And amongst these frozen faces you smiled, Surprised, surprisingly, like a child: And out of the frozen welter of sound Your voice came quietly, quietly. "What about God?" you said. "I have found Much to be said for Totality. All, I take it, is God: God's all-- This bottle, for instance ..." I recall, Dimly, that you took God by the neck-- God-in-the-bottle--and pushed Him across: But I, without a moment's loss Moved God-in-the-salt in front and shouted: "Check!" THE LIFE THEORETIC While I have been fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women. They have brazen faces like battering-rams. But I who think about books and such-- I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling, And the women palsy me with fear. But when it comes to fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Why, there I am. But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it, Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows. COMPLAINT OF A POET MANQUÉ We judge by appearance merely: If I can't think strangely, I can at least look queerly. So I grew the hair so long on my head That my mother wouldn't know me, Till a woman in a night-club said, As I was passing by, "Hullo, here comes Salome ..." I looked in the dirty gilt-edged glass, And, oh Salome; there I was-- Positively jewelled, half a vampire, With the soul in my eyes hanging dizzily Like the gatherer of proverbial samphire Over the brink of the crag of sense, Looking down from perilous eminence Into a gulf of windy night. And there's straw in my tempestuous hair, And I'm not a poet: but never despair! I'll madly live the poems I shall never write. SOCIAL AMENITIES I am getting on well with this anecdote, When suddenly I recall The many times I have told it of old, And all the worked-up phrases, and the dying fall Of voice, well timed in the crisis, the note Of mock-heroic ingeniously struck-- The whole thing sticks in my throat, And my face all tingles and pricks with shame For myself and my hearers. These are the social pleasures, my God! But I finish the story triumphantly all the same. TOPIARY