Classic Poem

The exquisite banality of rose and ivory:
Shadows of ivory carved into panels, stained
And decayed in the moulding; rose-colour looped
Casting a shadow of mauve; blown cherubs
Bulging in silver,
Lift six tapers to the lighted mirror.

A dusk, deep as the under side of a rose,
Is curtained under the old bed-dome.
Contracting the coverlet, a shape lies
Which may or may not be a man.

What thoughts should an old man have
In the London autumn
Between dusk and darkness?
Behind the shrunken eyelids, what apparitions?
What pebbles rattle in a dry stream?

A boy with a pale, lovely, dissolute face
Sprawled on the green baize, among the cards,
A Spanish pistol dropped from one hand —
Seen from the glazed squares of the club, a street
Cobbled with faces, bundles of rags and lice,
A yellow dwarf rising with protruding face —
Gilded Indian gamecocks clawing blood
Amid the clapping of pale hairless hands —
Lady Barfinger, masked in satin, disclosing her gums,
Labored graces of a cracked coquette —
A Jew that came on sliding haunches,
Crouched, and with distended palms
Whined for his pledges — Alvanley,
Embroidered in silver foil, poised at the court,
The ball a mirror of silvery Alvanleys.

Phantoms under a cloudy ceiling, uneasy images,
Sentences that never come to a period.
Thoughts of an old dandy shrunk to a nightgown.

The chamfered fall of silken rose —
Muffling London and the autumn rain —
Lifts and recurves,
A beautiful young man,
Naked, but for a superb white tiewig,
Moves in with slow pacings of a cardinal
Dreaming on his cane.

The firelight blushes on the suave
Thighs of the young man, as he glides
From his calm, with an inessential gesture
To brush his tiewig. Palm upon knuckles,
Fingers over the cane head, he regards
Amusedly his own face in the crystal.
" Without my powdered curled peruke
I were but a man; so, I am a dandy.

For what was there to do, being no god
Burnished and strong, amorous of immortals,
But to escape this disappointing body
Punily erect, patched with scant hair,
Rank in its smell too,
By hiding it in silk and civet — adding to silver hair,
Pomp of vermilion heels?
What else, indeed, unless to drown
All naked, to drown all sense in wine.

" They thought my wit was all in waistcoats,
My epigrams pointed but with dainty tassels,
When every ribbon that my fingers tied
Protested with a fragile indolent disdain
A world exquisitely old and dull and vain.
So I gave them my jest —
Walking stark naked to the gaming room
Where the preened dandies leaned across their cards,
Their pale long fingers spread among the cards.

" They laughed: I did not laugh: so old
So pitiful, so brutal and so dark
The buffoonery. But the body's the jest of Another —
I make my obeisance. "

Young Coatsworth has become
A naked glimmer on the lighted glass,
Fainter than the shimmer among rainy bees.

An old man lies propped on a bed
Counting the candles of the empty glass —
An old man who has seen
His own youth walking in the room.

The window silk puffs with a winter gust,
And Coatsworth, aetatis suae XXV,
Flapped in gold braid crinkled in air-blue,
With inscrutable precision
Bows in a lady,
Who repeats the scene with the graces of a marionette.

" Madam, " he says, addressing her panniers,
" Your bodice is miraculously a double moonrise,
Your throat the traditional swan's white —
But fuller. Your lips an exciting cochineal.
But in truth, love is at best
A fashionable intrigue, an accompliced secret,
Unendurable without grated orris root.
Love remains to the proud mind
A ladder loosened from the brazen tower,
A furtive flight from the sentineled domain
Where self is utterly contained in self.
Though you ordered the death of a thousand roses,
I've caught the breath of a garden, where
No man has ever been, and the ripe fruit
Drops through the tarnished air
Unheeded, and yew trees are made peacocks.
I thank you for your horrible favours.
Adieu — "

The lady unravels to a ragged smoke:
Coatsworth darkens with blood like a satyr,
Blushes in a burnish on the mirror,
Burns and is gone.

