Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

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Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 430

by Aldous Huxley

Mistress and mother

  When on your breast

  I lay so safely

  And could rest.

  WAKING

  Darkness had stretched its colour,

  Deep blue across the pane:

  No cloud to make night duller,

  No moon with its tarnish stain;

  But only here and there a star,

  One sharp point of frosty fire,

  Hanging infinitely far

  In mockery of our life and death

  And all our small desire.

  Now in this hour of waking

  From under brows of stone,

  A new pale day is breaking

  And the deep night is gone.

  Sordid now, and mean and small

  The daylight world is seen again,

  With only the veils of mist that fall

  Deaf and muffling over all

  To hide its ugliness and pain.

  But to-day this dawn of meanness

  Shines in my eyes, as when

  The new world’s brightness and cleanness

  Broke on the first of men.

  For the light that shows the huddled things

  Of this close-pressing earth,

  Shines also on your face and brings

  All its dear beauty back to me

  In a new miracle of birth.

  I see you asleep and unpassioned,

  White-faced in the dusk of your hair —

  Your beauty so fleetingly fashioned

  That it filled me once with despair

  To look on its exquisite transience

  And think that our love and thought and laughter

  Puff out with the death of our flickering sense,

  While we pass ever on and away

  Towards some blank hereafter.

  But now I am happy, knowing

  That swift time is our friend,

  And that our love’s passionate glowing,

  Though it turn ash in the end,

  Is a rose of fire that must blossom its way

  Through temporal stuff, nor else could be

  More than a nothing. Into day

  The boundless spaces of night contract

  And in your opening eyes I see

  Night born in day, in time eternity.

  BY THE FIRE

  We who are lovers sit by the fire,

  Cradled warm ‘twixt thought and will,

  Sit and drowse like sleeping dogs

  In the equipoise of all desire,

  Sit and listen to the still

  Small hiss and whisper of green logs

  That burn away, that burn away

  With the sound of a far-off falling stream

  Of threaded water blown to steam,

  Grey ghost in the mountain world of grey.

  Vapours blue as distance rise

  Between the hissing logs that show

  A glimpse of rosy heat below;

  And candles watch with tireless eyes

  While we sit drowsing here. I know,

  Dimly, that there exists a world,

  That there is time perhaps, and space

  Other and wider than this place,

  Where at the fireside drowsily curled

  We hear the whisper and watch the flame

  Burn blinkless and inscrutable.

  And then I know those other names

  That through my brain from cell to cell

  Echo — reverberated shout

  Of waiters mournful along corridors:

  But nobody carries the orders out,

  And the names (dear friends, your name and yours)

  Evoke no sign. But here I sit

  On the wide hearth, and there are you:

  That is enough and only true.

  The world and the friends that lived in it

  Are shadows: you alone remain

  Real in this drowsing room,

  Full of the whispers of distant rain

  And candles staring into the gloom.

  VALEDICTORY

  had remarked — how sharply one observes

  When life is disappearing round the curves

  Of yet another corner, out of sight! —

  I had remarked when it was “good luck” and “good night”

  And “a good journey to you,” on her face

  Certain enigmas penned in the hieroglyphs

  Of that half frown and queer fixed smile and trace

  Of clouded thought in those brown eyes,

  Always so happily clear of hows and ifs —

  My poor bleared mind! — and haunting whys.

  There I stood, holding her farewell hand,

  (Pressing my life and soul and all

  The world to one good-bye, till, small

  And smaller pressed, why there I’d stand

  Dead when they vanished with the sight of her).

  And I saw that she had grown aware,

  Queer puzzled face! of other things

  Beyond the present and her own young speed,

  Of yesterday and what new days might breed

  Monstrously when the future brings

  A charger with your late-lamented head:

  Aware of other people’s lives and will,

  Aware, perhaps, aware even of me ...

  The joyous hope of it! But still

  I pitied her; for it was sad to see

  A goddess shorn of her divinity.

  In the midst of her speed she had made pause,

  And doubts with all their threat of claws,

  Outstripped till now by her unconsciousness,

  Had seized on her; she was proved mortal now.

  “Live, only live! For you were meant

  Never to know a thought’s distress,

  But a long glad astonishment

  At the world’s beauty and your own.

  The pity of you, goddess, grown

  Perplexed and mortal.”

  Yet ... yet ... can it be

  That she is aware, perhaps, even of me?

  And life recedes, recedes; the curve is bare,

  My handkerchief flutters blankly in the air;

  And the question rumbles in the void:

  Was she aware, was she after all aware?

