Part 2
Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein. The people that pass Seem castles of glass, The old and the good, Giraffes of blue wood; The soldier, the nurse, Wooden face and a curse, Are shadowed with plumage Like birds by the gloomage. Blond hair like a clown’s, The music floats, drowns The creaking of ropes The breaking of hopes. The wheezing, the old, Like harmoniums scold: Go to Babylon, Rome, The brain-cells called home, The grave, New Jerusalem, Wrinkled Methusalem: From our floating hair Derived the first fair And queer inspiration Of music (the nation Of bright-plumed trees And harpy-shrill breeze).
* * * * *
Turn, turn again, Ape’s blood in each vein.
_SEVEN NURSERY SONGS_
I
OLD LADY FLY-AWAY
Old Lady Fly-Away Lost her temper, night and day, Took the bright moon’s broom-- Swept round the attic room. “Dear me, where _can_ it be? Not a temper can I see!” Sighed the Moon upon the stair: “Always look to see, dear, When you ‘put your foot down,’ Lest it crushes Babylon; _Try_ to get it nearer home, In fields of clover or in Rome!” Old Lady Fly-Away Knew her temper would not stay, So pretended not to hear-- Sweeping for it on the stair.
II
GREAT SNORING AND NORWICH
Great Snoring and Norwich A dish of pease porridge! The clock of Troy town Strikes one o’clock; brown Honey-bees in the clover Are half-the-seas-over, And Time is a-boring From here to Great Snoring. But Time, the grey mouse, Can’t wake up the house, For old King Priam Is sleepy as I am!
III
FAT WILLIAM AND THE TRAINS
When I should be at work, instead I lie and kick for fun, in bed: Down the narrow rails, hear trains Go quick as other people’s brains-- Hump their backs and snore and growl, Grumble, rumble, tumble, prowl-- Bearing people, pink as pigs, Through water-clear fields dancing jigs. Like a whale among my pillows Dash I, splash I, sheets in billows As the trains toss spangled seas, Like bright flags on the tusks of these. How I envy those at work When I can lie in bed and shirk.
IV
A PENNY FARE TO BABYLON
“A penny fare to Babylon, A penny for each thought!” “Oh, ma’am, no, ma’am, Can’t be bought! The Sun gives pots of money, The Moon, her bread and honey, When humming like a clover-field I go up to town. Whitened by the Moon’s flour, All the birds I own, Lest they be baked into a pie, Are flown, dear, flown. Though you whistle in the corridors That dance into my brain-- Oh, ma’am, no, ma’am, They will not come again.”
V
THE BUTCHER’S SHOP
Pantaloon jumps in his bright Butcher’s shop, where red and white Meat hangs up like clown’s attire-- Laughs as shrill as grass or fire. In his house sits Il Dottore, In the rickety top story Plays a mandoline to please Coral bells on cherry trees.... But the bees have left his bonnet For the meat; they buzz upon it-- Goldy summer lights--they hover Like the bees upon red clover, Flying straight into the shop, Full of facts, where theories stop.
VI
THE KING OF CHINA’S DAUGHTER
The King of China’s daughter, She never would love me Though I hung my cap and bells upon Her nutmeg tree. For oranges and lemons, The stars in bright blue air, (I stole them long ago, my dear) Were dangling there. The Moon did give me silver pence, The Sun did give me gold, And both together softly blew And made my porridge cold; But the King of China’s daughter Pretended not to see When I hung my cap and bells upon Her nutmeg tree.
VII
OLD KING PTOLEMY
Old King Ptolemy Climbed the stair Into the attic Of Anywhere. Old King Ptolemy Sulked to bed; Maids cleared up his toys-- “Broken,” they said. “The King’s in a temper, The King’s in a pet,” Wriggling their necks like geese-- “Oh, what a fret!” The Struwwelpeter Round-eyed Sun, Rocked on his rocking-horse Half in fun,-- Rocked on the landing, Rocked on the stair: “Babylon’s empty, The cupboard is bare.... King Ptolemy’s snoring Sounds on the breeze Like the sound of fruit growing On mulberry trees.”
PEDAGOGUES AND FLOWER-SHOWS
I
Tall cranes with wooden bodices Stuffed full of shadow odyssies.
They hiss like geese through schoolroom bars At the bright flower-show of the stars.
