Harold Acton

“ Bleak gaiety of flowers, whiffs
Of loneliness, ah loneliness
To ever clasp in my caress.
And shall I, poor mazed lunatic,
When memories come crowding thick,
Dangle a silly mandrake-root,
Swinging upon Time’s parachute?
Can thoughts have colours, colours thoughts,
Or do I wander midst the orts
Of half-forgotten nightmare-pyres?
We poets have exchanged our lyres
For heart-strings. We have souls to save
From boredom; come then, let’s be brave
And sing the baser passions, sing
Until the blood jerked up will ring
A matins for our lusts and shames,
And men will tingle at our names. ”

“ The fields of France will run in little rivers of their blood
And a few, all gashed and gory, will be sprawling in the mud.
Some are going to a land of death, and never to arise,
Some are going to their funerals; I roll with bloodshot eyes—
Boum, boum—boum, boum, boum.
[31]
And their lithe and youthful bodies will be broken mannequins
That the Doctors will be cutting, and the bandages and pins
Will take the place of cockroaches and rats with pinkish eyes
And the lice that suck the blood of every soldier ere he dies. ”

“ Our lives are cratered with great pocks and scabs,
Meticulously morselled into pangs,
Birth-scream, death-rattle, straggling years between,
Of childhood and uneasy puberty,
Of adolescence and maturity,
Resolve tormented into slow decay,
Crabbed, agued, rheumatic, cough our lives away.
And some, less fortunate, cough up their blood.
Then let us sing the world’s hilarity!
With plunging pistons let our laughter press,
Lumbering in massed squadrons, vitriol
To blister the anæmic orb of moon. ”

“ II. Malaguenas
BODY erect and arm defiantly curved,
she flings small steps to the clack of her castanets,
which snap their rhythm at one, more musical
than the slight scrape of the plectrum on mandoline strings.
She turns and yet so slowly, so haughtily ...
I wonder if she is an Empress masquerading
in this dim-lighted, ill-reputed café.
Click and the rhythm swims to Pedro’s head,
whose features contain the lineaments of appreciation.
Clack and the rhythm swims to Sancha’s head.
Whom then shall she favour with a rose? ”

“ Where faint sails clasp the ribbands of the sea.
But round his navel leaps the thick dark blood,
His chest is lapped in scarlet from the thighs,
Now purpled are those limbs afore as white
As veils of snow unflecked by merest breeze.
Cypris was fair: whilst her Adonis lived
The light would melt her body into song,
But with Adonis has her beauty died,
Died as a vaporous melody on a lute.
“Woe, woe, for Cypris!” all the mountains call,
The oak-trees answer: “For Adonis, woe!” ”

“ And somewhere, waking in the middle night
Soft longing arms spread out in love’s embrace
Find nothing, no one; in a dazed despair
Grope for a form to clasp, to touch, and then
Fall limply back in dismal loneliness.
Perpetual Penelopes unspin
The webs they spun meticulous at day.
Somewhere the honey-throated nightingale
Is voiceless for the burden of his love,
And somewhere it is good to be alive....
That sinister, that sombre poet-waif
So tired to tears and tearless, with those eyes{70}
Airily floating in eternal stare,
Bartered his soul for void philosophies. ”

“ A bed of balsam, bed of crisp lush flowers,
Whose poor crushed frozen lips compactly closed
Lie, flakes of ice, where once were flakes of fire,
Their loveliness a thing of agony.{8}
The moon has slanted off, and querulous ghosts
Hover along the brink of treacherous voids
And leap into this night of blinded eyes
(Blind now to pleasure’s lapping ecstasies) ;
This peacock-throated night whose stifling cries
Shudder and crack: ’tis Misery who calls
“Woe” to the black solemnities of sky
For loveliest Adonis—he is dead. ”

“ A labyrinth of azure-rifted clouds.
Where saffron-throated birds in whirring crowds
Would weep celestial music with their wings,
And tawny monkeys, tiny nimble things,
Would play their melodramas in the trees,
And throbbing swarms of honey-sucking bees
Vibrate the petalled air in droning waves,
And mingle with the murmuring of slaves. ”

“ And tears and blood on earth are turned to flowers:
The ruby blood brings forth the pursy rose,
The tears bring forth the air-white wind-flower,
For loveliest Adonis—he is dead.
No seemly couch, this lonely bed of leaves
For dead Adonis: beautiful in death
As one that stumbles on a slumber, falls
On downy-wingèd doze of braided air.{11} ”

