The Burning Wheel

Aldous Huxley

Description

The Burning Wheel (1916) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Published when the poet was only twenty-two, The Burning Wheel captures the mind of an artist at its earliest fertile stage, enthralled with a world either blooming with change or wilting with all-out war. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words.

“The Burning Wheel” opens the collection with a kaleidoscopic vision of life and creation, illuminating the poet’s debt to the French Symbolists. “Weary of its own turning,” the burning wheel slows for a moment’s rest. This wheel, both machine and pure, wild flame, is the poet compelled to create, the mind that “[w]akes from the sleep of its quiet brightness / And burns with a darkening passion and pain.” In “Quotidian Vision,” Huxley returns to earth to remark: “There is a sadness in the street / And sullenly the folk I meet / Droop their heads as they walk along.” In these simple, rhyming couplets, the poet channels the verse and vision of William Blake to see, despite the “mist of cold and muffling grey,” a “dead world move for him once more / With beauty for its living core.” The Burning Wheel is a compelling collection from an artist whose poetry is no less remarkable for having gone mostly unnoticed.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Burning Wheel is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Sujets

• vision
• British poetry
• 20th century
• Irish
• English
• Poetry
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish

Informations

• Publié par: Mint Editions
• Date de parution: 16 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513284606
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Burning Wheel
Aldous Huxley
 
 
The Burning Wheel was first published in 1916.
This edition published by Mint Editions 2021.
ISBN 9781513279589 | E-ISBN 9781513284606
Published by Mint Editions®
minteditionbooks .com
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
Project Manager: Micaela Clark
Typesetting: Westchester Publishing Services
 
C ONTENTS T HE B URNING W HEEL D OORS OF THE T EMPLE V ILLIERS DE L’I SLE -A DAM D ARKNESS M OLE T HE T WO S EASONS T WO R EALITIES Q UOTIDIAN V ISION V ISION T HE M IRROR V ARIATIONS ON A T HEME OF L AFORGUE P HILOSOPHY P HILOCLEA IN THE F OREST B OOKS AND T HOUGHTS “C ONTRARY TO N ATURE AND A RISTOTLE ” E SCAPE T HE G ARDEN T HE C ANAL T HE I DEAL F OUND W ANTING M ISPLACED L OVE S ONNET S ENTIMENTAL S UMMER T HE C HOICE T HE H IGHER S ENSUALISM S ONNET F ORMAL V ERSES P ERILS OF THE S MALL H OURS C OMPLAINT R ETURN TO AN O LD H OME F RAGMENT T HE W ALK
 
T HE B URNING W HEEL
Wearied of its own turning,
Distressed with its own busy restlessness,
Yearning to draw the circumferent pain—
The rim that is dizzy with speed—
To the motionless centre, there to rest,
The wheel must strain through agony
On agony contracting, returning
Into the core of steel.
And at last the wheel has rest, is still,
Shrunk to an adamant core:
Fulfilling its will in fixity.
But the yearning atoms, as they grind
Closer and closer, more and more
Fiercely together, beget
A flaming fire upward leaping,
Billowing out in a burning,
Passionate, fierce desire to find
The infinite calm of the mother’s breast.
And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,
Bright, tenderly radiant;
All bitterness lost in the infinite
Peace of the mother’s bosom.
But death comes creeping in a tide
Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear
Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness
And burns with a darkening passion and pain,
Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.
And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,
Begetting once again the wheel that yearns—
Sick with its speed—for the terrible stillness
Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.
And so once more
Shall the wheel revolve till its anguish cease
In the iron anguish of fixity;
Till once again
Flame billows out to infinity,
Sinking to a sleep of brightness
In that vast oblivious peace.
 
D OORS OF THE T EMPLE
Many are the doors of the spirit that lead
Into the inmost shrine:
And I count the gates of the temple divine,
Since the god of the place is God indeed.
And these are the gates that God decreed
Should lead to his house:—kisses and wine,
Cool depths of thought, youth without rest,
And calm old age, prayer and desire,
The lover’s and mother’s breast,
The fire of sense and the poet’s fire.
But he that worships the gates alone,
Forgetting the shrine beyond, shall see
The great valves open suddenly,
Revealing, not God’s radiant throne,
But the fires of wrath and agony.