W.H.AUDEN
,Selected PoemsA
^ /
NEW EDITION
Edited by EDWARD MENDELSON
VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House New York
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Auden, Wystan Hugh, 1907-1973. Selected poems. I. Mendelson, Edward. PS3501.U55A17 1979 821'.9'12 78-55719
ISBN 0-394-72506-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
98765432
\N\Y-L0. PS
350( ■U55 /(17
Book design: Charlotte Staub
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8 waH* f La) t
jyH 141979
Contents
Preface ix
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed 1
From the very first coming down 2
Control of the passes was, he saw, the key 3
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings 3
Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see 4 , J
Will you turn a deaf ear 5 '
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all 7
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens 7
Since you are going to begin to-day 12
Consider this and in our time 14
This lunar beauty 16
To ask the hard question is simple 17
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle 18
What's in your mind, my dove, my coney 19
"0 where are you going?" said reader to rider 20
Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders 20
O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven 25
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear 26 JLg.^earing of harvests rotting in the valleys 28
v,20..Out on the lawn I lie in bed 29
A shilling life will give you all the facts 32
Our hunting fathers told the story 33
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head 33
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake 36
Now through night's caressing grip 41
O for doors to be open and an invite
with gilded edges 42
Look, stranger, at this island now 43
Now the leaves are falling fast 43
Dear, though the night is gone 44
Casino 45
Journey to Iceland 46
"0 who can ever gaze his fill" 48
Lay your sleeping head, my love 50
Spam 51
Orpheus 55
Miss Gee 55
Wrapped in a yielding air, beside 59 '38. As I walked out one evening 60
Oxford 63
In Time of War 64
The Capital 78
Musee des Beaux Arts 79
Epitaph on a Tyrant 80
In Memory of W. B. Yeats 80
Refugee Blues 83
The Unknown Citizen 85
September 1,1939 86
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun 89
In Memory of Sigmund Freud 91
Lady, weeping at the crossroads 95
Song for St. Cecilia's Day 96
The Quest 99
But I Can't 110
In Sickness and in Health 111
Jumbled in the common box 115
Atlantis 116
At the Grave of Henry James 119
Mundus et Infans 123
The Lesson 125
The Sea and the Mirror 127
Noon 175
Lament for a Lawgiver 176
Under Which Lyre 178
The Fall of Rome 183
In Praise of Limestone 184
Song 187
A Walk After Dark 188
Memorial for the City 190
Under Sirius 195
Fleet Visit 197
The Shield of Achilles 198
The Willow-Wren and the Stare 200
Nocturne 201
Bucolics 202
Horae Canonicae 216
Homage to Clio 232
First Things First 236
The More Loving One 237
Friday's Child 237
Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno 239
Dame Kind 242
You 245
After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics 246
On the Circuit 248
Et in Arcadia Ego 250
Thanksgiving for a Habitat 252
Epithalamium 278
Fairground 280
River Profile 282
Prologue at Sixty 284
Forty Years On 287
Ode to Terminus 289
August 1968 291
A New Year Greeting 292
Moon Landing 294
Old People's Home 295
Talking to Myself 296
A Lullaby 299
A Thanksgiving 300 100. Archaeology 302
A Note on the Text 305
I i
Index of Titles and First Lines 307 f
Preface
Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernist predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular. All of this Auden rejected. His continuing subject was the task of the present moment: erotic and political tasks in his early poems, ethical and religious ones later. When Auden looked back into history, it was to seek the causes of his present condition, that he might act better and more effectively in the future. The-past his poems envisioned was never a southern classical domain of unreflective elegance, as it was for the modernists, but a past that had always been ruined, a northern industrial landscape marred by the same violence and sorrow that marred his own.
P"
Everything that is most distinctive about Auden can be traced to his absorption in the present: even, in what might seem a paradox, his revival of the poetic forms and meters that modernism had pronounced dead a few years earlier. Auden was able to find them still alive and well, and as effective as they had always been. In Auden's unbroken vision of history, the ancient discontents survived in contemporary forms, but so did the ancient sources of personal and literary vitality. Modernism, disfranchised from the past by its own sense of isolated "modernity," could bring its literary tradition into the present only as'battered ironic fragments (as in Eliot) or by visionary heroic efforts (like Pound's) to "make
it new." For Auden, it had never grown old. A laconic Old English toughness thrived in his poetry, as did an Augustan civility. One might even find, in the shape of Auden's career, traces of an ambitious recapitulation of a thousand years of European literary history: his earliest poems use the Icelandic }
sagas as their major source; then in the thirties Dante is heard insistently in the background of his work; followed by Shakespeare in the forties; and in the sixties, Goethe.
Modernism tended to look back toward the lost reigns of a native aristocracy; too often, it found the reflected glory of ;
ancient "tradition" in political leaders who promised to restore social grandeur and unity through coercive force. Auden's refusal to idealize the past saved him from comparable fits of mistaken generosity. His poems and essays present the idea of the good society as, at best, a possibility, never |
actually to be achieved, but towards which one must always work. In Auden's poems from the thirties, this idea took form in a vision of history as the product of unconscious but purposive forces, of which social-democratic movements were potentially the conscious agents; one was free either to reject these forces or to ally oneself with them, but the choice was less a moral one than a choice between ultimate victory and J
ultimate defeat. Auden later renounced this view—which .
in any case he held less as a personal belief than as a scaffold- (
ing on which to build his poetry—and disowned the poems that expressed it. He came to understand history as the realm of conscious ethical choices, made personally and deliberately, and, if at all possible, in full awareness of their consequences. Whichever of these views Auden's political poems assumed, the poems consistently used the same basic technique. From the exhortatory "Spain" to the meditative "Vespers," Auden dramatized the unresolvable tension between personal wishes or fantasies (apocalytic fantasies in his early years, arcadian ones afterwards) and the claims and obligations of the social realm (which he designated "history" in the early poems, "the city" in the later ones). This drama of public responsibility and private desire is part of a tradition that extends
back to Virgil and beyond, but by the early part of this century it had disappeared from English poetry. Auden revived it with the same confidence and exuberance he had brought to his revival of traditional poetic forms.
In short, the surest way to misunderstand Auden is to read him as the modernists' heir. Except in his very earliest and latest poems, there is virtually nothing modernist about him, From the viewpoint of literary history, this is the most important aspect of his work. Most critics of twentieth-century poetry, however, still judge poems by their conformity to modernist norms; consequently, a myth has grown up around Auden to the effect that he fell into a decline almost as soon as he began writing. Critics who give credence to this myth mean, in fact, that Auden stopped writing the sort of poems they know how to read: poems written in a subjective voice, in tones of imaginative superiority and regretful isolation. Auden's poems speak instead in a voice almost unknown to English poetry since the end of the eighteenth century: the voice of a citizen who knows the obligations of his citizenship.
Like Brecht in Germany, whose career offers the closest parallels with his own, Auden began with a brashly threatening manner that grew into an ironic didactic one. Both Auden and Brecht started out as amoral romantic anarchists; and both, around the age of thirty, adopted a chastening public orthodoxy—Christianity in Auden's case, Communism in Brecht's, Both came to prefer mixed styles and miscellaneous influences to the purity of the lyric or the intensity of the visionary tradition, Both collaborated with other writers (once even with each other) as no poet had done since the start of the romantic era. Unlike the modernists, both adopted popular forms without the disclaimer of an ironic tone. Each exploited the didactic powers of literature, but rejected the reigning modernist assumptions that granted primacy to the creative imagination or asserted the writing of poetry to be the central human act. Neither was afraid to be vulgar, and neither would entrust serious issues to the inflation of the grand style. Modernism was a movement populated by exiles, at home only in their art. Auden and Brecht were exiles who returned.
The poem that opens this selection (dating from 1927, when Auden was twenty) is the first that Auden wrote in the voice . he came to recognize as his own. For about five years after- f
wards, his voice retained something of the modernist accent he had learned from Eliot, and his poems used the free verse he had learned at the same school. These first poems often have the air of gnomic fragments; they seem to be elements of some hidden private myth whose individual details never quite resolve themselves into a unified narrative. The same qualities of division and irresolution that mark the poems (
also mark the world they describe, a world where doomed heroes look down in isolation on an equally doomed society. There is division also between the poems and their readers; the poems not only refuse to yield up any cohesive meanings, but adopt a recurrent tone of foreboding and threat: "It is time for the destruction of error," "It is later than you think." Auden's early readers missed the point when they inferred from the poems' elusive privacy the existence of a coterie who shared the meanings and got the jokes; Auden's friends were as much in the dark as everyone else. The elusiveness and indecipherability of the early poems are part of their meaning: j
they enact the isolation they describe.
The turn away from this early style, and from the manner and subjects of modernism, can be dated precisely. Auden prepared for it in the late spring of 1933, in a series of poems that expressed first the hope of a release from isolation and '
from the delusive wish for an innocent place elsewhere, and, finally, asked for the will and strength to "rebuild our cities, |
not dream of islands." Then, in June 1933, Auden experienced what he later called a "Vision of Agape." He was sitting on a lawn with three colleagues from the school where he was teaching, when, he wrote, "quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it meant to love
one's neighbor as oneself." Before this, his poems had only been able to celebrate moments of impersonal erotic intensity, which he called "love." Now, in the poem "Out on the lawn I lie in bed," prompted by his vision, he had praise for everything around him. He described as "lucky" ("luck" in Auden's vocabulary has almost the force of religious "grace") "this point in time and space"—that is, the immediate moment and his "chosen ... working-place" where he had both friends and responsibilities. His earlier forebodings are transformed into a hymn of renewal; the mutual affections of his friends will have effects beyond the privacy of their English garden and will share in the strength that can rebuild the ruined city.
This jubilant tone could not last, but Auden's sense of public responsibility did. He now began to address his audience, rather than withdraw from it or threaten it; and his audience, amid the discontents of the thirties, was eager to listen. No English poet since Byron achieved fame so quickly. In plays that borrowed their techniques from the music-hall and the cabaret, in poems written in stirring rhythms with memorable rhymes, he hoped to "make action urgent and its nature clear." This proved to be less simple than he imagined. The urgency was vivid enough in his political poems, but the exact nature of the actions urged was never as clear as he might have wished. Readers felt free to find their own actions and attitudes endorsed in these poems, and Auden, recognizing this, began to face his own increasing scruples over his easy relations with his audience. He began to use "vague" as a strong moral pejorative; and the word seemed to apply to many of his own public statements, whose resonance and rhetorical force tended to overwhelm any objections that readers, or Auden's conscience, might raise against their content or their imprecision. In his most politically active years, in the mid-thirties, Auden constantly maintained an inward debate that led him to answer a public exhortation like "Spain" with the hermetic mysteries of a poem like "Orpheus," written at about the same moment. His love poems insisted on the fragility and transience of personal relations,
while at the same time his public poems proclaimed a hope for universal harmony. Auden was never altogether happy in his role as poetic prophet to the English Left, and he was often most divided when he appeared most committed. As early as 1936 he sensed that if he were ever to escape the temptations to fame and to the power to shape opinion that led him to
accept his role, he would have to leave England, His work in j
the later thirties records a series of exploratory voyages from England to Spain, Iceland, China, across Europe, finally to America, where, in 1938, he made his decision to leave both j
England and the role it offered, and to leave, he thought, forever.
When he arrived in America to stay, early in 1939, he set |
to work on what was virtually a new career, recapitulating his earlier one in a drastically different manner. He began to \
explore once again the same thematic and formal territory he had covered in his English years, but with a maturer vision,
I
and no longer distracted by the claims of a public. Whether or not by conscious intention, each of the longer poems he wrote during his first years in America served, in effect, as a replacement for a long poem he had written earlier in England. Thus in 1928 he had written a Christmas charade, "Paid j on Both Sides"; now, in 1941-42, he wrote a Christmas oratorio, "For the Time Being." In place of his 1936 verse-epistle i to a dead poet, "Letter to Lord Byron," he wrote in 1940 a ( verse-epistle to a living friend, "New Year Letter." In 1931 he had invented a form for The Orators, a three-part structure, framed by a prologue and epilogue, with the first part j spoken by a series of voices, the second by a single voice, and the third again by multiple voices; in 1943-44 he used the same form, with the central sequence inverted, for "The Sea and the Mirror." When he published the first of his collected . editions in 1945, the later poems were all present and complete, while the earlier ones had been either dismembered into their component parts or dropped entirely. Similarly, the inconclusive ending of his 1938 sonnet sequence "In Time of War"—"Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice"—
was resolved at the close of his 1940 sonnet sequence, "The Quest," in the recovered peace of "The Garden." Even the way he made his living in America repeated a pattern he had followed in the thirties: in England he had taught at various schools until 1935 when he left to work as a free-lance writer; in America he taught at various colleges and universities until 1945, then once again took up his free lance.
His shorter poems emerged from the same process of remaking that gave form to the longer ones. Shortly after he reached New York he began to write in a compressed introspective style that corresponded to the gnomic privacy of his earliest poems but transformed the old aggressiveness into self-reproach. Auden's poems passed judgement on his earlier self and work with a severity that disconcerted his admirers (who complained only of his departure from England, which he seemed to think was the best thing he had done). But the change in his life was as deep and extensive as the change in his work. The restrained and chastened intensity- of his first American poems was a sign of his newly discovered commitment to the Anglican faith he once thought he had outgrown in adolescence. In his first year in America he began attending church; he returned to communion late in 1940. The equivocal political commitments of a few years earlier proved to have been rehearsals for a religious commitment that was permanent and undivided, even if its later expression became considerably more relaxed. The last of his longer poems, "The Age of Anxiety" (1944-46), celebrates the personal triumph of his faith, against all odds. There was a corresponding change in the commitments of his love poems. In the thirties he had written of the transience of eros: "Lay your sleeping head, my love," this century's most famous love lyric, praises a faithless and unequal relationship, its inequality signaled by the very act of the conscious lover's address to his unconscious partner. In the forties Auden wrote of a love that was spousal and permanent, whose responsibility endured—as one title put it, in a phrase from the marriage service—"In Sickness and in Health."
