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For permission to include several poems in this book from Talking Bronco I thank Messrs. Faber & Faber. Owing to considerations of space and printing some of my published poems are held over for Volume III of my Collected Poems, which I hope to publish soon. To Mr. C. J. Sibbett I owe the rescue from the Cape Town archives of the only surviving fragment of “The Golden Shower”, a poem of some two thousand five hundred lines, which I lost at sea in 1926, and which, but for the diligence of my old friend, would have disappeared entirely. This poem followed “The Flaming Terrapin” but preceded most of the African poems in “Adamastor” and “The Wayzgoose”. Though I have just re-written and overhauled this poem from stem to stern, I have preserved both its mood and tense, written as it was in the pagan paradise of my childhood, boyhood, and early manhood, while living as a hunter, a fisherman, and a whaler in the bush of Natal and Zululand, and on the Indian Ocean. Other poems, reprinted herein, appeared in the following papers and reviews. The Catacomb, Nine, Nimbus, Poetry London-New York, The American National Review, The English National Review, The South African Nation, The Tablet, The Northern Review, The Outspan, The New Statesman, Adam and certain publications of the Middle East and East African Commands such as Jambo and Off Parade. I thank the Editors for permission to reprint them here.

The poems in this volume are arranged by me in order, unlike those in the first volume, some of which, owing to my absence abroad, appeared under the wrong headings.

Though forming a whole poem in itself, “The Vision of our Lady over Toledo” really belongs to my long Epic poem Flowering Rifle and is here printed with it.

I must here admit the theft in “The Rodeo” of the phrase “star-clovered” from Rob Lyle’s “Guitar”, in compensation for which I dedicate this book to his, as yet, undiscovered genius.

(To Frédéric Mistral, Neveu)

(Adapted from Horace’s Satire)

(To Mary Campbell)

Amphibious to this world of sunlit hours

And to that other which is only ours,

But whose divine realities in this,

As stars in pools, their own reflections kiss,

While here beneath a roof of cloudless days

We lovers, loitering in the forest ways,

Heedless of how the doting world may turn

Make it our wisest study to unlearn

Its idle cants, forgetting them so far

That for this brighter sphere in which we burn

Astronomers might name another star—

May Love, whose quick philosophers we are,

Our hearts of their mortality absolve,

Shatter the old inherited ideal

Round which men’s outworn energies revolve

Like spokes of wood or dull, mechanic steel,

And forge in us new weapons for assault

On all that is established in men’s hearts

That into swifter saddles we may vault

Remastering the great forgotten arts

By which men rose above the brutes of old,

Before they wearied of their steep ascent,

Anchored their spirits to a load of gold

And with a slack humility unbent

To teach themselves a vegetable growth;

We shall recapture the brave force they used

In their steep uprush, ere this finer sloth

Was like the sap of cabbages infused.

Destroying in ourselves the dreaming past,

Repealing our allegiance to its laws,

We shall defeat our memory at last,

And with new strength, unhingeing silver claws,

Leap on the mountain-backed unwieldy Lie

Under whose tyranny men crawl and die—

Thus like two lions we shall ride elate

That on a giant buffalo, in state,

Ride through their forest-kingdom breathing fire

To pitch their quarry headlong in the mire.

So by our bold example we may found

A dynasty of lovers in this land,

Where grunting faction makes the only sound,

Where clanking fetters ring on every hand,

Where slaves by slaves more servile are compelled,

And naught, save paunches, in respect are held:

So by our bold example we may found

A princely line, fore-run a titan race

That by their strength and beauty shall be crowned

More royally than kings: and they shall trace

Their birth from us and learn like us to move

Through cities with a bold insulting grace

Clashing bright spurs: their beauty will reprove

The hucksters of the counter-jumping race,

And with our likeness tease their sullen scowls,

Like sunrays to the noon-afflicted owls

Smiting their blank inquiry in the face.

Is our young brutal loveliness enough—

Her laughing breasts or my horse-taming strength?

Should we not in less perishable stuff

Take measurements, that it may go the length

Of our life’s journey, clothe us but so far

Into the country of the evening star

As to where lovers bid their last goodbye,

And there, cast off, like some rich garment lie,

From which our heirs-in-love their own may tear

And in our stead as regal emblems wear?

Then let us now, in our strong youthful prime,

Invest our riches in one blaze of rhyme—

And so to our old age and airy ghosts

Bequeath the memories of our shining feats,

That, when they reach those shadow-peopled coasts,

They still may buckle on as lordly boasts

Wherewith to swagger in those mournful streets.

Even as the Sea, coloured with boastful hues,

Into whose gloom the dancing stars diffuse

Their flatteries of fire, and seem to shake

A thousand sleeping Arguses awake—

All glittering with fierce hypnotic eyes,

Extravagantly vaunts his gorgeous dyes,

Flaunting his pride against the barren shores

Careless of whom his flaring lights amaze,

Though it be but to startle grunting boars,

Or bloodshot, staring buffaloes to daze—

So I whose mind love fires with glancing rays

Would vie with peacocks and, around the globe

Fantailing forth a mesh of coloured rhyme,

Would weave for my young love a fitting robe

With which to shimmer in the winds of time,

Teaching men’s hearts a mutinous commotion

As it waves forth to undiscovered lands,

Tigered with gold and azure like the ocean,

And braided with the green of palmy strands.

Ghosting like starlight through the minds of men

And panthered with their jealous eyes, as when

The ocean draws the wonder of the skies

And wears the gold amazement of their eyes,

So I would have her beauty glide forever

Glassing its image in that rushing river

Where life unravels into tragic tales

And time flows nightward lit with mortal dreams—

A moon above those serpent-winding streams

That have the eyes of poets for their scales.

Here in this land, where nature unconfined

Taunts the great desert of the human mind

From which as yet no bright euphorbias shoot

But only sweet unwieldy pumpkins fruit,

Vast sprawling platitudes with sugared vein

Cysts of the mind, and tumours of the brain:

Where Poesy has ever, on weak knees,

Limped in the track of old hypocrisies,

And, like a bullfrog, wheezing grateful cries

Snatched with a nimble flicker of its tongue

The tinsel sweetness of their sugared lies,

Uncaring that the brightest-coloured flies

Are often hatched the deepest in the dung.

Here in this desert, far from any Muse,

(Except yourself, the tenth, most proud and young)

Where Thought, half-starved, like a soft cactus screws

Its squirming root and rears its stunted blade

Scarce high enough to grant a lizard shade—

Here shall I strike my roots whose strenuous thongs

Into the barren lava hour by hour,

Incisively shall drive their eager prongs

And crest the desert boulders with a Flower.

Like a Magnolia with its pollen loaded,

As heavy as the gold on Danae’s thigh,

That by its own effulgence is exploded

Into a cloud of fragrance, one long sigh—

So I, whom love exalting to a god,

Forces, a fiery blossom, from the pod

Out of my own morality escape,

And shower, like Jove, to Danae’s golden rape:—

And while my words in many a burning gyre

Fume on the breeze and set the winds on fire

Like pollen in the spring; your soul shall seem

A glittering bee that travels to and fro

Loaded with all the wealth that I can dream

And all that I can realize and show.

The drought is done. Now to their gusty games,

Tagging their nimble heels with fleeter flames

Than those with which they charred the winter grass,^[1]

The winds upon the tops of lilies pass.

New sources rimple from the mountain-roots

And drawn in silver leashes by the spruits

Long files of red-gold lilies wind and meet

To spoor the rovings of their crystal feet:

The marshes, where the yellow weavers breed,

Whirr with great gusts of gold, and as they swing,

Shrill on the bending rushes, every reed

Lights its frail taper with a burnished wing.

Here, where relumed by changing seasons, burn

The phoenix trees of Africa in turn,

Each from the other’s ashes taking fire

As swiftly to revive as to expire,

Mimosa, jacaranda, kaffirboom,

And tulip-tree, igniting bloom from bloom,

While through their zodiac of flowery signs

The flame-furred sun like some huge moth is whirled

Circling forever, as he fades or shines,

Around the open blossom of the world—

All things as if to Venus’ touch ignite

And the grey soil is tinder to her tread

Whence married flowers explode into the light—

And burn with fiery pollen as they wed.

She burns through bark and wood as flame through glass

The dust is fuel to her warm desire

On which, with scintillating plumes, the grass

Runs waving like a disembodied fire:

But we of all her splendours are most splendid

In whom the rest are held and comprehended,

And our clear sprites, whom rays and showers begem,

Burn through each other as the world through them.

Though we seem merely mortal, what we are,

Is clearly mirrored on a deathless flood.

We change and fade: our dust is strewn afar—

Only the ancient river of our blood,

Rising far-off in unimagined spaces,

Red with the silt and ruin of the past

And churning with the strife of savage races,

Like deep Zambezi goes on rolling past,

Swiftens through us its energies unending,

And reaches out, beneath the shades we cast,

To what vast ocean of the night descending

Or in what sunny lake at last to sleep,

We do not know—save that it turns to foam,

Just here, for us; its currents curl and comb

And all its castalies in thunder leap,

Silvering, forth into a white resilience

Of ecstasy, whose momentary brilliance

Must compensate eternities of sleep.

Knowing these things, are not we lovers, then,

Though mortal in our nature, more than men?

Since by our senses, as by rivers, veined,

The hills of primal memory are drained,

And the dim summits of their frosty spars,

Whose tops are nibbled by the grazing stars,

Thawed by the rising noon of our desire,

And fusing into consciousness and fire,

Down through the sounding canyons of the soul

Their rich alluvium of starlight roll.

We bear to future times the secret news

That first was whispered to the new-made earth:

We are like worlds with nations in our thews,

Shaped for delight, and primed for endless birth.

We never kiss but vaster shapes possess

Our bodies: towering up into the skies,

We wear the night and thunder for our dress,

While, vaster than imagination, rise

Two giant forms, like cobras flexed to sting,

Bending their spines in one tremendous ring

With all the starlight burning through their eyes,

Fire in their loins, and on their lips the hiss

Of breath indrawn above some steep abyss.

When, like the sun, our heavenly desire

Has turned this flesh into a cloud of fire

Through which our nerves their strenuous lightnings fork,

Eternity has blossomed in an hour

And as we gaze upon that wondrous flower

We think the world a beetle on its stalk.

Let other folk, in theories sublime,

Spin out men’s souls like spider-threads through time:—

Be ours to fill the present with our strength

And rear in height what they spin out in length:

Yet while through us those burning forces smite

To which we are the engines of delight,

Let us not dream that here the end is won

Though we must turn our bodies from the sun

And be ourselves no more: for we are fuel

To deathless fires: about us as we play

Eternal forces, hungry for renewal,

Hurtle their live electrons to the fray.

Clouds, crystals, ferns, the ecstacies of matter,

All the fixed forms of beauty, whereunto

Habituated atoms, when they scatter,

By rays and showers are builded up anew—

All these are rhythms woven from the joy

With which live atoms touch, and kiss, and chime,

Yet through the silent chemistry of time,

Weaving smooth harmonies from change and storm,

Come hankering back to their appointed form

As waves to rhythm, or as words to rhyme.

Two poles of sex the night’s vast spaces know,

Like distant whirlpools in the deep revolved,

Round which the currents of the ages flow

And worlds, like spray, are driven and dissolved:

And where their ripples cross, with eddying gyre,

They disentwine from swirling spools of fire

The wheeling systems. As when tides have met,

With currents in opposing orbits set,

Each by the other sucked to swirling hollows,

They spin a million circles on the deep,

Ere each the same smooth orbit finds and follows,

And both upon a single pivot sweep.

Slowly their wheeling boundaries encroach;

The turning heavens stir with their approach,

And suns and planets into motion leap;

Even in us they herald their advances,

Flashing their signal through our sense and sight,

And in the casual meeting of our glances

Their outward ripples intersect in light.

Then let us not as perishable dust

Treat these sound bodies which we hold in trust:

But think of them as messengers that meet

Half way between the proud advance of kings,

Announcing their approach, who come to treat,

In gorgeous conclave, of eternal things:

For we are subjects of two foreign powers

Whose grand alliance time will bring to be—

And to this end the valley burns with flowers

And to this end the morning gilds the sea.

In what wild forms have you explored with me

The myriad labyrinths of earthly lust?

I love to think that as a tall young tree,

Golden with pollen, furred with fiery dust,

I fired my shower of Danae to the gust

Or made a happy pander of the bee:

I love to think that in our primal strength

Two panthers clothed us with a night of stars:

Or, as a stream beneath its nenuphars,

We rippled in the python’s flowery length:

Or that within the ocean-cleaving whale

We sent up rainbows in majestic play,

And that I sought you then, amid a hail

Of crackling pearls and cataracting spray,

As now amid a rain of golden words.

Yet through the dust a myriad times must pass,

In gold of lilies and in green of grass,

Or in the conscious flesh that now is ours,

Our swift protean essence of delight—

Until the earth has burned away in flowers

Until the stars have eaten up the night,

And having strung, like beads upon a thread,

The changing forms in which we now appear

We in that shining revelry shall tread

Of which we act the faint rehearsals here . . .

For when that final rosary is told,

He who is still new-born (though none so old)

The still-unchanging Present, fold from fold

Tearing the veil, will prove to us at last

That there was never Future time nor Past,

But that, a mere illusion in each tense,

Time was the mere reflection of events,

To fill up gaps between them in our sense—

Unreal and hollow, like the footworn track

That one who travels leaves behind his back,

Or merely finds between him and his goal!

And that, instead of Time or Space, a sole

Personal presence occupies the whole.

When all that was, or shall be, merely is

And all existence is self-known in His,

That which we feel to-day in either sprite,

And which we know in moments of delight

Will then be fixed. If into you I burn

Or both into that All, or each return

Singly into ourselves—all shall be one.

And in our love some part of this is done,

For though He shines by us, it’s not to dim

The least existence that exists in Him.

(To a Hiking Britisher)

Jump up behind, you pink, fat Pommie!

And profit by this trotting mule

You’ve stolen my appearance from me

And made me look an equal fool.

You buy dark specs from the opticians

But I collect such eyewear free.

Assault-guards, cops, and Red milicians

Bestowed these two black eyes on me.

My! it must be a lovely sight

To stare at castles through dim mists

But I am equal to your sleight:

Policemen were my oculists.

The Tcheka issued me this pair

And through their lens I read this sentence—

“Red Spaniards! if you take no care

It will be late for your repentance.”

Through dark prophetic rings I stare,

With which I read the future thus—

“The Ninth Crusade is in the air,

But poor old England’s missed the bus.”

I have to keep my goggles still

And see the world more blue than rose:

But you offsaddle yours at will

That play the jockey to your nose.

This flawless Sun without a fleck

You dare not meet it with your eye,

And so you’ve caught it round your neck

Like ringworm, or a bolshy tie.

While Britons wear that blood-red halter

And in such blinkers draw her hearse,

Britannia’s course will never alter

But rumble on from bad to worse.

Her people too will change their genders

And side so oft with the wrong side

Her victories will prove surrenders

And breed disasters far and wide.

Since long before Versailles her tallion

Was plain, by God and Man accurst,

Tell them that my mule’s a stallion

When you get home to Sissyhurst.

(To C. J. Sibbett)

Against the Bogus prophets of the Day

Chained to Corruption, Failure, and Decay,

What can I do but take the trampled sand,

Diestro by the Rightness of my hand,

Whose opening Palm, of Victory the Sign,

Branched from the mesa with the Bread and Wine,

By the same toil engendered as the grain

With many a million more, the Might of Spain,

With palms of triumph foresting the day

To wave the golden harvest on its way,

Of which strong millions, strictly contraband,

I introduce this sample to a Land

Where all the sweet emoluments are thrown

To that snug, sinister, and bungling drone,

The fist-shut Left, so dextrous with the dirk,

The striker, less in battle than from work:

The weed of Life that grows where air is hot

With “Meetings” for its aspidistra-plot:

That leaves its labour to the hammering tongue

And grows, a cactus, out of hot-house dung:

A manual head-ache, fastened in a fist,

And fed with fumes of foul carbonic mist:

A vegetable cramp: a bolted clam

Whose grudging doors on life and daylight slam:

The “No”-to-life translated as “I Am,”

A Life-constricting tetanus of fingers

Under whose sign an outworn Age malingers,

While from its back the nails eat slowly through,

For communists out-fakir the Hindu,

And hanker for stagnation thrice as vast

Where all must starve beneath the lowest Caste;

The fungus that, by still decaying, grows;

Sleep’s Aegis, save when dealing dirty blows;

Like the raised claw-bunch of an ancient stork,

With cork-screwed fingers, as a crumpled fork,

In a rheumatic ecstasy of hate

Clenched at the world, for being born too late;

This weary fist infests the world entire

As common in the palace as the byre,

As limply fungoid in the idle rich

As when it grimly toadstools from a ditch,

Or, friend to every cause that rots or fails,^[1]

Presides in Bloomsbury with tinted nails;

As doomed anachronisms, Sire and Son,

Capitalist and communist make one,

The scrawny offspring and the bloated sire

Sentenced by nature to the same hot fire;

So in red Bloomsbury the two are tied

Like gangsters to be taken for a ride—

Smug rebels to Society, the tame

Charaders in a dreary parlour game,

Where breaking crockery gives a lawless thrill

And Buffaloes each smug suburban Bill,

Where the Left Fist will pelt you from the fence,

But when you lift a hand in self-defence,

Although it scorns the bourgeois law and state,

Off to the lawyers takes the broken pate,

And at the first sign of a lifted quirt

Will cling his Mother Grundy by the skirt.

From every communist you can unsheath

The snug fat “bourgeois” creeping underneath,

And every Babbit is a foxes’ hole

From which a scrawny “comrade” snarls for dole!

So in Red Spain they’re fighting side by side

By common desperation both allied,

Both indispensable and no more strange

Than the unhealthy hide is to the mange—

But on our side such itches cannot grow

Since, with us, the whole Donkey had to go!

For though with lies your hearing they belabour

Theirs is the Capital as ours the Labour—

As fat Prieto boasted with a grin

“The Rights are penniless, and cannot win.”^[2]

But nature’s elements, except for gold,

Will shun the Communist’s convulsive hold,

And it’s an axiom that mere eyesight yields—

Grass hates to grow on communistic fields!

The plains and valleys fought upon our side

And rivers to our Victory were allied

That (loosed to whelm us and to flood the land)

Were parted like Red Seas on either hand:

Our comrades’ blood, still conscious in their veins,

Headed the waves away with curling manes,^[3]

And, swerving on both sides to let us free,

Galloped them foaming headlong to the sea—

In death still present, hand upon the reins,

Such friendship links us riders of the plains.

Nor can a clenched left fist create or fight

With the calm patience of the open Right,

Nor help a needy comrade, as we see

Each time they leave their wounded, when they flee,

When to remove their numbers to the rear

Might sow the grey, demoralizing fear.

Yet see this smuggled Right hand that I bring

The lightest feather moulted from the wing

Of our great Victory, spread from star to star,

With thunder-hackled mountains in her car,

Which all the way from Portugal to France

She inspans in her thundering advance,

Changing their fiery teams at every stage,

For new ones filled with ever-towering rage,

And loosing these in turn to drink and graze

The peace-calm waters and the flowery ways,

Till, last and most superb, the Pyrenees,

Snorting a fiery steam around their knees,

Shall trail her spoor of villages set free

Through waving cornfields to the Midland Sea.

By this light hand, this feather of her wing,

Had you but cared to watch the careless thing—

Just by the mere direction it was blown

This war was long predicted and foreshown—

Directness, Rightness, has that airy power,

Anticipating victory to the hour:

While Leftness fails in all, as it befell

When Strachey prophesied at Teruel.

Through its brown palm as through the map of Spain

The Lucky line runs free of worldly gain

Like Tagus through the brown Castilian plain;

Inept the gadgets of the Mode to peddle,

But while a working stirrup is my treadle,

A serviceable implement enough

To rope a Calf or Red-Neck^[4] by the scruff

And treat them kindly though they cut up rough;

Whose knot of nerves, by common labour spliced,

The rope and rein for manicure sufficed,

It scorns the scarlet nail-dye of the Left

And only in dexterity is deft,

Too business-like, unladylike a fist

To tantalize a British Communist,

As found the Tomboys of the Summer Schools

At San Mateo rounded up like mules,

As if they came not here to fight and kill

But to some nudist camp of Swedish drill

With sempahores no soldier understands

First clenching fists then throwing up their hands,

And when they’re wearied of their jamboree,

Ask to be bathed and taken home to Tea!

