Meringues, iced cakes, confections of whipped cream
Lavishly piled for some Olympian party –
A child’s idea of heaven. Now radiant
All around the airscrew’s boring penumbra
The clouds redouble, as nearer we climb,
Their toppling fantasy. We skirt the fringe of icebergs,
Dive under eiderdowns, disport with snowmen
On fields of melting snow dinted by the wind’s feet,
Gleefully brush past atom-bomb cauliflowers,
Frozen fuffs of spray from naval gunfire.
Wool-gathering we fly through a world of make-believe.
We are the aircraft, the humming-bird hawk moth
Hovering and sipping at each cloud corolla;
But also ourselves, to whom these white follies are
Valid as symbols for a tonic reverie
Or as symptoms of febrile flight from the real.
Let us keep, while we can, the holiday illusion,
The heart’s altimeter dancing bliss-high,
Forgetting gravity, regardless of earth
Out of sight, out of mind, like a menacing letter
Left at home in a drawer – let the next-of-kin acknowledge it.
The cloud-floor is fissured suddenly. Clairvoyance
It seems, not sight, when the solid air frays and parts
Unveiling, like some rendezvous remote in a crystal,
Bright, infinitesimal, a fragment of France.
We scan the naked earth as it were through a skylight:
Down there, what life-size encounters, what industrious
Movement and vocations manifold go forward!
But to us, irresponsible, above the battle,
Villages and countryside reveal no more life than
A civilization asleep beneath a glacier,
Toy bricks abandoned on a plain of linoleum …
After a hard winter, on the first warm day
The invalid venturing out into the rock-garden,
Pale as a shaft of December sunshine, pauses,
All at sea among the aubretia, the alyssum
And arabis – halts and moves on how warily,
As if to take soundings where the blossom foams and tumbles:
But what he does sound is the depth of his own weakness
At last, as never when pain-storms lashed him.
So we, convalescent from routine’s long fever,
Plummeting our gaze down to river and plain,
Question if indeed that dazzling world beneath us
Be truth or delirium; and finding still so tentative
The answer, can gauge how nearly we were ghosts,
How far we must travel yet to flesh and blood.
But now the engines have quickened their beat
And the fuselage pulsates, panting like a fugitive.
Below us – oh, look at it! – earth has become
Sky, a thunderscape curdling to indigo,
Veined with valleys of green fork-lightning.
The atrocious Alps are upon us. Their ambush –
A primeval huddle, then a bristling and heaving of
Brutal boulder-shapes, an uprush of Calibans –
Unmasks its white-fanged malice to maul us.
The cabin grows colder. Keep height, my angel!
Where we are, all but terra firma is safe.
Recall how flyers from a raid returning,
Lightened of one death, were elected for another:
Their homing thoughts too far ahead, a mountain
Stepped from the mist and slapped them down.
We, though trivial the hazard, retract
Our trailing dreams until we have cleared these ranges.
Exalted, numinous, aloof no doubt
To the land-locked vision, for us they invoke
A mood more intimate, a momentary flutter and
Draught of danger – death’s fan coquettishly
Tapping the cheek ere she turn to dance elsewhere.
Our mien is the bolder for this mild flirtation,
Our eyes the brighter, since every brush with her
Gives flesh a souvenir, a feel of resurrection.
Those peaks o’erpassed, we glissade at last to
A gentian pasture, the Genoan sea.
Look south, sky-goers! In flying colours
A map’s unrolled there – the Italy
Your schooldays scanned once: the hills are sand-blond,
A pale green stands for the littoral plain:
The sea’s bedizened with opening islands
Like iris eyes on a peacock’s fan.
How slowly dawns on the drowsy newborn
Whose world’s unworn yet – a firelit dress,
An ego’s glamorous shell, a womb of rumours –
The first faint glimmering of otherness!
But half awake, we could take this country
For some vague drift from prenatal dreams:
Those hills and headlands, like sleep’s projections
Or recollections, mere symbol seem.
Then hurtling southward along shores of myrtle,
Silverly circle the last lap,
My bull-headed moth! This land is nothing
But a mythical name on an outline map
For us, till we’ve scaled it to our will’s dimensions,
Filled in each wayward, imperious route,
Shaded it in with delays and chagrins,
Traced our selves over it, foot by foot.
Now tighter we circle, as if the vertical
Air is a whirlpool drawing us down;
And the airfield, a candle-bright pinpoint, invites us
To dance ere alighting … Hurry! We burn
For Rome so near us, for the phoenix moment
When we have thrown off this traveller’s trance,
And mother-naked and ageless-ancient
Wake in her warm nest of renaissance.
