Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

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Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 438

by Aldous Huxley


  “Thinker of useless thoughts, let him be cursed,

  Who in his folly, venturing to vex

  A question answerless and barren, first

  With wrong and right involved the things of sex!

  “He who in mystical accord conjoins

  Shadow with heat, dusk with the noon’s high fire,

  Shall never warm the palsy of his loins

  At that red sun which mortals call desire.

  “Go, seek some lubber groom’s deflowering lust;

  Take him your heart and leave me here despised!

  Go - and bring back, all horror and disgust,

  The livid breasts man’s love has stigmatized.

  “One may not serve two masters here below.”

  But the child answered: “I am torn apart,

  I feel my inmost being rent, as though

  A gulf had yawned - the gulf that is my heart.

  “Naught may this monster’s desperate thirst assuage,

  As fire ’tis hot, as space itself profound

  Naught stay the Fury from her quenchless rage,

  Who with her torch explores its bleeding wound.

  “Curtain the world away and let us try

  If lassitude will bring the boon of rest.

  In your deep bosom I would sink and die,

  Would find the grave’s fresh coolness on your breast.”

  Hence, lamentable victims, get you hence!

  Hell yawns beneath, your road is straight and steep.

  Where all the crimes receive their recompense

  Wind-whipped and seething in the lowest deep

  With a huge roaring as of storms and fires,

  Go down, mad phantoms, doomed to seek in vain

  The ne’er-won goal of unassuaged desires,

  And in your pleasures find eternal pain!

  Sunless your caverns are; the fever damps

  That filter in through every crannied vent

  Break out with marsh-fire into sudden lamps

  And steep your bodies with their frightful scent.

  The barrenness of pleasures harsh and stale

  Makes mad your thirst and parches up your skin;

  And like an old flag volleying in the gale,

  Your whole flesh shudders in the blasts of sin.

  Far from your kind, outlawed and reprobate,

  Go, prowl like wolves through desert worlds apart!

  Disordered souls, fashion your own dark fate,

  And flee the god you carry in your heart.

  ARABIA INFELIX

  Under a ceiling of cobalt

  And mirrored by as void a blue,

  Wet only with the wind-blown salt,

  The Arabian land implores a dew.

  Parched, parched are the hills, and dumb

  That thundering voice of the ravine;

  Round the dead springs the birds are seen

  No more, no more at evening come

  (Like lovely thoughts to one who dwells

  In quiet, like enchanting hopes)

  The leopards and the shy gazelles

  And the light-footed antelopes.

  Death starts at every rattling gust

  That in the withered torrent’s bed

  Whirls up a phantom of grey dust

  And, dying, lets the ghost fall dead.

  Dust in a dance may seem to live;

  But laid, not blown, it brings to birth.

  Not wind, but only rain can give

  Life, and to a patient earth.

  Hot wind from this Arabian land

  Chases the clouds, withholds the rain.

  No footstep prints the restless sand

  Wherein who sows, he sows in vain.

  If there were water, if there were

  But a shower, a little fountain springing,

  How rich would be the perfumed air,

  And the green woods with shade and singing

  Bright hills, but by the sun accursed,

  Peaceful, but with the peace of hell —

  Once on these barren slopes there fell

  A plague more violent than thirst:

  Anguish to kill inveterate pain

  And mortal slaking of desire;

  Dew, and a long-awaited rain —

  A dew of blood, a rain of fire.

  Into a vacant sky the moist

  Gray pledge of spring and coming leaves

  Swam, and the thirsty hills rejoiced,

  All golden with their future sheaves.

  Flower-phantoms in the parching air

  Nodded, and trees ungrown were bowed;

  With love like madness, like despair,

  The mountain yearned towards the cloud.

  And she in silence slowly came,

  Oh! to transfigure, to renew,

  Came laden with a gift of dew,

  But with it dropped the lightning’s flame;

  A flame that rent the crags apart,

  But rending made a road between

  For water to the mountain’s heart,

  That left a scar, but left it green.

  Faithless the cloud and fugitive;

  An empty heaven nor burns, nor wets;

  At peace, the barren land regrets

  Those agonies that made it live.

  THE MOOR

  Champion of souls and holiness, upholder

  Of all the virtues, father of the Church,

  Honest, honest, honest Iago! how

  Crusadingly, with what indignant zeal

  (Ora pro nobis), caracoling on

  Your high horse and emblazoned, gules on white,

  Did you ride forth (Oh, pray for us), ride forth

  Against the dark-skinned hosts of evil, ride,

  Martyr and saint, against those paynim hosts,

  Having for shield all Sinai, and for sword,

  To smite rebellion and avenge the Lord,

  The sharp, the shining certainty of faith!

  (Ora pro nobis) point us out the Way.

  “Lily bright and stinking mud:

  Fair is fair and foul is ill.

  With her, on her, what you will.

