The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
SWEENEY ERECT
_And the trees about me
Let them be dry & leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; & behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, Look, wenches!_
Paint me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Æolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne’s hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands
(Nausicaa and Polypheme);
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth;
The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees
Then straightens down from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed full-length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the female temperament
And wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, says Emerson,
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides;
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced;
Call witness to their principles
Deprecate the lack of taste
Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.
But Doris towelled from the bath
Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat.
MR. ELIOT’S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE
“_Look, look master, here comes two of the religious
caterpillars_”.
JEW OF MALTA
Polyphiloprogenitive
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.
In the beginning was the Word,
Superfetation of το εν
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptised God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The father and the Paraclete.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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