Action, action! First of all He spent three pounds he couldn’t afford In buying a book he didn’t want, For the mere sake of having been Irrevocably extravagant. Then feeling very bold, he pressed The bell of a chance house; it might Disclose some New Arabian Night Behind its grimy husk, who knows? The seconds passed; all was dead. Arrogantly he rang once more. His heart thumped on sheer silence; but at last There was a shuffling; something behind the door Became approaching panic, and he fled. VIII “MISERY,” he said, “to have no chin, Nothing but brains and sex and taste: Only omissively to sin, Weakly kind and cowardly chaste. But when the war is over, I will go to the East and plant Tea and rubber, and make much money. I will eat the black sweat of niggers And flagellate them with whips. I shall be enormously myself, Incarnate Chin.” The anguish of thinking ill of oneself (St. Paul’s religion, poignant beyond words) Turns ere you know it to faint minor thirds Before the ritualistic pomps of the world— The glass-grey silver of rivers, silken skies unfurled, Urim and Thummim of dawn and sun-setting, And the lawn sleeves of a great episcopal cloud, Matins of song and vesperal murmuring, Incense of night-long flowers and earth new-ploughed; All beauties of sweetness and all that shine or sing. Conscience is smoothed by beauty’s subtle fingers Into voluptuousness, where nothing lingers Of bitterness, saving a sorrow that is Rather a languor than a sense of pain. So, from the tunnel of St. Martin’s Lane Sailing into the open Square, he felt His self-reproach, his good resolutions melt Into an ecstasy, gentle as balm, Before the spire, etched black and white on the calm Of a pale windless sky, St. Martin’s spire, And the shadows sleeping beneath the portico And the crowd hurrying, ceaselessly, to and fro. Alas, the bleached and slender tower that aches Upon the gauzy sky, where blueness breaks Into sweet hoarseness, veiled with love and tender As the dove’s voice alone in the woods: too slender, Too finely pencilled—black and bleaching white On smoky mist, too clear in the keen light Of utmost summer: and oh! the lives that pass In one swift stream of colour, too, too bright, Too swift—and all the lives unknown, Alone. Alas. . . . A truce to summer and beauty and the pain Of being too consciously alive among The things that pass and the things that remain, (Oh, equal sadness!) the pain of being young.