But firstly, to fulfil the boastful promise,

In my last Book, of Saying it with Pommies,^[5]

To show I was in earnest when I spoke

And did not Dedicate them as a joke,

And though I could not say just where or when

Was certain they would flounder to my pen

Which never yet in prophecy has failed

And had them counted years before they sailed

And over lands and seas were puffed and floated

To within half a mile of where I wrote it—

Equestrian Muse of our Castilian trails,

Accept this offering (as of votive quails)

Of these three hundred Red-Necks, thrilled and caught

By Prophecy, on the live wires of thought,

Brought here to learn why communists “feel small”^[6]

And we so perpendicular and tall

(Like a Cathedral over Comrades’ Hall)

For whom I sent the gay whip-cracking words

To round them up in flabbergasted herds,

And stretched the wire of rhyme, and switched the shock

That numbed the birdsclaws of their noisy flock—

Those scrawny fists, late screwed into a knot,

But now their manual tetanus forgot,

As with the grapenuts reddening in their crops,

In Roman fashion, they salute the Wops—

Renouncing all their “Meeting”-gotten valiance,

To crawl before a handful of Italians!^[7]

Whose plight, electrocuted half by fear,

Must be my mandate to their Country’s Ear—

That huge spittoon of webbed and scarlet gristle,

Credulity’s Lofoden, the Niagara

Of Suction, where the lies like whirlwinds whistle,

And to uphold whose weight, a drunken staggerer

Revolving to its windmill-like career,

The Nation groans, the Atlas of its Ear!

And well might Lenin shout, such lugs to spy,

“Well-used, our Mightiest Weapon is the Lie”:

With Kosher-cooked Alcazars to be blasted

As badly as the real one was devasted,

Its huge defenceless target weakly wags

And streams in tatters like a hundred flags

For all to spit in—journalists or “highbrows”

(If guaranteed no brain behind the eyebrows)

For Defrocked Scoutmasters and wheedling Jews

The dumb receptacle of doctored news,

Of prophecies so stubbornly perverse

That they work out inspired—in the reverse,

(Like Lockhart’s Prague and Strachey’s Teruel

No sooner to be published than they fell)

And all those plans that democrats expound

To boomerang, in life, the wrong way round.

Where wowsers may discharge their wondrous lore

Who’ll “fight for peace,” and yet disarm for war—

This Ear, Public Convenience number One,

For all who rave or froth beneath the Sun,

Which sucks in all that’s said, or thought, or written,

And loves by Hebrews to be mauled or bitten,

Yet when I near it, gives a threatening wag,

“For Members Only” running up the flag,

Because I’ve got the future in my bag

And by the tail can swing that howling cat about,

Who live the things they only chew the fat about,

Since my existence has been lived and fought

As theirs at Oxford ready-made was bought

And in my teens I’d shed like threadbare trousers

Every experience possible to Wowsers;

I know what wrings their withers night and morn

To wish (quite rightly) they had not been born

Since of the English poets on your shelf

The only sort of “Worker” is myself,^[8]

Grown wiser in the company of mules

Than they with learned pedantries of fools,

And, since I was not sent with foreign cash,

Like some, to spread the bolshevistic rash,

Able both to explain the “Spanish Worker”

From the inside, as to expound the Shirker,

The Communist, whose bungling Left we fight

With this Right hand—in every sense the Right!

So that when I approach that Red Left Lug

And honourably would discharge my plug

Of truth, the buckshot of my deadly mug,

To pepper with reality its dream—

Like an anemone, with folding seam,

Into its neck it tries to disappear,

And where it wagged the Man, he wags the ear,—

Who every time contrives to swing the lead

When I would raise my trumpet to his head,

Though in this cud of victory that I chew

There’s balsam for the spittle of the Jew:

Since in a land where everything’s called New

That’s ready to dilapidate in two—

With “New Verse” and “New Statesman” to be new with

Alas, it’s a New Newness they could do with!

All things that date the most, this label means,

To-day’s boneshakers, last night’s crinolines,

That with the latest fashion and the mode

Still to the scrapheap point the shortest road—

So I must strive its meaning to re-New,

And stir the fossils in their rancid stew,

By showing them a thing they’ve seldom seen—

A writer who is not a dead machine

Turned out like Ford cars in a time of crisis

From Charlie-factories of Cam or Isis^[9]

And only guaranteed to run down-hill

Where failure can be headed for a spill.

For naught have they espoused in prose or rhyme

But perished through incompetence or crime:

What they uphold of its own self will fall

And out the Blums and Beneshes will crawl;

Though Lenin triumphed, into fullness blowing,

Ere these lugubrious Mascots could get going,

That was his luck, for Luck where they appear,

As from a Bunyip,^[10] howling flies in fear—

And now poor Lenin’s cherished dream of Spain,

Through their support, has gurgled down the drain.

When from his eminence Azaña fell,

It was upon the day they wished him well;

A letter came, from Woolfs and Huxleys sent

Support and sympathy to represent,

And straightway all his energies expired,

Something collapsed in him, he went all tired

And from the State executive was fired:

And flawlessly this axiom has been kept

What Auden chants by Spender shall be wept—

Go, ask the poor old Negus if I lie,

And Largo Caballero, by and by!

For they’ve signposts that always point the path

First to Geneva, afterwards to Bath,

When, crunched by the Right-handedness they lack,

Each Thug or slaver takes the scrap-yard track,

With these funereal croakers at his back;

Vultures and crows so rally to the field

And where they “group” you know the doom is sealed,

Before it hits our nostrils ripe and hot

They’ve long ago divined the inward rot,

And as by sympathy I sense the rose

Of Victory before its buds unclose,

So they (before it trumpets to the nose)

Anticipate the maggot on its way,

With it co-operate in swift decay,

And so with one more carcass strew the way:

Which you may spoor, by no exception crossed—

One trail of causes villainously lost!

See, how they come “Democracy” to save

The moment it begins to dig its grave,

While jutting bonework corrugates the scurf,

With murderous paws to shovel its own turf

A starved hyena at whose sapless dugs

The Russian Romulus in frenzy tugs,

While Spanish Remus has the brighter wheeze

To polish off its last remaining fleas—

Till even such a chump as Herbert Read

Woke up to it that things had gone to seed,

And chose the next most mouldy thing he could

That promised nits and jiggers in the wood,

Who now in Anarchism’s foetid cell

The elixir of life pretends to smell.

Decrepitude for them’s the only Right,

Though as “humanitarians” they write

With greasy Tartuffades to slime the cause

That has more victims in its murderous jaws

Than ever were destroyed in mortal fight,

Blasted with bombs, or heaved with dynamite,

Or executed here, to serve them right:

Not only that, but if we well examine,

Invariably they side with filth and famine,

Morality for them has never mattered,

Except when crime or failure must be flattered:

For all their talk of what is Right or Wrong,

What matters most to them is—“Does it Pong?”

For they’ll have nothing but what’s stale or late

And to be “modern” must be out of date.

They bury facts as crocodiles their meat

Returning later to “debunk” the treat

Which most they live for; like their friends, the Reds

Who pulled the mouldering corpses from their beds,

Who in Huesca’s graveyard raised a Bar,

And drummed with thighbones to the shrill guitar,

Doomed by the same sub-realistic curse

In living bodies to forestall their hearse,

A doomed and dying species, with their cause

Condemned by the inexorable laws,

Who only by inversion can exist

As perverts, in a charnel-breathing mist,

From Death and Sin their scrawny themes to twist—

And with such bards to trumpet them to battle

No wonder British Reds stampede like cattle!

Their “Progress” is to shunt along a track

Where “Left” means left-behind and “Front” means back

When was a Front so definitely split

As this fat Rump they have mistook for it,

And shown us little else as we advance

Our proper Front from Portugal to France:

And if they’re facing “Front”-wards, I’ll not quiz

What must the tail be like, if that’s the phyz?

With them, for opposites we have to hunt—

“Backward” ’s the word, when Popular the “Front.”

From Seville to Toledo, every day,

They write up their advances all the way:

With victories they fill their daily sheet,

Woe to our cause, then, if they should retreat—

God save us from their ultimate defeat!

In a whole year when they would do or die

Their sole Alcazar still has been the Lie,

There all their foes are routed, only there

Pusillanimity can fight with prayer!

Put France and England’s might upon the main,

The Gold of Moscow, and the loot of Spain,

Have all your mobs from arsenals prepared

Against a cause already thrice despaired,

A country prostrate, so that Moscow’s powers,

Can say “Within a fortnight Spain is ours”—

Add but their vows—and all is ineffectual

Once smiled on by the British Intellectual:

For they have spat on Life, the valiant Friend,

Who must be our companion to the end,

And he, no Red-Neck to forgive such fun,

From where they look, will turn away the Sun!

This, which I only whisper to my gun,

To the dry grass, and to a broken tree,

Long after may be heard beyond the sea

When nations catch their ancient health again

From the new might of Resurrected Spain,

That like a miracle, from nothing born,

To nightmare-ridden Europe shows the Morn

And stands between her and the living Hell

No liberal Democracy could quell—

But let these prisoners speak for my precision

And answer for my range and drive of Vision,

Who promised this before the war begun,

And drilled them with my pen before my gun

To dance in dudgeon what I wrote in fun:

And come like “Calais Burghers,” as I planned,

“With their pink halters tamely brought to hand”^[11]

In every detail fleshed, as fancied then,

When first the Sword was fathered by the Pen:

Surrendering without a single blow

For nothing, save that I foretold it so—

To make this great round-up at San Mateo

A film of my original rodeo—

To see them act down to its quaintest antic

The verse they dared to dream of as “Romantic,”

When (ere they dreamed of it) I had portrayed

The British International Brigade,

And twice predicted clearly in advance

Lest any fool should foist it on to chance

If only once I’d whirled the whistling line

To get them hog-tied with iambic twine,

Preventing all suggestions of coincidence

When the live words should burgeon into incidents,

As in a tame hypnotic trance they follow

My verse, the flaming lariat of Apollo.

See now, like filings to its powerful magnet,

Like barbels gasping in its mighty drag-net,

Daring all likelihood of place or time

To prove my sure trajectory in rhyme,

Trampling geography, deriding space,

To fetch these grapenut-crunchers face to face,

I haul them out of their subhuman trance

Before a true reality to dance.

For the first time by a creative thought

Their Joadified existence has been caught,

Their miserable can-can they rehearse

As margin illustrations to my verse,

Projected by its force, gambol by gambol,

Through its side-splitting rigmarole to scramble,

And learn the difference if they didn’t know it

Between a leftwing pedant and a poet!

Some fools may find Romantics in my Obra—

But where’s a Realism that is sob’rer

When heroes Rooperted in Spauden’s line

As dying stoics, nonchalant and fine,

Like numbed, frostbitten bullfrogs to a Cobra,

Galvanically volted through the spine,

Confront the cold Reality of mine?

I warned John Bull to fatten up his son^[12]

And Jackie Veal-Calf to be underdone

When with their stainless cutlery and steel

Like waiters they would serve their own cold veal,^[13]

Yes, even blobbed with mustard-coloured hair,

Which I’d forgot to order—all was there

A prophet’s feast of laughter to prepare!

And vain were all their boycotts to deflect

My prophecies that hiss their hair erect,

Who guaranteed their Popular Behinds

To show a pair of cheeks to all the winds,

And could as easily, in my Delphic rapture,

Have prophesied their slaughter as their capture,

But here the very Quarter-masters vex

For Turkey-food to redden up their necks

Till, all unhurt, we ship them to their shops

With grapenuts still distended in their crops

If we can find any—treating them kindly

To send them home from where they rushed so blindly

To fling their scraping curtseys to the Wops,

After they’d sacked the Churches, looted farms,

And raised us angry cattlemen in arms—

Leftness of Hand (the shame of work and war)

Disgracing England on a foreign shore,

Whose honour here I battle to restore

From such unholy ridicule to save her.

And when I Bolshevize for Royal Favour

Amongst her Modern Southeys, henna-tressed,

By watering down the Vodka like the rest,

May my Right hand lose cunning, flinch, and waver,

Salaaming there for baksheesh with their best,

Who’ll call you honest, daring, fearless, bold,

For blacking boots and doing what you’re told,

If only you upclench that “no” to life

And wish your Father hadn’t took a wife,

If only you renounce all Faith and Vision

Foresentencing your manhood to derision.

For King’s Gold Medals when I strive to please

Their winning will require a sterner test,

No defrocked Scoutmaster could Tupper these

That jingle with the Cross upon my chest:

When Britain and her poets stand for causes

That aren’t foredoomed by foul subhuman crime

They’ll change their present sanctions to applauses

And own me for the prophet of my time,

Since the whole trouble with the other chaps is

Whatever cause they flunkey for collapses

However well it flourished at the time:

For I foretold La Mancha’s Knight would prance

With Charlie like a cockroach on his lance

Which I was called Romantic to believe:

Around the Fates to play at pitch and toss

Like kittens with the skein of Atropos

My devil-daring prophecies had leave;

So happy were the Fates at last to weave

A prophecy that wasn’t pusillanimous,

And when they saw my program, were unanimous

I’d come a tedious chapter to relieve:

So merry hummed the wheel and clashed the shears

Was never such a miracle for years

Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve:

For when our cause was scarce a handsbreadth grown

And theirs in blood and arson towered alone

And Absolute from Portugal to France,

With flawless certitude I flung defiance

At all our pundits, bards, and men of Science,

Who’ve always viewed my gasconades askance,

Since well they know, those paladins of failure!

They’ve backed no cause from Greenland to Australia

But petered out for fear of worse mischance.

For still the “Southern Stranger” of their theme,^[14]

My “Southern Gestures Modify” their dream—

And well may they beware: for from her chain

A “Southern Gesture” liberated Spain.^[15]

For where they doze in faint Utopian steam

Among their vicious languors and their lilies,

My Hand will pepper them with Southern chillies

Whenever I can spare it from my team,

As these found out, these gutless weary-willies

Who but that I had called this dance of wowsers

Would still be hiking in their sawn-off trousers

Or climbing grapenut-trees in some green lane—

But that I gave the rendezvous in Spain,

And came to greet them, shouting from my mule,

“Woodley! Old Woodley! welcome Home to School!”

One votive goat, had they but spared my kraal

Would have been worth this batch, their kit, and all,

Who had not even the guts to run away

When their Red Paradise behind them lay

And not a single man to bar their way—

Inviting them with all its charms untold,

The New Jerusalem, the Age of Gold,

Where loving “comrades” howl for gory tripes

And pay their services with shots and swipes.

But take them, Muse, since they were in our contract,

Forgiving me the horseplay of this Entre-Acte,

And oh, sweet sister of Right-handed men,

Be ready to direct my willing pen

With the same constant certitude as when

Though years and seas and lands between us lay,

It goaded them my summons to obey:

And as it then Collectivized one Fool

Out of these Tomboys of the Summer School

Grant that it now may move as many minds

As here it chivvied prominent Behinds—

“Popular Fronts”—ahem! I meant to say

For we can euphemize as well as they—

And so collectivize a Wiser Man

Out of the better specimens of this Clan

Till England is unpommified once more

And poets grace her God-forsaken shore.

For just as ably, and with equal vision,

As I forecapture pommies with precision

And with a breath can puff to non-existence

Three years of time, a thousand miles of distance,

I can distinguish Right from Crying Wrong

And that’s the theme and purpose of my song.

So sun my couplets with your radiant smiles

And ride with me these long Castilian miles

Your weight upon the croup behind me swinging,

Your Open Palm upon my thorax clinging,

That palm of victory in whose warm hold

To lullaby a wound my heart is singing

Like a red bird within its frond of gold;

While lovely as the lilt of the guitar

The silence of my rifle sounds afar,

Your jet-blue curls and lips like burning chillies,

Your beauty, like the Giantess of lilies,

Respiring fragrance as we ride along,

The one-horse cavalry whose charge is song,

Two voices underneath a single hat,

Two singers on the same bay bronco sat,

Two melodies in love with the same tune,

That runs in gold and silver to the moon.

Now like the rushing Tagus let us sing

How houses from their blasted ruins spring,

For one bombarded town how twenty rise

And float those long-lost colours to the skies:^[16]

How kneeling crowds receive our marching hosts

As if we had been dear, departed ghosts:

As if they had forgot that wine is red

And dazzled by the whiteness of our bread.

The loaves and fishes of an “outworn creed”

Suffice the starving multitude to feed,

And that is wrought by the mere faith of Spain

For which the purse-proud nations strove in vain.

Shiploads from Britain, loaded trains from France

Served but the march of hunger to advance,

As Bread to famine, water turned to thirst,

The miracles of Jesus were reversed:

In vain the Gaucho toiled for their relief

On Pampas thundering with tons of beef—

Round up the plains, or trawl the teeming sea

Where the Red Curse is, there will Hunger be!

The cargoes of a myriad trains and boats

Shrunk to a spider’s breakfast in their throats.

They gasp to see our half-ton bullocks bleed

Whom wealth of mighty nations failed to feed,

To see the flocks of fat merinos spring

From some poor provinces where Christ is King,

Where loaves are multiplied from scanty grain

And fishes seem deserters from the main.^[17]

Now through the Nation as our legions spread

The richer by the poorer half is fed:

Beside the lewd inscription, where they sprawl,

From loafing idly charcoaled on the wall

Hammer and Sickle to their labour fall.

Storks to the steeples, rollers to the wires

Return, and swallows to the broken spires—

And men to the religion of their Sires!

Over the blood of martyrs scarcely dry

Toledo, there, against the morning sky

Like some great battle-cruiser from the fight

Returned with Victory (terrific sight!).

God’s flagship, she, with shattered sides, presents

Her leaning funnels and her gaping rents,

In high salute uplifts her steepled guns,

And far the deep reverberation runs—

Through echoing gorges of the hills it roars

The listening plain receives it and adores

And at her mast the Royal Ensign soars,

Where one ecstatic eagle soars and faints,

And morning like a red and golden banner

Is roaring in the hurricane hosanna

Of the Heroes, and the Martyrs, and the Saints!

(To Major S. C. Mason of the Nigerian Regiment)

Red as the guardroom lamp

The moon inspects the trees:

High over Heartbreak Camp,

Orion stands at ease:

With buttons lit, for Sentry,

He challenges who’s there

Acceding all the entry

Whose passport is Despair.

All joys are privates there

Who seldom go on leave

And only sorrows wear

Three chevrons on their sleeve:

But boredom wears three pips,

A fiend of monstrous size,

With curses on his lips

And circles round his eyes.

All round, for league on league

And labouring up the hills,

The clouds are on fatigue,

Collecting damps and chills.

Sir Dysentery Malaria,

A famous brigadier,

Commands the whole sub-area,

And stalking in his rear,

A more ferocious colonel

Lord Tremens (of the Drunks)

To whose commands infernal

We tremble in our bunks.

Here, till the pale aurora

Dismiss the stars from drill,

I dream of my Señora

Behind the guardroom grille.

In the outcry of crickets

And the silence of guitars,

I watch the lonely pickets

And the slow patrol of stars.

Our vineyard and the terrace

By the Tagus, they recall,

With the Rose of the Sierras,

Whom I love the best of all!

My heart was once her campfire

And burned for her alone,

Fed with the thyme and samphire

That azure days had grown.

My thoughts for their safari

Have scarcely taken wings

Through spaces wide and starry

To hear her stroke the strings.

But ere one word be spoken

A fiend my elbow jogs,

The reverie is broken

By the tomtom of the wogs:

And, all illusions killing,

Upon the stillness jars

A far hyaena drilling

His company of stars.

(Headline in a Daily Paper)

Personae: Two British N.C.O.’s. The Nat.

 It seems we’ve lost the way for good.

                                        But, look!

The hill has calved: and much, that we mistook

For landscape, lives (unless it’s my malaria)

And moves, and grows, and profiteers in area.

No random herd of buffalo or buck

Could make the waking eyesight come unstuck,

And from its focus swerve to such a pitch

That bush, mirage, or vision—which is which?

 Now multiple, now single—yet I trace,

Through all, the blurred refraction of a face;

But if it has a voice that rumour seems

Far less its own, than of the trees and streams,

The whistling of a trillion leafy tongues

To which the ancient forests heave their lungs.

 It scares me stiff. Let’s slip into this wood

And do a Spaunday while the going’s good.