PART THREE
A Letter from Rome
We have been here three days, and Rome is really –
I know, I know; it would take three life-times to cover
The glorious junk-heap. Besides, our generation –
Well, you’ve only to think of James, as one must do here,
Lapping the cream of antiquity, purring over
Each vista that stroked his senses, and in brief
Rubbing himself against Rome like a great tabby,
To see what I mean. We who ‘flowered’ in the Thirties
Were an odd lot; sceptical yet susceptible,
Dour though enthusiastic, horizon-addicts
And future-fans, terribly apt to ask what
Our all-very-fine sensations were in aid of.
We did not, you will remember, come to coo.
Still, there is hope for us. Rome has absorbed
Other barbarians: yes, and there’s nobody quite so
Sensuously rich and reckless as the reformed
Puritan … This by the way, to establish a viewpoint.
You wanted my impressions. If only one were
A simple sieve, be the mesh close or wide,
For Rome to shake (and how it does shake one!), sifting
Some finer stuff from the coarser. But the trouble with me is
– Or perhaps it’s the trouble with Rome – to discriminate
Merely between what is here and what has been here,
Between the eye and the mind’s eye. The place has had
Over two thousand years of advance publicity
For us, which clouds the taste and saps the judgment.
What are you to do when Catullus buttonholes you
On the way to St. Peter’s? When the Colosseum presents
Nero1 comparing notes with Roderick Hudson
On art and egotism? Sights, sounds, phantoms –
It is all too much for me, it should not be allowed!
Perhaps, though, it is just he
re that something emerges.
As when, composing a poem, the tangle of images
And jangle of words pressing hard on you, mobbing you, may
Compel you to choose the right moment to disengage
And find the one word, the word of command which makes them
Meekly fall in to their ranks, and the march continues:
So from this Rome, where the past lies weltering
In the blood of the present, and posters of Betty Grable
Affront the ghost of Cato; from all its grandiose
Culs-de-sac – the monumental gateways
That open on nothing, the staircases starting for heaven,
The stone-blind palaces sweltering in the noon;
From the stilled tempest of the Sistine ceiling
To the water exasperated by sirocco
In every fountain basin; from the whole gamut,
Theatrical, vulgar, rhetorical, fractious, sublime,
Of a city young as Tithonus, a city so ancient
That even the shadows here lie thick as dust: –
Emerges from all this, like invisible writing
Drawn out by the heart’s warmth, one lucid word.
Compost. I do not suppose the word original
(Original! Rome is quite beyond that). But think of it –
Century into century rotting down,
Faith piled on faith, Mithra on Jupiter,
Christ upon Mithra, Catholicism on Christ,
Temples imbedded in churches, church-stones in palaces:
Think of the pagan gods, demoted to demons,
Haunting and taunting the Early Fathers; long-dead
Lights of love, immortalized as Madonnas,
Demurely smiling at man’s infant idealism.
Superstition, sanctity, cruelty, laws, art, lust –
Layer after layer laid down, course upon course
They renew the soul of this city, a city whose prospects
Are quarried out of its bones, a soul digesting
All foreignness into one rich dark fibre.
Rome, I can tell you, is the very type of
The hugger-mugger of human growth. For here
You can see the grand design eternally crossed
By the abject means, and its seedy ruin redeemed with
Valerian, arbutus, fennel; a character root-fast
Like a man’s in the deposit of all his acts.
Or say, a woman’s; for so she appeared to us
On the first morning when we sauntered out
(The night before, wild strawberries and Frascati
Gold as the Roman May-light, cool as grottoes).
A woman – how shall I put it? – who makes you feel
She has waited two thousand years to meet you, and now
At once she is wholly yours, her liquid tongue,
Her body mantled in the full flush of Ceres,
And Primavera fluttering in her eyes.
She can be tiresome, no doubt, feverish, languid,
Changing her moods like dresses. But today
She has chosen to be divinely acquiescent:
‘What shall we do?’ the shell-like murmur comes,
‘Shall we go shopping? Would you like me to show you the sights?’
‘I will do anything you say, anything.’
… So we took, in the end, a carrozza to St. Peter’s.
The driver was plainly a phantom; his conveyance
Jarred like old bones and mumbled of better days when
Violet-adorned beauties, sedate or giddy,
Turned all heads on the Corso. Thus we went
Jaunting over the seven hills of Rome
With the streets rocking beneath us as if seven ages
Turned in their grave, while noise upon noise the drift
Of our own – its voices, horns, wheels, bells, loudspeakers –
Washed past us; then it dwindled away to a sea-shell
Cadence, beyond the Tiber, as we came near
Vatican city.
And now vates tacete
Should be the word. Words here can only scrabble
Like insects at the plinth of a colossus,
Scrabble and feebly gesticulate and go elsewhere.