“ The rustling of the clouds was pearling grey and silver by,
The lady of the clouds had dropped her muff, but on she trailed,
Her dainty gown was powder-blue, her train was dragon-tailed.
Her face was pale as curds and whey with sleepy-starey look,
The stars they must have bored her, for they were her only book—
And yet she seemed disdainful as the poplars bowed their plumes,
With all the feudal worship that a cloudy queen assumes.
Oh, why was it the poet glanced with envy in his eye
Above him at the clouds a-sailing grey and silver by?
[41] Escape (Rêvons: c’est l’heure—Verlaine) ”

“ The mountains lost their foreheads in the clouds;
The saffron-wingèd manticor of day, [34]
As constellations glimmered from their shrouds,
Had taken sudden fear and flown away.
On fallen blossoms stretched
Beneath ten mango groves
One Titan slept and snored
With nostrils wide as stoves.
Caparisoned in trappings massy gold,
Six Titanesses, heaped on mammoths, ride,
That grunt beneath their weight until they scold
And lacerate each fibrous, knotted hide.
The mountains tremble now,
And cedars spin like tops,
The satyrs hide in caves
Until the thudding stops. ”

“ But you may love the slender fleeting things,
The terrible music of the slipping hours,
If sordid Life has nothing else to give.
In each clock-tick there is a something new—
Unsatiated sweet imaginings,
Pianola dreams or orchidaceous flowers! ”

“ Which spits small Beardsley-drops about the street
And trickles down into the gutters fast,
Whilst I am left to numbly contemplate
The thin, white apron strings of cloud above,
Until the raucous luncheon-bell once more
Calls upon men to glut themselves with food.
Then hour on hour of thudded octaves; hour
On hour of doddering on yellow keys—
Long, shapeless valses, British Grenadiers,
Whilst water in the closet down below
Persists in gurgling semitone applause. [56]
The clouds grow sullen and the clerks return
As neat as they set out. ”

“ With eyes like pale grey membranes fixed and glazed
Ever he stares upon snow-silent fields,
And sweating skies that lean towards the earth
Like a great toper leaning at a bar.
Ever the mournful cries of mountain-apes
Echo, re-echo, and abysmally,
Ever the sour snow falls. And where’s the moon? ”

“ As lidless eyes for crows to peck at them.
And in the sloe-gin heat of summer days
The sky’s enamel is not quite Limoges
But almost; here and there a tiny scratch
Of soaring bird, some swallow on the wing
Does irritate the surface. Sheer below,
Fierce-biting on the edges, rise the trees;
Their taper-blossoms opulently lit
As girandoles that smoulder silently
Blue dust of incense; kohl-eyed evening
Sponges the face with dripping fragrances.
The vines and olives terraced on the hills
Melt on the dean horizon blurringly,
Where clouds descend in deluge, liquid-gold. ”

“ Shropshire, you know, with clouds of down,
This is a change from the gaping sheep
Grazing for ever, half asleep.
I have just come from the country wealds,
Shropshire, you know, with spinach fields,
Men there are honest and plump and red,
Here they are sallow for lack of bread.
But in the office the clock ticks fast
Telling how soon the hours flit past,
Middle-aged drudges the hour-long day
Hammer their pallid lives away. ”

“ The maid moves in to draw the window blind.
Her lips compressed have never known a curse.
Amazed, she sees frail drops are trickling down
What she had ever held to be a mask.
Half-pitying the old exhausted man
So infantine, yet sitting all alone
As in blue forest depths a mossy stone,
Where toads crouch like the voice in gramophone,
She brings him crumpets and a cup of tea.
III
“HE’S got hot lips when he plays jazz.” ”

“ White arms, mouths of carmine, ankles so slender
You might fear that they would snap candy-wise.
In the nebular effects of cigarette smoke,
Through the various hemispheres the eye turns,
One of us is breathing out rhythms
For the gratification of an audience.
Animated in the hum of conversation,
We achieve miracles.
When the veneer is shed and the heart lain bare
We turn men’s thoughts to Heaven or to Hell—
Cathedral Altar or the Brothel couch. ”