The houses (children’s bricks) float by On swords of moonshine, cry and sigh.
The schoolmen spray with glittering laughter This flower-show, budding strangely after.
“Our map-like cheeks are painted red Where sawdust gods were pierced and bled
“By all this moonshine, and we feel Blood should be dry,”--Erazureel
Cried; “Blue, pink, yellow planets, bright Flowers frilled as seas breathe in the night;
These frillèd pinks, so neat and nice, We’ll teach to turn the world to ice.
Our science then can soon inure The stars to blossom from manure;
The world will be all map-like, plain As our lined cheeks, and once again
The soul (moot point) will scarce intrude Its lack of depth and magnitude!”
PEDAGOGUES AND FLOWER-SHOWS
II
WHAT THE PROFESSOR SAID TO THE EDITOR OF “WHEELS”
Old Professor Goosecap Watched the planet’s flower-show. “Pedagogues well-drilled, mayhap, Marshalled in a row, Can perceive in China asters Half a hemisphere’s disasters, With rays to pierce the fourth dimension: Come, limit it to our declension! Pedagogues, through schoolroom bars, Must thrust their faces like a map Crownèd with a dunce’s cap, To hiss like geese at the stars, And crush with wooden toe-- All growing, And blowing, These Canterbury bells as they blow, These silvery bells in a row!”
SWITCHBACK
By the blue wooden sea, Curling laboriously, Coral and amber grots (Cherries and apricots), Ribbons of noisy heat, Binding them head and feet, Horses as fat as plums Snort as each bumpkin comes. Giggles like towers of glass (Pink and blue spirals) pass, Oh, how the Vacancy Laughed at them rushing by! “Turn again, flesh and brain, Only yourselves again! How far above the Ape, Differing in each shape, You with your regular, Meaningless circles are!”
TRAMS
Castles of crystal, Castles of wood, Moving on pulleys Just as you should! See the gay people Flaunting like flags, Bells in the steeple, Sky all in rags. Bright as a parrot Flaunts the gay heat-- Songs in the garret, Fruit in the street; Plump as a cherry, Red as a rose, Old Mother Berry-- Blowing her nose!
BANK HOLIDAY
I
The houses on a see-saw rush In the giddy sun’s hard spectrum, push
The noisy heat’s machinery; Like flags of coloured heat they fly.
The wooden ripples of the smiles Suck down the houses, then at whiles,
Grown suctioned like an octopus, They throw them up again at us,
As we rush by on coloured bars Of sense, vibrating flower-hued stars,
With lips like velvet drinks and winds That bring strange Peris to our minds.
BANK HOLIDAY
II
Seas are roaring like a lion; with their wavy flocks Zion, Noses like a scimitar, Hair a brassy bar Come To The sun’s drum; through Light green waters swim their daughters, lashing with their eel-sleek-locks The furred Heads Of mermaids that occurred, Sinking to their cheap beds. Blurred Legs, like trunks of tropical Plants, rise up and, over all, Green as a conservatory, Is the light ... another story.... It has grown too late for life: Put on your gloves and take a drive!
SMALL TALK
I
Upon the noon Cassandra died The harpy preened itself outside.
Bank Holiday put forth its glamour, And in the wayside station’s clamour
We found the café at the rear, And sat and drank our Pilsener beer.
Words smeared upon our wooden faces Now paint them into queer grimaces;
The crackling greeneries that spirt Like fireworks, mock our souls inert,
And we seem feathered like a bird Among those shadows scarcely heard.
Beneath her shade-ribbed switchback mane The harpy, breasted like a train,
Was haggling with a farmer’s wife: “Fresh harpy’s eggs, no trace of life.”
Miss Sitwell, cross and white as chalk, Was indisposed for the small talk.
Since, peering through a shadowed door, She saw Cassandra on the floor.
SMALL TALK
II
Upon the noon Cassandra died, Harpy soon Screeched outside. Gardener Jupp, In his shed, Counted wooden Carrots red. Black shades pass, Dead-stiff there, On green baize grass-- Drink his beer. Bumpkin turnip, Mask limp-locked, White sun frights The gardener shocked. Harpy creaked Her limbs again: “I think, she squeaked, It’s going to rain!”
