I see your quizzical little mouth and I reread your riddling words about the Ants and Spiders - and I smile, to think you are all the time there, poised and watchful - and something more, that I know of, whether you will or no…
What do I ask? you will enquire in your precise and yet mocking way - cutting down my protestations to preciseproposals. I do not know - how can I know? I only cast myself upon your mercy, not to be cut off, not scantedwith a single famished kiss, not yet, not now. Can we not find a small space, for a limited time - in which to marvel that we have found each other?
Do you remember - no, of course you must remember - how we saw the Rainbow, from the brow of our hill, under our clump of trees - where light suffused the watery drops in the indrownedair - and the Flood was stayed - and we - we stood under the arch of it, as though the whole Earth were ours, by new Covenant - Andfrom foot to distantfoot of the rainbow is one bright, joined curve, though it shifts with our changing vision.
What a convoluted Missive, to lie and gather dust,maybeforever, in the Poste Restante. I shall walk, from time to time, in the Park, and waiteven, under those same Trees - and trust you will forgive - and a little more
Your R.H.A.
Oh Sir - things flicker and shift, they are indeed all spangle and sparks and flashes. I have sat by my fireside all this long evening - on my safe stool- turning my burning cheeks towards the Aspirations of the flame and the caving-in, the ruddy mutter, the crumbling of the consumed coals to - where am I leading myself- - to lifeless dust- Sir.
And then- out there- when the Rainbow stood out on the dark air over a drowning world - no Lightning struck those Trees, nor trickled along their Wooden Limbs to earth - yet flame licked, flame enfolded, flame looped veins - burned up and utterly consumed -
Struck trees die black
Fire in the Air
Leaves not a Wrack of bone or hair -
Our first Parents hid under such strong circling trees, I believe - but the Eye saw them - who had incautiously eaten knowledge which was death to them -
If the world shall not be drowned with water a secondtime - it is certain how we shall perish - it is told us -
And you also - in Ragnarôk- matched Wordsworth's fleet waters of a drowning world - with - the tongues of Surtur's flames that lapped the shores - Of all the earth and drunk its solid crust - And spat it molten gold on the red heaven -
And after that - a rain - of Ash -
Ash the sheltering World-Tree,
Ash the deadly Rain
So Dust to Dust and Ash to Ash again -
I see whole beviesof shooting stars - likegold arrows before my darkening eyes - theypresage Headache - but beforethe black- and burning -I have a small light spaceto say - oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot. I shouldgo up - not with the orderly peace of my beloved hearth here - with its miniature caverns of delight, its hot temporary jewel-gardens with their palisadoes and promontories - no -I shall go up - like Straw on a Dry Day - a rushing wind - a tremor on the air - a smell of burning - a blown smoke - and a deal of white fine powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks- oh no I cannot -
You see, Sir, I say nothing of Honour, nor of Morality - though they are weighty matters - I go to the Core, which renders much disquisition on these matters superfluous. The core is my solitude, my solitude that is threatened, that you threaten, without which I am nothing- so how may honour, how may morality speak to me?
I read your Mind, my dear Mr Ash. You will argue now for a monitored and carefully limited combustion - afire-grate with bars and formal boundaries and brassy finials -ne progredietur ultra-
But I say - your glowing salamander is a Firedrake. And there will be - Conflagration -
Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness. This has extended from the burning in the clearing - until this minute - and now speaks.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed. Not that I have not dreamed of walking in thefurnace - as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego - But we latter-day Reasonable Beings have not the miracle-working Passion of the old believers -
I have known - Incandescence - and must decline to sample it further. The headache proceeds apace. Half my head - is merely a gourd full of pain - Jane will post this so it goes now. Forgive its faults. And forgive me.
Christabel
My dear,
What am I to make of your missive -I had almost writ missile - which as I foretold has crossed mine - but which as I had not the couragetoforetell is not a cool denial but a most heated riddling, to take up your metaphor? You are a true poet - when you are agitated, or discomposed, or unusually interested in any matter - you express your ideas in metaphor. So what am I to make of all this scintillation? I will tell you - a Pyre from which you, my Phoenix, shall fly up renewed and unchanged - the gold more burnished, the eye brighter -semper eadem.
And is it an effect of Love - to set beside each of us, like a manifest emanation some mythic monstrous and inhuman self? So thatit becomes easy and natural for you to write as a Creature of the burning fiery furnace, a hearth-salamander turned Firedrake of the air, and easy and naturalfor you to see me in both mythic readings at once of my pliable name - the World-Tree consumed to its papery remnants. Youfeel - as I feel -elemental in thisforce. All creation rushed round us out there - earth, air, fire, water, and there we were, I beg you to remember, warm and human and safe, in the circle of the trees, in each other's arms, under the arch of the sky.
The most important thing to make clear to you is this. I make no threat to your solitude. How should I? How may I? Is not your blessed desire to be alone the only thing which makespossible what would else in very truth harm someone?
This agreed - may we not, in some circumscribed way - briefly, perhaps, probably - though it is Love's Nature to know itself eternal - andin confined spaces too - may we not steal some -I almost wrote small, but it will never be that - somegreat happiness? We must come togrief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. All of which casuistry is only to say, my very dear, come back to the Park, let me touch your hand again, let us walk in our decorous storm together. There may well come a moment when this will be impossible, for manygood reasons - but you know, andfeel, as I know andfeel that this moment of impossibility is not yet, is not now?
I am reluctant to take my pen from the paper andfold up this letter-for as long as I write to you, I have the illusion that we are in touch, that is, blessed. Did you know, speaking of dragons as we were, and ofconflagration and intemperate burning - that the Chinese dragon, who in Mandarin is Lung- is a creature not of the fiery but exclusively of the watery element? And thus a cousin of your mysterious Melusina in her marble tub? Which is to say, there may be cooler dragons, who may take more temperate pleasures. He appears, blue and winding, on Chinese dishes, with a sprinkling mane and accompanied by what I once took to be little flakes of fire, and now know to be curlings of water.
What a page of prose to lie like some bomb in the Poste Restante. I am become, in the last two days, a restless Anarchist.
I shall wait under the trees - from day to day, at your time - and look outfor a woman like a steady upright flame and a grey hound poured along the ground like smoke -