Classic Poem

I

It was not a large garden, as gardens go,
But carefully patterned with row after row
Of flower-beds edged by low, clipped box
In the quaintly prim and orthodox
Manner of seventeen-eighty or thereabouts.
A couple of dolphins spurted out spouts
Of silver-blue water from a couple of fountains,
And the distant sky was suggestive of mountains.
I say suggestive, for it lay with the wind
If the sky were thicker or thinner skinned.
Even when the air was without a vapour
All one saw was a luminous blur
Which might have been a cloud of a trick
Of the eyes, smarting under the too sharp prick
Of the very clearness, till you looked again
And saw it still. It was never plain,
But hung like a whisper of something bright
In the large, slow blue, about half the height
From horizon to zenith. This dolomite
Which, for better disguise, I shall call Ghost Peak,
Was considered by Julius to be the unique
Cause of his coming, and presently buying,
The charming old house he was now occupying.
A writer may live where his fancies dictate
Provided his copy be kept up to date,
And Julius had certainly earned some repose
And might, if he wanted, play dominoes,
Or whist, or billiards, for the rest of his life,
Might even consider the taking a wife.
Not Julius, he sought only lapses of hours
Within reach of the sight and scent of flowers.
He loved the languor of faded chintz,
The strange nostalgia of coloured prints
To hang above Sheraton chairs, the sham
And exquisite classics of the brothers Adam.
His garden delighted him through and through,
With its peacocks and unicorns clipped in yew,
And the broad lines of the gravel walks,
Firm and flat between tall stalks
Of fox-glove, or monk's-hood, down which to betake
Himself to the edge of the long green lake
Which lay at the foot of the garden-close —
And over all the Ghost Peak rose.
On the days when it did; when it didn't, he fought
A weird depression which clenched his thought
And seemed to squeeze it between cold claws.
He harried his soul in a search for laws
Of the bonds of man with things, the caress
Of awe and horror in loveliness.
He burned his brain in a search to find
What the Ghostly Mountain meant to his mind,
What his chairs and tables held him by,
Whether or not he had heard a sly
Rustle, as he passed, from the peacock yews.
Once he thought that the cockatoos
On the chintz of his arm-chair flapped their wings.
These were most fearful and joyous things.
The mellow place had a sort of spell,
And it suited him thoroughly, blissfully well.
He was tired out with the old routine
Of man and man, now something between
Held him away and apart. Intense
Became his ultra-commonsense,
And he was happy and preened himself
On being an unusual sort of elf,
Not feeling the need of his fellows at all.
Julius was riding for a fall.

One day his luck, or his fate, or his fiend,
(Something sardonic, at least) intervened
Between him and the comfortable life he was leading,
And suggested a walk in the town. Too much reading
Had made his head buzz, so he put on his hat
And started out blithely, considering that
This bright afternoon was an excellent season
To visit a shop he had not, for some reason,
Yet entered. An antiquity dealer's, of course.
Such gentry, he mused, were the clear single source
Of his pleasures. How gaily he walked down the street!
I might almost say strutted, so very replete
Was he with good temper. The shop-door stood wide,
And Julius, poor devil, stepped squarely inside.

II

The place was dim, with shafts of dusty light
Shocking the gloom to colour. On the right,
A grim old cabinet whose worm-holed wood
Was black as iron, reared its vastitude
Quite out of sight among the smoky rafters.
Its front was carven with the grinning laughters
Of broken-faced, libidinous dwarfs who clung
Among the twistings of a snaky tongue
That proved itself a vine by flinging clusters
Of grapes out here and there, which, through the dust blurs,
Shimmered with subtle, polished, purple lustres.
The thing was most intriguing, harsh, and fine,
But like a thunder-cloud which breaks the line
Of open clearness in a Summer sky.
Worm-eaten oak could scarcely qualify
Among his painted satin-wood escritoires,
His Wedgwood vases and majolicas.
" The eighteenth century is my period, "
He told the shopman, who answered with a nod,
And forthwith guided him among the maze
Of torn brocaded chairs, the chipping glaze
Of things which once were lacquer, and the traps
Of sprawling andirons with trivets on their laps,
Into a little yard behind the shop
All full of urns, and columns, and a crop
Of marble Mercuries, and Venuses, and Floras,
Of cavaliers in bautas and black-silk-masked signoras.
The shopman waved his hand and turned away.

