The Heptalogia | Page 8

Pretty compliment, pairing me off, sir, with Keats--as if _he_
could
write Lamia!
While I never produced a more characteristic and
exquisite book, One that gave me more real satisfaction, than did, on
the whole, Lalla
Rookh.
Was it there that I called on all debtors, being pestered myself
by a
creditor, (he
Isn't paid yet) to rise, by the proud appellation of
bondsmen--hereditary? Yes--I think so. And yet, on my word, I can't
think why I think it was so. It more probably was in the poem I made a
few seasons ago
On that Duchess--her name now? ah, thus one
outlives a whole cycle of joys! Fair supplants black and brown
succeeds golden. The poem made rather a

noise.
And indeed I have seen worse verses; but as for the woman,
my friend-- Though his neck had been never so stiff, she'd have made a
philosopher
bend.
As the broken heart of a sunset that bleeds pure purple and gold
In the shudder and swoon of the sickness of colour, the agonies old
That engirdle the brows of the day when he sinks with a spasm into rest
And the splash of his kingly blood is dashed on the skirts of the west,
Even such was my own, when I felt how much sharper than any snake's
tooth Was the passion that made me mistake Lady Eve for her niece
Lady Ruth. The whole world, colourless, lapsed. Earth fled from my
feet like a dream, And the whirl of the walls of Space was about me,
and moved as a stream Flowing and ebbing and flowing all night to a
weary tune
("Such as that of my verses"? Get out!) in the face of a
sick-souled moon. The keen stars kindled and faded and fled, and the
wind in my ears Was the wail of a poet for failure--you needn't come
snivelling tears And spoiling the mixture, confound you, with dropping
your tears into that! I know I'm pathetic--I must be--and you
soft-hearted and fat, And I'm grateful of course for your kindness--there,
don't come hugging
me, now--
But because a fellow's pathetic, you needn't low like a
cow.
I should like--on my soul, I should like--to remember--but somehow I
can't--
If the lady whose love has reduced me to this was the niece or
the aunt. But whichever it was, I feel sure, when I published my lays of
last year (You remember their title--The Tramp--only
seven-and-sixpence--not dear), I sent her a copy (perhaps her tears fell
on the title-page--yes-- I should like to imagine she wept)--and the
Bride of Bulgaria (MS.) I forwarded with it. The lyrics, no doubt, she
found bitter--and sweet; But the Bride she rejected, you know, with
expressions I will not repeat. Well--she did no more than all publishers
did. Though my prospects were
marred,
I can pity and pardon them. Blindness, mere blindness! And
yet it was hard. For a poet, Bill, is a blossom--a bird--a billow--a

breeze-- A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among
trees. And a bard who is also the pet of patricians and dowagers doubly
can Express his contempt for canaille in his fables where beasts are
republican.
Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness for men so
deficient in _ton_ I cannot but feel it was cruel--I cannot but think it
was wrong. I with the heat of my heart still burning against all bars

As the fire of the dawn, so to speak, in the blanched blank brows of
the stars--
I with my tremulous lips made pale by musical breath--
I
with the shade in my eyes that was left by the kisses of Death-- (For
Death came near me in youth, and touched my face with his face, And
put in my lips the songs that belong to a desolate place-- Desolate truly,
my heart and my lips, till her kiss filled them up!) I with my soul like
wine poured out with my flesh for the cup-- It was hard for me--it was
hard--Bill, Bill, you great owl, was it not? For the day creeps in like a
Fate: and I think my grand passion is rot: And I dreamily seem to
perceive, by the light of a life's dream done, The lotion at six, and the
mixture at ten, and the draught before one.
Yes--I feel rather better. Man's life is a mull, at the best; And the patent
perturbator pills are like bullets of lead in my chest. When a man's
whole spirit is like the lost Pleiad, a blown-out star, Is there comfort in
Holloway, Bill? is there hope of salvation in Parr? True, most things
work to their end--and an end that the shroud overlaps. Under lace,
under silk, under gold, sir, the skirt of a winding-sheet
flaps--
Which explains, if you think of it, Bill, why I can't, though my