Title: Ara vus prec
Author: Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes:

  Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
    in the original text.
  Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
  Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
  Typographical and punctuation errors have been silently corrected.



                            _Ara Vus Prec_


                                 _by_
                             _T. S. Eliot_

                            [Illustration]

                            THE OVID PRESS

                       _Or puoi, la quantitate
              Comprender dell’ amor ch’a te mi scalda,
              Quando dismento nostra vanitate
             _Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda._



_CONTENTS_


                                       _page_
    _Gerontion_                           11
    _Burbank_                             14
    _Sweeny among the Nightingales_       16
    _Sweeny erect_                        18
    _Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service_  20
    _Whispers of Immortality_             21
    _The Hippopotamus_                    22
    _A Cooking Egg_                       25
    _Lune de Miel_                        26
    _Dans le Restaurant_                  27
    _Le Spectateur_                       28
    _Mélange Adultère de Tout_            29
    _Ode_                                 30
    _Prufrock_                            33
    _Portrait of a Lady_                  38
    _Preludes_                            43
    _Rhapsody of a Windy Night_           46
    _Morning at the Window_               49
    _The Boston Evening Transcript_       49
    _Aunt Helen_                          50
    _Cousin Nancy_                        51
    _Mr. Apollinax_                       52
    _Conversation Galante_                53
    _La Figlia Che Piange_                54



THIS IS NO.



GERONTION


              _Thou hast nor youth nor age
        But as it were, an after dinner sleep
        Dreaming of both._

    Here I am, an old man in a dry month
    Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
    I was neither at the hot gates
    Nor fought in the warm rain
    Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
    Bitten by flies, fought.
    My house is a decayed house
    And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
    Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
    Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
    The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
    Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
    The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
    Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

                          I an old man,
        A dull head among windy spaces.

    Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign.”
    The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
    Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
    Came Christ the tiger
    In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
    To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
    Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
    With caressing hands, at Limoges

    Who walked all night in the next room;
    By Hakagama, bowing among the Titians;
    By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
    Shifting the candles; Fraülein von Kulp
    Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
    Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
    An old man in a draughty house
    Under a windy knob.

    After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
    History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
    And issues; deceives with whispering ambitions,
    Guides us by vanities. Think now
    She gives when our attention is distracted,
    And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
    That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
    What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
    In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
    Into weak hands what’s thought can be dispensed with
    Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
    Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
    Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
    Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

    These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

    The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
    We have not reached conclusion, when I
    Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
    I have not made this show purposelessly
    And it is not by any concitation
    Of the backward devils.
    I would meet you upon this honestly.
    I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
    To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
    I have lost my passion: why should I want to keep it
    Since what is kept must be adulterated?
    I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
    How should I use it for your closer contact?

    These with a thousand small deliberations
    Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
    Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
    With pungent sauces, multiply variety
    In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
    Suspend its operations, will the weevil
    Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammell, whirled
    Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
    In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
    Of Belle Isle, or running by the Horn,
    White feathers in the snow, the gulf claims
    And an old man, driven on the Trades
    To a sleepy corner.
                        Tenants of the house,
    Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.



BURBANK WITH A BAEDEKER: BLEISTEIN WITH A CIGAR.


    _Tra la la la la la laire—nil nisi divinum stabile
    est; cætera fumus—the gondola stopped the old palace was
    there How charming it’s grey & pink—Goats & monkeys,
    with such hair too!—so the Countess passed on until she
    came through the little park, where Niobe presented her
    with a cabinet, & so departed._

    Burbank crossed a little bridge
      Descending at a small hotel;
    Princess Volupine arrived,
      They were together, and he fell.

    Defunctive music under sea
      Passed seaward with the passing bell
    Slowly: the god Hercules
      Had left him, that had loved him well.

    The horses, under the axletree
      Beat up the dawn from Istria
    With even feet. Her shuttered barge
      Burned on the water all the day.

    But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
      A saggy bending of the knees
    And elbows, with the palms turned out,
      Chicago Semite Viennese.