The shift from private to public concerns that occurred in Auden's work in the early thirties occurred again in the mid- forties, although now he was without ambition for social influence and lived in a country where poets traditionally had none. His departure from England proved not to have been a rejection of all public roles, as he thought at the time, but a rejection of the wrong ones. He now became an interpreter of his society, not its scourge or prophet. Once again, as in England, he began collaborating on works for the stage. From the late forties onwards he wrote moral parables in the form of opera libretti, as in the thirties he had written political propaganda in the form of musical plays. His greatest works in the late forties and fifties were his extended meditations on the city, its historical origins and present complexities. An initial exploration of the subject, "Memorial for the City," a poem prompted in part by his experience of Germany in 1945, led to the extraordinary sequence of "Horae Canonicae," where the events of a single day, among various urban roles and personalities, are set within a framework encompassing vast reaches of time. The sequence's passage from dawn to dusk corresponds to passages from birth to death, from the rise to the fall of a city, and from the creation to the second coming. Parallel with these urban poems are a group set in rural landscapes: "In Praise of Limestone" establishes the theme, and the sequence of "Bucolics" extends and develops it.
In the late fifties and sixties Auden turned to the more local significance of a single dwelling place. In 1957, he bought a farmhouse in Austria as a summer home (the first home he had ever owned) and began the poems that grew into the sequence "Thanksgiving for a Habitat." While narrowing his focus to his private hearth he retained his sense of historical and social extension; each room of the house, like each landscape in "Bucolics," has its moral and political analogues, and more often than not, is the occasion for a meditation on history.
In his final years his subjects narrowed still further, and he returned to a transformed version of the privacy of his first poems. He left America to return to England. A nostalgic note, absent since his earliest poems, began to enter his work once more. Still, as he had denied his earlier nostalgic longings by recalling the evidence of history ("The pillar dug from the desert recorded only / The sack of a city"), now he emphasized the imaginary quality of the past whose image he evoked by writing about it in the language of folk tales. He wrote again ofa doomed landscape: not an external one, but the microcosmos of his own aging body. He directed his meditations on history to thanksgiving rather than analysis: if his last poems concern his doomed flesh they also celebrate the family and the age from which it sprang. He made explicit his gratitude to his literary sources. At the end, in "Archaeology," his last completed poem, he delved into an unknowably remote past, yet —as he prepared for his own exit from the world of time into an unknowable future—he concluded with an affirmation. History, he wrote, is made "by the criminal in us: / goodness is timeless."
In preparing the text of a selection of Auden's work, an editor must make his own decision between the claims of errant history and those of timeless goodness. Auden applied a moral standard to his earlier poems—and, some critics have charged, tried to rewrite his own history in the process—when he revised or discarded some of his most famous work, either in an effort to make it conform to his later standards of precision and clarity, or, more notoriously, to rid it of statements he had come to regard as hateful and false. All the collected and selected editions he prepared, and that are currently available on either side of the Atlantic, reflect his later judgements. Yet the claims of history, and of readers who want the discarded poems, are strong, and the present selection acknowledges them by reprinting the texts of the early editions and by including poems Auden rejected. A historical edition of this kind, reflecting the author's work as it first appeared in public rather than his final vision of it, should not be taken as implying that Auden's revisions or rejections were in any
way misguided; they were logical and consistent, and in almost every instance produced versions that were more coherent and complex than the originals. Probably the best way to get to know Auden's work is to read the early versions first for their greater immediate impact, and the revised ver- I
sions afterwards for their greater subtlety and depth. For most readers this book will be a First Auden, and the later I
collections are recommended as a Second. j
Most criticism, however, has taken a censorious view of '
Auden's revisions, and the issue is an important one because I
behind it is a larger dispute about Auden's theory of poetry. f
In making his revisions, and in justifying them as he did, Auden was systematically rejecting a whole range of modernist assumptions about poetic form, the nature of poetic language, and the effects of poetry on its audience. Critics who find the changes deplorable generally argue, in effect, that a '
poet loses his right to revise or reject his work after he publishes it—as if the skill with which he brought his poems from their early drafts to the point of publication somehow left him at the moment they appeared, making him a trespasser on his own work thereafter. This argument presupposes the romantic notion that poetic form is, or ought to be, "organic," that an authentic poem is shaped by its own internal forces rather than by the external effects of craft; versions of this ;
idea survived as central tenets of modernism. In revising his poems, Auden opened his workshop to the public, and the spectacle proved unsettling, especially as his revisions, unlike Yeats', moved against the current of literary fashion. In the later part of his career, he increasingly called attention in his essays to the technical aspects of verse, the details of metrical and stanzaic construction—much as Brecht had brought his stagehands into the full view of the audience. The goal in each case was to remove the mystery that surrounds works of art, to explode the myth of poetic inspiration, and to deny any special privileges to poetry in the realm of language or to artists in the realm of ethics.
Critics mistook this attitude as a "rejection" of poetry,
when in fact it was a recognition of its potential effects. The most notorious aspect of Auden's revisions, as of his whole poetic theory, was his insistence that a poem must not be "dishonest," must not express beliefs that a poet does not actually hold, no matter how rhetorically effective he finds them. In Auden's view, poetry could not be exempted from ethical standards of truth or falsehood: a poem could be a lie, and what was more serious, a poetic lie could be more persuasive in the public realm than lies less eloquently expressed. Words had the potential to do good or evil, whether their source was political discourse or the ordered images of a poem. Auden's sense of the effect of poetic language—like Brecht's sense of the effect of stage performance—differs entirely from the modernist theory that sets poetry apart from the world, either in an interior psychological arena or in the enclosed garden of reflexivity where poems refer only to themselves. Already in the thirties, Auden's political poems assumed they had the power to affect attitudes, and therefore indirectly to affect action; his later judgements on those poems made the same assumption, but from a very different moral perspective. In the first version of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" Auden had written that time would pardon writers like Kipling and Claudel for their right-wing views; the implication was that the left-wing views held by Auden and his audience were consonant with the force of history and would need no forgiveness whatever. Auden soon found this less easy to believe than he did when he wrote it, and was less willing to encourage such complacency in his readers. He dropped the stanzas about Kipling and Claudel, and dropped entirely such poems as "Spain" where the "struggle" is more important than its consequences and goodness is equated with victory, or "September 1, 1939" where a rhetorical sleight-of-hand grants the moral value of just actions to the ironic "messages" of the isolated just. These poems are memorable enough to survive all of Auden's interference, and there are ancient and vigorous critical standards by which they must be judged great art; still, when Auden called them "trash which he is ashamed to have written" he was taking them far more seriously—and taking poetic language far more seriously—than his critics ever did.
Too seriously, most readers would argue. Yet the revisions Auden made in the forties, like the changes in his life and work, effectively put into practice the doubts he had experienced earlier. He had embedded an allegory of his mixed feelings into The Ascent of F6, a play written with Christopher Isherwood in 1936. The play traces the destruction of a mountain climber (Auden's dramatic representative), at the moment of his greatest triumph, as a result of the conflicts inherent in a public role his private terrors tempted him to accept. Auden avoided a parallel fate by leaving England for America at the height of his fame, and by working to expunge from his poetry the tendencies that he sensed might otherwise have destroyed him and his poetry together. Later he could write more tolerantly of the temptation to "ruin a fine tenor voice I For effects that bring down the house," but by that time, having defeated his public temptations, he had set out to conquer his private ones also. The poems he wrote in this period, in the forties and after, are less immediately compelling than his earlier ones, but more profound and more rewarding in the long term. His masterpiece is arguably "The Sea and the Mirror" (its nearest rivals may be "New Year Letter" and "Horae Canonicae"), whose longest section, "Caliban to the Audience," is the work he preferred to all his others. It had been the most recalcitrant in conception—he was stalled six months before he could work out its form— and the most pleasurable in the writing; and it confronted most directly and comprehensively the limits and powers of his art, and its temptations and possibilities.
This selection includes poems chosen from all of Auden's books of verse; a note on sources may be found at the back. The texts are those of first publication in book form, modified only by the rare minor revisions Auden made within a few months of publication, and by the correction of misprints.
The arrangement is chronological, except where Auden arranged a group of poems written at different times into a single sequence; dates of composition are appended to each poem. I have tried to include examples from the full range of Auden's work in all its enormous variety of form, rhetoric and content; the only major formal omission, I believe, results from the impossibility of including either of the two long verse-letters, which took up too many pages to reprint in full and proved unamenable to abridgment. One long poem, "The Sea and the Mirror," is printed complete, and excerpts from other longer works are included only in cases where Auden printed the same excerpts as separate poems. The titles, or lack of titles in the early work, correspond to the usage in the first editions; the titles used for excerpts from "The Age of Anxiety" are those Auden used when he printed them in periodicals. No selection from a great poet has ever been satisfactory—a rule I know has not been broken by this one.
E.M.
w. H. AUDEN
Selected Poems
NEW EDITION
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
At Cashwell raises water; for ten years
It lay in flooded workings until this,
Its latter office, grudgingly performed,
And further here and there, though many dead
Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen
Taken from recent winters; two there were
Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand, clutching
The winch the gale would tear them from; one died
During a storm, the fells impassable,
Not athis village, but in wooden shape
Through long abandoned levels nosed his way
And in his final valley went to ground.
Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock, Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed: This land, cut off, will not communicate, Be no accessory content to one Aimless for faces rather there than here. Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall, They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind Arriving driven from the ignorant sea To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm Where sap unbaffled rises, being Spring; But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass, Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.
August 1927
From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year's arc a completed round
And love's worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, Spring's green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.
Nor speech is close nor fingers numb, If love not seldom has received An unjust answer, was deceived. I, decent with the seasons, move Different or with a different love, Nor question overmuch the nod, The stone smile of this country god That never was more reticent, Always afraid to say more than it meant.
December 1927
Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced with the old tricks.
At Greenhearth was a fine site for a dam And easy power, had they pushed the rail Some stations nearer. They ignored his wires. The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming.
The street music seemed gracious now to one For weeks up in the desert. Woken by water Running away in the dark, he often had Reproached the night for a companion Dreamed of already. They would shoot, of course, Parting easily who were never joined.
January 1928
4
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,
Walking together in the windless orchard
Where the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier.
Again in the room with the sofa hiding the grate, Look down to the river when the rain is over, See him turn to the window, hearing our last Of Captain Ferguson.
It is seen how excellent hands have turned to commonness.
One staring too long, went blind in a tower,
One sold all his manors to fight, broke through, and faltered.
Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl Under the headlands in their windy dwelling Because the Adversary put too easy questions On lonely roads.
But happy now, though no nearer each other, We see the farms lighted all along the valley; Down at the mill-shed the hammering stops And men go home.
Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.
March 1928
5
Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see His dextrous handling of a wrap as he Steps after into cars, the beggar's envy.
!
"There is a free one," many say, but err. He is not that returning conqueror,
Nor ever the poles' circumnavigator. 1
But poised between shocking falls on razor-edge !
Has taught himself this balancing subterfuge Of the accosting profile, the erect carriage.
The song, the varied action of the blood Would drown the warning from the iron wood Would cancel the inertia of the buried:
Travelling by daylight on from house to house The longest way to the intrinsic peace, With love's fidelity and with love's weakness.
March 1929
Will you turn a deaf ear To what they said on the shore, Interrogate their poises In their rich houses;
Of stork-legged heaven-reachers Of the compulsory touchers The sensitive amusers And masked amazers?
Yet wear no ruffian badge Nor lie behind the hedge Waiting with bombs of conspiracy In arm-pit secrecy;
Carry no talisman For germ or the abrupt pain Needing no concrete shelter Nor porcelain filter.
Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair, With no affectionate instant But his attendant?
For to be held for friend By an undeveloped mind To be joke for children is Death's happiness:
Whose anecdotes betray His favourite colour as blue Colour of distant bells And boys' overalls.
His tales of the bad lands Disturb the sewing hands; Hard to be superior On parting nausea;
To accept the cushions from Women against martyrdom, Yet applauding the circuits Of racing cyclists.
Never to make signs Fear neither maelstrom nor zones Salute with soldiers' wives When the flag waves;
Remembering there is . No recognised gift for this; No income, no bounty, No promised country.
But to see brave sent home Hermetically sealed with shame And cold's victorious wrestle With molten metal.
A neutralising peace i
And an average disgrace Are honour to discover For later other.
September 1929
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward's stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
October 1929
8
I
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond, Watching traffic of magnificent cloud Moving without anxiety on open sky— Season when lovers and writers find An altering speech for altering things, An emphasis on new names, on the arm A fresh hand with fresh power. But thinking so I came at once Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench, Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.
So I remember all of those whose death
Is necessary condition of the season's setting forth,
Who sorry in this time look only back
To Christmas intimacy, a winter dialogue
Fading in silence, leaving them in tears.
And recent particulars come to mind:
The death by cancer of a once hated master,
A friend's analysis of his own failure,
Listened to at intervals throughout the winter
At different hours and in different rooms.
But always with success of others for comparison,
The happiness, for instance, of my friend Kurt Groote,
Absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer
From the sea, the truly strong man.
A 'bus ran home then, on the public ground Lay fallen bicycles like huddled corpses: No chattering valves of laughter emphasised Nor the swept gown ends of a gesture stirred The sessile hush; until a sudden shower Fell willing into grass and closed the day, Making choice seem a necessary error.
April 1929
II
F
Coming out of me living is always thinking, Thinking changing and changing living, Am feeling as it was seeing— In city leaning on harbour parapet To watch a colony of duck below Sit, preen, and doze on buttresses Or upright paddle on flickering stream, Casually fishing at a passing straw. Those find sun's luxury enough, Shadow know not of homesick foreigner Nor restlessness of intercepted growth.
All this time was anxiety at night,
Shooting and barricade in street.
Walking home late I listened to a friend
Talking excitedly of final war
Of proletariat against police—
That one shot girl of nineteen through the knees,
They threw that one down concrete stair—
Till I was angry, said I was pleased.
Time passes in Hessen, in Gutensberg, With hill-top and evening holds me up, Tiny observer of enormous world. Smoke rises from factory in field, Memory of fire: On all sides heard Vanishing music of isolated larks: From village square voices in hymn, Men's voices, an old use. And I above standing, saying in thinking:
"Is first baby, warm in mother, Before born and is still mother, Time passes and now is other, Is knowledge in him now of other, Cries in cold air, himself no friend. In grown man also, may see in face In his day-thinking and in his night-thinking Is wareness and is fear of other, Alone in flesh, himself no friend.
