Sunday, August 15, 2021
Sweet Unrestraint
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), "Home-Sickness ... From the Town," in Oxford Poetry 1915 (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1915), p. 27:
Newer› ‹Older
Frou-frouery and faint patchouli smells,
And debile virgins talking Keats,
And the arch widow in accordion pleats,
Artfully fringing with the tales she tells
The giggling prurient.
Life nauseous! Let the whole crowd be sent
To the chosen limbos and appropriate hells
Reserved in memory's blackest stagnancy.
Back, back! No Social Contract! From the teats
Of our old wolfish mother nature drink
Sweet unrestraint and lust and savagery.
Feel goat-hair growing thick and redolent
On loin and thigh; look back
And mark the cloven hoof-marks of the track
You leave, then forward eyes again; no wink,
Lest for an instant you should miss the sight
Of moony floating flanks and haunches white
Flashed by your fleeting nymph girl through the leaves.
