Leda Aldous Huxley 9

Leda Aldous Huxley 9

Atrocious memory! For memory should be

Of things secure and dead, being past,

Not living and disquieting. At last

He threw the nightmare of his blankets off.

 

Cloudy ammonia, camels in your bath:

The earth hath bubbles as the water hath:

He was not of them, too, too solidly

Always himself. What foam of kissing lips,

Pouting, parting with the ghost of the seven sips

One smacks for hiccoughs!

Pitiable to be

Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.

 

There was his scar, a panel of old rose

Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;

Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,

Permanent souvenir of the Great War.

One of God’s jokes, typically good,

That wound of his. How perfect that he should

Have suffered it for—what?

 

 

 

 

II

OH, the dear front page of the _Times_!

Chronicle of essential history:

Marriage, birth, and the sly mysteriousness

Of lovers’ greetings, of lovers’ meetings,

And dirty death, impartially paid

To courage and the old decayed.

But nobody had been born to-day,

Nobody married that he knew,

Nobody died and nobody even killed;

He felt a little aggrieved—

Nobody even killed.

But, to make up: “Tuesday, Colchester train:

Wanted Brown Eyes’ address, with a view to meeting again.”

Dear Brown Eyes, it had been nice of her

To talk so friendly to a lonely traveller!

Why is it nobody ever talks to me?

 

And now, here was a letter from Helen.

Better to open it rather than thus

Dwell in a long muse and maze

Over the scrawled address and the postmark,

Staring stupidly.

Love—was there no escape?

Was it always there, always there?

The same huge and dominant shape,

Like Windsor Castle leaning over the plain;

And the letter a vista cut through the musing forest,

At the end the old Round Tower,

Singing its refrain:

Here we are, here we are, here we are again!

 

The life so short, so vast love’s science and art,

So many conditions of felicity.

“Darling, will you become a part

Of my poor physiology?

And, my beloved, may I have

The latchkey of your history?

And while this corpse is what it is

Dear, we must share geographies.”

So many conditions of felicity.

And now time was a widening gulf and space,

A fixed between, and fate still kept them apart.

Her voice quite gone; distance had blurred her face.

The life so short, so vast love’s science and art.

 

So many conditions—and yet, once,

Four whole days,

Four short days of perishing time,

They had fulfilled them all.

But that was long ago, ah! long ago,

Like the last horse bus, or the Christmas pantomime,

Or the Bells, oh, the Bells, of Edgar Allan Poe.

 

 

 

 

III

“HELEN, your letter, proving, I suppose,

That you exist somewhere in space, who knows?

Somewhere in time, perhaps, arrives this morning,

Reminding me with a note of Lutheran warning

That faith’s the test, not works. Works!—any fool

Can do them if he tries to; but what school

Can teach one to credit the ridiculous,

The palpably non-existent? So with us,

Votaries of the copulative cult,

In this affair of love, _quicumque vult_,

Whoever would be saved, must love without

Adjunct of sense or reason, must not doubt

Although the deity be far removed,

Remote, invisible; who is not loved

Best by voluptuous works, but by the faith

That lives in absence and the body’s death.

I have no faith, and even in love remain

Agnostic. Are you here? The fact is plain,

Constated by the heavenly vision of you,

Maybe by the mouth’s warm touch; and that I love you,

I then most surely know, most painfully.

But now you’ve robbed the temple, leaving me

A poor invisibility to adore,

Now that, alas, you’re vanished, gone . . . no more;

You take my drift. I only ask your leave

To be a little unfaithful—not to you,

My dear, to whom I was and will be true,

But to your absence. Hence no cause to grieve;

For absence may be cheated of a kiss—

Lightly and laughing—with no prejudice

To the so longed-for presence, which some day

Will crown the presence of

Le Vostre J.

(As dear unhappy Troilus would say).”

 

 

 

 

IV

OH, the maggots, the maggots in his brains!

Words, words and words.

A birth of rhymes and the strangest,

The most unlikely superfœtations—

New deep thoughts begot by a jingle upon a pun,

New worlds glimpsed through the window of a word

That has ceased, somehow, to be opaque.

All the muses buzzing in his head.

Autobiography crystallised under his pen, thus:

 

“When I was young enough not to know youth,

I was a Faun whose loves were Byzantine

Among stiff trees. Before me naked Truth

Creaked on her intellectual legs, divine

In being inhuman, and was never caught

By all my speed; for she could outrun thought.

 

Now I am old enough to know I am young,

I chase more plastic beauties, but inspire

Life in their clay, purity in their dung

With the creative breath of my desire.

And utter truth is now made manifest

When on a certain sleeping face and breast

 

The moonlight dreams and silver chords are strung,

And a god’s hand touches the aching lyre.”

He read it through: a pretty, clinquant thing,

Like bright spontaneous bird-song in the spring,

Instinct with instinct, full of dewy freshness.

Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;

If he chose to—but it was too much trouble,

And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,

Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned

In pleasant seas . . . to rise again and find

One o’clock struck and his unshaven face

Still like a record in a musical box,

And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury.

 

 

 

 

V

I.

THE Open Sesame of “Master John,”

And then the broad silk bosom of Aunt Loo.

“Dear John, this is a pleasure. How are you?”

“Well, thanks. Where’s Uncle Will?” “Your uncle’s gone

To Bath for his lumbago. He gets on

As well as anyone can hope to do

At his age—for you know he’s seventy-two;

But still, he does his bit. He sits upon

 

The local Tribunal at home, and takes

Parties of wounded soldiers out in brakes

To see the country. And three times a week

He still goes up to business in the City;

And then, sometimes, at night he has to speak

In Village Halls for the War Aims Committee.”

 

II.

“Well, have you any news about the war?

What do they say in France?” “I daren’t repeat

The things they say.” “You see we’ve got some meat

For you, dear John. Really, I think before

To-day I’ve had no lamb this year. We score

By getting decent vegetables to eat,

Sent up from home. This is a good receipt:

The touch of garlic makes it. Have some more.