  Vide Poem II. Page 54 FOR this agility chance found Him of all men, unfit As the red-beaked steeds of The CytherÆan for a chain bit. The glow of porcelain Brought no reforming sense To his perception Of the social inconsequence. Thus, if her colour Came against his gaze, Tempered as if It were through a perfect glaze He made no immediate application Of this to relation of the state To the individual, the month was more temperate Because this beauty had been. . . . . . . . . . . The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand Burst in upon the porcelain revery: Impetuous troubling Of his imagery. . . . . . . . . . . Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter, His sense of graduations, Quite out of place amid Resistance to current exacerbations, Gradually led him to the isolation Which these presents place Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination. By constant elimination The manifest universe Yielded an armour Against utter consternation, A Minoan undulation, Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances Strengthened him against The discouraging doctrine of chances, And his desire for survival, Faint in the most strenuous moods, Became an Olympian apathein In the presence of selected perceptions. A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern, The unexpected palms Destroying, certainly, the artist’s urge, Left him delighted with the imaginary Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge, Incapable of the least utterance or composition, Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition” Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities, August attraction or concentration. Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession Irresponse to human aggression, Amid the precipitation, down-float Lifting the faint susurrus Of his subjective hosannah. Ultimate affronts to human redundancies; Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters” Leading, as he well knew, To his final Exclusion from the world of letters. |
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