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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=429761" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Atlas</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">I. The King of Cuckooz<br>THE King of Cuckooz Contrey <br>Hangs peaked above Argier <br>With Janzaries and Marabutts <br>To bid a sailor fear— <br>With lantern-eyed astrologers <br>Who walk upon the walls <br>And ram with stars their basilisks <br>Instead of cannon-balls. <br>And in that floating castle <br>(I tell you it is so) <br>Five thousand naked Concubines <br>With dulcimers do go. <br>Each rosy nose anoints a tile, <br>Bang, bang! the fort salutes, <br>When He, the King of Cuckooz Land, <br>Comes forth in satin boots, <br>Each rosy darling flies before <br>When he desires his tent, <br>Or, like a tempest driving flowers, <br>Inspects a battlement. <br>And this I spied by moonlight <br>Behind a royal bamboo— <br>That Monarch in a curricle <br>Which ninety virgins drew; <br>That Monarch drinking nectar <br>(Lord God, my tale attest!) <br>Milked from a snow-white elephant <br>As white as your white breast! <br>And this is no vain fable <br>As other knaves may lie— <br>Have I not got that Fowl aboard <br>Which no man may deny? <br>The King's own hunting-falcon <br>I limed across the side <br>When by the Bayes of Africa <br>King James's Fleet did ride. <br>What crest is there emblazoned, <br>Whose mark is this, I beg, <br>Stamped on the silver manacle <br>Around that dainty leg? <br>Let this be news to you, my dear, <br>How Man should be revered; <br>Though I'm no King of Cuckooz Land, <br>Behold as fierce a beard! <br>I have as huge an appetite, <br>As deep a kiss, my girl, <br>And somewhere, for the hand that seeks, <br>Perhaps a Sultan's pearl! </div><div style="margin:10px 0">. Post-Roads<br>POST-ROADS that clapped with tympan heels <br>Of tilburies and whiskys rapidly spanking, <br>Where's now the tireless ghost of Ogilby? <br>Post-roads <br>That buoyed the rich and plunging springs <br>Of coaches vaster than Escurials, <br>Where now does Ogilby propel that Wheel, <br>What milestones does he pause to reprimand, <br>In what unmapped savanna of dumb shades? <br>Ye know not—ye are silent—brutish ducts <br>Numbed by the bastinadoes of iron boots, <br>Three hundred years asnore. Do you forget <br>The phaetons and fiacres, flys and breaks, <br>The world of dead men staring out of glass <br>That drummed upon your bones? Do you forget <br>Those nostrils oozing smoke, those floating tails, <br>Those criniers whipped with air? <br>And kidnapped lights, <br>Floats of rubbed yellow towed from window-panes, <br>Rushing their lozenges through headlong stones; <br>And smells of hackneys, mohair sour with damp, <br>Leather and slopped madeira, partridge-pies <br>Long-buried under floors; and yawning Fares <br>With bumping flap-dark spatulas of cards— <br>'Knave takes the ten . . . oh, God, I wish that it, <br>I wish that it was Guildford' . . . .<br>Ogilby <br>Did not forget, could not escape such ecstacies, <br>Even in the monasteries of mensuration, <br>Could not forget the roads that he had gone <br>In fog and shining air. Each line was joy, <br>Each computation a beatitude, <br>A diagram of Ogilby's eye and ear <br>With soundings for the nose. Wherefore I think, <br>Wherefore I think some English gentleman, <br>Some learned doctor of the steak-houses, <br>Ending late dinner, having strolled outside <br>To quell the frivolous hawthorn, may behold <br>There in the moonshine, rolling up an hill, <br>Steered by no fleshly hand, with spokes of light, <br>The Wheel—John Ogilby's Wheel—the WHEEL hiss by, <br>Measuring mileposts of eternity. