Possession Page 26

  The grassy knoll

  Shivers in His embrace

  His muscles—roll

  About—about—His Face

  Smiles hot and gold

  Over the small hill’s brow

  And every fold

  Contracts and stiffens—now

  He gathers strength

  His glistering length

  Grips, grips: the stones

  Cry out like bones

  Constricted—earth—in pain

  Cries out—again—

  He grips and smiles—

  My very dear,

  I write in haste—I fear your answer—I know not whether to depart or no—I will stay, for you—unless this small chance you spoke of prove a true possibility. Yet how may that be? How could you satisfactorily explain such a step? How can I not nevertheless hope?

  I do not wish to do irreparable damage to your life. I have so much rational understanding left to me, as to beg you—against my own desires, my own hope, my own true love—to think before and after. If by any kind of ingenuity it may be done satisfactorily so that you may afterwards live as you wish—well then—if it may—this is not matter for writing. I shall be in the Church at noon tomorrow.

  I send my love now and always.

  Dear Sir,

  It is done. BY FIAT. I spoke Thunder—and said—so it shall be—and there will be no questions now—or ever—and to this absolute Proposition I have—like all Tyrants—meek acquiescence.

  No more Harm can be done by this than has already been done—not by your will—though a little by mine—for I was (and am) angry.

  11

  SWAMMERDAM

  Bend nearer, Brother, if you please. I fear

  I trouble you. It will not be for long.

  I thank you now, before my voice, or eyes,

  Or weak wit fail, that you have sat with me

  Here in this bare white cell, with the domed roof

  As chalky-plain as any egg’s inside.

  I shall be hatched tonight. Into what clear

  And empty space of quiet, she best knows,

  The holy anchoress of Germany

  Who charged you with my care, and speaks to God

  For my poor soul, my small soul, briefly housed

  In this shrunk shelly membrane that He sees,

  Who holds, like any smiling Boy, this shell

  In his bright palm, and with His instrument

  Of Grace, pricks in his path, for infinite Light

  To enter through his pinhole, and seek out

  What must be sucked to him, an inchoate slop

  Or embryonic Angel’s fledgling wings.

  I have not much to leave. Once I had much,

  Or thought it much, but men thought otherwise.

  Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things

  Lively in death, injected by my Art,

  Lovingly entered, opened and displayed—

  The types of Nature’s Bible, ranged in ranks

  To show the secrets of her cunning hand.

  No matter now. Write—if you please—I leave

  My manuscripts and pens to my sole friend,

  The Frenchman, the incomparable Thévenot,

  Who values, like a true philosopher

  The findings of a once courageous mind.

  He should have had my microscopes and screws—

  The copper helper with his rigid arms

  We called Homunculus, who gripped the lens

  Steadier than human hands, and offered up

  Fragments of gauze, or drops of ichor, to

  The piercing eyes of Men, who dared to probe

  Secrets beyond their frame’s unaided scope.

  But these are gone, to buy the bread and milk

  This curdled stomach can no more ingest.

  I must die in his debt. He is my friend

  And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write

  For her, for Antoinette de Bourignon

  (Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God’s

  Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love)

  That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face

  To the bare wall, and leave this world of things

  For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came

  Halting to Germany, to seek her out.

  Now sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date,

  March, 1680, and then write my age

  His forty-third year. His small time’s end. His time—

  Who saw Infinity through countless cracks

  In the blank skin of things, and died of it.

  Think you, a man’s life grows a certain shape

  As out of ant’s egg antworm must proceed

  And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come

  The monstrous female or the winged drone

  Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?

  I am a small man, closed in a small space,

  Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,

  The inconsiderable and overlooked,

  The curious and the ephemeral.

  I like your small cell, Brother. Poverty,

  Whiteness, a window, water, and your hand

  Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.

  Thank you. It is enough.

  Where I was born

  Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,

  A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,

  A cabinet of curiosities.

  What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce

  Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,

  The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,

  Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds

  Heaped pêle-mêle o’er the tables and the chairs.

  A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl

  Of squat stone scarabs and small painted eyes

  Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.

  A mermaid swam in a hermetic jar

  With bony fingers scraping her glass walls

  And stiff hair streaming from her shrunken head.

  Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,

  Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,

  Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.

  And there was too a cockatrice’s egg,

  An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,

  That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup

  Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around

  With pitch-dark bandages from head to foot,

  Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands

  My infant limbs were held in, I assume.

