DUPLICATE SET

DO NOT
RETURN
THIS LOT

ALFRED
PROSE
PROSPECTS

I

H

ANG it all, there can be but the one "Sordello,"

But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,

Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's
an art-form,

Your "Sordello," and that the "modern world"

Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;

Say that I dump my catch, shiny and silvery

As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the mar-
ginal cobbles?

I stand before the booth (the speech), but the truth

Is inside this discourse: this booth is full of the mar-
row of wisdom.

Give up the intaglio method?

Tower by tower,

Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan

Follows the builder's whim; Beaucaire's slim gray

Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte —

Mohammed's windows, for the Alcazar

Has such a garden, split by a tame small stream —

The Moat is ten yards wide, the inner court-yard

Half a-swim with mire.

Trunk-hose?

There are not. The rough men swarm out

In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave
of Hearts.

And I discern your story:

Peire Cardinal

8

Was half fore-runner of Dante. Arnaut's the trick

Of the unfinished address,

And half your dates are out; you mix your eras;

For that great font, Sordello sat beside —

'Tis an immortal passage, but the font

Is some two centuries outside the picture —

And no matter,

Ghosts move about me patched with histories.

You had your business: to set out so much thought,

So much emotion, and call the lot "Sordello."

Worth the evasion, the setting figures up

'And breathing life upon them.

Has it a place in music? And your: "appear Ve-
rona!"?

I walk the airy street,

See the small cobbles flare with the poppy spoil.

'Tis your "Great Day," the Corpus Domini,
And all my chosen and peninsular village

Has made spread this scarlet blaze upon its lane,
Oh, before I was up,— with poppy-flowers.

Mid-June, and up and out to the half ruined chapel,
Not the old place at the height of the rocks
But that splay barn-like church, the Renaissance
Had never quite got into trim again.

As well begin here, here began Catullus:

"Home to sweet rest, and to the waves deep laugh-
ter,"

The laugh they wake amid the border rushes.

This is our home, the trees are full of laughter,

And the storms laugh loud, breaking the riven waves

On square-shaled rocks, and here the sunlight

Glints on the shaken waters, and the rain

Comes forth with delicate tread, walking from Isola

Garda

To Soleil's plovil.

It is the sun rains, and a spatter of fire

Darts from the "Lydian" ripples, lacus undae,

And the place is full of spirits, not *lemures*,

Not dark and shadow-wet ghosts, but ancient living,

Wood-white, smooth as the inner-bark, and firm of
aspect

And all a-gleam with colour?

Not a-gleam

But coloured like the lake and olive leaves,

GLAUKOPOS, clothed like the poppies, wearing
golden greaves,

Light on the air. Are they Etruscan gods?

The air is solid sunlight, *apricus*.

Sun-fed we dwell there (we in England now)

For Sirmio serves my whim, better than Asolo,

Yours and unseen. Your palace step?

My stone seat was the Dogana's vulgarest curb,

'And there were not "those girls," there was one
flare,

One face, 'twas all I ever saw, but it was real . . .

And I can no more say what shape it was . . .

But she was young, too young.

True, it was Venice,

8

And at Florian's under the North arcade

I have seen other faces, and had my rolls for breakfast,

Drifted at night and seen the lit, gilt cross-beams

Glare from the Morosini.

And for what it's worth

8

I have my background; and you had your back
ground,

Watched "the soul," Sordello's soul, flare up

HOLLANDS PLACEMANAGEMENT

2 LUSTRA Sam July 6-11 Cas 21-14 No 4
And lap up life, and leap "to th' Empyrean":
Worked out the form, meditative, semi-dramatic,
Semi-epic story; and what's left?
Pre-Daun-Chaucer, Pre-Boccacio? Not Arnaut,
Not Uc St Circ.

Gods float in theazure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed;
It is a world like Puvis'.?

Never so pale, my friend,
'Tis the first light — not half-light — Panisks
And oak-girls and the Maclids have all the wood;

Our olive Sirmio
Lies in its burnished mirror, and the Mounts Balde
and Riva
Are alive with song, and all the leaves are full of
voices.

"Non è fuggi."

"It is not gone." Metastasio
Is right, we have that world about us.
And the clouds bowe above the lake, and there are
folk upon them

Going their windy ways, moving by Riva,
By the western shore, far as Lonato,
And the water is full of silvery almond-white swimmers,
The silvery water glazes the upturned nipple.

"When Atlas sat down with his astrolabe,
He brother to Prometheus, physicist."

We let Ficino

Start us our progress, say it was Moses' birth year?
Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster
Bulges the squarish bronzes.

Daub out, with blue of scarabs, Egypt,
Green veins in the turquoise?

