On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac

Song Meaning

The lyrics paint a stark, almost hallucinatory scene where the speaker confronts a powerful, unsettling image: a black centaur at the edge of a dark wood. This centaur's presence, marked by the sound of its hooves and the unnerving calls of "horrible green parrots," seems to crush the speaker's own creative output, "stamped down into the sultry mud." There's an immediate sense of being overwhelmed and perhaps corrupted by this primal, wild force. The central tension arises from the speaker's reaction to this overwhelming presence. While acknowledging the natural order – "What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat" – the speaker admits to being "driven half insane" by the "green wing" (likely referring to the parrots). This madness leads to a desperate, almost alchemical act of creation: gathering "mummy wheat" and grinding it "grain by grain," then baking it, and finally producing "full-flavoured wine" from an ancient, forgotten source. It's a process of transforming the decayed and the lost into something potent, a desperate attempt to match or overcome the centaur's power. The most striking craft element is the juxtaposition of the primal, destructive centaur and the speaker's obsessive, almost ritualistic creation. The "seven Ephesian topers" who slept through empires passing offer a profound contrast to the speaker's frenetic "mad abstract dark." They represent a deep, oblivious slumber, while the speaker is wide awake, consumed by a "long Saturnian sleep" that is paradoxically active and watchful. This ancient, wine-soaked sleep mirrors the centaur's wildness, suggesting a shared, albeit differently expressed, detachment from the ordinary world. Ultimately, the lyrics resonate through this potent blend of primal dread and obsessive, almost mad, artistic endeavor. The speaker's declaration, "I have loved you better than my soul," directed at the centaur or the image it represents, reveals a deep, consuming fixation. The final lines, positioning the speaker as the vigilant guardian against the "horrible green birds," suggest a profound, perhaps self-destructive, identification with the very forces that initially threatened to obliterate them.