  And your hands, will they? presently will fold

  This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,

  Weakened by so much straining over motes

  And specks of living matter, eyes that oped

  In innocent lustre on that teasing heap

  Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe

  By resolute captains of the proud Dutch ships

  That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,

  Sail out of mist and squalls, ride with the wind

  To burning lands beneath a copper sun

  Or never-melted mountains of green ice

  Or hot dark secret places in the steam

  Of equatorial forests, where the sun

  Strikes far above the canopy, where men

  And other creatures never see her light

  Save as a casual winking lance that runs

  A silver shaft between green dark and dark.

  I had a project, as a tiny boy

  To make a catalogue of all this pelf,

  Range it, create an order, render it,

  You might say, human-sized, by typing it

  According to the use we made of it

  Or meanings we saw in it. I would part

  Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets

  (Pure superstition) from the minerals—

&
nbsp; Rose-quartz, quicksilver, we could grind to heal

  Agues or tropic fever. Living things

  Should have their own affined taxonomy,

  Insect with insect, dusty bird with bird,

  And all the eggs, from monstrous ostrich-globe

  To chains of soft-shelled snakes’ eggs, catalogued,

  Measured with calipers and well set out

  Gainst taffeta curtains, in curved wooden cups.

  My father had a pothecary’s shop

  And seemed well-pleased at first to have a son

  With such precocious yearnings of the mind.

  He was ambitious for me. In his thoughts

  He saw me doing human good, admired

  By men, humble in God’s eyes, eloquent

  For truth and justice. When he saw that I

  Was not the lawyer-son his hopes embraced

  He fixed on a physician. “Who can mend

  Man’s ailing frame, succours his soul too,” said

  My father, a devout and worldly man,

  “And keeps himself in bread and meat and wine.

  Since fallen man must ail, the doctor’s care

  Is ever-wanted, this side of the grave.”

  But I had other leanings. Did they come

  From scrupulous intellect, or glamorous spell

  Cast by my infant nursery’s denizens?

  It seemed to me that true anatomy

  Began not in the human heart and hands

  But in the simpler tissues, primal forms,

  Of tiny things that crept or coiled or flew.

  The clue to life lay in the blind white worm

  That eats away the complex flesh of men,

  Is eaten by the farmyard bird who makes

  A succulent dinner for another man

  And so completes the circle. Life is One

  I thought, and rational anatomy

  Begins at the foot o’ the ladder, on the rung

  Nearest the fertile heat of Mother Earth.

  Was it for that, or was it that my Soul

  Had been possessed, in that dark Cabinet

  By the black spider, big as a man’s fist,

  Tangible demon, in her sooty hair,

  Or by the coal-black Moths of Barbary

  Pierced through their frail dark wings, and crucified

  With pins, for our amusement?

  These were strange

  And yet were forms of life, as I was too

  (With a soul superadded, understood)

  And kin to me, or so I thought, when young.

  For all seemed fashioned from the self-same stuff,

  Mythic gold yolk and glassy albumen

  Of ancient Egypt’s fabled Mundane Egg,

  Laid in the Void by sable-plumaged Night.

  From which sprang Eros, all in feathered light

  Who fecundated Chaos, wherein formed

  Germens of all that lives and moves on Earth.

  The Orphic fables in their riddling wit

  Pointed us there, perhaps, towards a truth.

  I sought to know the origins of life.

  I thought it lawful knowledge. Did not God

  Who made my hands and eyes, lend me the skill

  To make my patient copper mannikin

  Who held the lenses, variously curved

  Steady above the living particles

  I learned to scry and then to magnify

  Successively in an expanding scale

  Of diminution or of magnitude,

  Until I saw successive plans and links

  Of dizzying order and complexity?

  I could anatomise a mayfly’s eye,

  Could so arrange the cornea of a gnat

  That I could peer through that at New Church Tower,

  And see it upside down and multiplied,

  Like many pinpoints, where no Angels danced.

  A moth’s wing scaly like a coat of mail,

  The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies—

  I saw a new world in this world of ours—

  A world of miracle, a world of truth

  Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.

  That glass of water you hold to my lips,

  Had I my lenses, would reveal to us

  Not limpid clarity as we suppose—

  Pure water—but a seething, striving horde

  Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails