“Perhaps so,” Fairchild said, with detachment, brooding again on a page. “Listen:
“‘Lips that of thy weary all seem weariest,
Seem wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay not to heart thy boy’s hand, to protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own woman’s breast.
“‘Weary thy mouth with smiling; canst thou bride
Thyself with thee and thine own kissing slake?
Thy virgin’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake,
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.’
“‘Hermaphroditus,’” he read. “That’s what it’s about. It’s a kind of dark perversion. Like a fire that don’t need any fuel, that lives on its own heat. I mean, all modern verse is a kind of perversion. Like the day for healthy poetry is over and done with, that modern people were not born to write poetry any more. Other things, I grant. But not poetry. Kind of like men nowadays are not masculine and lusty enough to tamper with something that borders so close to the unnatural. A kind of sterile race: women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget. . . .”
He closed the book and removed his spectacles slowly. “You and me sitting here, right now, this is one of the most insidious things poetry has to combat. General education has made it too easy for everybody to have an opinion on it. On
