Early Writings Read online

  But perhaps a sort of a bow.

  The musician returns to the dominant.

  Behold then the the that I am;

  Behold me sententious, dégagé,

  Behold me my saeculum in parvo,18

  Bergson’s objective fact,

  London’s last foible in poets.

  I love all delicate sounds,

  The purple fragrance of incense;

  I love the flaked fire of sunlight

  Where it glints like red rain on the water;

  I love the quaint patterns inwoven

  In Mozart, Steibelt,19 Scarlatti,

  I love their quavers and closes,

  The passionate moods of singing.

  TO WHISTLER, AMERICAN

  On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.

  You also, our first great,

  Had tried all ways;

  Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,

  And this much gives me heart to play the game.

  Here is a part that’s slight, and part gone wrong,

  And much of little moment, and some few

  Perfect as Diirer!

  “In the Studio” and these two portraits,* if I had my choice!

  And then these sketches in the mood of Greece?

  You had your searches, your uncertainties,

  And this is good to know—for us, I mean,

  Who bear the brunt of our America

  And try to wrench her impulse into art.

  You were not always sure, not always set

  To hiding night or tuning “symphonies”;

  *“Brown and Gold—de Race.”

  “Grenat et Or—Le Petit Cardinal.”

  Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried

  And stretched and tampered with the media.

  You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts

  Show us there’s chance at least of winning through.

  PORTRAIT D’UNE FEMME

  Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, 1

  London has swept about you this score years

  And bright ships left you this or that in fee:

  Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,

  Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

  Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.

  You have been second always. Tragical?

  No. You preferred it to the usual thing:

  One dull man, dulling and uxorious,

  One average mind—with one thought less, each year.

  Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit

  Hours, where something might have floated up.

  And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

  You are a person of some interest, one comes to you

  And takes strange gain away:

  Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;

  Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,

  Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else

  That might prove useful and yet never proves,

  That never fits a corner or shows use,

  Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:

  The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;

  Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,

  These are your riches, your great store; and yet

  For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

  Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:

  In the slow float of differing light and deep,

  No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

  Nothing that’s quite your own.

  Yet this is you.

  N.Y.

  My City, my beloved, my white! Ah, slender,

  Listen! Listen to me, and I will breathe into thee a soul.

  Delicately upon the reed, attend me!

  Now do I know that I am mad,

  For here are a million people surly with traffic;

  This is no maid.

  Neither could I play upon any reed if I had one.

  My City, my beloved,

  Thou art a maid with no breasts,

  Thou art slender as a silver reed.

  Listen to me, attend me!

  And I will breathe into thee a soul,

  And thou shalt live for ever.

  THE SEAFARER

  From the Anglo-Saxon

  May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

  Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days

  Hardship endured oft.

  Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

  Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

  And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

  Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

  While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

  My feet were by frost benumbed.

  Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

  Hew my heart round and hunger begot

  Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

  That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

  List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

  Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

  Deprived of my kinsmen;

  Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

  There I heard naught save the harsh sea

  And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,

  Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,

  Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,

  The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.

  Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern

  In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

  With spray on his pinion.

  Not any protector

  May make merry man faring needy.

  This he little believes, who aye in winsome life

  Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,

  Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft

  Must bide above brine.

  Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

  Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then,

  Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now

  The heart’s thought that I on high streams

  The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

  Moaneth alway my mind’s lust

  That I fare forth, that I afar hence

  Seek out a foreign fastness.

  For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,

  Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth

  greed;

  Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful

  But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare

  Whatever his lord will.

  He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having

  Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight

  Nor any whit else save the wave’s slash,

  Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.

  Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,

  Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,

  All this admonisheth man eager of mood,

  The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks

  On flood-ways to be far departing.

  Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,

  He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,

  The bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not—

  He the prosperous man—what some perform

  Where wandering them widest draweth.

  So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock,

  My mood ’mid the mere-flood,

  Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.

  On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,

  Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,

  Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,

  O’er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow

  My lord deems to me this dead life

  On loan and on land, I believe not

  That any earth-weal eternal standeth

  Save there be some
what calamitous

  That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.

  Disease or oldness or sword-hate

  Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.

  And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after-

  Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,

  That he will work ere he pass onward,

  Frame on the fair earth ’gainst foes his malice,

  Daring ado, ...

  So that all men shall honour him after

  And his laud beyond them remain ’mid the English,

  Aye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,

  Delight ’mid the doughty.

  Days little durable,

  And all arrogance of earthen riches,

  There come now no kings nor Cæsars

  Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

  Howe’er in mirth most magnified,

  Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,

  Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

  Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

  Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

  Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

  No man at all going the earth’s gait,

  But age fares against him, his face paleth,

  Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

  Lordly men, are to earth o’ergiven,

  Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,

  Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

  Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

  And though he strew the grave with gold,

  His born brothers, their buried bodies

  Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

  THE RETURN

  See, they return; ah, see the tentative

  Movements, and the slow feet,

  The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

  Wavering!

  See, they return, one, and by one,

  With fear, as half-awakened;

  As if the snow should hesitate

  And murmur in the wind,

  and half turn back;

  These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”

  Inviolable.

