There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture From the allegoric sky: Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh, Slides down the flank of Mars and takes From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist, Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist. A burgess tumbles from the bridge Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips From Caesar through the plunging legs To the blue sea between the ships. Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell. Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence. But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily all the virtues.... Art, science, history, religion—they too were to have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too large and pretentious ever to be realised. I began (deep calls to deep) with Nero, the artist. “Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden House.” Dark stirrings in the perfumed air Touch your cheeks, lift your hair. With softer fingers I caress, Sporus, all your loveliness. Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines The moon; and fire-flies in the vines, Like stars in a delirious sky, Gleam and go out. Unceasingly The fountains fall, the nightingales Sing. But time flows and love avails Nothing. The Christians smoulder red; Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead. And you, sweet Sporus, you and I, We too must die, we too must die. But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key. I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence—reasons which, at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is. The Christians by whose muddy light Dimly, dimly I divine Your eyes and see your pallid beauty Like a pale night-primrose shine Colourless in the dark, revere A God who slowly died that they Might suffer the less; who bore the pain Of all time in a single day, The pain of all men in a single Wounded body and sad heart.