{"id":372,"date":"2016-10-26T20:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T20:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/ivytech-engl206-master\/?post_type=chapter&p=372"},"modified":"2016-11-10T21:26:37","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T21:26:37","slug":"hugh-selwyn-mauberley-by-ezra-pound","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-introliterature\/chapter\/hugh-selwyn-mauberley-by-ezra-pound\/","title":{"raw":"Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920","rendered":"Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920"},"content":{"raw":"_MAUBERLEY_\r\n
            CONTENTS\r\n             Part I.\r\n            ________\r\n\r\n_Ode pour l'\u00e9lection de son sepulcher_\r\nII.\r\nIII.\r\nIV.\r\nV.\r\n_Yeux Glauques_\r\n_\"Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma\"_\r\n_Brennbaum_\r\n_Mr. Nixon_\r\nX.\r\nXI.\r\nXII.\r\n\r\n         ____________\r\n\r\n            ENVOI\r\n            1919\r\n        ____________\r\n\r\n          Part II.\r\n           1920\r\n        (Mauberley)\r\n\r\nI.\r\nII.\r\nIII. _\"The age demanded\"_\r\nIV.\r\nV.   _Medallion_\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nE.P.\r\nODE POUR SELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE\r\n\r\nFOR three years, out of key with his time,\r\nHe strove to resuscitate the dead art\r\nOf poetry; to maintain \"the sublime\"\r\nIn the old sense. Wrong from the start--\r\n\r\nNo hardly, but, seeing he had been born\r\nIn a half savage country, out of date;\r\nBent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;\r\nCapaneus; trout for factitious bait;\r\n\r\n_\u1f34\u03b4\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd \u03b3\u03ac\u03c1 \u03c4\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03b8', \u03cc\u03c3' \u03ad\u03bd\u03b9 \u03a4\u03c1\u03bf\u03af\u03b7_\r\nCaught in the unstopped ear;\r\nGiving the rocks small lee-way\r\nThe chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.\r\n\r\nHis true Penelope was Flaubert,\r\nHe fished by obstinate isles;\r\nObserved the elegance of Circe's hair\r\nRather than the mottoes on sun-dials.\r\n\r\nUnaffected by \"the march of events,\"\r\nHe passed from men's memory in _l'an trentiesme\r\nDe son eage_; the case presents\r\nNo adjunct to the Muses' diadem.\r\n\r\n\r\nII.\r\n\r\nTHE age demanded an image\r\nOf its accelerated grimace,\r\nSomething for the modern stage,\r\nNot, at any rate, an Attic grace;\r\n\r\nNot, not certainly, the obscure reveries\r\nOf the inward gaze;\r\nBetter mendacities\r\nThan the classics in paraphrase!\r\n\r\nThe \"age demanded\" chiefly a mould in plaster,\r\nMade with no loss of time,\r\nA prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster\r\nOr the \"sculpture\" of rhyme.\r\n\r\n\r\nIII.\r\n\r\nTHE tea-rose tea-gown, etc.\r\nSupplants the mousseline of Cos,\r\nThe pianola \"replaces\"\r\nSappho's barbitos.\r\n\r\nChrist follows Dionysus,\r\nPhallic and ambrosial\r\nMade way for macerations;\r\nCaliban casts out Ariel.\r\n\r\nAll things are a flowing,\r\nSage Heracleitus says;\r\nBut a tawdry cheapness\r\nShall reign throughout our days.\r\n\r\nEven the Christian beauty\r\nDefects--after Samothrace;\r\nWe see _\u03c4\u03bf \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd_\r\nDecreed in the market place.\r\n\r\nFaun's flesh is not to us,\r\nNor the saint's vision.\r\nWe have the press for wafer;\r\nFranchise for circumcision.\r\n\r\nAll men, in law, are equals.\r\nFree of Peisistratus,\r\nWe choose a knave or an eunuch\r\nTo rule over us.\r\n\r\nO bright Apollo,\r\n_\u03c4\u03af\u03bd'  \u03ac\u03bd\u03b4\u03c1\u03b1, \u03c4\u03af\u03bd'  \u03ae\u03c1\u03c9\u03b1, \u03c4\u03af\u03bd\u03b1 \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u03bd_,\r\nWhat god, man, or hero\r\nShall I place a tin wreath upon!\r\n\r\n\r\nIV.\r\n\r\nTHESE fought, in any case,\r\nand some believing, pro domo, in any case . .\r\nSome quick to arm,\r\nsome for adventure,\r\nsome from fear of weakness,\r\nsome from fear of censure,\r\nsome for love of slaughter, in imagination,\r\nlearning later . . .