  This fire must be put out with blood,

  Put out with blood.”

  But for a glint, a hint of questing eyes,

  Invisible, darkness through darkness goes

  On feet that even in their victim’s dreaming

  Wake not an echo.

  Lost, he is lost; and yet thus wholly in darkness

  Melted, the Moor is more Othello than when,

  Green-glittering, the sharp Venetian day

  Revealed him armed and kingly and commanding

  Captain of men.

  How still she lies, this naked Desdemona,

  All but a child and sleeping and alone,

  How still and white!

  Whose breasts, whose arms, the very trustfulness

  Of her closed eyelids and unhurried breath

  More than a philtre maddeningly invite

  Lust and those hands, those huge dark hands, and death.

  “For oh, the lily and the mud!

  Fair is still fair and foulness, ill.

  With her, on her, what you will.

  This fire must be put out with blood.”

  Well, now the fire is out, and the light too;

  All, all put out. In Desdemona’s place

  Lies now a carrion. That fixed grimace

  Of lidless eyes and starting tongue

  Derides his foolishness. Cover her face;

  This thing but now was beautiful and young.

  Honest Iago’s Christian work is over;

  Short, short the parleying at the Golden Gate.

  “For I am one who made the Night ashamed

  Of his own essence, that his dark was dark;

  One who with good St. Jerome’s filthy tongue

  Tainted desire and taught the Moor to scorn

  His love’s pale body, and because she had

  Lain gladly in hi
s arms, to call her whore

  And strangle her for whoredom.” So he spoke,

  And with majestic motion heaven’s high door

  Rolled musically apart its burnished vans

  To grant him entrance.

  Turning back meanwhile

  From outer darkness, Othello and his bride

  Perceive the globe of heaven like one small lamp

  Burning alone at midnight in the abyss

  Of some cathedral cavern; pause, and then

  With face once more averted, hand in hand,

  Explore the unseen treasures of the dark.

  NOBLEST ROMANS

  Columns and unageing fountains,

  Jets of frost and living foam —

  Let them leap from seven mountains,

  The seven hills of Rome.

  Flanked by arch and echoing arch,

  Let the streets in triumph go;

  Bid the aqueducts to march

  Tireless through the plain below.

  Column-high in the blue air,

  Let the marble Caesars stand;

  Let the gods, who living were

  Romans, lift a golden hand.

  Many, but each alone, a crowd,

  Yet of Romans, throng their shrine;

  Worshippers themselves divine,

  Gods to gods superbly bowed;

  Romans bowed to shapes that they,

  Sculptors of the mind, set free;

  Supplicant that they may be

  Peers of those to whom they pray.

  ORION

  Tree-tangled still, autumn Orion climbs

  Up from among the North Wind’s shuddering emblems

  Into the torrent void

  And dark abstraction of invisible power,

  The heart and boreal substance of the night.

  Pleione flees before him, and behind,

  Still sunken, but prophetically near,

  Death in the Scorpion hunts him up the sky

  And round the vault of time, round the slow-curving year,

  Follows unescapably

  And to the end, aye, and beyond the end

  Will follow, follow; for of all the gods

  Death only cannot die.

  The rest are mortal. And how many lie

  Already with their creatures’ ancient dust!

  Dead even in us who live - or hardly live,

  Since of our hearts impiety has made,

  Not tombs indeed (for they are holy; tombs

  Secretly live with everlasting Death’s

  Dark and mysterious life),

  But curious shops and learned lumber rooms

  Of bone and stone and every mummied thing,

  Where Death himself his sacred sting

  Forgets (how studiously forgotten

  Amid the irrelevant to and fro of feet!),

  Where by the peeping and the chattering,

  The loud forgetfulness seemingly slain,

  He lies with all the rest - and yet we know,

  In secret yet we know,

  Death is not dead, not dead but only sleeping,

  And soon will rise again.

  Not so the rest. Only the Scorpion burns

  In our unpeopled heaven of empty names

  And insubstantial echoes; only Death

  Still claims our prayers, and still to those who pray

  Returns his own dark blood and quickening breath,

  Returns the ominous mystery of fear.

  Where are the gods of dancing and desire?

  Anger and joy, laughter and tears and wine,

  Those other mysteries of fire and flame,

  Those more divine than Death’s — ah, where are they?

  Only a ghost between the shuddering trees,

  Only a name and ghostly numbers climb;

  And where a god pursued and fled,

  Only a ghostly time, a ghostly place

  Attends on other ghostly times and places.

  Orion and the rest are dead.

  And yet to-night, here in the exulting wind,

  Amid the enormous laughters of a soul

  At once the world’s and mine,

  God-like Orion and all his brother stars

  Shine as with living eyes,

  With eyes that glance a recognition, glance a sign

  Across the quickened dark, across the gulphs

  That separate no more,

  But, like wide seas that yet bring home the freight

  Of man’s mad yearning for a further shore,

  Join with a living touch, unbrokenly,

  Life to mysterious life,

  The Hunter’s alien essence to my own.

