HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY -- VOGON POETRY VIGNETTE

by Douglas Adams

Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own," wrote:

And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts them back again without looking at them I began to envisage an age to come of pure, of self-assertive virility, such as the letters of professors (take Sir Walter Raleigh's letters, for instance) seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy have already brought into being. For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is "to develop the Italian novel." "Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations" came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope "that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it." We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.

Ordo Templi Orientis, "The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz," wrote:

Habib hath heard; let all Iran
who spell aright from A to Z
Exalt thy fame and understand
with whom I made a marriage-bed;
Resort to tool-and-podex play
till all the world in tears is shed
Before the sword of Azrael,
the trump of Israfel the dread. [2]

Jehannum shall exclaim "Habib!"
and light inform its murky fire,
Entrancing all the ghouls [4] to love,
waking the Shaitans to desire!

Black is the midnight when that wintry bird
Stands on the snowbank like an ermine tail
Blotting the royal robes: he cries a word
That gilds the red blood in the blessed Grail:
Wherefore the Beetle ramps upon the Hill,
And argent angels trumpet sour and shrill.

Drear and devout the dead monks moan and rave
Within these cells of this my labyrinth:
They couple with the ghuls upon my grave,
And on my monument's marmoreal plinth
They rage in amorous rituals unto Pan,
Whose leer breeds Thersites and Caliban.

Woe to the world! the bull and girl conjoin.
The monster guards the grot: the sly goat grins
When priest and prelate privately purloin
The perfume of our quintessential sins.
Woe! when that pizzle, ripe from Hathor's Cow,
Writes the red blush on Pasiphae's brow!

Zazel, the saturnine, the brooding fiend,
Listens and laughs at this ecstatic "woe"!
His desart teats from twisted terrors weaned
The ghost of Chasmodai: our vials flow
With galangal and marjoram and myrrh,
As Rhodope rapes life from Lucifer.

Chryselephantine cross! how good you gleam!
How gods and goats respire the dark perfume
Of oliban, and scent the erotic steam
Of myrtle in the cypress groves of gloom
That rolls and gathers into shapes of bronze
Who dream strange dreams and chant strange orisons.

Myrrh be thy music, harping thy perfume,
When thou canst sit upon the foursquare stone
Shaped like an egg, well hid within the tomb
Where Jesus drawls: "Consult that cruel crone
Who mutters mantrams to her swart tom-cat,
And trims her broomstick toward Ararat!"

Priapus laughs, and we behold him Pan;
Then if I smile, in me Panthea glows;
I am a panther, mark the caravan,
Devour a child, and plant a royal rose.
Then to my Rose if Pan is his own Pandar
My horn is worth the two of Alexander.

Qaiyum thine anguish, with the thorny crown
Lashing thy brow, the jackal's direful din
Breaking thy body! Could not eiderdown
Serve thee? His kisses cool thee? Is not sin
The royal road to sainthood, eremite
Whose purple pestle shuns the Dog's delight?

Rays of Aldeboran invade the coil
Of this my labyrinth and point the way.
Lick Nina for the consecrated oil!
Scrape Jesus for the sacramental clay!
See how the fumes of Voodoo curl around
Thy Wanga-circle, the enchanted ground.

Shaitan appears. But gloomier clouds of smoke
Than hell's are here, where wand and spell combine
The utmost spawn of chaos to invoke
As gods within the most supernal shrine.
I am the master. Will not God contest
The last grim struggle for his Alkahest?
 

"Far out, in the uncharted backwaters at the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy, lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has -- or had -- a problem, which was this -- most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd, because, on the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained and lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans. And then, one day, nearly 2,000 years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone, the Earth was demolished to make way for a hyperspace by-pass and so the idea was lost forever.

Meanwhile, Arthur Dent has escaped from the Earth in the company of a friend of his, who has unexpectedly turned out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and not from Guildford after all. His name is Ford Prefect, for reasons which are unlikely to become clear again at the moment, and they are currently hiding in the storeroom of a Vogon spaceship.

[Arthur]  What's that?

[Ford] If we're lucky, it's a Vogon come to throw us out into space.

[Arthur] And if we're unlucky?

[Ford] The captain might want to read us some of his poetry first.

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