Or gray gradual steps
Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars:
Temple of teak-wood, and the gilt-brown arches
Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,
Fine screens depicted: sea-waves curled high,
Small boats with gods upon them,
Bright flame above the river: Kuanon,
Footing a boat that's but one lotus petal,
With some proud four-square genius
Leading along, one hand upraised for gladness,
Saying, "'Tis she, his friend, the mighty Goddess.
Sing hymns, ye reeds, and all ye roots and herons
and swans, be glad.

"Ye gardens of the nymphs, put forth your flowers."
What have I of this life?

## Or even of Guido?

A pleasant lie that I knew Or San Michael,
Believe the tomb he leapt was Julia Laeta's,
Do not even know which sword he'd with him in the
street-charge.

I have but smelt this life, a whiff of it,
The box of scented wood
Recalls cathedrals. Shall I claim;
Confuse my own phantastikon
Or say the filmy shell that circumscribes me
Contains the actual sun;
confuse the thing I see
With actual gods behind me?

Are they gods behind me?

Worlds we have, how many worlds we have.

If Botticelli

Brings her ashore on that great cockle-shell,
His Venus (Simonetta?), and Spring
And Aufidus fill all the air
With their clear-outlined blossoms?
World enough. Behold, I say, she comes
"Apparelled like the Spring, Graces her subjects"
("Pericles"),
Such worlds enough we have, have brave decor
And from these like we guess a soul for man
And build him full of aery populations.

(Panting and Faustus),

Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about
us:

Barred lights, great flares, and write to paint, not
music,

O Casella.

II

## O "Virgilio mio,"

Send out your thought upon the Mantuan palace,
Drear waste, great halls; pigment flakes from the
stone;

## Forlorn quarter:

Silk tatters still in the frame, Gonzaga's splendour,
Where do we come upon the ancient people,
Or much or little,

Where do we come upon the ancient people?

"All that I know is that a certain star"—

All that I know of one, Joios, Tolosan,
Is that in middle May, going along

A scarce discerned path, turning aside

3 LUSTRA Sum July 7—11 Cas 21-14—No 4

In "level poplar lands," he found a flower, and
wept;

"Y a la primera flor," he wrote,

"Qu'ieu trobei, tornei em plor."

One stave of it, I've lost the copy I had of it in Paris,
Out of a blue and gilded manuscript:

Couci's rabbits, a slim fellow throwing dice,

Purported portraits serving in capitals.

Joi os we have, by such a margent stream,

He strayed in the field, wept for a flare of colour

When Coeur de Lion was before Chalus;

Arnaut's a score of songs, a wry sestina;

The rose-leaf casts her dew on the ringing glass,

Dolmetsch will build our age in witching music,

Viols da Gamba, tabors, tympanons.

Yin-yo laps in the reeds, my guest departs,

The maple leaves blot up their shadows,

The sky is full of Autumn,

We drink our parting in saki.

Out of the night comes troubling lute music,

And we cry out, asking the singer's name,

And get this answer:

"Many a one

Brought me rich presents, my hair was full of jade,
And my slashed skirts were drenched in the secret
dyes,

Well dipped in crimson, and sprinkled with rare
wines;

I was well taught my arts at Ga-ma-rio

And then one year I faded out and married."

The lute-bowl hid her face. We heard her weeping.

Society, her sparrows, Venus' sparrows.

Catullus hung on the phrase (played with it as Mal-
larmé

Played for a fan: "Rêveuse pour que je plonge.");

Wrote out his crib from Sappho:

God's peer, yea and the very gods are under him

Facing thee, near thee; and my tongue is heavy,

And along my veins the fire; and the night is

Thrust down upon me.

That was one way of love, *flamma demanat*,

And in a year: "I love her as a father,"

And scarce a year, "Your words are written in
water,"

And in ten moons: "O Caelius, Lesbia illa,

Caelius, Lesbia, our Lesbia, that Lesbia

Whom Catullus once loved more

Than his own soul and all his friends,

Is now the drab of every lousy Roman";

So much for him who puts his trust in woman.

Dordoigne! When I was there
There came a centaur, spying the land
And there were nymphs behind him;
Of procession on procession by Salisbury,
Ancient in various days, long years between them;
Ply over ply of life still wraps the earth here.
Catch at Dordoigne!

Vicount St. Antoni —

"D'amor tug miei cossir"—hight Raimon Jordans
Of land near Caortz. The Lady of Pena
"Gentle and highly prized."

And he was good at arms and bos trobaire,
"Thou art the pool of worth, flood-land of pleasure,
And all my heart is bound about with love,
As rose in trellis that is bound over and over";
Thus were they taken in love beyond all measure.