\r\n\r\nsome in fear, learning love of slaughter;\r\nDied some \"pro patria, non dulce non et decor\". .\r\n\r\nwalked eye-deep in hell\r\nbelieving in old men's lies, then unbelieving\r\ncame home, home to a lie,\r\nhome to many deceits,\r\nhome to old lies and new infamy;\r\n\r\nusury age-old and age-thick\r\nand liars in public places.\r\n\r\nDaring as never before, wastage as never before.\r\nYoung blood and high blood,\r\nFair cheeks, and fine bodies;\r\n\r\nfortitude as never before\r\n\r\nfrankness as never before,\r\ndisillusions as never told in the old days,\r\nhysterias, trench confessions,\r\nlaughter out of dead bellies.\r\n\r\n\r\nV.\r\n\r\nTHERE died a myriad,\r\nAnd of the best, among them,\r\nFor an old bitch gone in the teeth,\r\nFor a botched civilization,\r\n\r\nCharm, smiling at the good mouth,\r\nQuick eyes gone under earth's lid,\r\n\r\nFor two gross of broken statues,\r\nFor a few thousand battered books.\r\n\r\n\r\nYEUX GLAUQUES\r\n\r\nGLADSTONE was still respected,\r\nWhen John Ruskin produced\r\n\"Kings Treasuries\"; Swinburne\r\nAnd Rossetti still abused.\r\n\r\nF\u0153tid Buchanan lifted up his voice\r\nWhen that faun's head of hers\r\nBecame a pastime for\r\nPainters and adulterers.\r\n\r\nThe Burne-Jones cartons\r\nHave preserved her eyes;\r\nStill, at the Tate, they teach\r\nCophetua to rhapsodize;\r\n\r\nThin like brook-water,\r\nWith a vacant gaze.\r\nThe English Rubaiyat was still-born\r\nIn those days.\r\n\r\nThe thin, clear gaze, the same\r\nStill darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd fac\r\nQuesting and passive ....\r\n\"Ah, poor Jenny's case\"...\r\n\r\nBewildered that a world\r\nShows no surprise\r\nAt her last maquero's\r\nAdulteries.\r\n\r\n\r\n\"SIENA MI FE', DISFECEMI MAREMMA\"\r\n\r\nAMONG the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,\r\nEngaged in perfecting the catalogue,\r\nI found the last scion of the\r\nSenatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.\r\n\r\nFor two hours he talked of Gallifet;\r\nOf Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;\r\nTold me how Johnson (Lionel) died\r\nBy falling from a high stool in a pub . . .\r\n\r\nBut showed no trace of alcohol\r\nAt the autopsy, privately performed--\r\nTissue preserved--the pure mind\r\nArose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.\r\n\r\nDowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;\r\nHeadlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued\r\nWith raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.\r\nSo spoke the author of \"The Dorian Mood\",\r\n\r\nM. Verog, out of step with the decade,\r\nDetached from his contemporaries,\r\nNeglected by the young,\r\nBecause of these reveries.\r\n\r\n\r\nBRENNBAUM.\r\n\r\nTHE sky-like limpid eyes,\r\nThe circular infant's face,\r\nThe stiffness from spats to collar\r\nNever relaxing into grace;\r\n\r\nThe heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,\r\nShowed only when the daylight fell\r\nLevel across the face\r\nOf Brennbaum \"The Impeccable\".\r\n\r\n\r\nMR. NIXON\r\n\r\nIN the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht\r\nMr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer\r\nDangers of delay. \"Consider\r\n    \"Carefully the reviewer.\r\n\r\n\"I was as poor as you are;\r\n\"When I began I got, of course,\r\n\"Advance on royalties, fifty at first\", said Mr. Nixon,\r\n\"Follow me, and take a column,\r\n\"Even if you have to work free.\r\n\r\n\"Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred\r\n\"I rose in eighteen months;\r\n\"The hardest nut I had to crack\r\n\"Was Dr. Dundas.\r\n\r\n\"I never mentioned a man but with the view\r\n\"Of selling my own works.\r\n\"The tip's a good one, as for literature\r\n\"It gives no man a sinecure.\"\r\n\r\nAnd no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.\r\nAnd give up verse, my boy,\r\nThere's nothing in it.\r\n\r\n                   *    *    *\r\n\r\nLikewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:\r\nDon't kick against the pricks,\r\nAccept opinion. The \"Nineties\" tried your game\r\nAnd died, there's nothing in it.