Year: 2020

“Aberrantry” by H.R. Barbor

Aberrantry

Go forth, my song's antithesis,

Make a loud claim, acclaim your claim

Beyond the Word's periphrasis.

Perchance unwisdom, sensing this,

Shall turn again Whittington-wise

And, with indefinite surmise

Born of impertinence, find tame

Toys modelled of logic and of sense—

Mechanic toys that toy with sense

As with a painted cocoanut

Carved to the feature of its butt.

Pay her no homage. She'd reject

Homage, homage came of age

And struts and fawns and apes a rage

That simian prototypes affect.

 

Nor ask what you would have. She turns

Grief to a grin and grins to growls,

Twirling the whirligig bright prism,

And while Sir Malkin throatily howls :

" Mi-aw, Mi-aw, my own adored,"

Trolling his pussy-catechism,

He far outleaps the solecism

 

[ . . . ]

 

H.R. Barbor's poem "Aberrantry" was published in 1921 in the sixth cycle of the Wheels anthology. To read the poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

Librivox Audio Recording (Hosted on Archive.org)

The Modernist Journals Project

“Sullen Moods” by Robert Graves

Sullen Moods

Love, do not count your labour lost

Though I turn sullen, grim, retired

Even at your side; my thought is crossed

With fancies by old longings fired.

 

And when I answer you, some days

Vaguely and wildly, do not fear

That my love walks forbidden ways,

Breaking the ties that hold it here

 

[ . . . ]

 

Robert Graves' poem "Sullen Moods" was published in Georgian Poetry 1920-1922. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publicaiton, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

“Perché” by Frances Gregg

Perché

I am the possessor and the possessed

I am of the unborn.

My kind have not yet come up on the earth.

Or—are they gone?

Am I then left, a memory of the dead?

Am I dream-wraith, a ghost of beauty fled?

I who possess and am possessed,

Am I born and dead?

 

Strange madness beset me.

Passing pageant-wise across my web of thought.

The red circlet of Narcissus gems my blood,—

And I brood on a golden reed.

Who doth possess me—I possess.

Yea, I am dead!

 

In the pale light from the grave

The Sisters weave:

Crimson—and green and golden thread

Upon Time's robe.

 

Frances Gregg's poem "Perché" was published in the 1916 Others anthology. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

“The God” by H.D.

The God

I.

I asked of your face:

is it dark,

set beneath heavy locks,

circled with stiff ivy-fruit,

clear,

cut wiht great hammer-stroke,

brow, nose and mouth,

mysteirous and far distant

from my sense.

 

I asked:

can he from his portals of ebony

carved with grapes,

turn toward the earth?

 

[. . . ]

 

H.D.'s poem "The God" was published in the 1917 Some Imagist Poets anthology. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follows the link(s) below:

Hathitrust

The Modernist Journals Project

Project Gutenberg

“Elan Vital” by Sherard Vines

Elan Vital

I lay in the tepid mud

Grey-drab, bubbling here and there with steam,

A cell

Rebellious, derisive of my creator's

Incoherent gropings.

I would be the sport no longer

Of his bovine essays in creation!

 

The other cells,

Ere they dissolved meekly back

Into inorganism

Tried, at my effrontery

To develop shocked hands

That they might hold them up protesting.

I laughed cells' laughter

And said; " I am life; see me live,"

I died laughing.

 

I was the creeping things

Slime-tracking the thundered on

Primaeval strata.

[ . . . ]

Sherard Vines' poem "Elan Vital" was published in the 1919 "cycle" of Wheels. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

Librivox audio recording hosted on Archive.org

“Synthesized Perfumes and Essences” by Marsden Hartley

Synthesized Perfumes and Essences

Morning comes with such rapidity, purple plum

hanging on sensuous boughs over my head,

sweeping my shoulders, grazing my cheek, that

I wonder one ever thinks of the going of even-

ing.

I never talk of evening save to say of, it, it is another

kind of light.

Dark holes called doorways are for me only as places

to go into where one watches the light of night

from them.

[ . . . ]

Marsden Hartley's poem "Synthesized Perfumes and Essences" was published in 1920 in the third Others anthology. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org 

“The Villain” by William H. Davies

The Villain

While joy gave clouds the light of stars,

That beamed where'er they looked;

And calves and lambs had tottering knees,

Excited, while they sucked;

While every bird enjoyed his song,

Without one thought of harm or wrong—

I turned my head and saw the wind,

Not far from where I stood,

Dragging the corn by her golden hair

Into a dark and lonely wood.

 

William H. Davies' poem "The Villain" was published in Georgian Poetry 1921-1922. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link below:

Archive.org

“Argyria” by Richard Aldington

“Clerk’s Song” by Sherard Vines

Clerk's Song

After the office hours chime away
And hurrying souls drift homeward, one by one
The long shadows that follow the dead sun
Wake, and become coherent, just as a
Sequence of words is strung into a lay;

Their cool blue fingers recreate my thought,
They slant in curious shapes across the bricks
A cube, a hippogriff, a crucifix,
A grape cluster that drips its crimson draught
Of Anaesthesia, as I have long sought.

[ . . . ]

 

Sherard Vines' poem "Clerk's Song" was published in the 1918 "cycle" of the Wheels anthology. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the links below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

“Portrait of Nancy Trevors” by Donald Evans

Portrait of Nancy Trevors

They sat in her drawing-room amid easeful silence in

tolerant enmity.

The men were three, and her husband was the third.

This in its way amplified his urbanity.

His suavities were of ivory.

He was more irreproachable than her virginal tea

cups.

 

She gave her lips to the moment, and her fingers

nestled in a bowl of apricots.

The tea was amber, and the pungent lemon and the

blanched sugar

Seized and caressed the eyes as each man took a prof-

fered cup.

 

It loosed the tongues, and the four were free.

As four portraits on a wall come to life they stirred

the silence with a babbling that gleamed.

The drawing-room was draped in a wistaria mist,

And the flutter of the phrases patted the cheek with

an alien charm.

In but a short while she had become dominant.

And then she wrapped herself in the soothing nerves

of excitement.

 

The three were lost in the pursuit of fragrance.

Their chairs were their kingdoms, and there were no

other empires.

Archly then her voice dared:

"Will you have another cup, my beloved?"

 

It was three cups that rang to her, and her hus

band's, it chanced, was the third.

She smiled over her adroit and ample confession, and

it was enough.

She had done with the hour,

And she let the uneasy hush turn to a hodden-grey.

Donald Evans' poem "Portrait of Nancy Trevors" was published in 1920 in the third Others anthology. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link below:

Archive.org