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THE ultimate experiment performed

To reach the planes of Mars and Jupiter

Without discomfort. First-class passengers

With restaurants and Adam sitting rooms,

Bathing and barbers, bars American

Could while away the slowly-dripping time.

Blast-furnaces and gasometers, yards

Of bulky timber-joists and refuse-heaps,

Pitch, cataclysmic mounds of dross and slag,

Deep yawning pits, the seething pores of Hell,

Slim towers of factories, vertiginous,

Soul-traps to vitiate and brutalize,

To mould men bitter and recalcitrant …

The foul miasma of this atmosphere

Confabulate in retching multitudes.

In tension rapt, awaiting holocausts;

Mephitic and fuliginous, the sky—

Where green and yellow lights like demon’s eyes

Blink through the murk; ideas as microbes flock

Half-garrotted; they struggle: “Air, more air!”

Spasmodic; then neurotically grasp

A semi-groan before the strangulation.

The hooters blare

through air …

And women sigh

near by,

For husbands thrash;

they lash

Gnarled, purple stripes.

Oh Cripes!

To bear a child

is mild

Compared to it,

a pit

Of Hell is sweet,

the heat

Is soothing, calm

as balm.

For what is home?

a tomb,

And men but wive

to thrive;

In hope they live

to give

Despair or worse,

to curse

The squalid life

of wife

With travail fraught,

distraught.

The hooters blare

through air …

Obese black columns oscillate the streets.

The hands troop out into the twilit hour

Like billion-herded emmets, dinosaurs

That crawl with crude disaster in their souls.

There; poised above, a lemon-rind of moon

Recalls a youth of twitterings, desires

For nacreous, warm flesh. Oh God! that life

Should filter so through factory machines.

The ancient recrudescence; slowly-healed

Wounds all unripped in agony again.

Some lips are taut in bloodless nudity:

Are they enhungered for the limbs of dead?

No; they have savoured lust till they were lax

Of mind and body, with no palate for it

For smooth, white thighs and hot, fierce mouths they feel

Naught else than heavy-lidded lassitude.

All of a sudden voices rend the streets;

“Comrades, away! The spring is calling, haste

Ere we tear moon and stars from out the sky!”

The echoes give them courage, and the town

Becomes an archipelago of cries.

Men hop and run as little children run

Pink-naked on a curling yellow beach.

The women gaze from doorsteps, gorgon-eyed

And wonder what strange madness troubles them.

Sir Simon Moss, reclining in a chair,

With stout cigar held firm by regular

Well-ordered tusks of tooth, can hear the noise.

Another war? to reap more profits in

Exceeded mortal fortune. Nay; there blazed

Some sorry plague. Perhaps the rabies gript ’em.

Thus he pursues his reading of The Times.

Shrill voices fade, as stars in polychrome

Fade on the cold, grey atmosphere of dawn.

“Comrades, away! the smack of wind is sweet”

Faint as the whisper of dim violins.

“Comrades, away …” faint as the autumn leaves

(Burnt paper crackling gently on the breeze).

And houses humped like elephants asleep,

Insolent hulks out-sprawled on many miles,

That muffled women’s sobs; for anxiously

They feared the sons would follow in their wake.

And the sons followed; far away, the hills

Exhaled a ripe, new life where no machines

Might pound away the frailly-cobwebbed air.

To casual mossy stones and thistle weeds

The city crumbled; now its walls lie bare

As lidless eyes for crows to peck at them.

And in the sloe-gin heat of summer days

The sky’s enamel is not quite Limoges

But almost; here and there a tiny scratch

Of soaring bird, some swallow on the wing

Does irritate the surface. Sheer below,

Fierce-biting on the edges, rise the trees;

Their taper-blossoms opulently lit

As girandoles that smoulder silently

Blue dust of incense; kohl-eyed evening

Sponges the face with dripping fragrances.

The vines and olives terraced on the hills

Melt on the dean horizon blurringly,

Where clouds descend in deluge, liquid-gold.

The flies fling flashes on cerulean meres

Where steely bream and roach with rosy fins

Goggle amongst the shrubberies of cress

Half-dizzied by their vacant harmonies.

The fruit of the wild gourd or hellebore

Has tranced die sense of man; die moonlight leaks

In silver puddles on the carpet-lawns.

Dry thud of hooves; the satyrs have returned!