460 THE WORLD OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
The glaucous gold of her rivery tresses
Each haunts the traveler, each possesses
The drunken wavering soul awhile;
Then with a phantom's cock-crow smile
Mocks craving with sheer vanishment.
Mole-eyes grow hawk's: knowledge is lent
In grudging driblets that pay high
Unconscionable usury
To unrelenting life. Mole learns
To travel more secure; the turns
Of his long way less puzzling seem,
And all those magic forms that gleam
In airy invitation cheat
Less often than they did of old.
The earth slopes upward, fold by fold
Of quiet hills that meet the gold
Serenity of western skies.
Over the world's edge with clear eyes
Our mole transcendent sees his way
Tunneled in light: he must obey
Necessity again and thrid
Close catacombs as erst he did,
Fate's tunnelings, himself must bore
Through the sunset's inmost core.
The guiding walls to each-hand shine
Luminous and crystalline;
And mole shall tunnel on and on,
Till night let fall oblivion.
First Philosopher's Song
From Leda
A POOR degenerate from the ape,
Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb,
I contemplate my flaccid shape
And know I may not rival him,
FIFTH PHILOSOPHER'S SONG 461
Save with my mind a nimbler beast
Possessing a thousand sinewy tails,
A thousand hands, with which it scales,
Greedy of luscious truth, the greased
Poles and the coco palms of thought,
Thrids easily through the mangrove maze
Of metaphysics, walks the taut
Frail dangerous liana ways
That link across wide gulfs remote
Analogies between tree and tree;
Outruns the hare, outhops the goat;
Mind fabulous, mind sublime and free!
But oh, the sound of simian mirth!
Mind, issued from the monkey's womb,
Is still umbilical to earth,
Earth its home and earth its tomb.
Fifth Philosopher's Song
From Leda
A MILLION million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you'd quietly died!
462 THE WORLD OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
Mediterranean
From The Cicadas
THIS tideless sapphire uniformly brims
Its jeweled circle of Tyrrhenian shore.
No vapors tarnish, not a cloud bedims,
And time descending only more and more
Makes rich, makes deep the unretiring gem.
And yet for me who look on it, how wide
The world of mud to which my thoughts condemn
This loathing vision of a sunken tide!
The ebb is mine. Life to its lowest neap
Withdrawn reveals that black and hideous shoal
Where I lie stranded. Oh deliver me
From this defiling death! Moon of the soul,
Call back the tide that ran so strong and deep,
Call back the shining jewel of the sea.
Carpe Noctem
From The Cicadas
THERE is no future, there is no more past,
No roots nor fruits, but momentary flowers.
Lie still, only lie still and night will last,
Silent and dark, not for a space of hours,
But everlastingly. Let me forget
All but your perfume, every night but this,
The shame, the fruitless weeping, the regret.
Only lie still: this faint and quiet bliss
Shall flower upon the brink of sleep and spread,
Till there is nothing else but you and I
Clasped in a timeless silence. But like one
Who, doomed to die, at morning will be dead,
I know, though night seem dateless, that the sky
Must brighten soon before tomorrow's sun.
THE CICADAS 463
Midsummer Day
From The Cicadas
THIS day was midsummer, the longest tarrying
Time makes between two sleeps. What have I done
With this longest of so few days, how spent,
Dear God, the golden, golden gift of sun?
Virginal, when I rose, the morning lay
Ready for beauty's rape, for wisdom's marrying.
I wrote: only an inky spider went,
Smear after smear, across the unsullied day.
If there were other places, if there were
But other days than this longest of few;
If one had courage, did one dare to do
That which alone might kill what now defaces
This the one place of all the countless places,
This only day when one will never dare!
The Cicadas
From The Cicadas
SIGHTLESS, I breathe and touch; this night of pines
Is needly, resinous and rough with bark.
Through every crevice in the tangible dark
The moonlessness above it all but shines.
Limp hangs the leafy sky; never a breeze
Stirs, nor a foot in all this sleeping ground;
And there is silence underneath the trees
The living silence of continuous sound.
For like inveterate remorse, like shrill
Delirium throbbing in the fevered brain,
An unseen people of cicadas fill
Night with their one harsh note, again, again.
464 THE WORLB OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
Again, again, with what insensate zest!
What fury of persistence, hour by hour!
Filled with what devil that denies them rest,
Drunk with what source of pleasure and of power!
Life is their madness, life that all night long
Bids them to sing and sing, they know not why;
Mad cause and senseless burden of their song;
For life commands, and Life! is all their cry.
I hear them sing, who in the double night
Of clouds and branches fancied that I went
Through my own spirit's dark discouragement,
Deprived of inward as of outward sight:
Who, seeking, even as here in the wild wood,
A lamp to beckon through my tangled fate,
Found only darkness and, disconsolate,
Mourned the lost purpose and the vanished good.
Now in my empty heart the crickets* shout
Re-echoing denies and still denies
With stubborn folly all my learned doubt,
In madness more than I in reason wise.
Life, life! The word is magical. They sing,
And in my darkened soul the great sun shines;
My fancy blossoms with remembered spring,
And all my autumns ripen on the vines.
Life! and each knuckle of the fig tree's pale
Dead skeleton breaks out with emerald fire.
Life! and the tulips blow, the nightingale
Calls back the rose, calls back the old desire:
And old desire that is forever new,
Desire, life's earliest and latest birth,
Life's instrument to suffer and to do,
Springs with the roses from the teeming earth;
THE CICADAs
Desire that from the world's bright body strips
Deforming time and makes each kiss the first;
That gives to hearts, to satiated lips
The endless bounty of tomorrow's thirst.
Time passes, and the watery moonrise peers
Between the tree trunks. But no outer light
Tempers the chances of our groping years,
No moon beyond our labyrinthine night.
Clueless we go; but I have heard thy voice,
Divine Unreason! harping in the leaves,
And grieve no more; for wisdom never grieves,
And thou hast taught me wisdom; I rejoice.
I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice. For it was good
advice the fruit of much experience and many meditations. But I am
afraid that, being a rather foolish young man, he merely laughed at what
he must have supposed was only a silly joke: laughed, as I myself foolishly
laughed when, years ago, that charming and talented and extraordinary
man, Ronald Firbank, once told me that he wanted to write a novel about
life in Mayfair and so was just off to the West Indies to look for copy
among the Negroes. I laughed at the time; but I see now that he was
quite right. Primitive people, like children and animals, are simply
civilized people with the lid off, so to speak the heavy elaborate lid of
manners, conventions, traditions of thought and feeling beneath which
each one of us passes his or her existence. This lid can be very con-
veniently studied in Mayfair, shall we say, or Passy, or Park Avenue. But
what goes on underneath the lid in these polished and elegant districts?
Direct observation (unless we happen to be endowed witfi a very pene-
trating intuition) tells us but little; and, if we cannot infer what is going
on under other lids from what we see, introspectively, by peeping under
our own, then the best thing we can do is to take the next boat for the
West Indies, or else, less expensively, pass a few mornings in the nursery,
or alternatively, as I suggested to my literary young friend, buy a pair of
cats.
Yes, a pair of cats. Siamese by preference; for they are certainly the
most 'Tiuman" of all the race of cats. Also the strangest, and, if not the
most beautiful, certainly the most striking and fantastic. For what dis-
quieting pale-blue eyes stare out from the black-velvet mask of their
faces! Snow white at birth, their bodies gradually darken to a rich mulatto
color.
