Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  The Life-line in his hand not rubbed away

  As you might think, by constant scrape and rasp,

  But deepened rather, as the line of Fate,

  By earth imbedded in his wrinkled palm;

  A golden ring worn thin upon his finger,

  A signet ring, no ring of human marriage,

  On that brown hand, dry as a crust of bread,

  A ring that in its circle belts him close

  To earthly seasons, and in its slow thinning

  Wears out its life with his.

  That hand, that broke with tenderness and strength

  Clumps of the primrose and the primula,

  Watched by a loving woman who desired

  Such tenderness and strength to hold her close,

  And take her passionate giving, as he held

  His broken plants and set them in the ground,

  New children; but he had no thought of her.

  She only stood and watched his capable hand

  Brown with the earth and golden with the ring,

  And knew her part was small in his lone heart.

  [Centered Ellipses, as shown here] …

  As the poor orphan that the Fates maltreat

  Toughens uncoddled in the frost, the sleet,

  Expecting nothing else from world unkind

  Where he who lives not, dies;

  But at the first soft touch awakes to throw

  Blossoms of thankfulness in wild surprise

  Such different aspect of the world to find,

  And in the kiss of sun forgets the snow.

  So Autumn’s not the end, not the last rung

  Of any ladder in the yearly climb,

  When that is deathly old which once was young,

  Since time’s no ladder but a constant wheel

  Like an old paddled mill that dips and churns

  The mill-race, and upon the summit turns

  Unceasingly to heel

  Over, and scoop fresh water out of time.

  Autumn’s a preparation for renewal,

  Yet not entirely shorn

  Of tardy beauty, last and saddest jewel

  Bedizening where it may not adorn.

  Few of the autumn blooms are deeply dear,

  Lacking the spirit volatile and chaste

  That blows across the ground when pied appear

  The midget sweets of Spring, and in their haste

  The vaporous trees break blossom pale and clear,

  —Carpet and canopy, together born.

  …

  Pack the dark fibre in the potter’s bowl;

  Set bulbs of hyacinth and daffodil,

  Jonquil and crocus (bulbs both sound and whole),

  Narcissus and the blue Siberian squill.

  Set close, but not so tight

  That flow’ring heads collide as months fulfil

  Their purpose, and in generous sheaf expand

  Obedient to th’ arrangement of your hand.

  Yours is the forethought, yours the sage control.

  Keep the too eager bulbs from ardent light;

  Store in a gloomy cupboard, not too chill;

  Give grateful moisture to the roots unseen,

  And wait until the nose of bleached shoot

  Pushes its inches up, in evidence

  That many worms of root

  Writhe whitely down to fill

  The darkness of the compost, tangled, dense.

  Then may you set your bowls on window sill

  And smile to see the pallor turn to green.

  Fat, pregnant, solid horns, that overnight

  Swell into buds, and overnight again

  Explode in colour, morning’s sudden stain,

  In long succession, nicely planned between

  Epiphany and Easter, if so be

  Easter falls early and the window-pane

  Still shows the fine the crisp anatomy

  Of fern-like frosted frond,

  And nothing in the waiting soil beyond.

  But in October, later, shall you stand

  With paper sack of bulbs and plunge your hand

  And careless fling your bulbs both large and small

  To roll, to topple, settling sparse or thick,

  Over the grass, and plant them where they fall

  (Legitimate device, a sanctioned trick).

  Thus in a drift as though by Nature planned

  Snowdrops shall blow in spreading tide,

  Little white horses breaking on the strand

  At edge of orchard; and the orange-eyed

  Narcissus of the poets in a wide

  Lyrical river flowing as you pass

  Meandering along the path of grass.

  …

  Now the dark yew, that sombre secret soul,

  Bears fruit, more coral than our ugly blood;

  Bright wax within the green, a tallow stud

  Most exquisite in substance and in form,

  Strewn by the birds and by the soft wild storm

  In sprinkled carpet underneath the bays

  Of taxine carpentry, these autumn days.

