The Children's Book

20

At the turn of the century, the young were about to be adults, or some of them were, and the elders looked at the young, with their fresh skins and new graces and awkwardnesses with a mixture of tenderness, fear and desire. The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.

Prosper Cain’s family appeared to be unproblematic, indeed hopeful. Julian went to Cambridge in December 1899 and took the entrance exam for King’s College, where he was awarded a scholarship. He would start in the autumn of 1900. Florence was studying for Cambridge higher certificates in several subjects, and was talking of studying languages at Newnham College. The newly named Victoria and Albert Museum was in a turmoil of building and a turmoil of reorganisation; arguments raged between those who saw the museum as a “collection of curios,” and those who saw its primary task as the academic education of craftsmen and teachers. The Royal College of Art, which had replaced the National Training School, of which Walter Crane had been Principal in 1898–9, was now ruled by a Council of Art, four experts from the Art Workers Guild, full of Arts and Crafts idealism. W. R. Lethaby became the first Professor of Design at the college, and the course was energetically rearranged for “Art Teachers of both sexes,” “designers,” and “Art Workmen.” There was a Matron for Women Students since there was no woman teacher, and a large body of young ladies.

Prosper Cain had been watching Imogen Fludd. He could not, he told himself, stand the sight of her mooning around Purchase House looking something between a draggled goosegirl and an incarcerated princess. By 1900 she was twenty-one, or thereabouts, and had neither husband, nor profession, nor sensible life at home. But she did, he thought, have a delicate but real artistic talent. He was sure she should get out of Benedict Fludd’s aura, and the miasma of Seraphita’s inactivity, and learn to do something. He spoke to Walter Crane, who admired Benedict Fludd’s pots, and was well aware of the vagaries of his temperament. Prospective students had to take a rigorous series of exams in architecture (twelve hours for a drawing of a small architectural object); a six-hour modelling exam of—say—in charcoal the mouth of Michelangelo’s David; drawing (a life drawing of the head, hand and foot); ornament and design—a drawing from memory of a piece of foliage, such as oak, ash or lime; and lettering by hand of a given sentence. Prosper Cain did not know whether Imogen had skills enough—or courage enough—to enter these public competitions. He persuaded Crane to allow her to attend the college classes as an amateur observer. They would see how she developed. There could be a polite fiction that she was “visiting” the Keeper of Precious Metals.

Cain went down to Lydd in the late autumn of 1899 and put this idea to Imogen, whom he took for a walk along the beach, having rather firmly and rudely rejected Seraphita’s hints that Pomona would like to come too. This gave him a ridiculous feeling that he was behaving like a suitor, when in fact his feelings were quasi-paternal. Imogen wore a long hooded cloak, held together with two beaten silver clasps which he thought were very ugly. The hood would not stay over her head, and the whole garment blew and flapped in the wind coming off the sea. When the hood was down, her hair blew about too. It was caught up in theory, by a plaited strand which held it in a mane behind her head, but the whole thing, he thought, was a dreadful mess. She should see a hairdresser. She should have a hat with some style to it. She looked downwards, with cast-down lashes, at her serviceable but very worn boots, and reached, with hands draped in fingerless lacy mittens, to hold down the blown bits of her clothing. She had, he thought, a very sweet face, an innocent face, that should not have had the quality of lifelessness he perceived in it.

“I wanted to catch you by yourself, which has proved difficult. I have an idea I should like to put to you.”

“I don’t think—”

“Please, hear me out, before you refuse me.” That sounded very like a suitor. She went on looking down.

He put his plan to her. He explained that after the period of apprenticeship, and learning the ropes, she could take the entrance exam, and become a craftswoman, or a teacher, as she chose.

“Why?” she said. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“I don’t like waste. And you have talent.”

“There are all sorts of reasons,” she said into the wind and the spray, “why this can’t happen. It can’t.”

“Would you like it, if it could?”

She bowed her head. The hood flopped forward.

“I shall speak to your father. Today.”

“You can’t. I mustn’t… they need me, Mother and Father, Pomona …”

“And what do you need? Your brother hasn’t felt he must stay here.”

Geraint had indeed taken himself off to the counting rooms and telegrams of the City of London, where he was rapidly becoming successful in Basil Wellwood’s bank.

“I believe I have some influence with your father. I shall convince him you will be safe, for I shall invite you to stay with myself and Florence, whilst you learn the ways of the college. How can he object?”

