Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part II]

                                   I

Turned from the “eau-forte

Par Jaquemart”

To the strait head

Of Messalina:

“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 qu’est ce qu’ils peuvent comprendre?

 

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 ærial 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 sieve ...

Ultimately, his seismograph:

 

—Given that is his “fundamental passion,”

This urge to convey the relation

Of eye-lid and cheek-bone

By verbal manifestations;

 

To present the series

Of curious heads in medallion—

 

He had passed, inconscient, full gaze,

The wide-banded irides

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. PAGE 355

 

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-Nietzschean 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.