DANSONS LA GIGUE
Dance the jig, whirl In the street, girl. Rush up and down, Houses, to town-- On the see-saw Made out of raw Hot yellow rays, Crude edges of days. Dance the jig, whirl-- Like your blond curl! Oh! it is fine to-day, On this Bank Holiday! Sound of young feet Comes down the street ... Never again Pleasure or pain.... Dance the jig, whirl In the street, girl. Do the dead ache In summer, to slake Their thirst of love?--Hush,-- No tears to gush, My soul is of mud, Cannot weep blood....
* * * * *
Dance the jig, dance the jig,-- Dance the jig, girl.
MESSALINA AT MARGATE
The tents are coloured like a child’s balloons; They swell upon the air like August moons Anchored by waters paler than a pearl; The airs like rain-wet shrinking petals curl
Beneath the rainbow lights of noon that fill The open calyx with the faintest thrill, Then break in airy bubbles on the sense Like sounds upheld in exquisite suspense.
In grande toilette, and with a parasol Bright-fringèd as the noonday sun, (that fool Of beauty,) Messalina promenades. A crinoline keeps off the other shades:
Her grape-black hair casts shadows deep as death; All curled and high, yet stirring at Time’s breath. The powder on her face is shuddering white As dust of æons seen in heaven’s light.
She leaves the sands, where in tents striped like fruits The dancers whirl like winds to airy flutes, And music, soother than the pulp of pearls Whose sweetness decks the swan-white syren girls,
In air-pale waves like water, has the sheen Of mirrors, floats like flower-wing’d stars.--O spleen! Leave Regent’s Park and quit society Only to find this immorality!
So now she goes to church, where bonnets steam Like incense, and the painted windows seem Naught but a coloured veil stupidity Had wrought to clothe her dumb soliloquy:
“There’s comfort in old age: the steam of food Ascending like the rich man’s soul to God; And little words that crackle as they went, How such and such a life was evil spent,
“Until they make a fire to warm our hands. For Time has wrapp’d the heart in swaddling bands, But yet they could not save it from the cold.-- The soul’s a pander grown; for she has sold
“My body to the Church; does nicely now. Oh! Soul has much to learn from flesh, I vow.” Thus Messalina, grown both old and fat,-- The Church’s parrot now, and dull at that!
PEDAGOGUES
The air is like a jarring bell That jangles words it cannot spell, And black as Fate, the iron trees Stretch thirstily to catch the breeze.
The fat leaves pat the shrinking air; The hot sun’s patronising stare Rouses the stout flies from content To some small show of sentiment.
Beneath the terrace shines the green Metallic strip of sea, and sheen Of sands, where folk flaunt parrot-bright With rags and tags of noisy light.
The brass band’s snorting stabs the sky And tears the yielding vacancy-- The imbecile and smiling blue Until fresh meaning trickles through;
And slowly we perambulate With spectacles that concentrate, In one short hour, Eternity, In one small lens, Infinity.
With children, our primeval curse, We overrun the universe-- Beneath the giddy lights of noon, White as a tired August moon.
The air is like a jarring bell That jangles words it cannot spell, And black as Fate, the iron trees Stretch thirstily to catch the breeze.
SONG FROM “THE QUEEN OF PALMYRA”
And shall we never find those diamonds bright That were the fawn-queen of Palmyra’s eyes?-- Ah, dark hot jewels lie hidden from the sight Beneath dark palm-trees where the river sighs Beyond the tomb of young eternities; And in the desert, lonely flowers weep-- The clouds have such long hair--that tangles Sleep.
THE CHOIR-BOY RIDES ON THE SWITCHBACK
In the fruit-ripe heat of afternoon Each muslined school-child seems a moon;
And in the tents, those lazy waves From out the echoing coral caves
Of light, like Venus from the sea The clown seems, blond hair floating free.
The switchback, with its noisy run, Is turning like the wooden sun
As he rides on his rocking-horse All Struwwelpeter-haired; we course
On sands as moist as sugar-cane, And the Fat Woman’s face and mane
Are sometimes dappled by the shade Into the likeness of some maid
Long dead ... those golden shadows fell On Cressid or Alaciel.
The beggar-tunes on horseback ride, With cheeks as pink as Angels’,--glide
Through Babylon, Chicago, Troy, And Black Man’s Land. Each golden boy
Blows silver trumpets over these, As clear as apples on the trees.
