Chapter 5

“Quite the little poet”—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark. Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera—a little artist and a large man. Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero.

Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim to being a competent second-class halma player—but a good deal more competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I wrote about the larks. “Quite the little poet”—always and, alas, incorrigibly I am that.

Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate, is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that immortal “Needle Case in the form of a Harp.” “Caligula crossing the bridge of boats between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577: d. 1640).” The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of the Lake District.

Prow after prow the floating ships

Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.

Caesar on a piebald horse

Prances with all his cavalcade.

Drunk with their own quick blood they go.

The waves flash as with seeing eyes;

The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,

And they have filled the vacant skies

With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set

The Sea Winds singing with their shout,

Made Vesta’s temple on the headland

Spin like a twinkling roundabout.

The twined caduceus in his hand,

And having golden wings for spurs,

Young Caesar dressed as God looks on

And cheers his jolly mariners;

Cheers as they heave from off the bridge

The trippers from the seaside town;

Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads

And shove them bubbling down to drown.

There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture

From the allegoric sky:

Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs

Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,

Slides down the flank of Mars and takes

From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,

Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops

Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.

A burgess tumbles from the bridge

Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips

From Caesar through the plunging legs

To the blue sea between the ships.

Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell. Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence.

But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily all the virtues ... Art, science, history, religion—they too were to have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too large and pretentious ever to be realised. I began (deep calls to deep) with Nero, the artist. “Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden House.”

Dark stirrings in the perfumed air

Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.

With softer fingers I caress,

Sporus, all your loveliness.

Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines

The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,

Like stars in a delirious sky,

Gleam and go out. Unceasingly

The fountains fall, the nightingales

Sing. But time flows and love avails

Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;

Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead.

And you, sweet Sporus, you and I,

We too must die, we too must die.

But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key. I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence—reasons which, at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is.

The Christians by whose muddy light

Dimly, dimly I divine

Your eyes and see your pallid beauty

Like a pale night-primrose shine

Colourless in the dark, revere

A God who slowly died that they

Might suffer the less; who bore the pain

Of all time in a single day,

The pain of all men in a single

Wounded body and sad heart.

The yellow marble smooth as water

Builds me a Golden House; and there

The marble gods sleep in their strength

And the white Parian girls are fair.

Roses and waxen oleanders,

Green grape bunches and the flushed peach, —

All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,

Knowing, loving, becoming each.

The ship went down, my mother swam:

I wedded and myself was wed;

Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:

Old Seneca too slowly bled.

The wild beast and the victim both,

The ravisher and the wincing bride;

King of the world and a slave’s slave,

Terror-haunted, deified—

An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,

All these I am and needs must be.

Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.

And you have heard my symphony

Of wailing voices and clashed brass,

With long shrill flutings that suspend

Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,

And piercing breathless joys that end

In agony—could I have made

My song of Furies were the bane

Still sap within the hemlock stalk,

The red swords virgin bright again?

Or take a child’s love that is all

Worship, all tenderness and trust,

A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—take

And with the violence of lust

Tear and defile it. You shall hear

The breaking dumbness and the thin

Harsh crying that is the very music

Of shame and the remorse of sin.

Christ died; the artist lives for all;

Loves, and his naked marbles stand

Pure as a column on the sky,

Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand

Not our humiliation, not

The shuddering of an after shame;

And of his agonies men know

Only the beauty born of them.

Christ died, but living Nero turns

Your mute remorse to song; he gives

To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,

And while his music plays, God lives.

Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit.

And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add, the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. “In the gardens at Capri.” (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?)

Hour after hour the stars

Move, and the moon towards remoter night

Averts her cheek.

Blind now, these gardens yet remember

That there were crimson petals glossy with light,

And their remembrance is this scent of roses.

Hour after hour the stars march slowly on,

And year by year mysteriously the flowers

Unfold the same bright pattern towards the sky.

Incurious under the streaming stars,

Breathing this new yet immemorial perfume

Unmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;

And the two women who are my bedfellows,

Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodies

Still hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.

Commendable, I should now think, this fixture of the attention upon the relevant, the human reality in the centre of the pointless landscape. It was just at the time I wrote this fragment that I was learning the difficult art of this exclusive concentration on the relevant. They were painful lessons. War had prepared me to receive them; Love was the lecturer.

