Олдос Хаксли: Leda

NIGHT is a void about me; I lie alone;
And water drips, like an idiot clicking his tongue,
Senselessly, ceaselessly, endlessly drips
Into the waiting silence, grown
Emptier for this small inhuman sound.
My love is gone, my love who is tender and young.
O smooth warm body! O passionate lips!
I have stretched forth hands in the dark and nothing found:
The silence is huge as the sky—I lie alone—
My narrow room, a darkness that knows no bound.
How shall I fill this measureless
Deep void that the taking away
Of a child’s slim beauty has made?
Slender she is and small, but the loneliness
She has left is a night no stars allay,
And I am cold and afraid.
Long, long ago, cut off from the wolfish pack,
From the warm, immediate touch of friends and mate,
Lost and alone, alone in the utter black
Of a forest night, some far–off, beast–like man,
Cowed by the cold indifferent hate
Of the northern silence, crouched in fear,
When through his bleared and suffering mind
A sudden tremor of comfort ran,
And the void was filled by a rushing wind,
And he breathed a sense of something friendly and near,
And in privation the life of God began.
Love, from your loss shall a god be born to fill
The emptiness, where once you were,
With friendly knowledge and more than a lover’s will
To ease despair?
Shall I feed longing with what it hungers after,
Seeing in earth and sea and air
A lover’s smiles, hearing a lover’s laughter,
Feeling love everywhere?
The night drags on. Darkness and silence grow,
And with them my desire has grown,
My bitter need. Alas, I know,
I know that here I lie alone.

BENEATH the sunlight and blue of all–but Autumn
The grass sleeps goldenly; woodland and distant hill
Shine through the gauzy air in a dust of golden pollen,
And even the glittering leaves are almost still.
Scattered on the grass, like a ragman’s bundles carelessly dropped,
Men sleep outstretched or, sprawling, bask in the sun;
Here glows a woman’s bright dress and here a child is sitting,
And I lie down and am one of the sleepers, one
Like the rest of this tumbled crowd. Do they all, I wonder,
Feel anguish grow with the calm day’s slow decline,
Longing, as I, for a shattering wind, a passion
Of bodily pain to be the soul’s anodyne?

THE irony of being two … !
Grey eyes, wide open suddenly,
Regard me and enquire; I see a face
Grave and unquiet in tenderness.
Heart–rending question of women—never answered:
“Tell me, tell me, what are you thinking of?”
Oh, the pain and foolishness of love!
What can I do but make my old grimace,
Ending it with a kiss, as I always do?

DIAPHENIA, drunk with sleep,
Drunk with pleasure, drunk with fatigue,
Feels her Corydon’s fingers creep—
Ring–finger, middle finger, index, thumb—
Strummingly over the smooth sleek drum
Of her thorax.
Meanwhile Händel’s Gigue
Turns in Corydon’s absent mind
To Yakka–Hoola.
She can find
No difference in the thrilling touch
Of one who, now, in everything
Is God–like. “Was there ever such
Passion as ours?”
His pianoing
Gives place to simple arithmetic’s
Simplest constatations:—six
Letters in Gneiss and three in Gnu:
Luncheon to–day cost three and two;
In a year—he couldn’t calculate
Three–sixty–five times thirty–eight,
Figuring with printless fingers on
Her living parchment.
“Corydon!
I faint, faint, faint at your dear touch.
Say, is it possible … to love too much?”

SIMEON, the withered stylite,
Sat gloomily looking down
Upon each roof and skylight
In all the seething town.
And in every upper chamber,
On roofs, where the orange flowers
Make weary men remember
The perfume of long–dead hours,
He saw the wine–drenched riot
Of harlots and human beasts,
And how celestial quiet
Was shattered by their feasts.
The steam of fetid vices
From a thousand lupanars,
Like smoke of sacrifices,
Reeked up to the heedless stars.
And the saint from his high fastness
Of purity apart
Cursed them and their unchasteness,
And envied them in his heart.

A CREAM of phosphorescent light
Floats on the wash that to and fro
Slides round his feet—enough to show
Many a pendulous stalactite
Of naked mucus, whorls and wreaths
And huge festoons of mottled tripes
And smaller palpitating pipes
Through which a yeasty liquor seethes.
Seated upon the convex mound
Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays
And sings his canticles and hymns,
Making the hollow vault resound
God’s goodness and mysterious ways,
Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.

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.

HOW clear under the trees,
How softly the music flows,
Rippling from one still pool to another
Into the lake of silence.

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.

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.