Classic and Contemporary Poetry
GOLD COAST CUSTOMS, by EDITH SITWELL Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: One fantee wave Last Line: For the fires of god go marching on. Subject(s): Customs, Social; Gold Coast, Africa | ||||||||
In Ashantee, a hundred years ago, the death of any rich or important person was followed by several days of national ceremonies, during which the utmost licence prevailed, and slaves and poor persons were killed that the bones of the deceased might be laved with human blood. These ceremonies were called Customs. ONE fantee wave Is grave and tall As brave Ashantee's Thick mud wall. Munza rattles his bones in the dust, Lurking in murk because he must. Striped black and white Is the squealing light; The dust brays white in the market place, Dead powder spread on a black skull's face. Like monkey skin Is the sea -- one sin Like a weasel is nailed to bleach on the rocks Where the eyeless mud screeched fawning, mocks At a negro that wipes His knife . . . dug there A bugbear bellowing Bone dared rear -- A bugbear bone that bellows white As the ventriloquist sound of light, It rears at his head-dress of felted black hair The one humanity clinging there -- His eyeless face whitened like black and white bones And his beard of rusty Brown grass cones. Hard blue and white Courie shells (the light Grown hard) outline The leopardskin musty Leaves that shine With an animal smell both thick and fusty. One house like a ratskin Mask flaps fleet In the sailor's tall Ventriloquist street Where the rag houses flap -- Hiding a gap. Here, tier on tier, Like a black box rear In the flapping slum Beside Death's docks. I did not know this meaner Death Meant this: that the bunches of nerves still dance And caper among these slums, and prance. "Mariners, put your bones to bed!" But at Lady Bamburgher's parties each head, Grinning, knew it had left its bones In the mud with the white skulls . . . only the grin Is left, strings of nerves, and the drum-taut skin. When the sun in the empty Sky is high In his dirty brown and white Birdskin dress -- He hangs like a skull With a yellow dull Face made of clay (Where tainted, painted, the plague-spots bray) To hide where the real face rotted away. So our wormskin and paper masks still keep, Above the rotting bones they hide, The marks of the Plague whereof we died: The belief, The grief, The love, Or the grin Of the shapeless worm-soft unshaping Sin -- Unshaping till no more the beat of the blood Can raise up the body from endless mud Though the hell-fires cold As the worm, and old, Are painted upon each unshaped form -- No more man, woman, or beast to see -- But the universal, devouring Worm. When the sun of dawn looks down on the shrunken Heads, drums of skin, and the dead men drunken, I only know one half of my heart Lies in that terrible coffin of stone, My body that stalks through the slum alone. And that half of my heart That is in your breast You gave for meat In the sailor's street To the rat that had only my bones to eat. But those hardened hearts That roll and sprawl, In a cowl of foul blind monkey-skin, Lest the whips of the light crash roaring in -- Those hearts that roll Down the phantom street They have for their beat The cannibal drums And the cries of the slums, And the Bamburgher parties -- they have them all! One high house flaps . . . taps Light's skin drum -- Monkey-like shrunk On all fours now come The parties' sick ghosts, each hunting himself -- Black gaps beneath an ape's thick pelt, Chasing a rat, Their soul's ghost fat Through the negro swamp, Slum hovel's cramp, Of Lady Bamburgher's parties above With the latest grin, and the latest love, And the latest game: To show the shame Of the rat-fat soul to the grinning day With even the ratskin flayed away. Now, a thick cloud floating Low o'er the lake, Millions of flies Begin to awake, With the animation Of smart conversation: From Bedlam's madness the thick gadflies Seek for the broken statue's eyes. Where the mud and the murk Whispering lurk: "From me arises everything, The negro's louse The armadillo, Munza's bone and his peccadillo," Where flaps degraded The black and sated slack macerated And antiquated Beckoning negress Nun of the shade, And the rickety houses Rock and rot, Lady Bamburgher airs That foul plague-spot Her romantic heart. From the cannibal mart, That smart Plague-cart, Lady Bamburgher rolls where the foul news-sheet And the shambles for souls are set in the street. And stuck in front Of this world-tall Worm, Stuck in front Of this world's