Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (624 page)

SÜSSMUND’S ADDRESS TO AN UNKNOWN GO
D

(ADAPTED FROM THE HIGH GERMAN - REFERS TO Carl Eugen Freiherr von Süssmund, b. 1872, d. 1910. This is, of course, a quite free adaptation.)

MY God, they say I have no bitterness!
Dear Unknown God, I gasp, I fade, I pine!
No bitterness! Have firs no turpentine?
If so, it’s true.

Because I do not go wandering round Piccadilly
Like an emasculated lily
In a low-necked flannel shirt beneath the rain.
(Is that what you’d do,
Oh God Unknown,
If you came down
To Piccadilly
And worried over London town?)
Wailing round Covent Garden’s what I should do
Declaiming to the beefy market porters
Dramatic propaganda about social wrongs
Denouncing Edward Morters
Or saying that Mr William Pornett
Is eleven kinds of literary hornet,
Or that the death of Mr Arthur Mosse
Would be no sort of loss
But a distinct gain
 
— That sort of silly literary songs
About no
one you
know,
And no one else could ever want to know.

You owe
(You’ve heard a thousand thousand
dat qui cito’s
)
Some sort of poisonous dew

Shed on the flowers where these high-horned mosquitoes
Dance in a busy crew.
But they will go on setting up their schools,
Making their little rules,
Finding selected ana,
Collected in Montana:
Connected with Commedié Diviné
Or maidens with names like Deiridriné...
Dear Lord, you know the stuff
You must have heard enough.

Find me a barrel into which to creep
Dear Unknown God, and get dead drunk and sleep.
But listen, this is for your ear alone
(God: where are you? Let me come close and whisper
What no one knows — I’m really deadly tired,
I cannot write a line, my hands are stiff,
Writing’s a rotten job, my head goes round:
You have afflicted me with whip-cord nerves.
That hammering fool drives me distracted... God!
Strike him with colic, send him screaming home.
Strike, Dash and Dash and Dash with eye complaints;
That beast who choked his dog with a tight collar
(He gave his child the lead to hold) last night;
It made me sick; God strike him with the pip.
And send down one dark night and no one near
And one white throat within my fingers’ grip!)

Dear God, you bade me be a gentleman,
And well you know I’ve been it. But their rot...
Sometimes it makes me angry. This last season
I’ve listened smiling to new Celtic bards,
To Anti-Vivisectionists and Friends of Peace,
To Neo-Psychics, Platonists and Poets
Who saved the Universe by chopping logs
In your own image —

I’ve smiled at Whigs intoning Whiggery
To keep the Labour Market down; at Tories
Sickening for office. I have surely been
Plumb centre in the Movement. O my God
Is this a man’s work. God I’ve backed up—’s
With proper letters in the Daily Press:
I’ve smiled at Dowagers and Nonconformists;
At wriggling dancers; forty pianists;
Jew politicians; Front Rank Statesmen’s—’s
Yankee conductors of chaste magazines...
God, fill my purse and let me go away.

But God, dear God! I’ll never get away
I know the — you are!
That’s off my chest. You’ll never let me go.
I know I’ll never drink myself dead drunk
Because to-morrow I shall have appointments
 
— You’ll make them for me — with a Jail Reform
And Pure Milk Rotter — such a pleasant man!
One garden city builder, seven peers
Concerned with army remounts, and a girl
Mad to take dancing lessons! Such my morrow!

It’s not so much I ask Great God of mine
(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)
These earnest, cold-in-the-heart and practised preachers
Have worked their will on me for long enough,
Some boring me to tears while I sat patient;
Some picked my purse and bit me in the back
The while I smiled as you have taught me to,
(Fill up my little purse and let me go!)
It’s not my job to go denouncing jobs
You did not build me for it. Not my job!
Whilst they are on the make, snatching their bits
Beneath the wheels of ninety-nine reforms.

(Note
. — I have been unable to follow the Freiherr at any interval
at all on this page without leaving several words blank. F.M.H.)