Mere magnitude one might deal with, or pure and simple
Meaning; but both in one, they give no purchase.
A dome superb as heaven’s vault, capping a story
Whose hero blessed the meek; a desert of floor
Refracting faith like a mirage; the orchestration
Of gold and marble engulfing the still, small voice: –
You cannot pass over St. Peter’s and what it stands for,
Whether you see it as God’s vicarious throne
Or the biggest bubble ever yet unpricked.
And here, I have to confess, the old Puritan peeped out;
Not in sour protest against the Scarlet Woman,
Nor quite in the mood of my generation – its volatile
Mixture of hero-worship and disrespect;
But that an early habit of going to church
Prevents me from going to churches however distinguished
Their provenance, just as a sight-seer. Faith perhaps,
Though unconscious, is not yet dead, its breath still clouding
The glass of aesthetic perception. Apart from which,
I could not do with the guides who spring up like sweat-white
Fungi from every chink, and cling to one, furtively
Offering their curious knowledge; these pimps are not
The type you would choose to lead you to any altar.
So I was lost, ill at ease here, until by chance
In a side chapel we found a woman mourning
Her son: all the lacrimœ rerum flowed
To her gesture of grief, all life’s blood from his stone.
There is no gap or discord between the divine
And the human in that pieta of Michelangelo.
Then, after a marathon walk through the Vatican galleries,
An endless belt of statues, tapestry, pictures
Glazing the eye, we came out into the streets again.
Better than all the museums, this strolling folk
Who sun themselves in the apricot light of antiquity
And take its prestige for granted. Cameo faces,
Contessa or contadina; bronze boys skylarking
As if they had just wriggled free from a sculptor’s hand –
How easily art and nature overlap here!
Another thing you would like about the Romans
Is the way they use their city, not as a warren
Of bolt-holes, nor a machine into which one is fed
Each morning and at evening duly disgorged,
But as an open-air stage. Palazzo, tenement
Seem pure façade – back-cloth for a continuous
Performance of business, love-making, politics, idling,
Conducted with a grand operatic extravagance
At the tempo of family theatricals. That same night
In the Piazza del’ Esedra, sipping
Grappa, we watched the people, warm as animals
And voluble as fountains, eddying round
While the floodlit masonry was mere slabs of moonshine.
Rome is a city where flesh and blood can never
Be sacrificed, or mistaken, for abstractions.
But already (you can imagine how) my mind’s
Crisscrossed with figures, memoranda, lightning sketches,
Symbolic doodlings, hour by hour set down
Haphazardly as in Rome era on era.
And time is already shuffling tricks with discards.
Those fountains yesterday at the Villa d’Este
Grouped like patrician spectres in white conclave
Against a drop-scene of terraces and urns –
Did we indeed see them, or have they stepped
From a picture book
years ago perused? Last night
We found on a wall of the Pincio a bas-relief,
A wide white calm imperious head suddenly
Surveying us out of the blank wall like some racial
Memory still not deep enough bricked up.
Yesterday, then, was a day with the dead. We hired
A car, and set out first for the Palatine hill.
The Forum? Well, picture a clearing found
In the depth of a clamorous forest, a low space littered
With bits of temples, arches, altars, mosaics
And God knows what – classical tags, fag ends,
Smatterings and stumps of a once apparently stable
Civilization, which packed up for all that
And left, like a gipsy encampment or picnic party:
And over it all, the silence of sheer exhaustion.
This area, sad as scar-tissue now, was the heart
Of a great republic, the S. P. Q. R.
Here they governed – a people, like the Scots,
Smouldering, pious, intolerant, living hard,
And demon fighters. Warlike was the seed;
But Time has pushed out this crop of decayed teeth.
It was the usual story. Long before
Their aqueducts ran dry and became picturesque,
Their virtue had imperceptibly seeped away
Into the dunes of ambition. They caught
Luxury, like a syphilis, from their conquests.
Then, feeling queer, they appointed one man to cure them
And made a god of him. The disease was arrested
From time to time. But injections grew more frequent,
And the extremities began to rot;
While at home no amount of marble could hide the sick core –
Vestals too free with their flame, tribunes long impotent,
A rabble who had not the wherewithal to redeem its
Too often pledged heirlooms, justice and hardiness.
So we were glad on the whole to leave this spot
Where glum mementoes of decline and fall
Are cherished like a grievance in Rome’s heart,
And drive out towards Tivoli. The name
Had a certain frivolous charm for one oppressed
By dwelling on ruined greatness. The little town,
Modishly perched on an olive-tressed hillside,
Is famous for its sulphur springs (our driver
Stopped the car so that we might inhale it)
And of course, for the Villa d’Este. There at first
In the elaborate Renaissance gardens
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