Her name was Barbara Waters. I saw her first when I was about fourteen. She was a month or two older than I. It was at one of those enormous water picnics on the Cherwell that were organised from time to time during the summer vacation by certain fiery and energetic spirits among the dons’ wives. We would start out at seven, half a dozen punt-loads of us, from the most northerly of the Oxford boat-houses and make our way up-stream for an hour or so until night had fairly set in. Then, disembarking in some solitary meadow, we would spread cloths, unpack hampers, eat hilariously. And there were so many midges that even the schoolboys were allowed to smoke cigarettes to keep them off—even the schoolgirls. And how knowingly and with what a relish we, the boys, puffed away, blowing the smoke through our noses, opening our mouths like frogs to make rings! But the girls always managed to make their cigarettes come to pieces, got the tobacco into their mouths and, making faces, had to pick the bitter-tasting threads of it from between their lips. In the end, after much giggling, they always threw their cigarettes away, not half smoked; the boys laughed, contemptuously and patronisingly. And finally we packed ourselves into the punts again and floated home, singing; our voices across the water sounded praeternaturally sweet. A yellow moon as large as a pumpkin shone overhead; there were gleamings on the crests of the ripples and in the troughs of the tiny waves, left in the wake of the punts, shadows of almost absolute blackness. The leaves of the willow trees shone like metal. A white mist lay along the meadows. Corncrakes incessantly ran their thumbs along the teeth of combs. A faint weedy smell came up from the river; the aroma of tobacco cut violently across it in pungent gusts; sometimes the sweet animal smell of cows insinuated itself into the watery atmosphere, and looking between the willows, we would see a company of the large and gentle beasts kneeling in the grass, their heads and backs projecting like the crests of mountains above the mist, still hard at work, though the laborious day was long since over, chewing and chewing away at a green breakfast that had merged into luncheon, at the tea that had become in due course a long-drawn-out vegetarian dinner. Munchily, squelchily, they moved their indefatigable jaws. The sound came faintly to us through the silence. Then a small clear voice would begin singing “Drink to me only with thine eyes” or “Greensleeves.”

Sometimes, for the fun of the thing, though it was quite unnecessary, and if the weather happened to be really warm, positively disagreeable, we would light a fire, so that we might have the pleasure of eating our cold chicken and salmon mayonnaise with potatoes baked—or generally either half baked or burnt—in their jackets among the glowing cinders. It was by the light of one of these fires that I first saw Barbara. The punt in which I came had started some little time after the others; we had had to wait for a late arrival. By the time we reached the appointed supping place the others had disembarked and made all ready for the meal. The younger members of the party had collected materials for a fire, which they were just lighting as we approached. A group of figures, pale and colourless in the moonlight, were standing or sitting round the white cloth. In the black shadow of a huge elm tree a few yards further off moved featureless silhouettes. Suddenly a small flame spurted from a match and was shielded between a pair of hands that were transformed at once into hands of transparent coral. The silhouettes began to live a fragmentary life. The fire-bearing hands moved round the pyre; two or three new little flames were born. Then, to the sound of a great hurrah, the bonfire flared up. In the heart of the black shadow of the elm tree a new small universe, far vivider than the ghostly world of moonlight beyond, was suddenly created. By the light of the bright flames I saw half a dozen familiar faces belonging to the boys and girls I knew. But I hardly noticed them; I heeded only one face, a face I did not know. The leaping flame revealed it apocalyptically. Flushed, bright and with an air of being almost supernaturally alive in the quivering, changing light of the flames, it detached itself with an incredible clarity and precision from against a background of darkness which the fire had made to seem yet darker. It was the face of a young girl. She had dark hair with ruddy golden lights in it. The nose was faintly aquiline. The openings of the eyes were narrow, long and rather slanting, and the dark eyes looked out through them as though through mysterious loopholes, brilliant, between the fringed eyelids, with an intense and secret and unutterable happiness.

The mouth seemed to share in the same exquisite secret. Not full, but delicately shaped, the unparted lips were curved into a smile that seemed to express a delight more piercing than any laughter, any outburst of joy could give utterance to. The corners of the mouth were drawn upwards so that the line of the meeting of the lips was parallel with her tilted eyes. And this slanting close-lipped smile seemed as though suspended on two little folds that wrinkled the cheeks at the corners of the mouth. The face, which was rather broad across the cheek-bones, tapered away to a pointed chin, small and firm. Her neck was round and slender; her arms, which were bare in her muslin dress, very thin.

The punt moved slowly against the current. I gazed and gazed at the face revealed by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to me that I had never seen anything so beautiful and wonderful. What was the secret of that inexpressible joy? What nameless happiness dwelt behind those dark-fringed eyes, that silent, unemphatic, close-lipped smile? Breathlessly I gazed. I felt the tears coming into my eyes—she was so beautiful. And I was almost awed, I felt something that was almost fear, as though I had suddenly come into the presence of more than a mere mortal being, into the presence of life itself. The flame leapt up. Over the silent, secret-smiling face the tawny reflections came and went, as though wild blood were fluttering deliriously beneath the skin. The others were shouting, laughing, waving their arms. She remained perfectly still, close-lipped and narrow-eyed, smiling. Yes, life itself was standing there.

The punt bumped against the bank. “Catch hold,” somebody shouted, “catch hold, Francis.”

Reluctantly I did as I was told; I felt as though something precious were being killed within me.

In the years that followed I saw her once or twice. She was an orphan, I learned, and had relations in Oxford with whom she came occasionally to stay. When I tried to speak to her, I always found myself too shy to do more than stammer or say something trivial or stupid. Serenely, looking at me steadily between her eyelids, she answered. I remember not so much what she said as the tone in which she spoke—cool, calm, assured, as befitted the embodiment of life itself.