But this is truth;
There’s not one trick they’ve not brought off on me,
I guess they think I haven’t noticed it
For I’ve no bitterness...
They’ve lied about me to my mistresses,
Stolen my brandy, plagiarized my books,
Lived on me month by month, broken agreements,
Perjured themselves in courts, and sworn false oaths
With all the skill of Protestant British tradesmen
Plundering a Papist and a foreigner
With God on their lips —
But all that’s private...
              
Oh, you sleeping God,
I hope you sit amongst the coloured tents
Of any other rotten age than this —
With great pavilions tinctured all with silks,
Where emerald lawns go stretching into space,
With mailèd horses, simple drunken knights,
Punctilious heralds and high-breasted ladies
Beauteous beyond belief and not one better
Than you would have her be — in such a heaven
Where there’s no feeling of the moral pulse,
I think I’d find some peace — with treachery
Of the sword and dagger kind to keep it sweet
 
— Adultery, foul murder, pleasant things,
A touch of incest, theft, but no Reformers.

Dear God of mine
Who’ve tortured me in many pleasant ways
I hope you’ve had some fun. And thank you, God!
No doubt you’ll keep your bargain in the end,
No doubt I’ll get my twopenny-halfpenny pay
At the back door of some bright hued pavilion
From a whore of Heaven —

But when it comes to “have no bitterness”...
(For bitter we read “earnest”) I’ve no stomach
For such impertinence; its subtlety
(You know it, God, but let me get it down)
Is too ingenious. It implies just this:

“Here is a man when times are out of joint
Who will not be enraged at Edward Morter,
Pornett or Mosse; who will not to the woes
Of a grey underworld lend passionate ears
Nor tear his hair to tatters in the cause
Of garden suburbs or of guinea pigs
Injected with bacilli... Such a man
(So say the friends that I have listened to
Whole wasted, aching desolate afternoons!)
Is morally castrated; pass him by;
Give him no management in this great world,
No share in fruity Progress or the wrongs
Of market porters, tram conductors, pimps,
Marriage-reforming divorcees, Whig statesmen
Or serious Drama.”

Did I, dear God, ever attempt to shine
As such a friend of Progress? God, did I
Ever ambitiously raise up my voice
To outshout these eminent preachers?
Suck up importance from a pauper’s wrongs
I never did!
But these mosquitoes must make precious sure
I do not take a hand in their achievements
Therefore they say, I have no bitterness
Being a eunuch amongst these proper men,
Who stand foursquare ‘gainst evil (that’s their phrase!)

God, you’ve been hard on me; I’m plagued with boils,
Little mosquito-stings, warts, poverty!
Yes, very hard. But when all’s catalogued
You’ve been a gentleman in all your fun.
No doubt you’ll keep your bargain, Unknown God.
This surely you will never do to me —
Say I’m not bitter. That you’ll never do.
‘Twould be to outpass the bounds of the Divine
And turn Reformer.

THE FEATHE
R

I WONDER dost thou sleep at night,
False friend and falser enemy!
I — wonder if thy hours are long and drag out wearily!
We’ve passed days and nights together
In our time... But that white feather
That the wind’s blown past the roof ridge
It is gone
—
So I from thee!

Aye, chase it o’er the courtyard stones.
Past friend of mine, my enemy!
Chase on beneath the chestnut boughs and out toward the sea,
If the fitful wind should fail it,
Thou may’st catch it, and may’st trail it
In midden’s mud and garbage...
As thou hast my thoughts of thee.

So I wonder dost thou sleep at night?
Once friend of mine, my enemy?
Or whether dost thou toss and turn to plan new treachery?
As the feather thou hast trodden
So my thoughts of thee are sodden
When I think — Yes, half forgotten,
A faint taste of something rotten
Comes at times, like worm-struck wood ash
Comes at times
,
the thought of thee.

