Part 10 (1/2)

Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest, If that might be, when she was never less, Moving or still, than perfect loveliness.”

Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met his eyes in Africa (this is the pa.s.sage of surpa.s.sing ugliness) where

”Among unthinkable flowers, they 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 ta.s.selled flesh”

to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die.

Have her he must:

”G.o.ds, 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 l.u.s.t, She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must....”

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

” ... While she, Who was to be their victim, joyously Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill And every fear and all, save only this: That she was young, and it was perfect bliss To be alive where suns so goldenly s.h.i.+ne, And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine, And the cicadas sing from morn till night, And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ...

Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay In the deep gra.s.s, while the sun kissed away The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine As those old images of the G.o.ds that s.h.i.+ne With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years By the touching lips of countless wors.h.i.+ppers, Her body was; and the sun's golden heat Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue, Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky s.h.i.+mmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily, And hidden in the gra.s.s, cicadas shrill Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until A listener might wonder if they cried In his own head or in the world outside.”

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed G.o.d.

”Crouched on the flowery ground Young Leda lay, and to her side did press The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ...

Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim Austerity of virginal flank and limb His curved and florid beauty, till she felt That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt The bones and marrow of her strength away....

And over her the swan shook slowly free The folded glory of his wings, and made A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade To be her veil and keep her from the shame Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.

Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain, Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again.”

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and pa.s.sionate and are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human pa.s.sions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on ”the convex mound of one vast kidney” of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers'

songs he likes to sing of man as ”a poor degenerate from the ape” and of G.o.d as a fool.

”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.”

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his role of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

”Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous b.u.t.tocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.”

But _Frascati's_ shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

”Bubble-breasted swells the dome Of this my spiritual home, From whose nave the chandelier, Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.

We in the round balcony sit, Lean o'er and look into the pit Where feed the human bears beneath, Champing with their gilded teeth.

What negroid holiday makes free With such priapic revelry?

What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?

What G.o.ds like wooden stalagmites?

What stream of blood or kidney pie?

What blasts of Bantu melody?

Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.

And there we sit in blissful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm.”