"He say 'We must forgive and forget,' Forgetting saying but is unforgiving And unforgiving is in his living; Body reminds in him to loving, Reminds but takes no further part, Perfunctorily affectionate in hired room But takes no part and is unloving But loving death. May see in dead, In face of dead that loving wish,
As one returns from Africa to wife
And his ancestral property in Wales." '
Yet sometimes man look and say good At strict beauty of locomotive, Completeness of gesture or unclouded eye; In me so absolute unity of evening And field and distance was in me for peace, Was over me in feeling without forgetting Those ducks' indifference, that friend's hysteria, 4
Without wishing and with forgiving, To love my life, not as other, Not as bird's life, not as child's, "Cannot," I said, "being no child now nor a bird." 1
May 1929
III
Order to stewards and the study of time, Correct in books, was earlier than this But joined this by the wires I watched from train, Slackening of wire and posts' sharp reprimand, In month of August to a cottage coming.
I
Being alone, the frightened soul
Returns to this life of sheep and hay
No longer his: he every hour
Moves further from this and must so move,
As child is weaned from his mother and leaves home
But taking the first steps falters, is vexed,
Happy only to find home, a place
Where no tax is levied for being there.
So, insecure, he loves and love Is insecure, gives less than he expects.
He knows not if it be seed in time to display I';
Luxuriantly in a wonderful fructification !
Or whether it be but a degenerate remnant Of something immense in the past but now
Surviving only as the infectiousness of disease Or in the malicious caricature of drunkenness; Its end glossed over by the careless but known long To finer perception of the mad and ill.
Moving along the track which is himself, He loves what he hopes will last, which gone, Begins the difficult work of mourning, And as foreign settlers to strange country come, By mispronunciation of native words And by intermarriage create a new race And a new language, so may the soul Be weaned at last to independent delight.
Startled by the violent laugh of a jay I went from wood, from crunch underfoot, Air between stems as under water; As I shall leave the summer, see autumn come Focusing stars more sharply in the sky, See frozen buzzard flipped down the weir And carried out to sea, leave autumn, See winter, winter for earth and us,
A forethought of death that we may'find ourselves at death Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.
August 1929
IV
It is time for the destruction of error. The chairs are being brought in from the garden, The summer talk stopped on that savage coast Before the storms, after the guests and birds: In sanatoriums they laugh less and less, Less certain of cure; and the loud madman Sinks now into a more terrible calm.
The falling leaves know it, the children,
At play on the fuming alkali-tip
Or by the flooded football ground, know it—
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's: Orders are given to the enemy for a time With underground proliferation of mould, With constant whisper and the casual question, To haunt the poisoned in his shunned house, To destroy the efflorescence of the flesh, To censor the play of the mind, to enforce Conformity with the orthodox bone, With organised fear, the articulated skeleton.
You whom I gladly walk with, touch,
Or wait for as one certain of good,
We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
Death of the old gang; would leave them
In sullen valley where is made no friend,
The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.
October 1929 ■
9
Since you are going to begin to-day Let us consider what it is you do. You are the one whose part it is to lean, For whom it is not good to be alone. Laugh warmly turning shyly in the hall Or climb with bare knees the volcanic hill, Acquire that flick of wrist and after strain
Relax in your darling's arms like a stone Remembering everything you can confess, Making the most of firelight, of hours of fuss; But joy is mine not yours—to have come so far, Whose cleverest invention was lately fur; Lizards my best once who took years to breed, Could not control the temperature of blood. To reach that shape for your face to assume, Pleasure to many and despair to some, I shifted ranges, lived epochs handicapped By climate, wars, or what the young men kept, Modified theories on the types of dross, Altered desire and history of dress.
You in the town now call the exile fool That writes home once a year as last leaves fall, Think—Romans had a language in their day And ordered roads with it, but it had to die: Your culture can but leave—forgot as sure As place-name origins in favourite shire— Jottings for stories, some often-mentioned Jack, And references in letters to a private joke, Equipment rusting in unweeded lanes, Virtues still advertised on local lines; And your conviction shall help none to fly, Cause rather a perversion on next floor.
Nor even is despair your own, when swiftly Comes general assault on your ideas of safety: That sense of famine, central anguish felt For goodness wasted at peripheral fault, Your shutting up the house and taking prow To go into the wilderness to pray, Means that I wish to leave and to pass on, Select another form, perhaps your son; Though he reject you, join opposing team Be late or early at another time,
My treatment will not differ—he will be tipped, Found weeping, signed for, made to answer, topped. Do not imagine you can abdicate; Before you reach the frontier you are caught;
Others have tried it and will try again (
To finish that which they did not begin:
Their fate must always be the same as yours,
To suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,
Holders of one position, wrong for years.
November 1929 ,,
10 -
Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly—look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
Pass on, admire the view of the massif
Through plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel;
Join there the insufficient units
Dangerous, easy, in furs, in uniform
And constellated at reserved tables
Supplied with feelings by an efficient band
Relayed elsewhere to farmers and their dogs
Sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens.
Long ago, supreme Antagonist,
More powerful than the great northern whale
Ancient and sorry at life's- limiting defect,
In Cornwall, Mendip, or the Pennine moor
Your comments on the highborn mining-captains,
Found they no answer, made them wish to die
—Lie since in barrows out of harm.
You talk to your admirers every day
By silted harbours, derelict works,
In strangled orchards, and the silent comb Where dogs have worried or a bird was shot. Order the ill that they attack at once: Visit the ports and, interrupting The leisurely conversation in the bar Within a stone's throw of the sunlit water, Beckon'your chosen out. Summon
Those handsome and diseased youngsters, those women
Your solitary agents in the country parishes;
And mobilise the powerful forces latent
In soils that make the farmer brutal
In the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats.
Then, ready, start your rumour, soft
But horrifying in its capacity to disgust
Which, spreading magnified, shall come to be
A polar peril, a prodigious alarm,
Scattering the people, as torn-up paper
Rags and utensils in a sudden gust,
Seized with immeasurable neurotic dread.
Financier, leaving your little room Where the money is made but not spent, You'll need your typist and your boy no more; The game is up for you and for the others, Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns. Of College Quad or Cathedral Close, Who are born nurses, who live in shorts Sleeping with people and playing fives. Seekers after happiness, all who follow The convolutions of your simple wish, It is later than you think; nearer that day Far other than that distant afternoon Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet They gave the prizes to the ruined boys. You cannot be away, then, no Not though you pack to leave within an hour, Escaping humming down arterial roads:
The date was yours; the prey to fugues, Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies After some haunted migratory years To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue. (
March 1930
11
This lunar beauty Has no history Is complete and early; If beauty later Bear any feature It had a lover And is another.
This like a dream Keeps other time And daytime is The loss of this; For time is inches And the heart's changes Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
But this was never A ghost's endeavour Nor finished this, Was ghost at ease; And till it pass Love shall not near The sweetness here Nor sorrow take His endless look.
April 19 30
To ask the hard question is simple; Asking at meeting
With the simple glance of acquaintance
To what these go
And how these do:
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.
But the answer
Is hard and hard to remember:
On steps or on shore
The ears listening
To words at meeting,
The eyes looking
At the hands helping,
Are never sure
Of what they learn
From how these things are done.
And forgetting to listen or see
Makes forgetting easy;
Only remembering the method of remembering, Remembering only in another way, Only the strangely exciting lie, Afraid
To remember what the fish ignored,
How the bird escaped, or if the sheep obeyed.
Till, losing memory, Bird, fish, and sheep are ghostly, And ghosts must do again What gives them pain. Cowardice cries For windy skies, Coldness for water, Obedience for a master.
Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;
Shall the bird live,
Shall the fish dive,
And sheep obey
In a sheep's way;
Can love remember
The question and the answer,
For love recover
What has been dark and rich and warm all over?
? August 1930
13
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. Upon what man it fall In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing, Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face, That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome.
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him. through doorway voices Of new men making another love.
Save him from hostile capture, From sudden tiger's spring at corner; Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
August 1930
14
What's in your mind, my dove, my coney; Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life; Is it making of love or counting of money, Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
Open your eyes, my dearest dallier; Let hunt with your hands for escaping me; Go through the motions of exploring the familiar; Stand on the brink of the warm white day.
Rise with the wind, my great big serpent; Silence the birds and darken the air; Change me with terror, alive in a moment; Strike for the heart and have me there.
November 1930
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider, "That valley is fatal where furnaces burn, Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden, That gap is the grave where the tall return."
"O doyou imagine," said fearer to farer, "That dusk will delay on your path to the pass, Your diligent looking discover the lacking Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"
"0 what was that bird," said horror to hearer, "Did you see that shape in the twisted trees? Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"
"Out of this house"—said rider to reader "Yours never will"—said farer to fearer "They're looking for you"—said hearer to horror As he left them there, as he left them there.
from "The Orators": October 1931
16
(TO MY PUPILS)
Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders, Watching with binoculars the movement of the grass for an
ambush,
The pistol cocked, the code-word committed to memory;
The youngest drummer Knows all the peace-time stories like the oldest soldier, Though frontier-conscious,
About the tall white gods who landed from their open boat, Skilled in the working of copper, appointing our feast-days, Before the islands were submerged, when the
weather was calm, The maned lion common, An open wishing-well in every garden; When love came easy.
Perfectly certain, all of us, but not from the records, Not from the unshaven agent who returned to the camp; The pillar dug from the desert recorded only
The sack of a city, The agent clutching his side collapsed at our feet, "Sorry! They got me!"
Yes, they were living here once but do not now,
Yes, they are living still but do not here;
Lying awake after Lights Out a recruit may speak up:
"Who told you all this?" The tent-talk pauses a little till a veteran answers "Go to sleep, Sonny!"
Turning over he closes his eyes, and then in a moment Sees the sun at midnight bright over cornfield and pasture, Our hope.. .. Someone jostles him, fumbling for boots,
Time to change guard: Boy, the quarrel was before your time, the aggressor No one you know.
Your childish moments of awareness were all of our world, At five you sprang, already a tiger in the garden, At night your mother taught you to pray for our Daddy
Far away fighting, One morning you fell off a horse and your brother mocked you: "Just like a girl!"
J
You've got their names to live up to and questions won't help, ! You've a very full programme, first aid, gunnery, tactics, The technique to master of raids and hand-to-hand fighting;
Are you in training? Are you taking care of yourself? Are you sure of passing The endurance test?
Now we're due to parade on the square in front of the
Cathedral,
When the bishop has blessed us, to file in after the choir-boys, To stand with the wine-dark conquerors in the roped-off pews, Shout ourselves hoarse: "They ran like hares; we have broken them up like firewood; They fought against God,"
While in a great rift in the limestone miles away At the same hour they gather, tethering their horses
beside them;
A scarecrow prophet from a boulder foresees our judgement,
Their oppressors howling; And the bitter psalm is caught by the gale from the rocks: "How long shall they flourish?"
What have we all been doing to have made from Fear That laconic war-bitten captain addressing them now "Heart and head shall be keener, mood the more As our might lessens": To have caused their shout "We will fight till
we lie down beside The Lord we have loved"?
There's Wrath who has learnt every trick of guerilla warfare, The shamming dead, the night-raid, the feinted retreat; Envy their brilliant pamphleteer, to lying
As husband true, Expert impersonator and linguist, proud of his power To hoodwink sentries.
Gluttony living alone, austerer than us,
Big simple Greed, Acedia famed with them all
For her stamina, keeping the outposts, and somewhere Lust
With his sapper's skill, Muttering to his fuses in a tunnel "Could I meet here with Love, I would hug him to death."
f
There are faces there for which for a very long time
We've been on the look-out, though often at home we imagined,
Catching sight of a back or hearing a voice through a doorway,
We had found them at last; Put our arms round their necks
and looked in their eyes and discovered We were unlucky.
And some of them, surely, we seem to have seen before: Why, that girl who rode off on her bicycle one fine
summer evening And never returned, she's there; and the banker we'd noticed
Worried for weeks ; Till he failed to arrive one morning and his room was empty, Gone with a suitcase.
They speak of things done on the frontier we were never told, The hidden path to their squat Pictish tower They will never reveal though kept without
sleep, for their code is "Death to the squealer": They are brave, yes, though our newspapers
mention their bravery In inverted commas.
But careful; back to our lines; it is unsafe there, Passports are issued no longer; that area is closed; There's no fire in the waiting-room now
at the climbers' junction, And all this year
T
i
Work has been stopped on the power-house;
the wind whistles under The half-built culverts.
Do you think that because you have heard that on
Christmas Eve
In a quiet sector they walked about on the skyline,
Exchanged cigarettes, both learning the words for "I love you" In either language,
You can stroll across for a smoke and a chat any evening? Try it and see.
That rifle-sight you're designing; is it ready yet?
You're holding us up; the office is getting impatient;
The square munition works out on the old allotments Needs stricter watching;
If you see any loiterers there you may shoot without warning, We must stop that leakage.
All leave is cancelled to-night; we must say good-bye.
We entrain at once for the North; we shall see in the morning
The headlands we're doomed to attack; snow
down to the tide-line: Though the bunting signals "Indoors before it's too late; cut peat for your fires," We shall lie out there.
from "The Orators": November 1931
Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven, Make simpler daily the beating of man's heart; within, There in the ring where name and image meet,
Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;
Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
And make us as Newton was,who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
For now that dream which so long has contented our will,
mean, of uniting the dead into a splendid empire, Under whose fertilising flood the Lancashire moss
Sprouted up chimneys, and Glamorgan hid a life Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys, Is already retreating into her maternal shadow;
Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air, The flotsam at which Dumbarton gapes and hungers; While upon wind-loved Rowley no hammer shakes
The cluster of mounds like a midget golf course, graves Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels; Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory.
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future; For the seed in their loins were hostile, though
afraid of their pride, And, tall with a shadow now, inertly wait.
I
In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse, Standing on these impoverished constricting acres, The ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone,
I f
Consider the years of the measured world begun, The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water. Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh
When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are
watching these islands, As children in Chester look to Moel Fammau to decide On picnics bythe clearness or withdrawal of her
treeless crown,
Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite's slumber Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness Its military silence, its surgeon's idea of pain;
And out of the Future into actual History,
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn
For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.
May 1932
18
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear Down in the valley drumming, drumming? Only the scarlet soldiers, dear, The soldiers coming.
O what is that light I see flashing so clear Over the distance brightly, brightly?
Only the sun on their weapons, dear, As they step lightly.
O what are they doing with all that gear; What are they doing this morning, this morning?
Only the usual manoeuvres, dear, Or perhaps a warning.
O why have they left the road down there; Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?
Perhaps a change in the orders, dear; Why are you kneeling?