But I would not have thy night thoughts
As the slow clock beats to day ward!
I’ll be sleeping with my eyes shut,
Dreaming deep, or dreaming wayward.
And I hear thee turn and mutter
As thy dawn-ward candles gutter —
For thou fear’st the dark... Hark! “Judas!”
Says the dawn wind from the sea.
Round the house it whispers “Judas!”
Friend of mine, my enemy.

SONGS FROM LONDO
N

The following poems appeared in the volume of the above name published by Mr Elkin Mathews in 1910.

VIEW
S

I

BEING in Rome I wonder will you go
Up to the Hill. But I forget the name —
Aventine? Pincio? No: I do not know.
I was there yesterday and watched. You came.

The seven Pillars of the Forum stand
High, stained and pale’neath the Italian heavens,
Their capitals linked up form half a square;
A grove of silver poplars spears the sky.
You came. Do you remember? Yes, you came,
But yesterday. Your dress just brushed the herbs
That nearly hide the broken marble lion —
And I was watching you against the sky.
Such light! Such air! Such prism hues! and Rome
So far below; I hardly knew the place.
The domed St Peter’s; mass of the Capitol;
The arch of Trajan and St Angelo —
Tiny and grey and level; tremulous
Beneath a haze amidst a sea of plains —
But I forget the name, who never looked
On any Rome but this of unnamed hills.

II

Tho’ you’re in Rome you will not go, my You,
Up to that Hill — but I forget the name,
Aventine? Pincio? No, I never knew —
I was there yesterday. You never came.
I have that Rome; and you, you have a Me,
You have a Rome and I, I have my You;
My Rome is not your Rome: my you, not you
   
       
... For, if man knew woman
I should have plumbed your heart; if woman, man
Your me should be true I.... If in your day —
You who have mingled with my soul in dreams,
You who have given my life an aim and purpose,
A heart, an imaged form — if in your dreams
You have imagined unfamiliar cities
And me among them, I shall never stand
Beneath your pillars or your poplar groves,...
Images, simulacra, towns of dreams
That never march upon each other’s borders
And bring no comfort to each other’s hearts!

III

Nobly accompanied am I — Since you,
You — simulacrum, image, dream of dreams,
Amidst these images and simulacra
Of shadowy house fronts and these dim, thronged streets
Are my companion!
Where the pavements gleam
I have you alway with me: and grey dawns
In the far skies bring you more near — more near
Than City sounds can interpenetrate.
All vapours form a background for your face
In this unreal town of real things,
And my you stands beside me and makes glad
All my imagined cities and thence walks
Beside me towards yet unimagined hills —
Being we two, full surely we shall go
Up to that Hill.... some synonym for Home.
Avalon? Grave? or Heaven? I do not know....
But one day or to-day, the day may come,
When I may be your I, your Rome my Rome.

FINCHLEY ROA
D

AS we come up at Baker Street
Where tubes and trains and’buses meet
There’s a touch of fog and a touch of sleet;
And we go on up Hampstead way
Towards the closing in of day...

You should be a queen or a duchess rather,
Reigning in place of a warlike father
In peaceful times o’er a tiny town
Where all the roads wind up and down
From your little palace — a small, old place
Where every soul should know your face
And bless your coming. That’s what I mean,
A small grand-duchess, no distant queen,
Lost in a great land, sitting alone
In a marble palace upon a throne.

And you’d say to your shipmen: “Now take your ease,
To-morrow is time enough for the seas.”
And you’d set your bondmen a milder rule
And let the children loose from the school.
No wrongs to right and no sores to fester,
In your small, great hall’neath a firelit dais,
You’d sit, with me at your feet, your jester,
Stroking your shoes where the seed pearls glisten
And talking my fancies. And you as your way is,
Would sometimes heed and at times not listen,
But sit at your sewing and look at the brands
And sometimes reach me one of your hands,
Or bid me write you a little ode,
Part quaint, part sad, part serious...

But here we are in the Finchley Road
With a drizzling rain and a skidding’bus
And the twilight settling down on us.