\r\n\r\n\r\nX.\r\n\r\nBENEATH the sagging roof\r\nThe stylist has taken shelter,\r\nUnpaid, uncelebrated,\r\nAt last from the world's welter\r\n\r\nNature receives him,\r\nWith a placid and uneducated mistress\r\nHe exercises his talents\r\nAnd the soil meets his distress.\r\n\r\nThe haven from sophistications and contentions\r\nLeaks through its thatch;\r\nHe offers succulent cooking;\r\nThe door has a creaking latch.\r\n\r\n\r\nXI.\r\n\r\n\"CONSERVATRIX of Mil\u00e9sien\"\r\nHabits of mind and feeling,\r\nPossibly. But in Ealing\r\nWith the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?\r\n\r\nNo, \"Mil\u00e9sien\" is an exaggeration.\r\nNo instinct has survived in her\r\nOlder than those her grandmother\r\nTold her would fit her station.\r\n\r\n\r\nXII.\r\n\r\n\"DAPHNE with her thighs in bark\r\nStretches toward me her leafy hands\",--\r\nSubjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room\r\nI await The Lady Valentine's commands,\r\n\r\nKnowing my coat has never been\r\nOf precisely the fashion\r\nTo stimulate, in her,\r\nA durable passion;\r\n\r\nDoubtful, somewhat, of the value\r\nOf well-gowned approbation\r\nOf literary effort,\r\nBut never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:\r\n\r\nPoetry, her border of ideas,\r\nThe edge, uncertain, but a means of blending\r\nWith other strata\r\nWhere the lower and higher have ending;\r\n\r\nA hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,\r\nA modulation toward the theatre,\r\nAlso, in the case of revolution,\r\nA possible friend and comforter.\r\n\r\n             *       *       *\r\n\r\nConduct, on the other hand, the soul\r\n\"Which the highest cultures have nourished\"\r\nTo Fleet St. where\r\nDr. Johnson flourished;\r\n\r\nBeside this thoroughfare\r\nThe sale of half-hose has\r\nLong since superseded the cultivation\r\nOf Pierian roses.\r\n\r\n\r\nENVOI (1919)\r\n\r\nGO, dumb-born book,\r\nTell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;\r\nHadst thou but song\r\nAs thou hast subjects known,\r\nThen were there cause in thee that should condone\r\nEven my faults that heavy upon me lie\r\nAnd build her glories their longevity.\r\n\r\nTell her that sheds\r\nSuch treasure in the air,\r\nRecking naught else but that her graces give\r\nLife to the moment,\r\nI would bid them live\r\nAs roses might, in magic amber laid,\r\nRed overwrought with orange and all made\r\nOne substance and one colour\r\nBraving time.\r\n\r\nTell her that goes\r\nWith song upon her lips\r\nBut sings not out the song, nor knows\r\nThe maker of it, some other mouth,\r\nMay be as fair as hers,\r\nMight, in new ages, gain her worshippers,\r\nWhen our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,\r\nSiftings on siftings in oblivion,\r\nTill change hath broken down\r\nAll things save Beauty alone.\r\n\r\n\r\n1920\r\n\r\n(MAUBERLEY)\r\n\r\n            I.\r\n\r\nTURNED from the \"eau-forte\r\nPar Jaquemart\"\r\nTo the strait head\r\nOf Mcssalina:\r\n\r\n\"His true Penelope\r\nWas Flaubert\",\r\nAnd his tool\r\nThe engraver's\r\n\r\nFirmness,\r\nNot the full smile,\r\nHis art, but an art\r\nIn profile;\r\n\r\nColourless\r\nPier Francesca,\r\nPisanello lacking the skill\r\nTo forge Achaia.\r\n\r\n            II.\r\n\r\n     _\"Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et\r\n      gu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre?\r\n      S'ils ne comprennent pas la po\u00e8sie,\r\n      s'ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu'est ce\r\n      qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette pas-\r\n      sion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose\r\n      est grossi\u00e8re et le parfum des violettes un\r\n      tonnerre?\"_            CAID ALI\r\n\r\nFOR three years, diabolus in the scale,\r\nHe drank ambrosia,\r\nAll passes, ANANGKE prevails,\r\nCame end, at last, to that Arcadia.\r\n\r\nHe had moved amid her phantasmagoria,\r\nAmid her galaxies,\r\nNUKTIS AGALMA\r\n\r\nDrifted....drifted precipitate,\r\nAsking time to be rid of....\r\nOf his bewilderment; to designate\r\nHis new found orchid....\r\n\r\nTo be certain....certain...