Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Thinker of useless thoughts, let him be cursed,
Who in his folly, venturing to vex
A question answerless and barren, first
With wrong and right involved the things of sex!
“He who in mystical accord conjoins
Shadow with heat, dusk with the noon’s high fire,
Shall never warm the palsy of his loins
At that red sun which mortals call desire.
“Go, seek some lubber groom’s deflowering lust;
Take him your heart and leave me here despised!
Go - and bring back, all horror and disgust,
The livid breasts man’s love has stigmatized.
“One may not serve two masters here below.”
But the child answered: “I am torn apart,
I feel my inmost being rent, as though
A gulf had yawned - the gulf that is my heart.
“Naught may this monster’s desperate thirst assuage,
As fire ’tis hot, as space itself profound
Naught stay the Fury from her quenchless rage,
Who with her torch explores its bleeding wound.
“Curtain the world away and let us try
If lassitude will bring the boon of rest.
In your deep bosom I would sink and die,
Would find the grave’s fresh coolness on your breast.”
Hence, lamentable victims, get you hence!
Hell yawns beneath, your road is straight and steep.
Where all the crimes receive their recompense
Wind-whipped and seething in the lowest deep
With a huge roaring as of storms and fires,
Go down, mad phantoms, doomed to seek in vain
The ne’er-won goal of unassuaged desires,
And in your pleasures find eternal pain!
Sunless your caverns are; the fever damps
That filter in through every crannied vent
Break out with marsh-fire into sudden lamps
And steep your bodies with their frightful scent.
The barrenness of pleasures harsh and stale
Makes mad your thirst and parches up your skin;
And like an old flag volleying in the gale,
Your whole flesh shudders in the blasts of sin.
Far from your kind, outlawed and reprobate,
Go, prowl like wolves through desert worlds apart!
Disordered souls, fashion your own dark fate,
And flee the god you carry in your heart.
ARABIA INFELIX
Under a ceiling of cobalt
And mirrored by as void a blue,
Wet only with the wind-blown salt,
The Arabian land implores a dew.
Parched, parched are the hills, and dumb
That thundering voice of the ravine;
Round the dead springs the birds are seen
No more, no more at evening come
(Like lovely thoughts to one who dwells
In quiet, like enchanting hopes)
The leopards and the shy gazelles
And the light-footed antelopes.
Death starts at every rattling gust
That in the withered torrent’s bed
Whirls up a phantom of grey dust
And, dying, lets the ghost fall dead.
Dust in a dance may seem to live;
But laid, not blown, it brings to birth.
Not wind, but only rain can give
Life, and to a patient earth.
Hot wind from this Arabian land
Chases the clouds, withholds the rain.
No footstep prints the restless sand
Wherein who sows, he sows in vain.
If there were water, if there were
But a shower, a little fountain springing,
How rich would be the perfumed air,
And the green woods with shade and singing
Bright hills, but by the sun accursed,
Peaceful, but with the peace of hell —
Once on these barren slopes there fell
A plague more violent than thirst:
Anguish to kill inveterate pain
And mortal slaking of desire;
Dew, and a long-awaited rain —
A dew of blood, a rain of fire.
Into a vacant sky the moist
Gray pledge of spring and coming leaves
Swam, and the thirsty hills rejoiced,
All golden with their future sheaves.
Flower-phantoms in the parching air
Nodded, and trees ungrown were bowed;
With love like madness, like despair,
The mountain yearned towards the cloud.
And she in silence slowly came,
Oh! to transfigure, to renew,
Came laden with a gift of dew,
But with it dropped the lightning’s flame;
A flame that rent the crags apart,
But rending made a road between
For water to the mountain’s heart,
That left a scar, but left it green.
Faithless the cloud and fugitive;
An empty heaven nor burns, nor wets;
At peace, the barren land regrets
Those agonies that made it live.
THE MOOR
Champion of souls and holiness, upholder
Of all the virtues, father of the Church,
Honest, honest, honest Iago! how
Crusadingly, with what indignant zeal
(Ora pro nobis), caracoling on
Your high horse and emblazoned, gules on white,
Did you ride forth (Oh, pray for us), ride forth
Against the dark-skinned hosts of evil, ride,
Martyr and saint, against those paynim hosts,
Having for shield all Sinai, and for sword,
To smite rebellion and avenge the Lord,
The sharp, the shining certainty of faith!
(Ora pro nobis) point us out the Way.
“Lily bright and stinking mud:
Fair is fair and foul is ill.
With her, on her, what you will.
This fire must be put out with blood,
Put out with blood.”
