Aldous Huxley

[dendraphile.livejournal.com]

Nero and Sporus or The Triumph of Art

The Christians by whose muddy light
Dimly, dimly I divine
Your eyes and see your pallid beauty
Like a pale night-primrose shine,

Colourless in the dark, revere
A God who sloly died that they
Might suffer the less, who bore the pain
Of all time in a single day,
The pain of all men in a single
Wounded body and sad heart.

The yellow marble, smooth as water,
Builds me a Golden House; and there
The marble Gods sleep in their strength
And the white Parian girls are fair.

Roses and waxen oleanders,
Green grape bunches and the flushed peach-
All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,
Knowing, loving, becoming each.

The ship went down, my mother swam:
I wedded and myself was wed:
Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:
Old Seneca too slowly bled.

The wild beast and the victim both,
The ravisher and the wincing bride,
King of the world and a slave's slave,
Terror-haunted, deified-

All these, sweet Sporus, I, an artist,
Am and, ana artist, needs must be.
Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.
And you have heard my symphony

Of wailing voices and clashed brass,
With long shrill flutings that suspend
Pain o'er a muttering gulph of terrors,
And piercing blasts of joy that end,

Gods, in what discord!- could I have
So hymned the Furies, were the bane
Still sap within the hemlock stalk,
The red swords virgin-bright again?

Or take a child's love that is all
Worship, all tenderness and trust,
A dawn-web, dewy and fragile- take
And with the violence of lust

Tear and defile it. You shall hear
The breaking dumbness and the thin
Harsh crying that is the very music
Of shame and the remorse of sin.

Christ died; the artist lives for all;
Loves, and his naked marbles stand
Pure as a column on the sky,
Whole lips, whose breasts, whose thighs demand

Not our humiliation, not
The shuddering of an after-shame;
and of his agonies men know
Only the beauty born of them.

Christ died, but living Nero turns
Your mute remorse to song; he gives
To idiot Fate eyes like a lover's,
And while his music plays, God lives.

Comments

[scratchmist.livejournal.com]

Brave New World is my most favorite book of all time. I didn't know Huxley wrote poetry, so thanks for sharing this ♥