O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care; Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?
Why, they are none of them wounded, dear, None of these forces.
O is it the parson they want with white hair; Is it the parson, is it, is it?
No, they are passing his gateway, dear, Without a visit.
O it must be the farmer who lives so near; It must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?
They have passed the farm already, dear, And now they are funning.
O where are you going? stay with me here!
Were the vows you swore me deceiving, deceiving?
No, I promised to love you, dear, But I must be leaving.
O it's broken the lock and splintered the door, O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;
Their feet are heavy on the floor
And their eyes are burning. October 1932
Hearing of harvests rotting inthe valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities,
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow.
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys; Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities, They reined their violent horses on the mountains, Those fields like ships to castaways on islands, Visions of green to them that craved for water.
They built by rivers and at night the water Running past windows comforted their sorrow; Each in his little bed conceived of islands Where every day was dancing in the valleys, And all the year trees blossomed on the mountains, Where love was innocent, being far from cities.
But dawn came back and they were still in cities; No marvellous creature rose up from the water, There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow; Although to moping villagers in valleys Some waving pilgrims were describing islands.
"The gods," they promised, "visit us from islands, Are stalking head-up, lovely through the cities; Now is the time to leave your wretched valleys And sail with them across the lime-green water; Sitting at their white sides. forget your sorrow, |
The shadow cast across your lives by mountains."
So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains Climbing up crags to get a view of islands; So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow Which stayed them when they reached unhappy cities; So many, careless, dived and drowned in water; So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys.
It is the sorrow; shall it melt? Ah, water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.
May 1933
20
(TO GEOFFREY HOYLAND]
Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June; Forests of green have done complete The day's activity; my feet Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space Is chosen as my working place;
Where the sexy airs of summer, The bathing hours and the bare arms, The leisured drives through a land of farms, Are good to the newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening, Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding From leaves with all its dove-like pleading Its logic and its powers.
That later we, though parted then
May still recall these evenings when ,
Fear gave his watch no look; The lion griefs loped from the shade And on our knees their muzzles laid, And Death put down his book.
Moreover, eyes in which I learn That I am glad to look, return
My glances every day; And when the birds and rising sun Waken me, I shall speak with one Who has not gone away.
Now North and South and East and West Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all: The healers and the brilliant talkers, I
The eccentrics and the silent walkers, 1
i
The dumpy and the tall.
She climbs the European sky; Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth's fixtures: (
Into the galleries she peers, And blankly as an orphan stares Upon the marvellous pictures.
I
To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here; though we
Whom hunger cannot move, From gardens where we feel secure Look up, and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love: |
And, gentle, do not care to know, |
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow, ,
What violence is done; !
Nor ask what doubtful act allows Our freedom in this English house, Our picnics in the sun.
The creepered wall stands up to hide The gathering multitudes outside
Whose glances hunger worsens; Concealing from their wretchedness Our metaphysical distress, Our kindness to ten persons.
And now no path on which we move But shows already traces of
Intentions not our own, Thoroughly able to achieve What our excitement could conceive, But our hands left alone.
For what by nature and by training We loved, has little strength remaining:
Though we would gladly give The Oxford colleges, Big Ben, And all the birds in Wicken Fen, It has no wish to live.
Soon through the dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent,
And, taller than a tree, Hold sudden death before our eyes Whose river-dreams long hid the size And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears; When stranded monsters gasping lie, And sounds of riveting terrify Their whorled unsubtle ears:
If
May this for which we dread to lose Our privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong; As through a child's rash happy cries The drowned voices of his parents rise In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm, All unpredicted may it calm
The pulse of nervous nations; Forgive the murderer in his glass, Tough in its patience to surpass The tigress her swift motions.
June 1933
21
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; Did little jobs about the house with skill And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still Or potter round the garden; answered some Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.
Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features.; Saw in the lion's intolerant look, Behind the quarry's dying glare, Love raging for the personal glory
That reason's gift would add, The liberal appetite and power, The rightness of a god.
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result, Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt? That human ligaments could so His southern gestures modify, And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours, To hunger, work illegally, And be anonymous?
? May 1934
23
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I'm led Through the night's delights and the day's impressions, Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood; Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe And the Danube flood.
Looking and loving our behaviours pass The stones, the steels and the polished glass; Lucky to Love the new pansy railway, The sterile farms where his looks are fed, And in the policed unlucky city Lucky his bed.
He from these lands of terrifying mottoes Makes worlds as innocent as Beatrix Potter's; Through bankrupt countries where they mend the roads Along the endless plains his will is Intent as a collector to pursue His greens and lilies.
i
Easy for him to find in your face The pool of silence and the tower of grace, To conjure a camera into a wishing rose; Simple to excite in the air from a glance The horses, the fountains, the sidedrum, the trombone And the dance, the dance.
Summoned by such a music from our time,
Such images to audience come 1
As vanity cannot dispel nor bless: [ Hunger and love in their variations
Grouped invalids watching the flight of the birds I
And single assassins. |
Ten thousand of the desperate marching by I Five feet, six feet, seven feet high: Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses
Churchill acknowledging the voters' greeting 1
Roosevelt at the microphone, Van der Lubbe laughing |
And our first meeting. |
But love, except at our proposal, |
Will do no trick at his disposal; Without opinions of his own, performs
The programme that we think of merit, And through our private stuff must work His public spirit.
Certain it became while we were still incomplete There were certain prizes for which we would never compete; A choice was killed by every childish illness, The boiling tears among the hothouse plants, The rigid promise fractured in the garden, And the long aunts.
And every day there bolted from the field Desires to which we could not yield; Fewer and clearer grew the plans, Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred, And early among my interesting scrawls Appeared your portrait.
You stand now before me, flesh and bone These ghosts would like to make their own. Are they your choices? O, be deaf When hatred would proffer her immediate pleasure, And glory swap her fascinating rubbish For your one treasure.
Be deaf too, standing uncertain now, A pine tree shadow across your brow, To what I hear and wish I did not: The voice of love saying lightly, brightly— "Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good Daily, nightly."
The power that corrupts. that power to excess . The beautiful quite naturally possess: To them the fathers and the children turn: And all who long for their destruction, The arrogant and self-insulted, wait The looked instruction.
w
Shall idleness ring then your eyes like the pest? O will you unnoticed and mildly like the rest, Will you join the lost in their sneering circles, Forfeit the beautiful interest and fall
Where the engaging face is the face of the betrayer, '
And the pang is all?
I
Wind shakes the tree; the mountains darken; And the heart repeats though we would not hearken: "Yours is the choice, to whom the gods awarded The language of learning and the language of love, Crooked to move as a moneybug or a cancer
Or straight as a dove." n
November 1934
24
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake
Lie Europe and the islands; many rivers
Wrinkling its surface like a ploughman's palm.
Under the bellies of the grazing horses
On the far side of posts and bridges
The vigorous shadows dwindle; nothing wavers.
Calm at this moment the Dutch sea so shallow
That sunk St. Paul's would ever show its golden cross
And still the deep water that divides us still from Norway.
We would show you at first an English village: You shall
choose its location Wherever your heart directs you most longingly to look; you
are loving towards it: Whether north to Scots Gap and Bellingham where the black
rams defy the panting engine: Or west to the Welsh Marches; to the lilting speech and the magicians' faces:
Wherever you were a child or had your first affair
There it stands amidst your darling scenery:
A parish bounded by the wreckers' cliff; or meadows where
browse the Shorthorn and maplike Frisian As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.
Hiker with sunburn blisters on your office pallor, Cross-country champion with corks in your hands, When you have eaten
your sandwich, your salt and your apple, When you have begged
your glass of milk from the ill-kept farm, What is it you see?
I see barns falling, fences broken,
Pasture not ploughland, weeds not wheat.
The great houses remain but only half are inhabited,
Dusty the gunrooms and the stable clocks stationary.
Some have been turned into prep-schools where the diet is in
the hands of an experienced matron, Others into club-houses for the golf-bore and the top-hole. Those who sang in the inns at evening have departed; they
saw their hope in another country, Their children have entered the service of the suburban areas;
they have become typists, mannequins and factory operatives; they desired a different rhythm of life. But their places are taken by another population, with views about nature,
Brought in charabanc and saloon along arterial roads;
Tourists to whom the Tudor cafes
Offer Bovril and buns upon Breton ware
With leather-work as a sideline: Filling stations
Supplying petrol from rustic pumps.
Those who fancy themselves as foxes or desire a
special setting for spooning Erect their villas at the right places, Airtight, lighted, elaborately warmed;
And nervous people who will never marry Live upon dividends in the old-world cottages With an animal for a friend or a volume of memoirs.
Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough. His concern to-day is for that which yesterday did not occur. In the hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his thoughts are appropriate to the years of the Penny Farthing: He tosses at night who at noonday found no truth.
Stand aside now: The play is beginning
In the village of which we have spoken; called Pressan Ambo: ie, Here too corruption spreads its peculiar and emphatic odours And Life lurks, evil, out of its epoch.
The young men in Pressan to-night Toss on their beds
Their pillows do not comfort Their uneasy heads.
The lot that decides their fate Is cast to-morrow,
One must depart and face Danger and sorrow.
Is it me? Is it me? Is it ... me? !
I;
Lookin your heart and see: There lies the answer.
Though the heart like a clever Conjuror or dancer
Deceive you often into many
A curious sleight t
And motives like stowaways j
Are found too late.
What shall he do, whose heart j
Chooses to depart?
He shall against his peace
Feel his heart harden, Envy the heavy birds
At home in a garden. For walk he must the empty
Selfish journey Between the needless risk And the endless safety.
Will he safe and sound Return to his own ground?
Clouds and lions stand
Before him dangerous And the hostility of dreams.
O let him honour us Lest he should be ashamed
In the hour of crisis, In the valleys of corrosion Tarnish his brightness.
Who are you, whose speech Sounds for out of reach?
You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock, The Two.
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.
Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word; To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.
Climb up the crane, learn the sailors' words When the ships from the islands laden with birds Come in.
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives: The expansive moments of constricted lives In the lighted inn.
But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
At a glance. Nothing is done, nothing is said, But don't make the mistake of believing us dead: I shouldn't dance.
We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall :
For hours. The sky is darkening like a stain, Something is going to fall like rain
And it won't be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid 1,
Revealing what was much better hid: (
Unpleasant. And look, behind you without a sound The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent. |
t
The bolt is sliding in its groove, Outside the window is the black removers van.
And now with sudden swift emergence Come the women in dark glasses and the
humpbacked surgeons And the scissor man.
This might happen any day So be careful what you say Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock, Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two. from "The Dog Beneath the Skin": 1932, ? 1934
25
Now through night's caressing grip Earth and all her oceans slip, Capes of China slide away From her fingers into day And the Americas incline Coasts towards her shadow line. Now the ragged vagrants creep Into crooked holes to sleep: Just and unjust, worst and best, Change their places as they rest: Awkward lovers lie in fields Where disdainful beauty yields: While the splendid and the proud Naked stand before the crowd And the losing gambler gains And the beggar entertains: May sleep's healing power extend Through these hours to our friend. Unpursued by hostile force, Traction engine, bull or horse Or revolting succubus; Calmly till the morning break Let him lie, then gently wake.
from "The Dog Beneath the Skin": ? 1935
O for doors to be open and aninvite with gilded edges To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma on the
platinum benches, With the somersaults and fireworks, the roast and the
smacking kisses— | Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, "
The six beggared cripples.
And Garbo's and Cleopatra's wits to go astraying, In a feather ocean with me to go fishing and playing Still jolly when the cock has burst himself with crowing— i
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, ,
The six beggared cripples.
And to stand on green turf among the craning yellow faces, Dependent on the chestnut, the sable, and Arabian horses, ;
And me with a magic crystal to foresee their places— Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, The six beggared cripples.
I
!
And this square to be a deck, and these pigeons sails to rig And to follow the delicious breeze like a tantony pig To the shaded feverless islands where the melons are big— j
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples. ^
f'
And these shops to be turned to tulips in a garden bed, And me with my stick to thrash each merchant dead '
As he pokes from a flower his bald and wicked head— Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples. ■
And a hole in the bottom of heaven, and Peter and Paul And each smug surprised saint like parachutes to fall, And every one-legged beggar to have no legs at all— Cried the six cripples to the silent statue, The six beggared cripples.
? Spring 1935
Look, stranger, at this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at the small field's ending pause Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges Oppose the pluck And knock of the tide, And the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf, and the gull lodges A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands; And the full view Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And al the summer through the water saunter.
November 1935
28
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours, left and right, Pluck us from the real delight; And the active hands must freeze Lonely on the separate knees.
Dead in hundreds at the back Follow wooden in our track, Arms raised stiffly to reprove In false attitudes of love.
Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come.
Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain's lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress.
March 1936
29
Dear, though the night is gone, The dream still haunts to-day That brought us to a room, Cavernous, lofty as A railway terminus, And crowded in that gloom Were beds, and we in one In a far corner lay.
w
Our whisper woke no clocks, We kissed and I was glad At everything you did,
Indifferent to those Who sat with hostile eyes In pairs on every bed, Arms round each other's necks, Inert and vaguely sad.
O but wha.t worm of guilt Or what malignant doubt Am I the victim of; That you then, unabashed, Did what I never wished, Confessed another love; And I, submissive, felt Unwanted and went out?
March 19 36
30
Casino
Only the hands are living; to the wheel attracted, Are moved, as deer trek desperately towards a creek Through the dust and scrub of the desert, or gently As sunflowers turn to the light.
And as the night takes up the cries of feverish children, The cravings of lions in dens, the loves of dons, Gathers them all and remains the night, the Great room is full of their prayers.
To the last feast of isolation, self-invited, They flock, and in the rite of disbelief are joined; From numbers all their stars are recreated, The enchanted, the world, the sad.
Without, the rivers flow among the wholly living, Quite near their trysts; and the mountains part them;
and the bird, Deep in the greens and moistures of summer, Sings towards their work.
But here no nymph comes naked to the youngest shepherd, The fountain is deserted, the laurel will not grow; The labyrinth is safe but endless, and broken Is Ariadne's thread.
As deeper in these hands is grooved their fortune: "Lucky Were few, and it is possible that none were loved; And what was godlike in this generation Was never to be born."
April 1936
31
Journey to Iceland
And the traveller hopes: "Let me be far from any Physician"; and the ports have names for the sea; The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow; And North means to all: "Reject!"
