‘Ye have but my seas to furrow. Go forth, for it is there!’
The East Wind roared: – ‘From the Kuriles, the Bitter Seas, I come,
‘And me men call the Home-Wind, for I bring the English home.
‘Look – look well to your shipping! By breath of my mad typhoon
‘I swept your close-packed Praya and beached your best at Kowloon!
‘The reeling junks behind me and the racing seas before,
‘I raped your richest roadstead – I plundered Singapore!
‘I set my hand on the Hoogli; as a hooded snake she rose;
‘And I flung your stoutest steamers to roost with the startled crows.
‘Never the lotos closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
‘But a soul goes out in the East Wind that died for England’s sake –
‘Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid –
‘Because on the bones of the English the English Flag is stayed.
‘The desert-dust hath dimmed it, the flying wild-ass knows,
‘The scared white leopard winds it across the taintless snows.
‘What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my sun to dare,
‘Ye have but my sands to travel. Go forth, for it is there!’
The West Wind called: – ‘In squadrons the thoughtless galleons fly
‘That bear the wheat and cattle lest street-bred people die.
‘They make my might their porter, they make my house their path,
‘Till I loose my neck from their rudder and whelm them all in my wrath.
‘I draw the gliding fog-bank as a snake is drawn from the hole.
‘They bellow one to the other, the frighted ship-bells toll;
‘For day is a drifting terror till I raise the shroud with my breath,
‘And they see strange bows above them and the two go locked to death.
‘But whether in calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day,
‘I leave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away,
‘First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky,
‘Dipping between the rollers, the English Flag goes by.
‘The dead dumb fog hath wrapped it – the frozen dews have kissed –
‘The naked stars have seen it, a fellow-star in the mist.
‘What is the Flag of England? Ye have but my breath to dare,
‘Ye have but my waves to conquer. Go forth, for it is there!’
Wyndham Lewis
[1882–1957]
Percy Wyndham Lewis was born on board his American father’s yacht off Nova Scotia. His mother was English and after some years spent in Maine and Maryland the family moved to England. His parents separated in 1893 and Lewis lived with his mother. He studied at Rugby, where his skills as a draughtsman were noted and won him a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London.
In 1901 Lewis travelled to France, Holland, Germany and Spain. Having familiarized himself with the artistic movements that were developing across Europe, he returned to England and firmly established himself as an informed leader of the avant-garde in art and literature. By 1914 he was leading the Vorticist movement in painting and looking to carry the movement’s principles over to literature. He sought allegiance with the poet Ezra Pound, with whom he published the Vorticist review Blast (1914–15). Lewis’s partnerships did not last long. His polemical views and brutal independence, coupled with obsessive criticism of his contemporaries, had by the end of the First World War led to his being ostracized by the art world.
Lewis’s first novel, Tarr (1918), met with a mixed response. His very distinctive anti-naturalistic style of expression, in keeping with the radicalism that was occurring in painting, was felt by some to be pretentious, although others, among them T. S. Eliot, praised his style for its vitality. Eliot went on to describe Lewis as ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’. In his subsequent novels The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and Time and Western Man (1927), and his epic satire The Apes of God (1930), Lewis developed his theme of opposing all forms of domination – whether political, psychological or bureaucratic – and set out to expose what he perceived as the mindlessness of twentieth-century man in his unconscious desire to be ruled. However, just when most writers appeared to be increasingly left-wing, as Lewis himself had been so far, in his typically controversial way he began to express sympathy for the right. In 1931 he wrote about his admiration for Hitler, and he went on to express a right-wing point of view in his book Left Wings Over Europe (1936). The following year he published what was considered by many to be his finest novel, The Revenge for Love (1937).
Having returned to Canada for the duration of the Second World War, in 1945 Lewis resettled in London. In 1946 he joined The Listener as art critic, but left in 1951 after his eyesight failed. Despite total blindness, Lewis continued to write. Among his later works are Rotting Hill (1951), stories based on Notting Hill in the 1940s, and the novels Self Condemned (1954) and The Human Age (1955), both of which were written in response to his nightmarish sense of lost identity as a European during his time in Canada.
Shortly before his death in 1957 the Tate Gallery held a retrospective of his work.