The dry skull stretches regretful claws
And the points of the tapers twist and bend —
Sallow fingers of Jewish usurers.

A rapier flicks through the curtains
Like a needle of sunlight splintered on the sea.
Coatsworth presses before him,
Back to the fireplace, a panting stripling
A jet of wet red spurts from the shirt front;
The youth sinks and dribbles in blood through the carpet.

" The end of such upstart heralds
As would bar my shield to the sinister. "
The reflected visage is rigid,
Puckered thinly with wrinkles.
" What if I got my finger's trick,
Whether with rapiers or a puffing neck-cloth,
From a confectioner of Bath
Whose fastidious years were spent
Tracing on cakes sweet labyrinths of ice,
Squeezing pink fondant into petalled buds?
What that, overnight, through an open window,
He got me because a crooked pear tree
Climbed to the window ledge?
No man's to call me bastard.
And what's a murder more or less
Amid the inane fecundity of blood and sweat.
A barmaid and a groom repair the loss. "

The dead youth has subsided in blood
Leaving the floor unsoiled
Coatsworth has leapt through the silvered glass
Leaving its flames unspoiled.

His pallor stained by the rose-dimmed dusk,
An old man lies on a curtained bed,
Whimpering like a beggar in a wet loft
When the wind's found the cracks and the straw is cold
Coatsworth, now old, steps from the window folds
With a gesture consciously tragic;
Stands for a moment
Half Don Juan, half Childe Harold;
Then stalks, a magpie motley
Black, buff and silver, up to the mirror.
He regards the vain, brave fall
Of the surtout, the triple tied neck-cloth,
The bronze hair brushed as in busts of Nero —
Then with a posture almost Byronic
Confides in silence.

" Amid the bumpers, the scaffoldings, the ilex cones,
I have ever worn the scorn of death
With the careless grace of a boutonniere.
But let me be buried with a fiery choir;
A scarlet and lace processional of boys,
And priests too old to lift their stiffened folds
Too wise to hold their clouded incense as a prayer.
Tie up my chin lest I should smile.
And press into my hand my laurel cane
Where Daphne with blown crinkled hair
Feels the hard wood invade her silver thighs;
Leave me my snuff box for its musty yawn
And for its intricate cool ivory
Showing an April faun at his desires;
Probate my will, offer my house for rent.

" I had thought to find a languor, to attain
A gallant erudition in the snuff box and the cane;
To restore a tarnished splendour
Ceremonious as a stole,
Gorgeous like a vestment — yet urbane;
Between the opening and the closing of the doors
To have stood between the sconces, ripe in silk,
Ancestral laces falling to the sword;
Reflected in the parquetry, to dream
Of Giorgione in a tricorn, and high wigs
Powdered with palest silver, piled like clouds;
Of odorous mummied roses, grown dusty with a queen
Tender and slight and proud.

" But I have stood so long
Before so many mirrors, I'm afraid,
Afraid at last that I may be
A shadow of masks and rapiers between the girandoles
A satin phantom, gone when the wax is down. "

He becomes a toothless grimace
Between the moveless cherubs, silver blown.

Under the lustered bed-dome, in the curtained dusk,
A throat moans — the sudden and lonely
Cry of one ridden by a nightmare,
Who wakes and finds it is no dream.

Old Coatsworth unravels from the bed clothes —
As ghost unwinding its buried linen;
And stands, toes clutched and indrawn,
Ridiculously muffled in linen ruffles;
Totters slowly to the glass
To find therein, grinning wide with terror,
The toothless mist of the last apparition
Shrieking, he plucks a candle from its socket
And drives the double flame into the darkness.
Another, another, another,
Four tapers extinguish their windy stains
In a smear of wax on the mirror.

Another flame drops from a bony claw.
Like the drums of a defeat, a heart sounds.
And he peers at the dwindling face in the mirror —
The face of a dandy brought to a shroud.

Clutching the last tremulous candle
The old dandy sways,
Clings to the air,
And sinks in a slow movement of exhausted mirth.

The mirror is heavy with shadows
And a white candle spreads a film on the hearthstone.