The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [96]
‘Thou with strange adultery
Doest in each breast a brothel keep;
Awake, all men do lust for thee,
And some enjoy thee when they sleep.’
No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love’s free-for-all in dreams. You only had to compare the dream situation with that adumbrated by poor old Edgar Allan Poe – for whom, for some reason, I always had a weakness – when he trafficked in a similar vein:
‘Now all my days are trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams –
In what ethereal dances
By what eternal streams.’
Ethereal dances would have been no good to Cowley, by eternal streams or anywhere else. He wanted substance. That verse used to run in my head when in love with Jean Duport – her grey eyes – though she laid no claims to being a dancer, and Poe’s open-air interpretive choreography sounded unimpressive. However, there were no limits when one was in that state. We rose once more for another hymn, ‘Now thank we all our God’, which was, I felt pretty sure, of German origin. Whoever was responsible for choosing had either forgotten that, or judged it peculiarly apposite for this reason. We had just prayed for the ‘United Nations’ and ‘our enemies in defeat’. In the same mood, deliberate selection of a German hymn might be intended to indicate public forgiveness and reconciliation. Quite soon, of course, people would, in any case, begin to say the war was pointless, particularly those, and their associates, moral and actual, who had chalked on walls, ‘Strike now in the West’ or ‘Bomb Rome’. Political activities of that kind might by now have brought together Mrs Andriadis and Gypsy Jones. The Te Deum. Then the National Anthem, all three verses:
‘God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us;
God save the King!
O Lord our God arise
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On thee our hopes we fix;
God save us all.
Thy choicest gift in store
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign!
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King I’
Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination nor subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, ‘reign’ had been considered an adequate rhyme to ‘king’; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.
The Royal Party withdrew. There was a long pause while photographs were taken outside on the steps. The Welsh Guards turned their attention to something in Moreland’s line, Walton’s ‘Grand March’. Orders had been issued that the congregation was to leave by the south portico, the door just behind us. It was now thrown open. Finn and I drove the military attachés like sheep before us in that direction. Once in the street, they would have to find their own cars. The last of them disappeared