Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

Home > Literature > Complete Works of Aldous Huxley > Page 426
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 426

by Aldous Huxley


  THE TILLOTSON BANQUET

  GREEN TUNNELS

  NUNS AT LUNCHEON

  UNCLE SPENCER

  LITTLE MEXICAN

  HUBERT AND MINNIE

  FARD

  THE PORTRAIT

  YOUNG ARCHIMEDES

  TWO OR THREE GRACES

  HALF-HOLIDAY

  THE MONOCLE

  FAIRY GODMOTHER

  CHAWDRON

  THE REST CURE

  THE CLAXTONS

  AFTER THE FIREWORKS

  EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS

  SIR HERCULES

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  AFTER THE FIREWORKS

  CHAWDRON

  CYNTHIA

  EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS

  EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS

  FAIRY GODMOTHER

  FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW

  FARD

  GREEN TUNNELS

  HALF-HOLIDAY

  HAPPILY EVER AFTER

  HAPPY FAMILIES

  HUBERT AND MINNIE

  LITTLE MEXICAN

  NUNS AT LUNCHEON

  PERMUTATIONS AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES

  SIR HERCULES

  THE BOOKSHOP

  THE CLAXTONS

  THE DEATH OF LULLY

  THE GIOCONDA SMILE

  THE MONOCLE

  THE PORTRAIT

  THE REST CURE

  THE TILLOTSON BANQUET

  TWO OR THREE GRACES

  UNCLE SPENCER

  YOUNG ARCHIMEDES

  The Poetry Collections

  During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. There he met several Bloomsbury figures, including Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead and Clive Bell.

  The Burning Wheel

  CONTENTS

  THE BURNING WHEEL.

  DOORS OF THE TEMPLE.

  VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM.

  DARKNESS.

  MOLE.

  THE TWO SEASONS.

  TWO REALITIES.

  QUOTIDIAN VISION.

  VISION.

  THE MIRROR.

  VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LAFORGUE.

  PHILOSOPHY.

  PHILOCLEA IN THE FOREST.

  BOOKS AND THOUGHTS.

  CONTRARY TO NATURE AND ARISTOTLE.

  ESCAPE.

  THE GARDEN.

  THE CANAL.

  THE IDEAL FOUND WANTING.

  MISPLACED LOVE.

  SONNET.

  SENTIMENTAL SUMMER.

  THE CHOICE.

  THE HIGHER SENSUALISM.

  SONNET.

  FORMAL VERSES.

  PERILS OF THE SMALL HOURS.

  COMPLAINT.

  RETURN TO AN OLD HOME.

  FRAGMENT.

  THE WALK.

  THE BURNING WHEEL.

  Wearied of its own turning,

  Distressed with its own busy restlessness,

  Yearning to draw the circumferent pain —

  The rim that is dizzy with speed —

  To the motionless centre, there to rest,

  The wheel must strain through agony

  On agony contracting, returning

  Into the core of steel.

  And at last the wheel has rest, is still,

  Shrunk to an adamant core:

  Fulfilling its will in fixity.

  But the yearning atoms, as they grind

  Closer and closer, more and more

  Fiercely together, beget

  A flaming fire upward leaping,

  Billowing out in a burning,

  Passionate, fierce desire to find

  The infinite calm of the mother’s breast.

  And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,

  Bright, tenderly radiant;

  All bitterness lost in the infinite

  Peace of the mother’s bosom.

  But death comes creeping in a tide

  Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear

  Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness

  And burns with a darkening passion and pain,

  Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.

  And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,

  Begetting once again the wheel that yearns —

  Sick with its speed — for the terrible stillness

  Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.

  And so once more

  Shall the wheel revolve till its anguish cease

  In the iron anguish of fixity;

  Till once again

  Flame billows out to infinity,

  Sinking to a sleep of brightness

  In that vast oblivious peace.

  DOORS OF THE TEMPLE.

  Many are the doors of the spirit that lead

  Into the inmost shrine:

  And I count the gates of the temple divine,

  Since the god of the place is God indeed.

  And these are the gates that God decreed

  Should lead to his house: — kisses and wine,

  Cool depths of thought, youth without rest,

  And calm old age, prayer and desire,

  The lover’s and mother’s breast,

  The fire of sense and the poet’s fire.

  But he that worships the gates alone,

  Forgetting the shrine beyond, shall see

  The great valves open suddenly,

  Revealing, not God’s radiant throne,

  But the fires of wrath and agony.

  VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM.

  Up from the darkness on the laughing stage

  A sudden trap-door shot you unawares,

  Incarnate Tragedy, with your strange airs

  Of courteous sadness. Nothing could assuage

  The secular grief that was your heritage,

  Passed down the long line to the last that bears

  The name, a gift of yearnings and despairs

  Too greatly noble for this iron age.

