English Rose

Early English everlasting

quadrate Rose

paradox-Imperial

trimmed with some travestied flesh

tinted with bloodless duties dewed

with Lipton's teas

and grimed with crack-packed

herd-housing

petalling

the prim gilt

penetralia

of a luster-scioned

core-crown

 

Rose of arrested impulses

self-pruned

of the primordial attributes

a tepid heart inhibiting

with tactful terrorism

the Blossom Populous

to mystic incest with its ancestry

establishing

by the divine right of self-assertion

the post-conceptual

virginity of Nature

 

wiping

its pink paralysis

A World-Blush

glowing from

a never-setting-sun

Conservative Rose

storage

of British Empire-made pot-pourri

of dry dead men making a sweetened smell

among a shrivelled collectivity

 

Which august dust

stirred by

the trouser-striped prongs of statesmanship

(whenever politic)

rises upon the puff of press alarum

and whirling itself

deliriously around the unseen

Bolshevik subsides

in ashy circularity

"a wreath" upon the unknown

soldier's grave

 

And Jehovah strikes --

through the fetish

of the island hedged --

Exodus

who on his holiday

(induced

by the insidious pink

of Albion's ideal)

is looking for a rose

 

And the rose

rises

from the green

of a green lane

rosily-stubborn

and robustly round

 

Under a pink print

sunbonnet

the village maid

scowls at the heathen

 

Albion

in female form

salutes the alien Exodus

 

staring so hard --

warms his nostalgia

on her belligerent innocence

 

The maidenhead

drooping her lid

and pouting her breast

 

forewarns

his amity

 

Amorphous meeting

in the month of May

 

This Hebrew

culled by Cupid on a thorn

of the rose

lays siege

to the thick hedgerows

where she blows

on Christian Sundays

 

She

simpering in her

ideological pink

He

loaded with Mosaic

passions that amass

like money

 

implores her to take pity upon him

and come and be a "Lady in the City"

 

Maiden emotions

breed

on leaves of novels

where anatomical man

has no notion

of offering other than the bended knee

to femininity

 

and purity

passes in pleasant ways

as the cows graze

 

For in those days

when Exodus courted the rose

literature was supposed to elevate us

 

So the maid with puffy

bosom where Jerusalem

dreams to ease

his head of calculations

in the Zero of ecstasy

and a little huffy

bristles with chastity

 

For this is the last Judgment

when Jehovah

roars "Open your mouth!

and I will tell you what you have been reading"

 

Exodus had been reading

Proverbs

making sharp distinction

between the harlot

and the Hausfrau arraying

her offspring in scarlet

approving

such as garner good advice like grain

and such as know enough

to come in from the rain

 

The would-be

secessionist from Israel's etiquette

(shielding pliant Jewesses from shame

less glances

and the giving

of just percentages

to matrimonial intermediaries)

is spiritually intrigued

by the Anglo-Saxon phenomenon

of Virginity

delightfully

on its own defensive!

 

This pouting

pearl beyond price

flouts

the male pretentions

to its impervious surface

 

Alice the gentile

Exodus the Jew

after a few

feverish tiffs

and reparations

chiefly conveyed in exclamations --

a means of expression

modified by lack of experience --

unite their variance

in marriage

 

Exodus

Oriental

mad to melt

with something softer than himself

clasps with soothing pledges

his wild rose of the hedges

 

While she

expecting

the presented knee

of chivalry

repels

the sub-umbilical mystery

of his husbandry

hysterically

 

His passionate-anticipation

of warming in his arms

his rose to a maturer coloration

which was all of aspiration

the grating upon civilization

of his sensitive organism

had left him

 

splinters upon an adamsite

opposition

of nerves like stalactites

 

This dying chastity

had rendered up no soul yet they pursued their conjugal

dilemmas as is usual

with people

who know not what they do

but know that what they do

is not illegal

 

Deep in the névrose

night he

peruses his body

divested of its upholstery

firmly insensitive

in mimicry

of its hypothetical model --

a petal

of the English rose

an abstracted Ada

in myopic contemplation

of the incontemplatable

compound rosette

of peerless negations

 

That like other Gods

has never appeared

leaving itself to be inferred

Whereof

it is not seemly

that the one petal

shall apprehend

of the other petals

their conformity

 

For of this Rose

wherever it blows

it is certain that an impenetrable pink curtain

hangs between it and itself

and in metaphysical vagrance

it passes beyond the ken

of men unless

possessed

of exorbitant incomes

And Then --

merely indicating its presence

by an exotic fragrance

 

A rose --

that like religions

before

becoming amateur --

enwraps itself

in esoteric

and exoteric

dimensions:

the official

and inofficial

social morale

The outer

classes

accepting the official

of the inner

as a plausible

gymnastic

for disciplining the inofficial

"flesh and devil"

to the ap parent impecca bility

of the English

 

And for the Empire

what form could be superior

to the superimposed

slivers

of the rose?

 

The best

is this compressed

all round-and-about

itself conformation

never letting out

subliminal infection

from hiatuses

in its sub-roseal skeleton

 

Its petals hung

with tongues that under the supervision

of the Board of Education

may never sing in concert --

for some

singing h

flat and some

h sharp 'The Arch

angels sing H'

 

There reigns a disproportionate

dis'armony

in the English Hanthem

And for further information

re the Rose --

and what it does to the nose

while smelling it

 

See Punch



~Mina Loy