\r\n(Amid aerial flowers)..time for arrangements--\r\nDrifted on\r\nTo the final estrangement;\r\n\r\nUnable in the supervening blankness\r\nTo sift TO AGATHON from the chaff\r\nUntil he found his seive...\r\nUltimately, his seismograph:\r\n\r\n--Given, that is, his urge\r\nTo convey the relation\r\nOf eye-lid and cheek-bone\r\nBy verbal manifestation;\r\n\r\nTo present the series\r\nOf curious heads in medallion--\r\n\r\nHe had passed, inconscient, full gaze,\r\nThe wide-banded irises\r\nAnd botticellian sprays implied\r\nIn their diastasis;\r\n\r\nWhich an\u00e6sthesis, noted a year late,\r\nAnd weighed, revealed his great affect,\r\n(Orchid), mandate\r\nOf Eros, a retrospect.\r\n\r\n            .     .     .\r\n\r\nMouths biting empty air,\r\nThe still stone dogs,\r\nCaught in metamorphosis were,\r\nLeft him as epilogues.\r\n\r\n\r\n\"THE AGE DEMANDED\"\r\n\r\nVIDE POEM II.\r\n\r\nFOR this agility chance found\r\nHim of all men, unfit\r\nAs the red-beaked steeds of\r\nThe Cyther\u00e6an for a chain-bit.\r\n\r\nThe glow of porcelain\r\nBrought no reforming sense\r\nTo his perception\r\nOf the social inconsequence.\r\n\r\nThus, if her colour\r\nCame against his gaze,\r\nTempered as if\r\nIt were through a perfect glaze\r\n\r\nHe made no immediate application\r\nOf this to relation of the state\r\nTo the individual, the month was more temperate\r\nBecause this beauty had been\r\n    ......\r\n           The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand\r\n           Burst in upon the porcelain revery:\r\n           Impetuous troubling\r\n           Of his imagery.\r\n    ......\r\n\r\nMildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,\r\nHis sense of graduations,\r\nQuite out of place amid\r\nResistance to current exacerbations\r\n\r\nInvitation, mere invitation to perceptivity\r\nGradually led him to the isolation\r\nWhich these presents place\r\nUnder a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.\r\n\r\nBy constant elimination\r\nThe manifest universe\r\nYielded an armour\r\nAgainst utter consternation,\r\n\r\nA Minoan undulation,\r\nSeen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances\r\nStrengthened him against\r\nThe discouraging doctrine of chances\r\n\r\nAnd his desire for survival,\r\nFaint in the most strenuous moods,\r\nBecame an Olympian _apathein_\r\nIn the presence of selected perceptions.\r\n\r\nA pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,\r\nThe unexpected palms\r\nDestroying, certainly, the artist's urge,\r\nLeft him delighted with the imaginary\r\nAudition of the phantasmal sea-surge,\r\n\r\nIncapable of the least utterance or composition,\r\nEmendation, conservation of the \"better tradition\",\r\nRefinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,\r\nAugust attraction or concentration.\r\n\r\nNothing in brief, but maudlin confession\r\nIrresponse to human aggression,\r\nAmid the precipitation, down-float\r\nOf insubstantial manna\r\nLifting the faint susurrus\r\nOf his subjective hosannah.\r\n\r\nUltimate affronts to human redundancies;\r\n\r\nNon-esteem of self-styled \"his betters\"\r\nLeading, as he well knew,\r\nTo his final\r\nExclusion from the world of letters.\r\n\r\n\r\n      IV.\r\n\r\nSCATTERED Moluccas\r\nNot knowing, day to day,\r\nThe first day's end, in the next noon;\r\nThe placid water\r\nUnbroken by the Simoon;\r\n\r\nThick foliage\r\nPlacid beneath warm suns,\r\nTawn fore-shores\r\nWashed in the cobalt of oblivions;\r\n\r\nOr through dawn-mist\r\nThe grey and rose\r\nOf the juridical\r\nFlamingoes;\r\n\r\nA consciousness disjunct,\r\nBeing but this overblotted\r\nSeries\r\nOf intermittences;\r\n\r\nCoracle of Pacific voyages,\r\nThe unforecasted beach:\r\nThen on an oar\r\nRead this:\r\n\r\n\"I was\r\nAnd I no more exist;\r\nHere drifted\r\nAn hedonist.\"\r\n\r\n\r\nMEDALLION\r\n\r\nLUINI in porcelain!\r\nThe grand piano\r\nUtters a profane\r\nProtest with her clear soprano.\r\n\r\nThe sleek head emerges\r\nFrom the gold-yellow frock\r\nAs Anadyomene in the opening\r\nPages of Reinach.\r\n\r\nHoney-red, closing the face-oval\r\nA basket-work of braids which seem as if they were\r\nSpun in King Minos' hall\r\nFrom metal, or intractable amber;\r\n\r\nThe face-oval beneath the glaze,\r\nBright in its suave bounding-line, as\r\nBeneath half-watt rays\r\nThe eyes turn topaz.\r\n<\/pre>","rendered":"
