E.H.R. Altounyan: Ornament of Honour [excerpt]

Ernest Haik Riddall Altounyan (1889-1962) is the author of a book length poem, Ornament of Honour, published in 1937 at Cambridge University Press. It is dedicated to T.E. Lawrence and written within six months of the latter's death. Altounyan, a doctor, had founded a hospital in Aleppo and had met Lawrence there, before moving to England.

PRELUDE

You never saw that crooked moon

Behind Aleppo's citadel:

You never saw it shine again

In Dorsetshire.

For you had died a week ago

And I live on, a man disguised,

Thinking our thoughts and gaieties.

Come, curse me for this solemn dirge,

Haltingly fashioned, word on word,

Protesting "Nought is changed at all

In the Universe."

It is a lie! You know it now,

As you sleep rotting, once a man,

Disjointed from our pleasant plan

Of sweet converse.

You smile at last: let us not talk but see

Each other's faces through the emptiness of loss,

Knowing that all is dross,

Save spirit and the vision self-contained.

FUGUE

1.

The sky no longer holds that crooked moon,

A full-orbed light outshines the enfeebled stars,

Peace of a sort now settles, but too soon

To presage the defeat of this dim Mars.

Still from the vapours of the torrid day

Steals a miasma through the clear spread night,

Enfolding in a shroud the spirit's play

Contemplative, serene in dead moonlight.

From birth to death there is no settlement

For all the wars of passionate desire,

Waged for some timeless live embodiment

To crown our forcèd passage through this mire.

O temporal life! Not Christ, not incarnation,

Can ever atone this life and this frustration.

FINALE

Of what avail, if to the range of man

We add a thousand million years of light?

Of what avail, if in this monstrous span

Our bodies flower passionate and whole?

Now, in this new-born moment of delight

When youthful suns still strut upon a morn,

Tossing aside the flimsy cloak of night,

Now, as I feel the thrusting bud of dawn

And hold the certainty of perfect bloom,

It nought avails, if swirling from the dark

And still imprisoned fount of years unborn

I now can feel the closing púlse of Time:

For pressing backward from the last of man

The tide of doom must filter through our pores

Converting satin sheen to dropsical

Dull pitting mass of one entrangled fear

Of doom to come.

If doom there be no present joy can mask

The secret tremor of the soul at bay;

Therefore uneasily we rise and fall

Upon the surface of our shallow cares...

APP would like to thank Vicken Koundakjian for the information and research of this piece.