Well, Julius, take your stock of the array,
But never again can there be yesterday
As you will recollect, I dare to say,
Though sportsmen keep stiff upper lips and pay.
The things were well enough at five yards distance
But at a closer view did not entrance.
Julius, discouraged, was turning to go in
When some conceit of colour, vaguely seen
Between two statues, struck his eager sense
And set him threading through the very dense
Concourse of mediocre marbles. Suddenly
She, charming feminine creature, held his eye.
The seeing was a dazzle in his head,
But what he saw by every honest measure
Had not this shimmering denied him leisure
To contemplate beyond his eager pleasure,
Was just a garden figure made of lead.

A garden figure. Yes, but what a one!
Bright as a flower under a white sun,
Vigorous and frail, with tints as gay as those
Which deck the saints in Fra Angelico's
Best adorations. Dressed in pink and blue,
A rose-red bodice, whence a kerchief flew
Streaming behind her on a hidden wind,
Her azure skirt was gathered up and pinned
A little to one side, her stockings shone
As though of very silk, and she had on
The blackest, shiniest pair of buckled shoes
That ever bore a maiden through the dews
Of a Summer morning. Then there was her hat
Of yellow straw, beribboned, wide, and flat.
Her face and hands were all that hands and face
Might be in hue and shapeliness, their grace
A balance of perfections. At her belt,
In her up-curving arm, she held a nose-gay
Of marigolds and phlox, the lively way
In which these flowers were modelled made a play
Of movement seem among them, and the scent
Just on the point of coming — yes, Julius smelt
Their pungent bitter sweetness as he bent
A little farther forward, then it went
Fading away, and Julius could have sworn
The lady smiled a little more. Was it scorn
Or only the shadow from the maple-tree?
What was it Julius saw or didn't see?
He scarcely stopped to wonder. Back he hurried
Into the shop, and though a trifle flurried
Achieved a tolerable bargain, for our hero
Was a shrewd business man, as you must know.
Well, that was done, the figure to be delivered.
Did Julius hear a rusty sound which quivered
Down the old cabinet, cracking in the heat?
Those grinning dwarfs pursued him to the street,
He felt their obscene jaws stretching and gobbling.
That cabinet was a disgusting thing,
A mouldering carcass which needed burying.
And then he straight forgot it, thinking where,
Beside which tree and close to which parterre,
He should place his little leaden Jardiniere.

III

That night the sun sank in a wheel of purple flame.
The Ghost Peak floated, an unapproachable purity, in the opposite sky.
The lake was a violent splendour with no farther shore.
But Julius had chosen the place for his statue;
He was content to sit on a garden bench and smoke,
And watch the white lilies fuse into incandescence under the fading of the sky.
At the end of a long vista,
Near, and not too near, a fountain,
Beneath an acacia whose drooping golden chains of flowers brushed her hat and shoulder,
Stood the little garden maiden,
A gaiety of colour in a green and gold shade.
Her pinks, and blue, and yellows, were like the tinkling of glass bells to his senses.
A front foot lightly, firmly advanced,
A back foot just on its tiptoe,
She paused, waiting a farther reason for coming forward,
Abiding the final chord of a rhythm not yet completed.
A dancer without music,
A walker without a goal,
Seeking a purpose to fulfil a movement
Unwittingly begun.
Half bold, half shy, and wholly alluring,
Julius congratulated himself on having added to his garden
Just the touch it needed,
And more than ever, felt no concern to leave it.

