.
 .   .   .
Mouths biting empty air,
 The still stone dogs,
 Caught in metamorphosis, were
 Left him as epilogues.

“THE AGE DEMANDED”

Vide Poem II. Page 54