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TO ALL THE DEAD, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A chinese queen on a lacquered throne
Last Line: To all the dead!
Alternate Author Name(s): Hueffer, Ford Hermann; Hueffer, Ford Madox
Subject(s): Death; Dead, The


I
A CHINESE Queen on a lacquered throne
With a dragon as big as the side of a house,
All golden, and silent and sitting alone
In an empty house.
With the shadows above and the shadows behind,
And the Queen with a paper white, rice white face,
As still as a partridge, as still as a mouse,
With slanting eyes you would say were blind—
In a dead white face.

And what does she think, and what does she see,
With her face as still as a frozen pool is,
And her air as old as the oldest sea,
Where the oldest ice of the frozen Pole is?

She should have been dead nine thousand year...
But there come in three score and sixty coolies
With a veil of lawn as large as a lake,
And the veil blows here and shimmers there
In the unseen winds of the shadowy house.
And dragons flew in the shadowy air,
And there were chrysanthemums everywhere,
And butterflies and a coral snake
All round the margin of the lake.

For the Prince has come to court the Queen
Still sitting on high on her lacquered throne
With the golden dragon: and all the sheen
And shimmer and shine of a thousand wantons
In silken stuffs, with ivory lutes
And slanting eyes and furred blue boots
That moved in the light of a thousand lanthorns...

It all dies down, and the Queen sits there,
She should have been dead nine thousand year.

II
Now it happened that in the course of to-day
(The Queen was last night) in the rue de la Paix
In a room that was old and darkish and musty,
For most of the rooms are quaintly cranky
In the rue de la Paix,
For when it was new the Grande Armée
Tramped all its legions down this way.

But I sat there, and a friendly Yankee
Was lecturing me on the nature of things
(It's a way Americans have!) He was cranky,
Just as much as his rooms and his chairs and his tables.
But the window stood open and over the way
I saw that the house with the modernest facings
Had an old tiled roof with mansards and gables.
It housed a jeweller, two modistes,
A vendor of fans; and the topmost sign
Announced in a golden double line
A salon of Chinese chiropodists.

And that is Paris from heel to crown
Plate-glass in the street and jewels and lacings
And cranky rooms on the upper floors
With rusty locks and creaking doors

But of what my American friend was saying
I haven't a thought—there was too much noise
Through the open windows—the motors braying,
The clatter of hoofs in a steady stream,
And a scream
Unceasing from twenty paper boys,
With twenty versions to take your choice,
In styles courageous or gay or rococco,
Of clamorous news about Morocco...

III
And suddenly he said: "Sandusky!"
Now what was he talking of there in his musky,
Worm-eaten rooms of the rue de la Paix?
—Of his youth of jack rabbits and peanuts and snakes
When all was silent about the Lakes.
Now what is the name of them? Lake Ladoga?
No, no, that's in Russia. It's Ticonderoga,
Ontario, Champlin, each with their woods,
And never a house for miles and miles
And the boys in their boats floated on by the piles
Of old wigwams where shreds of blankets dangled.
And they caught their jack rabbits, lit bonfires and angled
In shallows for catfish. That's it, in Sandusky!
The Bay of Sandusky.

And then I remembered with grey, clear precision,
And I saw—yes I saw—looking over the way
Two Chinese chiropodists, villainous fellows,
With faces of sulphur—and lemon—yellows,
Gaze with that gaze that's half fanatic,
Part atrocious and partly sweet,
Each from a window of his own attic
At a mannequin on my side of the street,
And each grinned and girned in his Manchester blue,
And smirked with his eyes and his pig-tail too.
And somehow they made me feel sick; but I lost them
At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them;
A scene no more nor less than a vision,
All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

It must have been seven years ago,
I was out on a river whose name I've forgotten;
The Hudson perhaps or the Kotohotten.
It doesn't much matter. Do you know the Hudson?
A sort of a Moselle with New York duds on,
There are crags and castles, a distance all grey,
Rocks, forests and elbows. But castles of Jay
And William H. Post and Mrs Poughkeepsie—
Imagine a Moselle that's thoroughly tipsy,
A nightmare of ninety American castles
With English servants trained up like vassals,
Of Hiram P. Ouese who's a fortune from pills for the liver.