“ Jagged umber ridges freaked with lines of snow,
Bitumen lakes, austere as faded fire,
And vague waste lands where gypsies squatting low{17}
Croon winged abandoned musics that expire
Like bruised sweet herbs, gushed madness, agonies
Of lances hurled at pulseless arteries.
Like vapours anchored to a mountain’s thigh
Legioned, remote and abstract, yet withal
Evocative of an infinity—
Beauty becoming metaphysical—
This Phœnix-land breeds new birds in the brain
From ash, for I have never been to Spain. ”

“ And through each weft you hear a piece of wind,
A tiny concertina-push of sound
And then an inrush, sobbing gently inward.
Why do we drown in customs, why become
Lost dying flames and strangers to the skies
Whose beams with clouds like wingèd chariots fly?
Why do we climb the towers which break our knees,
Horrible towers from which, when we look down
We wish to hurl ourselves? ”

“ And rows of beans and artichokes, a field
Interminably patterned, jigged and reeled
Along the corridors of memory.
“Is childhood happy? dismal fallacy!
And yet I am not one of those who think
That lilies smell not, orange-flowers stink.” ”

“ With mental clouds through cannonades of hours,
With foamless islands legioned with lush flow’rs,
Prismatic juicy glades bee-pasturing.
“In case of danger you must pull the ring.”
A girl arranges a mellifluous grin:
Eternal teas and afternoons begin
To lurk within the forests of the mind
With vividness that cuts it like a wind. ”

“ Or a Coon’s banana cakewalk
(Come and kiss me, ducky, do!) .
(A vision of red-mouths, outthrust bellies in a leafy
créme-de-menthe tropic.)
Wind Instruments
Trombone
I am the brawny man without a brain
Who yawns a heartfelt music mournfully. ”

“ And prowling beasts will turn in haste and flee
Before their weary footsteps through the night.
Our quickened hearts have grated on themselves,
We groin with lappered morphews of the mind,
Our wanton mirth has frozen into sorrow,
And we had thought to fashion of our joy
Round crackling pearls to pelt our wine-drenched loves.
But we were to have sung hilarity!
Our clowns are turned into tragedians,
And Pierrot’s chalk-white face is crinkled up
With bitter weeping; roguish Harlequin,
His apple cheeks all wet and blobbed with tears,
Wanders the streets of Bergamo alone. ”

“ Of saints are frequent—in their thoughtfulness
The citizens will give their saint a dress.
They lift her from the gilded canopy,
Studded in far Peru, on which she stands,
Sumptuous, realistic, in each eye
A gaping jewel; sprouting from her hands
Are paper flowers—in their thoughtfulness
They give their saint a new magenta dress.
The ceremony done, and people doff
Their piety: serrated streets resound
With gossip, vacuous laughter, idle scoff.
Like strips of tape the scattered crowds confound,
Mantillas and a rout of dusky hair,
Stray thoughts jerk off and clatter in the air.... ”

“ Against the temples of humanity;
A network of pure electricity
Installed for quick transmission through the world
Pours a perpetual electric day.
Men plough their fields by searchlights from the skies,
By searchlights blatant, geometrical,
As fingers from each god-like aeroplane
Pointed to each created mass of flesh
Accusing and forewarning.{28}
O empresses of jade who slumber on your cushions,
Who slumber delicately on your cushions! ”

“ Of clouds that lust enamoured of the stars,
Shimmering jewelled pinpricks wistfully
Awed by the vastness and the mystery
Wrapped palpitating round. Then fold on fold
The shoulders of the hills are outlined bold
With pallid smoothness, undulating far
To where the empty, trackless deserts are.
[51] Part II
URBANITIES
[52]
[53] Sabbath Morning Rain
LIKE diamond on window pane,
The sky is jagged by spears of rain.
As splashed by layers of grease and lard
The slate-roofs glitter cold and hard.
And people drag their damp-soled feet
Like sacks of dough along the street. ”

“ Some fired with sulphurous glow, and some askew
Sway perilously, like a drunkard’s hat.
But what are these with puckered, pointed ears
That flit among the crowds like strips of tape?
They seem to stumble into tragedies. ”

“ Fall on my Sunday best.” How like a woman’s kiss
It seemed to slither nudely down his throat.
Glutinous amber. The tea, when milk had flecked it,
Softening the vulgar cairngorm to a mere distinguished
Nebulosity (pompous) , nubiferousness (more pompous still) ,
Was almost worth the drinking, although it lacked
The romance of being specified Chinese. ”