 This is some walking Hangover it seems

Sent to molest us from the land of dreams,

Or one of those old Fogies out of books

That startle heroes with their gruesome looks,

And of their birth and lineage make a song

With genealogies four pages long,

Men-mammoths of the Titan’s hulking breed

That late in history have run to seed,

Or shifted off the road-maps and the charts

To cultivate the Californian arts.

So showed the Polypheme to the companions

As here this weird abortion of the banyans:

So Caesar’s country, bleeding from his sins,

With towers and castles for her curling-pins,

Took shape and met him at the swollen drift

Of Rubicon: so looming in the lift,

Shock-headed Adamastor, from his crag,

Came roaring down with sacrilegious brag

To scare the Lusiads, and (last March) ourselves,

Blaring his foghorn from the rocky shelves,

The day we slithered on the tilting deck

And half the convoy got it in the neck.

And so this Eye-sore to the Sergeants came,

MacCallion and MacNobody by name,

Though unlike others of his huffling race

He hesitates, it seems, to state his case.

 I fear some phoney mischief of the Japs

To hypnotise us into booby-traps.

I have him covered: shall I fire a burst?

 Our orders are—Diplomacy at first.

Keep on the right side of the locals, aim

To win their friendship and conserve the same.

Who knows but this may be some playful Yogi

Designing on our fears to come the Bogey?

Elephantiasis, of Man, and beast,

And spirit—is endemic to the east.

Some outsize rustic yokel this may be,

And harmlessly disposed to you and me:

Some local Rhino-gelder, from his size,

His odour, and the twinkle in his eyes,

One who sustains the economic push

De-lousing elephants from tracts of bush,

Or some old-fashioned farrier of the thunder

Who’s fallen upon evil times (no wonder!) . . .

 Wrong, every time! Your brains are both so slight

That, even were they made of dynamite,

They could not shift your forage-caps an inch.

A Fleet of Bombers would not make me flinch—

And so God help the first of you who plugs

My Nat-ship with that squittering hose of slugs!

In me you meet the father of the Nats

But keep the knowledge underneath your hats

Since no one will believe you if you don’t,

Or shoot a line according to your wont.

Although my voice seems on the air to you,

And you may think you’ve televised me too,

And tele-stunk me—since you mention smells

It’s all in the derangement of your cells.

Because your ears are singing with quinine

Association falsifies the scene:

You think in terms of Radio, as it hums,

Fooled by squeak and whistle in your drums,

And your disordered fancy does the rest

Conjuring nightmares from your fevered breast:

And so you clothe me in the forms you fear

And in my voice—who knows but that you hear

The fight-talk of some paunchy profiteer,

Who broadcasts, dropping aitches for applause,

And froths ‘We workers’ from his working jaws,

Champing his red civilian hate to froth

And tearing up his enemies like cloth,

Though in his life he never did a stroke

Save write best-sellers for the wealthy folk.

You now insult me with his voice and tone

And see, in me, the monster he has grown

Since such as he can branch, a gruesome race,

Their octopoid antennae through all space,

Destructive Titans, greedy in the gripe,

Long in the ears, and windy in the pipe,

Drunk with their power, blaspheming as they strut,

And mischievous as monkeys on the rut;

These, through the waves of ether, towering rise

With gods and angels to dispute the skies,

Through waves of ether they can scold the stars

And scare the pale inhabitants of Mars

With toad-like hate puffed up beyond amaze

To rule your destinies and guide your ways,

Class against class, to their eternal loss,

To prime with hate—and all against the Cross;

And while they wolf the income and the cash,

To head your empire to its final crash.

As for ‘free speech’ for which you’re bluffed to fight

It’s theirs alone, to throttle as you write.

This is the breed you have entrenched at home

By volunteering (Fools!) to cross the foam.

Class them with Polyphemus, Adamastor,

And other bungling hawkers of disaster,

But I, the silent engineer of fate,

Despise that whole Canaille as out of date.

Such outsize hufflers of the beetling brow,

Beside me, are anachronisms now,

And he of whom you spoke, with Godless brag

Who shivers on the aviating crag

Above the rotary abyss, where three

Conflicting currents churn the polar sea—

Is but a quaint survival, whom you saw

Crunching a whole armada in his jaw.

Though, painted with the carnage of his quarrel

His sands were rubies and his foam were coral:

Though in his depths, sharked by the U-boat’s crew,

The Red of British valour stripes the blue

As though to stain it yours, and with your blood

To colonise the whole rebellious flood:

Yes, though three Empires sank to stave his power,

There, where your Flag flutters its moth-like hour

And seems to you the iris of the battle

Amid the showers of hot mitraille, that rattle

From here to Madagascar, rip and roar

From thence away beyond the arctic shore—

Yet for his tens my thousands I can slay

And on the nightwind spirit them away.

My power is greater as my fame is less

And leaves more whisky for the Sergeants’ Mess,

More empty chairs to splinter into Crosses,

And less of you to Bullshine for your Bosses.

Go count those wooden crosses in the clearing,

In every glade my trophies reappearing,

And own the silent magic of the trees

More potent than his thunder-hackled seas.

Add, too, the Ogre of the Rising Sun

Who hunts you with an automatic gun—

History, when she judges of us three,

Will hand the testimonials to me.

My life is hypodermic: what you spy,

Projected by delirium, is not I,

Who’ve but to cool your fever one degree

As now I do, that you may hear and see,

And hand it to me, now you see me clear,

That like a fairy sylphid I appear.

Mine is the blitz of hushed anopheles,

The faint and flimsy squadrons of the breeze,

Dive-bombing armies as they snore at ease:

The red blood lit with patriotic fire

That burns for beauty with a fierce desire—

I turn to watery slime, that British wives

May curse for the remainder of their lives.

What’s more majestic underneath the sky,

Than when a British Regiment marches by

With rolling drums, and pipes, and colours spread,

And gravel crunching to the rhythmic tread,

The conscript, with the volunteer beside,

Lifted three inches by contagious pride,

And all by comradeship, with ghostly ply,

So harnessed, that the worst for all would die;

Like a great river with its waves of blood

Rolling together, in whose sacred flood

Three noble streams their red alluvium melt,

The Norman and the German and the Celt,

Each in its virtues over all supreme,

Yet, mixed, the attar of this life they seem;

Each from the other breeding what it lacks

In fiery emulation, seems to tax

The rest of nature to produce an equal—

Yet when I breathe on them, behold the sequel!

With drunken stagger by the road they trail,

Friend helping friend, and all to no avail,

With slavering jaws, and eyeballs glazed with lead,

And rambling speech, like spectres of the dead!

The majesty, the might of manly power

Faints at my touch, and withers like a flower.

No armour can avail you when I strike;

Both innocent and guilty fare alike;

The roses on the Red-Cross Sister’s cheek,

That, when she smiles, you have no breath to speak—

I turn to funeral lilies in a week.

Nor can the craven shun me in the rear—

War-correspondents, full of pork and beer,

In their snug tent, while writing their despatch

And lying off their heads at every scratch,

Will feel my chilly twinge, and blench, and quake,

And tell the truth entirely by mistake.

Mine are the suns of slow miasmal pomp;

Peril, without adventure, in the swamp;

The green reef creaming through protracted calms,

Dhows passing through the screen of dusty palms,

The rigmarole of Jambos and Salaams:

The solitude of coast-watches who’ve died

Of their own company—those hollow-eyed

Anchorites of the bush, through wounds or illness

Thrown out of fighting ranks, to face the stillness

Of jungle days. As when some ageing horse

Between the shafts has run his faithful course,

They sell him to the bullring; there he’s torn

By the dread silence with its fearful horn

While fever claps the blinkers on his brain

And buries in his flank the spurs of pain;

He perishes with none to heed his call

Save some few scorpions in the crumbling wall.

Now, for your daft intrusion of my reign

You, too, must suffer penitence and pain,

But, for the fact that you have made me laugh,

I spare your next of kin the telegraph.

Prepare, then, to appreciate my art

As from these sacred precincts you depart.

First in the fleecy silence of the ward,

Where through the night I wave my ghostly sword,

Where the mosquito-nets like dangled spooks

Tower to the roof and curtsey on their hooks—

You will be wrung like linen of your sweat

And incubate the nightmares as you fret,

Till, at the tenth relapse, they’ll fire you out

Unfit to soldier, but A.1 to tout.

Thence weak and stumbling, with unsteady hand,

Grope your way home—into a foreign land!—

To find that all you fought for (as you thought)

Has turned into the very thing you fought.

The selfsame peoples that your oath defends

Against your foes: as if to make amends,

Now shriek beneath the talons of your friends,

Who trample treaties, cozen, and betray

And slaughter with the same delight as they,

Differing only in the fists or palms

That semaphore their imbecile salaams,

Except that, though it’s stifled in the news,

Your friends hunt Christians as your foes the Jews

And seeing that the former are more numerous—

Why, that is what appeals to me as humorous!

 Arrest the bastard for despondent talk!

 Come do your worst. The truth you cannot baulk:

I am within your blood, and all I’ve spoken

Is of your guttering morale the token.

And I can shake you worse, yes, clear your eyes

Until you envy those you most despise—

Him of the double seawake, in whose track,

Expelled by fear, by profit ogled back

Both ease and riches follow: him who sold

His country’s youth for stolen Spanish gold

And pimping safely in the rear purveyed

Cheap bait for cannon fodder: him who prayed

For war, then farmed it in the M.O.I.,

Bewept poor soldiers that were doomed to die,

And beat the drum in loud heroic din

For a fat income and a scatheless skin:

The grigs and earwigs, safe beneath the boulder,

That you, poor Sisyphuses! stooped to shoulder,

And bending, sprained your backs for evermore.

These are the men for whom you won the war

Theirs is the freedom both of speech and thought

(Freedom to gag your own) for which you fought.

But for the Channel, and for such as you,

They would have been “collaborators”, too!

Then see your children head-lugged while you wait

From faith and family by the robot State,

Mass-hypnotised, dinned drunken by the tireless

Mechanic repetition of the wireless . . .

 Give it a bone! before we say goodnight.

We all become the Evil that we fight.

And if the coward flourishes in splendour

It is enough not to have sold my gender;

This, here, which in myself I carry now

Is all the liberty life can allow,

The only liberty for which I fought—

To live anonymous, to die unbought.

 You’ve said it right; that walking nightmare flits.

Restoring us some vestige of our wits:

And now I see the way. One must be deft

When liberty’s attacked from Right and Left.

With my left fist the Nazi though I fight

I’ve banged the bloody Bolshy with my right,

With his own captured arms, his guns and tanks,

Which first we had to rustle from his ranks.

Between the Jewish Fascism of Russia

And gentile Bolshevism farmed on Prussia,

I see no difference save in their salutes,

Though we may have to utilise what suits,

Use, each, a stick, his rival to attack

And break in splinters on the other’s back.

One’s faith, together with one’s native land,

Beyond all ideologies must stand:

When these are reconciled, as now and here,

A fig for all the Nats that may appear!

In human history, and rightly so,

The Final Word is with the knockout blow,

Except when, to deride that mortal thud,

Courageous martyrs write it down in blood.

Were whacked malingerers to lay the rule

Of what we learn as history at school,

With ‘Ifs’ and ‘Buts’ to crutch their limping style

And maunder through the slow, pedestrian mile,

(And that’s the role, on which I pulled the chain,

Our British Intellectuals played in Spain)—

We would learn suicide before our dates

And press precocious pistols to our pates,

For inquests than matriculations apter

Before we’d started on the second chapter.

Else, we prefer the company, in books,

Of smiling victors to disgruntled crooks,

When martyrs can’t be found whose brighter crown

Outlasts the greenest laurels of renown.

So thus Spain had the verdict either way

Signed with her blood though she had lost the day,

Since five of her first leaders, that were six,

Rushed forth to seize a bridgehead on the Styx,

On duty killed, or that they scorned to fly

When for their blood was raised the wolfish cry:

A fluid Spain’s Red “leaders” never stop

To risk although they’ve promised “the last drop”

Each time they led their bruisers (from the back)

To show a pair of heels to the attack,

Deserting both their wounded and their dead

For driven dupes, not free men bravely led.

As careful of their pockets as their skin

Except when their own comrades do them in

(As happened to Durruti and to Nin)

They left no redder stain their faith to write

Than what they sweat or piddled in their fright

In drops as yellow as their oaths were red—

And as they’ve written so shall they be read,

With all who try to stutter their apology

(From Duffduff down to Spaunday’s last anthology)

And all who farmed the carnage for good pay

Though from the firing they kept far away.

For see the Pasionaria (with her swag)

Escaping weeks before they struck their flag,

Preceded by a dozen fat poltroons

Each with ten dewlaps frilled in red festoons

To pose for anticlerical cartoons,

And dice for loot, in Mexican saloons.

But when the golden guineas cease to clink

And some new racket heaves the seas of ink,

The truth will out, and cry from shore to shore

When Bloomsbury and Fleet Street are no more.

How stale would seem the Epic race of man

Seen through the blinkers of the Also-Ran!

So History looks the winner in the mouth

Though but a dark outsider from the South,

A Talking Bronco, sharked from ear to ear

With laughter, like a running bandolier,

With teeth, like bullets fastened in their clips,

To chew the thunder and to spit the pips,

Ejecting from the breech, in perfect time,

The shells of metre and the shucks of rhyme,

Yet drive the thoughts with perforating aim

Like tracer-bullets on their threads of flame.

Open my lid, inspect my Steinway grin,

And view the shining ivories within.

With such a gadget Samson quelled his foes

And rained the thundering mitraille of blows,

When he invented, chopping men like straw,

The first machine-gun from a Donkey’s Jaw.

And shall I scorn such hardware, though my own,

When facing fiercer odds, and all alone?

As many philistines, plus all the Jews

Who ran the jet-Black Market of the News

When in the greatest racket of the ages

Commercial greed conscripted bards and sages

And every scribbler hired his raddled muse,

For Profit in the Barcelona stews;

While only one with something to express

Dared the Almighty Booktrade and the Press

One whom they could not face for all their sneers

Except, by shamming deaf, to stop their ears,

For from one flash of controversial wit

They panicked (they were so unused to it!)

And held (like Aesop’s mice) a loud committee

To ban his name from mention in their city,

Since from his pen (as from his bayonet too

Their heroes did) they scampered out of view—

And hence their vain and impotent taboo.

However that may be, it is a Law—

Let nobody deride the Donkey’s jaw,

For when men prove too dumb the Gods will pass

The lowdown through the jawbone of an ass,

Or talking horse (whichever comes along)

Providing that the bone is hard and strong,

With blows, or words, that rankle twice as sore,

To cuff them into decency once more!

By tuning up that mandible of bone

Darius’ stallion whinnied him a throne:

Achilles’ vocal horse, and Balaam’s Mule

Could put the best astrologers to school:

And from a horse’s kick superb and strong,

The fountain sprang of prophecy and song.

For what is Pegasus, that mystic force,

But part an aeroplane and part a horse,

And part a grand-piano for recitals

With gut and harpstrings humming in his vitals,

Where Beethoven and Bach with angel choirs

Funambulise upon the strings and wires?

Such is the horse I ride across the sky,

Expert in every sphere, to sing or fly,

Or drive a tail-shot in MacSpaunday’s eye.

And if I’m talking bullshine as you reckon,

Then go and ask the Billygoat at Brecon

Who broke the record of his I.T.C.

With rifle, tommygun, and L.M.G.?

And on the targets wrote his number, name,

And unit with an autograph of flame?

And why the Talking Bronco in the front

With Recces and Commandos takes the brunt

Though by his age, race, domicile, description,

Exempted from all service or conscription?—

While joint MacSpaunday shuns the very strife

He barked for loudest, when mere words were rife,

When to proclaim his proletarian loyalties

Paid well, was safe, raked in the heavy royalties,

And made the Mealy Mouth and Bulging Purse

The hallmark of Contemporary verse.

Then joint MacSpaunday, with quadruple bun

Commercially collectivised in one,

A Cerberus-Hyena, could not cease

His fierce Belligerence (in times of peace!)

But plagiarised from Blimp, ten years before,

The most ferocious arguments of war.

Yet now the Worker gets it in the Neck

Forked by the scruff upon the Trooper’s deck—

Collective Rat’s the first to leave the wreck,

To gorge, to fatten, and keep whole his hide,

While others bore the Cross for him and died.

His hydra heads, dispersing in a trice,

Unweave in fear their knot of Gordian Splice

With Woodley overseas his oaths to spurn,

Or, with a double seawake, to return,

When Avarice reconquers fear once more

To waft the Prophet to his native shore,

Only returning when the blitz is over

To bum fat sinecures, and bask in clover:

Or, when Conscription-time is due to jump,

Get posted to some rural Fireman’s Pump,

To tend wet cabbages from catching fire

And guard the vicar cycling round the shire,

And advertise the fact on blurb and board

For public recognition and reward:

Or in the Admiralty, licking stamps,

To wear a uniform with golden clamps,

Out of his job some aged clerk to Jew

Who thrice as well as he the work could do—

Which Yesmann praises in his “Emu Series”

(That Woolworthiser of ideas and theories)

As “work of national importance”—(Queries!)

Or at the most, if taken in the trawl,

Serve as a grudging Conscript if at all!

Deserters when devotion was most due,

But for the Channel and the bronco few,

They would have been “Collaborators” too!

Then call me all the Horses that you like!—

You will not find such virtues in a Tyke

That follows beaten armies in the rear

Alternately beset with greed and fear

And brings bad luck to every cause he scabies

Far worse than if he’d bitten it with rabies.

No sooner his anthology came out

Than at the sign Spain had no further doubt:

Red hunted Red in carnage through the land—

And yet he blames us that we lent a hand!

His leash of heads will bark, as he has shown,

For every cause or country save his own.

Fortunate Country! to avert an omen

Worse than the leftwing vulture to the Roman.

For where was he, when England stood alone?

This Bogus Proletarian, the Drone

Who stood beside the Worker (while it paid)

Seeks every ruse his Gospel to evade

Appeals to privilege of class and wealth,

To save his pockets and preserve his health,

In ministries, where cowardice makes free,

He settles, like the vulture on the tree,

Snuffling his snout in other people’s gore

As first in Spain he learned the trick before

With his ten-guinea throat-lump, gilded tear,

And Fox and Metro bringing up the rear,

Commercialising slaughter, with the Deans,

Press-barons, Earls, Bishops, and Picture-Queens,

Who rushed headlong on Sleeping-car Safaris

And made their Klondyke of the Manzanares.

Where Briddish Intellectuals made their pile

And Book-Clubs flourished in prodigious style,

Survey the wilderness they made of Spain

As rich in Sobstuff as devoid of grain,

As fat with tragedy as lean of meat

And full of Copy as forlorn of wheat—

Since there’s no villainy at which they’ll rest

To cultivate the sobs that sell the best.

A more ferocious, bloodthirsty poltroon

Has never howled for blood beneath the moon

Than joint MacSpaunday, when his leash of heads

To murder, rape, and arson roared the Reds.

For then he “stamped with emphasis” of tone

For “Energy and Energy alone”.

He put the test to cruel, killing steel

And from his verdict there was no appeal!

But when in answer to his Fee-Fo-Fum

As to an urgent S.O.S. I come

With “Death to Killers”—yes, he roared for that!—

And “Energy” enough to knock him flat—

Before we’ve killed a fourth of what they’ve killed

Or half his rosy daydreams are fulfilled,

A greedy masochist for kicks and blows

He roars for “Justice”, as he feels it close,

And yells the more for it, the more he feels

It sinks into his flanks with rising weals.

All Mealy-Mouthed, he changes now to ruth

And natters of “Disinterested Truth”—

So poor Negrin when he’d destroyed the Church

And even the Devil left him in the lurch,

Turned to the Vatican his dying hope

And wired his sad condolence—for the Pope!

Yet what paid propaganda has to do

With abstract “Truth” I’d rather not pursue—

Mine never was the nostrum-peddling manner

To wheedle you salvation—less a tanner.

And surely such Disinterest is funny

That’s always on the side of Ready Money,

Nor further from the sales will swerve its spoor

Than ants from trickled honey on the floor,

With no more split between the heart and pocket

Than if the latter were a neckworn locket,

Always with the main chance to coincide

And never into danger glance aside.

Surely (it does not seem too much to plead)

Disinterestedness may sometimes lead

To other goals than those of fear and greed.

Nor does it always move with the same slouch

As the Full Belly and the Bulging Pouch,

Nor always keep so sleek and whole a skin

As wraps the Brave MacSpaunday snug within.

