ROSA DECIDUA

              “O Rose, thou art sick!

                    The invisible worm

               That flies in the night

                    In the howling storm

               Has found out thy bed

                    Of crimson joy,

               And his dark secret love

                    Does thy life destroy.”—Blake.

Rose of the World!

If so, then what a world!

What worm at its red heart lay curled

From the beginning? Plucked and torn and trampled

And utterly corrupt is she

That was the queen-flower unexampled

In gardens goodlier than Arcady.

O Thou! whose body was my lyre, whose soul

Lay on my mouth like a live coal!

This time thou hearest not my song; thine ears

Are stopped with worse than death;

And all this wasted breath

Of mine—those songs of six most memorable years

Of ecstasy and agony—may not attain

To charm thy being into love again. . . .

This is no tragedy of little tears.

My brain is hard and cold; there is no beat

Of its blood; there is no heat

Of sacred fire upon my lips to sing.

My heart is dead; I say that name thrice over;

Rose!—Rose!—Rose!—

Even as lover should call to lover;

There is no quickening,

No flood, no fount that flows;

No water wells from the dead spring.

My thoughts come singly, dry, contemptuous,

Too cold for hate: all I can say is that they come

From some dead sphere without me;

Singly they come, beats of a senseless drum

Jarred by a fool, harsh, unharmonious.

There is no sense within me or about me;

Yet each thought is most surely known

For a catastrophe.

No climax of a well-wrought tragedy!

Single and sterile.

                         I am here for naught.

I have no memory of the rose-red hours.

No fragrance of those days amid the flowers

Lingers; all’s drowned in the accursed stench

Of this damned present. The past years abort

And this is found. Foul waters drench

My earth. All’s filth. With what cold eye one scans

This body that was—so long since—two years! I wrench

My soul to say it—all a man’s

Delight. Come, look at it! This leaden skin

With ochre staining its amorphous grey;

All that elastic brilliance passed away;

Minute invading wrinkles where the flesh

Is soaked away by the foul thing within

Her soul; the bloom so faint and fresh

Smudged to a smoky glow as one may see

At sunset in the Factory lands; the lips

Thinned and their colour sickened into slate;

The eyes like common glass; the hair’s gloss dull;

The muscles gone, all pendulous with fat;

The breath that was more sweet than Lebanon

And all the flowers and honey and spice thereof

Ripe for my soul’s kiss, eagerly to cull,

Now like a corpse three weeks drowned, swollen by sun

And water and vermin. There she sways and stares,

And with the jaw dropped all awry—first swears,

Then lurches; then she slobbers unctuously:

“I am not old: I am quite beautiful;

How have I lost your love? 

Pitiful! Pitiful! Pitiful!

This is no tragedy of little tears.

This worm was in her blood

Lurking for thrice five years,

And now I see him—that old slime that leers

Where Bacchus smiles, that evil and averse

God that is wholly curse,

As He is wholly blessing to the wise.

This thing invertebrate, this sewer-flood,

Compact of treacheries, meannesses, and lies,

Horrible thirst, infamous beastliness,

Dirt and disease, so sottish wallowing,

Yet sensitive to pain so hideous

That sometimes he appears all pain, all fear,

All hate—so slavish, yet so fierce a king,

A tyrant to himself, insidious

And cunning as some sordid sorceress;

Incapable of action or control,

Yet a black gulph to drown so strong a soul! . . .

He lay close curled within my rose’s heart.

There is no blame; yet what avails all art?

See! I reel back beneath the blow of her breath

As she comes smiling to me: that disgust

Changes her drunken lust

Into a shriek of hate—half conscious still

(Beneath the obsession of the will)

Of all she was—before her death, her death!

So hell boils over in her, and she rages

—It seems through countless ages—

With all the vile abuse

That had degraded Glasgow’s grimiest stews,

With all the knowledge of despair

Striking me cunningly, striking everywhere,

Mutilating the corpse of my dead love

With such a savagery,

Intensity above

All understanding, that it bleeds again

As a corpse should bleed at the murderer’s touch!

Then, not content, she must needs smutch

All my past purifying pain,

Turning all life to a thing fouler than

Aught yet imaginable to man!

Who asks me for my tears?

She flings the body of my sweet dead child

Into my face with hell’s own epitaph,

Profanes that shrine

Of infinite love and infinite loss,

My empty shrine, the one shrine undefiled,

My one close-claspèd cross—

And hers as much as mine!

Profanes it with a hideous laugh

And a lie flung with a curse; and I must hear,

And must not stamp on the snake, because, forsooth

This was my love, my peace, my faith, my truth,

The rosebud of my youth!

It was—it is not—it can never be.

This would corrupt God’s body with a breath.

I see Him sicken and swoon; I see Him rot

Through, though His tabernacle be

Eternity.

This makes a man catch hold of death

Greedily like a harlot in the street

That plucks by the arm some sot.

Death shakes me off with a hoarse curse.

Tied to this woman, his beneficence

Were too like heaven—and heaven’s somehow to earn,

No doubt—no way that I know! Hell’s enough

If hell would only burn

And silence the one devil-word of love.

Ay! death slinks off.

I have a child that claims my life

To keep from knowledge of her mother’s fate,

To keep from heritage thereof,

To shield from the world’s scoff,

To watch, stamp out the seeds of madness in her.

God! that hast held me back from hate,

Be merciful to me a sinner

And ward me, warding her! As it is written:

Excepting Adonai build the house, they labour

In vain that build it. And Again:

Excepting Adonai keep the city,

The watchman watcheth but in vain.

God, if there be a God, be Thou my Neighbour;

And if that God have pity, have Thou pity!

