Walked over En Bertran’s old layout,
Have seen Narbonne, and Cahors and Chalus,
Have seen Excideuil, carefully fashioned.
I have said:
‘Here such a one walked.
‘Here Cœur-de-Lion was slain.
‘Here was good singing.
‘Here one man hastened his step.
‘Here one lay panting.’
I have looked south from Hautefort,
thinking of Montaignac, southward.
I have lain in Rocafixada,
level with sunset,
Have seen the copper come down
tingeing the mountains,
I have seen the fields, pale, clear as an emerald,
Sharp peaks, high spurs, distant castles.
I have said: ‘The old roads have lain here.
‘Men have gone by such and such valleys
‘Where the great halls were closer together.’
I have seen Foix on its rock, seen Toulouse, and
Aries greatly altered,
I have seen the ruined ‘Dorata.’
I have said:
‘Riquier! Guido!’
I have thought of the second Troy,
Some little prized place in Auvergnat:
Two men tossing a coin, one keeping a castle,
One set on the highway to sing.
He sang a woman.
Auvergne rose to the song;
The Dauphin backed him.
‘The castle to Austors!’
‘Pieire kept the singing –
‘A fair man and a pleasant.’
He won the lady,
Stole her away for himself, kept her against armed
force:
So ends that story.
That age is gone;
Pieire de Maensac is gone.
I have walked over these roads;
I have thought of them living.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
LIFE AND CONTACTS
Vocat æstus in umbram
– Nemesianus Ec. IV.
E. P. 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In a half savage country, out of date;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;
‘`Iδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὄσ’ ὲνὶ Тροίη
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 I’an trentuniesme
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 τò καλóν
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 Pisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
τίν’ ἅνδρα, τίν ἣρωα, τίνα θεòν,
What god, man, or hero
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’; DISFECEMI 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 tr
ace 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 Blougram’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 Milésiend;
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,
Recking 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.
Canto I
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpiercéd ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides,
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
&n
bsp; Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
‘Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
Cam’st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?’
And he in heavy speech:
‘Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Circe’s ingle.
‘Going down the long ladder unguarded,
‘I fell against the buttress,
‘Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
‘But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
‘Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
‘A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
‘And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.’
And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
‘A second time? why? man of ill star,
‘Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
‘Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
‘For soothsay.’
And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: ‘Odysseus
‘Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
‘Lose all companions.’ And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe
Venerandam,
In the Cretain’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
Canto LI
Shines
in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon
With usury has no man a good house
made of stone, no paradise on his church wall
With usury the stone cutter is kept from his stone
the weaver is kept from his loom by usura
Wool does not come into market
the peasant does not eat his own grain
The girl’s needle goes blunt in her hand
The looms are hushed one after another
ten thousand after ten thousand
Duccio was not by usura
Nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted.
Neither Ambrogio Praedis nor Angelico
had their skill by usura
Nor St Trophime its cloisters;
Nor St Hilaire its proportion.
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 26