    A lustreless protrusive eye
      Stares from the protozoic slime
    At a perspective of Canaletto.
      The smoky candle end of time

    Declines. On the Rialto once.
      The rats are underneath the piles.
    The jew is underneath the lot.
      Money in furs. The boatman smiles,

    Princess Volupine extends
      A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
    To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
      She entertains Sir Ferdinand

    Klein. Who clipped the lion’s wings
      And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?
    —Thought Burbank, meditating on
      Time’s ruins, and the seven laws.



SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES


ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πγελὴν ἔσω

WHY SHOULD I SPEAK OF THE NIGHTINGALE?

THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS OF ADULTEROUS WRONG.

    Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
      Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
    The zebra stripes along his jaw
      Swelling to maculate giraffe.

    The circles of the stormy moon
      Slide westward to the River Plate,
    Death and the Raven drift above
      And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

    Gloomy Orion and the Dog
      Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
    The person in the Spanish cape
      Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

    Slips and pulls the table cloth
      Overturns a coffee cup,
    Reorganised upon the floor
      She yawns and draws a stocking up;

    The silent man in mocha brown
      Sprawls at the window sill and gapes;
    The waiter brings in oranges,
      Bananas, figs and hot-house grapes;

    The silent vertebrate exhales,
      Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
    Rachel née Rabinovitch
      Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

    She and the lady in the cape
      Are suspect, thought to be in league;
    Therefore the man with heavy eyes
      Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

    Leaves the room and reappears
      Outside the window, leaning in,
    Branches of wistaria
      Circumscribe a golden grin;

    The host with someone indistinct
      Converses at the door apart,
    The nightingales are singing near
      The convent of the Sacred Heart,

    And sang within the bloody wood
      When Agamemnon cried aloud
    And let their liquid siftings fall
      To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.



SWEENEY ERECT


                    _And the trees about me
     Let them be dry & leafless; let the rocks
     Groan with continual surges; & behind me
     Make all a desolation. Look, Look, wenches!_

    Paint me a cavernous waste shore
      Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
    Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
      Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

    Display me Æolus above
      Reviewing the insurgent gales
    Which tangle Ariadne’s hair
      And swell with haste the perjured sails.

    Morning stirs the feet and hands
      (Nausicaa and Polypheme);
    Gesture of orang-outang
      Rises from the sheets in steam.

    This withered root of knots of hair
      Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
    This oval O cropped out with teeth;
      The sickle motion from the thighs

    Jackknifes upward at the knees
      Then straightens down from heel to hip
    Pushing the framework of the bed
      And clawing at the pillow slip.

    Sweeney addressed full-length to shave
      Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
    Knows the female temperament
      And wipes the suds around his face.

    (The lengthened shadow of a man
      Is history, says Emerson,
    Who had not seen the silhouette
      Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).

    Tests the razor on his leg
      Waiting until the shriek subsides;
    The epileptic on the bed
      Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

    The ladies of the corridor
      Find themselves involved, disgraced;
    Call witness to their principles
      Deprecate the lack of taste

    Observing that hysteria
      Might easily be misunderstood;
    Mrs. Turner intimates
      It does the house no sort of good.

    But Doris towelled from the bath
      Enters padding on broad feet,
    Bringing sal volatile
      And a glass of brandy neat.



MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE


    “_Look, look master, here comes two of the religious
        caterpillars_”.
                                            JEW OF MALTA

    Polyphiloprogenitive
      The sapient sutlers of the Lord
    Drift across the window-panes.
      In the beginning was the Word.

    In the beginning was the Word,
      Superfetation of το εν
    And at the mensual turn of time
      Produced enervate Origen.

    A painter of the Umbrian school
      Designed upon a gesso ground
    The nimbus of the Baptised God.
      The wilderness is cracked and browned

    But through the water pale and thin
      Still shine the unoffending feet
    And there above the painter set
      The father and the Paraclete.

           *       *       *       *       *

    The sable presbyters approach
      The avenue of penitence;
    The young are red and pustular
      Clutching piaculative pence,

    Under the penitential gates
      Sustained by staring Seraphim
    Where the souls of the devout
      Burn invisible and dim.

    Along the garden-wall the bees
      With hairy bellies pass between
    The staminate and pistilate:
      Blest office of the epicene.

    Sweeney shifts from ham to ham
      Stirring the water in his bath.
    The masters of the subtle schools
      Are controversial, polymath.



