THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
to sink into. After one of these scenes I wrote a poem which begins
with lines which capture, I think, a little of her vigor:
Madam, your face half hidden by your hair
Which hung in touselled patterns from the fair
Massively-active flesh, surrounded by great pillows
You were the largest of your bed's huge billows!
Reclining there, incarnate confidence,
You chid me for my lack of competence
In the half-curtained room. Warm shadows fell
Round you, like guardian ghosts. I did not tell
You of them, being sure that you
Would think this an aesthetic thing to do.
And most aesthetic was the mad March wind
Which r.ashly rapped against the window blind.
...
It seems to me now that the only work I did of any merit at this
time was all written in indignation. But this was not my idea of what
poetry should be. I shall now try to describe this because it is as far
from anything I could do or have done as from the modernism in
which I became plunged afterwards.
My aim was to create a verbal swoon, an enchanting music, an
imagery that entranced the senses, a poetry where one completely
lost oneself in a world beyond the world of actuality. You look out
of a window onto a lawn; beyond the lawn there is a stream running
parallel with the house and the horizon, and barring the horizon,
rising like a dark pillar whose top is dark against
.a
round fire--the
moon-is a poplar tree whose leaves, absorbent of the darkness, seem
soaked in music. In short lines, with unnoticed subtle rhyming, you
convey this in your poem which is light on mind and ear. My
aim
in poetry was the extension within imagery of the great '0' of a pure
invocation.
Once, many years after this, when I was travelling in Greece,
I dined out of doors at a restaurant on an island in the bay of
Chalchis. The tables were under the stars, and a few yards from
them there lay the flapping black flag of the sea, beyond which in
a ring all round the waters stood the ring of the mountains trans–
parent with a stillness like awareness of the whole past. At the table
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