  The breeze that autumn night was hot and south.

  I met a frog that carried in his mouth

  One of those berries, on unknown intent.

  So brisk, so earnest, in his ranine hurry,

  I stood aside to let him take his bent.

  He had his right to’s life as I to mine;

  I had my right to my descriptive line,

  He had his right to his more precious berry.

  I stopped, he hopped, I watched him where he went.

  He had no fear of me and could not doubt

  What love I had for him, that blebbed and queer

  Visitant from the woodland mere

  Who, gaudy with his berry sticking out,

  Met me beneath the cavern of the porch

  As we were meant to meet,

  —Miniature monster circled at my feet

  Within the coin of my miraculous torch.

  He lowly, and the architectural porch so tall,

  But he, in his way, also a miracle.

  …

  Low sinks the sun, and long the shadows fall.

  The sun-clock, faithful measurer of time,

  Fixed to man’s dwelling on his flimsy wall

  Or tabled flat on curving pedestal

  Amongst his dying flowers, tells the last

  Hours of the year as to a funeral,

  With silent music, solemn and sublime.

  Now is the sunlight ebbing, faint and fast

  In intermittent gleams that seldom cut

  Throughout the day the quadrant of our fate

  With the slow stroke that says TOO SOON … TOO LATE …

  The stroke that turns our present to our past.

  BEWARE, THE OPEN GATE WILL SOON BE SHUT.

  November sun that latens with our age,

  Filching the zest from our young pilgrimage,

  Writing old wisdom on our virgin page.

  Not the hot ardour of the Summer’s height,

  Not the sharp-minted coinage of the Spring

  When all was but a delicate delight

  And all took wing and all the bells did ring;

  Not the spare Winter, clothed in black and white,

  Forcing us into fancy’s eremite,

  But gliding Time that slid us into gold

  Richer and deeper as we grew more old

  And saw some meaning in this dying day;

  Travellers of the year, who faintly say

  How could such beauty walk the common way?

  …

  POEMS OF PROVENCE

  The Provence poems of 1931 are love poems to Evelyn Irons, the editor of the women’s page of the Daily Mail. Vita had been interviewed by Irons and then invited her to Sissinghurst; they fell in love. Sometime after Evelyn’s March 6 visit, Vita wrote what she called a “diary poem,” a spontaneous poem not intended for publication. In contrast t
o the formal lyricism of her other poems, it reads in part:

  This is pain.

  I recognize it.

  I feared I had forgotten how to feel it.

  I feared, that I was so lapped in happiness and security,

  That I had forgotten the sting of pain, of sensation;

  But here is the familiar turmoil, the stinging.

  I welcome it; I fear it; I welcome my own fear of it.

  I am glad to find that I can still be afraid of my own sensations.

  I am glad to find that I can still be swept by a sensation I cannot logically explain to others;

  That I am still capable of an irrational passion,

  I who had grown so ordered, rational,

  I have established my contact with irrational humanity.…

  In the fall of 1931, Vita went with Evelyn to Provence, a trip that she led Harold to believe she was taking alone. They walked from Tarascon to Les Baux, and then visited Arles and Nîmes. Later, Vita wrote “Egypt, Egypt, Egypt” over her diary entries about the episode and changed the “we” to “I,” in case Harold should see the diary. All Passion Spent, about which Vita was less enthusiastic than the public, appeared at the time of her deepest involvement with Evelyn Irons, who lends her name to the heroine of Family History, the next of Vita’s novels.