  Gods of the winged shoe!

  With them the silver hounds,

  sniffing the trace of air!

  Haie! Haie!

  These were the swift to harry;

  These the keen-scented;

  These were the souls of blood.

  Slow on the leash,

  pallid the leash-men!

  FRATRES MINORES

  With minds still hovering above their testicles

  Certain poets here and in France

  Still sigh over established and natural fact

  Long since fully discussed by Ovid.

  They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres

  That the twitching of three abdominal nerves

  Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.

  THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF T. E. HULME

  First published at the end of Ripostes 1912

  Prefatory Note: In publishing his Complete Poetical Works at thirty,d Mr Hulme has set an enviable example to many of his contemporaries who have had less to say.

  They are reprinted here for good fellowship; for good custom, a custom out of Tuscany and of Provence; and thirdly, for convenience, seeing their smallness of bulk; and for good memory, seeing that they recall certain evenings and meetings of two years gone, dull enough at the time, but rather pleasant to look back upon.

  As for the “School of Images,” which may or may not have existed, its principles were not so interesting as those of the “inherent dynamists” or of Les Unanimistes, yet they were probably sounder than those of a certain French school which attempted to dispense with verbs altogether; or of the Impressionists who brought forth:

  “Pink pigs blossoming upon the hillside”; or of the Post-Impressionists who beseech their ladies to let down slate-blue hair over their raspberry-coloured flanks.

  Ardoise rimed richly—ah, richly and rarely rimed!—with framboise.

  As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping.

  I refrain from publishing my proposed Historical Memoir of their forerunners, because Mr Hulme has threatened to print the original propaganda.

  E.P.

  AUTUMN

  A touch of cold in the Autumn night—

  I walked abroad,

  And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

  Like a red-faced farmer.

  I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

  And round about were the wistful stars

  With white faces like town children.

  MANA ABODA

  Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end.

  Mana Aboda, whose bent form

  The sky in arched circle is,

  Seems ever for an unknown grief to mourn.

  Yet on a day I heard her cry:

  “I weary of the roses and the singing poets—

  Josephs all, not tall enough to try.”

  ABOVE THE DOCK

  Above the quiet dock in mid night,

  Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,

  Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away

  Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

  THE EMBANKMENT

  (The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.

  Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

  In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

  Now see I

  That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.

  Oh, God, make small

  The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

  That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

  CONVERSION

  Lighthearted I walked into the valley wood

  In the time of hyacinths,

  Till beauty like a scented cloth

  Cast over, stifled me. I was bound

  Motionless and faint of breath

  By loveliness that is her own eunuch.

  Now pass I to the final river

  Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound,

  As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus.

  SALUTATION THE THIRD

  Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:

  GUFFAW!

  So much for the gagged reviewers,

  It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;

  These are they who objected to newness,

  Here are their tomb-stones.

  They supported the gag and the ring:

  A little BLACK Box contains them.

  So shall you be also,

  You slut-bellied obstructionist,

  You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,

  You fungus, you continuous gangrene.

  Come, let us on with the new deal,

  Let us be done with pandars and jobbery,

  Let us spit upon those who pat the big-bellies for profit,

  Let us go out in the air a bit.

  Or perhaps I will die at thirty?

  Perhaps you will have the pleasure of defiling my pauper’s

  grave;

  I wish you joy, I proffer you all my assistance.

  It has been your habit for long

  to do away with good writers,

  You either drive them mad, or else you blink at their suicides,

  Or else you condone their drugs,

  and talk of insanity and genius,

  But I will not go mad to please you,

  I will not flatter you with an early death,

  Oh, no, I will stick it out,

  Feel your hates wriggling about my feet

  As a pleasant tickle,

  to be observed with derision,

  Though many move with suspicion,

  Afraid to say that they hate you;
>
  The taste of my boot?

  Here is the taste of my boot,

  Caress it,

  lick off the blacking.

  SONG OF THE BOWMEN OF SHU

  Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots1

  And saying: When shall we get back to our country?

  Here we are because we have the Ken-nin2 for our foemen,

  We have no comfort because of these Mongols.

  We grub the soft fern-shoots,

  When anyone says “Return,” the others are full of sorrow.3

  Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.

  Our defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend

  return.

  We grub the old fern-stalks.

  We say: Will we be let to go back in October?

  There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.

  Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.

  What flower has come into blossom?

  Whose chariot? The General’s.

  Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.

  We have no rest, three battles a month.

  By heaven, his horses are tired.

  The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.

  The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and

  quivers ornamented with fish-skin.

  The enemy is swift, we must be careful.

  When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring,

  We come back in the snow,

  We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,

  Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?

  By Bunno,4 reputedly 1100 B.C.

  THE RIVER SONG

  This boat is of shato-wood,1 and its gunwales are cut magnolia,

  Musicians with jewelled flutes and with pipes of gold

  Fill full the sides in rows, and our wine

  Is rich for a thousand cups.