The Heptalogia | Page 4

hold bright gold, engrossible?By spy--spring's air takes there no care?To wave the heath-flower's glossy bell!
XI
But gold bells chime in time there, coined--?Gold! Old Sphinx winks there--"Read my screed!"?Doctrine Jews learn, use, burn for, joined?(Through new craft's stealth) with health and wealth--?At once all three purloined!
XII
I rose with dawn, to pawn, no doubt,?(Miss this chance, glance untried aside?)?John's shirt, my--no! Ay, so--the lout!?Let yet the door gape, store on floor?And not a soul about?
XIII
Such men lay traps, perhaps--and I'm?Weak--meek--mild--child of woe, you know!?But theft, I doubt, my lout calls crime.?Shrink? Think! Love's dawn in pawn--you spawn?Of Jewry! Just in time!
V
OFF THE PIER
I
One last glance at these sands and stones!?Time goes past men, and lives to his liking,?Steals, and ruins, and sometimes atones.?Why should he be king, though, and why not I king??There now, that wind, like a swarm of sick drones!
II
Is it heaven or mere earth (come!) that moves so and moans? Oh, I knew, when you loved me, my soul was in flowerage-- Now the frost comes; from prime, though, I watched through to nones, Read love's litanies over--his age was not our age!?No more flutes in this world for me now, dear! trombones.
III
All that youth once denied and made mouths at, age owns.?Facts put fangs out and bite us; life stings and grows viperous; And time's fugues are a hubbub of meaningless tones.?Once we followed the piper; now why not the piper us??Love, grown grey, plays mere solos; we want antiphones.
IV
And we sharpen our wits up with passions for hones,?Melt down loadstars for magnets, use women for whetstones, Learn to bear with dead calms by remembering cyclones,?Snap strings short with sharp thumbnails, till silence begets tones, Burn our souls out, shift spirits, turn skins and change zones;
V
Then the heart, when all's done with, wakes, whimpers, intones Some lost fragment of tune it thought sweet ere it grew sick; (Is it life that disclaims this, or death that disowns?)?Mere dead metal, scrawled bars--ah, one touch, you make music! Love's worth saving, youth doubts, but experience depones.
VI
In the darkness (right Dickens) of Tom-All-Alone's?Or the Morgue out in Paris, where tragedy centuples?Life's effects by Death's algebra, Shakespeare (Malone's)?Might have said sleep was murdered--new scholiasts have sent you pills To purge text of him! Bread? give me--Scotticè--scones!
VII
Think, what use, when youth's saddle galls bay's back or roan's, To seek chords on love's keys to strike, other than his chords? There's an error joy winks at and grief half condones,?Or life's counterpoint grates the C major of discords--?'Tis man's choice 'twixt sluts rose-crowned and queens age dethrones.
VIII
I for instance might groan as a bag-pipe groans,?Give the flesh of my heart for sharp sorrows to flagellate, Grief might grind my cheeks down, age make sticks of my bones, (Though a queen drowned in tears must be worth more than Madge elate)[1] Rose might turn burdock, and pine-apples cones;
IX
My skin might change to a pitiful crone's,?My lips to a lizard's, my hair to weed,?My features, in fact, to a series of loans;?Thus much is conceded; now, you, concede?You would hardly salute me by choice, John Jones?
[Footnote 1: First edition:--?And my face bear his brand--mine, that once bore Love's badge elate!]

THE POET AND THE WOODLOUSE
Said a poet to a woodlouse--"Thou art certainly my brother; I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole; And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and smother, In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.
"Yea," the poet said, "I smell thee by some passive divination, I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house; What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion, Had the ?ons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.
"The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion, Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test; Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question, And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best."
"Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of awe stick To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight: Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch of solar caustic, On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate."
"Notwithstanding which, O poet," spake the woodlouse, very blandly, "I am likewise the created,--I the equipoise of thee;?I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie?The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.
"I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences, And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush: Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,?And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.
"I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings, Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee: And earth's