confession -- Like something rolled Before a procession, Is the face, a flimsy wormskin thing That someone has raked From the low plague-pit As a figure-head For Corruption dead, And a mask for the universal Worm. Her apeskin yellow Tails of hair Clung about her bone-white bare Eyeless mask that cackled there: The Worm's mask hid Her eyeless mud, Her shapeless love, The plot to escape From the God-ordained shape. And her soul, the cannibal Amazon's mart, Where in squealing light And clotted black night On the monkey-skin black and white striped dust they Cackle and bray To the murdered day, And the Amazon queen With a bone-black face Wears a mask with an apeskin beard; she grinds Her male child's bones in a mortar, binds Him for food, and the people buy. For this Hidden behind The Worm's mask grown White as a bone Where eyeholes rot wide And are painted for sight, And the little mouth red as a dead Plague-spot On that white mask painted to hide Death's rot, For this painted Plague-cart's Heart, for this Slime of the Worm that paints her kiss And the dead men's bones round her throat and wrist, The half of my heart that lay in your breast Has fallen away To rot and bray With the painted mud through the eyeless day. The dust of all the dead can blow Backwards and forwards, to and fro To cover the half of my heart with death's rot, Yet the dust of that other half comes not To this coffin of stone that stalks through the slum Though love to you now is the deaf Worm's lust That, cloven in halves, will reunite Foulness to deadness in the dust And chaos of the enormous night. How far is our innocent paradise, The blue-striped sand, Bull-bellowing band Of waves, and the great gold suns made wise By the dead days and the horizons grand. Can a planet tease With its great gold train, Walking beside the pompous main -- That great gold planet the heat of the Sun Where we saw black Shadow, a black man, run, So a negress dare Wear long gold hair? The negress Dorothy one sees Beside the caverns and the trees Where her parasol Throws a shadow tall As a waterfall -- The negress Dorothy still feels The great gold planet tease her brain. And dreaming deep within her blood Lay Africa like the dark in the wood; For Africa is the unhistorical Unremembering, unrhetorical Undeveloped spirit involved In the conditions of nature -- Man, That black image of stone hath delved On the threshold where history began. Now under the cannibal Sun is spread The black rhinoceros-hide of the mud For endlessness and timelessness . . . dead Grass creaks like a carrion-bird's voice, rattles, Squeaks like a wooden shuttle. Battles Have worn this deserted skeleton black As empty chain armour . . . lazily back With only the half of its heart it lies, With the giggling mud devouring its eyes, Naught left to fight But the black clotted night In its heart, and ventriloquist squealing light. But lying beneath the giggling mud I thought there was something living, the bray Of the eyeless mud can not betray -- Though it is buried beneath black bones Of the fetiches screeching like overtones Of the light, as they feel the slaves' spilt blood. In tiers like a box Beside the docks The negro prays, The negro knocks. "Is anyone there?" His mumblings tear Nothing but paper walls, and the blare Of the gaping capering empty air. The cannibal drums still roll in the mud To the bones of the king's mother laved in blood And the trophies with long black hair, shrunken heads That drunken shrunk upon tumbled beds. The negro rolls His red eyeballs, Prostrates himself. The negro sprawls; His God is but a flat black stone Upright upon a squeaking bone. The negro's dull Red eyeballs roll. . . . The immortality of the soul Is but black ghosts that squeak through the hole That once seemed eyes in Munza's skull. This is his god: The cannibal sun On bones that played For evermore, And the rusty roar Of the ancient Dead, And the squealing rat The soul's ghost fat. So Lady Bamburgher's Shrunken Head, Slum hovel, is full of the rat-eaten bones Of a fashionable god that lived not Ever, but still has bones to rot: A bloodless and an unborn thing That cannot wake, yet cannot sleep, That makes no sound, that cannot weep, That hears all, bears all, cannot move -- It is buried so deep Like a shameful thing In that plague-spot heart, Death's last dust-heap. * * * * * A tall house flaps In the canvas street, Down in the wineshop The Amazons meet With the tall abbess Of the shade . . . A ghost in a gown Like a stiff brigade Watches the sailor With a guitar Lure the wind