I will go home and pack my pride, Then with these beggar-tunes I’ll ride--
For all the hymns I try to sing Are but Love’s beggars shivering
In thorny thickets where one sees Stars grow for wild wet raspberries.
APRICOT JAM
Beneath the dancing, glancing green The tea is spread amid the sheen Of pince-nez (glints of thought); thus seen, In sharp reflections only, brain Perceives the world all flat and plain In rounded segments, joy and pain. The parasols dance like the sun, Cast wavering nets of shade that run Across the chattering table’s fun, The laughing faces, and across Half-shadowed faces looking cross, And black hair with a bird-bright gloss. The flashing children stayed and checked, Smooth india-rubber leaves reflect Their parrot-green on circumspect Glazed china, where the negroid tea Reflects the world’s obscurity In high lights such as pince-nez see. And all the sheen of shadows feather Muslin frocks like plumes; together, In the hot and flashing weather, Bird-high voices shrill and chatter With the high and glinting clatter Tea-cups make, and whispered patter-- (Listen, and you’ll get a slap!) Worlds are small as any map, And life will come our way--mayhap.
STOPPING PLACE
The world grows furry, grunts with sleep ... But I must on the surface keep. The jolting of the train to me Seems some primeval vertebræ Attached by life-nerves to my brain-- Reactionary once again. So that I see shapes crude and new And ordered,--with some end in view, No longer with the horny eyes Of other people’s memories. Through highly varnished yellow heat, As through a lens that does not fit, The faces jolt in cubes, and I Perceive their odd solidity And lack of meaning absolute: For why should noses thus protrude, And to what purpose can relate Each hair so oddly separate? Anchored against the puff of breeze, As shallow as the crude blue seas, The coloured blocks and cubes of faces Seem Noah’s arks that shelter races Of far absurdities to breed Their queer kind after we are dead. Blue wooden foliage creaks with heat And there are woollen buns to eat-- Bright-varnished buns to touch and see And, black as an Inferno, tea. Then (Recketts’ blue) a puff of wind.... Heredity regains my mind And I am sitting in the train While thought becomes like flesh,--the brain Not independent, but derived From hairy matter that half lived-- Identities not round or whole. A questing beast who thirsts for soul, The furry vegetation there-- Purring with heat, sucks in the air; And dust that’s gathered in the train, Protecting flesh, seems almost brain-- (That horny substance altering sight); How strange, intangible is light Whence all is born, and yet by touch We live,--the rest is not worth much.... Once more the world grows furred with sleep,-- But I must on the surface keep While mammoths from the heat are born-- Great clumsy trains with tusk and horn Whereon the world’s too sudden tossed Through frondage of our mind, and lost.
PORTRAIT OF A BARMAID
Metallic waves of people jar Through crackling green toward the bar
Where on the tables, chattering-white, The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.
Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles Shroud wooden faces in their wiles--
Sometimes they splash like water (you Yourself reflected in their hue).
The conversation, loud and bright, Seems spinal bars of shunting light
In firework-spirting greenery, O complicate machinery
For building Babel, iron crane Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane
In noise and murder like the sea Without its mutability
Outside the bar, where jangling heat Seems out of tune and off the beat,
A concertina’s glycerine Exudes and mirrors in the green
Your soul, pure glucose edged with hints Of tentative and half-soiled tints.
MATERIALISM; OR, PASTOR ---- TAKES THE RESTAURANT CAR FOR HEAVEN
Upon sharp floods of noise there glide The red-brick houses, float, collide
With aspidestras, trains on steel That lead us not to what we feel.
Hot glassy lights fill up the gloom As water an aquarium,--
All mirror-bright; beneath these seen, Our faces coloured by their sheen,
Seem objects under water, bent By each bright-hued advertisement
Whose words are stamped upon our skin As though the heat had burnt them in.
The jolting of the train that made All objects coloured bars of shade,
Projects them sideways till they split Splinters from eyeballs as they flit.
Down endless tubes of throats we squeeze Our words, lymphatic paint to please
Our sense of neatness, neutralize The overtint and oversize.
I think it true that Heaven should be A narrow train for you and me,
Where we perpetually must haunt The moving oblique restaurant
And feed on foods of other minds Behind the hot and dusty blinds.