Sometimes at least its pathways may divide

And even with the Book-Trade may collide.

Sometimes its way from Fleet Street widely deviates

A craggy path, which no smug pub alleviates,

And if it’s true it has its own set course

You have to hand it to the talking Horse

He sometimes shows that, when it pays the least,

He’ll take the mountain path with winter fleeced,

Or volunteering, share the sand and heat

Without a leftwing carpet to his feet.

So if by your Disinterest you swear

Come, ask yourself MacSpaunday when and where

It ever swerved you by one tiny hair

From the main chance, or took a different route

From that which pure self-interest would suit.

Say to confront you with an angry mob

To get you boycotted, or lose your job,

Or land you here beside the talking Pony

Who can do other things than talk bolony.

Quote to me any phrase you ever uttered

Excepting on the side your bread was buttered,

And cite one single case when you were found

Save where the cash and comfort most abound,

As a fifth-column and a trojan horse

In Leftwing ranks to neutralise the force

Of Socialism; mixing milk and water

With the red vodka of diluvial slaughter.

Was it for such “disinterested truth”

That you to butchers sold your country’s youth,

Crazing them, like the Gadarene, to die

And trade their tender bacon for a lie,

While in the rear you fattened and grew cosy

By painting sham Utopias pink and rosy,

For which you’d never risk a scratch yourself,

But only brewed the dope for easy pelf.

In vain might talking broncos counsel “Slow!”

And all the direful consequences show

Exactly as it happened four years after—

It only raised some patronising laughter.

But oh, the consternation on your faces,

The day the Talking Bronco kicked the traces!

And though you’d howled for blood, and fire and arson,

Behold you now, the caterwauling parson,

A punctured Tartuffe, oozing mercy, ruth,

And justice, and “disinterested truth!”

So off you went to call the wowsers’ meeting

To ban the talking bronco from competing

The “salted” horse that never need the vet see

Owes his inoculation to the tsetse:

Via the cobra’s bite we get the serum,

And, further still, to illustrate my theorem,

Mythologers anticipated science

Applying homeopathy to giants;

The hydra is inherent to the hero:

In Fafnir’s blood they douche the Herculero:

Achilles from the Styx his temper took,

With frothy gargle hissing in the brook,

Like a hot sword, whose handle was his heel,

Acquiring thus the properties of steel;

So I, in Lethe ducked a thousand times

By wishful critics, make a float of rhymes,

Deriving buoyancy from leaden spite

And like a pearly nautilus, or light

‘Portuguese-man-of-war’s’ more airy kite,

Go sailing with a six-yard thread of sting—

And woe to him that mixes with the thing!

Free verse and prose are slippers for the dons

Unfit to clang this marching age of bronze:

The true vernacular a thorax throws

And leads the rhyme and metre by the nose;

It takes the gradients at a marching tread

Alert for all the ambushes ahead,

And when it finds some wild romantic dream

Has broken loose, with tousled hair astream,

It’s easy to collect it on one’s pen

As passing troops collect a wayside hen:

And many a dream poor Spaunday lives to cluck

Has ended thus, upon my bayonet stuck,

All neatly barbecued, with careless art,

To fritter on the campfire of my heart!

So you can back the couplet every time,

With its ten fingers twirling thumbs of rhyme,

To seize and clamp the trailing thoughts they fray

And scatter like tobacco by the way,

And in iambics fold them, nearly set,

As nimble fingers scroll a cigarette,

For memory to case them in his breast

And smoke at leisure, as it suits him best.

For what poor Spaunday never understands—

The couplet is a verbal pair of hands

With a two-handed punch, more clean and deft

Than his one-armed and butterfisted Left.

The stumps and bunions of our modern prose

And of free verse, will never pluck the rose,

Or lace the boot, or prime the hand-grenade

That sinks their pink Utopias in the shade,

Though flung from five years distance, in the dark,

To burst prophetic on the chosen mark.

I litter no parades with cornucopias

Of stale ice-cream, or derelict Utopias,

To lie like last week’s picnic, spoil the view—

And leave one so much cleaning up to do!

My verse was nourished by Toledo’s sun

In whose clear light Ray, Sword, and Pen are one,

One in her soldier-poets of the past,

And here again united in her last:

The Pen a sword, prophetic in advance,

Deriding probability or chance,

That with unerring skill and biting scorn

Can sack a dud republic ere it’s born!

The sword a pen to chronicle its deed

And write in scarlet for the world to read:

And both the lightning’s thunder-scribbled ray

To singe the daft illusions of the day.

So dazzlingly from hand to hand they switch,

No Leftwing Bard could tell you which is which:

Ere he can name the lightning, forked or sheet,

It whistles up his foothold from his feet,

And sprawls him headlong with its blinding beams

Amongst the wreck of money-making dreams.

Like three prongs of one trident, where one hits

The other two will finish off the bits,

Since all together in one flame unite

To foin, to flash, to thunder, or to write!

The libel law your fortified enclosure

To save you from debunking and exposure,

A hydra-headed monster you oppose

To my clean arms, an omnibus of foes,

Stuffed full to bursting like a cat with kittens

With a strange rout of Briddishers and Yitons,

And Bogus Freestaters, and guys gone Yank

Like some farced Trojan horse, or Bolshy tank

With its red farrow, sniping from its womb

At Christian Outposts: but I spell your doom

For truth will out when Fleet Street is no more

And martyrs’ blood will cry from shore to shore.

As now to-day I’m fighting for the Jew

(Since Poles or Finns subsided out of view

Though once the pretext for this war, it’s true)

So I have fought for Christians, and my steel

Is always pointed at the tyrant’s heel,

Whether from Right or Left he dares to clout

His Maker’s image with a butcher’s knout.

For Blacks I’ve done as much, and risked my life,

As since for Jews or Christians in the strife;

When others jumped the liner for Japan

I stayed and faced the music I began.

Had pity stirred you half as much as greed

We might have had a different tale to heed

When half a million Christians had to bleed,

But these were poor and bribed no lawyer’s tongue,

Slaughtered by hand, tortured, and heaped, and flung,

To rot like mongrels on a heap of dung,

While you with Herod, and the cash, forsooth

Must blink away the evidence of truth.

But truth will ride and race you to your end,

Propitious enemy and baleful friend!

And as, by night, propelled with frantic strides

A Lion through his forest kingdom rides

Upon the breaking spine of a giraffe

(While all the echoes hold their sides and laugh)

With claws for spurs, and teeth for bridle-chains,

And torn lianas for the flying reins,

And gallops him, with deep, resounding thud

To pitch him headlong in a pool of blood—

So will my verse propel you to your doom,

And give you to the vultures for a tomb!

(To Mary Campbell)

(To the Memory of R.S.M. Charles Mulvey of Princess Pat’s Canadian Light Infantry)

From Notting Hill to Prince’s Gate

I’d started breaking-in my stick

And of my new, three-legged gait

Acquired the quaint arithmetic.

No more to canter, trot or trippel,

Where dandies prance along the Row,

I coaxed the strange unwieldy cripple

I had become yet feared to know:

In spite of one so ill-adjusted,

So keenly to the task he warmed,

So eagerly to me he trusted,

So newly had he been deformed,

That though he seemed a drunken lout,

Less of a comrade than a weight,

I had no further choice or doubt

But to accept him as my fate.

(So old Sinbad to ruth was wrought

When, thus accosted for a lift,

A chronic pickaback he caught

From the old scrounger by the Drift.)

Then as I pondered this new trouble

Which he’d confided to my care,

Six others passed us, bending double,

Who seemed our fellowship to share—

For in their style was nothing alien,

Those Hyde-Park Lancers, dressed to stun,

In great cocked hats, with slouch Australian,

Though plume or chinstrap they had none.^[1]

Like grim knights-errant on their journey,

Couching their broomsticks tipped with pins,

I watched them joust their dismal tourney

Tentpegging garbage into tins.

Identically armed and hatted,

We prodded grimly as we bent:

No last-man-in has ever batted

With a more desperate intent.

In the same action were our talents

Employed, though in a different stead,

Since I was prodding for my balance

And they were prodding for their bread.

Gone was the thunder of great herds,

Lost was the lilt of marching men,

And void the bandolier of words

That feeds the rifle of my pen.

I listened with my six companions

To the low hum of our environ,

And London’s streets, like roaring canyons,

With streams of whisky, blood and iron.

Amongst the leafless trees that froze

The wind struck up with flute and fife

The regimental march of those

Who’ve fallen out of step with life.

We must be silent when men mutter,

We must keep calm when tempers rise,

And when we’re shoved into the gutter

It’s we who must apologise.

To have one’s Cross laid on inside

Abates no ardour in the strife

Though something in us might have died

Yet something more had come to life.

(For Dame Commander Edith Sitwell)

The harper who discloses,

Hair-triggered on the sight with strands of fire,

The tiger in the roses

His harp of burning wire,—

And with the nerves of danger strings his lyre:

The archer, by whose science,

The index and the eye as one became,

In rhythmical alliance,

To slay with flawless aim

Or limn the flying forms in hues of flame;

By whom the eagle’s feather,

The arrow-tufting plume that steered the dart

Stained, with the barb together,

Red, in the bison’s heart,

First brushed the cavern wall with human art;

With him to be their shepherd

The zebras strum the wind with silver bars,

It was his aim that peppered

The velvet of the leopard,

Like midnight, with the buckshot of the stars.

His hunting brought me luck:

A woman by his assegai was struck

And, volted to the marrow

By that supernal arrow,

Fell kicking in the lilies like a buck.

I strain my failing powers

Yet only find the cinders where he camped,

Though by his spoor of flowers

I trail him through the hours—

The roses that his flying steeds have champed.

The fletcher, and the farrier

Who shod the flight of all fleet-footed things,

He shot the hawk and harrier

And swordfish from his slings—

Projectiles of a joy that has no barrier.

A legion of disguises

He captains. He devises, every day,

Miraculous surprises,

And as a bird arises

Where as a fish he vanished into spray.

So feathered, finned, and fanned

All speary strengths were formed to his design—

The sinews of my hand,

The windrows in the sand,

The bonework of the tunny’s vaulting spine;

Flames, ripples, ferns and clouds

That speak the selfsame language of surprise,

Where seraphs weave their shrouds,

If only to our eyes,

In fiercer resurrections to arise!

The handwriting’s the same,

The style is personal. All solar traffic

Of feathers, fronds, or flame

Indicates his one name

And signature. The ciphers are seraphic.

I seek him, wait his hour,

And contemplate the forms of speed and power,

Till I could almost capture

The trance of frozen rapture

That moors the kestrel by the sailing tower.

(For David and Poppa Wright)

Where the tired Argonaut last beached his skiff

To vanish with the river nymphs: as if

Our breed had not departed long ago,

I hear a voice, and one that I should know—

Chiron’s, I’ll swear! wheeling the whole great drove

To muster by the fennel-scented cove:

In answer to whose ancient rallying-cry

I’ve left my constellation in the sky.

Loud flutes the oriole in the berried ash;

White on white sands the dark-blue wavelets flash;

The great wood-pigeons hurl to left and right

The clattering whinny of their headlong flight

Through milk-white poplar-trees that colonnade

Beside the stream, an aqueduct of shade,

Then, as they near the sea-cliff, slack their stride

Of silver places, falter, and divide,

And let the stream fall sheer, like powdered snow,

Or a white horsetail, through its six-rayed bow,

Till with the kindred whiteness it can mingle

Of sister-foam, and salt, and creaming shingle.

Little has changed, except these girls—to trees,

Whom once we knew by name, the Heliades,

The myriad-flaking snowstorm of whose boughs

Is never still, though the cicadas drowse

And the winds sleep. But now the longed-for sound,

As of rock-rolling torrents underground,

Approaches, makes the hollow earth its drum

And waves the oleanders as they come—

Squadrons on squadrons, cantering abreast,

With cattle-spears and tridents borne at rest,

Tilting huge wineskins from their shoulders slung,

Discoursing in the old equestrian tongue,

Waving sombreros, strumming light guitars,

Or detonating stockwhips to the stars—

The sacred quadrupeds, for whose sake time

First flowered with knowledge, harmony, and rhyme.

Half gods, half brutes; they stem from stud celestial

And coarsest horseflesh too. Divine yet bestial—

Divine as was that madness when their sire

Embraced the cumulus of hail and fire

And dared to fall enamoured of the storm:

And bestial as the huge and prostrate form

It left of him, when, by the lightning shot

And heedless of the race he had begot,

It stretched him on the wheel of such huge girth

Its spokes are ages and its orb the earth.

Wisest of all earth’s breeds, they suffer most

Yet laugh and sing the loudest of the host,

Though fiercelier bisected by the line

That separates the monstrous and divine—

Than man or woman, who are forced to tame

Two warring natures in a single frame:

Than fauns or sirens far more strangely tainted:

Even than the minotaur less self-acquainted:

Only the Sphinx is to itself as strange

Whose mind through equal mysteries can range

And knows, as they do, that a God must die

Of love, lest on our heads should fall the sky.

They know of things unnamed in human breath

And why the fairest women smell of death,

Death, and the sea, and Charon’s spectral bark,

And pollen from the hushed rose of the dark.

And that in their saliva is the hiss

Of breath indrawn above some vast abyss,

I, Nessus, learned from Dejanira’s lips

Whose taste the fatal shaft could not eclipse.

Monstrosity is the awed exclamation

Of universes at their own creation;

Wherever a new world is seen to rise,

The hybrid is its utterance of surprise,

And with the forms of beast or fish or bird

Divine or human lineaments are blurred.

Hosanna, blasphemy, or screech or fright,

In seraph, gorgon, or hermaphrodite,

Answer their maker’s overcharge of power;

In beauty, shame, or terror, flame or cower;

Or turn upon their maker in revolt,

Out of his fist to wrest the thunderbolt,

In Titans: but in centaurs, deeply wise,

Eternal wonder finds its shape and size.

Enormous stallions captain their array

White, colorado, piebald, roan, or grey,

Bearded like rivergods, maned like the lion,

The very firstborn children of Ixion;

With (in their hoofbeats thundering aloud)

The lightnings of their old maternal cloud,

Though in their cries sounds, too, the ring of steel

Which tells of the inexorable wheel,

Around them frisk, and caper, and cavort

The youngsters, fettled out for crazy sport,

Beardless, and bronzed, with pillion-tempting shapes,

Apt for a thousand robberies and rapes

Of nymphs, or lusty dames, or maiden lilies,

Or rustling their own mares and sister-fillies

From their own fathers’ care: or waging fights

With satyrs rolling boulders down the heights.

But most of all their mares excite your wonder

In whom the lady cleaves the beast asunder

Forked from the hips into a surge of thunder

Like Venus when half-risen from the breaker,

Waist-deep in foam, she felt the tempest take her;

Amidst the cyclone of her own red hair

Burned motionless in the revolving air;

And in its angry vortex found the calm

Of the still taper and the windless palm.

Or as the sacred aloe skyward rears

That flowers but once in every hundred years

Stirs the dead lava through its crust of snow

Reviving fires that long had ceased to glow,

Resolving these in living sap to run

And rise erupting to the noonday sun,

Till, white without, but red within as blood,

To rift the pod with its explosive bud,

Smoking its pollen forth in fumes of gold

As though the fleece of Colchos were unrolled,

The bloom whose yawn is redder than a panther’s,

With snarl of fire and slash of golden anthers,

Gashes its great glory from the blue—

So from the brute the goddess burgeons through.

Than these two natures, never day and night

At dawn did more magnificently fight;

Nor the pole sheer away from its equator

To such an arctic blaze; nor from its crater

The snow-coned flame more frostily ignite

Its red-gold tresses trawling through the height.

Hippea there, the boldest of the troop,

Her hand a pistol-shot on her own croup,

Leaping the chasmed stream, romps into sight,

Titupping down the grass with daisies white.

So smoothly to a trot she changed her trippel

That on her breast it scarcely bounced the nipple.

While like a mitrailleuse of silver shots

Her one white stocking flickers as she trots,

She swerved into the forefront of the trek,

Unslung the light guitar from round her neck,

And to its music thrummed herself along:

And there were red carnations in her song

And one, snow-white, behind her ear. Thick shoaled,

Like blood-red mullet in a seine of gold,

The deeper shadows in her chestnut hair.

Freckled like rose-shot apricots, her bare

Shoulders and breasts and neck, beneath whose tan

Blurred veins of jacaranda forked and ran.

She snowed with graces, and her eyes with blue

Electric stars that pitied as they slew.

Like flint to steel her teeth the sunbeams broke

And flashed and sparkled as she smiled or spoke.

Like full red peppers were her laughing lips,

And downward from the snowline of her hips,

Like lava’d slopes, the muscles of the steed

Forth like a mountain-torrent hurled her speed

To swirl, to pause, in reveries to doze,

Or cataract in thunder as she chose.

The sailing horseflesh like a frigate strong

Followed its matchless figurehead along

And daisies sprang beneath her all the way

To spoor her passage with a wake of spray;

Two thousand years of youth as fair as Flora

Since for this noon she dawned, her own aurora;

When from the breaking cloud and broken Titan

Our breed began to thunder and to lighten,

Stampeding forth on hoofs like rolling boulders,

Or the red landslide when Vesuvius smoulders—

Out of the womb of ruin leapt her form

And was the rainbow of that raging storm.

Such beauty can be only born of strife

And men can only wrest it out of life

By sacrifice, in the forefront of danger,

Where strip the battle-nymphs to greet the stranger

And call their lovers from the ranks of doom;

Or where the sylph of pity fans the gloom

And stripes the carnage with her gorgeous plume.

Fillies as lovely, stallions thrice as strong

Returned that day to join their tribal throng;

They drank, they danced, they chanted ancient rhymes,

And boasted of the old equestrian times.

Here where, of old, the prince of music-makers

Had galloped, rounding up the deep-sea breakers

With music, on a grampus for his steed,

Along the rolling, green, star-clovered mead,

The Centaurs met once more beside the ocean;

And having praised all life and light and motion,

Earth, Sea, and Sky, and their Creator most,

Each one returned to his eternal post

And mounted guard in the imagination,

Taking once more his fixed, heraldic station

In poem, sculpture, frieze, or constellation.

The conches sounded for the tide to flow

And, reddened by the evening afterglow,

With the new moon horned in their silver brows,

The waves, like Herefords, came forth to browse

The deep green darkness by the windless shore

Along whose cliffs those hoofs will sound no more.

(To Frédéric Mistral, Neveu)

Of all the immortality-concoctors

Who cook their would-be by their midnight lamps—

They blame me that I shun my fellow-doctors

To haunt the quays, the markets, and the camps.

Yeats on his intellect could pull the blinds

Rapping up spooks. He fell for freaks and phoneys.

Weird blue-stockings with damp, flatfooted minds,

Theosophists and fakirs, were his cronies.

I, too, can loose my Pegasus to graze,

Carouse with drunken fiddlers at the Fair,

And with the yokelry on market days

Jingle in spurs and sheepskins round the square.

They say it is a waste of time. I differ.

To learn should be as easy as to look.

You could not pass examinations stiffer,

Nor sweat a deeper learning from the book—

Than to be passed for native by the million

When chiming in at horsefairs with my bid.

This taught me the Gallego and Castilian

By which I know my “Lusiads” and the “Cid”.

Comradeship, though it’s dated and antique,

Is all the Anthropology I know.

The Zulu and Swahili that I speak

I learned no more than water learned to flow.

Collective writers at my name grow raucous,

And pedants raise a loud indignant cry

Like the New Critics and the Kenyon caucus—

Or poultry, when a falcon cruises by!

I’ve had my share of solitudes and caverns.

What mountain-tops could teach I learned of old,

But got the true Provençal in the taverns

By which I sailed into the “Isles of Gold”.^[1]

To sit with Mistral under the green laurels

From which his children gathered me my crown,^[2]

While the deep wine that is the end of quarrels

Glows through me like the sunset going down.

(For my ex-Partner, “Triguito”, of Ciudad Rodrigo)

(To John and Audrey Sutherland)

Tragelaph and hippotragus

(While I graded as the Magus

Of their hieroglyphic spoors)

Were the printers of my journal

Dinted in the dews diurnal

On the silver-sanded shores,

Where, with summer floods inflated,

Blue Zambesi rolls elated

With the glory of her creatures,

Ornithologizing mud

Into flames as red as blood,

And papyrus into meteors.

There the noonday sky is star-lit

With a galaxy in scarlet

Should a shot ring down the lake,

While the Fauna turns to Flora

In the hurricane aurora

That the phoenicopters make.