And the great plains are for ever where the cold fish is hunted, And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt; Under the scolding flag the lover Of islands may see at last,
7
Faintly, his limited hope; and he nears the glitter Of glaciers, the sterile immature mountains intense In the abnormal day of this world, and a river's Fan-like polyp of sand.
Then let the good citizen here find natural marvels: The horse-shoe ravine, the issue of steam from a cleft In the rock, and rocks, and waterfalls brushing the Rocks, and among the rocks birds.
And the student of prose and conduct, places to visit; The site of a church where a bishop was put in a bag, The bath of a great historian, the rock where An outlaw dreaded the dark.
Remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and crying: "Beautiful is the hillside. I will not go";
The old woman confessing: "He that I loved the Best,, to him I was worst,"
For Europe is absent. This is an island and therefore Unreal. And the steadfast affections of its dead may be bought By those whose dreams accuse them of being Spitefully alive, and the pale
From too much passion of kissing feel pure in its deserts. Can they? For the world is, and the present, and the lie. And the narrow bridge over the torrent, And the small farm under the crag
Are the natural setting for the jealousies of a province; And the weak vow of fidelity is formed bythe cairn; And within the indigenous figure on horseback On the bridle path down by the lake
The blood moves also by crooked and furtive inches, Asks all your questions: "Where is the homage? When Shall justice be done? O who is against me? Why am I always alone?"
Present then the world to the world with its mendicant shadow; Let the suits be flash, the Minister of Commerce insane; Let jazz be bestowed on the huts, and the beauty's Set cosmopolitan smile.
For our time has no favourite suburb; no local features Are those of the young for whom all wish to care; The promise is only a promise, the fabulous Country impartially far.
Tears fall in all the rivers. Again the driver Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts Upon his deadly journey; and again the writer Runs howling to his art.
July 1936
32
"0 who can ever gaze his fill,"
Farmer and fisherman say, "On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Fathers, grandfathers stood upon this land, And here the-pilgrims from our loins shall stand." So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate heyday: But Death's soft answer drifts across Empty catch or harvest loss Or an unlucky May: The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it
Not to be born is the best for man The end of toil is a bailiff's order
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
"0 life's too short for friends who share,"
Travellers think in their hearts, "The city's common bed, the air, The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach, Where incidents draw every day from each Memorable gesture and witty speech."
So travellers think in their hearts, Till malice or circumstance parts Them from their constant humour: And slyly Death's coercive rumour In the silence starts: A friend is the old tale of Narcissus
Not to be born is the best for man An active partner in something disgraceful
Change your partner, dance while you can.
"0 stretch your hands across the sea,"
The impassioned lover cries, "Stretch them towards your harm and me. Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed, The stream sings at its foot, and at its head The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed." So the impassioned lover cries Till his storm of pleasure dies: From the bedpost and the rocks Death's enticing echo mocks, And his voice replies: The greater the love, the more false to its object
Not to be born is the best for man After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle Break the embraces, dance while you can.
"I see the guilty world forgiven," Dreamer and drunkard sing, "The ladders let down out of heaven; The laurel springing from the martyr's blood; The children skipping where the weepers stood; The lovers natural, and the beasts all good." So dreamer and drunkard sing Till day their sobriety bring: Parrotwise with death's reply From whelping fear and nesting lie, Woods and their echoes ring:
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and wilI not stop Dance till the stars come down with the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
September 1936
33
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away !
Individual beauty from \
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral: [
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me I
The entirely beautiful. |
»•
Soul and body have no bounds: f
To lovers as they lie upon 'i
Her tolerant enchanted slope '
In their ordinary swoon, |
Grave the vision Venus sends (
Of supernatural sympathy, -»
Universal love and hope; j While an abstract insight wakes Among the glaciers and the rocks The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of sweetness show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find the mortal world enough; Noons of dryness see you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
January 1937
34
Spain
Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech; Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle. L
i
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle. |
i
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek, The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower: '(
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor." \
And the investigator peers through his instruments i At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished: i
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire." j
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the Organiser. Time the refreshing river." {
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life J
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror: f
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
"Raise the vast military empires of the shark And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. 0 descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart And the eyes and the lungs, from the
shops and squares of the city: "O no, I am not the mover; Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped; I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story. I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas, On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city, Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch Through the unjust lands, through the night,
through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the oceans; They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad. and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions; And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom j
As the ambulance and the sandbag; !,
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation; To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and
breathing.
f
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.
I
>
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, |
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the
struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, ,.
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
April 1937
35
Orphus
What does the song hope for? And the moved hands A little way from the birds, the shy, the delightful? To be bewildered and happy, Or most of alI the knowledge of life?
But the beautiful are content with the sharp notes of the air; The warmth is enough. O if winter really Oppose, if the weak snowflake, What will the wish, what will the dance do?
Apri11937
36
Miss Gee
Let me tell you a little story About Miss Edith Gee; She lived in Clevedon Terrace At Number 83.
She'd a slight squint in her left eye, Her lips they were thin and small,
She had narrow sloping shoulders And she had no bust at all.
She'd a velvet hat with trimmings, And a dark-grey serge costume;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace In a small bed-sitting room.
She'd a purple mac for wet days, A green umbrella too to take,
She'd a bicycle with shopping basket And a harsh back-pedal brake.
The Church of Saint Aloysius Was not so very far;
She did a lot of knitting,
Knitting for that Church Bazaar.
Miss Gee looked up at the starlight And said: "Does anyone care
That I live in Clevedon Terrace
On one hundred pounds a year?"
She dreamed a dream one evening That she was the Queen of France
And the Vicar of Saint Aloysius Asked Her Majesty to dance.
But a storm blew down the palace,
She was biking through a field of corn,
And a bull with the face of the Vicar Was charging with lowered horn.
She could feel his hot breath behind her, He was going to overtake;
!
And the bicycle went slower and slower Because of that back-pedal brake.
Summer made the trees a picture, Winter made them a wreck;
She bicycled to the evening service
With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She passed by the loving couples, She turned her head away;
She passed by the loving couples And they didn't ask her to stay.
Miss Gee sat down in the side-aisle, She heard the organ play;
And the choir it sang so sweetly At the ending of the day.
Miss Gee knelt down in the side-aisle, She knelt down on her knees;
"Lead me not into temptation
But make me a good girl, please."
The days and nights went by her
Like waves round a Cornish wreck;
She bicycled down to the doctor
With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She bicycled down to the doctor, And rang the surgery bell;
"O, doctor, I've a pain inside me, And I don't feel very well."
Doctor Thomas looked her over, And then he looked some more;
Walked over to his wash-basin,
Said: "Why didn't you come before?"
Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,
Though his wife was waiting to ring;
Rolling his bread into pellets,
Said: "Cancer's a funny thing.
"Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do;
It's like some hidden assassin Waiting to strike at you.
"Childless women get it,
And men when they retire;
It's as if there had to be some outlet I
For their foiled creative fire."
j
His wife she rang for the servant,
Said: "Don't be so morbid, dear";
He said: "I saw Miss Gee this evening And she's a goner, I fear."
vi
They took Miss Gee to the hospital, She lay there a total wreck,
Lay in the ward for women
With the bedclothes right up to her neck.
f
They laid her on the table,
The students began to laugh;
And Mr. Rose the surgeon He cut Miss Gee in half.
I
Mr. Rose he turned to his students, Said: "Gentlemen, if you please,
We seldom see a sarcoma As far advanced as this."
I
They took her off the table,
They wheeled away Miss Gee
Down to another department
<
Where they study Anatomy. '
They hung her from the ceiling,
Yes, they hung up Miss Gee; And a couple of Oxford Groupers Carefully dissected her knee.
April 1937
Wrapped in a yielding air, beside
The flower's soundless hunger, Close to the tree's clandestine tide, Close to the bird's high fever, Loud in his hope and anger, Erect about his skeleton,
Stands the expressive lover, Stands the deliberate man.
Beneath the hot incurious sun,
Past stronger beasts and fairer He picks his way, a living gun, With gun and lens and bible, A militant enquirer, The friend, the rash, the enemy, The essayist, the able, Able at times to cry.
The friendless and unhated stone Lies everywhere about him, The Brothered-One, the Not-Alone, The brothered and the hated Whose family have taught him To set against the large and dumb, The timeless and the rooted, His money and his time.
For mother's fading hopes become
Dull wives to his dull spirits Soon dulled by nurse's moral thumb, That dullard fond betrayer, And, childish, he inherits, So soon by legal father tricked, The tall and gorgeous tower, Gorgeous but locked, but locked.
I
I
And ruled by dead men never met,
By pious guess deluded, Upon the stool of madness set Or stool of desolation, Sits murderous and clear-headed; Enormous beauties round him move, For grandiose is his vision
And grandiose his love. |
Determined on Time's honest shield The lamb must face the tigress, Their faithful quarrel never healed
Though, faithless, he consider ,
His dream of vaguer ages, Hunter and victim reconciled, The lion and the adder, The adder and the child.
i
Fresh loves betray him, every day
Over his green horizon A fresh deserter rides away,
And miles away birds mutter Of ambush and of treason; To fresh defeats he still must move, To further griefs and greater, And the defeat of grief.
May 1937 i
38
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street.
"I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime:
"0 let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow.
T
"0 plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
r
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens j
A lane to the land of the dead.
I
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer And Jill goes down on her back.
"0 look, look in the mirror, ;
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"0 stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart." 1
I
It was late, late in the evening, 1
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming And the deep river ran on.
November 1937 I
|
I
r
i
39 Oxford
Nature is so near: the rooks in the college garden Like agile babies still speak the language of feeling; By the tower the river still runs to the sea and will run, And the stones in that tower are utterly Satisfied still with their weight.
And the minerals and creatures, so deeply
in love with their lives Their sin of accidie excludes all others, Challenge the nervous students with a careless beauty, Setting a single error Against their countless faults.
O in these quadrangles where Wisdom honours herself Does the original stone merely echo that praise Shallowly, or utter a bland hymn of comfort, The founder's equivocal blessing On all who worship Success?
Promising to the sharp sword all the glittering prizes, The cars, the hotels, the service, the boisterous bed, Then power to silence outrage with a testament, The widow's tears forgotten, The fatherless unheard.
Whispering to chauffeurs and little girls, to tourists and dons, That Knowledge is conceived in the hot womb of Violence Who in a late hour of apprehension and exhaustion Strains to her weeping breast That blue-eyed darling head.
And is that child happy with his box of lucky books And all the jokes of learning? Birds cannot grieve: Wisdom is a beautiful bird; but to the wise Often, often is it denied To be beautiful or good.
Without are the shops, the works, the whole green county Where a cigarette comforts the guilty and a kiss the weak; There thousands fidget and poke and spend their money: Eros Paidagogos Weeps on his virginal bed.
Ah, if that thoughtless almost natural world Would snatch his sorrow to her loving sensual heart! But he is Eros and must hate what most he loves; And she is of Nature; Nature Can only love herself.
And over the talkative city like any other Weep the non-attached angels. Here too the knowledge of death Is a consuming love: And the natural heart refuses The low unflattering voice That rests not till it find a hearing.
December 1937
40
In Time of War
I
So from the years the gifts were showered; each Ran off with his at once into his life: Bee took the politics that make a hive, Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach.
And were successful at the first endeavour; The hour of birth their only time at college, They were content with their precocious knowledge, And knew their station and were good for ever.
Till finally there came a childish creature On whom the years could model any feature, And fake with ease a leopard or a dove;
Who by the lightest wind was changed and shaken, And looked for truth and was continually mistaken, And envied his few friends and chose his love.
II
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden; It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden; They knew exactly what to do outside.
They left: immediately the memory faded
Of all they'd learnt; they could not understand
The dogs now who, before, had always aided;
The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned.
They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild. In front, maturity, as he ascended, Retired like a horizon from the child;
The dangers and the punishments grew greater; And the way back by angels was defended Against the poet and the legislator.Only a smell had feelings to make known, Only an eye could pcint in a direction; The fountain's utterance was itself alone; The bird meant nothing: that was his projection
Who named it as he hunted it for food. He felt the interest in his throat, and found That he could send his servant to the wood, Or kiss his bride to rapture with a sound.
They bred like locusts till they hid the green And edges of the world: and he was abject, And to his own creation became subject;
And shook with hate for things he'd never seen, And knew of love without love's proper object, And was oppressed as he had never been.
IV
He stayed: and was imprisoned in possession. The seasons stood like guards about his ways, The mountains chose the mother of his children, And like a conscience the sun ruled his days.
Beyond him his young cousins in the city Pursued their rapid and unnatural course, Believed in nothing but were easy-going, And treated strangers like a favourite horse.
And he changed little,
But took his colour from the earth,
And grew in likeness to his sheep and cattle.
The townsman thought him miserly and simple, The poet wept and saw in him the truth, And the oppressor held him up as an example.
His generous bearing was a new invention: For life was slow; earth needed to be careless: With horse and sword he drew the girls' attention; He was the Rich, the Bountiful, the Fearless.
And to the young he came as a salvation; They needed him to free them from their mothers, And grew sharp-witted in the long migration, And round his camp fires learnt all men are brothers.
But suddenly the earth was full: he was not wanted.
And he became the shabby and demented,
And took to drink to screw his nerves to murder;
Or sat in offices and stole,
And spoke approvingly of Law and Order,
And hated life with all his soul.
VI
He watched the stars and noted birds in flight; The rivers flooded or the Empire fell: He made predictions and was sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well.
And fell in love with Truth before he knew her,
And rode into imaginary lands,
With solitude and fasting hoped to woo her.
And mocked at those who served her with their hands.
But her he never wanted to despise,
But listened always for her voice; and when
She beckoned to him, he obeyed in meekness,
And followed her and looked into her eyes; Saw there reflected every human weakness, And saw himself as one of many men.w
He was their servant—some say he was blind—
And moved among their faces and their things;
Their feeling gathered in him like a wind
And sang: they cried—"It is a God that sings"— '
And worshipped him and set him up apart, And made him vain, till he mistook for song The little tremors of his mind and heart At each domestic wrong.
Songs came no more: he had to make them. 1
With what precision was each strophe planned. He hugged his sorrow like a plot of land,
And walked like an assassin through the town,
And looked at men and did not like them, .
But trembled if one passed him with a frown.