Summer!
Summer!
Great gusts of surging Summer,
A breeze of perfume making its own wind!
Butterflies flickered among orange lilies,
Ruby-throated humming-birds drank from climbing nasturtiums
Hanging in a vanishing whirl of wings.
At night, the garden was a bowl of fire-flies,
And, when the moon rose, the Ghost Peak, suddenly, silently visible,
Bloomed in the half-height of the sky.
A fire-fly lit on the breast of the statue,
" As it might have been a diamond, " thought Julius,
" I had bought for her on Midsummer Day. "
He was pleased with the fancy,
And slipped his ring on the finger of the statue
To see it gleam in the moonlight.
Pricks of sapphire, ripples of rose,
Basilisk eyes which open and close,
How the light of the moon ran across the diamond!
How it splashed deep down in the facets of the stone
And flung up sprays of iris and maroon.
Julius played the tale of lover to his dream
Until the moon set,
But when he tried to pull the ring off,
It held instead,
Caught in the crook of a knuckle of lead,
And the white stone was red — red —
And in its heart lay the bright, coiled thread
Of a many-coloured snake with an eye in its head.
And there were grimaces
Of misshapen faces
Peering out of a green snake-tree.
The diamond glittered horribly,
For the eye made a light
Which broke through the night
In a sort of bungling, dazzling flight
That splintered the garden's symmetry:
The trees were so tall
They had no tops at all,
And the lake stood straight like a painted sea.
Then came the dark . . .
And the spark of the scratch
From a lighted match
As Julius sought to take the ring.
But he could not, it continued to cling.
Julius laughed.
" Good night, Madonna del Giardino, "
Said he,
" You may give the jewel back to me
To-morrow. "
And he went in to bed.

But not to-morrow,
Or the morrow, or the next,
Could he take off the ring. Julius was perplexed.
It was safe enough, for who would seek gems
On a garden figure's finger, and as all his stratagems
Had failed, why Julius left the matter where it was.
In fact, he grew to think of it as
An added touch of coquetry
To the statue's charm, and let it be.

A week or two of amazing weather
He and the statue passed together.
Julius was never more enamoured
Of his quaint old house, but the garden clamoured
With loud throat notes of yellow and red,
An orchestra in every bed,
The blaring brass of late Summer flowers.
In the early morning, the garden's blaze
Was softened by a half-Autumnal haze,
But by noon the colours were deafening.
I am not responsible for the sting
Of such a muddle of metaphors,
They were Julius's, and what was worse
He made many such as he sat by the fountain,
Under the gleam of his Vision, the Mountain,
Playing a game he delighted in:
That his garden lady was feminine
Flesh and blood to his masculine
Desire, a proper person before whom to kneel.
The game as he played it became almost real.
It was well no gardener was hovering round
To overhear poor Julius expound
His love in his best poetic style.
I fear the man might have been tempted to smile,
Or rather, more possibly, since persons so menial
Find everything out of routine uncongenial,
He might even have taken his master for mad;
A condition of things which, I hasten to add,
Was not so. The truth is man is so multiplex
He confuses himself with his this and his that,
And carries round constantly under his hat
A thousand odd notions. Now 'twas nothing but sex
Deprived its due reason, which set Julius sighing
Before a lead statue instead of complying
With all mystic wisdom and seeking a woman
Who, whatever she lacked, would be certainly human.

All the long Summer days, and soft Summer nights,
Julius sat by his statue, and sometimes the flights
Of his fancy (or eyesight) made him think he detected
A twitch or a shiver, he almost suspected
She might some day speak. So a month passed away,
Then a veer in the wind brought a cold rainy day.
No sitting and soaking for hours together,
And Julius was in for a real " spell of weather. "
Like wires across the landscape fell the rain,
The lean, swift wind became a hurricane,
Leaves rocketed along the air, the lashing trees
Thundered as they drove their quivering knees
Deep in the muddy grass, some leapt and screamed
As a branch broke and left the trunk all seamed
With the running scar. The windows creaked like bones
As the old house raged and tore on its foundation stones.
Two days the fury lasted, then a smooth
And sudden calm fell with a change of wind,
But still the sky seemed a grey marble veined
With spots and drops of black. Like a broken tooth,
The ancient sycamore stood with its stumps
All hollow to the rainfall. Where were clumps
Of flowers was beaten offal; where were walks
Were spaces littered with the rotting stalks
Of headless plants. Beyond was only mist;
A hatching of water hid the sudden twist
Of the path to the Dolphin Fountain. How was she?
But Julius had no mind to go and see.
He wanted lights, and brick façades, and town,
Somewhere where no leaves were which could be blown,
A brief half-hour away these might be had,
And Julius sought them eagerly, most glad,
For once, to leave his consoles and clipped yews.
Blood ran again along his dusty thews.