Mysteries of Roan and Sable,

By my magic, I was able

To decipher out of hand,

When the sunrise found me single

With my manuscript of shingle

And my lexicon of sand.

Now my skyline is a wall,

And these letters that I scrawl

Are the only tracks I study,

Dotted down in black and white,

For the phoenicopter’s flight

I can find no blaze more ruddy

Than my deep, black flagon streams

Bleeding, over blank, white reams,

From its heart, that seems to glow

(Gnashed by the swordplay of the candle

That spurns the gloom with wingèd sandal)

Like sunrise on a field of snow. . . .

Or sunset on a sheet of sand

Where, stalking Pegasus, my hand

Nooses with rhyme the running line,

While the hushed words, with spoor of ink

Like wingèd zebras, come to drink

The still reflection of the wine.

Still I go trailing phantom herds—

Ideas, that take the form of words

And on the blank sheet leave their spoor:

Or swerve into a wild stampede,

Momentous in their strength and speed,

Till with the hieroglyphs they score.

The white page blackens; words of fire

Char with their hoofs each sheeted quire

While hot thoughts scorch upon their track,

As when, by whitest rays shot through,

The sky, so bright that it is blue,

Becomes so blue that it is black.

In the black hearts of wine and ink

The spectrum hides; for when to drink

I tilt the flagon—swiftly-wheeling,

The lit cup swirls with ruby fire

That wings its phoenicopter-gyre

Reflected round the walls and ceiling.

In that twinned blackness glint the gleams

Of certainties behind our dreams,

Which fire my hopes, since I have seen

Papyrus into words ignite

More proudly, when its leaves were white

Than into birds, when it was green!

Author’s Note: This is not a fable. I heard and saw this rare bird (whose existence is acknowledged by naturalists under the name of Melierax Musicus) while hunting last year in Portuguese East Africa.

(For Gene Tunney)

Now in his ninth reincarnation

the rubbernecked, Hell-touring Thracian,

  whom swivelling his headlamps cost

    his gender and the dame he lorded,

by one jerk of his ball-and-socket

thrown out of heart and mind and pocket—

  came back to sing for all he’d lost,

    and this is what the disk recorded.

Where State-Police dared scarcely follow,

with other herdsmen of Apollo,

  by my own solar sire employed

    I ran a bareboned enterprise,

out in the great wide open spaces,

those yawns of boredom on the faces

  of continents, so vast and void

    they seem to swallow up the skies.

Where Sirius in cypher flashes,

(a mitrailleur of dots and dashes),

  his morse of green and crimson fires

    whose messages must not be told—

decoding the forbidden words

I sang them to my starving herds,

  the stock of Seven Deadly Sires

    whom only harmony can hold.

The charm restrained each restive beast

whose red horns, sickled in the East,

  Though in the future participle,

    are lunar to the pending flood

wherein they gaze, portending famine,

a Pharaoh’s nightmare to examine

  reflected in the last red ripple

    of daylight, as they drink its blood.

Astrologers of standard stars

(assassins of the blind guitars

  whose golden strings they snarled and tangled)

    Spoke only of expected slaughters,

but when of mine I stroked the strings

the four blue halcyons spread their wings,

  upon the sky my score was spangled

    And taught me by the winds and waters.

Dire snakes their deadly inclination

and rills, renouncing gravitation,

  exchanged their wonted ways and wills

    to the persuasion of my lyre:

for rills, like serpents fair and fond

enchanted by the charmer’s wand,

  and deadly snakes, like harmless rills,

    rippled their loops of liquid fire.

Trees marched behind me as I played

and that’s how avenues were made—

  by dryads falling into line,

    whole forests felled themselves in ranks,

told off from right to left by number,

then launched themselves as floating lumber

  upon my song (fir, spruce, and pine,)

    then sawed and stacked themselves in planks.

The more I sang, they pulped themselves

the more, to load the groaning shelves

  of bookshops, taking up positions,

    to hit the headlines in the News,

with trunks and boughs in pulp dissolving,

and rolls of linotype revolving,

  to foliate in fresh editions

    and fell themselves in foul reviews.

From underground my music drew

used oilshafts which were sawn into

  a million socket-holes, to sprout

    telegraphy—a pole in each.

Just with a rectilinear sound

I straightened roads that swerved and wound,

  to curve a bay I walked about,

    instead of straight along, the beach.

To tame the brutes of earth and seas

my later shipmates—Hercules,

  Jason, and Pollux—all confessed

    their methods fell far short of mine.

My livelihood, bull, horse, and whale

insured for years (this is no tale!)

  when I was hunted like a pest

    for swerving from the Party Line.

The Spaniards called me sticking-plaster.

I stuck so hard his tricks to master

  that Pegasus bucked off his brand

    and kicked his hind-shoes from the shell.

Upon his rump it left these scars

and my initials in the stars.

  As for his shoes, though forged by hand,

    they’re kicking round the stars as well.

’Twas there I found the Truth (Eureka!)

and when the Reds had fired Guernica

  stripped stark the huge earthquaking Lie

    by entering with the first platoon

to save two-thirds of the doomed village,

which Herod, red with rape and pillage,

  swore had been blasted from the sky

    into a crater of the moon.

I sang that Fraud conditions all things

that Nations feel in great or small things,

  sage artist, gossip, tout, and barber

    fall for the selfsame doctored dope,

noosed in the same hypnotic lasso

that sprawled Neruda and Picasso.

  (Guernica, Badajoz, Pearl Harbour

    are slipknots in the same old rope!)

Incensed at its perspicuous presage,

the State Police condemned my message

  and, seeing I was past enslaving,

    condemned me with the dead to dwell,

for scorning vice, deriding devils,

with angels holding lawless revels—

  and gave me thus a chance for saving

    Eurydice from worse than Hell.

I dodged the first outlying pickets

and in the Subway took two tickets

  from Elephant and Castle station,

    whence I had started off before,

for loss had left me less a lubber,

and time had vulcanised the rubber

  and shelled with something more crustacean

    The vertebrae that veered of yore.

Gin-soaked, a shot-gun in her clutches,

the Fury was a future duchess

  whom Hell had posted for a sentry,

    and who, though in her periwig

the vipers, hissing vague alarm,

like neckties on a hawker’s arm

  were faintly fluttered by my entry,

    continued snoring like a pig.

Although I lulled her snakes to sleep,

her elephants at bay to keep

  I did not need, for truth to tell

    she was not of the kind who’ve known

either Pink Elephants or Green,

but rather by such Beasts are seen

  when they are feeling far from well

    and have queer nightmares of their own.

With Charon’s outboard grimly chugging,

the armless torso closely hugging

  of my guitar, I made the landing

    at Lambeth on the Lesbian shore:

and from that Hell of English whoredom,

dead vice, and dull provincial boredom,

  my former failures notwithstanding,

    the fond Eurydice I bore.

When on the bank we tried to land

and found that both of us were banned,

  the land to me became a lock

    to which the ocean was the key,

and, signing on before the mast,

why, surely I was not the last,

  when doubt had foundered on a rock,

    to found my faith upon the sea.

And so to beat their curst embargo

dovetailing Pequod, Ark, and Argo,

  new world, gold fleece, and mystic whale,

    I made my faith one ship, quest, cargo,

course, compass, quadrant, guiding star,

and whatsoever doom avail

  the hazard of my questing sail—

    reef, solitude, or floating spar.

With hempen harpstrings tautly shrouded,

the oread sisters, thunderclouded

  with cumulus of straining cloth,

    sang to me with their souls of pine,

while harpers with the waves for strings

feathered them with their silver wings

  whose quills were oars, whose down was froth,

    to swan my Argoes through the brine.^[1]

The pines strode forward as I played,

whether in stately colonnade

  on slopes of Alp or Guadarrama

    or the sierras of the main

on decks as steep. Stampeding herds

taught me the impetus of words:

  and all I ever learned of drama

    was in the Catacombs of Spain.

There when I slew the Tcheka’s warder

and sentry, in that brief disorder,

  did I a second time from Hell come

    escaping, too, the common char-pit,

but lost the crown of the elected

by my unworthiness rejected,

  when guns, to bid the martyrs welcome,

    spread for those kings a crimson carpet.

In me, with dextral whorl, the Mistral

and the Sirocco, with sinistral

  volution, wrestling meet, to pull

    from strife the absolute accord,

depending on antagonism

to dynamise my dancing rhythm,

  as on the matador the bull

    whose consummation is the sword.

I know all victories are vain

to that which I beheld in Spain

  where with the eagle mates the dove

    the might of armies to defy

Since with Euridyce’s recapture,

I crossed the Rubicon of rapture,

  I’ll ask no more of life, nor love.

    It is my death for which I die—

A death of blood and tears as cruel

as could hydrate the blazing jewel

  of faith from ashes reascendant

    with which the victors rose resplendent,

when love with love fought out the duel

both as the fire and as the fuel,

  son, father, ancestor, descendant,

    and phoenix of its own renewal! . . .

Just here his voice was overheard

and he was taken at his word

  which cut short the recording session:

    and when the State Police had got him,

after the regulation season

of torture, when he lost his reason,

  no autocritical confession

    could be extracted. So they shot him.

A Poem from the “Battlefield of Spain”

(Dedicated to Mary Campbell)

“Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous dogma of papal infallibility is by far the most modest profession of its kind in existence. Compared to our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible Parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before God.”

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

“The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests. . . . What it spread was not an enlightenment but a malignant disease. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, have led directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once more whole-heartedly than any religious fanatic believed his superstitions; for in their name I helped to destroy the faith of the millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds.”

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

This poem was written before Mr. Chamberlain interrupted the disastrous course of English foreign politics herein satirized:^[1] and the manuscript has been out of my reach most of the time since. I hope this will excuse what might otherwise seem congenital pessimism and ingratitude for not alluding to the event. But before that it was difficult enough for born Englishmen to feel very patriotic, let alone for South Africans like myself! I therefore retain the original diatribe for its bearing on the decisive part of the Spanish War and also as a talisman against any relapse into suicidal hysterics on the part of British foreign policy, since Democracy is so subject to war-psychosis. How far at sea the Russian experts and their British satellites were about Spain there is no need for me to rub in. The bulk of my Spanish “War Poems” were printed in England two or three years before the war, and the last one to appear, early in 1935 (in Time and Tide of all places) clearly symbolized the Spanish war in a nutshell, together with the Red Debacle—“The Fight.” These poems (with the exception of four on Toledo inserted in the proofs) were sent in before the war and appeared as a book in the first weeks of the war, predicting the Red Debacle at a time when the British “Intelligentsia” was celebrating a Soviet triumph, so they were not very popular. They were treated as the work of a romantic, and excused on “literary grounds” for being on the spot (as usual) about ten years before the British Intelligentsia! In this book, naturally, I have still refused to wear the compulsory intellectual uniform of the British “Intelligentsia,” however romantic it may seem of me to walk upright instead of crawling about on all fours in the mental outfit of a moth-eaten Beefeater: and I have every hope that this work will appear as strange to them as my last, for events are anachronizing them so quickly that they can only continue to exist by intensifying the make-believe and unreality of their world, and by increasing their overtures to death, or, more belatedly, to birth-control (“not to be born”)—for their spiritual self-abortionism shows them to be more at home in the “Au Delà” than ever they will be in this life.

Humanitarianism, their ruling passion, an erzatz substitute for charity, invariably sides where there is most room for sentimental self-indulgence in the filth or famine of others. It sides automatically with the Dog against the Man, the Jew against the Christian, the black against the white, the servant against the master, the criminal against the judge. It is a suicidal form of moral perversion due to overdomestication, protestantism gone bad, just as are the other perversions with which our intellectuals are riddled. It was natural that it should side with the party that has slaughtered almost as many unarmed victims in the rearguard as the whole war has yet slain (with battles, sieges, air raids, and our executions) of soldiers and civilians alike.^[2] It is as helpless in front of propaganda as a frozen tadpole in front of a boaconstrictor: and propaganda is the Red’s main arm. Like all English writers on Spain I am biassed, but not by this form of sentimental perversion. I am biassed, unlike any of the others, by a thorough first-hand experience of life under both régimes as one of the working population: by the price and quality of bread: by the filth and famine obtaining on the side which started with the entire Capital of the country and the richest lands: and by the record-breaking harvests and prosperity on the side which only has the Labour—pulverizing any pretensions of the “left wing” to represent the Spanish worker, who can produce double of everything (where that paralysing influence is removed) with only half the amount of hands: thereby proving, according to the Marxian standards of productivity, that the Marxist is an anachronism and an economical drag on the country, who even in his own paradise has sunk far, far beneath the lowest level of pre-war republican production and should be (according to his own lights) “liquidated” forthwith, as an unproductive “mouth,” and a parasitic belly. He is fortunate to have more merciful judgment. This poem does not attempt to emulate such fine writers as Claudel and Pemán, who have done justice to the Epic and Lyrical aspects of the Spanish Renaissance. This is simply an account in terms of everyday life, from my own experience at the front and in both rearguards, of what must be the most extraordinary awakening of a national consciousness in a ruined and prostrate country that the world has yet seen.

A hundred years of strife with warring vans

Had winnowed Spain in two distinctive clans

Upon the left, inflammable, the chaff,

Corn to the right, the vulnerable half,

And thus in Spanish history began

The war between the Wowser and the Man—

Him that through tortoise-shell the rainbow saw

And ate his breakfast through a dead man’s jaw,^[1]

Who over lenses droops his godless lugs,

To regulate his life by those of bugs,

And whether it would better them or not,

Upon all others would impose his lot:

To figures who would subjugate our souls,

And hold a meeting when the tempest rolls,

By dead statistics would control a city

And run a battleship with a committee:

Though through the world wherever he prevailed,

His meddlesome experiments have failed:

Whether at work by the Infernal Lake,

He urge the world to war for peace’s sake

Like a snug lawyer fostering the Feuds

From which his slimy livelihood exudes,

Or godless surgeon in a sinecure

Who farms the cancers he pretends to cure,

And at all costs will keep the sickness sound

With busy Mafias working underground:

But when by pulling wires and licking stamps

The nearest to his victory he ramps,

And (history can testify the rule)

Would leap into the saddle from his stool

The bronco Life, with angry snort of fire,

Has ever boomeranged four feet entire

And stamped him like a cockroach in the mire.

Upon the Right his would-be victim stood,

Armed chiefly with a sense of Bad and Good,

Who had retained erect his classic form

Through all the epidemics of Reform:

Catastrophes of progress failed to bow

His haughty gaze and heaven-seeking brow:

His mother wit rejected any movement

That bid him cut his throat for self-improvement,

Nor would he hack away his legs or arms

Because his sires had used them on the farms:

Whose life’s a Georgic orderly and clean,

Who long has learned what dud reformers mean,

Shrewd in philosophy the fraud to scout,

In labour proud, in worship most devout,

Who reads less nonsense from his running brooks

Than waiters, primer-proud, with knowing looks,

Can mumble out of newspapers and books.

Who scorns the bargains of the soul-contractor,

To give his horse up for the Common Tractor,

And slave beneath a fiscal or a Factor,

Who’ve got the Russian clown Ju-jitsu’d clean,

Whom they can starve and trample and demean

By shutting off his store of gasolene:

The Russian was a savage: he of Spain

More highly civilized and deeply sane

Than most who read the papers in the train,

Was first the foreign heresy to hate,

On his broad shoulders fell the bloody spate

But only proved as many times before,

The Man of Peace is terrible in war!

He had a private spirit of his own

Nor pined for letting other folk alone,

But he would fight to keep his home entire

Although it was the devil lit the fire:

In him you have the Adversary, Man,

Go Hammer him according to your plan

And geld him with a Sickle if you can!

And that he took not kindly to the chain

Well may the baffled demagogues complain

Who never knew the Eagle Heart of Spain,

Nor nearer came to her dark eyes or hair

To see the deeps of splendour burning there,

Than to some bolshy “meeting” in the Square—

Nor guessed how high she lifts her peerless head

Whose burning saints on cold and hunger fed:

And, since the pain and sorrow of the world

Was far too soft a pillow, fiercely hurled

Their empire to the ends of the Abyss,

Searching the gulfs of the subconscious mind

New fiends to conquer, continents to find,

And ray their thoughts like comets to the blind:

Who face to face would meet with fiery beams

The eyeless monsters that molest our dreams

To show the way they can be faced and routed—

And Freud, the pervert’s Bible, gaily flouted.

All his worst nightmares they had foxed from earth

And hunted down—an age before his birth,

When the subhuman dream, to its derision,

Confronted by the clear seraphic vision,

Shrunk like a squid: and left the wakened sprite

To sun its clouds with valour and delight—

All our psychology so damp and dreary,

By practice mastered, where we grope with theory,

By conquest answered, where we pose the query—

Where ours leave off by darkness circled in,

Their terrible discoveries begin,

And far across the line where we draw rein

Their fiery beacons light the fearful plain,

Over the wreck of battles fiercely won,

The vanguard and the outposts of the Sun!

Was this the race that could be tamely fed

On the Utopian blarney of the Red,

Or bribed to trade its devil-daring breath

For slavery, equality, and death:

And, if these lying promises were truth,

For cheaper bread renounce its flaming youth—

Or the religion of the heart and head

For that of the soft belly and its bread?

Though “Pity the poor Reds” is now the cry

To greet our hard-won conquest of the sky,

When with our cities blown about our ears

We bore in silence what they bawl in tears

Before we had a bomber fledged to fly,

And months before we ventured to reply;

And bombs seemed respite to their thirsty knives

When young and old with half a million lives

Defrayed their clinic rage of G.P.I.

Whose Freudian delirium slew more

Than on both sides the heavy toll of war

And robbed the graves lest souls in peace should lie,

To whose main swamp and tidal wave of blood

The war seemed less a tributary flood

Than channel sluiced to drain that welter dry

Which still, in Russia, after twenty years,

Undrained, a stagnant fever-swamp appears,

And here, unconduited, would reek as high:

But that in Spain has waked a different breed

The murder-thriving bureaucrats to weed,

Who only prune themselves to multiply,

For all the rage of battles, sieges, bomb-raids,

Falls short of the Humanitarian “Comrades”

To whom the cowed and crowded cities yield

More room for prowess than the open field.

This will be seen when Triumph clears the sky

With Nitre less obscured than by the Lie,^[2]

Lenin’s “Most Powerful Weapon” (as he boasts)

To sow hysteria to the farthest coasts

Exasperating multitudes to die;

Then who this Glorious Rising would forgo?

Since Nature rose, Herself, the way to show

On her defacers raining blow for blow:

Corn, out of shame, refused for them to grow

And Gold (the looted wealth of all the land)

Inured to theft by every filthy hand,

The dirtiest of the elements in chief,

That loves the chill, webbed hand-clasp of the thief,

Its abject soul no further could demean

When Villainy and Fraud were swindled clean,

But rushed their frontiers headlong from a scene

Where forces nameless yet in books of crime

Had broken from the padded cells of Time.

Daring the rage of all who vainly think

Against a Nation to uphold a Stink,

In the fat snuggery of Auden, Spender,

And others of the selfsame breed and gender,

Who hold by guile the fort of English letters

Against the final triumph of their betters,

Muzzle the truth, and keep the Muse in fetters^[3]

While our own hoary sages with white hairs

Must cringe to them, like waiters on the stairs,

And few but Wyndham Lewis and myself,

Disdain salaaming for their praise and pelf,

With cleansing bombs to air the stuffy dens

Wherein they pick their noses with their pens,

Once more in naked blasphemy I stalk

And dare to prove I am not made of pork,

To flaunt this flaming heresy, the Truth,

Before the senile owl-roosts of our youth

Whom monkeys’ glands seem powerless to restore,

As Birth Control was profitless before,

Which, sponsored by their mockery of a Church,

Like stranded barbels, left them in the lurch,

Whose only impact on the world’s affairs

Has been to cause a boom in Rubber shares,

Who come to battle with both arms held up

And ask to be invited home to sup—

While back at home, to sound their battle-horn,

Some self-aborted pedants stray forlorn

And pity those who venture to be born—

Born, if they knew it, in the Morning’s pride

When never Death was sweeter to deride

Nor Life so fresh and fiery for the ride.