_MAUBERLEY_<\/p>\n
            CONTENTS\r\n             Part I.\r\n            ________\r\n\r\n_Ode pour l'\u00e9lection de son sepulcher_\r\nII.\r\nIII.\r\nIV.\r\nV.\r\n_Yeux Glauques_\r\n_\"Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma\"_\r\n_Brennbaum_\r\n_Mr. Nixon_\r\nX.\r\nXI.\r\nXII.\r\n\r\n         ____________\r\n\r\n            ENVOI\r\n            1919\r\n        ____________\r\n\r\n          Part II.\r\n           1920\r\n        (Mauberley)\r\n\r\nI.\r\nII.\r\nIII. _\"The age demanded\"_\r\nIV.\r\nV.   _Medallion_\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nE.P.\r\nODE POUR SELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE\r\n\r\nFOR three years, out of key with his time,\r\nHe strove to resuscitate the dead art\r\nOf poetry; to maintain \"the sublime\"\r\nIn the old sense. Wrong from the start--\r\n\r\nNo hardly, but, seeing he had been born\r\nIn a half savage country, out of date;\r\nBent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;\r\nCapaneus; trout for factitious bait;\r\n\r\n_\u1f34\u03b4\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd \u03b3\u03ac\u03c1 \u03c4\u03bf\u03b9 \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd \u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03b8', \u03cc\u03c3' \u03ad\u03bd\u03b9 \u03a4\u03c1\u03bf\u03af\u03b7_\r\nCaught in the unstopped ear;\r\nGiving the rocks small lee-way\r\nThe chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.\r\n\r\nHis true Penelope was Flaubert,\r\nHe fished by obstinate isles;\r\nObserved the elegance of Circe's hair\r\nRather than the mottoes on sun-dials.\r\n\r\nUnaffected by \"the march of events,\"\r\nHe passed from men's memory in _l'an trentiesme\r\nDe son eage_; the case presents\r\nNo adjunct to the Muses' diadem.\r\n\r\n\r\nII.\r\n\r\nTHE age demanded an image\r\nOf its accelerated grimace,\r\nSomething for the modern stage,\r\nNot, at any rate, an Attic grace;\r\n\r\nNot, not certainly, the obscure reveries\r\nOf the inward gaze;\r\nBetter mendacities\r\nThan the classics in paraphrase!\r\n\r\nThe \"age demanded\" chiefly a mould in plaster,\r\nMade with no loss of time,\r\nA prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster\r\nOr the \"sculpture\" of rhyme.\r\n\r\n\r\nIII.\r\n\r\nTHE tea-rose tea-gown, etc.\r\nSupplants the mousseline of Cos,\r\nThe pianola \"replaces\"\r\nSappho's barbitos.\r\n\r\nChrist follows Dionysus,\r\nPhallic and ambrosial\r\nMade way for macerations;\r\nCaliban casts out Ariel.\r\n\r\nAll things are a flowing,\r\nSage Heracleitus says;\r\nBut a tawdry cheapness\r\nShall reign throughout our days.\r\n\r\nEven the Christian beauty\r\nDefects--after Samothrace;\r\nWe see _\u03c4\u03bf \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03cc\u03bd_\r\nDecreed in the market place.\r\n\r\nFaun's flesh is not to us,\r\nNor the saint's vision.\r\nWe have the press for wafer;\r\nFranchise for circumcision.\r\n\r\nAll men, in law, are equals.\r\nFree of Peisistratus,\r\nWe choose a knave or an eunuch\r\nTo rule over us.\r\n\r\nO bright Apollo,\r\n_\u03c4\u03af\u03bd'  \u03ac\u03bd\u03b4\u03c1\u03b1, \u03c4\u03af\u03bd'  \u03ae\u03c1\u03c9\u03b1, \u03c4\u03af\u03bd\u03b1 \u03b8\u03b5\u03bf\u03bd_,\r\nWhat god, man, or hero\r\nShall I place a tin wreath upon!\r\n\r\n\r\nIV.\r\n\r\nTHESE fought, in any case,\r\nand some believing, pro domo, in any case . .\r\nSome quick to arm,\r\nsome for adventure,\r\nsome from fear of weakness,\r\nsome from fear of censure,\r\nsome for love of slaughter, in imagination,\r\nlearning later . . .\r\n\r\nsome in fear, learning love of slaughter;\r\nDied some \"pro patria, non dulce non et decor\". .\r\n\r\nwalked eye-deep in hell\r\nbelieving in old men's lies, then unbelieving\r\ncame home, home to a lie,\r\nhome to many deceits,\r\nhome to old lies and new infamy;\r\n\r\nusury age-old and age-thick\r\nand liars in public places.