IV

He could not grasp it,
Could not tear the shell
Off of his soul and see it as it was
Naked and green with life;
Nor could he see what tendrils from it held
Her tendrils. How his heart
Long since burst open with its fruit spilled out,
And so accustomed to a core of air,
Closed round her as a sheath
Fitted to its own kernel.
But these things were.
A month ago he was an amateur of taste,
To-day his footsteps rang like clanging bells,
The steps of self-sufficing, august man,
Beating a chime upon the universe.

A month he had been away, and when he came
Once more into his garden, late September
Lay like a melted hoar-frost on the air.
The flowers were dahlias, marigolds, and phlox,
All spangled with the chilling of the haze.
Julius smiled at them as he recollected,
For were not phlox and marigolds the flowers
His garden lady carried for her nosegay.
He praised himself for buying the little figure,
Hildegarde would like it. Then he turned
The corner by the fountain and there she was,
A dazzling clarity of shape and colour,
For now and then the fountain tossed its spray
A little higher, and lightly spattered her
So that she shone. So did the diamond
Still on her finger.
But Julius was ashamed to see it there
And made a note to have it cut away
If nothing else would free it. He went on
Down to the lake and skipped a stone or two
Across its surface, noted how faint and edgeless
The Mountain was, then went indoors to work.
He worked all day, and in the evening
Sat down to write a line to Hildegarde.
What is that heavy, pungent smell?
Flowers, of course, but not in the room,
There are none in the room. He shut
The window long ago. Again
He smells it, tart and sweet.
" The phlox and marigolds are lovely here, "
He writes, and stops astonished
For phlox and marigolds are what he smells,
And all the windows tightly shut!
He dips his pen, but instantly the scent
Becomes submerging like a drug,
Becomes an ether clogged with dreams.
A step? Could there come a step
Fanning the floor as lightly as a leaf?
Julius startled looks, and all his muscles
Cease to cohere, they run apart like sand.
He cannot move,
He must be drugged, for right before his eyes
Are phlox and marigolds, and they are arranged
In the pattern of the garden lady's nosegay.
He makes himself look up, but it is torture
Even to turn his eyes, and there she is,
Holding out the flowers. " God in Heaven's name!
What is this? " He speaks, but cannot move an inch.
" I love you, Julius, " and it is a voice
Brittle and sharp as glass, a crimson glass.
He hears and shudders.
" To whom are you writing, Julius?
Not to me, and you belong to me,
I have your ring, the ring of our betrothal. "
Then Julius tears his muscles from the coil
Of their inertia and leaps upon the statue,
Seizing her arm, her hand —
She folds upon him, smothering his face with hers,
Her crimson voice enters his heavy ears. His mouth is stopped . . .
Oh, God, how loud the ticking of the clock!
How hard the sleep which will not let him wake!
His eyelids are iron doors he cannot lift;
With all his strength he forces them to open.
The clock says eight, and sunlight fills the room.
There is no statue, so he must have dreamed.
But the letter he was writing, Hildegarde's —
There is no letter!

Well, let us leave it there. This is the first time,
And yesterday is a thing without a shape
Broken and scattered.
Can he build to-morrow and find his feet a footing?
Such perchance may be, or otherwise —
A year has many days.

