The Heptalogia | Page 9

soul
thereon broodeth,
Quite make out if I loved Lady Tamar as much as I
loved Lady Judith. Yet her dress was of violet velvet, her hair was
hyacinth-hued, And her ankles--no matter. A face where the music of
every mood Was touched by the tremulous fingers of passionate feeling,
and made Strange melodies, scornful, but sweeter than strings whereon
sorrow has

played
To enrapture the hearing of mirth when his garland of blossom
and green Turns to lead on the anguished forehead--"you don't
understand what I
mean"?
Well, of course I knew you were stupid--you always were
stupid at school-- Now don't say you weren't--but I'm hanged if I
thought you were quite
such a fool!
You don't see the point of all this? I was talking of
sickness and death-- In that poem I made years ago, I said this--"Love,
the flower-time
whose breath
Smells sweet through a summer of kisses and perfumes
an autumn of tears Is sadder at root than a winter--its hopes
heavy-hearted like fears. Though I love your Grace more than I love
little Letty, the maid of
the mill,
Yet the heat of your lips when I kiss them" (you see we were
intimate,
Bill)
"And the beat of the delicate blood in your eyelids of azure and
white Leave the taste of the grave in my mouth and the shadow of
death on my
sight.
Fill the cup--twine the chaplet--come into the garden--get out
of the
house--
Drink to _me_ with your eyes--there's a banquet behind,
where worms
only carouse!
As I said to sweet Katie, who lived by the brook on the
land Philip
farmed--
Worms shall graze where my kisses found pasture!" The
Duchess, I may
say, was charmed.
It was read to the Duke, and he cried like a child.

If you'll give me
a pill,
I'll go on till past midnight. That poem was said to
be--Somebody's, Bill. But you see you can always be sure of my hand
as the mother that bore me By the fact that I never write verse which
has never been written
before me.
Other poets--I blush for them, Bill--may adore and
repudiate in turn a Libitina, perhaps, or Pandemos; my Venus, you
know, is Laverna. Nay, that epic of mine which begins from
foundations the Bible is
built on--
"Of man's _first_ disobedience"--I've heard it attributed,
dammy, to
Milton.
Well, it's lucky for them that it's not worth my while, as I
may say,
to break spears
With the hirelings, forsooth, of the press who assert
that Othello was
Shakespeare's.
When he that can run, sir, may read--if he borrows the
book, or goes
on tick--
In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins
the Propontic. There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray
wrote the whole
of The Bard--
Or that I didn't write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country
Churchyard. When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins--"Ruin
seize thee!" and ends With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes
on his friends. And I'll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives
under the turf,
you
Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself--and begins
with

the curfew.
Now you'll grant it's more probable, Bill--as a man of the
world, if
you please--
That all these should have prigged from myself than that
I should have
prigged from all these.
I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such
tears would comport
with my dignity,
That the author of Christabel ever should smart from
such vulgar malignity. (You remember perhaps that was one of the first
little things that I
carolled
After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt,
and
Childe Harold.)
Oh, doubtless it always has been so--Ah, doubtless it
always will be-- There are men who would say that myself is a different
person from me. Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in
his plate Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of
hate.
'Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know;
You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe? It
was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles, Who
inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her
smiles.
There are tasters who've sipped of Castalia, who don't look on
_my_
brew as _the_ brew:
There are fools who can't think why the names
of my heroines of title
should always be Hebrew.
'Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said,
"Noo, dinna ye fash wi'
Apollo, mon;
Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad--look

at David and
Solomon.
And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang," said that
high-born young
man, "--tickles
The lug" (he meant ear) "of the reader--to throw in a
touch of the
Canticles."
So I versified half of The Preacher--it took me a week,
working slowly.
Bah!
You don't half know the sex, Bill--they like it. And