\r\n\r\nDaring as never before, wastage as never before.\r\nYoung blood and high blood,\r\nFair cheeks, and fine bodies;\r\n\r\nfortitude as never before\r\n\r\nfrankness as never before,\r\ndisillusions as never told in the old days,\r\nhysterias, trench confessions,\r\nlaughter out of dead bellies.\r\n\r\n\r\nV.\r\n\r\nTHERE died a myriad,\r\nAnd of the best, among them,\r\nFor an old bitch gone in the teeth,\r\nFor a botched civilization,\r\n\r\nCharm, smiling at the good mouth,\r\nQuick eyes gone under earth's lid,\r\n\r\nFor two gross of broken statues,\r\nFor a few thousand battered books.\r\n\r\n\r\nYEUX GLAUQUES\r\n\r\nGLADSTONE was still respected,\r\nWhen John Ruskin produced\r\n\"Kings Treasuries\"; Swinburne\r\nAnd Rossetti still abused.\r\n\r\nF\u0153tid Buchanan lifted up his voice\r\nWhen that faun's head of hers\r\nBecame a pastime for\r\nPainters and adulterers.\r\n\r\nThe Burne-Jones cartons\r\nHave preserved her eyes;\r\nStill, at the Tate, they teach\r\nCophetua to rhapsodize;\r\n\r\nThin like brook-water,\r\nWith a vacant gaze.\r\nThe English Rubaiyat was still-born\r\nIn those days.\r\n\r\nThe thin, clear gaze, the same\r\nStill darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd fac\r\nQuesting and passive ....\r\n\"Ah, poor Jenny's case\"...\r\n\r\nBewildered that a world\r\nShows no surprise\r\nAt her last maquero's\r\nAdulteries.\r\n\r\n\r\n\"SIENA MI FE', DISFECEMI MAREMMA\"\r\n\r\nAMONG the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,\r\nEngaged in perfecting the catalogue,\r\nI found the last scion of the\r\nSenatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.\r\n\r\nFor two hours he talked of Gallifet;\r\nOf Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;\r\nTold me how Johnson (Lionel) died\r\nBy falling from a high stool in a pub . . .\r\n\r\nBut showed no trace of alcohol\r\nAt the autopsy, privately performed--\r\nTissue preserved--the pure mind\r\nArose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.\r\n\r\nDowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;\r\nHeadlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued\r\nWith raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.\r\nSo spoke the author of \"The Dorian Mood\",\r\n\r\nM. Verog, out of step with the decade,\r\nDetached from his contemporaries,\r\nNeglected by the young,\r\nBecause of these reveries.\r\n\r\n\r\nBRENNBAUM.\r\n\r\nTHE sky-like limpid eyes,\r\nThe circular infant's face,\r\nThe stiffness from spats to collar\r\nNever relaxing into grace;\r\n\r\nThe heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,\r\nShowed only when the daylight fell\r\nLevel across the face\r\nOf Brennbaum \"The Impeccable\".\r\n\r\n\r\nMR. NIXON\r\n\r\nIN the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht\r\nMr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer\r\nDangers of delay. \"Consider\r\n    \"Carefully the reviewer.\r\n\r\n\"I was as poor as you are;\r\n\"When I began I got, of course,\r\n\"Advance on royalties, fifty at first\", said Mr. Nixon,\r\n\"Follow me, and take a column,\r\n\"Even if you have to work free.\r\n\r\n\"Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred\r\n\"I rose in eighteen months;\r\n\"The hardest nut I had to crack\r\n\"Was Dr. Dundas.\r\n\r\n\"I never mentioned a man but with the view\r\n\"Of selling my own works.\r\n\"The tip's a good one, as for literature\r\n\"It gives no man a sinecure.\"\r\n\r\nAnd no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.\r\nAnd give up verse, my boy,\r\nThere's nothing in it.\r\n\r\n                   *    *    *\r\n\r\nLikewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:\r\nDon't kick against the pricks,\r\nAccept opinion. The \"Nineties\" tried your game\r\nAnd died, there's nothing in it.\r\n\r\n\r\nX.\r\n\r\nBENEATH the sagging roof\r\nThe stylist has taken shelter,\r\nUnpaid, uncelebrated,\r\nAt last from the world's welter\r\n\r\nNature receives him,\r\nWith a placid and uneducated mistress\r\nHe exercises his talents\r\nAnd the soil meets his distress.