Leda Aldous Huxley 5

Leda Aldous Huxley 5

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

 

SWAN, Swan,

Yesterday you were

The whitest of things in this dark winter.

To-day the snow has made of your plumes

An unwashed pocket handkercher,

An unwashed pocket handkercher . . .

“Lancashire, to Lancashire!”—

Tune of the antique trains long ago:

Each summer holiday a milestone

Backwards, backwards:—

Tenby, Barmouth, and year by year

All the different hues of the sea,

Blue, green and blue.

But on this river of muddy jade

There swims a yellow swan,

And along the bank the snow lies dazzlingly white.

 

 

 

 

A MELODY BY SCARLATTI

 

HOW clear under the trees,

How softly the music flows,

Rippling from one still pool to another

Into the lake of silence.

 

 

 

 

A SUNSET

 

OVER against the triumph and the close—

Amber and green and rose—

Of this short day,

The pale ghost of the moon grows living-bright

Once more, as the last light

Ebbs slowly away.

Darkening the fringes of these western glories

The black phantasmagories

Of cloud advance

With noiseless footing—vague and villainous shapes,

Wrapped in their ragged fustian capes,

Of some grotesque romance.

But overhead where, like a pool between

Dark rocks, the sky is green

And clear and deep,

Floats windlessly a cloud, with curving breast

Flushed by the fiery west,

In god-like sleep . . .

And in my mind opens a sudden door

That lets me see once more

A little room

With night beyond the window, chill and damp,

And one green-lighted lamp

Tempering the gloom,

While here within, close to me, touching me

(Even the memory

Of my desire

Shakes me like fear), you sit with scattered hair;

And all your body bare

Before the fire

Is lapped about with rosy flame. . . . But still,

Here on the lonely hill,

I walk alone;

Silvery green is the moon’s lamp overhead,

The cloud sleeps warm and red,

And you are gone.

 

 

 

 

LIFE AND ART

 

YOU have sweet flowers for your pleasure;

You laugh with the bountiful earth

In its richness of summer treasure:

Where now are your flowers and your mirth?

Petals and cadenced laughter,

Each in a dying fall,

Droop out of life; and after

Is nothing; they were all.

 

But we from the death of roses

That three suns perfume and gild

With a kiss, till the fourth discloses

A withered wreath, have distilled

The fulness of one rare phial,

Whose nimble life shall outrun

The circling shadow on the dial,

Outlast the tyrannous sun.

 

 

 

 

FIRST PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

 

A POOR degenerate from the ape,

Whose hands are four, whose tail’s a limb,

I contemplate my flaccid shape

And know I may not rival him,

 

Save with my mind—a nimbler beast

Possessing a thousand sinewy tails,

A thousand hands, with which it scales,

Greedy of luscious truth, the greased

 

Poles and the coco palms of thought,

Thrids easily through the mangrove maze

Of metaphysics, walks the taut

Frail dangerous liana ways

 

That link across wide gulfs remote

Analogies between tree and tree;

Outruns the hare, outhops the goat;

Mind fabulous, mind sublime and free!

 

But oh, the sound of simian mirth!

Mind, issued from the monkey’s womb,

Is still umbilical to earth,

Earth its home and earth its tomb.

 

 

 

 

SECOND PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

 

IF, O my Lesbia, I should commit,

Not fornication, dear, but suicide,

My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)

Would drift face upwards on the oily tide

With the other garbage, till it putrefied.

 

But you, if all your lovers’ frozen hearts

Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown—

Your maiden modesty would float face down,

And men would weep upon your hinder parts.

 

’Tis the Lord’s doing. Marvellous is the plan

By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.

One law He made for woman, one for man:

We bow the head and do not understand.

 

 

 

 

FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

 

A MILLION million spermatozoa,

All of them alive:

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive.

 

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—

But the One was Me.

 

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,

Taking ark while the others remained outside!

Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,

If you’d quietly died!

 

 

 

 

NINTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG

 

GOD’S in His Heaven: He never issues

(Wise Man!) to visit this world of ours.

Unchecked the cancer gnaws our tissues,

Stops to lick chops and then again devours.

 

Those find, who most delight to roam

’Mid castles of remotest Spain,

That there’s, thank Heaven, no place like home;

So they set out upon their travels again.

 

Beauty for some provides escape,

Who gain a happiness in eyeing

The gorgeous buttocks of the ape

Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

 

And some to better worlds than this

Mount up on wings as frail and misty

As passion’s all-too-transient kiss

(Though afterwards—oh, _omne animal triste_!)

 

But I, too rational by half

To live but where I bodily am.

Can only do my best to laugh.

Can only sip my misery dram by dram.

 

While happier mortals take to drink,

A dolorous dipsomaniac,

Fuddled with grief I sit and think,

Looking upon the bile when it is black.

 

Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor!

We’ll pledge our Empire vast across the flood:

For Blood, as all men know, than Water’s thicker,

But water’s wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.