Ne'er have I slept; I labour endlessly,
Enriching space with many a masterpiece
That lives and dies in a day.
Over the baking of the chiselled rocks
Upon the vitrefaction of the many-coloured sands
I keep my watch
So well that the clay 'neath my fingers
Will metamorphose
To a porcelain of perfect rose,
Which I shatter with the buffets of my steam.
My accomplice is the Strait of Messina
Which dozes in the dawn, couching white and glossy
As an Angora cat...
My accomplice is the Strait of Messina
Lolling like a cushion of lazy turquoise silk,
With soft Arabian words embroidered by the wake
Of clouds and languorous sails,
Words woven silently methinks
With a fair silver thread upon the ocean's robe.
The perfidious moon is my accomplice,
The arch-courtesan of the painted stars,
For nowhere are the moon's cajoleries
So luring and persuasive.
And nowhere does the moon cast such assiduous eyes
To seduce the hard red funnels of the steamers,
Those surly strollers South
With a fat cigar in their mouth
Whose smoke they spit against the azure sky.
And nowhere does the moon throw such a tender shower
Of soft and violet ashes,
As that which lulls to sleep the lava petrified
On the black houses hanging on my flanks.
And nowhere has the moon such poignancy
Of inundations of light and ecstasy,
As on the gashed paths
Carved by my surgical fire.
But woe to those who follow the bleating light of the moon,
And the plaintive bells of the flocks,
And the bitter flutes of the shepherds whose world-weary notes
Are long, long threads that vanish in the blue!
Woe to those who refuse to make their galloping blood
Keep step with the gallop of the blood of my devastation!
And woe to those who wish to root their heads,
To root their feet and houses
In a craven hope of eternity!
A truce to building, for ye must encamp!
Nay, am I not shaped even as a tent
Whose truncated top fanneth my wrath?
I only love the acrobatic stars
Who balance on the rolling balls of smoke
Wherewith I juggle!
MYSELF
I can dance to them, and juggle in mid air,
And shower my song on the reverberations
Of thy storms that breed
In subterranean depths!...
And I descend
To hear the diapasons of thy voice.
So make a pause
In the electrical discharges of thy tubes
That tear from thy base the underlying rocks.
Enjoin to silence all thy babbling grottoes,
That all a-flutter quiver ceaselessly.
Gag with thick cinders
The basaltic echoes whose chorus rings thy praise.
What good are thy volcanic bombs
That serve as punctuations for the growlings of thy speech?
And what care I for the ruddy jets
Of thine aggressive foam?
Thy deluges of mud have soiled my wings of white,
But check me not, for proof against thine avalanche
Of scoria I descend, gilded and aureoled
By all the powdery shower of thy dumbfounded gold.
It is also relevant to mention that M. Marinetti has been recently
formulating new rules and principles for his new literary code. Among
the more drastic phases of this stylistic revolution we would mention
the employment of mathematical signs and symbols, the rebellion from
too rigid and pedantic a syntax, the minimum use of the adjective and
the infinitive, the opening up of new fields of images and metaphors,
and the freer and more increased use of onomatopœia. These ideas
are succinctly, though no doubt extravagantly, set out in the two
manifestos entitled _Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty_ and
_The Futurist Anti-Tradition_.
Space vetoes more than the enumeration of the other Futurist
poets--Luccini, Palazzescho, Folgore, and Altomare--though we may
perhaps mention the recently published _Poesie Electrichie_ of Govoni,
and the _A Claude Debussy_ of Paolo Buzzi, which won the first prize of
the first international competition of "Poesia," and which transfers
into a marvellously fluid Italian verse the at once ethereal and
faunish emotions of the composer's music.
But if, finally, we may speculate on the Future of Futurism, its real
prospects and its real significance are to be found in the fact that,
though extravagant and aggressive, it is in essence a concentrated
manifestation of the whole vital impetus of the twentieth century. Its
relationship to Nietzscheanism we have already examined. Almost equally
close is its affinity to the standpoints of such representative spirits
of the real genius of this particular age as Verhaeren and Mr. Wells;
Verhaeren, the gazer on the _Multiple Splendour_ of the _Tumultuous
Forces_ of the _Visages of Life_, with his motto, "Life is to be
mounted and not to be descended; the whole of life is in the soaring
upwards," who expresses in the strenuous majesty of his verse the whole
raging complex of our psychological and material civilisation; Mr.
Wells, too, the glorifier of all the new machinery of our scientific
fabric; Mr. Wells, who, with all his intoxication for the "gigantic
syntheses of life," expresses himself most effectually by the maxim,
"The world exists for and by initiative, and the method of initiative
is individuality."
Even if we go to more concrete and more topical manifestations, there
is not wanting evidence that the fiery blast of the Futurists is fanned
by the huge bellows of our own labouring _Zeitgeist_.
If indeed we may meddle with the very latest metaphysical terminology,
we would suggest that it is by a singularly brilliant and apposite
stroke of intuition on the part of, the newly discovered _élan de vie_
that, at a time which is moving at an unprecedented rapidity, at a time
when the two great brother nations of the Teutonic race are preparing
their rival sacrifices for the God of War with all the mocking and
drastic fraternity of a Cain and of an Abel; when the air is thick
with the wings of a new and regenerated France; when the militant
mænads of both the West and the East, under the inspiration of their
dashing and elusive Pythoness, are waging with foaming fanaticism a
Holy War of Sex; when even one of the most responsible of our lawyers
is coquetting dangerously with both the theory and the practice of the
superior ethical value of Active Resistance; when the most venerable
of our Lord Justices recently interpolated a homily on the Law of
Change into the middle of an otherwise purely legal judgment; when
the two young, but patriotic _condottieri_ of either political party
are fast leaping into a more and more aggressive prominence; when the
insurgent masses of our industrial proletariat have made a vehement and
not entirely unsuccessful charge against existing economic fabric of
the country; when Mr. Thomas Hardy has attended, in the pages of even
the _Fortnightly Review_, the funeral of the old God of pity, and when
Bergsonism, judiciously advertised in the masquerade of a religious
revival, has replaced the old Eternal Absolute with the creative
activity of an endless Movement, the Futurists should now exalt the
sublime vehemence of war, and the aggressive fury of youth, while M.
Marinetti chants the strident hallelujahs of the new God of sweat and
agony and tension, and Signor Russolo and his _confrères_ exhibit to us
in the actual canvases of the Sackville Galleries the rampant hordes of
rebellion and the painting of Movement itself.