Anyhow, I've forgotten the name of the river.

And the steamer steamed upwards between the hills
And passed through the rapids they called the Narrows
'Twixt the high grey banks where the firs grow jagged,
And the castles ceased and the forest grew ragged,
And the steamer belched forth sparks and stayed
At a wooden village, then grunted and swayed
Out to midstream and round a reach
Where the river widened and swirled about,
And we slowed in the current where black snags stuck out,
And suddenly we saw a beach—

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds
That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds;
So still and old and grey and ragged.
For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,
The Indian graves. ...

IV
And it wasn't so much the wampumed Braves,
Eagle feathers, jade axes and totems and arrows
That I thought about, for ten minutes later
I was up and away from the Rue de la Paix
In a train for Trêves.
But the word "Sandusky" still hung in my brain
As we went through greeny grey Lorraine
In a jolting train,
And then bargained for rooms with a German waiter.
Or it wasn't even in great concern
For the fate of "Sandusky Bay."—My friend
Pictured it thronged with American villas,
Dutch Porticos and Ionic pillars.
So that no boy's boat can land on the shores,
For the high-bred owners of dry goods stores
Forbid the practice. The villa lawns,
Pitch-pine canoes with America's daughters
In a sort of a daily Henley regatta
And the bright parasols of Japanese paper
Keep up a ceaseless, endless chatter,
In the endless, ceaseless girl graduate story
Where once there were silence, jack-rabbits and snakes,
And o'er all the gay clatter there floats old Glory—
The flag of the States, from a calico shop.

But stop!
I am not lamenting about the Lakes.

For, as grey dawns roll on to grey dawns,
Some things must surely come to an end,
Even old silences over old waters
Even here in Trêves the Porta Nigra
That isn't so much a gaunt black ruin,
As a great black whole—a Roman gate-way,
As high as a mountain, as black as a jail—
Even here, even here, America's daughters,
Long toothed old maids with a camera
(For even they must know decay,
And the passage of time, hasting, hasting away!)
And the charm of the past grows meagre and meagrer.
Though through it all the Porta Nigra
Keeps its black, hard and grim completeness,
As if no fleet minutes with all their fleetness
Could rub down its surface.
But we've walled it in in a manner of speaking
With electric trams that go sparking and streaking
And filling the night with squeals and jangles
As iron wheels grind on iron angles. ...

And nobody cares and nobody grieves
And all the spires and towers of Trêves
Shade upwards into the sooty skies,
And you dig up here a sword or a chalice,
Some bones, some teeth and some golden bangles
And several bricks from the Cæsar's Palace.

V
And so I come back to this funny old town
Where professors argue each other down
And every one is in seven movements
For every kind of Modern Improvements;
And there isn't a moment of real ease,
But students come from the seven seas
And we boast a professor of Neo-Chinese—
A thing to astonish the upland heather—
And more than the universities
Of all High Germany put together
Can show the like of.
The upland heather
It stretches for miles and miles and miles
Wine-purple and brooding and ancient and blasted,
An endless trackless, heather forest,
And so, between whiles,
When my mind's all reeling with Modern Movements
And my eyes are weary, my head at its sorest
And the best of beer has lost its zest,
I go up there to get a rest
And think of the dead. ...
For it's nothing but dead and dead and dying
Dead faiths, dead loves, lost friends and the flying,
Fleet minutes that change and ruin our shows,
And the dead leaves flitter and autumn goes,
And the dead leaves flitter down thick to the ground,
And pomps go down and queens go down
And time flows on, and flows and flows.

But don't mistake me, the leaves are wet
And most of their copper splendour is rotten
Like most of the dead—and still and forgotten,
And I don't feel a spark of regret
Not a spark. ...

