Kora in Hell

by William Carlos Williams

VI.

1

Of course history is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game’s up. But—though killies have green backs and white bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks! When we’ve tired of swimming we’ll go climb in the ledgy forest. Confute the sages.

2

Quarrel with a purple hanging because it’s no column from the Parthenon. Here’s splotchy velvet set to hide a door in the wall and there—there’s the man himself praying! Oh quarrel whether ’twas Pope Clement raped Persephone or—did the devil wear a mitre in that year? Come, there’s much use in being thin on a windy day if the cloth’s cut well. And oak leaves will not come on maples, nor birch trees either—that is provided—, but pass it over, pass it over.

A woman of good figure, if she be young and gay, welcomes the wind that presses tight upon her from forehead to ankles revealing the impatient mountains and valleys of her secret desire. The wind brings release to her. But the wind is no blessing to all women. At the same time it is idle to quarrel over the relative merits of one thing and another, oak leaves will not come on maples. But there is a deeper folly yet in such quarreling: the perfections revealed by a Rembrandt are equal whether it be question of a laughing Saskia or an old woman cleaning her nails.

3

Think of some lady better than Rackham draws them: mere fairy stuff—some face that would be your face, were you of the right sex, some twenty years back of a still morning, some Lucretia out of the Vatican turned Carmelite, some double image cast over a Titian Venus by two eyes quicker than Titian’s hands were, some strange daughter of an inn-keeper,—some.… Call it a net to catch love’s twin doves and I’ll say to you: Look! and there’ll be the sky there and you’ll say the sky’s blue. Whisk the thing away now? What’s the sky now?

By virtue of works of art the beauty of woman is released to flow whither it will up and down the years. The imagination transcends the thing itself. Kaffirs admire what they term beauty in their women but which is in official parlance a deformity. A Kaffir poet to be a good poet would praise that which is to him praiseworthy and we should be scandalized.