“You don’t understand—” said Imogen, dully. He stopped, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face.

“No, I don’t understand everything. But I believe I understand enough to put a case to your father.”

And then, suddenly, she flung herself into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He could not hear what she was saying, nervously and rapidly, into his jacket, but he held her, and patted her back, and felt her sob between his hands.

He approached Benedict Fludd himself with an anxiety he concealed completely. He went to see Fludd in his study—the room that had once been a scullery, and was now full of drying pots and drawing pads, in the midst of which was a Morris & Co. Sussex armchair, in which Fludd was sitting. He said

“I have something I want to say to you—a proposal I want to put you. About Imogen.”

Again, that lurking, parodic sense of being a suitor.

“What about Imogen?” said Fludd, ungraciously. Prosper Cain said that he had been impressed by Imogen’s talent, and explained his plan for her immediate fortune.

“She’s very well where she is,” said Fludd.

“She’s lonely and unemployed,” said Cain.

“Her family needs her, I need her.”

“You have Philip Warren and the inestimable Elsie. You have your wife and Pomona. I think it is time to give Imogen her freedom.”

“Ha! You think I imprison her.”

“No. But I think it is time for her to leave.”

“You are an interfering pompous military bastard. And you know, none better, that there’s no money to pay for her keep in the filthy city.”

“I propose that she lives with me as a visitor until—as I believe she can and should—she wins a scholarship to the Royal College. And then she will be enabled to earn her own keep. If she doesn’t marry. She doesn’t meet many young men, here.”

“You believe I don’t know what my duty is? And her duty is to care for her parents.”

“Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I know you love your daughter—”

“Do you? Do you know that?”

“Too much to part with her easily. But she will love you more freely if you can bring yourself to let her go. And I’ll bear the cost of her move if you’ll let me have that oxblood jar with the smoky snakes on it, which I’ve had my eyes on for a couple of years. It ought to be displayed in the collection, and you know it.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know I don’t know. But I have watched Imogen, and you haven’t given one good reason why she shouldn’t come to London.”

“Oh, take my daughter, and take my jar, and go to the Devil, Prosper Cain. Have a brandy. Look at Philip’s dandelion heads on these plates, with the seeds blowing. He’s a bright lad.”

“He’s a young man, too, as Imogen is a young woman. May I take some of the dandelion work to show to the Keepers, as well?”

Imogen came to London, and Prosper said to his daughter that something must be done to get her a decent hat and dress, but he didn’t know how. Florence said “I’ll find a hat—you know how good I am at hats—and I’ll tell her it’s mine and I can’t wear it. She’s too tall for my dresses. I’ll think of a way.”

“I do love you, my Florence. Will you always be so sensible?”

“No. I quite expect to become very silly as I grow older. Everyone seems to.”

• • •

In the Cains’ house inside the Museum, apart from the crashing and trundling and dust of the building programme, Imogen did indeed seem to settle into a more cheerful normality. She turned out to have an unexpected flair for architectural drawing, she made a few silk rosebuds and forget-me-nots for the simple hat Florence found for her, and she set out of her own accord to restructure her clothing into a usual shape for a lady art student. In the Fludds’ house, things were less cheerful. After Imogen’s departure, Pomona began sleepwalking again. She ended up, several times, in Philip’s bedroom, on one occasion wearing no clothes, and wrapped only in her excessively long, not very clean, golden hair. Philip and Elsie talked about this. Elsie thought Pomona was play-acting. She told Philip that Pomona was throwing herself at him—literally—because he was the only young male person anywhere in reach. She said Pomona was hysterical and was putting it on. Philip said no, she wasn’t, she was deeply asleep, he could tell when she touched him. He wanted to tell Elsie that Pomona’s cold, naked flesh, pressed against him, did stir and disturb him—he was only human—but at the same time as being most desirably creamy-white, with firm little breasts and soft pale pink nipples, she was somehow inert, meaty, kind of dead, he said to himself, so deeply asleep she was. Elsie did not tell Philip of an odd conversation she had had with Imogen, the day of Imogen’s departure. It was so improbable, that when she tried to remember it, she wondered if she had made it up. Imogen had embraced her warmly, which was uncharacteristic, was indeed the first time she had embraced Elsie, whom she always held at arm’s-length, in every way. She said to Elsie that there was something she must say to her. She drew her into the kitchen, in the pretext of checking supplies.

