AURORA LEIGHI read a score of books on womanhood
To prove, if women do not think at all
They may teach thinking (to a maiden aunt
Or else the author) — books that boldly assert
Their right of comprehending husband's talk
When not too deep, and even of answering
With pretty ‘may it please you’, or ‘so it is’ —
Their rapid insight and fine aptitude,
Particular worth and general missionariness,
As long as they keep quiet by the fire
And never say ‘no’ when the word says ‘ay’,
For that is fatal — their angelic reach
Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn,
And fatten household sinners — their, in brief,
Potential faculty in everything
Of abdicating power in it: she owned
She liked a woman to be womanly,
And English women, she thanked God and sighed
(Some people always sigh in thanking God),
Were models to the universe. And last
I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like
To see me wear the night with empty hands
A-doing nothing. So, my shepherdess
Was something after all (the pastoral saints
Be praised for't), leaning lovelorn with pink eyes
To match her shoes, when I mistook the silks;
Her head uncrushed by that round weight of hat
So strangely similar to the tortoise shell
Which slew the tragic poet.
By the way,
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you're weary — or a stool
To stumble over and vex you… ‘curse that stool!’
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this — that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.
[…]
(Book 1, 427-465)
Ay, but every age
Appears to souls who live in’t (ask Carlyle)
Most unheroic. Ours, for instance, ours:
The thinkers scout it, and the poets abound
Who scorn to touch it with a finger-tip:
A pewter-age — mixed metal, silver-washed;
An age of scum, spooned off the richer past,
An age of patches for old gaberdines,
An age of mere transition, meaning nought
Except that what succeeds must shame it quite
If God please. That’s wrong thinking, to my mind,
And wrong thoughts make poor poems.[…]
Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s — this live, throbbing age,
That brwals, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends more passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.
To flinch from modern varnish, coat or flounce,
Cry out for togas and the picturesque,
Is fatal — foolish, too. King Arthur’s self
Was commonplace to Lady Guenever;
And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat
As Fleet Street to our poets.
Never flinch,
But still, unscrupulously epic, catch
Upon the burning lava of a song
The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age:
That, when the next shall come, the men of that
May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say
“Behold — behold the paps we all have sucked!
This bosom seems to beat still, or at least
It sets ours beating: this is living art,
Which thus presents and thus records true life.”
(Book 5, 155-166; 200-222)
Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia, etc. contactar con: fores@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Universitat de València Press