WHISPERS OF IMMORTALITY


    Webster was much possessed by death
      And saw the skull beneath the skin;
    And breastless creatures under ground
      Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

    Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
      Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
    He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
      Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

    Donne, I suppose, was such another
      Who found no substitute for sense
    To seize and clutch and penetrate,
      Expert beyond experience

    He knew the anguish of the marrow
      The ague of the skeleton;
    No contact possible to flesh
      Allayed the fever of the bone.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Grishkin is nice; her Russian eye
      Is underlined for emphasis;
    Uncorseted, her friendly bust
      Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

    The couched Brazilian jaguar
      Compels the scampering marmoset
    With subtle effluence of cat;
      Grishkin has a maisonette:

    The sleek and sinuous jaguar
      Does not in his arboreal gloom
    Distil so rank a feline smell
      As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

    And even abstracter entities
      Circumambulate her charm;
    But our lot crawls between dry ribs
      To keep its metaphysics warm.



THE HIPPOPOTAMUS


    _Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut
     mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum
     Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros
     autem, ut concilium Dei et Conjunctionem Apostolorum.
     Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos
     sic habeo._
                                  S. IGNATII AD TRALLIANOS.

         _And when this epistle is read among you,
     cause that it be read also in the church of the
                      Laodiceans._


    The broad backed hippopotamus
      Rests on his belly on the mud;
    Although he seems so firm to us
      He is merely flesh and blood.

    Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
      Susceptible to nervous shock;
    While the True Church can never fail
      For it is based upon a rock.

    The hippo’s feeble steps may err
      In compassing material ends,
    While the True Church need never stir
      To gather in its dividends.

    The potamus can never reach
      The mango on the mango tree;
    But fruits of pomegranate and peach
      Refresh the Church from over sea.

    At mating time the hippo’s voice
      Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
    But every week we hear rejoice
      The Church, at being one with God.

    The hippopotamus’s day
      Is past in sleep; at night he hunts;
    God works in a mysterious way
      The Church can sleep and eat at once.

    I saw the potamus take wing
      Ascending from the damp savannas,
    And quiring angels round him sing
      The praise of God in loud hosannas.

    Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
      And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
    Among the saints he shall be seen
      Performing on a harp of gold.

    He shall be washed as white as snow,
      By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
    While the True Church remains below
      Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.



A COOKING EGG


       _En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
        Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues..._

    Pipit sate upright in her chair
      Some distance from where I was sitting;
    _Views of the Oxford Colleges_
      Lay on the table with the knitting.

    Daguerrotypes and silhouettes,
      Her grandfather and great great aunts,
    Supported on the mantelpiece
      An _Invitation to the Dance_.

           *       *       *       *       *

    I shall not want Honour in Heaven
      For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
    And have talk with Coriolanus
      And other heroes of that kidney.

    I shall not want Capital in Heaven
     For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
    We two shall lie together, lapt
      In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.

    I shall not want Society in Heaven
      Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
    Her anecdotes will be more amusing
      Than Pipit’s experience could provide.

    I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
      Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
    In the seven Sacred Trances;
      Piccarda de’ Donati will conduct me....

           *       *       *       *       *

    But where is the penny world I bought
      To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
    The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
      From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green;

    Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

    Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
      Over buttered scones and crumpets
      Weeping, weeping multitudes
      Droop in a hundred A. B. C.’s.



LUNE DE MIEL


    Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent á Terre Haute;
    Mais une nuit d’été, les voici à Ravenne,
    A l’aise entre deux draps, chez deux centaines de punaises;
    La sueur estivale, et une forte odeur de chienne.
    Ils restent sur le dos écartant les genoux
    De quatre jambes molles tout gonflées de morsures.
    On relève le drap pour mieux égratigner.
    Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Sainte Apollinaire
    In Classe, basilique connue des amateurs
    De chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.

    Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures
    Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan
    Où se trouvent le Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.
    Lui pense aux pourboires, et rédige son bilan.
    Ils auront vu la Suisse et traversé la France,
    Et Sainte Apollinaire, raide et ascétique,
    Vieille usine désaffectée de Dieu, tient encore
    Dans ses pierres écroulantes la forme précise de Byzance.