  After Vita’s involvement with Violet Trefusis, clearly the most important of her lesbian affairs, that with Evelyn Irons seems to many the most interesting. Evelyn and Vita had worked out their complex relationship as being deliciously many-sided, each of them sharing two genders. Evelyn lived with Olive Rinder, who became understandably jealous, fell ill, and gave up her job. (Vita would support her in later years.) In exasperation, Evelyn wrote Vita, “Damn my married life, as well as yours.”1 Predictably, since it had happened so many times that Vita was at the center of a triangular affair, Olive in her turn fell in love with Vita, causing yet another of what Harold and Vita called Vita’s “muddles” or “scrapes.”2

  “THE QUARRYMAN (LES BAUX)”

  Surly, the generations sent him out,

  Climbing a path as stony as his life,

  Through valleys aromatic in the drought

  With thyme and lavender among the boulders;

  The fierce sun dried his shirt upon his shoulders,

  And in his pocket warmed the clasped knife.

  But in the quarries underneath the hill

  The shadow bent its knee across the portal;

  The sun died instantly in sudden chill,

  And in the catacombs of tunnelled stone

  The candid chips lay strewn as fleshless bone,

  And candid shelves awaited urns immortal.

  He dumped his saw, his mattock, and his pick;

  He dumped his bundle on a handy ledge;

  And then by his prepared arithmetic

  Spat on his palms and fell to work begun

  On similar mornings when the thwarted sun

  Into the shadowed pylon drove its wedge.

  He laboured, never raising eye from line;

  One block completed cost him twenty days;

  He gave his life to an unseen design,

  Sculptor of mountains while he thought to carve

  A living, that his children should not starve,

  And with the sunset clattered down his ways.

  He laboured at his subterranean craft,

  Not seeing that the while, square temple rose,

  Roofed over by a mountain, apse and shaft,

  Deep-driven, pillared into ivory halls,

  Luminous galleries and virgin walls,

  Unfinished altars, white as drifted snows.

  Through the soft limestone hissed the rhythmic saw;

  The stone was hard without, but soft within,

  As he, whose hard exterior hid the flaw

  Of softness prey to ignorance and doubt;

  How grey, how beaten by the years without,

  How white, how tender when the tests begin!

  New shapes, new planes, undreamed by architect;

  An accidental beauty, born of need;

  Beauty of angles, vertical, erect,

  And monolithic as a sea-cut cave

  Where the withdrawal of the millionth wave

  Leaves the smooth surface when the tides recede.

  To what new god he left it dedicate,

  This straight new temple lit by crooked day,

  The smokeless altars, and the height elate,

  The slabs for sacrifice, the mounting stairs,

  The naves and transepts risen unawares,

  The sunlight and the shadow, who shall say?

  1931

  “THE TEMPLE OF LOVE (LES BAUX)”

  To put a circle round the courts of Love,

  I need but slip a ring upon your finger,

  And swear—brown earth beneath, blue skies above,

  In vineyards where the latened clusters linger—

  That I will love you till this you, this I,

  Give our dear flesh to worm or else to ash,

  Rotting in earth or smoking to the sky,

  When Death, at last, brings down his scarlet slash.

  Such easy uses whispered in your ear

  Reach you as lovers’ threadbare vows perhaps,

  And yet, perennial as the vintage here,

  They hold their truth beyond such brief collapse,

  Lifting me to the realms where constant are

  The dark companion and uncertain star.

  —1931

  “DAWN (LES BAUX)”

  What archer shot that arrow through my panes?

  A huntress moon that flees the hunter day,

  Or hunter day that masculine arraigns

  His right above his Cynthia’s soft affray?

  An arrow in my heart; I am transfixed;

  A bow in heaven snapped; the arrow sticks;

  My window widens; Phoebus in pursuit

  Chases a Cynthia wan and dissolute.

  —1931

  PART X

  ANIMAL REFLECTIONS

  One of Vita’s more engaging traits was her keen fondness for animals—and, in particular, for dogs of all breeds. She had many dogs over the years, often several at the same time. When she would go to see Virginia Woolf, the latter would write her to “come and be sure to bring Sally,” one of Vita’s dogs. Pictures abound of Vita and her dogs, of Vita and Leonard Woolf and the dogs of the two households, or of Vita and her sons and dogs. In one of Virginia Woolf’s famous descriptions of Vita, she sees her striding across her fields, accompanied by her many noble-featured dogs.