He turned his field into a meeting-place, s
And grew the tolerant ironic eye,
And formed the mobile money-changer's face,
And found the notion of equality. I
|
And strangers were as brothers to his clocks, !
And with his spires he made a human sky; Museums stored his learning like a box, (
And paper watched his money like a spy. ,
It grew so fast his life was overgrown, |
And he forgot what once it had been made for, \
And gathered into crowds and was alone,
And lived expensively and did without, ■
And could not find the earth which he had paid for, Nor feel the love that he knew all about.
They died and entered the closed life like nuns: Even the very poor lost something; oppression Was no more a fact; and the self-centred ones Took up an even more extreme position.
And the kingly and the saintly also were Distributed among the woods and oceans, And touch our open sorrow everywhere, Airs, waters, places, round our sex and reasons;
Are what we feed on as we make our choice. We bring them back with promises to free them, But as ourselves continually betray them:
They hear their deaths lamented in our voice, But in our knowledge know we could restore them; They could return to freedom; they would rejoice.
X
As a young child the wisest could adore him; He felt familiar to them like their wives: The very poor saved up their pennies for him, And martyrs brought him presents of their lives.
But who could sit and play with him all day? Their other needs were pressing, work, and bed: The beautiful stone courts were built where they Could leave him to be worshipped and well fed.
But he escaped. They were too blind to tell That it was he who came with them to labour, And talked and grew up with them like a neighbour:
To fear and greed those courts became a centre; The poor saw there the tyrant's citadel, And martyrs the lost face of the tormentor.
'Ml
He looked in all His wisdom from the throne Down on the humble boy who kept the sheep, And sent a dove; the dove returned alone: Youth liked the music, but soon fell asleep.
But He had planned such future for the youth: Surely His duty now was to compel; For later he would come to love the truth, And own his gratitude. The eagle fell.
It did not work: His conversation bored
The boy who yawned and whistled and made faces,
And wriggled free from fatherly embraces;
But with the eagle he was always willing ■ To go where it suggested, and adored And learnt from it the many ways of killing.
And the age ended, and the last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of the giant's enormous calf j
Would fall no more at dusk across the lawn outside.
They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death, But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath; The kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out.
f
Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad, And the pert retinue from the magician's house Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers i
were glad
To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed into their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad. '
Certainly praise: let the song mount again and again For life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, For the vegetable patience, the animal grace; Some people have been happy; there have been great men.
But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why: Cities and men have fallen; the will of the Unjust Has never lost its power; still, all princes must Employ the Fairly-Noble unifying Lie.
History opposes its grief to our buoyant song:
The Good Place has not been; our star has warmed to birth
A race of promise that has never proved its worth;
The quick new West is false; and prodigious, but wrong This passive flower-like people who for so long In the Eighteen Provinces have constructed the earth.
XIV
Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real; The groping searchlights suddenly reveal The little natures that will make us cry,
Who never quite believed they could exist, Not where we were. They take us by surprise Like ugly long-forgotten memories, And like a conscience all the guns resist.
Behind each sociable home-loving eye The private massacres are taking place; All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.
The mountains cannot judge us when we lie: We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys The intelligent and evil till they die.
•1 s
Engines bear them through the sky: they're free And isolated like the very rich; Remote like savants, they can only see The breathing city as a target which
Requires their skill; will never see how flying Is the creation of ideas they hate, Nor how their own machines are always trying To push through into life. They chose a fate
The islands where they live did not compel. Though earth may teach our proper discipline, At any time it will be possible
To turn away from freedom and become Bound like the heiress in her mother's womb, And helpless as the poor have always been.
XVI
Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; j
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
[
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, i
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives, i
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. l
But ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now: t
Nanking; Dachau.
They are and suffer; that is all they do: A bandage hides the place where each is living, His knowledge of the world restricted to The treatment that the instruments are giving.
And lie apart like epochs from each other —Truth in their sense is how much they can bear; It is not talk like ours, but groans they smother— And are remote as plants; we stand elsewhere.
For who when healthy can become a foot? Even a scratch we can't recall when cured, But are boisterous in a moment and believe
In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot Imagine isolation. Only happiness is shared, And anger, and the idea of love.
XVIII
Far from the heart of culture he was used: Abandoned by his general and his lice, Under a padded quilt he closed his eyes And vanished. He will not be introduced
When this campaign is tidied into books: No vital knowledge perished in his skull; His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull; His name is lost for ever like his looks.
He neither knew nor chose the Good, but taught us, And added meaning like a comma, when He turned to dust in China that our daughters
Be fit to love the earth, and not again Disgraced before the dogs; that, where are waters, Mountains and houses, may be also men.
But in the evening the oppression lifted; The peaks came into focus; it had rained: Across the lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained.
The gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,
For them to finish their exchange of views; |
It seemed a picture of the private life. I
.I.
Far off, no matter what good they intended, The armies waited for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain:
And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste, with all its young men slain, The women weeping, and the towns in terror.
They carry terror with them like a purse,
And flinch from the horizon like a gun; |
And all the rivers and the railways run
Away from Neighbourhood as from a curse.
They cling and huddle in the new disaster
Like children sent to school, and cry in turn;
For Space has rules they cannot hope to learn, |
Time speaks a language they will never master.
We live here. We lie in the Present's unopened i
Sorrow; its limits are what we are. '
The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell.
Can future ages ever escape so far,
Yet feel derived from everything that happened,
Even from us, that even this was well?
The life of man is never quite completed;
The daring and the chatter will go on:
But, as an artist feels his power gone,
These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.
Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for The wounded myths that once made nations good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel; but where They may regret they must; their life, to hear.
The call of the forbidden cities, see
The stranger watch them with a happy stare,
And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.
XXII
Simple like all dream wishes, they employ The elementary language of the heart, And speak to muscles of the need for joy: The dying and the lovers soon to part
Hear them and have to whistle. Always new, They mirror every change in our position; They are our evidence of what we do; They speak directly to our lost condition.
Think in this year what pleased the dancers best: When Austria died and China was forsaken, Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken,
France put her case before the world: "Partout
II y a de la joie." America addressed
The earth: "Do you love me as I love you?"
When all the apparatus of report Confirms the triumph of our enemies; Our bastion pierced, our army in retreat, Violence sucGessful like a new disease,
And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited; When we regret that we were ever born: Let us remember all who seemed deserted.
To-night in China let me think of one, I
'I
Who through ten years of silence worked and waited, '
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, And everything was given once for all:
And with the gratitude of the Completed He went out in the winter night to stroke That little tower like a great animal.
I
No, not their names. It was the others who built |
Each great coercive avenue and square, j
Where men can only recollect and stare, The really lonely with the sense of guilt
Who wanted to persist like that for ever; The unloved had to leave material traces: But these need nothing but our better faces, And dwell in them, and know that we shall never
Remember who we are nor why we're needed. Earth grew them as a bay grows fishermen Or hills a shepherd; they grew ripe and seeded;
And the seeds clung to us ; even our blood Was able to revive them; and they grew again; Happy their wish and mild to flower and flood.
Nothing is given: we must find our law. Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination; Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation The low recessive houses of the poor.
We have no destiny assigned us: Nothing is certain but the body; we plan To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man.
Children are really loved here, even by police: They speak of years before the big were lonely, And will be lost.
And only
The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell Some future reign of happiness and peace.
We learn to pity and rebel.
XXVI
Always far from the centre of our names, The little workshop of love: yes, but how wrong We were about the old manors and the long Abandoned Folly and the children's games.
Only the acquisitive expects a quaint Unsaleable product, something to please An artistic girl; it's the selfish who sees In every impractical beggar a saint.
We can't believe that we ourselves designed it,
A minor item of our daring plan
That caused no trouble; we took no notice of it.
Disaster comes, and we're amazed to find it The single project that since work began Through all the cycle showed a steady profit.
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice, Again and again we sigh for an ancient South, For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise, For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth.
Asleep in our huts, how we dream of a part In the glorious balls of the future; each intricate maze Has a plan, and the disciplined movements of the heart Can follow for ever and ever its harmless ways.
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains; We live in freedom by necessity, A mountain people dwelling among mountains.
1938 (except XII, 1936)
41
The Capital
Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting, Waiting expensively for miracles to happen, O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other, Cafe where exiles have established a malicious village;
n
You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished The strictness of winter and the spring's compulsion; Far from your lights the outraged punitive father, The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.
Yet with orchestras and glances, Q, you betray us To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent Unobservant offender falls in a moment Victim to the heart's invisible furies.
In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling; Factories where lives are made for a temporary use Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.
But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far Into the dark countryside, the enormous, the frozen, Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle, Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.
December 1938
42
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
December 1938
43
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
January 1939
44
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
(d. January 1939)
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the
floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which
they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost
convinced of his freedom; A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something
slightly unusual.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
February 1939
45
Refugee Blues
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for-us, my dear, yet there's no place for mi.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew, Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do
that.
The consul banged the table and said, "If you've got no passport you're officially dead": But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair; Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go
to-day?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said; "If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread": He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you
and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky; It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die": O we were in his mind, my dear, 0 we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't
German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay, Saw the fish swimming as if they were free: Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the
human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow; Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro: Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
March 19 39
The Unknown Citizen
To /S/07/M/378 This Marble Monument is Erected by the State
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,
he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in
every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but
left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A gramophone, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace; when there
was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with
their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
March 1939
47
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave; -
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse :
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow, "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
September 1939
48
Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.
Law is the wisdom of the old The impotent grandfathers shrilly scold; The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young.
Law, says the priest with a priestly look, Expounding to an unpriestly people, Law is the words in my priestly book, Law is my pulpit and my steeple.
Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose, Speaking clearly and most severely, Law is as I've told you before,
■W ?
Law is as you know I suppose, Law is but let me explain it once more, Law is The Law.
Yet law-abiding scholars write: Law is neither wrong nor right, Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times, j
Law is the clothes men wear Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good-morning and Good-night. j
Others say, Law is our Fate; Others say, Law is our State; Others say, others say Law is no more Law has gone away.
And always the loud angry crowd Very angry and very loud Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.
If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the law is
And that all know this,
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,
No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition. \
Although I can at least confine Your vanity and mine To stating timidly A timid similarity, We shall boast anyway: Like love I say.
Like love we don't know where or why Like love we can't compel or fly Like love we often weep Like love we seldom keep.
September 1939
49
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
{d. September 1939)
When there are so many we shall have to mourn, When grief has been made so public, and exposed To the critique of a whole epoch The frailty of our conscience and anguish,
Of whom shall we speak? For every day they die Among us, those who were doing us some good, And knew it was never enough but Hoped to improve a little by living.
Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished To think of our life, from whose unruliness So many plausible young futures With threats or flattery ask obedience.
But his wish was denied him; he closed his eyes Upon that last picture common to us all,
Of problems like relatives standing Puzzled and jealous about our dying.
For about him at the very end were still Those he had studied, the nervous and the nights, And shades that still waited to enter The bright circle of his recognition
Turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he Was taken away from his old interest
To go back to the earth in London, An important Jew who died in exile.
Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment His practice now, and his shabby clientele
Who think they can be cured by killing And covering the gardens with ashes.
They are still alive but in a world he changed Simply by looking back with no false regrets;
All that he did was to remember Like the old and be honest like children.
He wasn't clever at all: he merely told The unhappy Present to recite the Past
Like a poetry lesson till sooner Or later it faltered at the line where
Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged, How rich life had been and how silly, And was life-forgiven and more humble,
\
Able to approach the Future as a friend Without a wardrobe of excuses, without A set mask of rectitude or an Embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit In his technique of unsettlement foresaw
The fall of princes, the collapse of Their lucrative patterns of frustration.
If he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life Would become impossible, the monolith
Of State be broken and prevented The co-operation of avengers.
Of course they called on God: but he went his way, Down among the Lost People like Dante, down
To the stinking fosse where the injured Lead the ugly life of the rejected.
And showed us what evil is: not as we thought Deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith, Our dishonest mood of denial, The concupiscence of the oppressor.
And if something of the autocratic pose, The paternal strictness he distrusted, still
Clung to his utterance and features., It was a protective imitation
For one who lived among enemies so long: If often he was wrong and at times absurd, To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion
Under whom we conduct our differing lives: Like weather he can only hinder or help,
The proud can still be proud but find it A little harder, and the tyrant tries
To make him do but doesn't care for him much. He quietly surrounds all our habits of growth;
He extends, till the tired in even The remotest most miserable duchy
Have felt the change in their bones and are cheered,
And the child unlucky in his little State,
Some hearthwhere freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry,
Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape;
While as they lie in the grass of our neglect, So many long-forgotten objects Revealed by his undiscouraged shining
Are returned to us and made precious again;
Games we had thought we must drop as we grew up, Little noises we dared not laugh at, Faces we made when no one was looking.
But he wishes us more than this: to be free
Is often to be lonely; he would unite
The unequal moieties fractured
By our own well-meaning sense of justice,
Would restore to the larger the wit and will
The smaller possesses but can only use
For arid disputes, wouldgive back to The son the mother's richness of feeling.
But he would have us remember most of all
To be enthusiastic over the night
Not only for the sense of wonder It alone has to offer, but also
Because it needs our love: for with sad eyes
Its delectable creatures look up and beg
Us dumbly to ask them to follow; They are exiles who long for the future
That lies in our power. They too would rejoice
If allowed to serve enlightenment like him, Even to bear our cry of "Judas," As he did and all must bear who serve it.
One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
November 1939
50
Lady, weeping at the crossroads Would you meet your love In the twilight with his greyhounds, And the hawk on his glove?
Bribe the birds then on the branches, Bribe them to be dumb, Stare the hot sun out of heaven That the night may come.
Starless are the nights of travel, Bleak the winter wind; Run with terror all before you And regret behind.
Run until you hear the ocean's Everlasting cry;
Deep though it may be and bitter You must drink it dry.
Wear out patience in the lowest Dungeons of the sea,
Searching through the stranded shipwrecks For the golden key.
Push on to the world's end, pay the Dread guard with a kiss; Cross the rotten bridge that totters Over the abyss.
There stands the deserted castle Ready to explore; Enter, climb the marble staircase Open the locked door.
Cross the silent empty ballroom, Doubt and danger past; Blow the cobwebs from the mirror See yourself at last.
Put your hand behind the wainscot, You have done your part; Find the penknife there and plunge it Into your false heart.
