Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

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Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 427

by Aldous Huxley


  ESCAPE.

  I seek the quietude of stones

  Or of great oxen, dewlap-deep

  In meadows of lush grass, where sleep

  Drifts, tufted, on the air or drones

  On flowery traffic. Sleep atones

  For sin, comforting eyes that weep.

  O’er me, Lethean darkness, creep

  Unfelt as tides through dead men’s bones!

  In that metallic sea of hair,

  Fragrance! I come to drown despair

  Of wings in dark forgetfulness.

  No love ... Love is self-known, aspires

  To heights unearthly. I ask less, —

  Sleep born of satisfied desires.

  THE GARDEN.

  There shall be dark trees round me: — I insist

  On cypresses: I’m terribly romantic —

  And glimpsed between shall move the whole Atlantic,

  Now leaden dull, now subtle with grey mist,

  Now many jewelled, when the waves are kissed

  By revelling sunlight and the corybantic

  South-Western wind: so, troubled, passion-frantic,

  The poet’s mind boils gold and amethyst.

  There shall be seen the infinite endeavour

  Of a sad fountain, white against the sky

  And poised as it strains up, but doomed to break

  In weeping music; ever fair and ever

  Young ... and the bright-eyed wood-gods as they slake

  Their thirst in it, are silent, reverently ...

  THE CANAL.

  No dip and dart of swallows wakes the black

  Slumber of the canal: — a mirror dead

  For lack of loveliness remembered

  From ancient azures and green trees, for lack

  Of some white beauty given and flung back,

  Secret, to her that gave: no sun has bled

  To wake an echo here of answering red;

  The surface stirs to no leaf’s wind-blown track.

  Between unseeing walls the waters rest,

  Lifeless and hushed, till suddenly a swan

  Glides from some broader river blue as day,

  And with the mirrored magic of his breast

  Creates within that barren water-way

  New life, new loveliness, and passes on.

  THE IDEAL FOUND WANTING.

  I’m sick of clownery and Owlglass tricks;

  Damn the whole crowd of you I I hate you all.

  The same, night after night, from powdered stall

  To sweating gallery, your faces fix

  In flux an idiot mean. The Apteryx

  You worship is no victory; you call

  On old stupidity, God made to crawl

  For tempting with world-wisdom’s narcotics.

  I’ll break a window through my prison! See,

  The sunset bleeds among the roofs; comes night,

  Dark blue and calm as music dying out.

  Is it escape? No, the laugh’s turned on me!

  I kicked at cardboard, gaped at red limelight;

  You laughed and cheered my latest knockabout.

  MISPLACED LOVE.

  Red wine that slowly leaned and brimmed the shell

  Of pearl, where lips had touched, as light and swift

  As naked petals of the rose adrift

  Upon the lazy-luted ritournelle

  Of summer bee-song: laughing as they fell,

  Gold memories: dream incense, childhood’s gift,

  Blue as the smoke that far horizons lift,

  Tenuous as the wings of Ariel: —

  These treasured things I laid upon the pyre;

  And the flame kindled, and I fanned it high,

  And, strong in hope, could watch the crumbling past.

  Eager I knelt before the waning fire,

  Phoenix, to greet thine immortality ...

  But there was naught but ashes at the last.

  SONNET.

  Were I to die, you’d break your heart, you say.

  Well, if it do but bend, I’m satisfied —

  Bend and rebound — for hearts are temper-tried,

  Mild steel, not hardened, with the spring and play

  Of excellent tough swords. It’s not that way

  That you’ll be perishing. But when I’ve died,

  When snap! my light goes out, what will betide

  You, if the heart-breaks give you leave to stay?

  What will be left, I wonder, if you lose

  All that you gave me? “All? A year or so

  Out of a life,” you say. But worlds, say I,

  Of kisses timeless given in ecstasy

  That gave me Real You. I die: you go

  With me. What’s left? Limbs, clothes, a pair of shoes?...

  SENTIMENTAL SUMMER.

  The West has plucked its flowers and has thrown

  Them fading on the night. Out of the sky’s

  Black depths there smiles a greeting from those eyes,

  Where all the Real, all I have ever known

  Of the divine is held. And not alone

  Do I stand here now ... a presence seems to rise:

  Your voice sounds near across my memories,

  And answering fingers brush against my own.

  Yes, it is you: for evening holds those strands

  Of fire and darkness twined in one to make

  Your loveliness a web of magic mesh,

  Whose cross-weft harmony of soul and flesh

  Shadows a thought or glows, when smiles awake,

  Like sunlight passionate on southern lands.

  THE CHOICE.

  Comrade, now that you’re merry

  And therefore true,

  Say — where would you like to die

  And have your friend to bury

  What once was you?

  “On the top of a hill

  With a peaceful view

  Of country where all is still?”...

