Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, VARIATIONS ON A THEME: ELEGY ON DEAD FASHION; TO THOMAS BALSTON, by EDITH SITWELL


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

VARIATIONS ON A THEME: ELEGY ON DEAD FASHION; TO THOMAS BALSTON, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Queen venus' old historians seem like bees
Last Line: Some memory of what I was, and weep.


QUEEN VENUS' old historians seem like bees
That suck their honey from the thick lime-trees;
Behind their honeyed lattices all day,
As murmurous as thick-leaved lime-trees, they

Dream cells of Time away in murmuring o'er
The talk of little people gone before,
Within their palaces until gold eves
Bring them to windows in the tree-tops' leaves.

Manteaux espagnoles by the water's sheen,
Where trees resemble a great pelerine,
Are spread about the groups upon the lawns
Smooth as an almond's husk, or coat of fawns.

And cavaliers and ladies on the grass
Watch Chloe and young Damon as they pass, --
The shepherdess that runs from her swain's kiss,
Through leafy nets in a gown a l'Amadis

That rustles like the trembling evening,
Which falling on the lawns and brakes will bring
Roucoulement of doves, and veiled belles
Preening their cloaks of cashmere tourterelles.

Oh, voices speaking by the waterfall!
Heroic statues cast a shadow tall,
And rustic faces where long water runs
Are now transformed to gold five-petalled suns.

But the historians murmur still like bees:
"How old is Venus? older than the trees,
Does she remember still the ancient bliss,
Grown dead and rotten, of Adonis' kiss?"

Through mulberry trees a candle's thick gold thread --,
So seems the summer sun to the sad Dead;
That cackling candle's loud cacophonies
Will wake not Plato, Aristophanes,

For all their wisdom. There in the deep groves
They must forget Olympus and their loves,
Lying beneath the coldest flower we see
On the young green-blooming strawberry.

The nymphs are dead like the great summer roses,
Only an Abyssinian wind dozes;
Cloyed with late honey are his dark wings' sheens,
Yet, once on these lone crags, nymphs bright as queens

Walked with elegant footsteps through light leaves,
Where only elegiac air now grieves, --
For the light leaves are sere and whisper dead
Echoes of elegances lost and fled.

Queen Thetis wore pelisses of tissue
Of marine blue or violet, or deep blue,
Beside the softest flower-bells of the seas.
In winter, under thick swan-bosomed trees

The colours most in favour were marine,
Blue Louise, gris bois, grenate, myrtle green;
Beside the ermine bells of the lorn foam --
Those shivering flower-bells -- nymphs light-footed roam

No more, nor walk within vast, bear-furred woods
Where cross owls mocked them from their leafy hoods,
And once, the ermine leaves of the cold snow
Seemed fashion leaves of eighty years ago. --

When first as thin as young Prince Jamie's plaid
The tartan leaves upon the branches laid
Showed feathered flowers as brown as any gannet,
And thin as January or as Janet, --

Chione, Cleopatra, Boreas' daughters
Walked beside the stream's drake-plumaged waters
In crinolines of plaided sarsenet,
Scotch caps, where those drake-curling waters wet

Their elegant insteps. -- Household nymphs must wear
For humble tasks the ponceau gros d'hiver, --
(Tisiphone the Fury, like a dire
Wind raising up Balmoral towers of fire).

Another wind's small drum through thin leaves taps,
And Venus' children wearing their Scotch caps
Or a small toque Hongroise that is round-brimmed,
And with a wing from Venus' pigeons trimmed,

Run now with hoops and dolls they call "cher coeur,"
Chase Cupid in his jacket artilleur,
Play on the cliffs where like the goats' thick locks
The coarse grass grows, and clamber on the rocks.

Above the forest, whence he shot the does,
Was Jupiter's vast shooting-box of snows --
His blunderbuss's ancient repercussions
Fired but pears and apples, furred as Russians.

He threw his gun down and began to curse,
When up ran Venus' children with their nurse:
"See, Grandpapa, rocks like Balmoral's towers
Held still these brown and gannet-plumaged flowers."

Then underneath the hairy and the bestial
Skies of winter ripening, a celestial
Bucolic comedy of subtle meaning
Grew with rough summer suns, until with preening

Of soft bird-breasted leaves, again we knew
The secret of how hell and heaven grew.
Where walked great Jupiter, and like a peasant
Shot the partridge, grouse, and hare, and pheasant,

In the gods' country park there was a farm
Where all the gentle beasts came to no harm,
Left to run wild. And there in that great wood
Was Juno's dairy, cold as any bud,

With milk and cream, as sweet and thick as yellow
Apricots and melons, in the mellow
Noon when dairy maids must bear it through
Lanes full of trilling flowers and budding dew.

