At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes into the bathroom--
"Pitiable to be Quite so deplorably naked when one strips. There was his scar, a panel of old rose Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose; Adonis punctured by his amorous boar, Permanent souvenir of the Great War. One of God's jokes, typically good, That wound of his. How perfect that he should Have suffered it for--what?"
He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and _The Times_: he reads some of his old work ...
"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it; If he chose to--but it was too much trouble, And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe, Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find One o'clock struck and his unshaven face Still like a record in a musical-box, And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."
Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough, as one might expect, and then--
"Action, action! Quickly rise and do The most irreparable things; beget, In one brief consummation of the will, Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret. Action! This was no time for sitting still. He crushed his hat down over his eyes And walked with a stamp to symbolise Action, action--left, right, left; Planting his feet with flabby beat, Taking strange Procrustean steps, Lengthened, shortened to avoid Touching the lines between the stones-- A thing which makes God so annoyed."
Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear Jenny" waiting.
This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we might expect:
"Food and drink, food and drink: Olives as firm and sleek and green As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter, Swimming far down where the corpses sink Through the dense shadowy water. Silver and black on flank and back, The glossy sardine mourns its head. The red anchovy and the beetroot red, With carrots, build a gorgeous stair-- Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair-- And the green pallor of the salad round Sharpens their clarion sound.... Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive, And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious: Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live.... 'Jenny, adorable--' (what draws the line At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right To look so lovely as you look to-night, To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?' But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"