i.
With knee upraised and pen prepared he labors
to invest with bone and sinew his haunting phantoms:
an architect of order wrung from chaos,
fisher of Spiritus Mundi; a seeker of talismans
and tenderer of trinkets to basilisks. The dust
has crept upon all things and patinated
the objects of the visible world, and in this dross
the finger of Radcliffe trails, describing patterns
of supple flesh saved from infirmity
by active and regenerative desire,
rejuvinating and preserving lust.
A genuine satyr, unappeased and pining
perpetually, he observes, insatiable
and permanently unsated, his secreted eye
swollen with wonted visions, unbreakable lens
in torment trained on divers titillations,
voyeur and victim of venial predilections;
and yet, not this alone. Albeit fleshed
and robed in beauty his beloved spirits
loiter in chambers sewn with silver threads
of flute and violin, and there is laughter.
The girls are tender and the songs are sweet:
pristene calves rest on the arms of chairs,
bottoms recumbent, spread in warm divans;
and books lie open, occasionally thumbed.
By such is Radcliffe haunted, rendering him
vain and indiscernable. Soft smoke curls
from candles scented of jasmine and lavender,
enfolding and confounding him. His perfumed
doxies idle or wander aimlessly, their tread
dollops with sound virtually undecibled
the cavernous hollows of his skull. He sits
transfixed, his quill and tablet in neglect,
and surreptitiously attends each thresh
of softened thigh and the sublime constriction
of flesh in action: the flexing of broad haunches
flushed in sanguine absence of maidenhead.
But prudence guides him and a civil demeanor,
nor is he wont to proffer the leering invasion
of public eyes in public. He undertakes
no silver tongued seduction, is taciturn
and, in affected nonchalance, retiring; but burning,
he stagnates. Time, with her infinite skein,
unwinds his days and still the abyss yawns, white
and blinding in its emptiness, a palette
that mocks with nothing, not even the errant swirls
and loops that indicate a moving hand,
transparent cubes etched in the inviting margins,
or faces scribbled, or breasts in silhouette.
Nothing. Abhorrent absolute: sheer absence.
Infatuate of an ideal without fixity (because
lacking substance but not entirely divested
of identity), he lives behind his eyes, beholds
Arcadian sub-realms: green Elysiums
his wonted habitat and cherished demesne.
Lulled by coos of Keatsian nightingales
his hand is numb and indolently rests,
debilitated in rapture, oppressed to stasis.
Inebriate of luxurious Aprils, the interminable
burgeoning of undecaying Mays,
this Adam of his own eternal Spring
in self-imposed abandonment, invokes
wet-wristed muses who elude him, coy
as naiads sheened by brooks. Is this aesthetic
or merely self-defeating? it may be asked
and yet the answer is of a certainty
the latter, and the rub is there. We have heard
of gardens run to riot, whether forsaken
or never adequately tended: Swinburne tells of one
hard by a sea that will be our treasure trove.
ii.
In such a place he wanders. Down and away the surf
slides forever and folds her silver raiment.
Even among his flowers he smells her salt
and hears the faint falsetto of gulls in azure.
His head Icarian, he aspires to Heaven, and yet
in flesh his heels find purchase in soft loam.
White cherubs fluting water, feathers chipped,
flaunt wings and exhibit their immaculate balance,
dimpled and rigid until the final trump.
The muck of windfall, wet brown mulch of leaves,
and festering, foaming-over fruit. A ceiling
of branches arched above and intermingling
keeps the place in shade, in somber darkness.
In a given hour we will find our subject here,
apart from the barren house whose turrets and gables
add shadow to shadow, and which, like an ancient vessel,
cracks like gunfire. In those dusty chambers
Radcliffe dreams, at nightfall; but such dreams
will have no witness: let him be chary of them.
We only want such dreams as would be songs,
such as would cheer Silenus steeped in his tankard,
the bacchanalian visions, the dreams he summons
before his inward eye, wrought with volition.