And then beside the swanskin pool where pansies
And strawberries and other pretty fancies
With the wild cherries sing their madrigals,
The goddesses walked by the waterfalls;

But now beside the water's thin flower-bells
No bustles seem rose castles and tourelles
Beside the little lake that seems of thin
And plumeless and too delicate swanskin;

Nor sparks and rays from caleche wheels that roll
Mirror the haycocks with gilt rays like Sol
Where trees seemed icebergs, -- rose and green reflections
Of the passing nymphs and their confections. --

In summer, when nymph Echo was serene
On these lone crags walked many a beauteous queen,
As lovely as the light and spangled breeze
Beside the caves and myrtle groves and trees.

One wood-nymph wore a deep black velvet bonnet
With blackest ivy leaves for wreaths upon it, --
Shading her face as lovely as the fountains
While she descended from deep-wooded mountains,

And with the wood-gods hiding, Charlottine,
Boreas' daughter, wore a crinoline.
So fair with water-flowing hair was she,
That crinoline would shine from crag and tree.

When the gold spangles on the water seen
Were like the twanging of a mandoline,
And all the ripples were like ripest fruits
That grow from the deep water's twisted roots,

The water-nymph, dark Mademoiselle Persane,
On blond sands wore an Algerine turbane;
Of blue velours d'Afrique was the pelisse
Of Grisi the ondine, and like the fleece

Of water gods, or gold trees on the strand,
Her gold hair fell like fountains on the sand, --
The thick gold sand beside the siren waves, --
Like honey-cells those sands and fountain caves.

Dream of the picnics where trees, sylvan, wan,
Shaded our feasts of nightingale and swan,
With wines as plumed as birds of paradise,
Or Persian winds, to drown the time that flies!

Then, on the shaven ice-green grass one sees
Roses and cherries and ripe strawberries
Bobbing at our lips like scarlet fire
Between the meshes of the light's gold wire,

And the bacchantes with their dew-wet hair,
Like velvety dark leaves of vineyards, wear
Great bunched tufts of African red coral
Whose glints with sheen of dew and leaves now quarrel.

Here in a sheep-thick shade of tree and root
Nymphs nurse each fawn whose pretty golden foot
Skipped there. They, milk of flaxen lilies, sip
From a sweet cup that has a coral lip,

In that green darkness. Melons dark as caves
Held thick gold honey for their fountain waves,
And there were gourds as wrinkled dark as Pan,
Or old Silenus, -- figs whence jewels ran.

There in the forest, through the green baize leaves,
Walked Artemis, and like the bound-up sheaves
Of gilt and rustling-tressed corn, her arrows
Through greenhouses of vegetable marrows

She aimed; like the vast serres-chaudes of the lake,
Those greenhouses, her arrows then did break!
Her dress was trimmed with straw, her hair streamed bright
And glittering as topaz, chrysolite.

Among their castles of gold straw entwined
With blackest ivy buds and leaves, and lined
With lambs' wool, and among the cocks of hay,
The satyrs danced the sheep-trot all the day

And sometimes stole a gherkin and a marrow,
Some strawberries, and a cucumber narrow,
Where the straw-coloured harsh leaves hid the root,
And only showed the scarlet glistening fruit.

In wooded gardens where the green baize leaves
Hid fruit that rustled like Ceres' gilt sheaves
They danced the galloppade and the mazurka,
Cracoviak, cachucha, and the turka,

With Fauna and the country deities,
Pan's love Eupheme, and the Hyades, --
Phaola and Ambrosia and Eudora,
Panope and Eupompe with great Flora,

Euryale, the Amazonian queen
Whose gown is looped above the yellow sheen
Of her bright yellow petticoat, -- the breeze
Strewed wild flowers on her straw hat through the trees;

And country nymphs with round straw hats deep-brimmed,
And at one side with pheasants' feathers trimmed, --
With gowns of green mohair and high kid boots
Wherewith they trample radish, strawberry, roots.

But far are we from forests of our rest
Where the wolf Nature from maternal breast
Fed us with strong brown milk . . . those epochs gone,
Our eyeless statues weep from blinded stone.

And far are we from the innocence of man,
When Time's vast sculptures from rough dust began,
And natural law and moral were but one, --
Derived from the rich wisdom of the sun.

In those deep ages the most primitive
And roughest and uncouthest shapes did live
Knowing the memory of before their birth,
And their soul's life before this uncouth earth.

