Priapus or Siva.

  CONCEIT

  IT is conceit that kills us

  and makes us cowards instead of gods.

  Under the great Command: Know thyself, and that thou art mortal!

  we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important,

  fatally entangled in the Laocoon coils of our conceit.

  Now we have to admit we can’t know ourselves, we can only

  know about ourselves.

  And I am not interested to know about myself any more

  I only entangle myself in the knowing.

  Now let me be myself,

  now let me be myself, and flicker forth

  now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.

  MAN IS MORE THAN HOMO SAPIENS

  MAN is not quite a man

  unless he has his pure moments, when he is surpassing.

  I saw an angry Italian seize an irritating little official by the throat

  and all but squeeze the life out of him:

  and Jesus himself could not have denied that at that moment

  the angry man

  was a god, in godliness pure as Christ, beautiful

  but perhaps Ashtaroth, perhaps Siva, perhaps Huitzilopochtli

  with the dark and gleaming beauty of the messageless gods.

  SELF-CONSCIOUS PEOPLE

  O ARE you tangled up in yourself

  poor little man, poor little man!

  Is she tangled up in herself then

  poor woman, poor woman!

  But beware!

  They are like cats with unclean claws, tangled up in nets,

  and if you try to get them out

  they will tear you terribly, and give you blood-poisoning.

  TWO WAYS OF LIVING AND DYING

  WHILE people live the life

  they are open to the restless skies, and streams flow in and out

  darkly from the fecund cosmos, from the angry red sun, from

  the moon

  up from the bounding earth, strange pregnant streams, in and

  out of the flesh,

  and man is an iridescent fountain, rising up to flower

  for a moment godly, like Baal or Krishna, or Adonis, or Balder,

  or Lucifer.

  But when people are only self-conscious and self-willed

  they cannot die, their corpse still runs on,

  while nothing comes from the open heaven, from earth, from

  the sun and moon

  to them, nothing, nothing;

  only the mechanical power of self-directed energy

  drives them on and on, like machines,

  on and on, and their triumph in mere motion

  full of friction, full of grinding, full of danger to the gentle passengers

  of growing life,

  but on and on, on and on, till the friction wears them out

  and the machine begins to wobble

  and with hideous shrieks of steely rage and frustration

  the worn-out machine at last breaks down:

  it is finished, its race is over.

  So self-willed, self-centred, self-conscious people die

  the death of nothingness, worn-out machines, kaput!

  But when living people die in the ripeness of their time

  terrible and strange the god lies on the bed, -wistful, coldly wonderful,

  beyond us, now beyond, departing with that purity

  that flickered forth in the best hours of life,

  when the man was himself, so a god in his singleness,

  and the woman was herself, never to be duplicated, a goddess there

  gleaming her hour in life as she now gleams in death

  and departing inviolate, nothing can lay hand on her,

  she who at her best hours was herself, warm, flickering, herself,

  therefore a goddess,

  and who now draws slowly away, cold, the wistful goddess receding.

  SO LET ME LIVE

  So let me live that I may die

  eagerly passing over from the entanglement of life

  to the adventure of death, in eagerness

  turning to death as I turn to beauty

  to the breath, that is, of new beauty unfolding in death.

  GLADNESS OF DEATH

  OH death

  about you I know nothing, nothing —

  about the afterwards

  as a matter of fact, we know nothing.

  yet of death, oh death

  also I know so much about you

  the knowledge is within me, without being a matter of fact.

  And so I know

  after the painful, painful experience of dying

  there comes an after-gladness, a strange joy

  in a great adventure

  oh the great adventure of death, where Thomas Cook cannot

  guide us.

  I have always wanted to be as the flowers are

  so unhampered in their living and dying,

  and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.

  I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted

  there among the dark sun-rays of death.

  I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death

  to something flowery and fulfilled, and with a strange sweet perfume.

  Men prevent one another from being men

  but in the great spaces of death

  the winds of the afterwards kiss us into blossom of manhood.

  HUMANITY NEEDS PRUNING

  HUMANITY needs pruning

  It is like a vast great tree with a great lot of sterile, dead.

  rotting wood

  and an amount of fungoid and parasitic growth.

  The tree of humanity needs pruning, badly,

  it needs thoroughly pruning, not as in the late war, blasting

  with unintelligent and evil destruction

  but pruning, severely, intelligently and ruthlessly pruning.