\r\n\r\nThe haven from sophistications and contentions\r\nLeaks through its thatch;\r\nHe offers succulent cooking;\r\nThe door has a creaking latch.\r\n\r\n\r\nXI.\r\n\r\n\"CONSERVATRIX of Mil\u00e9sien\"\r\nHabits of mind and feeling,\r\nPossibly. But in Ealing\r\nWith the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?\r\n\r\nNo, \"Mil\u00e9sien\" is an exaggeration.\r\nNo instinct has survived in her\r\nOlder than those her grandmother\r\nTold her would fit her station.\r\n\r\n\r\nXII.\r\n\r\n\"DAPHNE with her thighs in bark\r\nStretches toward me her leafy hands\",--\r\nSubjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room\r\nI await The Lady Valentine's commands,\r\n\r\nKnowing my coat has never been\r\nOf precisely the fashion\r\nTo stimulate, in her,\r\nA durable passion;\r\n\r\nDoubtful, somewhat, of the value\r\nOf well-gowned approbation\r\nOf literary effort,\r\nBut never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:\r\n\r\nPoetry, her border of ideas,\r\nThe edge, uncertain, but a means of blending\r\nWith other strata\r\nWhere the lower and higher have ending;\r\n\r\nA hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,\r\nA modulation toward the theatre,\r\nAlso, in the case of revolution,\r\nA possible friend and comforter.\r\n\r\n             *       *       *\r\n\r\nConduct, on the other hand, the soul\r\n\"Which the highest cultures have nourished\"\r\nTo Fleet St. where\r\nDr. Johnson flourished;\r\n\r\nBeside this thoroughfare\r\nThe sale of half-hose has\r\nLong since superseded the cultivation\r\nOf Pierian roses.\r\n\r\n\r\nENVOI (1919)\r\n\r\nGO, dumb-born book,\r\nTell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;\r\nHadst thou but song\r\nAs thou hast subjects known,\r\nThen were there cause in thee that should condone\r\nEven my faults that heavy upon me lie\r\nAnd build her glories their longevity.\r\n\r\nTell her that sheds\r\nSuch treasure in the air,\r\nRecking naught else but that her graces give\r\nLife to the moment,\r\nI would bid them live\r\nAs roses might, in magic amber laid,\r\nRed overwrought with orange and all made\r\nOne substance and one colour\r\nBraving time.\r\n\r\nTell her that goes\r\nWith song upon her lips\r\nBut sings not out the song, nor knows\r\nThe maker of it, some other mouth,\r\nMay be as fair as hers,\r\nMight, in new ages, gain her worshippers,\r\nWhen our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,\r\nSiftings on siftings in oblivion,\r\nTill change hath broken down\r\nAll things save Beauty alone.\r\n\r\n\r\n1920\r\n\r\n(MAUBERLEY)\r\n\r\n            I.\r\n\r\nTURNED from the \"eau-forte\r\nPar Jaquemart\"\r\nTo the strait head\r\nOf Mcssalina:\r\n\r\n\"His true Penelope\r\nWas Flaubert\",\r\nAnd his tool\r\nThe engraver's\r\n\r\nFirmness,\r\nNot the full smile,\r\nHis art, but an art\r\nIn profile;\r\n\r\nColourless\r\nPier Francesca,\r\nPisanello lacking the skill\r\nTo forge Achaia.\r\n\r\n            II.\r\n\r\n     _\"Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et\r\n      gu'est ce qu'ils peuvent comprendre?\r\n      S'ils ne comprennent pas la po\u00e8sie,\r\n      s'ils ne sentent pas la musique, qu'est ce\r\n      qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette pas-\r\n      sion en comparaison avec laquelle la rose\r\n      est grossi\u00e8re et le parfum des violettes un\r\n      tonnerre?\"_            CAID ALI\r\n\r\nFOR three years, diabolus in the scale,\r\nHe drank ambrosia,\r\nAll passes, ANANGKE prevails,\r\nCame end, at last, to that Arcadia.\r\n\r\nHe had moved amid her phantasmagoria,\r\nAmid her galaxies,\r\nNUKTIS AGALMA\r\n\r\nDrifted....drifted precipitate,\r\nAsking time to be rid of....\r\nOf his bewilderment; to designate\r\nHis new found orchid....\r\n\r\nTo be certain....certain...\r\n(Amid aerial flowers)..time for arrangements--\r\nDrifted on\r\nTo the final estrangement;\r\n\r\nUnable in the supervening blankness\r\nTo sift TO AGATHON from the chaff\r\nUntil he found his seive...