Ode pour l'election de son sepulchre

“Vocat æstus in umbram”

Nemesianus Es. IV.

E. P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE

or three years, out of key with his time,

He strove to resuscitate the dead art

Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”

In the old sense. Wrong from the start—

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born

In a half savage country, out of date;

Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;

Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

Ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ’, ὂσ’ ἐνὶ Τρoίῃ

Caught in the unstopped ear;

Giving the rocks small lee-way

The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,

He fished by obstinate isles;

Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair

Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events,”

He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme

De son eage; the case presents

No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

he age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities

Than the classics in paraphrase!

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,

Made with no loss of time,

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

III

he tea-rose tea-gown, etc.

Supplants the mousseline of Cos,

The pianola “replaces”

Sappho’s barbitos.

Christ follows Dionysus,

Phallic and ambrosial

Made way for macerations;

Caliban casts out Ariel.

All things are a flowing,

Sage Heracleitus says;

But a tawdry cheapness

Shall outlast our days.

Even the Christian beauty

Defects—after Samothrace;

We see τὸ καλόν

Decreed in the market place.

Faun’s flesh is not to us,

Nor the saint’s vision.

We have the press for wafer;

Franchise for circumcision.

All men, in law, are equals.

Free of Peἰsistratus,

We choose a knave or an eunuch

To rule over us.

O bright Apollo,

τίν' άνδρα, τίν' ἥρωα, τίνα θεὸν,

What god, man, or hero

Shall I place a tin wreath upon!

hese fought in any case,

and some believing, pro domo, in any case ...

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

learning later ...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter

Died some, pro patria, non “dulce” non “et decor” ...

walked eye-deep in hell

believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

came home, home to a lie,

home to many deceits,

home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick

and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

Young blood and high blood,

fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,

disillusions as never told in the old days,

hysterias, trench confessions,

laughter out of dead bellies.

here died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,

100

For a few thousand battered books.

Yeux Glauques

ladstone was still respected,

When John Ruskin produced

“Kings Treasuries”; Swinburne

105

And Rossetti still abused.

Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice

When that faun’s head of hers

Became a pastime for

Painters and adulterers.

110

The Burne-Jones cartons

Have preserved her eyes;

Still, at the Tate, they teach

Cophetua to rhapsodize;

Thin like brook-water,

115

With a vacant gaze.

The English Rubaiyat was still-born

In those days.

The thin, clear gaze, the same

Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face,

120

Questing and passive . . . .

“Ah, poor Jenny’s case” . . .

Bewildered that a world

Shows no surprise

At her last maquero’s

125

Adulteries.

“Sienna Mi Fe’, Disfecemi Maremma”

mong the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones,

Engaged in perfecting the catalogue,

I found the last scion of the

130

Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.

For two hours he talked of Gallifet;

Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club;

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died

By falling from a high stool in a pub ...

135

But showed no trace of alcohol

At the autopsy, privately performed—

Tissue preserved—the pure mind

Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels;

140

Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued

With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.

So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood”,

M. Verog, out of step with the decade,

Detached from his contemporaries,

145

Neglected by the young,

Because of these reveries.

Brennbaum

he sky-like limpid eyes,

The circular infant’s face,

150

The stiffness from spats to collar

Never relaxing into grace;

The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,

Showed only when the daylight fell

Level across the face

155

Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable”.

Mr. Nixon

n the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht

Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer

Dangers of delay. “Consider

160

Carefully the reviewer.

“I was as poor as you are;

“When I began I got, of course,

“Advance on royalties, fifty at first”, said Mr. Nixon,

“Follow me, and take a column,

165

“Even if you have to work free.

“Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred

“I rose in eighteen months;

“The hardest nut I had to crack

“Was Dr. Dundas.

170

“I never mentioned a man but with the view

“Of selling my own works.

“The tip’s a good one, as for literature

“It gives no man a sinecure.”

And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.

175

And give up verse, my boy,

There's nothing in it."

* * *

Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me:

Don't kick against the pricks,

180

Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game

And died, there’s nothing in it.

eneath the sagging roof

The stylist has taken shelter,

185

Unpaid, uncelebrated,

At last from the world’s welter

Nature receives him,

With a placid and uneducated mistress

He exercises his talents

190

And the soil meets his distress.

The haven from sophistications and contentions

Leaks through its thatch;

He offers succulent cooking;

The door has a creaking latch.

195

“

onservatrix of Milésien”

Habits of mind and feeling,

Possibly. But in Ealing

With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen?

200

No, “Milésian” is an exaggeration.

No instinct has survived in her

Older than those her grandmother

Told her would fit her station.

XII

205

“

aphne with her thighs in bark

Stretches toward me her leafy hands”,—

Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room

I await The Lady Valentine’s commands,

Knowing my coat has never been

210

Of precisely the fashion

To stimulate, in her,

A durable passion;

Doubtful, somewhat, of the value

Of well-gowned approbation

215

Of literary effort,

But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation:

Poetry, her border of ideas,

The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending

With other strata

220

Where the lower and higher have ending;

A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention,

A modulation toward the theatre,

Also, in the case of revolution,

A possible friend and comforter.

225

* * *

Conduct, on the other hand, the soul

“Which the highest cultures have nourished”

To Fleet St. where

Dr. Johnson flourished;

230

Beside this thoroughfare

The sale of half-hose has

Long since superseded the cultivation

Of Pierian roses.

—
Ezra Pound

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1920