Some excerpts from Aldous Huxley’s poetry

A Little Memory

White in the moonlight,

Wet with dew,

We have known the languor

Of being two.

We have been weary

As children are,

When over them, radiant,

A stooping star,

Bends their Good-Night,

Kissed and smiled:—

Each was mother,

Each was child.

Child, from your forehead

I kissed the hair,

Gently, ah, gently:

And you were

Mistress and mother

When on your breast

I lay so safely

And could rest.

Books And Thoughts

Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry

Across the Lethe of the years -

These are my friends, and at their tears

I weep and with their mirth am merry.

On a high tower, whose battlements

Give me all heaven at a glance,

I lie long summer nights in trance,

Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents

That rise from earth, while the sky above me

Merges its peace with my soul's peace,

Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,

Nought break the quiet of my release:

In vain the windy sunlight raves

At the hush and gloom of polar caves.

Darknees

My close-walled soul has never known

That innermost darkness, dazzling sight,

Like the blind point, whence the visions spring

In the core of the gazer's chrysolite…

The mystic darkness that laps God's throne

In a splendour beyond imagining,

So passing bright.

But the many twisted darknesses

That range the city to and fro,

In aimless subtlety pass and part

And ebb and glutinously flow;

Darkness of lust and avarice,

Of the crippled body and the crooked heart…

These darknesses I know.

The Elms

Fine as the dust of plumy fountains blowing

Across the lanterns of a revelling night,

The tiny leaves of April's earliest growing

Powder the trees—so vaporously light,

They seem to float, billows of emerald foam

Blown by the South on its bright airy tide,

Seeming less trees than things beatified,

Come from the world of thought which was their home.

For a while only. Rooted strong and fast,

Soon will they lift towards the summer sky

Their mountain-mass of clotted greenery.

Their immaterial season quickly past,

They grow opaque, and therefore needs must die,

Since every earth to earth returns at last.

Winter Dream

Oh wind-swept towers,

Oh endlessly blossoming trees,

White clouds and lucid eyes,

And pools in the rocks whose unplumbed blue is pregnant

With who knows what of subtlety

And magical curves and limbs—

White Anadyomene and her shallow breasts

Mother-of-pearled with light.

And oh the April, April of straight soft hair,

Falling smooth as the mountain water and brown;

The April of little leaves unblinded,

Of rosy nipples and innocence

And the blue languor of weary eyelids.

Across a huge gulf I fling my voice

And my desires together:

Across a huge gulf ... on the other bank

Crouches April with her hair as smooth and straight and brown

As falling waters.

Oh brave curve upwards and outwards.

Oh despair of the downward tilting—

Despair still beautiful

As a great star one has watched all night

Wheeling down under the hills.

Silence widens and darkens;

Voice and desires have dropped out of sight.

I am all alone, dreaming she would come and kiss me.

Panic

The eyes of the portraits on the wall

Look at me, follow me,

Stare incessantly:

I take it their glance means nothing at all?

—Clearly, oh clearly! Nothing at all ...

Out in the gardens by the lake

The sleeping peacocks suddenly wake;

Out in the gardens, moonlit and forlorn,

Each of them sounds his mournful horn:

Shrill peals that waver and crack and break.

What can have made the peacocks wake?

The Life Theoretic

While I have been fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Other young men have been battling with the days

And others have been kissing the beautiful women.

They have brazen faces like battering-rams.

But I who think about books and such—

I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,

And the women palsy me with fear.

But when it comes to fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Why, there I am.

But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,

Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 610