Hugh Selwyn Mauberley | Page 3

her worshippers,
When our two

dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
1920
(MAUBERLEY)
I.
TURNED from the "eau-forte
Par Jaquemart"
To the strait head

Of Mcssalina:
"His true Penelope
Was Flaubert",
And his tool
The engraver's
Firmness,
Not the full smile,
His art, but an art
In profile;
Colourless
Pier Francesca,
Pisanello lacking the skill
To forge
Achaia.
II.
_"Qu'est ce qu'ils savent de l'amour, et
gu'est ce qu'ils peuvent
comprendre?
S'ils ne comprennent pas la poèsie,
s'ils ne sentent pas
la musique, qu'est ce
qu'ils peuvent comprendre de cette passion
en
comparaison avec laquelle la rose
est grossière et le parfum des
violettes un
tonnerre?"_ CAID ALI
FOR three years, diabolus in the scale,
He drank ambrosia,
All
passes, ANANGKE prevails,
Came end, at last, to that Arcadia.
He had moved amid her phantasmagoria,
Amid her galaxies,

NUKTIS AGALMA
Drifted....drifted precipitate,
Asking time to be rid of....
Of his
bewilderment; to designate
His new found orchid....
To be certain....certain...
(Amid aerial flowers)..time for

arrangements--
Drifted on
To the final estrangement;
Unable in the supervening blankness
To sift TO AGATHON from
the chaff
Until he found his seive...
Ultimately, his seismograph:
--Given, that is, his urge
To convey the relation
Of eye-lid and
cheek-bone
By verbal manifestation;
To present the series
Of curious heads in medallion--
He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,
The wide-banded irises
And
botticellian sprays implied
In their diastasis;
Which anæsthesis, noted a year late,
And weighed, revealed his great
affect,
(Orchid), mandate
Of Eros, a retrospect.
. . .
Mouths biting empty air,
The still stone dogs,
Caught in
metamorphosis were,
Left him as epilogues.
"THE AGE DEMANDED"
VIDE POEM II.
FOR this agility chance found
Him of all men, unfit
As the
red-beaked steeds of
The Cytheræan for a chain-bit.
The glow of porcelain
Brought no reforming sense
To his
perception
Of the social inconsequence.
Thus, if her colour
Came against his gaze,
Tempered as if
It were
through a perfect glaze
He made no immediate application
Of this to relation of the state

To the individual, the month was more temperate
Because this beauty

had been
......
The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand
Burst in upon the porcelain
revery:
Impetuous troubling
Of his imagery.
......
Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,
His sense of graduations,

Quite out of place amid
Resistance to current exacerbations
Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity
Gradually led him to the
isolation
Which these presents place
Under a more tolerant, perhaps,
examination.
By constant elimination
The manifest universe
Yielded an armour

Against utter consternation,
A Minoan undulation,
Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances

Strengthened him against
The discouraging doctrine of chances
And his desire for survival,
Faint in the most strenuous moods,

Became an Olympian _apathein_
In the presence of selected
perceptions.
A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,
The unexpected palms

Destroying, certainly, the artist's urge,
Left him delighted with the
imaginary
Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,
Incapable of the least utterance or composition,
Emendation,
conservation of the "better tradition",
Refinement of medium,
elimination of superfluities,
August attraction or concentration.
Nothing in brief, but maudlin confession
Irresponse to human
aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial
manna
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah.

Ultimate affronts to human redundancies;
Non-esteem of self-styled "his betters"
Leading, as he well knew,

To his final
Exclusion from the world of letters.
IV.
SCATTERED Moluccas
Not knowing, day to day,
The first day's
end, in the next noon;
The placid water
Unbroken by the Simoon;
Thick foliage
Placid beneath warm suns,
Tawn fore-shores

Washed in the cobalt of oblivions;
Or through dawn-mist
The grey and rose
Of the juridical

Flamingoes;
A consciousness disjunct,
Being but this overblotted
Series
Of
intermittences;
Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforecasted beach:
Then on an oar

Read this:
"I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist."
MEDALLION
LUINI in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest
with her clear soprano.
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As
Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.
Honey-red, closing the face-oval
A basket-work of braids which seem
as if they were
Spun in King Minos' hall
From metal, or intractable
amber;
The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its suave bounding-line, as


Beneath half-watt rays
The eyes turn topaz.
THIS EDITION OF 200 COPIES IS THE THIRD BOOK
OF THE OVID PRESS: WAS PRINTED BY JOHN
RODKER: AND COMPLETED APRIL
23RD. 1920
OF THIS EDITION:--
15 Copies on Japan Vellum numbered 1-15 & not for sale.
20 Signed
copies numbered 16-35
165 Unsigned copies numbered 36-200
The initials & colophon by E. Wadsworth.
The · OVID · PRESS
43 BELSIZE PARK GARDENS
LONDON N.W.3
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