1940
51
Song for St. Cecilia's Day
I
In a garden shady this holy lady With reverent cadence and subtle psalm, Like a black swan as death came on Poured forth her song in perfect calm: And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin Constructed an 'Organ to enlarge her prayer, And notes tremendous from her great engine Thundered out on the Roman air.
Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited, Moved to delight by the melody, White as an orchid she rode quite naked In an oyster shell on top of the sea; At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing Came out of their trance into time again, And around the wicked in Hell's abysses The huge flame flickered and eased their pain.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire: Translated Daughter, come down and startle Composing mortals with immortal fire.
II
I cannot grow; I have no shadow To run away from, I only play
I cannot err; There is no creature Whom I belong to, Whom I could wrong.
I am defeat When it knows it Can now do nothing By suffering.
All you lived through, Dancing because you No longer need it For any deed.
I shall never be Different. Love me.
O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall, O calm of spaces unafraid of weight, Where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all
The gaucheness of her adolescent state, 1
Where Hope within the altogether strange i
From every outworn image is released, »'
And Dread born whole and normal like a beast Into a world of truths that never change: Restore our fallen day; 0 re-arrange.
O dear white children casual as birds, |
Playing among the ruined languages, 7
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
O cry created as the bow of sin Is drawn across our trembling violin. O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain. O law drummed out by hearts against the still Long winter of our intellectual will. That what has been may never be again. O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath Of convalescents on the shores of death. O bless the freedom that you never chose. O trumpets that unguarded children blow About the fortress of their inner foe. O wear your tribulation like a rose.
July 1940
The Quest
The Door
Out of it steps the future of the poor, Enigmas, executioners and rules, Her Majesty in a bad temper or The red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.
Great persons eye it in the twilight for A past it might so carelessly let in, A widow with a missionary grin, The foaming inundation at a roar.
We pile our all against it when afraid, And beat upon its panels when we die: By happening to be open once, it made
Enormous Alice see a wonderland That waited for her in the sunshine, and, Simply by being tiny, made her cry.
The Preparations
All had been ordered weeks before the start From the best firms at such work; instruments To take the measure of all queer events, And drugs to move the bowels or the heart.
A watch, of course, to watch impatience fly, Lamps for the dark and shades against the sun; Foreboding, too, insisted on a gun And coloured beads to soothe a savage eye.
••fs ?
In theory they were sound on Expectation Had there been situations to be in; Unluckily they were their situation:
One should not give a poisoner medicine, A conjurer fine apparatus, nor A rifle to a melancholic bore.
The Crossroads
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake; one flashes on To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie, A village torpor holds the other one, Some local wrong where it takes time to die: The empty junction glitters in the sun.
So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell,
O places of decision and farewell,
To what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated, his salvation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?
All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear, But none have ever thought, the legends say, The time allowed made it impossible; For even the most pessimistic set The limit of their errors at a year. What friends could there be left then to betray, What joy take longer to atone for? Yet Who would complete without the extra day The journey that should take no time at all?
The Traveller
No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where A little fever heard large afternoons at play: His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.
Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned; For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.
Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on the horizon of his sigh
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.
The City
In villages from which their childhoods came Seeking Necessity, they had been taught Necessity by nature is the same, No matter how or by whom it be sought.
The city, though, assumed no such belief, But welcomed each as if he came alone, The nature of Necessity like grief Exactly corresponding to his own.
And offered them so many, every one Found some temptation fit to govern him; And settled down to master the whole craft
Of being nobody; sat in the sun
During the lunch-hour round the fountain rim;
And watched the country kids arrive and laughed.
i [
The First Temptation
Ashamed to be the darling of his grief He joined a gang of rowdy stories where His gift for magic quickly made him chief Of all these boyish powers of the air;
Who turned his hungers into Roman food. The town's asymmetry into a park; All hours took taxis; any solitude Became his flattered duchess in the dark.
But if he wished for anything less grand.
The nights came padding after him like wild
Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;
And when Truth met him and put out her hand.
He clung in panic to his tall belief
And shrank away like an ill-treated child.
The Second Temptation
The library annoyed him with its look Of calm belief in being really there; He threw away a rival's silly book, And clattered panting up the spiral stair.
Swaying upon the parapet he cried: "0 Uncreated Nothing, set me free, Now let Thy perfect be identified, Unending passion of the Night, with Thee."
And his long suffering flesh, that all the time Had felt the simple cravings of the stone And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,
Took it to be a promise when he spoke That now at last she would be left alone, And plunged into the college quad, and broke.
The Third Temptation
He watched with all his organs of concern How princes walk, what wives and children say; Re-opened old graves in his heart to learn What laws the dead had died to disobey.
And came reluctantly to his conclusion: "All the arm-chair philosophers are false; To love another adds to the confusion; The song of pity is the Devil's WaItz."
And bowed to fate and was successful so That soon he was the king of all the creatures: Yet, shaking in an autumn nightmare, saw,
Approaching down a ruined corridor, A figure with his own distorted features That wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.
The Tower
This is an architecture for the odd; Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid, So once, unconsciously, a virgin made Her maidenhead conspicuous to a god.
Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep Lost Love in abstract speculation burns, And exiled Will to politics returns In epic verse that lets its traitors weep.
f
Yet many come to wish their tower a well; For those who dread to drown of thirst may die, Those who see all become invisible: I
Here great magicians caught in their own spell Long for a natural climate as they sigh "Beware of Magic"-to the passer-by.
The Presumptuous
They noticed that virginity was needed To trap the unicorn in every case, But not that, of those virgins who succeeded, A high percentage had an ugly face.
The hero was as daring as they thought him, But his peculiar boyhood missed them all; The angel of a broken leg had taught him The right precautions to avoid a fall.
So in presumption they set forth alone On what, for them, was not compulsory: And stuck halfway to settle in some cave With desert lions to domesticity;
Or turned aside to be absurdly brave, And met the ogre and were turned to stone.
The Average
His peasant parents killed themselves with toil To let their darling leave a stingy soil For any of those smart professions which Encourage shallow breathing. and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made Their shy and country-loving child afraid No sensible career was good enough, Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies, A hundred miles from any decent town; The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down, He saw the shadow of an Average Man Attempting the Exceptional, and ran.
Vocation
Incredulous, he stared at the amused Official writing down his name among Those whose request to suffer was refused.
The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late To join the martyrs, there was still a place Among the tempters for a caustic tongue
To test the resolution of the young With tales of the small failings of the great, And shame the eager with ironic praise.
Though mirrors might be hateful for a while, Women and books should teach his middle age The fencing wit of an informal style To keep the silences at bay and cage His pacing manias in a worldly smile.
The Useful
The over-logical fell for the witch Whose argument converted him to stone; Thieves rapidly absorbed the over-rich; The over-popular went mad alone, And kisses brutalised the over-male.
As agents their effectiveness soon ceased; Yet, in proportion as they seemed to fail, Their instrumental value was increased To those still able to obey their wish.
By standing stones the blind can feel their way, Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight, Beggars assist the slow to travel light, And even madmen manage to convey Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.
The Way
Fresh addenda are published every day To the encyclopedia of the Way.
Linguistic notes and scientific explanations, And texts for schools with modernised spelling and
illustrations.
Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse, Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse
And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to: Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,
The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock.
Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.
And how reliable can any truth be that is got By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?
The Lucky
Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee, He would have oply found where not to look; Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed, It would not have unearthed the buried city; Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid, The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.
"It was not I", he cried as, healthy and astounded, He stepped across a predecessor's skull; "A nonsense jingle simply came into my head And left the intellectual Sphinx dumbfounded; I won the Queen because my hair was red; The terrible adventure is a little dull."
Hence Failure's torment: "Was I doomed in any case, Or would I not have failed had I believed in Grace?"
The Hero
He parried every question that they hurled: "What did the Emperor tell you?" "Not to push." "What is the greatest wonder of the world?" "The bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush."
Some muttered, "He is cagey for effect. A hero owes a duty to his fame. He looks too like a grocer for respect." Soon they slipped back into his Christian name.
-rWf
The only difference that could be seen From those who'd never risked their lives at all Was his delight in details and routine.
For he was always glad to mow the grass, Pour liquids from large bottles into small, Or look at clouds through bits of coloured glass.
Adventure
Others had swerved off to the left before, But only under protest from outside; Embittered robbers outlawed by the Law, Lepers in terror of the terrified.
Now no one else accused these of a crime; They did not look ill: old friends, overcome, Stared as they rolled away from talk and time Like marbles out into the blank and dumb.
The crowd clung all the closer to convention, Sunshine and horses, for the sane know why The even numbers should ignore the odd:
The Nameless is what no free people mention; Successful men know better than to try To see the face of their Absconded God.
The Adventurers
Spinning upon their central thirst like tops, They went the Negative Way toward the Dry; By empty caves beneath an empty sky They emptied out their memories like slops
Which made a foul marsh as they dried to death, Where monsters bred who forced them to forget The lovelies their consent avoided; yet, Still praising the Absurd with their last breath,
They seeded out into their miracles: The images of each grotesque temptation Became some painter's happiest inspiration;
And barren wives and burning virgins came To drink the pure cold water of their wells, And wish for beaux and children in their name.
The Waters
Poet, oracle and wit Like unsuccessful anglers by The ponds of apperception sit, Baiting with the wrong request The vectors of their interest; At nightfall tell the angler's lie.
With time in tempest everywhere, To rafts of frail assumption cling The saintly and the insincere; Enraged phenomena bear down In overwhelming waves to drown Both sufferer and suffering.
The waters long to hear our question put Which would release their longed-for answer, but.
'IS
The Garden
Within these gates all opening begins: White shouts and flickers through its green and red, Where children play at seven earnest sins And dogs believe their tall conditions dead.
Here adolescence into number breaks The perfect circle time can draw on stone, And flesh forgives division as it makes Another's moment of consent its own.
All journeys die here; wish and weight are lifted: Where often round some old maid's desolation Roses have flung their glory like a cloak,
The gaunt and great, the famed for conversation Blushed in the stare of evening as they spoke, And felt their centre of volition shifted.
Summer 1940
53
But I Can't
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to betold, although, Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know.
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reasons why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so.
Perhaps the roses really want to grow, The vision seriously intends to stay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
Suppose the lions all get up and go, And all the brooks and soldiers run away; Will Time say nothing but I told you so? If I could tell you I would let you know.
October 1940
54
In Sickness and in Health
(FOR MAURICE AND GWEN MANDELBAUM)
Dear, all benevolence of fingering lips That does not ask forgiveness is a noise
At drunken feasts where Sorrow strips To serve some glittering generalities: Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year And all our senses roaring as the Black Dog leaps upon the individual back.
Whose sable genius understands too well What code of famine can administrate
Those inarticulate wastes where dwell Our howling appetites: dear heart, do not Think lightly to contrive his overthrow; O promise nothing, nothing, till you know
The kingdom offered by the love-lorn eyes A land of condors, sick cattle, and dead flies.
And how contagious is its desolation, What figures of destruction unawares
>
Jump out on Love's imagination And chase away the castles and the bears; How warped the mirrors where our worlds are made; What armies burn up honour, and degrade Our will-to-order into thermal waste; How much lies smashed that cannot be replaced.
O let none say I Love until aware What huge resources it will take to nurse
One ruining speck, one tiny hair That casts a shadow through the universe: We are the deaf immured within a loud And foreign language of revolt, a crowd Of poaching hands and mouths who out of fear Have learned a safer life than we can bear.
Nature by nature in unnature ends : Echoing each other like two waterfalls,
Tristan, Isolde, the great friends, Make passion out of passion's obstacles; Deliciously postponing their delight, Prolong frustration till it lasts all night, Then perish lest Brangaene's worldly cry Should sober their cerebral ecstasy.
But, dying, conjure up their opposite, Don Juan, so terrified of death he hears
Each moment recommending it, And knows no argument to counter theirs; Trapped in their vile affections, he must find Angels to keep him chaste; a helpless, blind, Unhappy spook, he haunts the urinals, Existing solely by their miracles.
That syllogistic nightmare must reject The disobedient phallus for the sword;
The lovers of themselves collect, And Eros is politically adored: New Machiavellis flying through the air Express a metaphysical despair, Murder their last voluptuous sensation, All passion in one passionate negation.
Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command—Rejoice.
Rejoice. What talent for the makeshift thought A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught Pre-occupied and savage elements To dance into a segregated charm? Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm. And gardened from the wilderness of space The sensual properties of one dear face?
Rejoice, dear love, in Love's peremptory word; Al chance, all love, all logic, you and I.
Exist by grace of the Absurd, And without conscious artifice we die: O, lest we manufacture in our flesh The lie of our divinity afresh, Describe round our chaotic malice now, The arbitrary circle of a vow.
w
The scarves, consoles, and fauteuils of the mind May be composed into a picture still,
The matter of corrupt mankind Resistant to the dream that makes it ill, Not by our choice but our consent: beloved, pray That Love, to Whom necessity is play, Do what we must yet cannot do alone And lay your solitude beside my own.
That reason may not force us to commit That sin of the high-minded, sublimation,
Which damns the soul by praising it, Force our desire, 0 Essence of creation, To seek Thee always in Thy substances, Till the performance of those offices Our bodies, Thine opaque enigmas, do, Configure Thy transparent justice too. ,
Lest animal bias should decline our wish For Thy perfection to identify
Thee with Thy things, to worship fish, Or solid apples, or the wavering sky, Our intellectual motions with Thy light To such intense vibration, Love, excite, That we give forth a quiet none can tell From that in which the lichens live so well.
That this round 0 of faithfulness we swear May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square, Mere habits of affection freeze our thought In their inert society, lest we Mock virtue with its pious parody And take our love for granted, Love, permit Temptations always to endanger it.
Lest, blurring with old moonlight of romance The landscape of our blemishes, we try
To set up shop on Goodwin Sands, That we, though lovers, may love soberly, O Fate, O Felix Osculum, to us Remain nocturnal and mysterious: Preserve us from presumption and delay; O hold us to the voluntary way.
? Autumn 1940
55
Jumbled in the common box Of their dark stupidity, Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie; Time that tires of everyone Has corroded all the locks, Thrown away the key for fun.
In its cleft the torrent mocks Prophets who in days gone by Made a profit on each cry, Persona grata now with none; And a jackass language shocks Poets who can only pun.
Silence settles on the clocks; Nursing mothers point a sly Index finger at a sky, Crimson with the setting sun; In the valley of the fox Gleams the barrel of a gun.