But for a glint, a hint of questing eyes,
Invisible, darkness through darkness goes
On feet that even in their victim’s dreaming
Wake not an echo.
Lost, he is lost; and yet thus wholly in darkness
Melted, the Moor is more Othello than when,
Green-glittering, the sharp Venetian day
Revealed him armed and kingly and commanding
Captain of men.
How still she lies, this naked Desdemona,
All but a child and sleeping and alone,
How still and white!
Whose breasts, whose arms, the very trustfulness
Of her closed eyelids and unhurried breath
More than a philtre maddeningly invite
Lust and those hands, those huge dark hands, and death.
“For oh, the lily and the mud!
Fair is still fair and foulness, ill.
With her, on her, what you will.
This fire must be put out with blood.”
Well, now the fire is out, and the light too;
All, all put out. In Desdemona’s place
Lies now a carrion. That fixed grimace
Of lidless eyes and starting tongue
Derides his foolishness. Cover her face;
This thing but now was beautiful and young.
Honest Iago’s Christian work is over;
Short, short the parleying at the Golden Gate.
“For I am one who made the Night ashamed
Of his own essence, that his dark was dark;
One who with good St. Jerome’s filthy tongue
Tainted desire and taught the Moor to scorn
His love’s pale body, and because she had
Lain gladly in hi
s arms, to call her whore
And strangle her for whoredom.” So he spoke,
And with majestic motion heaven’s high door
Rolled musically apart its burnished vans
To grant him entrance.
Turning back meanwhile
From outer darkness, Othello and his bride
Perceive the globe of heaven like one small lamp
Burning alone at midnight in the abyss
Of some cathedral cavern; pause, and then
With face once more averted, hand in hand,
Explore the unseen treasures of the dark.
NOBLEST ROMANS
Columns and unageing fountains,
Jets of frost and living foam —
Let them leap from seven mountains,
The seven hills of Rome.
Flanked by arch and echoing arch,
Let the streets in triumph go;
Bid the aqueducts to march
Tireless through the plain below.
Column-high in the blue air,
Let the marble Caesars stand;
Let the gods, who living were
Romans, lift a golden hand.
Many, but each alone, a crowd,
Yet of Romans, throng their shrine;
Worshippers themselves divine,
Gods to gods superbly bowed;
Romans bowed to shapes that they,
Sculptors of the mind, set free;
Supplicant that they may be
Peers of those to whom they pray.
ORION
Tree-tangled still, autumn Orion climbs
Up from among the North Wind’s shuddering emblems
Into the torrent void
And dark abstraction of invisible power,
The heart and boreal substance of the night.
Pleione flees before him, and behind,
Still sunken, but prophetically near,
Death in the Scorpion hunts him up the sky
And round the vault of time, round the slow-curving year,
Follows unescapably
And to the end, aye, and beyond the end
Will follow, follow; for of all the gods
Death only cannot die.
The rest are mortal. And how many lie
Already with their creatures’ ancient dust!
Dead even in us who live - or hardly live,
Since of our hearts impiety has made,
Not tombs indeed (for they are holy; tombs
Secretly live with everlasting Death’s
Dark and mysterious life),
But curious shops and learned lumber rooms
Of bone and stone and every mummied thing,
Where Death himself his sacred sting
Forgets (how studiously forgotten
Amid the irrelevant to and fro of feet!),
Where by the peeping and the chattering,
The loud forgetfulness seemingly slain,
He lies with all the rest - and yet we know,
In secret yet we know,
Death is not dead, not dead but only sleeping,
And soon will rise again.
Not so the rest. Only the Scorpion burns
In our unpeopled heaven of empty names
And insubstantial echoes; only Death
Still claims our prayers, and still to those who pray
Returns his own dark blood and quickening breath,
Returns the ominous mystery of fear.
Where are the gods of dancing and desire?
Anger and joy, laughter and tears and wine,
Those other mysteries of fire and flame,
Those more divine than Death’s — ah, where are they?
Only a ghost between the shuddering trees,
Only a name and ghostly numbers climb;
And where a god pursued and fled,
Only a ghostly time, a ghostly place
Attends on other ghostly times and places.
Orion and the rest are dead.
And yet to-night, here in the exulting wind,
Amid the enormous laughters of a soul
At once the world’s and mine,
God-like Orion and all his brother stars
Shine as with living eyes,
With eyes that glance a recognition, glance a sign
Across the quickened dark, across the gulphs
That separate no more,
But, like wide seas that yet bring home the freight
Of man’s mad yearning for a further shore,
Join with a living touch, unbrokenly,
Life to mysterious life,
The Hunter’s alien essence to my own.
