The Dancers - Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell

Edith Sitwell is almost forgotten among the British literati as far as I can see. She is the greatest poetess in the English language without doubt for me. I went into a leading bookshop in Glasgow recently. They sell the full canon of classical literature. Nobody had heard of her. Deeply sad indeed and a sign of our times. Bought the Collected Poems at Voltaire and Rousseau bookshop in the west end. An oasis in a desert of philistinism and crassness. Here is a gem from the diadem. The Dancers The floors are slippery with blood: The world gyrates too. God is good That while His wind blows out the light For those who hourly die for us - We still can dance each night. The music has grown numb with death - But we will suck their dying breath, The whispered name they breathed to chance, To swell our music, make it loud That we may dance, - may dance. We are the dull blind carrion-fly That dance and batten. Though God die Mad from the horror of the light - The light is mad, too, flecked with blood, - We dance, we dance, each night.