  Great God, not I!

  I’d lie in the street

  Where two streams meet

  And there’s noise enough to fill

  The outer ear,

  While within the brain can beat

  Marches of death and life,

  Glory and joy and fear,

  Peace of the sort that moves

  And clash of strife

  And routs of armies fleeing.

  There would I shake myself clear

  Out of the deep-set grooves

  Of my sluggish being.

  THE HIGHER SENSUALISM.

  There’s a church by a lake in Italy

  Stands white on a hill against the sky?

  And a path of immemorial cobbles

  Leads up and up, where the pilgrim hobbles

  Past a score or so of neat reposories,

  Where you stop and breathe and tell your rosaries

  To the shrined terra-cotta mannikins,

  That expound with the liveliest quirks and grins

  Known texts of Scripture. But no long stay

  Should the pilgrim make upon his way;

  But as means to the end these shrines stand here

  To guide to something holier,

  The church on the hilltop.

  Your heaven’s so,

  With a path leading up to it past a row

  Of votary Priapulids;

  At each you pause and tell your beads

  Along the quintuple strings of sense:

  Then on, to face Heaven’s eminence,

  New stimulated, new inspired.

  SONNET.

  If that a sparkle of true starshine be

  That led my way; if some diviner thing

  Than common thought urged me to fashioning

  Close-woven links of burnished poetry;

  Then all the heaven that one time dwelt in me

  Has fled, leaving the body triumphing.

  Dead flesh it seems, with not a dream to bring

  Visions that better warm immediacy.

/>   Why have my visions left me, what could kill

  That feeble spark, which yet had life and heat?

  Fulfilment shewed a present rich and fair:

  I strive to mount, but catch the nearest still:

  Souls have been drowned between heart’s beat and beat,

  And trapped and tangled in a woman’s hair.

  FORMAL VERSES.

  I.

  Mother of all my future memories,

  Mistress of my new life, which but to-day

  Began, when I beheld, deep in your eyes,

  My own love mirrored and the warm surprise

  Of the first kiss swept both our souls away,

  Your love has freed me; for I was oppressed

  By my own devil, whose unwholesome breath

  Tarnished my youth, leaving to me at best

  Age lacking comfort of a soul at rest

  And weariness beyond the hope of death.

  II.

  Ah, those were days of silent happiness!

  I never spoke, and had no need to speak,

  While on the windy down-land, cheek by cheek,

  The slow-driven sun beheld us. Each caress

  Had oratory for its own defence;

  And when I kissed or felt her fingers press,

  I envied not Demosthenes his Greek,

  Nor Tully for his Latin eloquence.

  PERILS OF THE SMALL HOURS.

  When life burns low as the fire in the grate

  And all the evening’s books are read,

  I sit alone, save for the dead

  And the lovers I have grown to hate.

  But all at once the narrow gloom

  Of hatred and despair expands

  In tenderness: thought stretches hands

  To welcome to the midnight room

  Another presence: — a memory

  Of how last year in the sunlit field,

  Laughing, you suddenly revealed

  Beauty in immortality.

  For so it is; a gesture strips

  Life bare of all its make-believe.

  All unprepared we may receive

  Our casual apocalypse.

  Sheer beauty, then you seemed to stir

  Unbodied soul; soul sleeps to-night,

  And love comes, dimming spirit’s sight,

  When body plays interpreter.

  COMPLAINT.

  I have tried to remember the familiar places, —

  The pillared gloom of the beechwoods, the towns

  by the sea, —

  I have tried to people the past with dear known faces,

  But you were haunting me.

  Like a remorse, insistent, pitiless,

  You have filled my spirit, you were ever at hand;

  You have mocked my gods with your new loveliness:

  Broken the old shrines stand.

  RETURN TO AN OLD HOME.

  In this wood — how the hazels have grown! —

  I left a treasure all my own

  Of childish kisses and laughter and pain;

  Left, till I might come back again

  To take from the familiar earth

  My hoarded secret and count its worth.

  And all the spider-work of the years,

  All the time-spun gossamers,

  Dewed with each succeeding spring;

  And the piled up leaves the Autumns fling

  To the sweet corruption of death on death....

  At the sudden stir of my spirit’s breath

  All scattered. New and fair and bright

  As ever it was, before my sight

  The treasure lay, and nothing missed.

  So having handled all and kissed,

  I put them back, adding one new

  And precious memory of you.

  FRAGMENT.

  We’re German scholars poring over life,

  As over a Greek manuscript that’s torn

  And stained beyond repair. Our eyes of horn

  Read one or two poor letters; and what strife,

  What books on books begotten for their sake!