“If he asks you to—to pose for life-drawings, don’t. That is, don’t take your clothes off, even if you feel it’s all right, don’t. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said Elsie, feeling perversely that she would take her clothes off if she liked, whereas if she had been asked ten minutes earlier whether she would ever pose nude for an artist, she would have laughed sharply, and said “Not on your life.”

Things in the Wellwood families were less happy, and more contentious than in the Cains’. Basil Wellwood’s children were both opposed to the futures their parents desired for them. Charles, or Karl, had done moderately well at Eton, spending parts of his vacations secretly attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation with Joachim Susskind, and (also with Joachim Susskind) attending meetings of the Fabian Society where his uncle was speaking. The Fabians were going through a contentious period themselves, which divided the Imperialists, who supported the British army in the Boer War, and believed in spreading the virtues of British democracy throughout the world, from the gas-and-water socialists, who believed in concentrating, at home, on the public ownership and management of utilities and the land. The society had voted on a motion which expressed “deep indignation at the success of the monstrous conspiracy … which has resulted in the present wanton and unjustifiable war.” The motion was narrowly defeated. Sydney Olivier, although a senior Colonial Office official, was incensed at the war: his wild daughters burned Joseph Chamberlain in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night in 1899. The Webbs thought the war was regrettable and “underbred.” G. B. Shaw argued that the Society should sit on the fence, and wait till the war was won and demand nationalisation of the Rand mines and good working conditions for miners. A further vote was held in November, and won by the Imperialists. A flock of Fabians then resigned, including Ramsay MacDonald, Walter Crane, the head of the Royal College, and Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the campaign for the rights of women.

Charles/Karl and Joachim were excited. Charles wanted to go to the new London School of Economics, then in its sixth year of teaching. Basil Wellwood, who had not been to university himself, wanted his son to be at Oxford or Cambridge, and insisted that he sit the entrance exam. Charles asked for time to make up his mind, at least. He thought he might like to travel, to see the world. He thought, though he did not say this, that he might visit the German socialists, with Joachim. It was usual for English gentlemen to travel. All he asked, said Basil, was that Charles should ensure his place at Cambridge before his travel. Charles agreed to sit the scholarship exam in December 1900. He went back to Eton, and did the minimum of academic work.

Griselda was already threatened with a Season as a debutante. She and Dorothy were sixteen in 1900 and were studying—more slowly, more haphazardly than if they had been boys—for their school certificates and Highers. Katharina gave little dances for Griselda already, with selected young men, a harp and piano, fruit punch and lobster salad. Griselda begged Dorothy to come to these. “I am paralysed with shyness; if you are there we can look at it from outside, we can smile at each other, I won’t be alone.” Dorothy said dancing was no part of her plan of her life. She came, however, on occasion. She did care for Griselda. Griselda was altogether too pale to be beautiful, but she was striking in a fragile way. Dorothy was the opposite, dark-haired, golden-skinned, lithe from running in the woods. She told Griselda she hadn’t a party dress. Griselda gave her two of her own—an ivory silk, a deep rose chiffon. Violet adjusted them. Dorothy glared at her, and insisted that she strip away much of the ornamentation. This had the effect of streamlining Dorothy, so that she looked well-shaped and attractive. The boys pressed damp hands on her waist, and talked to her about hunting, and about other parties. Dorothy tried to talk to them about the war, and was rebuffed. She developed a fantasy which bothered her of anatomising the most clumsy and spotty ones in an operating theatre. If she said she meant to be a doctor, they said things like “My sister took a course in nursing until her children were born.” They seemed to think she was confused about the medical profession. Whereas they were confused about her.

Griselda asked her if she had ever been in love. No, said Dorothy, oddly she hadn’t, though perhaps she ought to have been, everyone appeared to be. Griselda said that sometimes she thought she herself was in love. This surprised Dorothy, and slightly annoyed her. She was the clever one. If Griselda was in love, she should have noticed for herself.

“Anyone I know?” she asked, too casually.

“Oh yes, you know him. Can’t you guess?”

Dorothy ran her mind over the boys at the dances. Griselda treated them all the same, making gentle small talk, dancing elegantly, not joking, not flirting.

“No, I can’t. I’m shocked. Tell me.”

