Through the Looking-Glass

The earth turns over, our side feels the cold,
And life sinks choking in the wells of trees;
The ticking heart comes to a standstill, killed,
The icing on the pond waits for its boys.
Among the holly and the gifts I move,
The carols on the piano, the glowing hearth,
All our traditional sympathy with birth,
Put by your challenge to the shifts of love.

Your portrait hangs before me on the wall;
And there what view I wish for, I shall find,
The wooded or the stony, though not all
The painters gifts can make its flatness round—
Through the blue irises the heaven of failures,
The mirror world where logic is reversed,
When age becomes the handsome child at last,
The glass sea parted for the country sailors.

Where move the enormous comics, drawn from life—
My father as an Airedale and a gardener,
My mother chasing letters with a knife:
You are not present as a character—
(Only the family have speaking parts)
You are a valley or a river bend,
The one an Aunt refers to as a friend,
The tree from which the weazel racing starts.

False; but no falser than the world it matches,
Love’s daytime kingdom which I say you rule,
The total state where all must wear your badges,
Keep order perfect as a naval school:
Noble emotions organised and massed
Line the straight flood-lit tracks of memory
To cheer your image as it flashes by;
All lust at once informed on and suppressed.

Yours is the only name expressive there,
And family affection the one in cypher;
Lay-out of hospital and street and square
That comfort to the homesick children offer,
As I, their author, stand between these dreams,
Son of a nurse and doctor, loaned a room,
Your would-be lover who has never come
In the great bed at midnight to your arms.

Such dreams are amorous; they are indeed:
But no one but myself is loved in these,
And time flies on above the dreamer’s head,
Flies on, flies on, and with your beauty flies.
All things he takes and loses but conceit;
This Alec still can buy the life within
License no liberty except his own,
Order the fireworks after the defeat.

Language of moderation cannot hide:—
My sea is empty and the waves are rough:
Gone from the map the shore where childhood played
Tight-fisted as a peasant, eating love;
Lost in my wake my archipelago,
Islands of self through which I sailed all day,
Planting a pirate’s flag, a generous bay;
And lost the way to action and to you.

Lost if I steer. Gale of desire may blow
Sailor and ship past the illusive reef,
And I yet land to celebrate with you
Birth of a natural order and of love;
With you enjoy the untransfigured scene,
My father down the garden in his gaiters,
My mother at her bureau writing letters,
Free to our favours, all our titles gone.