As Promised More Chinoiserie Poetry – Edith Sitwell weighs in…

Posted: May 16th, 2012 | No Comments »

I said, rashly, back in January that this would be the year of Chinois-inspired poetry on China Rhyming. I got off to a good start with Vachel Lindsay (here and here) and Ezra Pound (here). And now some more from various Sitwells.

Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell

The Sitwell’s all had a relationship with China in one way or another and for Edith and Sacheverell both wrote Chinois inspired poems – reproduced here today and tomorrow. And to start a short excerpt from John Pearson’s biography of the Sitwell’s followed by an untitled poem from Edith…

When Osbert Sitwell went to China in January, 1934, it was with the conviction that little of what he would see could last and because he wished to experience ‘the wonderful beauty of the system of life it incorporated before it should perish.’ For three months he and his companion David Horner rented a small house in the middle of Peking’s Tartar City. It amused Osbert to spend each morning writing about the charms of the chinoiserie Pavilion in his latest book, a social history of Brighton, while the winds brought the yellow sand from the Gobi Desert onto his work table. Through his friend Harold Acton, dandy aesthete turned Chinese man-of-letters, Sitwell and Horner had an entrée to a vanished Peking that Sitwell would bring vividly to life in Escape with Me!: An Oriental Sketch-Book (1939), hailed by Hugh Walpole as one of the half-dozen best travel books in English of the previous half-century.

When May came, and the peonies were over, it was time to leave. One of the last visits Osbert made before departing was to the ancient college of the imperial eunuchs. He spent some time talking to the oldest of them, a wrinkled, hairless man with a piping voice and an inquisitive manner: ‘Tell me, young man, the old castrato said, ‘do you have no group of people like us where you come from?’ Osbert thought a while then answered gravely, ‘Yes, indeed we have. We call it Bloomsbury.’

See John Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1978)

Untitled – Edith Sitwell

The King of China’s daughter She never would love me,

Though I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

For oranges and lemons

The stars in bright blue air (I stole them long ago, my dear)

Were dangling there.

The moon, she gave me silver pence;

The sun did give me gold:

And both together softly blew

And made my porridge cold.

But the King of China’s daughter

Pretended not to see,

When I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

---