They gasp, or yawn, to see in splinters hurled

Their Meetingoid, Committee-bungled world

Crushed with the selfsame weapons that they chose

Their dogmatized Utopias to impose,

Those Hells on Earth, against whose gloom we soldier,

That put in practice, turned out ten times mouldier

Than Dartmoor, Wormwood Scrubs, or Comrades’ Hall,

And which we have abolished once for all:

But which, while they’d the least pretence to shape,

Even dunghill rats surveyed with bristled nape

And dared the wildest torrents to escape:

For never yet was loafing such a passion

Or murder, rape, and arson so in fashion

As where conjoined in Brotherhood of “Labour”

Humanitarian Progress loves its Neighbour,

The bloated Cæsars in their purple lists

Out-Cæsared by to-day’s Philanthropists

Who, in as many weeks as they took years,

Trebled Rome’s catacombs for blood and tears:

Who slaughter ten times more, their love to press,

Than we for anger, vengeance, or redress,

No less when on each other’s necks they fall

And then they are most “comradely” of all,

Through the dark streets pursue their bestial “work”

And “labour” with the pistol and the dirk,

Till their own press, so used to deeds of mirk,

Despairs of these humanitarian brothers

And pleads for intercession—to their Mothers!

And though the hate of parents what it preaches,

To Christian Decency abjectly screeches—

A “crime” they’ll punish with far worse than death,

Yet for whose aid they gasp at every breath—

When we return their bombs, or “Freedom” hangs

Too heavy on their scruffs with gory fangs,

Depending on the creed they most abhor

And cadging all the time for more and more.

Never before by earthquake, fire or tide

Were bankruptcy or famine spread so wide

As by this all-reforming modern State

That voted work and eating out of date,

Whose best reform in labour, food, or pelf,

Has been that it anachronized itself.

While we, worse-handicapped, without a dime,

Fought and created in the teeth of time,

Who had no programme, years before prepared,

But had to snatch the moment as it flared.

With our spare hand (which they reserve for plunder)

Fixed to the Plough, and in our Right, the thunder,

Victorious in the harvest as the strife

We fly our banner on the Staff of Life,

Against their looted Mammon to sustain

A bronzed and curling Samson in the grain,

Whose lovely shocks more terrible appear

Than if with dragons’ teeth we’d sowed the rear,

A golden army waving through the land

Though fringed with scarlet war on either hand,

With her own flag of red and golden flame

The exiled, homing country to reclaim,

We spread upon her smoked and blackened limbs

The fleece of glory where the morning swims.

Like shells in quantity, as theirs in kind,

Whose bread’s as black and leaden as their mind,

The silver loaves our ammunition swell,

And shining stoves are armaments as well,

Since of the mortal kind it’s ours to capture

As much, or more, than we can manufacture

And twice our Works have ceased to turn a shell

As when Alfambra broke, Bilbao fell,

The dumps were piled so high that to the sight

It seemed the peaks had calved them overnight;

Though the Reds grow most valiant in their writing

When lack of arms excuses them from fighting,

Many besides myself have touched no gun

Or cutlery, but what from them was won.

If in most modern wars both sides are beaten,

Here no such platitudes we fight to sweeten—

Where both sides gain, though one against its will,

Cured of its madness by the surgeon’s skill:

The pruning sword conveys a hydra gift

And tendrils flower from every clog we shift,

And where it lopped the paralytic lump

A Briareus branches from the stump:

Like paralytics from their trances cured

Who leap to life at Fatima or Lourdes:

With style to compensate for deadweight lost

Creative rhythm thrice repays the cost

And thaws numbed strikers from their year-round frost:

Like trade winds to the stale and stagnant calms,

Dexterity releases lock-jawed palms,

And freshening runs to each suspended hand

As wanted rain through blistered forks of sand.

For there’s no Spaniard, Falangist or Red,

That can be driven, or that can’t be led—

It’s the Red Fields they still refuse to till

Though Chekas thunder, and their bloodhounds kill—

But on our side the barns are filled to burst,

And those that blame it on “coercion” first

Should find the Spaniard that can be coerced:

Only in Propaganda he appears

To chuck the Witch and Ogre from their spheres,

Wherever pommies lend their blood-red ears.

If damned coercion could have ruled the land

I would not hold this rifle in my hand,

But have to strike and dawdle half the year

Lest work offend the loafing pistoleer,

Or only work at such a wage and board

As no one in the country could afford—

For if you jibbed you’d only hear a thud

And if you woke at all, would wake in blood.

The votes, as if Democracy to slight,

And show its rusted workings to the sight,

Seated the left, yet counted for the right—

And this in spite of violated urns,

Shots at the booths, and falsified returns;

And straight the sinister and bungling drone

Prepared to cut its partner from the bone—

The dexterous hand was threatened for its life

By its tight-fisted vixen of a wife,

To whom that drunken judgement passed the knife:

And like Petruchio (had his wife been worse)

Must fence unarmed against his wedded curse;

And soon her cuts had opened wide the vein—

Our pull in numbers through the Terror’s reign

Adjusted by some half a million slain—

And loud they boasted, ere their tails were curled,

Their purpose was to sweep us from the world!

Though for five months we’d turned the other cheek

And when we struck, with loss of blood were weak,

Too late alas to stop the coward hand

That struck the hope and honour of the land

Who promised fair to parallel the Star,

Triumphant, of the gracious Salazar,

And only just in time to stay the wave

That would have swept the country to its grave

With all of Europe after, had it grown

And Spain not dared the fearful tide alone.

Such foreign aid as, later, we were lent,

The Reds already to the front had sent,

Out-numbering still, to-day, by four to one,

And antedating with four months to run:

Only the mad, Red populace was armed,

And well the weeded Army had been farmed,

Or “triturated,” in Azaña’s phrase—

A four-eyed Janus squinting divers ways,

With the Red generals in the pride of place

And ours consigned to exile and disgrace:

And though the whole Armada jilted thus,

Save for the fifth of it that stayed with us,^[4]

It crystallized the whole tremendous scene

Wherein the miracle’s less clearly seen,

But here the Lie’s restricted in its might

By Daylight, on the borders of the fight,

And cannot vent its squidlike screen of ink

As where the thunderclouds obscure the blink—

Where in the Ports the part blockades the Whole,

Dead bulk out-marshalled by the fiery soul:

The sea reflecting in its glassy frame

Both politics and strategy the same,

Upholds a mirror of the War we win

To those who get no insight from within—

As I who’ve lived beneath the two regimes

And have not dreamed the Leftie Teacher’s dreams,

Being no tourist, but with working hand

Curled in the mane of that equestrian land,

One with what was eternal in that Nation

To bear its woes with silent resignation

Until the choice was suicide or War:

For in her Cosmopolitan furore

Spain was a mirror in a public place

Where every stranger, seeing his own face,

Especially if it was botched or sore,

Believed it for the land that we Restore

His pimples for her kopjes he mistook

And for her Church his nose’s monstrous hook:

Her womanhood for his contagious whore—

And of his own reflection made a book:

Since the Real Spain was in the cloisters hidden

Beneath the fiery sky on mesas ridden

Where tourists would have fainted with the heat—

It was her dregs that filtered to the street,

Where communism hung around the bars

Among the dominoes and cheap cigars,

Where waiters, chauffeurs, menials were the guys

That headed on the infernal enterprise.

Let such as Bartlett blame their lack of spelling

For the subhuman crime he finds repelling,

Not on the damned philosophy he preaches

That mostly through the press its feelers reaches:

Do Bushmen or Bechuanas fall so low

Though on their Baobabs no primers grow?

It was the literate lounging class of Spain

That first conceived this Rabies of the brain.

The hardest workers, those that read the least,

Could still distinguish Beauty from the Beast—

The dope-fiends of cheap literature are first

To get their notions by the Kremlin cursed,

And reading without wisdom is to blame

For half the world destroyed with blood or flame—^[5]

By Leftwing reading incapacitated

Either to tolerate or be tolerated.

Experience better serves the most Unread

Who carry no Boloney home to bed.

But in her outward structure as it stood

While foreign borers criticized the wood

Which they themselves had chewed into a cud:

Amongst its crazy scaffolds, stays and props,

Quack-carpentered, and “jerried” in the shops,

I felt the living wood that was to bud,

Intact, with all the blossoms in its blood,

The upright stem, the horizontal spars,

That flowered so red to fruit in deathless stars,

But then as in the grasp of winter stood:

In all that buckled hulk of creaking wood,

It was the Cross that strangers had forgot

The only beam that did not smell of rot

But fragrant as a rose-tree after rain:

That though it was to take the hardest strain

Of all the girders in her width and length,

Subjected to the selfsame test of strength,

After the fire and tempest, would remain

Eternal, where all else collapsed and gave,

Starred in her sky, or rooted on her grave—

Giving their own advantages and odds

To the cash-counting, belly-bolstered gods

And leaving them, when they had won the toss,

Brained by the thundering hammer of the Cross!

Knowing these things how could I entertain

The Charlies’ Meeting Bates mistook for Spain,

Whose false experience of the land must yield

To mine both in the letters as the field:

Or take like Hemingway for “Spanish Earth”

Her richest acres decimating dearth,

Whose chiefs to beg for foreign corn must go

Which her best workers still refuse to grow—

Unless they have been murdered long ago:

While on our side the harvest has been rolled,

Brave as a lion with its mane of gold,

Up to the foremost trenches that we hold.

I saw the things that strike the tourist least—

Behind the bull-fighter, I saw the priest

More valiantly engage a vaster Beast,

With nobody to alternate or save,

Whose dark arena was the certain grave,

Who torried with the Fiend for crusts of bread

And took his final salary in lead.

For one, the gay peseta’s jingling shower

Like rain in April, when the palcos flower,

Where snowed with powder, cataracting pearls,

And forested on high with jet-blue curls,

A whole sierra made of lovely girls,

Thundering with a pigeon-flight of hands,

Sheers to the zenith from the bloodlit sands—

The trumpet slashed, and as the people roared,

More strident than the trumpet pealed the sword!

But for the priest, alone to take his toss

And ride the red horns of his Master’s cross

Amid the frenzy of demented scenes

And the worse slander of our fat black Deans,^[6]

When each strong Hercules, to all but Love

Invincible, had by that stronger force

Been vanquished as an eagle tears a dove:

And victor of the iron was the Corse

When none recanted to deflect the blow

As twenty thousand martyrdoms can show!

But I, for one, can’t visualize a Dean

Fried, for intransigence, in gasolene:

What are the faults such valour is not worth

That as a penny spends his life on Earth.

To some I know, with foreign baksheesh sent,

Like bottled germs, to foster discontent,

And coolie-ing Russia, by such action,

To drive out mere decay with putrefaction

(Helping our cause, as surgeons help his heirs

Who kill the patient with their rival cares)

Spain was to them what scurf they could infect

And flake away with their bought intellect;

So with the Kominterners of the day,

Mistaking both the slough and the decay

In which as feeding parasites they lay

When with the withered skin they peeled away—

For the live python with revolving spires

That from the tombstone of her mighty sires,

Shedding the rags of winter-bitten skin

With the snug parasites that housed within,

Volted with solar glories and desires

And wheeled upon a hundred spangling tyres

To strip the Zodiac of its rolling fires,

With gleaming helmets for her million scales

From a long winter of inertia sails

In a strong current of electric might

Like a great river churning power and light.

From dynamos of valour and delight.

Across the land she flings her glorious wave,

Circles the deathless City of the Brave,

And floods the desert with reviving rain—

The Sweat and Blood of sufferers and slain,

That shed for love, was never shed in vain.

Now the lost Hammer wakens from its swoon

And the dead Sickle, like the crescent moon

On the deep sea (two horns for every wave),

Comes like the Resurrection from the grave

And through the swells of softly waving corn

In glinting lines (for every wave a horn)

Is with the warm wind of the harvest borne,

A million tons, a sickle for each ton,

Of surplus wheat, refulgent in the sun!

So in the Stock as in the garnered wheat,

A lost moon livens to the solar heat

To swell the herds like tides, each wave a beast,

Whose rippling fat’s with gold and silver fleeced,

While surplus calves, with half a million brows,

Prepare the silver crescent to espouse,

Whose swelling horn the rest of Spain can feast.

The Bull, the massive Mountain on her plain,

The Hillrange of her work, the garnered grain:

Her two life-giving streams of wine and oil,

The Tagus and the Ebro of her toil:

The snowed sierras of her gathered Rice

That pearl in creamy height to fall in price—

Let these, her handwork, to the Earth and Sky

Proclaim the Worker’s Spain against the Lie

Which all in quantities unknown of yore,

May justify the bloody purge of war,

Since loafing communists, the country’s sore,

Had made such health impossible before:

Which, too, may compensate, for strangled vice,

The feelings of such literary lice

That fell off with such flakes of winter skin

They could infect or loosen from within,

When Spain threw down her dominoes and dice,

And Franco bade the epic years begin,

Flying unarmed to dare the fiery zone

And shouldering the Impossible alone,

To lift three fallen centuries from the slime

Where they had bogged the ebb and flow of time,

Which is no one-way stream as we mischart,

But circulates, like blood, the solar heart,

And when the artery’s stopped, to sap the vein,

The sword must slice the ligature in twain.

Then five of our first leaders that were six^[7]

Rushed forth to seize a bridgehead on the Styx,

On duty killed, or that they scorned to fly

When for their blood was raised the wolfish cry

(Unlike Red chiefs, who scuttle to Valencia—

And after to Geneva—peradventure!);

And if our sixth survives to see us win

It was not shirking danger saved his skin,

But that he flew so boldly in her face

It jerked her Phrygian Nightcap out of place:

For with a buffet as he brushed her by,

And zoomed from Teneriffe into the sky,

It jerked the aim and focus from her eye.

Waiting in ambush these, the Fury hid

Her snaky topknot, like a lurking squid,

Within the crater’s inky cloud of smoke,

And primed her snaky tresses for the stroke.

As when a gust, with truculent alarm,

Flutters the neckties on a hawker’s arm,

Swirling their dots and spangles on the gale,

They all lash out and strike—to no avail;

So did her tentacles of snaky hair,

With idle fangs that chopped the empty air,

Strike out and miss him—parried by a prayer.

She wrenched a foothill then from Teide’s base

And sent it flying after him through space.

The missile grazed the aviating chief

And seemed a meteor over Teneriffe,

Fell, hurtling on, it struck the brows of Spain

And, like the life-blood of her dearest vein,

The scarlet boinas^[8] trickled to the plain,

Till all Navarre was sown with drops of red

And half Castile with seeds of blood was spread:

Like holly in the woodland budding blithe,

Were every thorn a pitchfork or a scythe:

Like poppies in the grasses they were seen

Were every blade a bayonet to have been—

Home-made perhaps, but resolute and keen.

Those scarlet seeds took root in every field

Where Christ is King. An army was the yield.

Had they been dragons teeth and every tooth

Had sprung into a brave indignant youth

On fire to fight and die for Christ the King—

It would be less miraculous a thing.

For here were old men shuffling off to war

With muskets that a hundred years before

Routed Sir Lacy Evans from the shore

And captured his artillery outright

Whose Regulars refused to turn and fight

Although he raged and cursed with all his might.^[9]

Rise up, you Cocks, like Requetés enrolled,

With your red boinas and your spurs of gold,

And crow the Dawn of Victory afar . . .

“The Requetés are rising in Navarre!”

To meet her Chief, his Rubicon the Straits,

His country rose—but to fling wide the gates:

The cry was not to challenge, but implore,

With which she shook the desolated shore:^[10]

A headless phantom, she, in ragged attire

Whose flying streamers flogged the winds with fire,

Swung, like a lantern, her dismembered head

In which, like coals, the eyes were blazing red.

Those jet-blue curls that taught the grapes to grow

Had whitened in a night to hanks of snow,

With sleety whistle from her hand they spread

And seemed the smoke of that suspended head,

With which she turned to lamp him on his way

Through scenes of madness that defied the day—

Humanity, benighted at midnoon,

Had howled the sun into a small red moon,

And saw, through smoke, that high and holy light

As grey Baboons behold the moon at night.

But with the Gorgon-beauty of her face,

Where the Medusa’s would have chilled the race

Of blood, and walled the heart with chilling stone,

She turned his heart to adamant alone

Whose fiery crystal blazing from his breast,

The star of San Fernando,^[11] saved the West.

But for her Master’s wounds, with which she showed

The Signs of Resurrection on the road,

But for the Wounds upon her hands and feet—

The bravest would have sounded his retreat

Or plunged to suicide, to thunder down

With all creation for his tomb and crown.

Since, had not here the fury been withstood,

The world would have returned to rocks and wood,

With some few Anarchists to rake its crust

Who had not died of surfeit or disgust,

For such a fever as was here released,

But that its rage was quarantined and creased,

So ghoulishly babooning to the beast,^[12]

Might well have swept the world! But Herbert Read

And Huxley, too, with tender hearts that bleed,

For corpse-defiling Anarchists must plead!

O world gone imbecile! each way one looks

Humanitarians slobbering over crooks!

Each skull a box of worms before its time,

To fish for bloaters of subhuman crime

In the backwaters of the Stygian gloom,—

Prawning for larvæ where the mildews bloom!

These in their lives, as in their prose and verse,

Anticipate the coffin and the hearse:

When living Christians have been fed to pigs,

The maggot never stirs beneath their wigs

As pleased as punch when half a million die

And better citizens than you or I:

But ever in the cause of the Hyena

They’ll take the controversial arena—

A sort of “Rabid Canine Friends Society”

Who go beyond the Deans in slimy piety,

To boost the Anarchist, whose foetid breath

Is perfumed with the carrion worms of death,

Who chooses graveyards for his camps: for rooms

To kennel in the charnels and the tombs:^[13]

This Mystic of all negative distortion,

Even the Reds regard as an abortion—

Decadence never stank, till now, it’s true,

And Beardsley was a pearl of morning dew,

Since literature has lived divorced from life

As a mad cuckold from a hated wife

In love with Death and still by her rejected

Save only where the brainworm is respected.

Even the Communists get conscience-stricken

To see these moral paralytics sicken

And bump them off by dozens at a time

When they out-charlotade the bounds of crime . . .

Were but our writers to spare moral reasons

To tartuffade their anti-human treasons,

To spare that sickening sweetness and humanity

With which they butter-scotch the base inanity

Scavenging like the bees around the rose

Wherever foul corruption picks its nose!

For here we’re not concerned with any Cave-man

The anarchist’s the pure and simple Grave-man,

The walking mummy, exiled from his home,

In the sub-real, ten feet beneath the loam,

The sickliest fungus of a rotten culture

Engaged, himself, upon his own sepulture.

Though to their side momentously was rolled

The mountainous advantage of the gold:

And worth as much, when minutes were so short

And miles so long, the tankers in the port:

The snorting horsepower of the sea and land,

In cornered petrol, nuzzled to their hand,

By them corralled beyond the millionth ton,

Which we must crease or lazo on the run:

With telegraphs and ’phones, with rails and wires

From town to town conducting their desires,

Of the whole land they had the voice and ears

When we were deaf with blows and blind with tears:

While weak with loss of blood, and numbed with fright,

We saw the rabble, absolute in might,

Loosed from the gaols, armed from the magazines,

Turning the streets to shambles and latrines.

With weeks for Centuries, in killed and burned,

The Roman circuses to life returned,

Trebled themselves, the Cæsars to depose,

And throned the Comrade with the purple nose,

Where cranium measurements became the Crown

And Finger-Prints the seal of all renown,

And the fierce spirochete, with might and main,

The raging dog-star of the human brain,

Knouting the cells, became the ruling Tsar,

To vomit fire and pestilence afar,

While syphilis and alcohol began

The death-dance of Regenerated Man,

And Christians learned, upon a stage more grand,

What bloody Circus was our Native land!

Theirs were the Aegis and the thunderbolts,

That from the towering pylons loose the volts,

Where roost the rookeries of winged words,

And shake them through the sky like migrant birds

Which have the power of panic in their wings

To bear the lies to foreign states and kings:

Out-plaguing Egypt, never hummed the skies

With locusts as the ether now with lies

Nor Lenin’s “mightiest arm” more fiercely plied

Its Red vendetta against human pride,

Believed by most: for in its cause to plead

Negligent honour keeps no lawyer fee’d,

And Propaganda ill accords with pride

But barks its head off on the guilty side—

To set the world against us with its votes

Whose only crime was to defend our throats;

Until those towering trees, that leafed with lies,

Began to flower with answers and replies,

Like bees and humming-birds to sip the dew

The churchman and the intellectuals flew,

And never yet were trilled with livelier notes

The Tartuffades of Anglican devotes.