Once we could have made the docks, Now it is too late to fly; Once too often you and I Did what we should not have done; Round the rampant rugged rocks Rude and ragged rascals run.
January 1941
56
Atlantis
Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis, You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is Making the voyage this year, As gales of abnormal force Are predicted, and that you Must therefore be ready to Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys, At least appearing to love Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.
Should storms, as may well happen,
Drive you to anchor a week In some old harbour-city
Of Ionia, then speak With her witty scholars, men Who have proved there cannot be Such a place as Atlantis: Learn their logic, but notice
How its subtlety betrays
Their enormous simple grief; Thus they shall teach you the ways To doubt that you may believe.
If, later, you run aground
Among the headlands of Thrace, Where with torches all night long
A naked barbaric race Leaps frenziedly to the sound Of conch and dissonant gong; On that stony savage shore Strip off your clothes and dance, for Unless you are capable
Of forgetting completely About Atlantis, you will Never finish your journey.
Again, should you come to gay
Carthage or Corinth, take part In their endless gaiety;
And if in some bar a tart, As she strokes your hair, should say "This is Atlantis, dearie," Listen with attentiveness To her life-story: unless You become acquainted now
With each refuge that tries to Counterfeit Atlantis, how Will you recognise the true?
Assuming you beach at last Near Atlantis, and begin The terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen Tundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere, i
Stone and snow, silence and air, i
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are, Travelling and tormented, Dialectic and bizarre.
Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse With all Atlantis shining Below you yet you cannot Descend, you should still be proud Even to have been allowed '
Just to peep at Atlantis !
In a poetic vision: Give thanks and lie down in peace, Having seen your salvation.
I
All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may Hermes, master of the roads, And the four dwarf Kabiri, Protect and serve you always; And may the Ancient of Days Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance, Lifting up, dear, upon you The light of His countenance.
January 1941
At the Grave of Henry James
The snow, less intransigeant than their marble, Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools atmy feet Accommodate blue now, and- echo such clouds as occur To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing Moment remarks they repeat
While the rocks, named after singular spaces Within which images wandered once that caused
All to tremble and offend, Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking the spot Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness And novelty came to an end.
To whose real advantage were such transactions When words of reflection were exchanged for trees?
What living occasion can Be just to the absent? 0 noon but reflects on itself, And the small taciturn stone that is the only witness To a great and talkative man
Has no more judgement than my ignorant shadow Of odious comparisons or distant clocks
Which challenge and interfere With the heart's instantaneous reading of time, time that is A warm enigma no longer in you for whom I Surrender my private cheer.
Startling the awkward footsteps of my apprehension, The flushed assault of your recognition is
The donnee of this doubtful hour: O stern proconsul of intractable provinces, O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist, Assent to my soil and flower.
t
As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks, j
And aspirin pre-suppose, On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down,
and any who will Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus Of the master and the rose.
Our theatre, scaffold, and erotic city
Where all the infirm species are partners in the act
Of encroachment bodies crave, Though solitude in death is de rigueur for their flesh And the self-denying hermit flies as it approaches >
Like the carnivore to a cave.
That its plural numbers may unite in meaning, '
Its vulgar tongues unravel the knotted mass (
Of the improperly conjunct, !
Open my eyes now to all its hinted significant forms, ' Sharpen my ears to detect amid its brilliant uproar The low thud of the defunct.
O dwell, ironic at my living centre,
Half ancestor, half child; because the actual self
Round whom time revolves so fast Is so afraid of what its motions might possibly do That the actor is never there when his really important Acts happen. Only the past
Is present, no one about but the dead as, Equipped with a few inherited odds and ends,
One after another-we are Fired into life to seek that unseen target where all Our equivocal judgements are judged and resolved in One whole Alas or Hurrah.
And only the unborn remark the disaster When, though it makes no difference to the pretty airs The bird of Appetite sings,
And Amour Propre is his usual amusing self, Out from the jungle of an undistinguished moment The flexible shadow springs.
Now more than ever, when torches and snare-drum Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears Breaks in insultingly on anywhere, when in our dreams Pigs play on the organs and the blue sky runs shrieking As the Crack of Doom appears,
Are the good ghosts needed with the white magic Of their subtle loves. War has no ambiguities
Like a marriage; the result Required of its affaire fatale is simple and sad, The physical removal of all human objects That conceal the Difficult.
Then remember me that I may remember The test we have to learn to shudder for is not
An historical event, That neither the low democracy of a nightmare nor An army's primitive tidiness may deceive me About our predicament,
That catastrophic situation which neither Victory nor defeat can annul; to be
Deaf yet determined to sing, To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place, To be radically corrupt yet mournfully attracted By the Real Distinguished Thing.
And shall I not specially bless you as, vexed with My little inferior questions, to-day I stand
Beside the bed where you rest Who opened such passionate arms to your Bon when It ran Towards you with Its overwhelming reasons pleading All beautifully in Its breast?
O with what innocence your hand submitted To those formal rules that help a child to play,
While your heart, fastidious as :
A delicate nun, remained true to the rare noblesse Of your lucid gift and, for its own sake, ignored the Resentful muttering Mass,
Whose ruminant hatred of all which cannot Be simplified or stolen is still at large;
No death can assuage its lust To vilify the landscape of Distinction and see The heart of the Personal brought to a systolic standstill, The Tall to diminished dust.
Preserve me, Master, from its vague incitement; Yours be the disciplinary image that holds
Me back from agreeable wrong 1
And the clutch of eddying muddle, lest Proportion shed j The alpine chill of her shrugging editorial shoulder On my loose impromptu song.
Suggest; so may I segregate my disorder i
Into districts of prospective value: approve;
Lightly, lightly, then, may I dance Over the frontier of the obvious and fumble no more In the old limp pocket of the minor exhibition, Nor riot with irrelevance,
And no longer shoe geese or water stakes, but Bolt in my day my grain of truth to the barn
Where tribulations may leap With their long-lost brothers at last in the festival Of which not one has a dissenting image, and the Flushed immediacy sleep.
Into this city from the shining lowlands Blows a wind that whispers of uncovered skulls And fresh ruins under the moon,
Of hopes that will not survive the secousse of this spring Of blood and flames, of the terror that walks by night and The sickness that strikes at noon.
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end To the vanity of our calling: make intercession For the treason of all clerks.
Because the darkness is never so distant, And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings, Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author And giver of all good things.
1 Spring 1941
58
Mundus et Infans
( F OR ALBERT AND ANGELYN STEVENS )
Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul Has given him a healthy appetite: clearly, her role
In the New Order must be To supply and deliver his raw materials free;
Should there be any shortage, She will be held responsible; she also promises To show him all such attentions as befit his age. Having dictated peace,With one fist clenched behind his head, heel drawn up to thigh, The cocky little ogre dozes off, ready,
Though, to take on the rest l
Of the world at the drop of a hat or the mildest
Nudge of the impossible, Resolved, cost what it may, to seize supreme power and Sworn to resist tyranny to the death with all Forces at his command.
A pantheist not a solipsist, he co-operates With a universe of large and noisy feeling-states
Without troubling to place Them anywhere special, for, to his eyes, Funnyface
Or Elephant as yet Mean nothing. His distinction between Me and Us Is a matter of taste; his seasons are Dry and Wet; He thinks as his mouth does. j
Still his loud iniquity is still what only the
Greatest of saints become—someone who does not lie: ,
He because he cannot Stop the vivid present to think, they by having got
Past reflection into A passionate obedience in time. We have our Boy- Meets-Girl era of mirrors and muddle to work through, Without rest, without joy.
Therefore we love him because his judgements are so Frankly subjective that his abuse carries no
Personal sting. We should Never dare offer our helplessness as a good
Bargain, without at least Promising to overcome a misfortune we blame History or Banks or the Weather for: but this beast Dares to exist without shame.
Let him praise our Creator with the top of his voice, Then, and the motions of his bowels; let us rejoice
That he lets us hope, for He may never become a fashionable or
Important personage: However bad he may be, he has not yet gone mad; Whoever we are now, we were no worse at his age; So of course we ought to be glad
When he bawls the house down. Has he not a perfect right To remind us at every moment how we quite
Rightly expect each other To go upstairs or for a walk if we must cry over
Spilt milk, such as our wish That, since, apparently, we shall never be above Either or both, we had never learned to distinguish Between hunger and love?
? August 1942
59
The Lesson
The first time that I dreamed, we were in flight, And fagged with running; there was civil war, A valley full of thieves and wounded bears.
Farms blazed behind us; turning to the right. We came at once to a tall house, its door Wide open, waiting for its long-lost heirs.
An elderly clerk sat on the bedroom stairs Writing; but we had tiptoed past him when He raised his head and stuttered—"Go away." We wept and begged to stay:
m
i
He wiped his pince-nez, hesitated, then Said no, he had no power to give us leave;
Our lives were not in order; we must leave. •
* * *
The second dream began in a May wood; We had been laughing; your blue eyes were kind, Your excellent nakedness without disdain.
Our lips met, wishing universal good;
But on their impact sudden flame and wind
Fetched you away and turned me loose again
To make a focus for a wide wild plain,
Dead level and dead silent and bone dry,
Where nothing could have suffered, sinned, or grown. ,
On a high chair alone
I sat, a little master, asking why
The cold and solid object in my hands
Should be a human hand, one of your hands. * * *
And the last dream was this: we were to go j
To a great banquet and a Victory Ball After some tournament or dangerous test.
Only our seats had velvet cushions, so
We must have won; though there were crowns for all,
Ours were of gold, of paper all the rest.
O fair or funny was each famous guest. Love smiled at Courage over priceless glass, And rockets died in hundreds to express Our learned carelessness. A band struck up; all over the green grass A sea of paper crowns rose up to dance: Ours were too heavy; we did not dance.
I woke. You were not there. But as I dressed Anxiety turned to shame, feeling all three Intended one rebuke. For had not each In its own way tried to teach My will to love you that it cannot be, As I think, of such consequence to want What anyone is given, if they want?
October 1942
60
The Sea and the Mirror
A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest
(TO JAMES AND TANIA STERN)
And am I wrong to worship where Faith cannot doubt nor Hope despair Since my own soul can grant my prayer? Speak, God of Visions, plead for me And tell why I have chosen thee.
Emily Bronte
Preface
(The Stage Manager to the Critics)
The aged catch their breath, For the nonchalant couple go Waltzing across the tightrope As if there were no death Or hope of falling down;
u
The wounded cry as the clown j
Doubles his meaning, and O j
How the dear little children laugh When the drums roll and the lovely Lady is sawn in half.
i
O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains. '
Art opens the fishiest eye J
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat j
The Chamber of Temptation Where heroes roar and die. We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how |
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion's mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?
Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
.Ml the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.
I Prospero to Ariel
Stay with me, Ariel, while I pack, and with your first free act
Delight my leaving; share my resigning thoughts As you have served my revelling wishes: then, brave spirit,
Ages to you of song and daring, and to me Briefly Milan, then earth. In all, things have turned out better
Than I once expected or ever deserved; I am glad that I did not recover my dukedom till
I do not want it; I am glad that Miranda No longer pays me any attention; I am glad I have freed you,
So at last I can really believe I shall die. For under your influence death is inconceivable:
On walks through winter woods, a bird's dry carcass Agitates the retina with novel images,
A stranger's quiet collapse in a noisy street Is the beginning of much lively speculation,
And every time some dear flesh disappears What is real is the arriving grief; thanks to your service,
The lonely and unhappy are very much alive. But now all these heavy books are no use to me any more, for
Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best, Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel
To the silent dissolution of the sea Which misuses nothing because it values nothing;
Whereas man overvalues everything Yet, when he learns the price is pegged to his valuation,
Complains bitterly he is being ruined which, of course, he is. So kings find it odd they should have a million subjects
Yet share in the thoughts of none, and seducers Are sincerely puzzled at being unable to love What they are able to possess; so, long ago, In an open boat, I wept at giving a city,
Common warmth and touching substance, for a gift In dealing with shadows. If age, which is certainly
Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe
It will get away with anything, while age <
Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing: J
The child runs out to play in the garden, convinced '
That the furniture will go on with its thinking lesson,
Who, fifty years later, if he plays at all, Will first ask its kind permission to be excused.
When I woke into my life, a sobbing dwarf Whom giants served only as they pleased,
I was not what I seemed; ' Beyond their busy backs I made a magic I
To ride away from a father's imperfect justice, |
Take vengeance on the Romans for their grammar, Usurp the popular earth and blot out for ever
The gross insult of being a mere one among many: |
Now, Ariel, I am that I am, your late and lonely master, (
Who knows now what magic is:—the power to enchant ( That comes from disillusion. What the books can teach one (
Is that most desires end up in stinking ponds, But we have only to learn to sit still and give no orders,
To make you offer us your echo and your mirror; We have only to believe you, then you dare not lie; ;
To ask for nothing, and at once from your calm eyes, With their lucid proof of apprehension and disorder, !
All we are not stares back at what we are. For all things, I In your company, can be themselves: historic deeds .
Drop their hauteur and speak of shabby childhoods When all they longed for was to join in the gang of doubts
Who so tormented them; sullen diseases Forget their dreadful appearance and make silly jokes;
Thick-headed goodness for Oiice is not a bore. No one but you had sufficient audacity and eyesight '
To find those clearings where the shy humiliations Gambol on sunny afternoons, the waterhole to which j
The scarred rogue sorrow comes quietly in the small hours: , And no one but you is reliably informative on hell; >
As you whistle and skip past, the poisonous
Resentments scuttle over your unrevolted feet,
And even the uncontrollable vertigo, Because it can scent no shame, is unobliged to strike.
Could he but once see Nature as
In truth she is for ever, What oncer would not fell in love? Hold up your mirror, boy, to do
Your vulgar friends this favour: One peep, though, will be quite enough;
To those who are not true, A statue with no figleaf has A pornographic flavour.
Inform my hot heart straight away
Its treasure loves another, But turn to neutral topics then, Such as the pictures in this room,
Religion or the Weather; Pure scholarship in Where and When,
How Often and With Whom, Is not for Passion that must play The Jolly Elder Brother.
Be frank about our heathen foe,
For Rome will be a goner If you soft-pedal the loud beast; Describe in plain four-letter words
This dragon that's upon her: But should our beggars ask the cost,
Just whistle like the birds; Dare even Pope or Caesar know The price of faith and honour?
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