DANS LE RESTAURANT


    Le garçon délabré qui n’a rien à faire
      Que de se gratter les doigts et se pencher sur mon épaule:
      “Dans mon pays, il fera temps pluvieux,
      Du vent, du grand soleil et de la pluie;
      C’est ce qu’on appelle le jour de lessive des gueux.”
      (Bavard, baveux, à la croupe arrondie,
    Je t’en prie, au moins, ne bave pas dans la soupe.)
      “Les saules tout trempés, et des bourgeons sur les ronces—
      C’est là, dans une averse, qu’on s’abrite.
      J’avais sept ans, elle était plus petite.
      Elle était toute mouillée, je lui ai donné des primevères.”
      Les tâches de son gilet montent au chiffre de trente-huit.
      “Je la chatouillais, pour la faire rire.
      Elle avait une odeur fraîche qui m’était inconnue,—”

                              Mais alors, vieux lubrique—

      “Monsieur, le fait est dur,
      Il est venu, nous péloter, un gros chien,
      Moi j’avais peur, je l’ai quittée à mi-chemin;
      C’est dommage.”

                              Mais alors, tu as ton vautour.
    Va-t’en te décrotter les rides du visage;
    Tiens, ma fourchette, décrasse-toi le crâne,
    De quel droit paies-tu des expériences comme moi?
    Tiens, voilà dix sous, pour la salle-de-bain.

    Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
    Oubliait le cri des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
    Et les profits et les pertes, et la cargaison d’étain;
    Un courant de sous-mer l’emporta très loin,
    Le repassant aux étapes de sa vie antérieure.
    Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible.
    Cependant, ce fut jadis un bel homme, de haute taille.



LE SPECTATEUR


    Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise!
    Qui coule si pres du Spectateur.
    Le directeur
    Du Spectateur
    Empeste la brise.
    Les actionnaires
    Réactionnaires
    Du Spectateur
    Conservateur
    Bras-dessus bras-dessous
    Font des tours
    A pas de loup.
    Dans un égout
    Une petite fille
    En guenilles
    Camarde
    Regarde
    Le directeur
    Du Spectateur
    Conservateur
    Et crève d’amour.



MÉLANGE ADULTÈRE DE TOUT


    En Amérique, professeur;
    En Angleterre, journaliste;
    C’est à grands pas et en sueur
    Que vous suivrez à peine ma piste.
    En Yorkshire, conférencier;
    A Londres, un peu banquier;
    (Vous me paierez bien la tête.)
    C’est à Paris que je me coiffe
    Casque noir de jemenfoutiste.
    En Allemagne, philosophe
    Surexcité par Emporheben
    Au grand air de Bergsteigleben;
    J’erre toujours de-ci de-là
    A divers coups de tra la la
    De Damas jusque à Omaha;
    Je célebrai mon jour de fête
    Dans un oasis d’Afrique,
    Vêtu d’une peau de girafe.

    On montrera mon cénotaphe
    Aux côtes brulantes de Mozambique.



ODE


      _To you particularly, and to all the Volscians
       Great hurt and mischief._

    Tired.
    Subterrene laughter synchronous
    With silence from the sacred wood
    And bubbling of the uninspired
    Mephitic river.

                                  Misunderstood
    The accents of the now retired
    Profession of the calamus.

    Tortured.
    When the bridegroom smoothed his hair
    There was blood upon the bed.
    Morning was already late.
    Children singing in the orchard
    (Io Hymen, Hymenæe)
    Succuba eviscerate.

    Tortuous.
    By arrangement with Perseus
    The fooled resentment of the dragon
    Sailing before the wind at dawn.
    Golden apocalypse. Indignant
    At the cheap extinction of his taking-off.
    Now lies he there
    Tip to tip washed beneath Charles’ Wagon.



_PRUFROCK._



THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK


     _S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
      A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
      Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
      Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
      Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
      Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo._

    Let us go then, you and I,
    When the evening is spread out against the sky
    Like a patient etherized upon a table;
    Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
    The muttering retreats

    Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
    And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
    Streets that follow like a tedious argument
    Of insidious intent
    To lead you to an overwhelming question....
    Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
    Let us go and make our visit.

