I cannot give the reasons,
I only sing the tunes:
the sadness of the seasons
the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness
and all that’s squishified.
My voice has all the lushness
of what I can’t abide

And yet it has a beauty
most proud and terrible
denied to those whose duty
is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains
I make my viscous way
and watch the sepia fountains
throw up their lime-green spray.

*****

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is now best known for his Gormenghast novels, but he was first known as a British artist, and his works are in the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives. His poetry is very varied, and much of it is nonsense on the surface but with interesting depth. Peake was born in China, joining the list of foreign-born British-educated novelists that includes Kipling, Tolkien and Ishiguro.

As is useful for artists, he seems to have had extremely strong visualisation and a photographic memory. Fifty years ago in British Columbia I met a woman (whose name I don’t recall) who had known Peake as a youth. Apparently he particularly liked Kipling’s novel ‘Stalky & Co’ and knew it by heart. He handed her the copy he carried and told her to choose a page: she gave him the page number, and he then recited it from the top down.

“Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake” by Eckhart Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.