Leda Aldous Huxley 2

Leda Aldous Huxley 2

He rolled

About his bed, in many a rich fold

Crumpling his Babylonian coverlet,

And yawned and stretched. The smell of his own sweat

Brought back to mind his Libyan desert-fane

Of mottled granite, with its endless train

Of pilgrim camels, reeking towards the sky

Ammonian incense to his hornèd deity;

The while their masters worshipped, offering

Huge teeth of ivory, while some would bring

Their Ethiop wives—sleek wineskins of black silk,

Jellied and huge from drinking asses’ milk

Through years of tropical idleness, to pray

For offspring (whom he ever sent away

With prayers unanswered, lest their ebon race

Might breed and blacken the earth’s comely face).

Noon pressed on him a hotter, heavier weight.

O Love in Idleness! how celibate

He felt! Libido like a nemesis

Scourged him with itching memories of bliss.

The satin of imagined skin was sleek

And supply warm against his lips and cheek,

And deep within soft hair’s dishevelled dusk

His eyelids fluttered; like a flowery musk

The scent of a young body seemed to float

Faintly about him, close and yet remote—

For perfume and the essence of music dwell

In other worlds among the asphodel

Of unembodied life. Then all had flown;

His dream had melted. In his bed, alone,

Jove sweating lay and moaned, and longed in vain

To still the pulses of his burning pain.

In sheer despair at last he leapt from bed,

Opened the window and thrust forth his head

Into Olympian ether. One fierce frown

Rifted the clouds, and he was looking down

Into a gulf of azure calm; the rack

Seethed round about, tempestuously black;

But the god’s eye could hold its angry thunders back.

There lay the world, down through the chasméd blue,

Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view;

And in the midst, bright as a summer’s day

At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay;

And Ocean round the world’s dim fringes tossed

His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost;

And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea

Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily.

And ’twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land,

Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand,

And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow

And the white, changeless silences of snow;

While here and there towns, like a living eye

Unclosed on earth’s blind face, towards the sky

Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight

Of his fair earth gave him but small delight

Now in his restlessness: its beauty could

Do nought to quench the fever in his blood.

Desire lends sharpness to his searching eyes;

Over the world his focused passion flies

Quicker than chasing sunlight on a day

Of storm and golden April. Far away

He sees the tranquil rivers of the East,

Mirrors of many a strange barbaric feast,

Where un-Hellenic dancing-girls contort

Their yellow limbs, and gibbering masks make sport

Under the moons of many-coloured light

That swing their lantern-fruitage in the night

Of overarching trees. To him it seems

An alien world, peopled by insane dreams.

But these are nothing to the monstrous shapes—

Not men so much as bastardy of apes—

That meet his eyes in Africa. Between

Leaves of grey fungoid pulp and poisonous green,

White eyes from black and browless faces stare.

Dryads with star-flowers in their woolly hair

Dance to the flaccid clapping of their own

Black dangling dugs through forests overgrown,

Platted with writhing creepers. Horrified,

He sees them how they leap and dance, or glide,

Glimpse after black glimpse of a satin skin,

Among unthinkable flowers, to pause and grin

Out through a trellis of suppurating lips,

Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips

And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes

Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes

Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh . . .

He turns

Northward his sickened sight. The desert burns

All life away. Here in the forkéd shade

Of twin-humped towering dromedaries laid,

A few gaunt folk are sleeping: fierce they seem

Even in sleep, and restless as they dream.

He would be fearful of a desert bride

As of a brown asp at his sleeping side,

Fearful of her white teeth and cunning arts.

Further, yet further, to the ultimate parts

Of the wide earth he looks, where Britons go

Painted among their swamps, and through the snow

Huge hairy snuffling beasts pursue their prey—

Fierce men, as hairy and as huge as they.