From the islands far. Oh far horizons and bright blue wine And majesty of the seas that shine, Bull-bellowing waves that ever fall Round the god-like feet and the goddess tall! A great yellow flower With the silence shy To the wind from the islands Sighs "I die." At the foot of the steps Like the navy-blue ghost Of a coiling negro, In dock slums lost, (The ghost, haunting steamers And cocktail bars, Card-sharpers, schemers And Pullman cars) A ripple rose With mud at its root And weeping kissed A statue's foot. In the sailor's tall Ventriloquist street The calico dummies Flap and meet; Calculate: "Sally go Pick up a sailor." Behind that facade The worm is a jailer. "I cannot stiffen . . . I left my bones Down in the street: no overtones Of the murdered light can join my dust To my black bones pressed in the House of Lust. Only my feet still walk in the street; But where is my heart and its empty beat? Starved silly Sally, you dilly and dally, The dummies said when I was a girl. The rat deserts a room that is bare, But Want, a cruel rat gnawing there Ate to the heart, all else was gone, Nothing remained but Want alone. So now I'm a gay girl, a calico dummy, With nothing left alive but my feet That walk up and down in the Sailor's Street. Behind the bawdy hovels like hoardings Where harridans peer from a grovelling boarding House, the lunatic Wind still shakes My empty rag-body, nothing wakes; The wind like a lunatic in a fouled Nightgown, whipped those rags and howled. Once I saw it come Through the canvas slum, Rattle and beat what seemed a drum, Rattle and beat it with a bone. O Christ, that bone was dead, alone. Christ, Who will speak to such ragged Dead As me, I am dead, alone and bare, They expose me still to the grinning air, I shall never gather my bones and my dust Together (so changed and scattered, lost . . .) So I can be decently buried. What is that whimpering like a child That this mad ghost beats like a drum in the air? The heart of Sal That once was a girl And now is a calico thing to loll Over the easy steps of the slum Waiting for something dead to come." From Rotten Alley and Booble Street The beggars crawl to starve near the meat Of the reeling appalling cannibal mart And Lady Bamburgher, smart Plague-cart. Red rag face and a cough that tears They creep through the mud of the docks from their lairs; And when the dog-whining dawn light Nosed for their hearts, whined in fright, With a sly high animal Whimpering, half-frightened call To worlds outside our consciousness It finds no heart within their dress. The Rat has eaten That and beaten Hope and love and memory, At last, and even the will to die. But what is the loss? For you cannot sell The heart to those that have none for Hell To fatten on . . . or that cheap machine, And its beat would make springs for the dancing feet Of Lady Bamburgher down in the street, Of her dogs that nose out each other's sin, And grin, and whine, and roll therein. Against the Sea-wall are painted signs "Here for a shilling a sailor dines." Each Rag-and-Bone Is propped up tall (Lest in death it fall) Against the Sea-wall. Their empty mouths are sewed up whole Lest from hunger they gape and cough up their soul. The arms of one are stretched out wide . . . How long, since our Christ was crucified? Rich man Judas, Brother Cain, The rich men are your worms that gain The air through seething from your brain; Judas, mouldering in your old Coffin body, still undying As the Worm, where you are lying With no flesh for warmth, but gold For flesh, for warmth, for sheet, Now you are fleshless, too, as these That starve and freeze; Is your gold hard as Hell's huge polar street, Is the universal blackness of Hell's day so cold? * * * * * When, creeping over The Sailor's street Where the houses like ratskin Masks flap, meet Never across the murdered bone Of the sailor, the whining overtone Of dawn sounds, slaves Rise from their graves, Where in the corpse-sheet night they lay Forgetting the mutilating day, Like the unborn child in its innocent sleep. Ah Christ, the murdered light must weep -- (Christ that takest away the sin Of the world, and the rich man's bone-dead grin) The light must weep Seeing that sleep And those slaves rise up in their death-chains, part The light from the eyes The hands from the heart, Since their hearts are flesh for the tall And sprawling Reeling appalling Cannibal mart, But their hands and head Are machines to breed Gold for the old and the greedy Dead. I have seen the murdered God look through the eyes Of the drunkard's