THE BURNING WHEEL

BY

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Oxford

B. H. Blackwell, Broad St.

1916

ADVENTURERS ALL

A SERIES OF YOUNG POETS UNKNOWN TO FAME

COME MY FRIENDS—'TIS NOT TOO LATE "TO SEEK A NEWER WORLD
—IT MAY BE THAT THE GULFS WILL WAN US DOWN—IT MAY BE WE
SHALL TOUCH THE HAPPY ISLES—YET—OUR PURPOSE HOLDS—TO
SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET.
ULYSSES

SPEECH FINELY FRAMED DELIGHTETH THE EARS OF THEM THAT HEAR THE STORY — II MACCAB. XV.

My thanks are due to the Editor of the Nation for permission to reprint "The Mirror," "Variations on a theme of Laforgue" and "Philosophy."

CONTENTS.

The Burning Wheel
Doors of the Temple
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Darkness
Mole
The Two Seasons
Two Realities
Quotidian Vision
Vision
The Mirror
Variations on a Theme of Laforgue
Philosophy
Philoclea in the Forest
Books and Thoughts
Contrary to Nature and Aristotle
Escape
The Garden
The Canal
The Ideal found wanting
Misplaced Love
Sonnet
Sentimental Summer
The Choice
The Higher Sensualism
Sonnet
Formal Verses
Perils of the Small Hours
Complaint
Return to an Old Home
Fragment
The Walk

THE BURNING WHEEL.


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