So soon those pylons groaned with heavier fruits

Foreign supplies, and swarms of Red recruits,

That came in such a record-breaking crop

That weight of numbers brought us to a stop,

By avalanches brought upon one knee

And forced to duck each time we shook the tree—

But as Antaeus, when he touched the earth,

From our bent knees our victories have birth,

Down on our knees our fiery strength we stem

And prayer’s to us what dynamite to them.

To have the loaded batteries, cells, and wires

Primed for the expert gunnery of liars;

The power, the fleet, the air force, in their hands

Save what in ours had come away in strands—

No pity then when all was in their powers

And round our heads were bombed the reeling towers,

And yet no whining on the part of ours!

To have the keys, rails, centres, and the straits

And be the wardens of our own shut gates,

Through which, as spooks, we had to glide our spoors,

To leak through keyholes, and to fade through doors—

The very straits sharked by the submarine

Were redder than their surfaces were green:

To see the dice so loaded—you’d have said

Dynamics and Geography were Red

To Federate the Lightnings and the Gales

And Bolshevize the Ocean with its Whales—

And then get drunk in proper “comrade” fashion

To find we’d seized the arms and bagged the ration,

Which is their chief excuse and major reason

For being gudgeoned in and out of season,

Who rise red-eyed from rapes and drunk debauches

To find our banners streaming at their porches—

And is the answer to each canting fool

Who deems such drones were ever fit to rule,

And shows the Right hand is the hand of workers

And the shut Left—of parasites and shirkers,

And that Democracy has had its hour

That shoves such sleepy scullions into power,

Which only as a system could be borne

When Christians held barbarity in scorn

And, with the land-myths, nourished with the sod

The voice of peoples was the voice of God.

Ere poisoned by the radio from the sky

And half electrocuted with the lie

The great Majority were numbed to die,

And twilight would have settled on their brains

Had we not come, the riders of the plains,

To fox that Talking Mongoose^[14] from the sky,

The gait of living effortless at last

And Meetings now a nightmare of the Past!

The whole of Modern Science and Invention

Went to the Left it seemed by God’s intention

And took the Gold lest, where her cause should crumble,

Materialism should have cause to grumble,

The dice were doctored with her own false hand

When in her bout with Faith she staked the land,

And it should prove beyond the least denial,

In her own language, by her own gross trial,

Beyond appeal, and openly to view,

Which was the least a bumpkin of the two.

And many now would give a sum to hide

What then they wrote in plutocratic pride

Our “penniless adventure” to deride,

When sneering at our lack of arms and cash

They called it, neither foolhardy nor rash,

But “sheer premeditated suicide,”

When on the plains “invincible” was hurled

The Army of the People of the World,

The hoarse blaspheming of the godless horde

Against the Cross and Crescent of the Lord,

The Cross, our Hammer, and the Quarter Moon

Our Sickle, and Hosanna for our tune!

Although in foreign aid by one to four

Outnumbered as preceded months before,

Which on our side was proffered, not entreated

As when to “Workers of the World” they’ve bleated

Their myriad S.O.S.’s through the skies—

To prove how “Spanish” is their enterprise!

As to the Moors, whom they were first to bribe

With their Autonomy—that swarthy tribe

Whom they invited first, why should we ban

When they proclaim the Brotherhood of Man

When Chinks and Chuckchees pour with might and main

To swell the People’s Army on the plain,

How else into our hands chanced these to fall

Five hundred tailless apes from Senegal,

As regulars enlisted one and all?

Azaña’s ten pesetas to refuse

And fight for five—the Moors were free to choose

And be called “Mercenaries” as are we

Who in the Legion are content with three,

While Requetés and Falangists fight free—

And only “Patriots” claim the larger fee!^[15]

In all the news of Spain it will be found

The Labels have been stuck the wrong way round—

That Moors should fight for us, small wonder, too,

Since on their side the Reds have got the Jew—

You cannot have your cake and eat it too!

Without Autonomy, without more pay,

They chose with us the clear equestrian way,

That links the herdsmen to the whole world’s end

Wherever out of Abel we descend:

Rather to help the rightful heirs of Man

Than rule with sub-men on an equal plan.

Too near in blood the grumble to advance,

As near as Senegal is far from France

With troops recruited from the tops of trees

From the less agile of the Chimpanzees—

Poor Islam’s had no cause for hesitations

Betwixt Democracies and the Dictations,

And well she knows how her victorious aid

By Democratic countries is repaid,

Who bombing their best allies to their shame,

Vainglorious Mussolini dare to blame

For treating his worst enemies the same!

Of Liberty or Freedom they’ve enough

Who’ve learned to dread the namby pamby stuff—

Since both have wrung them fiercely by the scruff!

They think of each as of a blood-dripped Ogress

And know there is most headway where least “Progress.”

Remembering Russia,^[16] in her injured pride

The Moon of Islam sunk their godless tide,

But, joined with Italy, could count far less

Than this huge League of Nations in Distress,

Of whom we’ve buried more in French alone

Than live Italians can with us be shown.^[17]

The scum of Europe into it was poured

And facing there the hydra of the horde,

The fauna of the steppes, the dregs of drains,

From Ainus down to France’s quadrumanes,

We multiplied its heads the more we slew

Although like side-show coconuts they flew—

And by Brunete you may see in stacks

Dead bodies climbing on each other’s backs

To make a huge paella of the plains,

A dish of rice, with corpses for the grains,

Whom safe intriguing pedants sent to die

And sell their scrawny mutton for a lie,

To perish for an ignominious cause:

Not as our “dead,” in rhyme with Cosmic laws,

Who die as queens in childbed, giving birth

To the resurgent order of the earth

In certain victory and faith unshaken

Since first Red Saville with ten men was taken,

When in Red hands lay Spain all crushed and gory

And in our hearts the hazard and the glory!

And “Viva la Muerte” when we cry

That valiant comrade never lets us die,

Whose every death’s a splinter of the Cross

Redeeming Victory as theirs reap loss.

Our deaths like towering stones are piled on high

To lift a great cathedral to the sky

And stand in rock, the thunders to defy;

While theirs form dumps of excavated sand

To room its deep foundations in the land,

Their only monument a vacuous hole

And ours a towering temple in the soul:

Theirs the lugubrious dirges in the distance

Where birth-controlled into a false existence

The sons of Onan, in the mists forlorn,

Lament their evil fortune to be born

And through the world unbroken and the same

Would socialize their misery and shame,

Which life rejects with ridicule and scorn.

For as our test, the touchstone of our right,

To sink these new Cromagnons out of sight,

Whose impetus is not to breach the tomb

With souls immortal forging through the gloom,

But hankers back to the prenatal womb—

It was demanded that, against all odds

Imaginable, we should face their Gods

Of Economics, Science, Gold, and Sex,

And, naked, force the yoke upon their necks:

Against the very lightnings of the sky,

The ether volted with one towering Lie,

To prove ourselves reluctantly, though pressed,

With their own arms (which, first, we had to wrest)

By their own standards, and their chosen test,

The fittest for survival and the best:

To force their Evolution into fact

When by that foul inversion we’re attacked

And all our clergy into catsmeat hacked:

To illustrate, with deeds, their boasted aim

Which as their sole religion they proclaim

To “liquidate the useless and the lame.”

And if we did not do it long before

Say, when Gil Robles held the reins of war,

“Thou shalt not kill” was what we waited for:

The binding ban that cannot be untied

Save by the stronger—that on Suicide:

Since for five months we’d turned the other cheek

And only stalled the Terror by a week.

Never was physical advantage vaunted

As by the Reds: nor penury so taunted:

But soon the stores, the petrol, and machines

Came over to our hands by their own means:

It seems they came to ask us for employment

Since in our hands they found the best enjoyment

For matter loves to leap in lovely acts

As show the rainbows and the cataracts,

Gets tired in the mere positive to live

And likes a jaunt in the superlative,

With valour looping, seeking where the God is,

In training, as it were, for when, set free,

Its elements will form in human bodies

Just as we train in war, cadets to be

For our commissions in the Seraphry—

For it was Sick of the obscene satanics

Of those who make a Gospel of Mechanics,

Tired of its pusillanimous alliance

With those who make Religion out of Science—

And soon the Russian experts showed as boobs

With anything that can’t be kept in tubes,

Stamp-tallied, or methodically docketed—

But in this war the prayers of martyrs rocketed,

The powers of Faith were loosened on the air,

And gum and scissors failed to cope with prayer.

Materialists have done far more to shatter,

Than any one, the patient nerve of Matter

Which the most fiery mystics always found

So tame and humble (when they touched the ground)

And showed, as organizers, far more sense

Than these materialists—incompetence,

Since “Wrecking” amongst Matter-sodden races

Has proved the title to the highest places,

Tracking each other’s bloodspoor as they slink

One after one, each other’s blood to drink,

To bugle round the world from zone to zone

The One Discovery by Science made known—

It’s better to bow down to wood and stone

And worship them with human sacrifice

Than worship nothing at this bloodier price

Of millions slain for greater filth and famine;

Since every “Reformation” we examine

That sprung from lack of Christian Resignation

Has plunged the world in deeper desolation:

And “Progress” is another way of trying

To kill an invalid, to stop him dying,

To rid the world of pain on the assumption

That colds are cured by Galloping Consumption.

The Inquisition in six hundred years

Pumped not a thousandth of the blood and tears

As, in some twenty, has the world-reforming,

Free-thinking, Rational, Cathedral-storming

Humanitarian, with his brother love,

To whom Tsarism was a sucking dove

And Hitler was to this degrading sham,

As to a rabid skunk, a snow-white lamb.

The pains of godless scientists^[18] and scholars

Have brought us worse than Patagonian squalors,

Saharan Famine, Dust-bowls, creeping drought,

Death in the Spirit and despair without,

And yet to-day the thinkers and the sages

Can patronize the towering middle ages

As being somewhat Bigoted and Narrow—

The sow of Bigotry could never farrow

Until the true freethinker came along

And liberated “Reason” grew so strong,^[19]

Intolerance into delirium blazing

And Bigotry the hair of crime upraising—

To justify whatever Inquisition

To such a lust of blood could be physician,

Restoring it to its intended place

As warder and protector of the Race—

They made mere lunacy limp far behind,

And all the bloodiest manias of the mind,

To this of souls, seem innocent and kind:

Till one could wish a death by their own knout

To those who made religions out of doubt

Like rabid bloodhounds maddening men to slaughter

Who blame their hydrophobia on the Water:

Which by its raving could convince a clod

Of the reality and life of God

Whose absence roared so terribly, Whose lack

Could so disfigure, mutilate and hack

(Worse than their victims) those whom it afflicted,

Who seemed, from human lineaments evicted,

To roar and whinny like the ghouls of Hell

Which (if not elsewhere) here was proved as well,

Converting me to seek Him on the spot,

To see that foul Abyss where He was not:

To find no evidence my sense to dim

But to pure Evil was the lack of Him,

Exasperated to a white-hot glow

By the mere consciousness that this was so—

As it proclaimed itself in speech and fact

And by the loathing in each studied act.

And this identity alone sufficed

To drive an open reason straight to Christ,

No longer open then, but signed and sealed,

To side with Nature and to take the field,

For even their machinery rebelled

And as by miracles, our armouries swelled:

Till we could almost pray for what we wanted

And take the answer to the prayer for granted,

And with our Pater nosters and Hail Marys

Were liming Aeroplanes like tame canaries:

They came down singing to the left and right

And on our very doorsteps seemed to light

Because the “Comrades” in their lying raptures

Of many of our towns had billed the Captures,

So swivelling fleets of armoured cars and lorries

Into our arms, with other welcome quarries.

Heaven through our prayers, Hell through their furious lies

From day to day augmented our supplies:

Their “Mightiest Weapon” in their hands had twisted

And in our cause would gaily have enlisted

Had we the least encouragement bestowed.

We needed tanks: as if they knew the road,

They came like bakers’ vans to orders booked,

When the fierce sun their crews of Russians cooked

Who have to be like convicts bolted in—

Surrender being their one besetting sin:

And with the Centigrade at sixty-seven

Their brains were baked and yeasted in their leaven,

And what the sun began, the iron heated,

The Fahrenheit and Centigrade completed,

To save us any need of work more fiery,

As they came nosing to our mazed inquiry,

For the good sun, our ally and physician,

Had kept those dread-vans in the best condition,

Which came to us quite of their own volition

To take our orders and obey us better

Than ever to their owners at Brunete.

The Scottish Ambulance, to crown the laugh,

Delivered both medicaments and staff

Its worthless crew of wowsers to deride

And ask for clean employment on our side,

Renouncing Knox for Scotland’s former Grace

As it were conscious to be near the place

Where, led by Bruce’s Heart, for Christ and Glory,

Her valiant horsemen topped the peaks of story

And sounded through the world’s most manly age

The loudest peal in Froissart’s tingling page—

To sink to this, by their own pills and clysters

Disowned for base Geneva-bitten twisters,

Kidnapped by their own lorry as it came

To honk for work, with eager lamps aflame,

As though the shade of Bruce had honked its horn

To hold the modern Scotchmen up to scorn!

But best of all, in this Mechanic treason—

Revolting to our side and with such reason!

Was when the wireless spoke in decent Spanish

And bade the Nightmares of the Nation vanish,

When, like a sunbeam through a dungeon leaking,

Came Quiepo’s voice from Red Sevilla speaking:

As if the great Quevedo had not died

That lashing tongue its whip of scorpions plied

And round and round the heavens thrashed their lies

In bat-swarms from their belfries in the skies.

Like lovely rain, we heard his valiant shout,

Over a country killed with dust and drought,

And those who else in dudgeon might have died

Now faced the firing squad with laughing pride.

But clearer far, than in its glad revolt,

In its behaviour, Matter proved no dolt,

And that it has opinions of its own—

As any one who’s worked in wood and stone

Can tell you: and that of all things that stir it

It is most pervious to the human Spirit

Whose horsepower, though the Bolsheviks decry,

Propels the graveward hearse in which they lie.

Whether it’s guns to fire, or bricks to pile,

Matter is always sensitive to style

(Which is the breathing rhythm of the soul)

And shows itself Devout from pole to pole:

In storms and shocks it always looks for order

The waves in uniform, with silver border,

Still fight to keep in equidistant ranks

As we against artillery and tanks:

Happier still to worship than to grovel

It shows in the Cathedral than the hovel,

And there of centuries will take the polish

Requiring tons of Nitre to demolish:

But when democracy begins to soar

To whom the jail, the brothel, and the store,

Stand for the Church, and tries for like proportions

Matter complies with sorrowful distortions.

And rather as a slave than an ally

“Co-operates” to raise them to the sky,

But always uses them for dump or jake

And does not strain to hold them when they shake,

For still the rot and rubbish most abound

Where Freedom has “collectivized” the ground,

While Monuments and Churches still outlast

The strongest forts and castles of the past,

With the Arenas standing side by side

The first cathedrals of our deathless pride:

And still sun-temples and Stonehenges stand

Praising the Solar glories through the land—

Until our scientists so brisk and nimble

Discovered in the Tree a Phallic Symbol

And other Wowser’s Voodoo in the thimble,

And by his guts and sex the Charlie linked

To his destruction, to become extinct,

Unfit to suffer, to create, or strive

Where only towering virtue can survive,

And even God must suffer, bleed and die

Lest on our hangdog heads should fall the sky.

For if we want with symbols to be taught

You’ll find more Crosses in this world for thought,

Scored in the wrinkles of your skin they are

And your whole body is a shafted spar,

With a man on it, hammered day and night:

But the Good Thief was hammered to the Right

And bore the nails with valour and delight,

Unlike the snarling Comrade on the Left

Whose dole and rights all other thoughts bereft

When he was in the high, Majestic Place,

Out-soaring Cæsar and the Suns of Space!

We see the Priests of Famine, Death, and Loss

United in their hatred of the Cross

And far more rabid in their anti-creed

Than fervent in the causes they would speed

In which they’re hydra-headed, only here

Their necks in one great celluloid appear

And in the common halter of defeat,

Where all as in one goitred neck they meet

To make one think the collar and the shame

Are one concentric zero and the same—

To see what are their sole two points of union

Should drive the very devil to communion.

The hatred of the Cross is their Disaster,

Than the great flood, a cataclysm vaster:

Thinking to tear it down, they tore the Sky,

A rain of blood, and lightning from on high,

And the great thunder, headlong and terrific,

When Abel stretched his length to the Pacific

The land a murder, and the wind a cry:—

And hence a War for War, to the last breath,

The Sword He came to bring, the Sword of Death!

No “War-to-end-War” (and beget ten more!)

To “fight for Peace,” the Babylonian Whore,

The turtle-winged Sow that comes to farrow

Bloodbaths for which the ocean is too narrow:

A war for eagles—not for turtle-doves

Henpecked to bleeding corpses by their loves!

A war for warriors, not for pacifists

Who tear the living womb with gory fists

Who rape, castrate, and torture, and deplore

With lifted hands the very name of War!

And well may they abominate the Sword,

The bared and naked vengeance of the Lord—

And curse the Soldier, him, the human brand,

That came to lop the sacrilegious Hand,

And root the godless vermin from the land:

For wounds are wings for those who know where God is,

Junkers and Fiats are our slaughtered bodies.

It was not we who lead-swung to the Pities,

When half the loveliest of our ancient cities

Were in the clouds rebuilt—if flames could take them

And rushing smoke restore them in the sky,

When rivers were alive—if blood could make them,

Our blood that had not had the time to die!

Since their intention was not, as they’ve sworn

To finish off the idle and outworn,

But (as we’ve proved it openly enough)

To exterminate the valiant, strong, and tough—

And by a sudden knifetwist in the scruff!

That the most abject might assume the Seat

And heads be trampled by their dirty feet,

That crime might flourish, sodomy abound,

And Love be crushed forever to the ground:

There as they raped, and sodomised, and lusted,

By their obscene babooneries disgusted,

Indignant Venus played them wicked pranks,

Sending, incognito, into their ranks

The twin milicianas, Pox and Clap,

Who operated to such dire mishap,

Dispensing, free, to officers and rankers

Their running sores, and fistulæ, and chancres,

That to their charms more casualties fell

Throughout the war (as captured records tell)^[20]

Than to the heavy toll of shot and shell.

Yet all their knowledge could be used to save—

Even what they burrowed from the Ape Man’s grave

And vulgarized into a murderous creed:

They teach us (as the Anarchists to-day)

The Grave is Sacred, it will search and slay

Its desecrators, and destroy their breed,

A knowledge worth all Huxley’s dreary screed.

A far worse vengeance than the Pharaoh took

Came from the Ape Man’s miserable spook

Who still with fury chivvies them to-day:

For though they had the live created Adam

Like a Rolls Royce upon the blue MacAdam

Of time, his body like a golden dream,

The stream-lined dolphin of the vital stream—

With Michaelangelo to see that Car win

Like a great Malcolm at its solar wheel,

It roused their abjectness and loosed a Darwin,

Whom any Inquisition would repeal,

And let that bungling workman fit in parts

Of obsolete machines and rusted carts:

And if we have to go to Davey Jones

For our spare parts, among the rocks and stones,

The Aurignac man could spare us better bones,

Heighten our foreheads, and square out the shoulder,

A handsomer progenitor, though older,

Than those with which they bestialize our breed,

Since you could make a theory no bolder,

That we are but Aurignacs gone to seed:

For Capitalistic lore, as Communistic,

Must first of all discredit all that’s mystic

To sell the mind and body cheap for slavery

Degrading them by slow hypnosis first,

In which the Modern poets head the knavery

In all the arts of degradation versed,

The coolies and the agents of the Jew

Whose only passion is to gripe the two,

And never let their memory escape

The angry vengeance of a bone-rigged ape—

As if Created Adam but exists

Through kind permission of anatomists,

And life were a condition of the body

Not vice versa, as the merest noddy,

By reasoning, can swiftly ferret out,

Till reason makes him sceptical of doubt.

As great Marconi by sheer instinct knew

Lord of the sightless forces of the blue,

But which the humbler unillumined mind

By obvious comparisons can find—

Unless his brain’s been pommified in slices

Or soused in muddy draughts of Cam or Isis—

Simply contrasting both in peace and war

The works of faith with those of Charlie lore—

For see these broken walls arise in prayer

Which they destroyed in impotent despair,

The fountain running where the stream they cut,

The flour-mill turning that for months was shut.

Where “progress” turned the villages to pyres

From new-built hearths a different smoke aspires

And as for fighting, though our ranks were spare,

Behold those mountains of dead Charlies there!