THAÏS IN HEAVEN
When you lay dying fast, you said-- And, weeping, were not comforted: “Look through this paper world! I see
The lights of Heaven burn like gold The other side; and Souls are sold For these, yet only flesh, sold we!”
And then you died and went to bliss.-- I’m curious now to know if love Is really Heaven--where _you_ rove.-- Your kind of love ... or mine, Thaïs?
And is there still the clinging mud? I think it drowned your soul like wine. And do the stars like street-lamps shine, Gilding the gutters where you stood,
And lighting up your small face where Thin powder, like a trail of dust, Shows the mortality of lust ... Still black as hissing rain, your hair?
Your body had become your soul.... Thaïs,--do spirits crumble whole?
_FOUR NOCTURNES_
I
PROCESSIONS
Within the long black avenues of Night Go pageants of delight,
With masks of glass the night has stained with wine, Hair lifted like a vine;--
And all the coloured curtains of the air Were fluttered. Passing there,
The sounds seemed warring suns; and music flowed As blood; the mask’d lamps showed
Tall houses light had gilded like despair: Black windows, gaping there.
Through all the rainbow spaces of our laughter Those pageants followed after;
The negress Night, within her house of glass Watched the processions pass.
II
GAIETY
Blow out the candles. Let the dance begin. Already, pale as Sin,
The candles weep and pry like living things ... They dance, who have no wings.
More vast and black than endless sleep, this room. Time beats his empty drum
Whose hollow sound is echoed in our eyes-- Deep wells where no moon lies.
A crumpled paper mask hides every face-- Creased to a smile of grace,
With eyelids gilded, so the bitter tears Make music for men’s ears.
These masks, some coloured like an August moon, Or white, as sands that swoon
Within Time’s hour-glass, some as grey as rain,-- Still mimic joy and pain.
Thin pointed rags and tags edge our attire ... Bright plumes?... or tongues of fire,
Whose painted laughter cracks the gilded sky Of this flat empery
That has no soil where any flower may root, Nor rest for weary foot,
But endless leagues of mirror: such the ground That no horizons bound,--
Carved topaz water;--sound a mirror seems! O! nakedness of dreams
Beneath the blinding radiance of hot skies Where no sun lives or dies.
* * * * *
Now that the dusty, creaking curtain, Day, Is folded, laid away,
Each masked dancer is both piercèd Heart And Dream, its poiniard.
Small winds creep from Infinity.... A flame Our blown hair, white as shame.
Those seeds of worlds, the stars, are nought but blown Red tinsel from a Clown;
The candles, living things to dance and pry: Out! hard Reality!
III
VACUUM
Blown through the leaden circles of our hell, Each wisp of soul, tattered by winds of lust, Clawed at the voices, like a beaten bell. No movement ever raised the lifeless dust,
As, blown beneath the night’s enormous pall, We call to you with goatish prance and paces: Our lips are red as nights of festival And hell has dyed its fires upon our faces.
These barren bodies may no children breed To quench the sun with their corrupted breath Save these our hearts, our breasts, our bodies feed-- The fruit of love like ours, the worms of death.
Within our brain the darkness slowly fell: Our eyes’ dark vacuum reflects no days-- No voice, no sight, no thought within our hell-- But only flesh our loneliness allays.
IV
“ET L’ON ENTEND À PEINE LEURS PAROLES”
Monotonously fell the rain, Like thoughts within an empty brain;
The lolling weeds that fattened there Absorbed the broken lifeless air.
“Do those dim eyes still hold a flame That leaps to Heaven at my name?”
“Mine eyes would hold God’s face in sight; But your lips burned away the light.”
“Within your brain the blood runs high?” “You came like thought; you licked it dry.”
“Oh, we have burnt our souls with lust Till they are whiter than the dust ...
Now are they white as purity?” “You blind mine eyes ... I cannot see.”
“I am so tired--I fain would creep To hide within your heart and weep.”
“My heart is dust ... no tears to shed.” “But carrion lives--it lives”--I said.
_TREATS_
I
FUNERALS
Beneath umbrellas I can see Pink faces sheened with stupidity,
With whiskers spirting from them, (days Of boredom, black and sentient rays
From other personalities.) And, mourners too, white-bearded seas