  The tree of human existence needs badly pruning

  or the whole tree may fall rotten.

  SELF-SACRIFICE

  SELF-SACRIFICE, after all, is a wrong and mistaken idea.

  It cannot be anything but wrong to sacrifice

  good, healthy, natural feelings, instincts, passions or desires,

  just as it cannot be anything but wrong to cut the throats

  of doves for Venus, or steers for Hermes,

  if it is merely Venus or Hermes you are thinking of.

  Venus would rather have live doves than dead, if you want to

  make an offering.

  If you want to make her an offering, let the doves fly from

  her altar.

  But what we may sacrifice, if we call it sacrifice, from the self,

  are all the obstructions to life, self-importance, self-conceit,

  egoistic self-will,

  or all the ugly old possessions that make up the impediments

  of life,

  ugly old furniture, ugly old books, ugly old buildings, ugly old

  “ art,”

  anything that belongs to us, and is ugly and an impediment

  to the free motion of life

  sacrifice that to the bright gods, and satisfy the destructive instinct.

  SHEDDING OF BLOOD

  “ WITHOUT shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”

  What does it mean?

  Does it mean that life which has gone ugly and unliving is sin

  and the blood of it must be spilt?

  O spill the blood, not of your firstling lamb, without spot or blemish,

  but kill the scabbed and ugly lamb, that spreads contagion.

  O slay, not the bright proud life that is in you, that can be happy,

  but the craven, the cowardly, the creeping you, that can only

  be unhappy, kill it, the unliving thing.

  O sacrifice, not that which is noble and generous and

  spontaneous in humanity

  but that which is mean and base and squalid and degenerate,

  destroy it, shed its unclean blood, kill it, put it out of existence.

  O shed the unclean, mean, cowardly, greedy, egoistic, de —

  generate blood

  and let mankind make new blood, fresh and bright.

  THE OLD IDEA OF SACRIFICE

  THE old idea of sacrifice was this:

  that blood of the lower life must be shed

  for the feeding and strengthening of the handsomer, fuller life.

  O when the old world sacrificed a ram

  it was to the gods who make us splendid

  and it was for a feast, a feast of meat, for men and maids

  on a day of splendour, for the further splendour of being men.

  It was the eating up of little lives,

  even doves, even small birds

  into the dance and splendour of a bigger life.

  There is no such thing as sin.

  There is only life and anti-life.

  And sacrifice is the law of life which enacts

  that little lives must be eaten up into the dance and splendour

  of bigger lives, with due reverence and acknowledgement.

  SELF-SACRIFICE

  SELF-SACRIFICE is perhaps the vilest deed a man can do.

  The self that we are, at its best, is all that we are

  is the very individual flame of life itself

  which is the man’s pure self.

  And to sacrifice that, to anything or anybody whatsoever

  is the vilest cowardice and treachery.

  Yet a woman can add her flame to a man’s

  or a man can add his flame to the flame of another man

  as a gift of gladness, seeing the glamour of life go up

  swifter and higher and brighter, for the yielding and the

  adding together.

  I HEARD A LITTLE CHICKEN CHIRP

  I HEARD a little chicken chirp:

  My name is Thomas, Thomas Earp!

  And I can neither paint nor write

  I only can set other people right.

  All people that can write or paint

  do tremble under my complaint.

  For I am a chicken, and I can chirp,

  and my name is Thomas, Thomas Earp.

  CROSS, COARSE, HIDEOUS

  (Police description of my pictures.)

  LATELY I saw a sight most quaint:

  London’s lily-like policemen faint

  in virgin outrage as they viewed

  the nudity of a Lawrence nude!

  MR SQUIRE

  Dearly-beloved Mr Squire

  so long as you lead the gawky choir

  of critical cherubs that chirrup and pipe

  in the weekly press their self-satisfied swipe.

  Oh London’s Mercury, Sunday-School Squire

  so long as you tune your turn-turn lyre

  with its tinkle-winkle and tweeddle-dee

  to the lesser fry in the hierarchy.

  So long will they lift their impertinent voices

  and chirrup their almost indecent noises

  almost as empty as belching or hiccup

  in grand chorale to your monthly kick-up.

  So now we beg you, Mr Squire

  do now once forever, retire

  and leave the critical piggy-wiggies.

  LET THERE BE LIGHT!

  IF ever there was a beginning

  there was no god in it

  there was no Verb

  no Voice

  no Word.