The clutter of roses, the patter of water, the dank
smell of stone, and somewhere, like the face of a girl
behind a veil, the sun in ambiguous effulgence floats,
her brilliance paled by cumuli. She has become
the maiden in waiting, retires in billowy cloud,
her curcuit negligible. In the sea's mirror at twilight
she gives the birds their splendor. But the pallor of one
in hue no darker than his fractured fountains,
complected whiter than such stone, remains.
The darkness suits him. In his somnolent farings
he cleaves to shadow, with feline coyness elusive
of light that violates his canopy. The night
is kindred, being conjuror and creator,
father of fables, of fanciful things and fey.
Dian, chaser of tine and talon, be with him,
our wandering child, be guide and guardian
among his ruins. Upon your silver breast
he suckles, a lecherous infant, of that cold pablum
nourished, and to it interminably addicted.
A benediction to his windy casements,
anoint his barren house, glow on his spires,
and wink at his revolving weathercocks.
Perched in his gutters, be his paramour,
impaled upon his posts, his courtezan;
and creeping slowly to his coverlet
attend him, blue equestrienne. For these
are his darkest hours, before the oblivious
false death of sleep, a time of deliberate defilement,
debased and solipsistic venery. Then Dian,
who art not, slip away and give redress
by your absence. Go and hunt in fields celestial.
iii.
His night is not our night, nor his day our day.
In body he exists in one, in mind
the other. His daydream is, in perpetuity,
one solitary and refulgent noon,
Sol fixed in apogee, and his Huntress hidden,
occluded by Olympic summits. He hearkens
to Philomelas in his reveries
and ravens in his waking hours. The flowers
of Arcady he ponders in abstraction
and cloying roses in concrete. His garden
is chaos apprehended, his girls, attired
in fictive flesh, are clearly comprehended. Once
he lived as any other earthly child
before the blessing of the rose turned curse,
before the fountains proved of supple figure.
He stepped from boyhood into song. Sabrinas
rose, stippled with water; Corinnas sidled,
skirted in voluptuous verse; Lucastas
pined in sainted constancy. He plighted
troth to his kindred, scribbled epithalamiums,
and swore his oath: our poor bucolic bachelors
will find sweet consummation, will be attended
by leaning maids upon goat-trodden hills
as fitting compensation for a sonnet.
The wind caws; stars are quenched like tapers; night
covers our subject in its heavy raiment.
He rises, in the cottony web of dreams
woven like a chrysalis. All is shaken
in the buffeting wind, the pushed and tousled
trees rattle and scratch at teary glass, banshees
bellow in pandemonium. In shadow
he slips between the rusted gates and wanders
misted by rainfall, through the crooked stones,
padding in loam, tented in bougainvillea. The world
would liefer not abide such men, is fain
to harbor a domestic medium. Withal,
he was his bane, his dreams anathema,
his constructs cancerous. Now Dian, veiled
in the liquescent even, is no assailant
nor venial accomplice. Soon she slips
unreckoned under the battered ocean. Dawn
spills timorously on the waking world and finds
him still as statuary, sodden by rain.
The earth is dewed in birdsong, gemmed by matins,
the garden crisped with mornfrost. Necklaced flowers
melt like weeping nuns at novena, their petals
rosaries baptized by infatuate tears.
Winds at rest, the sky is flecked with clouds
perambulating like swans, their white disorder
in blithe accord with one who idles, adrift
in derelict ennui, through accrued dementia,
fain for his paramours, their fair and roseate
curves appareled in diaphanous dress. Come
lambs that gambol on green hills, soft fleeced,
where Pan winds his organic horn; white flocked,
make hillocks boil, make all one teeming May,
fecund and prodigal. Come brooding swain,
crack pated nympholept, in rapt concupiscence
ring concords, sonorous hullabaloos of song.
Druid among the stones, among changing leaves,
whispers of Zephyrus, the busy drone
of bees afield, the clamor of birds; come
Apollonian priest, obsequious acolyte
and Pierian avatar; vouchsafe to us
the wonders of Hippocrene and Helicon,
the abluent waters and monuments. He wanders
in perpetuity, in wonderment.