But the Vicount Pena
Went making war into an hostile country,
And was sore wounded. The news held him dead,
And at this news she had great grief and teen,"
And gave the church such wax for his recovery
That he recovered,

"And at this news she had great grief and teen"
And fell a-moping, dismissed St. Antoni,
"Thus was there more than one in deep distress,"
So ends that novel. Here the blue Dordoigne
Placid between white cliffs, pale

As the background of a Leonardo. Elis of Mont-
fort

Then sent him her invitations (wife of de Gordon).
It juts into the sky, Gordon that is,
Like a thin spire. Blue night pulled down about it
Like tent-flaps or sails close hauled. When I was
there,

La Noche de San Juan, a score of players
Were walking about the streets in masquerade,
Pike-staves and paper helmets, and the booths
Were scattered align, the rag ends of the fair.

False arms, true arms:

A flood of people storming about Spain:
My Cid rode up to Burgos,
Up to the studded gate between two towers,
Beat with his lance butt. A girl child of nine years
Comes to the shrine-like platform in the wall,
Lisps out the words a-whisper, the King's writ:
Let no man speak to Diaz (Ruy Diaz, Myo Cid)
Or give him help or food, on pain of death:
His heart upon a pike, his eyes torn out, his goods

4 LUSTRA Sum July 7-11 Cas 21-14-No 4
sequestered.

Cid from Bivar, from empty perches of dispersed
hawks,

From empty presses,

Came riding with his company up the great hill

(Afe Minaya!) to Burgos in the Spring,

And thence to fighting, to down-throw of Moors

And to Valencia rode he. By the beard! Muy
velida!

Of onrush of lances, of splintered staves

Riven and broken casques, dismantled castles;

Of painted shields split up, blazons hacked off,

Piled men and bloody rivers. Or

"Of sombre light upon reflected armour"

When De las Nieblas sails —

"Y dar nueva lumbre las armas y hierros"—

And portents in the wind, a pressing air;

Full many a fathomed sea-change in the eyes

That sought with him the salt sea victories,

Rumble of balladist.

Another gate:

And Kumasaka's ghost comes back to explain

How well the young man fenced who ended him.

Another gate:

The kernelled walls of Toro, las almenas,

Afield, a king come in an unjust cause,

Atween the chinks aloft flashes the armoured figure,

"Muy linda!", "Helen!", "a star,"

Lights the king's features ...

"No use, my liege. 'She is your highness' sister,"

Breaks in Ancures.

"Mal fuego s'enciende!"

Such are the gestes of war.

A tire-woman,

Court sinecure, the court of Portugal,

And the young prince loved her, Pedro,

Called later, Cruel. Jealousy, two stabbed her,

Courtiers, with king's connivance.

And he, the prince, kept quiet a space of years.

And came to reign, after uncommon quiet,

And had his will upon the dagger-players:

A wedding ceremonial: he and the dug-up corpse in
cerements.

Who winked at murder kisses the dead hand,

Does loyal homage

"Que despois de ser morta foy Rainha."

Dig up Camoens:

"That once as Proserpine
Gatheredst thy soul's light fruit, and every blindness;
Thy Enna the flary mead-land of Mondego,
Long art thou sung by Maidens in Mondego."
What have we now of her, his "linda Iguez"?
Houtmans in jail for debt in Lisbon, how long after,
Contrives a company, the Dutch eat Portugal,
Follow her ships tracks. Roemer Vischer's daugh-
ters
Talking some Greek, dally with glass engraving:
Vondel, the Eglantine, Dutch Renaissance.
The old tale out of fashion, daggers gone,
And Gaby wears Braganza on her throat,
Another pearl, tied to a public gullet.

I knew a man, but where 'twas is no matter,
Born on a farm, he hankered after painting,
His father kept him at work, no luck,
Married and got four sons,
Three died, the fourth he sent to Paris. And this
son:
Ten years of Julians' and the ateliers,
Ten years of life, his pictures in the salons,
Name coming in the press;
and when I knew him:
Back once again in middle Indiana,
Acting as usher in the theatre,
Painting the local drug-shop and soda bars,
The local doctor's fancy for a mantle-piece:
Sheep! jabbing the wool upon their flea-bit backs.
"Them sheep! Them goddamd sheep!!" Ador-
ing Puvis,
Giving his family back what they had spent on him,
Talking Italian cities,
Local excellence at Perugia;
dreaming his renaissance,
Take my Sordello!

### III

Another one, half-cracked: John Heydon,
Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation,
"Servant of God and secretary of nature,"
The half transparent forms, in trance at Bulverton:
"Decked all in green," with sleeves of yellow silk
Slit to the elbow, slashed with various purples,
(Thus in his vision) Her eyes were green as glass,
Her foot was leaf-like, and she promised him,
Dangling a chain of emeralds, promised him
The way of holiest wisdom.