  But we enjoy it; and meanwhile neglect

  The line that’s left us perfect from the wrecked

  Rich argosy, clear beyond doubts to make

  Conjectures of. So in my universe

  Of scribbled half-hid meanings you appear,

  Sole perfect symbol of the highest sphere;

  And life’s great matrix crystal, whose depths nurse

  Soul’s infinite reflections, glows in you

  With now uncertain radiance...

  THE WALK.

  I. THROUGH THE SUBURBS.

  Provincial Sunday broods above the town:

  The street’s asleep; through a dim window drifts

  A small romance that hiccoughs up and down

  An air all trills and runs and sudden lifts

  To yearning sevenths poised ... not Chopin quite,

  But, oh, romantic; a tinsel world made bright

  With rose and honeysuckle’s paper blooms,

  And where the moon’s blue limelight and the glooms

  Of last-act scenes of passion are discreet.

  And when the tinkling stops and leaves the street

  Blank in the sunlight of the afternoon

  You feel a curtain dropped. Poor little tune!

  Perhaps our grandmother’s dull girlhood days

  Were fired by you with radiances of pink,

  Heavenly, brighter far than she could think

  Anything might be ... till a greater blaze

  Tinged life’s horizon, when he kissed her first,

  Our grandpapa. But a thin ghost still plays

  In music down the street, echoing the plaint

  Of far romance with its own sadder song

  Of Everyday; and as they walk along,...

  The young man and the woman, deep immersed

  In all the suburb-comedy around ...

  They seem to catch coherence in the sound

  Of that ghost-music, and the words come faint: —

  Oh the months and the days,

  Oh sleeps and dinners,

  Oh the planning of ways

  And quotidian means!

  Oh endless vistas of mutton and greens,

  Oh weekly mimblings of prayer and praise,

  Oh Evenings with All the Winners!

  Monday sends the clothes to the wash

  And Saturday brings them home again:

  Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche

  And Destiny is a sale caboche;

  But I’ll give you heaven

  In a dominant seven,

  And you shall not have lived in vain.

  “In vain,” the girl repeats, “in vain, in vain ...”

  Your suburb’s whole philosophy leads there.

  The ox-stall for our happiness, for pain,

  Poignant and sweet, the dull narcotic ache

  Of wretchedness, and in resigned despair

  A grim contentment ... ashen fruits to slake

  A nameless, quenchless thirst. The tinkling rain

  Of that small sentimental music wets

  Your parching suburb: it may sprout ... who knows?...

  In something red and silken like a rose,

  In sheaves of almost genuine violets.

  Faint chords, your sadness, secular, immense,

  Brims to the bursting this poor Actual heart.

  For surging through the floodgates that the sense

  On sudden lightly opens sweeps the Whole

  Into the narrow compass of its part.

  He.

  Inedited sensation of the soul!

  You’d have us bless the Hire-Purchase System,

  Which now allows the poorest vampers

  To feel, as they abuse their piano’s dampers,

  That angels have stooped down and kissed ’em

  With Ave-Maries from the infinite.

  But poor old Infinite’s dead. Long live his heir,
r />   Lord Here-and-Now ... for all the rest

  Is windy nothingness, or at the best

  Home-made Chimera, bodied with despair,

  Headed with formless, foolish hope.

  She.

  No, no!

  We live in verse, for all things rhyme

  With something out of space and time.

  He.

  But in the suburb here life needs must flow

  In journalistic prose ...

  She.

  But we have set

  Our faces towards the further hills, where yet

  The wind untainted and unbound may blow.

  II. FROM THE CREST.

  So through the squalor, till the sky unfolds

  To right and left its fringes, penned no more,

  A thin canal, ‘twixt shore and ugly shore

  Of hovels, poured contiguous from the moulds

  Of Gothic horror. Town is left at last,

  Save for the tentacles that probe,... a squat

  Dun house or two, allotments, plot on plot

  Of cabbage, jejune, ripe or passed,

  Chequering with sick yellow or verdigris

  The necropolitan ground; and neat paved ways

  That edge the road ... the town’s last nerves ... and cease,

  As if in sudden shame, where hedges raise

  Their dusty greenery on either hand.

  Their path mounts slowly up the hill;

  And, as they walk, to right and left expand

  The plain and the golden uplands and the blue

  Faint smoke of distances that fade from view;

  And at their feet, remote and still?

  The city spreads itself.

  He.

  That glabrous dome that lifts itself so grand,

  There in the marish, is the omphalos,

  The navel, umbo, middle, central boss

  Of the unique, sole, true Cloud-Cuckoo Land.

  Drowsy with Sunday bells and Sunday beer

  Afoam in silver rumkins, there it basks,

  Thinking of labours past and future tasks

  And pondering on the end, forever near,

  Yet ever distant as the rainbow’s spring.

  For still in Cuckoo-Land they’re labouring,

  With hopes undamped and undiscouraged hearts:

  A little musty, but superb, they sit,

  Piecing a god together bit by bit

 

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