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    The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
    The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
    The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
    Ebook70 pages33 minutes

    The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

    By Aldous Huxley and Mint Editions

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    About this ebook

    The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. 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 Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third poetry collection.

    “The Defeat of Youth” is a moving sonnet sequence on the passage of innocence to experience, on familiar transformation of love into lust. Capturing the experience of youthful attraction, Huxley imagines the moment in which the beloved “leans, and there is laughter in the face / She turns toward him; and it seems a door / Suddenly opened on some desolate place / With a burst of light and music.” As the young man awakens to the life of another, his vision turns tragically pure, molding an image of “immanence divine,” a face “in a flash of laughter” and a “young body with an inward flame.” As the poem unfolds, however, he feels only shame to have touched “things deadly to be desired.” Throughout this collection, Huxley explores the poet’s tendency to sing and to praise the world’s fleeting beauty while “[o]ther young men have been battling with the days / And others have been kissing the beautiful women.” The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is the work of a poet uncertain of his visionary gift, doubtful of his art’s worth or purpose, yet sure of the power of language.

    This edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

    Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

    With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMint Editions
    Release dateFeb 16, 2021
    ISBN9781513284620
    Author

    Aldous Huxley

    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

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      Book preview

      The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems - Aldous Huxley

      THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH

      I. Under the Trees

      There had been phantoms, pale-remembered shapes

      Of this and this occasion, sisterly

      In their resemblances, each effigy

      Crowned with the same bright hair above the nape’s

      White rounded firmness, and each body alert

      With such swift loveliness, that very rest

      Seemed a poised movement: … phantoms that impressed

      But a faint influence and could bless or hurt

      No more than dreams. And these ghost things were she;

      For formless still, without identity,

      Not one she seemed, not clear, but many and dim.

      One face among the legions of the street,

      Indifferent mystery, she was for him

      Something still uncreated, incomplete.

      II

      Bright windy sunshine and the shadow of cloud

      Quicken the heavy summer to new birth

      Of life and motion on the drowsing earth;

      The huge elms stir, till all the air is loud

      With their awakening from the muffled sleep

      Of long hot days. And on the wavering line

      That marks the alternate ebb of shade and shine,

      Under the trees, a little group is deep

      In laughing talk. The shadow as it flows

      Across them dims the lustre of a rose,

      Quenches the bright clear gold of hair, the green

      Of a girl’s dress, and life seems faint. The light

      Swings back, and in the rose a fire is seen,

      Gold hair’s aflame and green grows emerald bright.

      III

      She leans, and there is laughter in the face

      She turns towards him; and it seems a door

      Suddenly opened on some desolate place

      With a burst of light and music. What before

      Was hidden shines in loveliness revealed.

      Now first he sees her beautiful, and knows

      That he must love her; and the doom is sealed

      Of all his happiness and all the woes

      That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter.

      The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter—

      And love flows in on him, its vastness pent

      Within his narrow life: the pain it brings,

      Boundless; for love is infinite discontent

      With the poor lonely life of transient things.

      IV

      Men see their god, an immanence divine,

      Smile through the curve of flesh or moulded clay,

      In bare ploughed lands that go sloping away

      To meet the sky in one clean exquisite line.

      Out of the short-seen dawns of ecstasy

      They draw new beauty, whence new thoughts are born

      And in their turn conceive, as grains of corn

      Germ and create new life and endlessly

      Shall live creating. Out of earthly seeds

      Springs the aerial flower. One spirit proceeds

      Through change, the same in body and in soul—

      The spirit of life and love that triumphs still

      In its slow struggle towards some far-off goal

      Through lust and death and the bitterness of

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