smirched Mask as he lurched O'er the half of my heart that lies in the street Neath the dancing fleas and the foul news-sheet. Where, a black gap flapping, A white skin drum The cannibal houses Watch this come -- Lady Bamburgher's party; for the plan Is a prize for those that on all fours ran Through the rotting slum Till those who come Could never guess from the mudcovered shapes Which are the rich or the mired dire apes As they run where the souls, dirty paper, are blown In the hour before dawn, through this long hell of stone. Perhaps if I too lie down in the mud, Beneath tumbrils rolling And mad skulls galloping Far from their bunches of nerves that dance And caper among these slums and prance, Beneath the noise of that hell that rolls I shall forget the shrunken souls The eyeless mud squealing "God is dead," Starved men (bags of wind), and the harlot's tread, The heaven turned into monkey-hide By Lady Bamburgher's dancing fleas, Her rotting parties and death-slack ease, And the dead men drunken (The only tide) Blown up and down And tossed through the town Over the half of my heart that lies, Deep down, in this meaner Death with cries. The leaves of black hippopotamus-hide Black as the mud Cover the blood And the rotting world. Do we smell and see That sick thick smoke from London burning, Gomorrah turning Like worms in the grave, The Bedlam daylights murderous roar, Those pillars of fire the drunkard and whore, Dirty souls boiled in cannibal cookshops to paper To make into newspapers, flags? . . . They caper Like gaping apes. Foul fires we see, For Bedlam awakes to reality. The drunken burning, The skin drums galloping, In their long march still parched for the sky, The Rotten Alleys where beggars groan And the beggar and his dog share a bone; The rich man Cain that hides within His lumbering palaces where Sin Through the eyeless holes of Day peers in, The murdered heart that all night turns From small machine to shapeless Worm With hate, and like Gomorrah burns -- These put the eyes of Heaven out, These raise all Hell's throats to a shout, These break my heart's walls toppling in, And like a universal sea The nations of the Dead crowd in. Bahunda, Banbangala, Barumbe, Bonge, And London fall . . . rolling human skin drums Surrounded by long black hair, I hear Their stones that fall, Their voices that call, Among the black and the bellowing bones. But yet when the cannibal Sun is high The sightless mud Weeps tears, a sigh, To rhinoceros-hided leaves: "Ah why So sightless, earless, voiceless, I?" The mud has at least its skulls to roll; But here as I walk, no voices call, Only the stones and the bones that fall; But yet if only one soul would whine, Rat-like from the lowest mud, I should know That somewhere in God's vast love it would shine; But even the rat-whine has guttered low. I saw the Blind like a winding-sheet Tossed up and down through the blind man's street Where the dead plague-spot Of the spirit's rot On the swollen thick houses Cries to the quick, Cries to the dark soul that lies there and dies In hunger and murk, and answers not. Gomorrah's fires have washed my blood -- But the fires of God shall wash the mud Till the skin drums rolling The slum cries sprawling And crawling Are calling "Burn thou me!" Though Death has taken And pig-like shaken Rooted and tossed The rags of me. Yet the time will come To the heart's dark slum When the rich man's gold and the rich man's wheat Will grow in the street, that the starved may eat, -- And the sea of the rich will give up its dead -- And the last blood and fire from my side will be shed. For the fires of God go marching on. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BUCOLIC COMEDY: EARLY SPRING by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: FLEECING TIME by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: FOX TROT by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: KING COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR MAID by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SERENADE by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPINNING SONG by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: SPRING by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE BEAR by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE DOLL by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: THE FOX; FOR ANN PEARN by EDITH SITWELL BUCOLIC COMEDY: WHY by EDITH SITWELL ELEGY: THE GHOST WHOSE LIPS WERE WARM; FOR GEOFFREY GORER by EDITH SITWELL |
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