  Time moved for you not in quotidian beats,

  But in the long slow rhythm the ages keep

  In their immortal symphony. You taught

  That not in the harsh turmoil of the streets

  Does life consist; you bade the soul drink deep

  Of infinite things, saying: “The rest is naught.”

  DARKNESS.

  My close-walled soul has never known

  That innermost darkness, dazzling sight,

  Like the blind point, whence the visions spring

  In the core of the gazer’s chrysolite ...

  The mystic darkness that laps God’s throne

  In a splendour beyond imagining,

  So passing bright.

  But the many twisted darknesses

  That range the city to and fro,

  In aimless subtlety pass and part

  And ebb and glutinously flow;

  Darkness of lust and avarice,

  Of the crippled body and the crooked heart ...

  These darknesses I know.

  MOLE.

  Tunnelled in solid blackness creeps

  The old mole-soul, and wakes or sleeps,

  He knows not which, but tunnels on

  Through ages of oblivion;

  Until at last the long constraint

  Of each-hand wall is lost, and faint

  Comes daylight creeping from afar,

  And mole-work grows crepuscular.

  Tunnel meets air and bursts; mole sees

  Men hugely walking ... or are they trees?

  And far horizons smoking blue,

  And chasing clouds for ever new?

  Green hills, like lighted lamps aglow

  Or quenching ‘neath the cloud-shadow;

  Quenching and blazing turn by turn,

  Spring’s great green signals fitfully burn.

  Mole travels on, but finds the steering

  A harder tas
k of pioneering

  Than when he thridded through the strait

  Blind catacombs that ancient fate

  Had carved for him. Stupid and dumb

  And blind and touchless he had come

  A way without a turn; but here,

  Under the sky, the passenger

  Chooses his own best way; and mole

  Distracted wanders, yet his hole

  Regrets not much wherein he crept,

  But runs, a joyous nympholept,

  This way and that, by all made mad —

  River nymph and oread,

  Ocean’s daughters and Lorelei,

  Combing the silken mystery,

  The glaucous gold of her rivery tresses —

  Each haunts the traveller, each possesses

  The drunken wavering soul awhile;

  Then with a phantom’s cock-crow smile

  Mocks craving with sheer vanishment.

  Mole-eyes grow hawk’s: knowledge is lent

  In grudging driblets that pay high

  Unconscionable usury

  To unrelenting life. Mole learns

  To travel more secure; the turns

  Of his long way less puzzling seem,

  And all those magic forms that gleam

  In airy invitation cheat

  Less often than they did of old.

  The earth slopes upward, fold by fold

  Of quiet hills that meet the gold

  Serenity of western skies.

  Over the world’s edge with clear eyes

  Our mole transcendent sees his way

  Tunnelled in light: he must obey

  Necessity again and thrid

  Close catacombs as erst he did,

  Fate’s tunnellings, himself must bore

  Through the sunset’s inmost core.

  The guiding walls to each-hand shine

  Luminous and crystalline;

  And mole shall tunnel on and on,

  Till night let fall oblivion.

  THE TWO SEASONS.

  Summer, on himself intent,

  Passed without, for nothing caring

  Save his own high festival.

  My windows, blind and winkless staring,

  Wondered what the pageant meant,

  Nor ever understood at all.

  And oh, the pains of sentiment!

  The loneliness beyond all bearing ...

  Mucus and spleen and gall!

  But now that grey November peers

  In at my fire-bright window pane?

  And all its misty spires and trees

  Loom in upon me through the rain

  And question of the light that cheers

  The room within — now my soul sees

  Life, where of old were sepulchres;

  And in these new-found sympathies

  Sinks petty hopes and loves and fears,

  And knows that life is not in vain.

  TWO REALITIES.

  A waggon passed with scarlet wheels

  And a yellow body, shining new.

  “Splendid!” said I. “How fine it feels

  To be alive, when beauty peels

  The grimy husk from life.” And you

  Said, “Splendid!” and I thought you’d seen

  That waggon blazing down the street;

  But I looked and saw that your gaze had been

  On a child that was kicking an obscene

  Brown ordure with his feet.

  Our souls are elephants, thought I,

  Remote behind a prisoning grill,

  With trunks thrust out to peer and pry

  And pounce upon reality;

  And each at his own sweet will

  Seizes the bun that he likes best

  And passes over all the rest.

  QUOTIDIAN VISION.

  There is a sadness in the street,

  And sullenly the folk I meet

  Droop their heads as they walk along,

  Without a smile, without a song.

  A mist of cold and muffling grey

  Falls, fold by fold, on another day

  That dies unwept. But suddenly,

  Under a tunnelled arch I see

  On flank and haunch the chestnut gleam

  Of horses in a lamplit steam;

  And the dead world moves for me once more

  With beauty for its living core.