I am sitting up here on a sort of a mound
And the dull red sun has just done sinking
And it's grown by this woodside fully dark
And I'm just thinking. ...
And the valley lands and the forests and tillage
Are wrapped in mist. There's the lights of a village,
Of one—of three—of four!—
Four I can count from this high old mound...
In Tilly's time you could count eighteen...
You know of Tilly? A general
Who ravaged this land. There was Prince Eugene,
And Marshal Saxe and Wallenstein,
And God knows who ... They are dead men all
With tombs in cathedrals here and there,
Just food for tourists. It's rather funny,
They ravaged these cornfields and burned the hamlets,
They drove off the cattle and took the honey,
And clocks and coin and chests and camlets:
Reduced the numbers to four from eighteen;
You can see four glimmers of light thro' the gloom.
But as for Marshal Wallenstein,
No doubt he's somewhere in some old tomb
With a marble pillow beneath his head.
He was shot. Or he wasn't. Anyhow he's dead!
And I'm sitting here on an old, smashed mound.
And the wood-leaves are flittering down to the ground.
And I'm sitting here and just thinking and wondering,
Clear thoughts and pictures, dull thoughts and blundering.
It's all one. But I wonder...I wonder...

And under
The earth of the barrow there's something moving
Or no—not moving. Yes, shoving, shoving,
Through the thick, dark earth—a fox or a mole.
Phui! But it's dark! I can't grasp the whole
Of my argument—No. I'm not dropping to sleep!
(I can hear the leaves in the dark, cold wood!
That's a boar by his rustling!) "From good to good,
And good to better you say we go."
(There's an owl overhead.) "You say that's so?"
My American friend of the rue de la Paix?
"Grow better and better from day to day."
Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day;
Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay
Of a suburban cemetery. "Friend,
My Yankee friend." (He's mighty heavy and tusky,
Judged by his rustlings, that old boar in the wood)
"From good to good!
Have you found a better bay than old Sandusky?
Or I a better friend than the one that's left me?"
"No Argument?—Well I'm not arguing
I came out here to think"—
Now what's that thing
That's coursing o'er dead leaves. It's not a boar!
Some sort of woman! A Geheimrath's cook
Come out to meet her lover of the Ninth—
An Uhlan Regiment! You know the Uhlans,
Who charged at Mars La Tour; that's on their colours.

But that little wretch.
Whoever heard such kissing! Sighs now! Groans!
In the copper darkness of these wet, high forests.
Well, well, that's no affair of mine to-night.
I came out here though, yes, I'd an engagement
With Major Hahn to give him his revenge—
What was it? At roulette? But I'd a headache!
I came out here to think about that Queen!
The Chinese one—the one I saw in Paris.
To-night's the thirtieth...the thirty-first.
Why, yes, it's All Souls' Eve. That's why I'm morbid
With thoughts of All the Dead...That Chinese Queen
She never kissed her lover. But a queer,
A queer, queer look came out on her rice white face!
I never knew such longing was in the world,
Though not a feature stirred in her! No kisses!
But there she wavered just behind his back
With her slanting eyes. No moth about a flame,
No seabird in the storm round a lighthouse glare
Was e'er so lured to the ruin and wreck of love.
And he knelt there with such a queer, queer face
A queer, queer smile, and his uplifted hands
He prayed as we pray to a Queen in dragon silk;
His hands rubbed palm on palm. And so she swayed
And swayed just like a purple butterfly
Above the open jaws of a coral snake.

But she
Should have been dead nine thousand years and more,
Says our Chinese professor. For such acting
Was proper to the days and time of TSüang:
It's hopelessly demoded, dead and gone!
To-day we have—Chinese chiropodists
Who smile like toads at Paris mannequins
In the sacred name of Progress. Well, well, well!
I'm not regretting it—No vain regrets!
What's that. ...

Out of the loom of the Philosopher's wood
Two figures brushing on the frozen grass.
The Uhlan and the cook. So I cried out:
"So late at night and not yet in the barracks!
Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" ... "Oh ghosts! oh ghosts,"
I got my answer: "Friend,
In our old home the air's so thick with ghosts
You couldn't breathe if they were an objection!"
And so I said: "Well, well!" to make them pass. ...