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">. Dutch Seacoast<br>No wind of Life may strike within <br>This little country's crystal bin, <br>Nor calendar compute the days <br>Tubed in their capsule of soft glaze. <br>Naked and rinsed, the bubble-clear <br>Canals of Amsterdam appear, <br>The blue-tiled turrets, china clocks <br>And glittering beaks of weathercocks. <br>A gulf of sweet and winking hoops <br>Whereon there ride poops <br>With flying mouths and fleeting hair <br>Of saints hung up like candles there— <br>Fox-coloured mansions, lean and tall, <br>That burst in air but never fall <br>Whose bolted shadows, row by row, <br>Float changeless on the stones below— <br>Sky full of ships, bay full of town, <br>A port of waters jellied brown: <br>Such is the world no tide may stir, <br>Sealed by the great cartographer. <br>O, could he but clap up like this <br>My decomposed metropolis, <br>Those other countries of the mind, <br>So tousled, dark and undefined! </div><div style="margin:10px 0">. Mermaids<br>ONCE Mermaids mocked your ships <br>With wet and scarlet lips <br>And fish-dark difficult hips, Conquistador; <br>Then Ondines danced with Sirens on the shore, <br>Then from his cloudy stall, you heard the Kraken call, <br>And, mad with twisting flame, the Firedrake roar. <br>Such old-established Ladies <br>No mariner eyed askance, <br>But, coming on deck, would swivel his neck <br>To watch the darlings dance, <br>Or in the gulping dark of nights <br>Would cast his tranquil eyes <br>On singular kinds of Hermaphrodites <br>Without the least surprise. <br>Then portulano maps were scrolled <br>With compass-roses, green and gold, <br>That fired the stiff old Needle with their dyes <br>And wagged their petals over parchment skies. <br>Then seas were full of Dolphins' fins, <br>Full of swept bones and flying Jinns, <br>Beaches were filled with Anthropophagi <br>And Antient Africa with Palanquins. <br>Then sailors, with a flaked and rice-pale flesh <br>Staring from maps in sweet and poisoned places, <br>Diced the old Skeleton afresh <br>In brigs no bigger than their moon-bunched faces. <br>Those well-known and respected Harpies <br>Dance no more on the shore to and fro; <br>All that has ended long ago; <br>Nor do they sing outside the captain's porthole, <br>A proceeding fiercely reprehended <br>By the governors of the P. & O. <br>Nor do they tumble in the sponges of the moon <br>For the benefit of tourists in the First Saloon, <br>Nor fork their foaming lily-fins below the side <br>On the ranges of the ale-clear tide. <br>And scientists now, with binocular-eyes, <br>Remark in a tone of complacent surprise: <br>'Those pisciform mammals—pure Spectres, I fear— <br>Must be Doctor Gerbrandus's Mermaids, my dear!' <br>But before they can cause the philosopher trouble, <br>They are GONE like the cracking of a bubble. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">. The Seafight<br>HERE in a gulf of golden leaf <br>You'll find a seafight ringed with flame; <br>Cannons that cry Tirduf, Tirduf, <br>Daggers that collop, guns that maim; <br>Jaws beaked with blood, men flung to hell, <br>Men blasting trumpets, men that flee, <br>Men crimped by death, and under all <br>Old patient, baleful, spying Sea— <br>Old Sea, that in a dicebox rolls <br>Their trundling skulls, their jacks of bone, <br>That sucks them out of broken hulls <br>When other mumbling mouths have gone— <br>Old hungry Sea, that holds our flesh <br>In the huge forceps of the storm, <br>And they are given to the fish <br>And we plucked forth, and we made warm. <br>But ye that kill, why heed the face <br>Of Ocean? Not alone you slay, <br>Since deeper seas are dammed in space <br>And fiercer storms can scream in clay; <br>Existence has as bitter teeth, <br>But we can always find a minute <br>For the festivities of death <br>Who sail upon this dangerous planet.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Kenneth+Slessor">Kenneth Slessor</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=429761" data-title="The Atlas de Kenneth Slessor" data-description="I. The King of Cuckooz
THE King of Cuckooz Contrey 
Hangs peaked above Argier 
With Janzaries and Marabutts 
To bid a sailor fear— 
With lantern-eyed astrologers 
Who walk upon the walls 
And ram with stars their basilisks 
Instead of cannon-bal..."></div>
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