The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [95]
The habitation of dragons. Looking back on the V.1’s flying through the night, one thought of dragons as, physically speaking, less remote than formerly. Probably they lived in caves and came down from time to time to the banks of a river or lake to drink. The ground ‘where each lay’ would, of course, be scorched by fiery breath, their tails too, no doubt, giving out fire that made the water hiss and steam, the sedge become charred. Not all the later promises of the prophecy were easily comprehensible. An intense, mysterious beauty pervaded the obscurity of the text, its assurances all the more magical for being enigmatic. Who, for example, were the wayfaring men? Were they themselves all fools, or only some of them? Perhaps, on the contrary, the wayfaring men were contrasted with the fools, as persons of entirely different sort. One thing was fairly clear, the fools, whoever they were, must keep off the highway; ‘absolutely verboten’, as Biggs, Staff Officer Physical Training, used to say. Brief thoughts of Biggs, hanging by the neck until he was dead in that poky little cricket pavilion; another war casualty, so far as it went. The problem of biblical exegesis remained. Perhaps it was merely a warning: wayfaring men should not make fools of themselves. Taking the war period, limiting the field to the army, one had met quite a few wayfaring men. Biggs himself was essentially not of that category: Bithel, perhaps: Odo Stevens, certainly. Borrit? It was fascinating that Borrit should have remembered Pamela Flitton’s face after three years or more.
‘I’ve been in Spain on business sometimes,’ Borrit said. ‘A honeymoon couple would arrive at the hotel. Be shown up to their bedroom. Last you’d see of them. They wouldn’t leave that room for a fortnight – not for three weeks. You’d just get an occasional sight of a brassed-off chambermaid once in a way lugging off a slop-pail. They’ve got their own ways, the Spaniards. “With a beard, St Joseph; without, the Virgin Mary.” That’s a Spanish proverb. Never quite know what it means, but it makes you see what the Spaniards are like somehow.’
There were more prayers. A psalm. The Archbishop unenthrallingly preached. We rose to sing Jerusalem.
‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear; O Clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!’
Was all that about sex too? If so, why were we singing it at the Victory Service? Blake was as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so. It was not quite such wonderful stuff as the Prophet rendered into Elizabethan English, yet wonderful enough. At the same time, so I always felt, never quite for me. Blake was a genius, but not one for the classical taste. He was too cranky. No doubt that was being ungrateful for undoubted marvels offered and accepted. One often felt ungrateful in literary matters, as in so many others. It would be interesting to know what the military attachés made of the poem. General Asbjornsen certainly enjoyed singing the words. He was quite flushed in the face, like a suddenly converted Viking, joining in with the monks instead of massacring them.
Reflections about poetry, its changes in form and fashion, persisted throughout further prayers. ‘Arrows of desire’, for example, made one think of Cowley. Cowley had been an outstanding success in his own time. He had been buried in Westminster Abbey. That was something which would never have happened to Blake. However, it was Blake who had come out on top in the end. Pope was characteristically direct on the subject
‘Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,
But still I love the language of his heart’
But, admitting nobody read the Pindarique Odes, surely the pointed wit was just what did survive? In Cowley’s quite peculiar grasp of the contrasted