Truce, truce. . . . Once again he fled;— All his life, it seemed, was a flight;— Fled and found Sanctuary in a cinema house. Huge faces loomed and burst, Like bubbles in a black wind. He shut his eyes on them and in a little Slept; slept, while the pictures Passed and returned, passed once more and returned. And he, like God in the midst of the wheeling world, Slept on; and when he woke it was eight o’clock. Jenny? Revenge is sweet; he will have kept Dear Jenny waiting. IX TALL straight poplars stand in a meadow; The wind and sun caress them, dappling The deep green grass with shine and shadow; And a little apart one slender sapling Sways in the wind and almost seems Conscious of its own supple grace, And shakes its twin-hued leaves and gleams With silvery laughter, filling the place Where it stands with a sudden flash of human Beauty and grace; till from her tree Steps forth the dryad, now turned woman, And sways to meet him. It is she. Food and drink, food and drink: Olives as firm and sleek and green As the breasts of a sea god’s daughter, Swimming far down where the corpses sink Through the dense shadowy water. Silver and black on flank and back, The glossy sardine mourns its head. The red anchovy and the beetroot red, With carrots, build a gorgeous stair— Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair— And the green pallor of the salad round Sharpens their clarion sound. De lady take hors d’œuvres? and de gentleman too? Per due! Due! Echo answers: Du’ . . . “So, Jenny, you’ve found another Perfect Man.” “Perfect, perhaps; but not so sweet as you, Not such a baby.” “Me? A baby. Why, I am older than the rocks on which I sit. . . .” Oh, how delightful, talking about oneself! Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive, And wine’s strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious: Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live. What though the mind still think that one thing’s vicious More than another? If the thought can give This wine’s rich savour to our laughing kiss, Let us preserve the Christian prejudice. Oh, there are shynesses and silences, Shynesses and silences! But luckily God also gave us wine. “Jenny, adorable—” (what draws the line At the mere word “love”?) “has anyone the right To look so lovely as you look to-night, To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?” But candidly, he wondered, do I care? He heard her voice and himself spoke, But like faint light through a cloud of smoke, There came, unreal and far away, Mere sounds utterly empty—like the drone Of prayers, _crambe repetita_, prayers and praise, Long, long ago, in the old School Chapel days; Senseless, but so intrusive on one’s own Interior life one couldn’t even think . . . O sweet, rare, perilous, retchy drink! Another glass . . .