  LOVE SONG

  Dear absurd child — too dear to my cost I’ve found —

  God made your soul for pleasure, not for use:

  It cleaves no way, but angled broad obtuse,

  Impinges with a slabby-bellied sound

  Full upon life, and on the rind of things

  Rubs its sleek self and utters purr and snore

  And all the gamut of satisfied murmurings,

  Content with that, nor wishes anything more.

  A happy infant, daubed to the eyes in juice

  Of peaches that flush bloody at the core,

  Naked you bask upon a south-sea shore,

  While o’er your tumbling bosom the hair floats loose.

  The wild flowers bloom and die; the heavens go round

  With the song of wheeling planetary rings:

  You wriggle in the sun; each moment brings

  Its freight for you; in all things pleasures abound.

  You taste and smile, then this for the next pass over;

  And there’s no future for you and no past,

  And when, absurdly, death arrives at last,

  ‘Twill please you awhile to kiss your latest lover.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  All fly — yet who is misanthrope? —

  The actual men and things that pass

  Jostling, to wither as the grass

  So soon: and (be it heaven’s hope,

  Or poetry’s kaleidoscope,

  Or love or wine, at feast, at mass)

  Each owns a paradise of glass

  Where never a yearning heliotrope

  Pursues the sun’s ascent or slope;

  For the sun dreams there, and no time is or was.

  Like fauns embossed in our domain
,

  We look abroad, and our calm eyes

  Mark how the goatish gods of pain

  Revel; and if by grim surprise

  They break into our paradise,

  Patient we build its beauty up again.

  REVELATION

  At your mouth, white and milk-warm sphinx,

  I taste a strange apocalypse:

  Your subtle taper finger-tips

  Weave me new heavens, yet, methinks,

  I know the wiles and each iynx

  That brought me passionate to your lips:

  I know you bare as laughter strips

  Your charnel beauty; yet my spirit drinks

  Pure knowledge from this tainted well,

  And now hears voices yet unheard

  Within it, and without it sees

  That world of which the poets tell

  Their vision in the stammered word

  Of those that wake from piercing ecstasies.

  MINOAN PORCELAIN

  Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze

  All imperturbable do not

  Even make pretences to regard

  The justing absence of her stays,

  Where many a Tyrian gallipot

  Excites desire with spilth of nard.

  The bistred rims above the fard

  Of cheeks as red as bergamot

  Attest that no shamefaced delays

  Will clog fulfilment, nor retard

  Full payment of the Cyprian’s praise

  Down to the last remorseful jot.

  Hail priestess of we know not what

  Strange cult of Mycenean days!

  THE DECAMERON

  Noon with a depth of shadow beneath the trees

  Shakes in the heat, quivers to the sound of lutes:

  Half shaded, half sunlit, a great bowl of fruits

  Glistens purple and golden: the flasks of wine

  Cool in their panniers of snow: silks muffle and shine:

  Dim velvet, where through the leaves a sunbeam shoots,

  Rifts in a pane of scarlet: fingers tapping the roots

  Keep languid time to the music’s soft slow decline.

  Suddenly from the gate rises up a cry,

  Hideous broken laughter, scarce human in sound;

  Gaunt clawed hands, thrust through the bars despairingly,

  Clutch fast at the scented air, while on the ground

  Lie the poor plague-stricken carrions, who have found

  Strength to crawl forth and curse the sunshine and die.

  IN UNCERTAINTY TO A LADY

  I am not one of those who sip,

  Like a quotidian bock,

  Cheap idylls from a languid lip

  Prepared to yawn or mock.

  I wait the indubitable word,

  The great Unconscious Cue.

  Has it been spoken and unheard?

  Spoken, perhaps, by you ...?

  CRAPULOUS IMPRESSION

  (To J.S.)

  Still life, still life ... the high-lights shine

  Hard and sharp on the bottles: the wine

  Stands firmly solid in the glasses,

  Smooth yellow ice, through which there passes

  The lamp’s bright pencil of down-struck light.

  The fruits metallically gleam,

  Globey in their heaped-up bowl,

  And there are faces against the night

  Of the outer room — faces that seem

  Part of this still, still life ... they’ve lost their soul.

  And amongst these frozen faces you smiled,

  Surprised, surprisingly, like a child:

  And out of the frozen welter of sound

  Your voice came quietly, quietly.

  “What about God?” you said. “I have found

  Much to be said for Totality.

  All, I take it, is God: God’s all —

  This bottle, for instance ...” I recall,

  Dimly, that you took God by the neck —

  God-in-the-bottle — and pushed Him across:

  But I, without a moment’s loss

  Moved God-in-the-salt in front and shouted: “Check!”

