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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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} ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The ponderous bourdon of some heart is stirred.
Men live their packed exasperated lives,
Callous and unfamiliar, yet each knows,
In all these sordid chiaroscuro hives,
His neighbour’s pleasures and his neighbour’s woes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some luckless women bear their children blind
And some hare-lipped and others lunatick
With soft and fumbling brains and shifting eyes,
Who dandle curly flowers, their lolling tongues
Clicking and moist with unrestrained saliva. ”

“ With froth of flowers we have been rich—
The globuled frog-spawn on the ditch
Was mottled with our wonder; vast
Moist moans of raping bees’ repast
Have sluiced our languid afternoons
Like ripples crawling on lagoons. ”

“ The light is cruel: it is hard to read
The letters on these stones, but, lo, the words:
“Lord Jesus Christ” and further “soul”; what birds
Erased the script with droppings? and what weed
Has wrested from these crevices a home?
“In month of Athyr” ... “Lucius fell asleep”....
His age is mentioned: he was young; and deep
Beneath the damaged parts, as in a foam
Of centuries I see, disfigured, “tears.”
Then “tears” again, “for us his friends who weep”.... ”

“ My languid frame drown in their drunkenness?
I crave: my hair of flowers not created
To strew oblivion of human anguish,
But gold, for ever virgin of the spices,
In cruel flashes and in heavy pallor,
Will mark the sterile chilliness of metals,
Having reflected you, my native jewels,
Vases and arms, from solitary childhood.
Nurse. Pardon, oh queen, for age eclipsed the plea
With which you deign to vindicate my mind
Grown sallow as an old or gloomy book....{76}
Hérodiade. ”

“ Before the screech-owl adds to ruin-glooms,
The merry robin-redbreast and the wren
Will trill their notes in Bayswater again.
“The worst of influenza’s over now,
But rents are high ... the weather is not cold
Considering the month of year, but how
The war has broken through our lives! how old”.... ”

“ The wells bewail Adonis on the hills.
Echo resounds “Ai, ai ... Adonis dead ...
Most beautiful Adonis ... he is dead.”
As Venus saw the wasting limbs, the wound{10}
Gashed in the whiteness of her loved one’s thighs,
She clasped him to her, moaning supply warm
Against his chilled inertness:
“Farewell, Adonis ”