    In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.

    The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
    The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
    Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
    Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
    Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
    Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
    And seeing that it was a soft October night,
    Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

    And indeed there will be time
    For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
    Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
    There will be time, there will be time
    To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
    There will be time to murder and create,
    And time for all the works and days of hands
    That lift and drop a question on your plate;
    Time for you and time for me,
    And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
    And for a hundred visions and revisions,
    Before the taking of a toast and tea.

    In the room the women come and go
    Talking of Michelangelo.

    And indeed there will be time
    To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
    Time to turn back and descend the stair,
    With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
    (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
    My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
    My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
    (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
    Do I dare
    Disturb the universe?
    In a minute there is time
    For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

    For I have known them all already, known them all:
    Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
    I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
    I know the voices dying with a dying fall
    Beneath the music from a farther room.
        So how should I presume?

    And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
    The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
    And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
    When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
    Then how should I begin
    To spit out all the butt-ends of my ways and days?
        And how should I presume?

    And I have known the arms already, known them all—
    Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
    (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
    Is it perfume from a dress
    That makes me so digress?
    Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
        And should I then presume?
        And how should I begin?

           *       *       *       *       *

    Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
    And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
    Of lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows?...

    I should have been a pair of ragged claws
    Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

           *       *       *       *       *

    And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
    Smoothed by long fingers,
    Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
    Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
    Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
    Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
    But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
    Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought
          in upon a platter,
    I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
    I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
    And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
    And in short, I was afraid.

    And would it have been worth it, after all,
    After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
    Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
    Would it have been worth while,
    To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
    To have squeezed the universe into a ball
    To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
    To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
    Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
    If one, settling a pillow by her head,
      Should say: “That is not what I meant at all,
      That is not it, at all.”

    And would it have been worth it, after all,
    Would it have been worth while,
    After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
    After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail
          along the floor—
    And this, and so much more?—
    It is impossible to say just what I mean!
    But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
    Would it have been worth while
    If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
    And turning toward the window, should say:
      “That is not it at all,
      That is not what I meant, at all.”

           *       *       *       *       *

    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
    Am an attendant, lord, one that will do
    To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
    Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
    Deferential, glad to be of use,
    Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
    Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
    At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
    Almost, at times, the Fool.

    I grow old ... I grow old ...
    I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.

    Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
    I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
    I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

    I do not think that they will sing to me.

    I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
    Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
    When the wind blows the water white and black.

    We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
    By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
    Till human voices wake us, and we drown.



PORTRAIT OF A LADY


    _Thou hast committed—
     Fornication: but that was in another country,
     And besides, the wench is dead._
                                  THE JEW OF MALTA

                         I

    Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
    You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—
    With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
    And four wax candles in the darkened room,
    Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
    An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
    Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
    We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
    Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.
    “So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
    Should be resurrected only among friends
    Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom
    That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.”
    —And so the conversation slips
    Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
    Through attenuated tones of violins
    Mingled with remote cornets
    And begins.

    “You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
    And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
    In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
    (For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind!
    How keen you are!)
    To find a friend who has these qualities,
    Who has, and gives
    Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
    How much it means that I say this to you—
    Without these friendships—life, what _cauchemar_!”
    Among the windings of the violins
    And the ariettes
    Of cracked cornets
    Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
    Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
    Capricious monotone
    That is at least one definite “false note”.
    —Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
    Admire the monuments
    Discuss the late events,
    Correct our watches by the public clocks.
    Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

                         II

    Now that lilacs are in bloom
    She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
    And twists them in her fingers while she talks.
    “Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
    What life is, you who hold it in your hands;”
    (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
    “You let it flow from you, you let it flow
    And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
    And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
    I smile, of course,
    And go on drinking tea.

    “Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
    My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
    I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
    To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

    The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune
    Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:
    “I am always sure that you understand
    My feelings, always sure that you feel,
    Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

    You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.
    You will go on, and when you have prevailed
    You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

    But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
    To give you, what can you receive from me?
    Only the friendship and the sympathy
    Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

    I shall sit here, serving tea to friends....”

    I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
    For what she has said to me?