Orion lives; yet I who know him living,
Elsewhere and otherwise
Know him for dead, and dead beyond all hope,
For ’tis the infertile and unquickening death
Of measured places and recorded times,
The death of names and numbers that he dies.
Only the phantom of Orion climbs.
Put out the eyes, put out the living eyes
And look elsewhere; yes, look and think and be
Elsewhere and otherwise.
But here and thus are also in their right,
Are in their right divine to send this wind of laughter
Rushing through the cloudless dark
And through my being; have a right divine
And imprescriptible now to reveal
The starry god, the right to make me feel,
As even now, as even now I feel,
His living presence near me in the night.
A curved and figured glass hangs between light and light,
Between the glow within us and the glow
Of what mysterious sun without?
Vast over earth and sky, or focussed burningly
Upon the tender quick, our spirits throw
Each way their images - each way the forms
O! shall it be of beauty, shall it be
The naked skeletons of doubt?
Or else, symbolically dark, the cloudy forms
Of mystery, or dark (but dark with death)
Shapes of sad knowledge and defiling hate?
“Lighten our darkness, Lord.” With what pure faith,
What confident hope our fathers once implored
The Light! But ’tis the shitten Lord of Flies
Who with his loathsome bounties now fulfils
On us their prayers. Our fathers prayed for light.
Through windows at their supplication scoured
Bare of the sacred blazons, but instead
Daubed with the dung-god’s filth, all living eyes,
Whether of stars or men, look merely dead;
While on the vaulted crystal of the night
Our guttering souls project,
Not the Wild Huntsman, not the Heavenly Hosts,
But only times and places, only names and ghosts.
And yet, for all the learned Lord of Dung,
The choice is ours, the choice is always ours,
To see or not to see the living powers
That move behind the numbered points and times.
The Fly King rules; but still the choice remains
With us his subjects, we are free, are free
To love our fate or loathe it; to rejoice
Or weep or wearily accept; are free,
For all the scouring of our souls, for all
The miring of their crystal, free to give
Even to an empty sky, to vacant names,
Or not to give, our worship; free to turn
Lifewards, within, without, to what transcends
The squalor of our personal ends and aims,
Or not to turn; yes, free to die or live;
Free to be thus and passionately here,
Or otherwise and otherwhere;
Free, in a word, to learn or not to learn
The art to think and musically do
And feel and b
e, the never more than now
Difficult art harmoniously to live
All poetry - the midnight of Macbeth
And ripe Odysseus and the undying light
Of Gemma’s star and Cleopatra’s death
And Falstaff in his cups; the art to live
That discipline of flowers, that solemn dance
Of sliding weights and harnessed powers
Which is a picture; or to live the grave
And stoical recession, row on row,
Of equal columns, live the passionate leaping,
The mutual yearning, meeting, marrying,
And then the flame-still rapture, the fierce trance
Of consummation in the Gothic night.
The choice is always ours. Then, let me choose
The longest art, the hard Promethean way
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan
That inward fire, whose small precarious flame,
Kindled or quenched, creates
The noble or the ignoble men we are,
The worlds we live in and the very fates,
Our bright or muddy star.
Up from among the emblems of the wind
Into its heart of power,
The Huntsman climbs, and all his living stars
Are bright, and all are mine.
MEDITATION
What now caresses you, a year ago
Bent to the wind that sends a travelling wave
Almost of silver through the silky com
Westward of Calgary; or two weeks since
Bleated in Gloster market, lowed at Thame,
And slowly bled to give my lips desire;
Or in the teeming darkness, fathoms down,
Hung, one of millions, poised between the ooze
And the wind’s foamy skirts; or feathered flew,
Or deathwards ran before the following gun.
And all day long, knee deep in the wet grass,
The piebald cows of Edam chewed and chewed,
That what was cheese might pulse thus feverishly;
And now, prophetically, even now
They ponder in their ruminating jaws
My future body, which in Tuscan fields
Yet grows, yet grunts among the acorns, yet
Is salt and iron, water and touchless air,
Is only numbers variously moved,
Is nothing, yet will love your nothingness.
Vast forms of dust, tawny and tall and vague,
March through the desert, creatures of the wind.
Wind, blowing whither, blowing whence, who knows?
Wind was the soul that raised them from the sand,
Moved and sustained their movement, and at last
Abating, let them fall in separate grains
Slowly to earth and left an empty sky.
SEPTEMBER