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Brasheanna
Sonnets on Peter Brash, a publican, dedicated to Charles Baxter
I
We found him first as in the dells of May
The dreaming damsel finds the earliest flower;
Thoughtless we wandered in the evening hour;
Aimless and pleased we went our random way:
In the foot-haunted city in the night,
Among the alternate lamps, we went and came
Till, like a humourous thunderbolt, that name,
The hated name of Brash, assailed our sight.
We saw, we paused, we entered, seeking gin.
His wrath, like a huge breaker on the beach,
Broke instant forth. He on the counter beat
In his infantile fury; and his feet
Danced impotent wrath upon the floor within.
Still as we fled, we heard his idiot screech.
II
We found him and we lost. The glorious Brash
Fell as the cedar on the mountain side
When the resounding thunders far and wide
Redoubling grumble, and the instant flash
Divides the night a moment and is gone;
He fell not unremembered nor unwept;
And the dim shop where that great hero slept
Is sacred still. We, steering past the Tron
And past the College southward, and thy square
Fitz-Symon! reach at last that holier clime,
And do with tears behold that pot-house, where
Brash the divine once ministered in drink,
Where Brash, the Beershop Hornet, bowed by time,
In futile anger grinned across the zinc.
III
There let us often wend our pensive way,
There often pausing celebrate the past;
For though indeed our Brash be dead at last,
Perchance his spirit, in some minor way,
Nor pure immortal nor entirely dead,
Contrives upon the farther shore of death
To pick a rank subsistence, and for breath
Breathes ague, and drinks creosote of lead,
There, on the way to that infernal den,
Where burst the flames forth thickly, and the sky
Flares horrid through the murk methinks he doles
Damned liquors out to Hellward-faring souls,
And as his impotent anger ranges high
Gibbers and gurgles at the shades of men.
IV
Alas! that while the beautiful and strong,
The pious and the wise, the grave and gay,
All journey downward by one common way,
Bewailed and honoured yet with flowers and song,
There must come crowding with that serious throng,
Jostling the ranks of that discreet array,
Infirm and scullion spirits of decay,
The dull, the droll, the random and the wrong.
An ape in church, an artificial limb
Tacked to a marble god serene and blind—
For such as Brash, high death was not designed,
That canonising rite was not for him;
Nor where the Martyr and the Hero trod
Should idiot Brash go hobbling up to God.
V
To Goodness or Greatness: to be good and die,
Or to be great and live forever great:
To be the unknown Smith that saves the state
And blooms unhonoured by the public eye:
To be the unknown Robinson or Brown
Whose piping virtues perish in the mud
Or triumphing in blasphemy and blood,
The imperial pirate, pickled in renown:
Unfaltering Brash the latter number chose
Of this eterne antithesis: and still
The flower of his immortal memory blows
Where'er the spirits of the loathed repose
Where'er the trophy of the gibbet hill
Dejects the traveller and collects the crows.