\r\nUltimately, his seismograph:\r\n\r\n--Given, that is, his urge\r\nTo convey the relation\r\nOf eye-lid and cheek-bone\r\nBy verbal manifestation;\r\n\r\nTo present the series\r\nOf curious heads in medallion--\r\n\r\nHe had passed, inconscient, full gaze,\r\nThe wide-banded irises\r\nAnd botticellian sprays implied\r\nIn their diastasis;\r\n\r\nWhich an\u00e6sthesis, noted a year late,\r\nAnd weighed, revealed his great affect,\r\n(Orchid), mandate\r\nOf Eros, a retrospect.\r\n\r\n            .     .     .\r\n\r\nMouths biting empty air,\r\nThe still stone dogs,\r\nCaught in metamorphosis were,\r\nLeft him as epilogues.\r\n\r\n\r\n\"THE AGE DEMANDED\"\r\n\r\nVIDE POEM II.\r\n\r\nFOR this agility chance found\r\nHim of all men, unfit\r\nAs the red-beaked steeds of\r\nThe Cyther\u00e6an for a chain-bit.\r\n\r\nThe glow of porcelain\r\nBrought no reforming sense\r\nTo his perception\r\nOf the social inconsequence.\r\n\r\nThus, if her colour\r\nCame against his gaze,\r\nTempered as if\r\nIt were through a perfect glaze\r\n\r\nHe made no immediate application\r\nOf this to relation of the state\r\nTo the individual, the month was more temperate\r\nBecause this beauty had been\r\n    ......\r\n           The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand\r\n           Burst in upon the porcelain revery:\r\n           Impetuous troubling\r\n           Of his imagery.\r\n    ......\r\n\r\nMildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,\r\nHis sense of graduations,\r\nQuite out of place amid\r\nResistance to current exacerbations\r\n\r\nInvitation, mere invitation to perceptivity\r\nGradually led him to the isolation\r\nWhich these presents place\r\nUnder a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.\r\n\r\nBy constant elimination\r\nThe manifest universe\r\nYielded an armour\r\nAgainst utter consternation,\r\n\r\nA Minoan undulation,\r\nSeen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances\r\nStrengthened him against\r\nThe discouraging doctrine of chances\r\n\r\nAnd his desire for survival,\r\nFaint in the most strenuous moods,\r\nBecame an Olympian _apathein_\r\nIn the presence of selected perceptions.\r\n\r\nA pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,\r\nThe unexpected palms\r\nDestroying, certainly, the artist's urge,\r\nLeft him delighted with the imaginary\r\nAudition of the phantasmal sea-surge,\r\n\r\nIncapable of the least utterance or composition,\r\nEmendation, conservation of the \"better tradition\",\r\nRefinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,\r\nAugust attraction or concentration.\r\n\r\nNothing in brief, but maudlin confession\r\nIrresponse to human aggression,\r\nAmid the precipitation, down-float\r\nOf insubstantial manna\r\nLifting the faint susurrus\r\nOf his subjective hosannah.\r\n\r\nUltimate affronts to human redundancies;\r\n\r\nNon-esteem of self-styled \"his betters\"\r\nLeading, as he well knew,\r\nTo his final\r\nExclusion from the world of letters.\r\n\r\n\r\n      IV.\r\n\r\nSCATTERED Moluccas\r\nNot knowing, day to day,\r\nThe first day's end, in the next noon;\r\nThe placid water\r\nUnbroken by the Simoon;\r\n\r\nThick foliage\r\nPlacid beneath warm suns,\r\nTawn fore-shores\r\nWashed in the cobalt of oblivions;\r\n\r\nOr through dawn-mist\r\nThe grey and rose\r\nOf the juridical\r\nFlamingoes;\r\n\r\nA consciousness disjunct,\r\nBeing but this overblotted\r\nSeries\r\nOf intermittences;\r\n\r\nCoracle of Pacific voyages,\r\nThe unforecasted beach:\r\nThen on an oar\r\nRead this:\r\n\r\n\"I was\r\nAnd I no more exist;\r\nHere drifted\r\nAn hedonist.\"\r\n\r\n\r\nMEDALLION\r\n\r\nLUINI in porcelain!\r\nThe grand piano\r\nUtters a profane\r\nProtest with her clear soprano.\r\n\r\nThe sleek head emerges\r\nFrom the gold-yellow frock\r\nAs Anadyomene in the opening\r\nPages of Reinach.\r\n\r\nHoney-red, closing the face-oval\r\nA basket-work of braids which seem as if they were\r\nSpun in King Minos' hall\r\nFrom metal, or intractable amber;\r\n\r\nThe face-oval beneath the glaze,\r\nBright in its suave bounding-line, as\r\nBeneath half-watt rays\r\nThe eyes turn topaz.\r\n<\/pre>\n\n\t\t\t 
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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t 
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