V

He might have thought the thing a dream
And steadied himself by that.
But when a wall dissolves between two worlds
An honest man does not put himself off
With sophistries. Julius was honest.
He played no tricks of thinking,
And never got the chance. She saw to that.
If he went down the garden to the lake,
She'd leave her pedestal and follow him
Pleading in her glassy, tinkling voice
That she was his.
He tried to work. What nonsense!
He could not see his paper, for her arm
Was always there holding out her flowers.
She ran the scale of coquetry, now coddling him
With little Dresden china figure gestures,
Now raging in a heavy leaden fury.
Once she took up his manuscript
And threw it down and stamped upon it,
Then fell to weeping, bunched up on the floor,
All crumpled to a sad humility.
She was very lovely, you remember,
So possibly, if Hildegarde —
And I'm not saying that there were no moments
When he half wished to cross the line
Between the worlds.
It was not much to cross it,
Just leave his bedroom door unlocked at night,
Or spend an Autumn evening by the fountain.
Once done the other world was his,
But not the two.
No man can straddle both and be alive.
And yet he touched the edge, he knew it,
For the sycamore stumps were headless snakes some evenings
Cut jaggedly across the middle section,
The top half gone.
They jerked half-circles, breaking in the middle
Of a long whip-tail sweep. The movement snapped directly on the edge
Which kept him in this world. If he should cross
Then he would see the snakes' heads fully winding.
He knew this. Luckily that moment did not come,
At least, not then. Then he would face about
And sternly order the figure to be gone.
When he was fierce like that, she went,
Drooping and tearful underneath the trees,
And that night he was free of her. For other nights
She passed beneath his window, wringing her hands,
Those little hands which kept his diamond,
Or else outside his door moaning and moaning,
Pressing her mouth to the key-hole,
Squeezing herself full length against the door,
Beating her hands upon it. It was anguish
To listen to her sobbing in the night,
And half betrayed himself, I must believe.
It was unbearable, he grew to loathe her,
And loathed her most when most near being conquered,
For fact disports itself with paradox.
He knew her suffering, but hers was single,
His double-darting. And then one afternoon,
Worn out with sleeplessness and struggle, he saw a way
To give her what she wanted and save himself.
She was alone, the only figure
In all the silent garden. She should have a mate,
He would seek her one; and instantly,
Next morning, he escaped, and went to town,
Going directly to the shop
Where he had purchased her.

The bulging, broken faces
Fleered at him with crooked mouths,
With mouths like bloody gashes
Which made red stains on the oak wood,
The black oak wood of the cabinet.
Or was it the sun?
He heard them slobbering words,
He saw the words like smoke
Rising up and wreathing the rafters.
He saw the green snake-tree
Convulsed, contorted, and swaying.
He saw it was his sycamore
As he had never seen it.
The leaves were clapping and sighing.
The leaves and the faces together,
And the long snake boughs with heads
Which swept in terrible circles.
It was like a far-off screaming
Coming through time, not space,
Tenuously coming through time.
" Fool! Fool! Fool! " in a sort of smoky echo,
Drawing from aeons of time,
Ending dark and still in the rafters.

And he saw a moon in the rafters
Shaped like the Ghost Peak Mountain,
A moon of copper and crystal,
In the midst of the flowing smoke.

Julius stood stock still, forcing his mind
To balance itself, to gain a solid kind
Of upright thinking. With his will drawn tense
He held it sternly to obedience.
The swirl of smoke subsided, he ceased to hear
The whispering, the faces frozen to mere
Grotesque immovable carvings on the doors
Of an old oak cabinet, one among scores,
An excellent specimen. When Julius
Reached to that point and could quite see it thus,
He had, he felt, attained a victory
Over himself, or over the incubi
Which always seemed about to haunt him. So,
Relieved, he called out loudly, " Oh, Hullo!
Is any one here? " At this, the proprietor
Appeared and inquired what Julius had come for.
Easily explained, to find another
Lead statue to match and set off the other.
Again they went into the little yard,
Past the forlorn Greek goddesses who stared
At them with dull, nicked eyeballs grimed with dust,
Gaunt in their marble robes beneath a crust
Of mosses overscoring them like rust;
Past the poor chipped rococo cavaliers
Mincing their minuets, the gondoliers
Vigorously rowing on the cindered grass.
At length, beyond a crucifix of brass,
The proprietor stopped and pointed. There it was,
The very thing, exactly the right size,
A little manikin in a gardener's guise,
With yellow breeches and a purple coat;
His loose white shirt was open at the throat,
And he was idly leaning on a scythe.
A springy fellow, well set up and lithe,
Some rustic gallant decades and decades dead
Achieved an immortality of lead.
The thing was done, the garden lady mated,
The shopman more than amply compensated.
And Julius, charmed with his expedient,
Passed through the shop, so happily intent
Upon his ruse he did not look at all
At the old black cabinet against the wall.
Is it better to see, or not to see? A question
Weighty as Hamlet's. This time no suggestion
Of anything untoward struck his sense.
He preened himself upon his sapience.