  THE LIFE THEORETIC

  While I have been fumbling over books

  And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

  Other young men have been battling with the days

  And others have been kissing the beautiful women.

  They have brazen faces like battering-rams.

  But I who think about books and such —

  I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,

  And the women palsy me with fear.

  But when it comes to fumbling over books

  And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

  Why, there I am.

  But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,

  Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows.

  COMPLAINT OF A POET MANQUÉ

  We judge by appearance merely:

  If I can’t think strangely, I can at least look queerly.

  So I grew the hair so long on my head

  That my mother wouldn’t know me,

  Till a woman in a night-club said,

  As I was passing by,

  “Hullo, here comes Salome ...”

  I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass,

  And, oh Salome; there I was —

  Positively jewelled, half a vampire,

  With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily

  Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire

  Over the brink of the crag of sense,

  Looking down from perilous eminence

  Into a gulf of windy night.

  And there’s straw in my tempestuous hair,

  And I’m not a poet: but never despair!

  I’ll madly live the poems I shall never write.

  SOCIAL AMENITIES

  I am getting on well with this anecdote,

  When suddenly I recall

  The many times I have told it of old,

  And all the worked-up phrases, and the dying fall

  Of voice, well timed in the crisis, the note

  Of mock-heroic ingeniously struck —

  The whole thing sticks in my throat,

  And my face all tingles and pricks with shame

  For myself and my hearers.

  These are the social pleasures, my God!

  But I finish the story triumphantly all the same.

  TOPIARY

  Hailing sometimes to understand

  Why there are folk whose flesh should seem

  Like carrion puffed with noisome steam,

  Fly-blown to the eye that looks on it,

  Fly-blown to the touch of a hand;

  Why there are men without any legs,

  Whizzing along on little trollies

  With long long arms like apes’:

  Failing to see why God the Topiarist

  Should train and carve and twist

  Men’s bodies into such fantastic shapes:

  Yes, failing to see the point of it all, I sometimes wish

  That I were a fabulous thing in a fool’s mind,

  Or, at the ocean bottom, in a world that is deaf and blind,

  Very remote and happy, a great goggling fish.

  ON THE BUS

  Sitting on the top of the ‘bus,

  I bite my pipe and look at the sky.

  Over my shoulder the smoke streams out

  And my life with it.

  “Conservation of energy,” you say.

  But I burn, I tell you, I burn;

  And the smoke of me streams out

  In a vanishing skein of grey.

  Crash and bump ... my poor bruised body!

  I am a harp of twittering strings,

  An elegant instrument, but infinitely second-hand,

  And if I have not got phthisis it is only an accident.

  Droll phenomena!

  POINTS AND LINES

  Instants in the quiet, small sharp
stars,

  Pierce my spirit with a thrust whose speed

  Baffles even the grasp of time.

  Oh that I might reflect them

  As swiftly, as keenly as they shine.

  But I am a pool of waters, summer-still,

  And the stars are mirrored across me;

  Those stabbing points of the sky

  Turned to a thread of shaken silver,

  A long fine thread.

  PANIC

  The eyes of the portraits on the wall

  Look at me, follow me,

  Stare incessantly:

  I take it their glance means nothing at all?

  — Clearly, oh clearly! Nothing at all ...

  Out in the gardens by the lake

  The sleeping peacocks suddenly wake;

  Out in the gardens, moonlit and forlorn,

  Each of them sounds his mournful horn:

  Shrill peals that waver and crack and break.

  What can have made the peacocks wake?

  RETURN FROM BUSINESS

  Evenings in trains,

  When the little black twittering ghosts

  Along the brims of cuttings,

  Against the luminous sky,

  Interrupt with their hurrying rumour every thought

  Save that one is young and setting,

  Headlong westering,

  And there is no recapture.

  STANZAS

  Thought is an unseen net wherein our mind

  Is taken and vainly struggles to be free:

  Words, that should loose our spirit, do but bind

  New fetters on our hoped-for liberty:

  And action bears us onward like a stream

  Past fabulous shores, scarce seen in our swift course;

  Glorious — and yet its headlong currents seem

  Backwaters of some nobler purer force.

  There are slow curves, more subtle far than thought,

  That stoop to carry the grace of a girl’s breast;

  And hanging flowers, so exquisitely wrought

  In airy metal, that they seem possessed

  Of souls; and there are distant hills that lift

  The shoulder of a goddess towards the light;

  And arrowy trees, sudden and sharp and swift,

  Piercing the spirit deeply with delight.

  Would I might make these miracles my own!

 

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