New at IWP Books: Leonard Bacon, 1927, Guinea-Fowl and Other Poultry.

Evening in Great Portland Street

(James Boswell speaks to his son Alexander)

If I was drunk last night, what is it to thee?
Wise men were so before, and yet will be.
But it was wretched port. A doctor? No!
I shall be better in an hour or so.
Your intonation is not kind, my son —

You’re a Scotch numbskull, when all’s said and done,
Who hate — ay hate — my book, and feel disgraced
By virtue and by fame, by truth and taste,
By everything I had and you have not.
At length I know why Johnson loathed a Scot.
You never waited, troubled and distrait,
While Beauclerk tarried two long hours away.
Eheu fugaces — hours that would not fly,
Even though charmed away by Lady Di.
But Beau did come at last. That was a night!
Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, and that central light
Of my existence, whom I yet reflect,
Being of the elect, my son, of the elect,
The elect, who know it grateful to the mind
The pure reward of certitude to find,
Sweet to the soul, floating in dereliction,
To base at last upon superb conviction.
That Johnson gave me. Then I could lay hold
On thought, and know base metal from true gold,
And seize the pure idea, unrefined
And virgin from the matrix of the mind.

Men have laughed at me, that I jotted down
What was their only title to renown.
Yet Beauclerk might have thanked his generous fate
Because I saw how little things are great.
Fame is a solid, say they what they will
For long years hence they will be living still.
They lived and loved and laughed at me. I proved
To others that they laughed and lived and loved.
Though, it may be, some after age will find
Their figures but the fiction of my mind,
And century after century insist
Upon the whimsy of a novelist.
(Centuries themselves perhaps foredoomed to be
Parentheses in future history.)

Grant my impertinence! grant I was absurd!
Yet it was greatness, that I saw and heard.
And is it not my merit, that I drew
The features of the greatness that I knew?
Is it not well for later time to hear
The voice of Johnson, genial and severe?
Johnson who hated Hume and Whigs and Traitors,
Scotchmen and Hacks and Cant, and loved good Haters,
Good English, and the King, and Church and State,
And set unclouded in the gulfs of Fate.

Let ’em laugh at my note-books. It was much
To have the ears of Midas — and the touch, —
To lime the winged wisdom of an age,
The obviously immortal on my page,
Knowing, however well the form I caught,
‘Twas but the shadow thrown by radiant thought,
The uncapturable thing that still escapes,
Though seen, Protean, in a thousand shapes.
I saw, what is suspected now and then,
A motion forward in the minds of men,
And, in a waste of things and thoughts a-swarm,
Perceived a wholeness in the multiform,
Perceived, was dazzled by excess of light,
And — drunk on execrable port last night.
Here’s Aleck, glum and with reproving eyes.
Come, come, my son! “Don’t attitudinize!”

An Afternoon in Artillery Walk

(Mary Milton loquitur)

I think it is his blindness makes him so
He is so angry, and so querulous.
Yes, Father! I will look in Scaliger.
Yes, Cousin Phillips took the notes — I think —
May all the evil angels fly away
With Cousin Phillips to the Serbonian Bog,
Wherever that may be. And here am I
Locked in with him the livelong afternoon.
There’s Anne gone limping with that love of hers,
Her master-carpenter, and Deborah
Stolen away. Yes, Father, ’tis an aleph
But the Greek glose on’t in the Septuagint
Is something that I cannot quite make out.
The letter’s rubbed.
Oh, thus to wear away
My soul and body with this dry-as-dust
This tearer-up of words, this plaguey seeker
After the things that no man understands.
‘Tis April. I am seventeen years old,
And Abram Clark will come a-courting me.
Oh what a Hell a midday house can be!
Dusty and bright and dumb and shadowless,
Full of this sunshot dryness, like the soul
Of this old pedant here. I will not bear
Longer this tyranny of death in life
That drains my spirit like a succubus.
I am too full of blood and life for this —
This dull soul-gnawing discipline he sets
Upon our shoulders, the sad characters.
Chapter on chapter, blank and meaningless.
Now by the May-pole merry-makers run,
And the music throbs and pulses in light limbs,
And the girls’ kirtles are lifted to the knee.
Ah would that I were blowsy with the heat,
Being bussed by some tall fellow, and kissing him
On his hot red lips — some bully royalist
With gold in’s purse and lace about his throat
And a long rapier for the Puritans.
Or I would wander by some cool yew-hedge,
Dallying with my lover all the afternoon,
And then to cards and supper — cinnamon,
Some delicate pastry, and an amber wine
Burning on these lips that know a year-long lent.
Then to the theatre, and Mistress Nell
That the king’s fond of. Mayhap gentlemen
About would praise me, and I should hear them buzz,
And feel my cheek grow warm beneath my mask,
And glance most kindly
I was in a muse
I have the paper, father, and the pens.
Now for the damnable dictation. So!
“High — on a throne — of royal state — which far
Outshone — the wealth of “Ormus” — S or Z?
How should I know the letter? — “and of Ind.
Or where — the gorgeous East — with richest hand
Showers — on her kings — barbaric — pearl and gold.
Satan exalted sate.”