    You will see me any morning in the park
    Reading the comics and the sporting page.
    Particularly I remark
    An English countess goes upon the stage.
    A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,
    Another bank defaulter has confessed.
    I keep my countenance,
    I remain self-possessed
    Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
    Reiterates some worn-out common song
    With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
    Recalling things that other people have desired.
    Are these ideas right or wrong?

                        III

    The October night comes down; returning as before
    Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease
    I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door
    And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

    “And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?
    But that’s a useless question.
    You hardly know when you are coming back,
    You will find so much to learn.”
    My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

    “Perhaps you can write to me.”
    My self-possession flares up for a second;
    _This_ is as I had reckoned.
    “I have been wondering frequently of late
    (But our beginnings never know our ends!)
    Why we have not developed into friends.”

    I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
    Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
    My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

    “For everybody said so, all our friends,
    They all were sure our feelings would relate
    So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
    We must leave it now to fate.
    You will write, at any rate.
    Perhaps it is not too late.

    I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

    And I must borrow every changing shape
    To find expression ... dance, dance
    Like a dancing bear,
    Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
    Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—

    Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
    Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
    Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
    With the smoke coming down above the house-tops;
    Doubtful, for quite a while
    Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
    Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...
    Would she not have the advantage, after all?
    This music is successful with a “dying fall”
    Now that we talk of dying—
    And should I have the right to smile?



PRELUDES


                    I

    The winter evening settles down
    With smell of steaks in passageways.
    Six o’clock.
    The burn-out ends of smoky days.
    And now a gusty shower wraps
    The grimy scraps
    Of withered leaves about your feet
    And newspapers from vacant lots;
    The showers beat
    On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
    And at the corner of the street
    A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
    And then the lighting of the lamps.

                    II

    The morning comes to consciousness
    Of faint stale smells of beer
    From the sawdust-trampled street
    With all its muddy feet that press
    To early coffee-stands.

    With the other masquerades
    That time resumes,

    One thinks of all the hands
    That are raising dingy shades
    In a thousand furnished rooms.

                   III

    You tossed a blanket from the bed,
    You lay upon your back, and waited;
    You dozed, and watched the night revealing
    The thousand sordid images
    Of which your soul was constituted;
    They flickered against the ceiling.
    And when all the world came back
    And the light crept up between the shutters,
    And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
    You had such a vision of the street
    As the street hardly understands;
    Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
    You curled the papers from your hair,
    Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
    In the palms of both soiled hands.

                    IV

    His soul stretched tight across the skies
    That fade behind a city block,
    Or trampled by insistent feet
    At four and five and six o’clock;
    And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
    And evening newspapers, and eyes
    Assured of certain certainties,
    The conscience of a blackened street
    Impatient to assume the world.

    I am moved by fancies that are curled
    Around these images, and cling:
    The notion of some infinitely gentle
    Infinitely suffering thing.

    Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
    The worlds revolve like ancient women
    Gathering fuel in vacant lots.



RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT


    Twelve o’clock.
    Along the reaches of the street
    Held in a lunar synthesis
    Whispering lunar incantations
    Dissolve the floors of the memory
    And all its clear relations,
    Its divisions and precisions,
    Every street lamp that I pass
    Beats like a fatalistic drum,
    And through the spaces of the dark
    Midnight shakes the memory
    As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

    Half-past one.
    The street lamp sputtered,
    The street lamp muttered,
    The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
    Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
    Which opens on her like a grin.
    You see the border of her dress
    Is torn and stained with sand,
    And you see the corner of her eye
    Twists like a crooked pin.”

    The memory throws up high and dry
    A crowd of twisted things;
    A twisted branch upon the beach
    Eaten smooth and polished
    As if the world gave up
    The secret of its skeleton,
    A broken spring in a factory yard,
    Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
    Hard and curled and ready to snap.

    Half-past two,
    The street lamp said,
    “Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
    Slips out its tongue
    And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
    So the hand of a child, automatic,
    Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
    I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
    I have seen eyes in the street
    Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
    And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
    An old crab with barnacles on his back,
    Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

    Half-past three,
    The lamp sputtered,
    The lamp muttered in the dark.
    The lamp hummed:
    “Regard the moon,
    La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
    She winks a feeble eye,
    She smiles into corners.
    She smoothes the hair of the grass.
    The moon has lost her memory.
    A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
    Her hand twists a paper rose,
    That smells of dust and old Cologne,
    She is alone
    With all the old nocturnal smells
    That cross and cross across her brain.
    The reminiscence comes
    Of sunless dry geraniums
    And dust in crevices,
    Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
    And female smells in shuttered rooms,
    And cigarettes in corridors
    And cocktail smells in bars.”