  Orion lives; yet I who know him living,

  Elsewhere and otherwise

  Know him for dead, and dead beyond all hope,

  For ’tis the infertile and unquickening death

  Of measured places and recorded times,

  The death of names and numbers that he dies.

  Only the phantom of Orion climbs.

  Put out the eyes, put out the living eyes

  And look elsewhere; yes, look and think and be

  Elsewhere and otherwise.

  But here and thus are also in their right,

  Are in their right divine to send this wind of laughter

  Rushing through the cloudless dark

  And through my being; have a right divine

  And imprescriptible now to reveal

  The starry god, the right to make me feel,

  As even now, as even now I feel,

  His living presence near me in the night.

  A curved and figured glass hangs between light and light,

  Between the glow within us and the glow

  Of what mysterious sun without?

  Vast over earth and sky, or focussed burningly

  Upon the tender quick, our spirits throw

  Each way their images - each way the forms

  O! shall it be of beauty, shall it be

  The naked skeletons of doubt?

  Or else, symbolically dark, the cloudy forms

  Of mystery, or dark (but dark with death)

  Shapes of sad knowledge and defiling hate?

  “Lighten our darkness, Lord.” With what pure faith,

  What confident hope our fathers once implored

  The Light! But ’tis the shitten Lord of Flies

  Who with his loathsome bounties now fulfils

  On us their prayers. Our fathers prayed for light.

  Through windows at their supplication scoured

  Bare of the sacred blazons, but instead

  Daubed with the dung-god’s filth, all living eyes,

  Whether of stars or men, look merely dead;

  While on the vaulted crystal of the night

  Our guttering souls project,

  Not the Wild Huntsman, not the Heavenly Hosts,

  But only times and places, only names and ghosts.

  And yet, for all the learned Lord of Dung,

  The choice is ours, the choice is always ours,

  To see or not to see the living powers

  That move behind the numbered points and times.

  The Fly King rules; but still the choice remains

  With us his subjects, we are free, are free

  To love our fate or loathe it; to rejoice

  Or weep or wearily accept; are free,

  For all the scouring of our souls, for all

  The miring of their crystal, free to give

  Even to an empty sky, to vacant names,

  Or not to give, our worship; free to turn

  Lifewards, within, without, to what transcends

  The squalor of our personal ends and aims,

  Or not to turn; yes, free to die or live;

  Free to be thus and passionately here,

  Or otherwise and otherwhere;

  Free, in a word, to learn or not to learn

  The art to think and musically do

  And feel and b
e, the never more than now

  Difficult art harmoniously to live

  All poetry - the midnight of Macbeth

  And ripe Odysseus and the undying light

  Of Gemma’s star and Cleopatra’s death

  And Falstaff in his cups; the art to live

  That discipline of flowers, that solemn dance

  Of sliding weights and harnessed powers

  Which is a picture; or to live the grave

  And stoical recession, row on row,

  Of equal columns, live the passionate leaping,

  The mutual yearning, meeting, marrying,

  And then the flame-still rapture, the fierce trance

  Of consummation in the Gothic night.

  The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose

  The longest art, the hard Promethean way

  Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan

  That inward fire, whose small precarious flame,

  Kindled or quenched, creates

  The noble or the ignoble men we are,

  The worlds we live in and the very fates,

  Our bright or muddy star.

  Up from among the emblems of the wind

  Into its heart of power,

  The Huntsman climbs, and all his living stars

  Are bright, and all are mine.

  MEDITATION

  What now caresses you, a year ago

  Bent to the wind that sends a travelling wave

  Almost of silver through the silky com

  Westward of Calgary; or two weeks since

  Bleated in Gloster market, lowed at Thame,

  And slowly bled to give my lips desire;

  Or in the teeming darkness, fathoms down,

  Hung, one of millions, poised between the ooze

  And the wind’s foamy skirts; or feathered flew,

  Or deathwards ran before the following gun.

  And all day long, knee deep in the wet grass,

  The piebald cows of Edam chewed and chewed,

  That what was cheese might pulse thus feverishly;

  And now, prophetically, even now

  They ponder in their ruminating jaws

  My future body, which in Tuscan fields

  Yet grows, yet grunts among the acorns, yet

  Is salt and iron, water and touchless air,

  Is only numbers variously moved,

  Is nothing, yet will love your nothingness.

  Vast forms of dust, tawny and tall and vague,

  March through the desert, creatures of the wind.

  Wind, blowing whither, blowing whence, who knows?

  Wind was the soul that raised them from the sand,

  Moved and sustained their movement, and at last

  Abating, let them fall in separate grains

  Slowly to earth and left an empty sky.

  SEPTEMBER

 

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