“THE AGE DEMANDED”

For this agility chance found

Him of all men, unfit

As the red-beaked steeds of

The Cytheræan for a chain bit.

The glow of porcelain

Brought no reforming sense

To his perception

Of the social inconsequence.

Thus, if her colour

Came against his gaze,

Tempered as if

It were through a perfect glaze

He made no immediate application

Of this to relation of the state

To the individual, the month was more temperate

Because this beauty had been.

The coral isle, the lion-coloured sand

Burst in upon the porcelain revery:

Impetuous troubling

Of his imagery.

Mildness, amid the neo-Neitzschean clatter,

His sense of graduations,

Quite out of place amid

Resistance to current exacerbations,

Invitation, mere invitation to perceptivity

Gradually led him to the isolation

Which these presents place

Under a more tolerant, perhaps, examination.

By constant elimination

The manifest universe

Yielded an armour

Against utter consternation,

A Minoan undulation,

Seen, we admit, amid ambrosial circumstances

Strengthened him against

The discouraging doctrine of chances,

And his desire for survival,

Faint in the most strenuous moods,

Became an Olympian apathein

In the presence of selected perceptions.

A pale gold, in the aforesaid pattern,

The unexpected palms

Destroying, certainly, the artist’ s urge,

Left him delighted with the imaginary

Audition of the phantasmal sea-surge,

Incapable of the least utterance or composition,

Emendation, conservation of the “better tradition”

Refinement of medium, elimination of superfluities,

August attraction or concentration.

Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession

Irresponse to human aggression,

Amid the precipitation, down-float

Of insubstantial manna,

Lifting the faint susurrus

Of his subjective hosannah.

Ultimate affronts to human redundancies;

Non-esteem of self-styled “his betters”

Leading, as he well knew,

To his final

Exclusion from the world of letters.