“You must have noticed. I love Toby Youlgreave. It’s hopeless, I know. But things happen to me when I see him. I go to his lectures just to hear his voice—well no, not just—what he says is amazing—but when I hear it, I feel a jump, inside me.”

“He’s old,” said Dorothy flatly. She said it too vehemently, because she had prevented herself from saying “But he’s in love with my mother.”

“I know,” said Griselda. “It’s totally inappropriate,” she said lugubriously. She added sententiously “It doesn’t matter how old he is, because at our age it would be a disaster to meet the one, because it would be the wrong time. Since it has to be hopeless, he can be as old as he likes. Well, is. As old as he is.”

“I think you’re making fun of me, Grisel.”

“No, I’m not, I’m not. There’s a sensible watching bit of me that knows I’m making use of beloved Toby, to practise being in love, in safety so to speak. And there’s an irrational bit that goes swoony and dissolving when I see him. Doesn’t that happen to you at all?”

“No,” said Dorothy, staunchly and truthfully. They began to laugh, for no good reason, and were soon weak with laughter.

Prosper Cain was pleased with his children. The Wellwoods were anxious about Tom. He had become solitary in a way that was unexpected and did not seem quite natural. Charles had passed his Highers comfortably. Tom had not. He had done well in geometry and zoology and had failed everything else, including English, which was hard to do. Basil and Olive were surprised, as were Toby Youlgreave and Vasily Tartarinov, who had both expected him to pass with better results than his cousin. Tom remarked briefly that he felt he hadn’t been concentrating. He had found the whole situation—writing all that stuff—time-restrictive and unreal. What did he intend to do? Humphry asked him. Tom didn’t know, apparently. He was always occupied. He spent his days on foot, in the woods, on the hills, never really considering going outside the bowl of English countryside between the North and South Downs. He didn’t seem to mind being alone—Dorothy, to whom he had been close, lived as much at Griselda’s houses as her own, and was concentrating furiously on physics, chemistry and zoology. He made friends, in a remote way, with gamekeepers and farmers’ boys—he was good at leaning on fences, for long periods, asking questions about rabbits, pheasants, trout and pike. He sat on river banks with a rod and line, observing the weeds and shadows where the fish hung in the current, or lurked under a stone. He practised approaching rabbits and hares as Richard Jefferies recommended, putting his feet down softly and steadily, without a two-legged rhythm, keeping his arms close to his sides—human arms, Jefferies believed, alarmed wild creatures as teeth and claws and scent did in other predators. Tom got to be reasonably skilful at approaching recumbent hares, or keeping quiet in a wood at twilight and waiting for the badgers to emerge, snuffling. He could pick up their scent as though he was himself a wild thing. He spent hours rigorously training his imagination to understand the needs and limitations of the body of a bee, or a redstart, a slow-worm or a moorhen, a laying cuckoo or the enslaved foster-mother of its monstrous changeling. He made inventories of the varieties of grasses in the edges of the ploughed fields, or the numbers of nesting birds in one hedgerow, or the pond life in the clay-lined pond where the cattle slobbered with their lips, smelling of hay and dung and milkiness. He didn’t consider all this a preparation for any particular way of life. He didn’t want to “be” a naturalist, and had no professional interest in being either a sportsman or a gamekeeper. He read perpetually—there was always a book in the satchel he carried—but he only read two kinds of writings. He read books by naturalists—particularly Jefferies, whose very rooted mild English mysticism about the English soil seemed to Tom to be part of his own body. And he read and reread William Morris’s romances about tragic lovers, monstrous dangers, and infinite journeys; this included News from Nowhere, with its ideally happy craftsmen in their stone cottages, with their rich crops of vegetables, flowers, vines and honey. There was much that he did not read. He shied away from sexual intrigues, feeling what he characterised as boredom and disgust, and secretly half-knew was a kind of fear. He did not read, as did many Fabian children, and upper-class renegades like Charles/Karl, the angry descriptions of the condition of the working class, in Manchester and London, Liverpool and Birmingham. Nor, which is perhaps more surprising in a boy with his inclinations, did he read travels and explorations outside England. India did not inhabit his imagination, nor did the North American plains and the South American jungles. He knew there was savage fighting in the Veld in South Africa, he knew there were stubborn and sturdy Boers resisting Imperial Britain, but his imagination did not partake in gallant battles, or suffer wounds and setbacks. Still less did it reach out to the original black or brown inhabitants of those remote places. It burrowed into the chalk with solitary wasps, and sky-blue butterflies who laid their eggs in ants’ nests. He read Darwin’s work on earthworms, and accepted—without thinking too hard—Darwin’s views of the natural world, including human animals, as a perpetual violent striving and struggling for existence and advantage. Sex interested him in English creatures—he knew about the domestic lives of stoats, and the breeding of champion hounds and horses. Love interested him as something far away and hopeless in the world of romance. He walked over the earth, noting things like a scout or a hunter—a newly broken twig, a disturbed heap of pebbles, an unusually dense clump of brambles, the slotted footprint of a fallow deer, the holes stabbed in turf by predatory beaks. He seemed to be there just—simply—to take all this in, and know it. Underneath the earth, in an imaginary realm of rock tunnels and winding stairs, the shadowless seeker, with the trusted Company, never growing older, never changing their intent, travelled on towards the dark queen weaving her webs, and snares, and shrouds.