Just a glimmer of light there was across the grass
And on my barrow mound. Upon his head
The gleam of a helmet, and some sort of pelt
About his shoulders and the loom of a spear.
You never know these German regiments,
The oddest uniforms they have; and as for her
Her hair was all across her shoulders and her face,
Woodland embraces bring the hairpins out...
"My friend," I said, "you'd better hurry home
Or else you'll lose your situation!" They
Bickered in laughter and the man just said:
"You're sitting on it!"
So I moved a little,
Apologetically, just as it
It was his table in a restaurant.
So he said calmly, looking down at me:
"They call these mounds the Hunnen Gräber—Graves
Of Huns—a modern, trifling folk!
We've slept in them well on nine thousand years
My wife and I. The dynasty TSüang
Then reigned in China—well, you know their ways
Of courting. But your specialty just now
I understand's not human life but death.
I died with a wolf at my throat, this woman here
With a sword in her stomach. Yes she fell on it
To keep me company in that tumulus.
Millions and millions of dead there lie round here
In the manœuvre grounds of the Seventeenth.
Oh, yes, I'm up to date, why not, why not?
When they've the Sappers here in garrison
The silly chaps come digging in these mounds
For practice; but they've not got down to us.
The Seventeenth just scutter up and down
At scaling practice and that's rather fun.
There was a sergeant took a chap by the ear
Last year and threw him bodily down the mound;
Then the recruit up with his bayonet
And stuck him through the neck—no end of things
We find for gossip in nine thousand years!
A Mongol people? Yes of course we were
I knew her very well that Queen who loved,
With the rice white face—"Ta-why's" her proper name
And that adultery bred heaps of trouble!
You've heard of Troy? "Tra-hai's" the real name
As Ta-why's Helen. Well, you know all that?
That trouble sent us here, being burnt out
By the King called Ko-ha! And we wandered on
In just ten years of burning towns. This slave
My wife came from Irkutsk way to the east
Where the tundra is—You know the nightingales
Come there in spring, and so they buried us
Finger to finger as the ritual is.
Not know the ritual? Well, a mighty chief
Is buried in a chamber like a room
Walled round with slabs of stone. But mighty lovers
Lie on their backs at both arms' length, so far
That just each little finger touches. Well
That's how they buried us. A hundred years
It took to get accustomed to the change.
We lay just looking up—just as you might
Upwards through quiet water at the stars,
The roots of the grass, and other buryings,
Lying remembering and touching fingers.
Just still and quiet. Then I heard a whisper
Lasting a hundred years or so; "Your lips,"
It said," Your lips! your lips! your lips!" And then
It might have been five more score years. I felt
Her fingers crawling, crawling, up my wrist.
And always the voice, call, calling;"Give your lips!"

It must have taken me a thousand years
—The Dead are patient—just to know that she
Was calling for my lips. What an embrace!
My God what an embrace was ours through the Earth!
My friend, if you should chance to meet Old Death
That unprogressive tyrant, tell him this,
He execrates my name—but tell him this—
He calls me Radical! Red Socialist,
That sort of thing. But you just tell him this,
The revolutionary leader of his realms
Got his ambition from his dead girl's lips.
Tell him in future he should spare hot lovers,
Though that's too late! We're working through the earth,
By the score, by the million. Half his empire's lost.
How can he fight us? He has but one dart
For every lover of the sons of Ahva!
You call her Eve. This is a vulgar age"...
And so beside the woodland in the sheen
And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon
And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips!
Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat,
It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed,
The call of the dead. A multitudinous
And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed,
Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips
Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms
The coldness of the dew—and all a gleam
Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses,
Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders
Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods...

There came great rustlings from the copper leaves
And pushing outwards, shouldering, a boar
With seven wives—a monstrous tusky brute.
I rose and rubbed my eyes and all eight fled
Tore down the mountain through the thick of the leaves
Like a mighty wave of the sea that poured itself
Farther and farther down the listening night.
All round me was the clearing, and white mist
Shrouded the frosty tussocks of old grass.
And in the moonlight a wan fingerpost
(I could not read the lower row of words.)
Proclaimed: "Forbidden!" That's High Germany.
Take up your glasses. "Prosit!" to the past,
To all the Dead!





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