"Omniformis
Omnis intellectus est":

HOLLAND PLACE CHAMBERS
KENSBOROUGH

5—LUSTRA—Sum July 7—11 Cas 21-14—No 4
That every intellect is omniform.

“A daemon is a substance in the locus of souls.”

Munching Ficino's mumbling Platonists.

Valla, more earth and sounder rhetoric,

Prefacing praise to his Pope, Nicholas:

A man of parts skilled in the subtlest sciences;

A patron of the arts, of poetry; and of a fine discernment.

A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.

“Know then the Roman speech: a sacrament”

Spread for the nations, eucharist of wisdom,

Bread of the liberal arts.

Ha! Sir Blancatz,

Sordello would have your heart up, give it to all the princes;

Valla, the heart of Rome,

sustaining speech,

Set out before the people. “Nec bonus

Christianus” (in the Elegantiae) “ac bonus Tullianus.”

Shook the church. Marius, Du Bellay, wept for the buildings;

Baldassar Castiglione saw Raphael

“Lead back the soul into its dead, waste dwelling,”

Laniato corpore. Lorenzo Valla

“Broken in middle life? Bent to submission?

Took a fat living from the Papacy”

(That's in Villari, but Burckhardt's statement's different).

“More than the Roman city the Roman speech”

Holds fast its part among the ever living.

“Not by the eagles only was Rome measured.”

“Wherever the Roman speech was, there was Rome.”

Wherever the speech crept, there was mastery,

Spoke with the law's voice, while your greek logicians. x x x

More greeks than one! Doughty's “Divine Homeros”

Came before sophistry. Justinopolitan, uncatalogued,

One Andreas Divus gave him in latin,

In Officina Wecheli, M.D. three “X s.” eight,

Caught up his cadence, word and syllable:

“Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail,

Black keel and beasts for bloody sacrifice,

Weeping we went.”

I've strained my ear for -ensa, -ombra, and -ensa,
And cracked my wit on delicate canzoni,

Here's but rough meaning:

"And then went down to the ship, set keel to
breakers,
Forth on the godly sea,
We set up mast and sail on the swart ship,
Sheep bore we aboard her, and our bodies also,
Heavy with weeping; and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships — wind jamming the tiller —
Thus with stretched sail

we went over sea till day's end.

Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays,
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from
heaven,
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there,
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the
place
Aforesaid by Circe.

Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin,
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with
white flour,
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-
heads,
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods.
Sheep, to Tiresias only; black and a bell sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead,
Of brides, of youths, and of much-bearing old;
Virgins tender, souls stained with recent tears,
Many men mauled with bronze lance-heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreary arms,
These many crowded about me,
With shouting pallor upon me, cried to my men for
more beasts.

Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze,
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine,
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous, impotent dead
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,

6—LUSTRA—Sum July 7—11 Cas 21.14—No 4
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged
other.

Pitiful spirit, and I cried in hurried speech:

"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?

Com'st thou a-foot, outstripping seamen?"

And he in heavy speech:

"Ill fate and abundant wine! I slept in Circe's
ingle,

Going down the long ladder unguard ed, I fell
against the buttress,

Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.

But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,

Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-board, and
inscribed:

'A man of no fortune and with a name to come.'

And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."

Came then another ghost, whom I beat off, Anticlea,
And then Tiresias, Theban,

Holding his golden wand, knew me and spoke first:

"Man of ill hour, why come a second time,

Leaving the sunlight, facing the sunless dead, and
this joyless region?

Stand from the fosse, move back, leave me my
bloody bever,

And I will speak you true speeches."

And I stepped back,

Sheathing the yellow sword. Dark blood he drank
then,

And spoke: "Lustrous Odysseus

Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark
seas,

Lose all companions." Foretold me the ways and
the signs.

Came then Anticlea, to whom I answered:

"Fate drives me on through these deeps. I sought
Tiresias,

Told her the news of Troy. And thrice her shadow
Faded in my embrace.

Lie quiet Divus. Then had he news of many faded
women,

Tyro, Alcmena, Chloris,
Heard out their tales by that dark fosse, and sailed
By sirens and thence outward and away,
And unto Circe. Buried Elpenor's corpse.
Lie quiet Divus, plucked from a Paris stall
With a certain Cretan's " Hymni Deorum ";
The thin clear Tuscan stuff

Gives way before the florid mellow
phrase,
Take we the goddess, Venerandam
Auream coronam habentem, pulchram. . . .
Cypri munimenta sortita est, maritime,
Light on the foam, breathed on by Zephyrs
And air-tending Hours, mirthful, orichalci, with
golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida.

END OF THIRD CANTO