    The lamp said
    “Four o’clock,
    Here is the number on the door.
    Memory!
    You have thè key
    The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
    Mount.
    The bed is open: the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
    Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

    The last twist of the knife.



MORNING AT THE WINDOW


    They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens
    And along the trampled edges of the street
    I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
    Sprouting despondently at area gates.

    The brown waves of fog toss up to me
    Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
    And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
    An aimless smile that hovers in the air
    And vanishes along the level of the roofs.



CONVERSATION GALANTE


    I observe: “Our sentimental friend the moon!
    Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
    It may be Prester John’s balloon
    Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
    To light poor travellers to their distress.”
      She then: “How you digress!”

    And I then: “Some one frames upon the keys
    That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
    The night and moonshine; music which we seize
    To body forth our own vacuity.”
      She then: “Does this refer to me?”
      “Oh no, it is I who am inane.”

    “You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
    The eternal enemy of the absolute,
    Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
    With your air indifferent and imperious
    At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—”
      And—“Are we then so serious?”



AUNT HELEN


    Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
    And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
    Cared for by servants to the number of four.
    Now when she died there was silence in heaven
    And silence at her end of the street.
    The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet—
    He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
    The dogs were handsomely provided for,
    But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
    The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
    And the footman sat upon the dining-table
    Holding the second house-maid on his knees—
    Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.



COUSIN NANCY


    Miss Nancy Ellicott
    Strode across the hills and broke them,
    Rode across the hills and broke them—
    The barren New England hills—
    Riding to hounds
    Over the cow-pasture.

    Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
    And danced all the modern dances;
    And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
    But they knew that it was modern.

    Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
    Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
    The army of unalterable law.



MR. APPOLINAX


Ω τῆς καινότητος. Ἡράκλεις, τῆς παραδοξογιας. εὺμήχανος ἄνθρωπος.

    When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
    His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
    I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,
    And of Priapus in the shrubbery
    Gaping at the lady in the swing.
    In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s
    He laughed like an irresponsible fœtus.
    His laughter was submarine and profound
    Like the old man of the sea’s
    Hidden under coral islands
    Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
    Dropping from fingers of surf.
    I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair,
    Or grinning over a screen
    With seaweed in its hair.
    I heard the beat of centaurs’ hoofs over the hard turf
    As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.
    “He is a charming man”—“But after all what did he mean?”—
    “His pointed ears ... he must be unbalanced,”—
    “There was something he said that I might have challenged.”
    Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah
    I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.



THE BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT


    The readers of the _Boston Evening Transcript_
    Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

    When evening quickens faintly in the street,
    Wakening the appetites of life in some
    And to others bringing the _Boston Evening Transcript_,
    I mount the stairs and ring the bell, turning
    Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
    If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
    And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the _Boston Evening Transcript_.”



LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE


_O quam te memorem virgo_...

    Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
    Lean on a garden urn—
    Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
    Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise
    Fling them to the ground and turn
    With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
    But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

    So I would have had him leave,
    So I would have had her stand and grieve,
    So he would have left
    As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
    As the mind deserts the body it has used.
    I should find
    Some way incomparably light and deft.
    Some way we both should understand,
    Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

    She turned away, but with the autumn weather
    Compelled my imagination many days,
    Many days and many hours:
    Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
    And I wonder how they should have been together!
    I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
    Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
    The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

         THIS EDITION OF 264 COPIES IS THE FIRST BOOK
           PRINTED BY JOHN RODKER AND WAS COMPLETED
                        DEC: 10ᵗʰ 1919.

                       OF THE EDITION:—

    _10 Copies unnumbered are for review.
     4 Copies on Japan Vellum numbered 1-4 & not for sale.
     30 Signed Copies numbered 5-34
     220 Copies numbered 35-255_

       _The Initials & Colophon by E.A.Wadsworth._

[Illustration]




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