Most appropriate and pleasing,
The little purple-coated gentleman
Stood between a clipped peacock and a clipped unicorn,
An engaging bit of colour beside the achromatic yews.
He leant on his scythe,
Agreeably regarding the little lady across the path.
The Dolphin of the fountain appeared unconcerned,
He spat out his jet of silver-blue water as usual,
But then this was half-past four in the afternoon,
And the sun was very bright in the sky,
The sun which lit this world and not the other.
It was after it had set that things —
But Julius had installed his panacea,
And he went down to the lake to skip stones.
Even when twilight came, he was unmolested.
" So much for that, " thought Julius.
But he went back to the house a roundabout way nevertheless.

VI

Tap! Tap! Tap! The sound of those buckled shoes!
The little stealthy noise hurt his ears like a bruise.
Three days she had not come, and he had been so sure
The spell was broken, even had found himself content
To relinquish the shadowy dawn of something impermanent,
The vague and twilit edges which seemed to circumfuse
The real, and sometimes almost suck it or melt it away.
Had it been pleasure or pain? Julius could not say.
He had taken his stand on the solid when he bought the little man.
Tap! Tap! on the gravel, the footsteps came — they came.
And each was like a crack in his smooth and perfect plan.
Why did she come now, after three days of waiting?
It was he who was eager to ask an explanation.
She came in swiftly and knelt with her marigolds and phlox
Held quivering out before her in a sort of supplication.
" For you, dear Julius, " she said. He brushed by the evasion.
" Why? " he demanded, ironically conscious of the paradox,
The question sounded as if he had breathlessly watched the clocks
And counted the moments of absence. She took it so at once,
And with a certain majesty of loving stepped swiftly forward.
What was his response?

Julius, Julius, are you man or superman?
Can you pass the nether space
And keep a clue for returning?
As you stand in the flesh,
This woman, this leaden woman,
What is she that her wooing has at once the grace of flowers
And the horror of serpents?

Beware, Julius, and look
Through the window, someone is there,
And moonlight striking on the sharp hook
Of a scythe in the blue night air.
The face is sinister which you thought so debonair,
And the eyes are blood-grapes staring at the little Jardiniere,
And at you also, Julius.
His leaden heart is green, green as an unripe pear,
For jealousy and hate is a choking thong in his throat —
Her beautiful, beautiful mouth, her sucking, intolerable mouth!
Julius feels his head throb, his stifled arteries bloat.
He is the tide of a sea, the thunder about to break,
With all his strength, he bursts himself awake
And flees up the stair.
The long, thin vapours of the nether space
Are closing down as he mounts the stair.
He feels a tenuous, flaccid air
Puffing against his upturned face.
The walls of the rooms are spinning and whirling,
The tables, with legs in the air, are curling
Round and round like hoops on their polished edges.
Unfastened curtains are flaring and furling
And racketing over the window-ledges.
A chiffonier glides across the floor
And catches at him with a golden claw.
Fire leaps from the seats of the chairs;
The flames break off and float like hairs.
The feathers of the red chintz cockatoos
Are burning convolvuli of reds and blues.
Through the heat
Comes the awful beat
Of running — running leaden feet.
Panting and moaning, her little hands
Clutching and pulling at the air, the strands
Of her shredded petticoat dabbed with blood,
She follows Julius, the Gardener behind
Runs with a frothy, scarlet cud
Oozing out of his muoth. His hair is twined
With blotched and broken maple-leaves;
His arms below his rolled-up sleeves
Are hairy as apes; his scythe is a tongue
Whimpering for flesh. Julius has swung
Out of the window, he drops to the ground.
She, with the curve of a springing hound,
Is after; and the Gardener, flung on a bound
Like a bladder projected into light air,
Is next, and running with the others there.

