BETWEEN the drawing of the blind

And being aware of yet another day

There came to him behind

Close, pregnant eyelids, like a flame of blue,

Intense, untroubled by the wind,

A Mediterranean bay,

Bearing a brazen beak and foamless oars

To where, marmoreally smooth and bright,

The steps soar up in one pure flight

From the sea’s edge to the palace doors,

That have shut, have shut their valves of bronze—

And the windows too are lifeless eyes.

The galley grated on the stone;

He stepped out—and was alone:

No white-sailed hopes, no clouds, nor swans

To shatter the ocean’s calm, to break the sky’s.

Up the slow stairs:

Did he know it was a dream?

First one foot up, then the other foot,

Shuddering like a mandrake root

That hears the truffle-dog at work

And draws a breath to scream;

To moan, to scream.

The gates swing wide,

And it is coolly dark inside,

And corridors stretch out and out,

Joining the ceilings to their floors,

And parallels ring wedding bells

And through a hundred thousand doors

Perspective has abolished doubt.

But one of the doors was shut,

And behind it the subtlest lutanist

Was shaking a broken necklace of tinkling notes,

And somehow it was feminine music.

Strange exultant fear of desire, when hearts

Beat brokenly. He laid his hand on the latch—

And woke among his familiar books and pictures;

Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.

Thursday. Wasn’t he lunching at his aunt’s?

Distressing circumstance.

But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,

Which was some consolation. What a chin!

Civilized ten thousand years, and still

No better way than rasping a pale mask

With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:

Repulsive task!

And the more odious for being quotidian.

If one should live till eighty-five . . .

And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?

But that lute, playing across his dream . . .

Quick drops breaking the sleep of the water-wheel,

Song and ebbing whisper of a summer stream,

Music’s endless inconsequence that would reveal

To souls that listened for it, the all

Unseizable confidence, the mystic Rose,

Could it but find the magical fall

That droops, droops and dies into the perfect close . . .

And why so feminine? But one could feel

The unseen woman sitting there behind

The door, making her ceaseless slow appeal

To all that prowls and growls in the caves beneath

The libraries and parlours of the mind.

If only one were rational, if only

At least one had the illusion of being so . . .

 
Nine o’clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!

He wept to think of all those single beds,

Those desperate night-long solitudes,

Those mental Salons full of nudes.

Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.

Eight thousand nights alone—minus, perhaps,

Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.

  Five little bits of heaven

  (Tum-de-rum, de-rum, de-rum),

Five little bits of Heaven and one that was a lapse,

High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly

In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the

(Like infants’ impoliteness, a terrible infant’s brightness),

And he would shut his eyes so as not to see

His own hot blushes calling him a swine.

Atrocious memory! For memory should be

Of things secure and dead, being past,

Not living and disquieting. At last

He threw the nightmare of his blankets off.

 
Cloudy ammonia, camels in your bath:

The earth hath bubbles as the water hath:

He was not of them, too, too solidly

Always himself. What foam of kissing lips,

Pouting, parting with the ghost of the seven sips

One smacks for hiccoughs!

Pitiable to be

Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.

There was his scar, a panel of old rose

Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;

Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,

Permanent souvenir of the Great War.

One of God’s jokes, typically good,

That wound of his. How perfect that he should

Have suffered it for—what?