  VISION.

  I had been sitting alone with books,

  Till doubt was a black disease,

  When I heard the cheerful shout of rooks

  In the bare, prophetic trees.

  Bare trees, prophetic of new birth,

  You lift your branches clean and free

  To be a beacon to the earth,

  A flame of wrath for all to see.

  And the rooks in the branches laugh and shout

  To those that can hear and understand;

  “Walk through the gloomy ways of doubt

  With the torch of vision in your hand.”

  THE MIRROR.

  Slow-moving moonlight once did pass

  Across the dreaming looking-glass,

  Where, sunk inviolably deep,

  Old secrets unforgotten sleep

  Of beauties unforgettable.

  But dusty cobwebs are woven now

  Across that mirror, which of old

  Saw fingers drawing back the gold

  From an untroubled brow;

  And the depths are blinded to the moon,

  And their secrets forgotten, for ever untold.

  VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LAFORGUE.

  Youth as it opens out discloses

  The sinister metempsychosis

  Of lilies dead and turned to roses

  Red as an angry dawn.

  But lilies, remember, are grave-side flowers,

  While slow bright rose-leaves sail

  Adrift on the music of happiest hours;

  And those lilies, cold and pale,

  Hide fiery roses beneath the lawn

  Of the young bride’s parting veil.

  PHILOSOPHY.

  “God needs no christening,”

  Pantheist mutters,

  “Love opens shutters

  On heaven’s glistening.

  Flesh, key-hole listening,

  Hears what God utters” ...

  Yes, but God stutters.

  PHILOCLEA IN THE FOREST.

  I.

  ‘TWas I that leaned to Amoret

  With: “What if the briars have tangled Time,

  Till, lost in the wood-ways, he quite forget

  How plaintive in cities at midnight sounds the chime

  Of bells slow-dying from discord to the hush whence

  they rose and met.

  “And in the forest we shall live free,

  Free from the bondage that Time has made

  To hedge our soul from its liberty?

  We shall not fear what is mighty, and unafraid

  Shall look wide-eyed at beauty, nor shrink from its majesty.”

  But Amoret answered me again:

  “We are lost in the forest, you and I;

  Lost, lost, not free, though no bonds restrain;

  For no spire rises for comfort, no landmark in the sky,

  And the long glades as they curve from sight are dark

  with a nameless pain.

  And Time creates what he devours, —

  Music that sweetly dreams itself away,

  Frail-swung leaves of autumn and the scent of flowers,

  And the beauty of that poised moment, when the day

  Hangs ‘twixt the quiet of darkness and the mirth of the

  sunlit hours.”

  II.

  Mottled and grey and brown they pass,

  The wood-moths, wheeling, fluttering;

  And we chase and they vanish; and in the grass

  Are starry flowers, and the birds sing

  Faint broken songs of the dying spring.

  And on the beech-bole,
smooth and grey,

  Some lover of an older day

  Has carved in time-blurred lettering

  One word only— “Alas.”

  III.

  Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play,

  When shimmeringly, glimpse by glimpse

  Seen through the leaves, the silken figures sway

  In measured dance. Never at shut of day,

  When Time perversely loitering limps

  Through endless twilights, should your strings

  Whisper of light remembered things

  That happened long ago and far away:

  Lutes, I forbid you! You must never play...

  And you, pale marble statues, far descried

  Where vistas open suddenly,

  I bid you shew yourselves no more, but hide

  Your loveliness, lest too much glorified

  By western radiance slantingly

  Shot down the glade, you turn from stone

  To living gods, immortal grown,

  And, ageless, mock my beauty’s fleeting pride,

  You pale, relentless statues, far descried...

  BOOKS AND THOUGHTS.

  Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry

  Across the Lethe of the years-

  These are my friends, and at their tears

  I weep and with their mirth am merry.

  On a high tower, whose battlements

  Give me all heaven at a glance,

  I lie long summer nights in trance,

  Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents

  That rise from earth, while the sky above me

  Merges its peace with my soul’s peace,

  Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,

  Nought break the quiet of my release:

  In vain the windy sunlight raves

  At the hush and gloom of polar caves.

  CONTRARY TO NATURE AND ARISTOTLE.

  One head of my soul’s amphisbaena

  Turns to the daytime’s dust and sweat;

  But evenings come, when I would forget

  The sordid strife of the arena.

  And then my other self will creep

  Along the scented twilight lanes

  To where a little house contains

  A hoard of books, a gift of sleep.

  Its windows throw a friendly light

  Between the narrowing shutter slats,

  And, golden as the eyes of cats,

  Shine me a welcome through the night.

 

‹ Prev