It’s Valentine’s Day, the sun is shining and our kitchen is fragrant with the scent of wet hen, since I spent a portion of this morning washing Daisy’s bottom and drying it with the hair-dryer. Meanwhile, my tiny study is fragrant with the scent of dusty lavender, after a book avalanche knocked over a bowl of dried lavender I had imprudently balanced on the edge of the cupboard. The lavender is everywhere: all over the desk, books, heaps of paper and alas inside a drawer or two as well as I hadn’t closed them. I don’t even know where the bowl is, it seems to have slipped into another dimension. Anyway, perhaps this is a hint that I should tidy up.
All of this has turned my thoughts to James Elroy Flecker, and so I thought I would post a bit of ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’ from Hassan here. I became slightly obsessed with James Elroy Flecker as a teenager after my school put on a production of Hassan. It has been a while now though since I read him and while his attitudes towards the Middle East are disappointing to say the very least, the romantic lushness of much of his work cannot be denied.
Everyone rightly knows the beautiful Epilogue, so here is the Prologue.
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,—
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:
And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.
II
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so far:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there
When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells.
When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.
(Uncredited illustration for T.E. Lawrence, An Essay on James Elroy Flecker and Forgotten Warfare; Southampton, Mark Valentine, 1988; found here)