We could remember in that ancient time
Of our primeval innocence, a clime
Divined deep in the soul, in which the light
Of vaster suns gave wisdom to our sight;

Now, days like wild beasts desecrate each part
Of that forgotten tomb that was our heart;
There are more awful ruins hanging there
Than those which hang and nod at empty air.

Yet still our soul keeps memories of that time
In sylvan wildernesses, -- our soul's prime
Of wisdom, forests that were god's abode,
And Saturn marching in the Dorian mode.

But all the nymphs are dead. The sound of fountains
Weeps swan-soft elegies to the deep mountains, --
Repeats their laughter, mournful now and slow,
To the dead nymph Echo. Long ago

Among the pallid roses' spangled sheens
On these lone crags nymphs that were bright as queens
Walked with elegant footsteps through light leaves
Where now a dark-winged southern wind soft grieves,

So cloyed with honey he must close his wing.
No ondine Grisi now may rise to sing,
For the light leaves are sere and whisper dead
Echoes of elegances lost and fled.

The nymphs are dead. And yet when spring begins
The nation of the Dead must feel old sins
Wake unremembering bones, eternal, old
As Death. Oh, think how these must feel the cold

In the deep groves! But here these dead still walk
As though they lived, and sigh awhile, and talk.
O perfumed nosegay brought for noseless Death!
This brightest myrrh can not perfume that breath.

The nymphs are dead, -- Syrinx and Dryope
And that smooth nymph that changed into a tree.
But though the shade, that Ethiopia, sees
Their beauty make more bright its treasuries,

Their amber blood in porphyry veins still grows
Deep in the dark secret of the rose,
Though dust are their bright temples in the heat,
The nymph parthenope with golden feet.

My glittering fire has turned into a ghost,
My rose is now cold amber and is lost;
Yet from that fire you still could light the sun,
And from that amber, bee-winged motes could come;

Though grown from rocks and trees, dark as Saint Anne,
The little nun-like leaves weep our small span,
And eyeless statues in the garden weep
For Niobe who by the founts doth sleep,

In gardens of a fairy aristocracy
That lead downhill to mountain peaks of sea,
Where people build like beavers on the sand
Among life's common movements, understand

That Troy and Babylon were built with bricks;
They engineer great wells into the Styx
And build hotels upon the peaks of seas
Where the small trivial Dead can sit and freeze.

Still ancient fanfares sound from mountain gorges
Where once Prometheus lit enormous forges:
"Debout les morts!" No key when the heart closes:
The nymphs are dead like the great summer roses.

But Janet, the old wood-god Janus' daughter,
All January-thin and blond as water,
Runs through the gardens, sees Europa ride
Down to the great Swiss mountains of the tide,

Though in the deep woods, budding violets
And strawberries as round as triolets
Beneath their swanskin leaves feel all alone. . . .
The golden feet that crushed them now are gone.

Beside the Alps of sea, each crinoline
Of muslin and of gauze and grenadine
Sweeps by the Mendelssohnian waterfall,
O'er beaver-smooth grass, by the castle wall,

Beside the thick mosaic of the leaves.
Left by the glamour of some huger eves
The thick gold spangles on those leaves are seen
Like the sharp twanging of a mandoline;

And there, with Fortune, I too sit apart
Feeling the jewel turn flower, the flower turn heart,
Knowing not goddess's from beggar's bones,
Nor all death's gulf between those semitones.

We who were proud and various as the wave, --
What strange companions the unreasoning grave
Will give us . . . wintry Prudence's empty skull
May lie near that of Venus the dead trull!

There are great diamonds hidden in the mud
Waiting Prometheus' fire and Time's vast flood,
Wild glistening flowers that spring from these could know
The secret of how hell and heaven grow.

But at a wayside station near the rock
Where vast Prometheus lies, another bock
Is brought by Ganymede . . . why dream the Flood
Would save those diamonds hidden in the mud?

The farmer on his donkey now rides down
The mountain side with angels' eggs the town
Will buy, beside the mountain peaks of sea
And gardens of the fairy aristocracy,

And ladies in their carriages drive down
The mountain to the gardens of the town,
And the hot wind, that little Savoyard,
Decked them with wild flowers a la montagnard.

The wood-nymphs Nettie, Alexandrine, tear
Balmoral gowns made for this mountain wear, --
White veils; each Fauchon-emigre bonnet
Bears coronets of berries wild upon it;

Huge as the great gold sun, each parasol
That hides it; fluid zephyrs now extol
Antiope's short bell-shaped pelerine
Worn lest gauze ribbons of the rain be seen.