Olive Wellwood, visiting Prosper Cain in his London house, thick with the dust of building works, shaken by the sound of sledge-hammer and cranes, told the Keeper of Precious Metals, in confidence, that she was troubled about her son. She knew that Cain found this motherly concern attractive; she created, deliberately, a feeling of warmth and helplessness; it was also true, as she recognised with a slight shock of fear, that she was worried about Tom. He had been such a sunny child, she said, so sweet-tempered, so bright. And now he seemed to moon around, aimlessly, and had no friends. “I feel I don’t know him any more,” she said. Major Cain said that that was perhaps usual with parents and children. Children grew up, they moved away. Yes, said Olive, but Tom didn’t exactly move away, that was partly what she was saying. He had moved, she said finely, into himself.

She took Prosper Cain’s hand between her own.

“I wondered if Julian—he and Julian seemed to like each other—I wondered if Julian might come and—say—take a walk with him, talk to him?”

Cain thought it was always tricky, enlisting one member of a generation against another. He said cautiously that he knew that Julian had felt badly when Tom ran away from Marlowe.

“That was when it all began,” said Olive. “I don’t want you to ask Julian to interrogate Tom, that would be most unwise. Just to come and walk with him, talk with him.”

So Julian wrote to Tom and asked him to accompany him on a walk through the New Forest. He wrote, which was true, that he needed to get away from London and academic work. He thought they might mix sleeping out of doors with staying in pubs. Tom took time to reply, and then sent a colourless postcard saying he would be very pleased to come.

When Julian saw Tom again he knew he had always been in love with him. Or knew, for Julian was always double-minded, that he needed to indulge in the fantasy that he had always been in love with him. Tom at eighteen was lovely in the way he had been lovely at twelve, with the same rapid, shy, awkward grace, the same perfectly proportioned face, the same—for Julian was now experienced—lovely buttocks in his flannels. He was still like a carving, with his mass of honey-hair and his long gold lashes almost on his cheek when he blinked. And his mouth was quiet and calm, and the odd fact that he had become very hairy, on both face and body, only complicated the carved effect by veiling it. Men who loved boys, Julian thought, simply loved beauty, in a way men who loved girls did not. There were beautiful girls who had the same pure effect as beautiful boys, but girls were to be assessed as mothers-to-be, they were not simply and only lovely. He had no illusion that kissing Tom, or simply touching him, would have anything to do with communing with Tom’s soul. Tom’s body was opaque. If there was a soul animating it, Julian felt that it would be both presumptuous and possibly unrewarding to try to commune with it. He watched the light in the hairs on Tom’s forearm as he swung his pack to his shoulders. He felt—apart from a stirring in his trousers—as he felt when his father showed him a gleaming mediaeval spoon, when the wrapping fell away. He thought to himself that Tom had done well to leave Marlowe so precipitously. If he had stayed, he would have become prey to the hunters and possibly learned to be a nasty flirt, as happened to so many. This Julian thought along with many other things, as they strode along the field-paths and round the woodlands, for Tom was not given to conversation, only to companionable pace-keeping, so Julian talked to himself, in his head. Julian decided wryly that he had to be on his best behaviour, because Tom had been foolishly entrusted to him by their elders.

