Capricornus, or, The Goat

C
Supervises over the teatable our voluble hostess
The passing round of titterings and toasties.
Her glass-eyed friends, confidence's make-and-breaks,
Give each in series gobbets of another's cakes.
Dough drips into their tight triangular shoes.
Their mouths give vent to evil-smelling news
Keep their minds pure, make mental products crisper,
With speaking eyeball rolls and the not too improper whisper.
Fawn-eyed, the daughter, a gossip apprentice,
Festoons gilt malice on her unmalicious twenties.
Holiday smarmed the manureminded ephebus
Sees in every skirt lubricity's rebus.
Sex is their unknown god, with neither purity nor pox,
To whom they genuflect whenever they enjoy their shocks.
A little of everything, is the note they strike,
The only limitation, what they think they do not like.
Always they suffer inexpressible injustices,
Making their own beds, these amateur Procrusteses,
But expect their maids to lie in them. The middle classes
Must have some defence against the vulgar masses.
They have no use for idle gossips that scarify:
But in their own leisure get together to verify
Rumours of rationalists, use of contraceptives,
Probable bastards, hope of their proving defectives
(Details being perquisites of good detectives).
This of course for the parish's sake. These long nose weevils
Seek knowledge of others', as expression of their own, evils:
And naught escapes being twisted and messed,
Their own souls included, on matters of interest.
Ignorant, superficial, malignant, self-deceived,
Ashamed to bear, but proud to be bereaved,
Devoted to truth's medals, but dismayed to see its flesh—
Babies are born to them in prams and crêches.
Lip-honouring peace, by their indignant whispers
Others they desecrate, their own insure, in their smug vespers.
At mattins for their own sins pray to be forgiven,
Revelling in others while walking home from heaven.
Martrylike suffer for transgressions of the parish,
Or say they do, particularly the most garish.
But humbly at their bedside never hope that Jesus has destroyed
Others' misfortunes wholly, lest themselves be unemployed.
Such and so balsting are their faded Joys
Which time, nor Sickness, never quite destroys.

Balder and balder every haircut
Cutting a caper as lewd as he dare cut,
Quasiphilosophically Capricorn carouses
Ill at ease in such respectable houses,
The disinherited soul of an atrabilious
Semi self-deprecating paterfamilias.
With many eyeglitters at women's legs in stockings
And at the schoolboys' furtive corybantic eyecockings,
His Bacchanalian belly he wobbles like a sack
with metaphysical justification as Dionysiac,
And ungenteel jokes undoubtedly due to his strabismus
Distorting even the quaint festivities of Christmas.
Remembering in the artificial afternoon
Old days when Pan his saxophonic tune
Under the ilex played, and how the figwood image
Nimbly swayed in the nights of lustful scrimmage,
And how in pleased surprise he uttered several Eurekas
At finding the gross fungus Ithyphallus Impudicus.
With him his father's hair his father's scalp reveals
Commensurate, with scratching too much during silent meals,
With virgin's blood the holly on the wall
Drips. As from Druid branches fail to fall
Light, intense pearl juices from alabaster fitting,
The proper tight-drawn hostess cuts unwitting
Symbols of fertility from Christmas cake. All jollity
Is fastened down. Only innocent frivolity
Saturnalia is allowed in houses of good quality.

Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. The door bursts open wide
The Sunday china stands up horrified.
Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. All he has ever remembered
Bulges out like a plaster panel badly distempered.
Tiddledywog. Meh, membrum caprinum erexit:
Culpabat, alia aliam, quia ipsa conspexit.
Tiddledywog.Tiddledywog.Tiddledywog.
First he puts under the mat Persian cat and Pekinese dog.
Then the tables' and chairbacks' torselling
Smashes, and piles on potsherds of Worcester porcelain.
Tiddledywog.Tiddledywog. Forefeet dangling like clappers
Dancing about he grips the frightened flapper's
Flaxen coils, throws to the ground and violates her.
Which done she becomes he: he hates her,
And turning on the boy, knocks his eyes out,
Strips him, and using sinewy tail as a knout
Flogs the boy till he eddies and faints. And the mother faints,
Whom Capricorn props up upon the chintz
And bathing her forehead with cold milk and tea
Reverses coldness that used to be.
But when she recovers, recovers himself and batters
The woman to death. This seems to mend matters.
Next pausing somewhat incommoded by his toils,
The carpets, cushions, colour schemes he soils.
Last in fierce memory of dislocate desire
The house itself he dislocates with fire.
Scatters the redhot imitation coals
Over this mortuary of human souls.
The imitation furniture goes up in smoke
And well fired china serves as admirable coke.
Like wood distilled that dribbles clammily
Oozes the ectoplasm of his burning family.
Various vermicular disseminations
Germinating from his character's past emanations,
Wriggle until he tramples them. This action
Causes him an electric satisfaction.
But as he leaves the drawing-room for the servants' hall
To seize the housemaid ere the whole place fall
He, bleating with dismay, or recognition rather,
Finds himself facing himself as his own father.
Incestuous terror tempts him to do patricide:
But this he cannot, lest it turn out suicide:
So forfeiting this chance of lovely pain,
Since man once killed can not have joy of killing self again,
And since the air is gradually overheating,
With slight discomfort in his merry bleating,
A muffler from the hall veiling him from being stark,
He leaves the house to meditate, quite decent, in the Park.

Attend the coda. Hardly out he passes
Ere the charred, smashed, cadaverous wilting masses,
Shape back to chintz and gilded wood and scones.
The ancient house of Capricorn & Sons
Stands unassailable in statu quo,
Unconscious of the wiles of wurrico.
Immaculate the virgin hopes her stare
Has an enlightened but offended air:
The boy unscarred eyes still the cakes and knees
Smiling as sticky as the things he sees:
The hostess volubly goes prattling on
Deadly and regular as Gatling gun:
With spurious teeth and with triangular feet
The friends tread on each other's corns and eat:
While Capricorn, morose from losing od,
Defends the Empire and the Will of God.


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