  FROM FACES (1961)

  Vita’s reflections on various dogs, included in the rare volume Faces, are full of humor, affection, and history, both of dog lore and Vita’s personal experiences. Her unmistakably negative reaction to the sullen and unappealing Saluki that was given to her by Gertrude Bell in Persia (an event that she recounts at length in the pages of her Passenger to Teheran) is not allowed to influence her reaction here on these ultra-thin, ultra-chic, ultra-sensitive dogs.

  Vita is at her most endearing when describing one of her cocker spaniels who gave birth at the same time as one of her cats and borrowed a few kittens to nurse along with the rest of the cocker litter; the Cocker was amused, the cat not a whit. Vita’s sense of humor and play is given its full rein in these descriptions. These one-page pieces are among her most delightful productions.

  FACES

  The Saluki or Gazelle-Hound

  The Saluki is an Arab; in fact, saluk in Arabic means hound, and it is further suggested, with some plausibility, that the breed originated in the town or district of Saluk. Possibly the oldest breed in the world, their portrait appears in mural paintings in Egyptian tombs, notably in the tomb of Rechmara 1400 B.C. This and the fact that they were also known in Persia and China, despite the reluctance of the Arabs to part with their dogs, implies that they were greatly valued for their swiftness and endurance in hunting and f
ormed an acceptable present to the princes of those distant lands. “Oh my Huntsman,” writes a Persian poet in 800 A.D., “bring me my dogs brought by the Kings of Saluk,” and remarked further that a Saluki ran so fast that his feet and his head seemed joined in his collar, which is scarcely surprising when we reflect that they were used in the pursuit of gazelle, antelope, and hare. If the cheetah is the swiftest animal on earth, the Saluki must run it very close.

  They enjoyed also the honour of being modelled by Benvenuto Cellini for Cosimo de Medici.

  These most romantic of dogs were practically unknown in England before the end of the nineteenth century. A Mr. Allen, in the 1880s, had exhibited one Jierma, whose unusual grace aroused much excitement and caused her to be mistakenly described as a Persian greyhound. But it was not until after 1895, when the Hon. Florence Amherst was presented with two puppies bred by sheikhs of a Bedouin tribe, that the breed became established here and caught the popular imagination to such an extent that some exhibitors added an Eastern glamour to the proceedings by appearing in full native dress.

  Salukis resemble their native desert in colouring, as any traveller familiar with the desert under varying lights will agree. They may be a plain pale tan, or grizzled, or golden, or cream, or even white as some of the sand-dunes. The lovely creature in the photograph displays the silky ears, and undoubtedly possesses also “feathers” of the same texture down the back of the legs and on the curly tail. There are also smooth-coated Salukis with no feathers, to my mind less attractive.

  I once had a Saluki, presented to me in Baghdad straight out of the desert by Miss Gertrude Bell, without exception the dullest dog I ever owned. Salukis are reputed to be very gentle and faithful; this one, Zurcha, meaning the yellow one, was gentle enough because she was completely spiritless, and as for fidelity she was faithful only to the best arm-chair. I took her up from Baghdad into Persia, where nothing would induce her to come out for a walk—perhaps because I omitted to provide a gazelle. In the end I followed the historical tradition and gave her to a Persian prince, who subsequently lost her somewhere in Moscow. I was unlucky, of course, in the only Saluki I ever owned, and these remarks must not be taken as an aspersion upon an incomparably elegant and ancient race.

  The Cocker Spaniel

  It is not surprising that this silky little creature should be so popular, for it combines sporting instincts in the field with domestic affection in the house, and as a puppy is irresistible. It would seem also that, the sporting instincts denied their scope, it can accommodate itself with the utmost resignation to an uneventful existence. No dog ever led a duller or more sedentary life than Miss Elizabeth Barrett’s Flusb, whose ears so closely resembled his mistress’s curls.