Above in the gurgling tree-tops
Are whispering, misty mouths
Slobbering words like lava
Spilling them down the stems.
The mouths bleed words which drip
Into crawling slimy pools
And seep away like worms
Through the slit and cringing grass-blades.
Man-high is pausing stillness,
But the tree-leaves are whistling and crying
With pallid childish voices.
A screaming comes out of the distance,
An old dead agony wailing.
The anguish of frozen planets
Engulfed in a timeless whirling.
No ear can catch it and hold it,
It hangs beyond hearing, a sense
Of sound aching into the flesh,
Never there; never quite silent.
The sycamore stumps are completed
Into white and hovering snakes
Which glitter and gloom like silver
And wave in a pattern of circles
Perpetually turning and coiling.
The peacocks and unicorns,
With the faces of men and women,
Dance with the blue-black dolphins
Or bathe themselves in the fountains.
They tear off their feathers and skin,
And stand up as golden figures
With red mouths, and red ears; their bellies
Are round and polished as brass,
In the centre of each is a diamond.
They sing, and gambol, and roll,
And pelt one another with flowers,
With marigolds and phlox,
And dash them into the fountain.
The Ghost Peak lies like a wound
In a puckered purple sky,
Sharp cut out of copper and crystal.
It throws a light on the garden
And streaks it with terrible shadows.
Through the shadows, in the glare of the copper light,
Goes Julius.
His breath scalds his lungs,
His feet stick and cling upon the gravel,
Behind him he hears the feet of the leaden figures
Nearer, louder, shattering his ears,
Confusing his steps with the rhythm of theirs.
His tongue is a red-hot ball in his mouth,
His lungs labour as though under sand.
The peacocks and unicorns skip round him,
They form a ring and dance before him,
Ogling him, thrusting upon him,
Strewing the ground with the diamonds plucked from their bellies.
Before him lies the lake,
Shuddering in sharp angles of copper and crystal.
He flogs his lungs, his feet,
He sees only the lake between the dancing unicorns and peacocks.
He hurls himself against the twined arms
And breaks through them.
He leaps, with a last pulse of effort,
Into the lake.
Water rises and blinds him,
Copper-flaming water like a great wall crushes upon him.
As he sinks — A clap! — loud and reverberant as thunder.
Another clap! And a cleft wave rises to left and right,
Hangs a moment asunder,
And falls together with a noise of breaking crystals.
The Ghost Peak explodes
And tumbles in bloody atoms down the sky . . .

VII

Through quiet water, riffled by the moon,
Julius swims, toward the silent wharves
Of the little village. He hears the gentle grind
Of rowboats against the wharf-sides,
Reaches one and clambering into it feels for the gunwale
And then the bow and painter. He pulls the painter,
Hand over hand, until his fingers touch
The seamed wood of the wharf. Then, rising up,
He steps ashore as the boat rocks away.
A striking clock reminds him of the hour.
It is five o'clock. Already above the roofs
The sky is tinted, but there are still some stars
Like diamonds — Oh, damnable allusion!
Like diamonds! — A slightly twisted smile
Twitches his face. And now he sees but one,
Rayless and small, immensely bright to keep
Itself a sparkle in the coloured sky.
He sees it as the spectre of a death
Which might have been, eyeing the resurrection
Which is. Thank God! Now he can watch it fade
Beneath the creeping daylight — just a star,
Going out in the morning. Stars are worlds;
But what has he to do with other worlds
Who knows so blunderingly of this? Well then
What's to do in this world? There's Hildegarde —
With which beginning he finds it is the end,
And other things superfluous. Why return?
Why not start here directly where he stands?
He will go to town, and after Hildegarde
(He feels no qualm at seeing Hildegarde,
Some things are certain, Hildegarde is one),
Call at his agent's and give him strict instructions
To sell his house and all his furniture
At once. He has a written inventory.
It is correct except for two lead figures,
Small garden figurines of no great value,
Fallen into the lake by accident
And much too heavy to think of salvaging.
This plausible fiction happily invented,
The rising sun projected his sudden shadow
Before him on an earth of gold. Which noting,
He laughed and marched along the alley whistling
The broom song from the " Sorcerer's Apprentice. "