Tom did not look at Julian, almost at all. He poked with his stick in hedgerows, or stopped, raising his hand, to listen quietly to birdsong and rustlings. Julian knew that he himself was not only not beautiful, he was not even handsome. He was slight and wiry; his mouth was long, narrow and mobile; he was slightly knock-kneed, and he walked circumspect and hunched, unlike Tom’s habitation of all the air around him. Because he had the sense to say nothing for a very long time, Tom did begin to initiate conversations. They were about hedges and ditches. He pointed out good places to set snares. He found an orchid—“quite rare.” He discussed good and bad coppicing.

And at night—they slept out, on unrolled blankets and a waterproof—he talked about the stars. He knew them all, the planets and the constellations. Bright Venus, almost aligned with red Mars, Mercury faint on the horizon. The head of the Water-Snake, “just to the left of Canis Major” just below Gemini. The gibbous moon, waning.

He did not talk about himself. He never said “I want…” or “I hope …” and only rarely “I think …” He did express an impersonal grief at the vanishing of certain predatory species, exterminated by gamekeepers, the hen harrier, the pine marten, the raven. He speculated about why the weasel, stoat and crow had proved more cunning and more pertinacious. Julian said

“Perhaps you should be a naturalist? Study zoology and write books, or work in the Natural History Museum.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “I don’t write.”

“What are you going to do? What do you want to do?”

“Do you remember at the Midsummer party, they asked us all what we wanted to be? And Florian said, he wanted to be a fox in a foxhole?”

“Well?”

“I have some sympathy with that.”

“And since you can’t be a fox in a foxhole?” said Julian lightly, lightly.

“I don’t know,” said Tom. His face clouded. “They go on at me,” he said. “They want me to go to Cambridge. They make me sit exams. And so on.”

“Cambridge isn’t bad. It’s beautiful. Full of interesting people.”

“Cambridge is all right for you. You like people.”

“And you don’t?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do with people.”

The next day was hot. They found a river, and Tom said they would swim in it. He put down his pack, stripped to his skin, folded his clothes neatly and put them on the top of his pack. Then he waded in, through the reeds on the bank of the river: Julian sat on the bank, amongst the buttercups, and watched him, entranced. He would never, he thought, forget the vision of Tom’s penis against his hairy thigh as he bent over his clothes. He would never forget the sight of those thighs, striding through brown-green water into something suddenly deeper, so that he vanished and rose again with floating duckweed scattered like confetti in his thick hair. Tom was not only sunny, he was sunburned. Everywhere exposed to the sun had been painted a ruddy-tanned colour, with paler hairs gleaming on it. The V of his shirt-neck, the bracelet of colour-change on his upper arms, various zebra-gradations of gold on his calves and thighs.

“Come on in. What are you doing?”

“Looking at you.”

“Well, don’t. Come and feel the water, the delicious water. It’s hot on top, and cold and clammy under. I’ve got mud and tiddlers between my toes. Come on in.”

Oh, and how I would like to come into him, Julian thought, undressing, patting down his own member with precautionary fingers. I can’t believe he knows as little as he appears to know. He ought to be a dreadful bore. He would be, if he wasn’t beautiful. No, that isn’t fair, he’s nice, he’s nice through and through, whatever that useless word means. A nice young man. But sad, I intuit, sad under. His own knees were going under, and then the embarrassing appendage. Tom splashed him—from a distance, always from a distance—with great rainbows of water, and then swam off, upriver, like a trout.

“I’ll show you where the pike would hide themselves,” he said. “I know.” He said “This is good, this is good fun.”

“Yes,” said Julian, enjoying the water as substitute sensation. “It is good fun.”

Tom said, when they were sitting in the sun to dry themselves “What’s your favourite poem?”

“Just one? I could say ten. Busy old fool, unruly sun. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? ‘Caliban upon Setebos’? What’s yours?”

“What was he doing, the great god Pan

Down in the reeds by the river?

“I can say all of it. I often do.”

“Say it.”

“What was he doing, the great god Pan

Down in the reeds by the river?

Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

And breaking the golden lilies afloat

With the dragon-fly on the river…

“He cut it short, did the great god Pan

(How tall it stood in the river!),

Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

And notched the poor dry empty thing

In holes, as he sat by the river.

“ ‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan

(Laughed while he sat by the river),

‘The only way, since gods began

To make a sweet music, they could succeed.’

Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,

He blew in power by the river…

“Yet half a beast is the great god Pan

To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man:

The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,

For the reed which grows nevermore again

As a reed with the reeds in the river.”