  There was nothing to say:

  Let there be light!

  All that story of Mr God switching on day

  is just conceit.

  Just man’s conceit!

  — Who made the Sun?

  — My child, I cannot tell a lie,

  I made it!

  George Washington’s Grandpapa!

  All we can honestly imagine in the beginning

  is the incomprehensible plasm of life, of creation struggling

  and becoming light.

  GOD IS BORN

  THE history of the cosmos

  is the history of the struggle of becoming.

  When the dim flux of unformed life

  struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself,

  and broke at last into light and dark

  came into existence as light,

  came into existence as cold shadow —

  then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight.

  Behold, God is born!

  He is bright light!

  He is pitch dark and cold!

  And in the great struggle of intangible chaos

  when, at a certain point, a drop of water began to downwards

  and a breath of vapour began to wreathe up

  Lo again the shudder of bliss through all the atoms!

  Oh, God is born!

  Behold, he is born wet!

  Look, He hath movement upward! He spirals!

  And so, in the great aeons of accomplishment and debacle

  from time to time the wild crying of every electron:

  Lo! God is born.

  When sapphires cooled out of molten chaos:

  See, God is born! He is blue, he is deep blue, he is for ever blue!

  When gold lay shining threading the cooled-off rock:

  God is born! God is born! bright yellow and ductile He is born.

  When the little eggy amoeba emerged out of foam and nowhere

  then all the electrons held their breath:

  Ach! Ach! Now indeed God is born! He twinkles within.

  When from a world of mosses and of ferns

  at last the narcissus lifted a tuft of five-point stars

  and dangled them in the atmosphere,

  then every molecule of creation jumped and clapped its hands:

  God is born! God is born perfumed and dangling and with a

  little cup!

  Throughout the aeons, as the lizard swirls his tail finer than water,

  as the peacock turns to the sun, and could not be more splendid,

  as the leopard smites the small calf with a spangled paw, perfect,

  the universe trembles: God is born! God is here!

  And when at last man stood on two legs and wondered,

  then there was a hush of suspense at the core of every electron:

  Behold, now very God is born!

  God Himself is born!

  And so we see, God is not

  until he is born.

  And also we see

  there is no end to the birth of God.

  THE WHITE HORSE

  THE youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on

  and the horse looks at him in silence.

  They are so silent they are in another world.

  FLOWERS AND MEN

  FLOWERS achieve their own floweriness and it is a miracle.

  Men don’t achieve their own manhood, alas, oh alas! alas!

  All I want of you, men and women,

  all I want of you

  is that you shall achieve your beauty

  as the flowers do.

  Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages.

  Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem?

  Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?

  ... as the gentian and the daffodil. . . .

  Tell me! tell me! is there in you a beauty to compare

  to the honeysuckle at evening now

  pouring out his breath.

  PRAYER

  GIVE me the moon at my feet

  Put my feet upon the crescent, like a Lord!

  O let my ankles be bathed in moonlight, that I may go

  sure and moon-shod, cool and bright-footed

  towards my goal.

  For the sun is hostile, now

  his face is like the red lion,

  SHIP OF DEATH

  I SING of autumn and the falling fruit

  and the long journey towards oblivion.

  The apples falling like great drops of dew

  to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

  Have you built your ship of death, oh, have you?

  Build then your ship of death, for you will need it!

  Can man his own quietus make

  with a bare bodkin?

  With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make

  a bruise or break of exit for his life

  but is that a quietus, oh tell me, is it quietus?

  Quietus is the goal of the long journey

  the longest journey towards oblivion.

  Slips out the soul, invisible one, wrapped still

  in the white shirt of the mind’s experiences

  and folded in the dark-red, unseen

  mantle of the body’s still mortal memories.

  Frightened and alone, the soul slips out of the house

  or is pushed out

  to find himself on the crowded, arid margins of existence.

  Oh, it is not so easy, I tell you it is not so easy

  to set softly forth on the longest journey, the longest journey.

  It is easy to be pushed out of the silvery city of the body

  through any breach in the wall,

  thrust out on to the grey grey beaches of shadow

  the long marginal stretches of existence, crowded with lost souls

  that intervene between our tower and the shaking sea of the beyond.

  Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time

  and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.

  Once outside the gate of the walled silvery life of days

  once outside, upon the grey marsh beaches, where lost souls moan

  in millions, unable to depart

  having no boat to launch upon the shaken, soundless