Then tell me Science is the God of War

And not its batman, which we take him for,

Who better answers to our curse and rod

Than to their faith who treat him as a god,

For though we study him with equal skill

It is to rule him, not to serve his will:

For any fool can tell you he had none,

Save for some scient-anarchists who shun

The evident, as blind-worms do the sun.

Without a moral value he remains

A menial still for all his active brains,

And better serves a master for his meals

Who keeps him in his place, and firmly deals,

Than when he rules promoted to the fore—

As Sancho wise in proverbs found before,

Solomon and Aurelius had not more

Wise Apophthegms than thronged that lousy pate

On all affairs of government or state—

And yet poor Sancho had to abdicate.

The same with Science and the same with Art—

Without the horse to which they are the cart

They break away, colliding down the hill

And at each jolt, a posse of Charlies spill,

Whether it be philanthropy or crime,

To be the laughter of succeeding time,

As Haldane came back sneezing from Madrid

And Beaujannec got caught with what he hid.

So Science as a deity of war,

Takes a low rank, with Mithras, Mars, or Thor,

As makeshifts all, for want of something more:

Who though he takes our side, could never father

Giants of the Cabeza and Alcazar,

And shines the best by brave example led

As by our peerless Captain bleeding red,

The living Jupiter, authentic Mars,

Than thunderbolts more terrible his scars,

When on the Cross, victorious and high,

The Eagle Aviator takes the sky

To show us how to conquer and to die:

And prove to all the Devil’s routed cattle

The God of Love is still the God of Battle

And when in victory our labours cease,

The Christ of Battles is the Christ of Peace:

And all that is worth-while beneath the sun

By suffering and sacrifice is won:

Not the Hortensia pale of the “Renaissance”

With fleshy angels in polite obeisance

Correctly twining to an easy Cross—

But the wide-winged and wounded Albatross

The tempest-torn, that rides (and bears) the strife

And soars upon the hurricane of life:

The Christ, the Emperor of the Middle Ages

Of human dignity, resigned, and brave,

Before the dotage of our bards and sages

Who since this second childhood only rave

The human race from suffering to save

Even at the cost of life; when suffering

Is all we have to conquer to be king

Of more than worlds; but were it once removed,

Lower than dogs we’d live, by life reproved,

Scorned by the angels as effete buffoons

And spat on by the devils as poltroons.

For there’s been no “renaissance” up till now

Except for Galathea’s croup and prow—

This is the dawn of Psyche mortified,

The spirit, and the martyr, and the bride!

Only by suffering, suffering can be killed

Only by dying life can be fulfilled,

Death slain, and the lie given to the Charlie crew,

Who shouldn’t have been born, and say so too!

The Christ of Salamanca teaches this,

The devil-routing Lord of the Abyss

Who, till this time of men resigned and bold,

Ignatius was the last man to behold—

Since then, till now, men fought for greed or lust

To seize the booty or to bite the dust,

But the old world is “braver” than the “new,”

Can use it as its foot-stool or its shoe:

Or when it rots as it’s begun to do,

As a sharp knife can cut that Stilton through

Cough though the scientist or squirm the Jew,

Or stink, abjectly dead, the poets too.

That God was never brilliantined or curled

Who out of Chaos saw his battles won,

And gave, like Moscardò, his only Son,

To save the charred Alcazar of the world.

For of all gods, he only breathed our breath

To live the solar myths, and conquer death:

In his last highest creature, as his least,

Fulfilled the law by which they are increased,

And stooping to her sternest law, allied

His nature to our own as to a bride,

In one fierce act of suffering and of strife

From mutual death to wrest immortal life,

For that same principle He died to crown

To life’s most humble sources filters down,

And easier in their tiny worlds is seen

Than in our own more complicated scene,

Wherein the miracle’s but dimly spied

(Unless that inspiration is our guide)

Which from the glory of His bleeding wings,

Out-soaring Cæsars, paladins, and kings,

Nature reflects into her humblest hive^[21]

Where One must die that generations thrive—

And even in our own ejected seed

Creation is the Devil-Darer’s deed

Who wins the ovum by his strength and speed,

As in the bee that resurrects the breed,

In death to triumph, over death to drive,

And die of Love, to save the race alive,—

Where One ascends to triumph and to bleed

To form the generation or the Creed,

On whose immortal, onward-rushing wave

He rides superb across the open grave

That gapes to swallow the rejected drones,

And there while they await the final chill,

Like Bloomsburies, perhaps, in envious need

They’ll sit and patronize the Victor’s deed

Or, as the English poets, stray forlorn

And curse their evil fortune to be born—

The miracle and Fiat to deny

Of which they are the residue flung by,

While through his saints and soldiers runs the spark,

The rose and rapture that defies the dark,

To whose adventure life and death are flame

And both conduct to victory the same,

Since if His soldiers lose the brighter crown

It is for earthly conquest and renown.

And here the warring principles are shown

Betwixt the male and the rejected drone:

The latter would for safety break their necks

Reducing life to comfort, food, and sex:

The former all-accepting soar above

To triumph over death and die for love,

For as the lucky seed, against all odds,

From germ to man, from manhood to the gods

Aspires: a war eternally must redden

Betwixt the solar instinct and the leaden,

Though the advantage be to those who deaden.

Not Cæsar soaring to his lonely tower

Superb in beauty, aquiline in power,

His world-wide circle round the sun can fling

But their dull thoughts, like pellets in his wing,

By treachery must bring him hurtling down

By sacrifice to consecrate and crown,

And so much more when all unarmed they spy

The mightier Cæsar of the earth and sky.

Even from stone his likeness must be razed

Or when upon a living face it’s blazed—

As when the good Sotelo fell in gore,

But resurrected on the wings of war

His spirit, with his Master’s wounds astream,

Arose his butchered country to redeem—

Such sacrifices consecrate our cause

In serving the divine and earthly laws.

Since on this earth an atheist never trod

All men are either for or anti-God:

Even these anti-Gods depend on Faith

Which if they died would take no kind of scathe,

But if the Faith were dead, doubt would explore

A hollower existence than before,

With no more crumbs to pilfer but instead

A notice up to say “The Baker’s Dead”:

For all who by negation try to live

Depend on what the positive can give—

And so the parasite who kills his prey

Must feed on his own flesh or fade away.

When Bolshevisms’s left upon the hob,

With no one else to murder or to rob,

Then suicide becomes its only job—

Wolves wolfing wolves, bears over-bearing bears,

And Socialism slaughtering its heirs,

Lest mere experience should teach these comics

Some rudiments of life or economics

(Which any simple yokel on his own,

Can settle for himself if left alone),

As now in Russia they seem “taking notice,”

For Stalin’s knife is still where Lenin’s throat is.

In all affairs of comfort, food, or pelf

The poor materialist defeats himself:

Wherever Bread or Money’s the religion

The death of it extends through all the region:

Hyenas, “Blums,” Staviskies, pimps and sharks

Have made their Father Christmas out of Marx

And strikes and famines follow grim and stark,

Wherever his goloshes leave their mark—

The bread goes black, lead mingles with the “duro”

To spoor this bleak Messiah of the bureau—

And you may search Madrid or Barcelona

For any sign of Ceres or Pomona:

From his infected presence to the mystics

They fly: but first with his profound statistics

They play the devil, spoiling every plan;

Such is their hatred of the Fallen Man—

But plenty follows still with sumptuous Feast

Earth’s triumvirs, her wise men of the East:

The Soldier, and the Prophet and the Priest

Though these are best on fiercest hardship bred

The snow for blanket and the rock for bed—

From them the rosy wine, the silver bread!

In Spain, where Lenin thought his way was clear,

If anywhere within the human sphere

Then communism should have triumphed here,

For through the land for years it mined and holed

And trawled the gutters with its seines of gold:

What was corruptible in all the land

Was long ago a pawn in Moscow’s hand—

And that it was corruptible, was broken

No sooner than its “No” to life was spoken,

For having lost the true and vital track

Of destiny, some bungled ages back,

Which all must lose who lose their sense of sin—

That poison riots and revolves within:

And had it killed us it would still have rolled

In agonies, till it was stark and cold:

(Geneva so, its ward-mate, nearest death

By the worst jerks was galloped out of breath

And did its greatest harm upon its bier,

Throwing the fiercest fits of its career,

From which the world but barely tumbled clear).

To hook it was our final act, though first,

But after that its fury must be nursed,

Though many took for growing strength, its rage

From primary to tertiary stage—

As a grey shark, the “Comrade” of the main,

That, stalling to the horsekick of the cane,

Weaves his great circle, like a trail of milk,

And tons of water, triggered by the silk,

Hang on his fins and turn to watermills

The rooster-combs that tremble in his gills,

Till from the huge compression of his heart

As from a charge of cordite he must part;

His pain the tube, his agony the gun,

His furious projectile leaps the sun,

The traces spiral round him to his head

Boxed by the sinker with its fist of lead,

The cutting Sickle of his tail as vain

As the great ram and Hammer on his brain,

With fins all porcupined, in sidelong share,

He rounds upon a foe that is not there,

Till drowned, his blood with waterbubbles mixed,

By his own speary strength he lies transfixed,

And self-harpooned, self-strangled of his breath,

Is brought to bed of his last orphan, Death—

The fisher hauls his body to the slip,

Around whose bulk the happy children skip,

Bathers feel warmer round the arms and thighs,

Only the intellectual droops his eyes

And his subscription to the papers sends

For the protection of “Our Scaly Friends.”

With our right hand and dominating skill

We sense the tactics of that frantic will,

And round the great stockade with whip and line

Can play the epileptics of his spine,

Confining here, exasperating there,

We play him off against his own despair,

More dangerous as he draws near his end

And the great pangs their spinal voltage send;

Switching the current as we haul or slack

Our hand convulses each renewed attack,

The great buckjumping throes that rend his back,

As still his failing spirit strives to straddle

The jerks and jolts that jump it from the saddle,

While through his vertebrae like rattled stones,

The marrow, like an injured snake of bones,

Rears to each fierce parabola of pain

That rockets through their dislocated chain,

Till, like a boa constrictor, thwarted Sin

Recoils with havoc on the soul within.

Where others see in each return to strife

A new vitality or lease of life—

We know his violence and his swiftening breath

Momentously are magnetized by Death

Where Gravity, engrafted with the bone,

Exerts, as in the headlong fall of stone,

The Will of the Earth-Mother, linked with ours,

The force that tests, the vengeance that devours,

Whose upward-climbing force, with ours aspires

To throw down all of which the Cosmos tires,

A weight of crushing guilt, it loads the foe,

But of our white resilience strings the bow,

To keep us anchored till our task be done

Lest we should rise and vanish in the sun,

For these great forces come the world to wake

Spurn at the ground with every stride we take,

And the earth’s reigning at our upward verve,

With singing line, as to a kite will serve;

Through it we weigh the prize of every limb,

Queued for enlistment in the seraphim:

Its gentle thorn still conscious in our skin

To goad the working chrysalis within,

It keeps us still in love with earthly things

Lest yet we take our plumeless arms for wings

Before their scarlet feathers have been grown

And the deep wounds have quilled them to the bone.

But here we must be ballasted awhile

Till we remind the valleys of their style,

The ancient rhythm broken to restore

And teach the corn to rustle forth once more,

To wake from her enchantments and despair

The sleeping princess with the yellow hair

And fence her safety with our ridge of steel

That she may ride at our advancing heel,

Once more full-skirted with her waving plume

Her empire of the prairies to resume,

While the red poppies at her call aspire

With fangs of gold, and baying scent and fire,

Close at our stirrups race with lolling tongue

Like hounds to hunting when the world was young

To bark the “comrade” up the nearest tree,

The lewd baboon that would not let her be—

For we must save creation for our sons

However much against the grain it runs

To hunt that base Neanderthal with guns,

For only on the frontiers of the Styx

Is room for him whose blood can no more mix

With ours than lukewarm gravy can with fire,

Who weighs his grudging sweat against his hire

When sacrifice is what the gods require;

And those in whom the solar glory strives

Like willing horses thrash and flog their lives

Until they drop; for to a soul of flame

All raptures beside sacrifice seem tame,

And we must pay, long overdue, the debt

Our enemies have shirked, of Adam’s sweat,

Both for themselves and us, and so continue

The lease we only hold with straining sinew,

Which “rights” and “freedom” would fob off and shirk,

But we’ll accept, though treble be the work,

Till over the corroded, cratered plain

The coloured harvest spreads its ruddy stain

And through the land expands its belt of gold

Just as the young moon swallows up the old;

For as the new moon eats the old with fire

Whose blackness is the coal of its desire,

So their black chaos is but welcome fuel

And phoenix-tinder to this fierce renewal

That from such carbon can hydrate the jewel:

Till from the clear shield of the land will scale

The blackened cinder of that injured nail

For the new horn digests the blackened crust

That shrivels, of itself, from self-disgust,

Renounced by those same Marañons and Gassets

That gnawed and blackened first its pearly facets,

Which first they irritated and infected

But then with valiant honesty, rejected,

But which our health unsqueamishly devours

As valiant roots turn rubbish into flowers.

Our own clean hands accept the filth and dirt,

Off the green wound we peel the plastered shirt,

Wash the live ulcer, set the splintered bone,

And tend the sores as if they were our own,

Remembering offal was the food of saints

From which their lips could kiss the evil taints,

While the lewd kisser of the godless thug

Will turn good bread to weevils in his mug:

While spuds—to us, the magnates of the soil,

The alluvial nuggets of our sweat and toil—

Grilled as with frosts, reward his chilling spade

Thrice-honed upon the Minus-centigrade,

With no more relish than if with his hoe

He had sliced off his gnarled and grimy toe,

Whose limping toil provides (for yams and onions)

Kibes of the soil, and vegetable bunions,

Whose price and quality their journals paint

With lamer diatribe and splayed complaint:

But which, were they the all we had to sup with,

We could give thanks for, let alone put up with,

Since the bright Spain, the Spain we represent,

Digests their Spain, and with devout content

Says grace for every bunioned foot of land

That limps, so painful, to her open hand,

Pardons the filth and grime, accepts the stain,

And wipes it with her own bright locks of grain.

Less work, more comfort, and increasing dole,

Inspire the negative and graveward soul,

And from such grudging niggardness will hatch

As drab conditions, with complaints to match,

But those who thank their sires that they were born

And with the roosters praise the darkest morn,

Who ask no dole, who make their sport of loss,

And for their sofa clamour for a Cross,

Crying for gulfs to match against their might

And darknesses to exercise their light,—

Spirits of power and valour and delight

Who know that danger, suffering, and pain

The most of living ecstasy contain,

Thence to be wrestled for with might and main,

As purest radium from the hardest rocks

And proudest victories from the fiercest shocks—

When such as these upon the earth prevail

Her sister planets, turning as they sail,

See a strange glory on earth’s lighted face

To compensate the sorrow and disgrace

With which she blushes for that darker strain

And bears the bloody Charlotades of Cain.

And so must Spain to passing stars appear

Two-thirds illumed as in the lunar sphere

And all the rest besmeared with greed and lust,

But there a scythe of light the darkness reaping

And there a Sword with dented edges sweeping:

And often have I blest her humble dust

Sure of the sacred treasure in its keeping,

That holy, holy, holy was the rust

Wherein those twin Excaliburs were sleeping.

Remembering Lenin and his “Powerful Weapon”

You’ll find far less Banana peel to step on,

Invert their victories, transpose their labels,

And on his abject ruse you’ll turn the tables,

As here their boasted mission turns our own

To purge the country of the Moneyed Drone

And theirs the role they had prescribed for us

To stew in their own juice and raise a fuss,

For though with lies your hearing they belabour

Theirs is the Capital as ours the Labour:

They are the workless plutocrats, content

To sink their harvests fifty-five per cent,

And raise their prices to such eagle height

That profiteering fainted at the sight,

With them the deepest marks suggesting ploughs

Are furrows in their corrugated cows,

And, as their farming had gone worse to seed,

The fields consuming what the beasts should feed,

The windmills gone on strike, or, tick for tock,

Losing a marathon to the village clock:

But look at ours that with the Junkers race

And spill in flour what they devour in space

Whose sails invisible, with slumbrous tune,

Are scarce a blur upon the rising moon:

As for our crops—with such terrific might

The warrior scythe was never seen to fight!

On land, we win a seafight with our plough

Who shares to victory with her cruiser prow,

Of that famed cavalry to dim the feat

That riding on the ocean took a fleet,

Whose furrow heaving surges in the loam

Outstrips the snorting bowsprits of the foam,

Since on dry land her naval fight was hurled

Against the fleets and breadships of the world,

To raise more corn and lay more surplus by

Than the Red horde “collectivized” to die

And more to feed them as we forge along,

In war more valiant, as in work more strong,

Than they with all their treasuries could purchase

Or, pity-mongering, cadge from foreign churches,

Though churches easier than forts they’ll scathe

And sacrilege is their sole act of faith!

Theirs but the promises of what we bring

Who all their weight on Propaganda fling,

Wasting more steam on meeting and debate

Than we reserve in silence to create,

For “propaganda” rounds off all their scope

Though our Religion they proscribed as “dope”

Which never yet unfitted men for battle

Or caused them to neglect the crops and cattle

Like that cheap Vodka of the intellect

Which never save as poison took effect,

Like hemp-smoke to confound their acts with words

And breeding lice for rearing flocks and herds—

As in new-rescued lands we can determine

Their live-stock is confined to rats and vermin:

Prize cattle they can make of bugs and fleas

As of defeats their famous victories:

For Propaganda (Mystics of the Lie)

Becomes their Universe, their Earth and Sky,

Until their bluff, invented to deceive,

They are the only gudgeons to believe.

And where in Agricultural Reform

Were lists and figures ever seen to swarm

As there, devouring acres of good paper,

Their cyphers and statistics whirl and caper,

Like the mosquitos of their fevered area

With plagues of economical malaria,

Like stings their soaring prices come to fix,

Till Life’s a skeleton of rattling sticks

That jitters with delirium by the Styx—

Which multiplies the bureaucrats and clerks,

As fire with fire, to drive out Marx with Marx

Till all’s a chaos, remedy and itch

Confounded and involved to such a pitch,

Except to argue wildly which is which

There’s nothing, save to thieve while there’s a chance

And rent one’s future domicile in France.

For economics shun their laboured course,

But serve us out of habit like a horse,

To prove the economics of the camp

Worth all the sweated oil of Marx’s lamp,

One Quartermaster, come to feeding cities,

Worth fifty paid professors on Committees

One Cantinera, come to feeding villages,

Worth all the world of Vladimirs and Ilytches!

And honesty can save more time and pains

Than all the theories of Maynard Keynes,

Which, old and humble, like Aladdin’s lamp,

Yet feeds the city and sustains the camp,

And as Spain welcomes home her wandered half,

Slays for the prodigal the fatted calf.

While scores of paid professors on their Boards

Have emptied golden cities of their hoards,

To prove without a further waste of breath

That Bolshevism means decay and death

And like the Arian heresy of old

That thus its final paralytics rolled

Four hundred years after its birth was told,

Is but the Reformation come to roost

Four hundred years after its rage was loosed—

Its highest prophets in their windy pride

Anachronized by corporals on our side

Where Cuesta’s simple land-laws are applied,

Torpedoeing the Talmud-heavy bulk

Of Marx’s Capital, whose sodden hulk

(The Apocalypse of hate-hysteric toil)

Rainbows the wave with tons of midnight oil,

Meaningless hieroglyphics, whose oily hues

Enough to brilliantine the world of Jews,

Or (as we’ve seen) to set the world on fire,—

Exploded thus, and spilled upon its ire,

Can still the Storm, and make the waves expire.

For still where Marx’s influence is least,

Red fields with vestiges of grass are fleeced,

But where his lore we trample and oppose

Reviving Nature thanks us with the rose

And the live earth recovers from his blows—

This fat Cabestro of the starving kine

Had brought old Pharaoh’s nightmare into line,

But we supplied the answer to his dream

And drove along the heifers full of cream

With horns of plenty dropping oil and wine!

As Marx the land, so Freud to blast the mind

These creeping desert-makers were designed—

The one by famine to subdue our stomachs,

The one by formulas the mind to flummox,

And both to blast our sense of bad and good

Reducing life to terms of sex and food,

And give us over to their grasping kind

As footballs to be kicked about behind:

But their great error was to sap the breeds

That were to soldier for their ghastly creeds,—

The Russian, now a slave to doubt and fear,