"Home-Sickness -- From the Town"
by Aldous Huxley

 

Frou-Frouery and faint patchouli smells,

And debile virgins talking Keats,

And the arch widow in accordion pleats,

Artfully fringing with the tales she tells

The giggling prurient.

Life nauseous! Let the whole crowd be sent

To the chosen limbos and appropriate hells

Reserved in memory's blackest stagnancy.

 

Back, back! No Social Contract! From the teats

Of our old wolfish mother nature drink

Sweet unrestraint and lust and savagery.

Feel goat-hair growing thick and redolent

On loin and thigh; look back

And mark the cloven hoof-marks of the track

You leave, then forward eyes again; no wink,

Lest for an instant you should miss the sight

Of moony floating flanks and haunches white

Flashed by your fleeting nymph girl through the leaves.

 

This was Huxley's first adult poem published in 1914 in Oxford Poetry.

source: Bedford, Sybille. Aldous Huxley: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

 

 

 

Links to each chapter:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18