At the weekend I shifted quite a lot of stuff around the house, in preparation for a major redecoration project in my main bedroom, which, when it gets started, means I’ll be sleeping in the spare room for quite a while. I moved a whole case of old paperback novels I’ve kept since I was a teenager and couldn’t help opening one that happened to be at the top. It was An Alien Heat, the first novel in the classic Dancers at the End of Time trilogy by Michael Moorcock whose books I devoured voraciously when I was at school. At the front of this one is a quotation from a poem by Theodore Wratislaw which contains the title phrase. I had a quick google about and found the whole poem, which turned out to be a very sensual and well-constructed sonnet, as opposed to the cack-handed parody I put up recently. The title of this poem also of course furnished the name of a well-known band.
I hate the flower of wood or common field.
I cannot love the primrose nor regret
The death of any shrinking violet,
Nor even the cultured garden’s banal yield.
The silver lips of lilies virginal,
The full deep bosom of the enchanted rose
Please less than flowers glass-hid from frost and snows
For whom an alien heat makes festival.
I love those flowers reared by man’s careful art,
Of heady scents and colors: strong of heart
Or weak that die beneath the touch of knife,
Some rich as sin and some as virtue pale,
And some as subtly infamous and frail
As she whose love still eats my soul and life.
In the Dark 