"Oh the blond hair of Fortune in the grove!
Lean from your carriage, hold her lest she rove."
"Her face is winter, wrinkled, peaceless, mired,
Black as the cave where Cerberus was sired. --

O soul, my Lazarus! There was a clime
Deep in your tomb of flesh, defying time,
When a god's soul played there, began to dance
Deep in that tomb with divine, deathless Chance.

But that huge god grew wearied of our game
And all the lion-like waterfalls grew tame.
Venus, a statue mouldering on the wall,
Noseless and broken now, forgetting all

The fanfares, knows that Phoebus gilds her still
On pastoral afternoons; but she is chill.
Venus, you too have known the anguished cold,
The crumbling years, the fear of growing old!

Here in this theatre of redistributions,
This old arena built for retributions,
We rose imperial from primeval slime
Through architecture of our bones by Time;

Now night like lava flows without a chart
From unremembering craters of the heart,
Anguished with their dead fires. -- Beneath the caves
And crags the Numidean sibyl raves;

We hear the sibyl crying Prophecy.
'There where the kiss seems immortality
I prophesy the Worm . . . there, in the kiss,
He'll find his most imperial luxuries.'"

* * * * *

Where mountains, millers' dusty bags, seem full
Of Priam's gold, and all the black sheep's wool
Of thunderstorms, and grass in forests floats
As green as Tyrolean peasants' petticoats,

Dead Venus drove in her barouche, her shawl
As mauve as mountain distance covering all,
As she swept o'er the plain with her postillions
That were black and haughty as Castillians.

There, high above the thickest forests were
The steepest high-walled castles of the air;
And paths led to those castles that were bordered
With great gardens, neat and walled and ordered

With rivers, feathered masks, and pots of peas
Mournful beneath the vast and castled trees,
Where gardeners clip the strange wind's glittering fleece.
Oh, how that wind can blow through a pelisse!

Miss Ellen and Miss Harriet, the ondines,
Bore baskets full of velvet nectarines
And walnuts, over wooden trellissed bridges
That cross the streams and the steep mountain ridges.

They wore straw-coloured crinolines of faille
Beneath their shady bonnets made of paille, --
Their melancholy laughter ever sounds
Through castled trees and over castle grounds.

But I am sad, and by the wrinkled lake,
Where the great mauve flowers will never wake,
But drip with sleep and dew, I read this thin,
Dry, withered book of delicate swanskin,

And find a tale of an Olympian glade
Where Psyche has become a kitchenmaid;
The world, that pitiful old catchpenny,
Whines at her booth for pence, and finds too many,

Showing the gods no larger than ourselves,
And twittering bird-like from the rocky shelves
Of this Olympus, and no prophecy
They roar, but whisper triviality.

The ancient castle wall of Chaos nods.
Through gaps of ruined air and withered pods
A showman came; he smiles like Time and mocks
Me, takes his marionettes from their small box, --

The gods, Time-crumbled into marionettes.
Death frays their ageless bodies, hunger frets
Them, till at last, like us, they dance
Upon the old dull string pulled now by Chance.

This is the game the apeish shuddering dust
Plays for the market and the house of lust;
There are a thousand deaths the spirit dies
Unknown to the sad Dead that we despise.

Still ladies in their carriages drive down
The mountain to the gardens of the town,
And the hot wind, that little Savoyard,
Decked them with wild flowers a la montagnard.

Rich as a tomb each dress! oh, pity these!
I think the rich died young, and no one sees
The young loved face show for a fading while
Through that death-mask, the sad and cynic smile.

* * * * *

These living skeletons blown by the wind
Were Cleopatra, Thais . . . age unkind
Has shrunken them so feeble and so small
That Death will never comfort them at all.

They are so poor they seem to have put by
The outworn fashion of the flesh! They lie
Naked and bare in their mortality
Waiting for Death to warm them, childishly.

Do these Dead, shivering in their raggedness
Of outworn flesh, know us more dead, and guess
How day rolls down, that vast eternal stone,
Shuts each in his accustomed grave, alone?

Round the eternal skeleton their dress
Is rags, our mountain-high forgetfulness
Through centuries is piled above the Dead,
Waiting in vain for some remembered tread

Upon this rock-bound march that all we made
To the eternal empire of the shade, --
To the small sound of Time's drum in the heart.
The sound they wait for dies, the steps depart.

Come not, O solemn and revengeful Dead, --
Most loving Dead, from your eternal bed
To meet this living ghost, lest you should keep
Some memory of what I was, and weep.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net