 

Bewildered furrows deepen the Thunderer’s scowl;

This world so vast, so variously foul—

Who can have made its ugliness? In what

Revolting fancy were the Forms begot

Of all these monsters? What strange deity—

So barbarously not a Greek!—was he

Who could mismake such beings in his own

Distorted image. Nay, the Greeks alone

Were men; in Greece alone were bodies fair,

Minds comely. In that all-but-island there,

Cleaving the blue sea with its promontories,

Lies the world’s hope, the seed of all the glories

That are to be; there, too, must surely live

She who alone can medicinably give

Ease with her beauty to the Thunderer’s pain.

Downwards he bends his fiery eyes again,

Glaring on Hellas. Like a beam of light,

His intent glances touch the mountain height

With passing flame and probe the valleys deep,

Rift the dense forest and the age-old sleep

Of vaulted antres on whose pebbly floor

Gallop the loud-hoofed Centaurs; and the roar

Of more than human shouting underground

Pulses in living palpable waves of sound

From wall to wall, until it rumbles out

Into the air; and at that hollow shout

That seems an utterance of the whole vast hill,

The shepherds cease their laughter and are still.

Cities asleep under the noonday sky

Stir at the passage of his burning eye;

And in their huts the startled peasants blink

At the swift flash that bursts through every chink

Of wattled walls, hearkening in fearful wonder

Through lengthened seconds for the crash of thunder—

Which follows not: they are the more afraid.

Jove seeks amain. Many a country maid,

Whose sandalled feet pass down familiar ways

Among the olives, but whose spirit strays

Through lovelier lands of fancy, suddenly

Starts broad awake out of her dream to see

A light that is not of the sun, a light

Darted by living eyes, consciously bright;

She sees and feels it like a subtle flame

Mantling her limbs with fear and maiden shame

And strange desire. Longing and terrified,

She hides her face, like a new-wedded bride

Who feels rough hands that seize and hold her fast;

And swooning falls. The terrible light has passed;

She wakes; the sun still shines, the olive trees

Tremble to whispering silver in the breeze

And all is as it was, save she alone

In whose dazed eyes this deathless light has shone:

For never, never from this day forth will she

In earth’s poor passion find felicity,

Or love of mortal man. A god’s desire

Has seared her soul; nought but the same strong fire

Can kindle the dead ash to life again,

And all her years will be a lonely pain.

 

Many a thousand had he looked upon,

Thousands of mortals, young and old; but none—

Virgin, or young ephebus, or the flower

Of womanhood culled in its full-blown hour—

Could please the Thunderer’s sight or touch his mind;

The longed-for loveliness was yet to find.

Had beauty fled, and was there nothing fair

Under the moon? The fury of despair

Raged in the breast of heaven’s Almighty Lord;

He gnashed his foamy teeth and rolled and roared

In bull-like agony. Then a great calm

Descended on him: cool and healing balm

Touched his immortal fury. He had spied

Young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side.

 

Even as she broke the river’s smooth expanse,

Leda was conscious of that hungry glance,

And knew it for an eye of fearful power

That did so hot and thunderously lour,

She knew not whence, on her frail nakedness.

Jove’s heart held but one thought: he must possess

That perfect form or die—possess or die.

Unheeded prayers and supplications fly,

Thick as a flock of birds, about his ears,

And smoke of incense rises; but he hears

Nought but the soft falls of that melody

Which is the speech of Leda; he can see

Nought but that almost spiritual grace

Which is her body, and that heavenly face

Where gay, sweet thoughts shine through, and eyes are bright

With purity and the soul’s inward light.

Have her he must: the teasel-fingered burr

Sticks not so fast in a wild beast’s tangled fur

As that insistent longing in the soul

Of mighty Jove. Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole

Vast universe was blotted from his thought

And nought remained but Leda’s laughter, nought

But Leda’s eyes. Magnified by his lust,

She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must . . .

His spirit worked; how should he gain his end

With most deliciousness? What better friend,

What counsellor more subtle could he find

Than lovely Aphrodite, ever kind

To hapless lovers, ever cunning, too,

In all the tortuous ways of love to do

And plan the best? To Paphos then! His will

And act were one; and straight, invisible,

He stood in Paphos, breathing the languid air

By Aphrodite’s couch. O heavenly fair

She was, and smooth and marvellously young!