Hugh Selwyn Mauberley | Page 2

hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old
lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and
high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V.
THERE died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old
bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
YEUX GLAUQUES
GLADSTONE was still respected,
When John Ruskin produced

"Kings Treasuries"; Swinburne
And Rossetti still abused.
Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice
When that faun's head of hers

Became a pastime for
Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons
Have preserved her eyes;
Still, at the Tate,
they teach
Cophetua to rhapsodize;
Thin like brook-water,
With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat
was still-born
In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same
Still darts out faun-like from the
half-ruin'd fac
Questing and passive ....
"Ah, poor Jenny's case"...
Bewildered that a world
Shows no surprise
At her last maquero's

Adulteries.
"SIENA MI FE', DISFECEMI MAREMMA"
AMONG the pickled foetuses and bottled bones,
Engaged in
perfecting the catalogue,
I found the last scion of the
Senatorial
families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers'

Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high
stool in a pub . . .
But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed--

Tissue preserved--the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the
whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;
Headlam for uplift; Image
impartially imbued
With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the
Church.
So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood",
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his
contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.
BRENNBAUM.
THE sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness
from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed
only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum
"The Impeccable".
MR. NIXON
IN the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht
Mr. Nixon advised me
kindly, to advance with fewer
Dangers of delay. "Consider
"Carefully the reviewer.
"I was as poor as you are;
"When I began I got, of course,

"Advance on royalties, fifty at first", said Mr. Nixon,
"Follow me,
and take a column,
"Even if you have to work free.
"Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred
"I rose in eighteen
months;
"The hardest nut I had to crack
"Was Dr. Dundas.

"I never mentioned a man but with the view
"Of selling my own
works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature
"It gives no man a
sinecure."
And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,

There's nothing in it.
0. * *
Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:
Don't kick
against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The "Nineties" tried your game

And died, there's nothing in it.
X.
BENEATH the sagging roof
The stylist has taken shelter,
Unpaid,
uncelebrated,
At last from the world's welter
Nature receives him,
With a placid and uneducated mistress
He
exercises his talents
And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions
Leaks through its
thatch;
He offers succulent cooking;
The door has a creaking latch.
XI.
"CONSERVATRIX of Milésien"
Habits of mind and feeling,

Possibly. But in Ealing
With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?
No, "Milésien" is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her

Older than those her grandmother
Told her would fit her station.
XII.
"DAPHNE with her thighs in bark
Stretches toward me her leafy
hands",--
Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room
I await
The Lady Valentine's commands,

Knowing my coat has never been
Of precisely the fashion
To
stimulate, in her,
A durable passion;
Doubtful, somewhat, of the value
Of well-gowned approbation
Of
literary effort,
But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation:
Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of
blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending;
A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention,
A modulation toward the
theatre,
Also, in the case of revolution,
A possible friend and
comforter.
0. * *
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
"Which the highest cultures have
nourished"
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since
superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
ENVOI (1919)
GO, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes;

Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were
there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy
upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.
Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but
that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As
roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and
all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.
Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the
song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair
as hers,

Might, in new ages, gain