A Shirt of Hair, And Not With The Bottoms Of His Trousers Rolled

You can tell I'm avoiding finishing my marking. Oy. I dug up this piece of juvenalia that I find rather difficult to assess. There's a clarity and a strength to it, but the clarity is probably too overt in some senses, and the strength is of a kind of sinewy strength rather than a more purely musculur strength. (Then again, I'm sinewy, so....) Anyway, I offer it here since otherwise most people will not stumble upon it.

The Love Song of St. Sebastian

I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light;
I should arise your neophyte
And then put out the light
To follow where you lead,
To folllow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
And against your grown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I washideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.

I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your earls curl back in a certain way
Like no one's else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And followe the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees---
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

--- T. S. Eliot (written circa 1914, originally sent in a letter to Conrad Aiken; republished in Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks)

It's hard to tell which Saint Sebastian of which Eliot writes here (Eliot himself notes that there are three of them in his mind, and it's quite possible that Eliot has conflated the three in some way, centred largely around the image of the Descant From The Cross). Eliot thought this piece 'strained' and never chose to publish in his lifetime, but I can't help but think there's a kind of powerful, incantatory simplicity to it, though the poem's final five lines do seem to me very forced and uncontrolled. (And probably over-influenced by the Black Romantic writers like Andre Gide.) The odd thing for me, though, is that in the second stanza, I can almost hear Leonard Cohen singing those lines, which I could probably explain but which would certainly not be worth the explanatory words. Pensees, quelqu'un?