For never man was smitten as I am smitten;

Nor from Time’s yesterday to Time’s to-morrow

Was there a sorrow like unto this sorrow!

How many hours was Christ upon the cross?

How many days in hell? But I have hung

From the day of infinite loss

Watching her degradation into dung

Three years.

Three years!

And now who asks me to shed tears?

Let a man pierce my side,

I warrant him nor blood nor water flows,

But such a poison as Locusta never

Distilled from toad, asp, viper, scorpion,

Nightshade, gall, orpiment, Jews’ hearts,

Old women’s tongues, by monstrous arts;

But this my poison drips, without endeavour,

From the mere soul of the world’s rose!

What alchemy of hell this ronyon

Venus has skill of!

                           Wonder that I live!

This has been like a bag-pipe drone to wail

Its monotone through high, low, fast and slow.

It has been like a secret cancer,

Forcing all servants of the life to give

Their work to the usurper; all its themes assail

The main word Life; they build their archipelago

Of poison in each sea where life was holy.

Their questions have no answer,

But all’s converted to the abominable

Soul-sickening thing that one is tied to. This is I

Just as God in His Nature, wholly

Involved therein, its tune, its motive, its quintessence.

There were no meaning in Spring’s aspen spell,

Where man’s sole treasury, the sky,

Made bankrupt of His presence.

Only, this God is a black fiend;

Of blood, the babe’s drink, weaned

And fattened on—what liquor and meat? Unnameable

By all the giant horrors that haunt hell!

These years I have watched her fade, my masterful love

And all-embracing pity strove

Like athletes in an amorous bout to make

Some child to tread upon that snake.

But ever the worm slipped, escaped; its spires

Here crushed, there rose the stronger for the pressure

That gave it purchase; keener flamed the fires

In its eyes triumphant. Now its soul asserts

Its master-pleasure;

The worm exerts

Its adult might, and in one bout

The spine snaps of that child of Love and Pity,

And mangled he falls out

Of the fight. Just so child Hercules

Strangled two serpents in his pretty

Red fists, achieved twelve labours, won to ease,

And was done down to death and madness by

The subtle poison that himself distilled.

So all the God in life is chilled

To a corpse. The informing one? God’s a cast clout

Of a leper! Leave me here, corruptest of earth’s whores

To scrape my sores!

Cry like a dog and run about the city!

There is no word left, now the deed is dead!

No thought of her is in me; I am a stranger

To all that dream of danger

And bliss that Rose was. The green shoots

Of life that spring in me are fed

Not even on the mire of her decay.

They spring from other roots.

Now I am cleansed of her, I am so to say

A man part paralysed. One limb is dead

In feeling as in motion. This remains

To ask: Will all catch death—how soon? This head

Excites its miserable brains

To think the word it knows by intellect

To be the right word—pity! Then reflect:

“Pitiful! Pitiful! most pitiful!

The pity of it! Think of the love past,

Blossoms too beautiful!

Think of the hardships conquered comrade-wise!

Think of the babe and its most piteous end!”

—All these things sound like lies.

I do not comprehend

Anything of them—“Pity! pity! pity!”

’Tis like the dripping of some stagnant rain

From the housetops of a ruined city

Upon the flagstones. Not one petal clings

Upon the stalk of life or memory. Stain

Not one pale thought with blushes; my soul’s dead

As a corpse flung out of the tideway on

The stinking flats of London mud. The springs

Are dry beyond appeal; dull grey like lead

(And heavier) is my soul’s carrion.

If she came pleasing now, pure passionate, and sane,

I would not take her back again.

I am warned—that’s one word. Let my own back feel the lash!

All power of love is burnt right through to ash.

Bray it in a mortar, mix with gall and ink,

And give it to the children for a drink!

I’ll wait till she is dead, to bring those tears.

I doubt not in the garden of my heart
Whence she is torn that flowers will bloom again.

May those be flowers of weeping, flowers of art.

Flowers of great tenderness and pain,

Broad lilied meers

Lying in a lonely leafless forest

Silent and motionless beneath the moon.

I feel my weakness, O thou soul that soarest

Into a heaven beyond imagining

On the unfaltering wing.

Of the magic swan! I know this tune

Should swell to a strong note, a triumph note

Blared through a trumpet’s throat

To tell the world I am no coward, or else

Sob in sweet minor, soft as Asmodel’s

Chant to the nightingale. I am so wrecked, so rent

That one seems brag, the other sentiment.

I cannot leave the present; I will not pose

There lies the rotten rose

And stinks. That is the truth; the rest is gloss.

My loss was total loss.

So close that rose lay to my heart, its fall

Was the catastrophe of all.

Now call me callous! Pass me, prigs, and sneer

At the base soul that could not bear its cross!

I say that infinite loss is infinite loss,

That tears are trivial, tears are happiness,

That this blind ache is God’s last punishment

For love; that all things in that one thing shent

Are damned, that had I loved her less

I could have prated in some honeyed strain.

Taking a subtle pleasure in my pain.

It is my bulk, the mass of my intent,

That makes the ruin abject. I had sung

Some partial earthquake; here the universe

Crashes with one great curse,

Whelming the singer and the song. My tongue

Is palsied; only this chaotic clash

Of curses echoes the dire crash.

And after all the roar, there steals a strain

At last of tuneless, infinite pain;

And all my being is one throb

Of anguish, and one inarticulate sob

Catches my throat. All these vain voices die,

And all these thunders venomously hurled

Stop. My head strikes the floor; one cry, the old cry,

Strikes at the sky in its exquisite agony:

Rose! Rose o’ th’ World!