To-day I am free and no longer need your freedom: You, I suppose, will be off now to look for likely victims;

Crowds chasing ankles, lone men stalking glory,

Some feverish young rebel among amiable flowers

In consultation with his handsome envy, A punctual plump judge, a fly-weight hermit in a dream

Of gardens that time is for ever outside— To lead absurdly by their self-important noses.

Are you malicious by nature? I don't know. Perhaps only incapable of doing nothing or of

Being by yourself, and, for all your wry faces, May secretly be anxious and miserable without A master to need you for the work you need. Are all your tricks a test? If so, I hope you find, next time,

Someone in whom you cannot spot the weakness Through which you will corrupt him with your charm. Mine

you did

And me you have: thanks to us both, I have broken Both of the promises I made as an apprentice:— To hate nothing and to ask nothing for its love. All by myself I tempted Antonio into treason;

However that could be cleared up; both of us know That both were in the wrong, and neither need be sorry:

But Caliban remains my impervious disgrace. We did it, Ariel, between us; you found on me a wish

For absolute devotion; result—his wreck That sprawls in the weeds and will not be repaired:

My dignity discouraged by a pupil's curse, I shall go knowing and incompetent into my grave.

The extravagant children, who lately swaggered Out of the sea like gods, have, I think, been soundly hunted

By their own devils into their human selves: To all, then, but me, their pardons. Alonso's heaviness

Is lost; and weak Sebastian will be patient In future with his slothful conscience—after all, it pays;

Stephano is contracted to his belly, a minor But a prosperous kingdom; stale Trinculo receives,

Gratis, a whole fresh repertoire of stories, and Our younger generation its independent joy.

Their eyes are big and blue with love; its lighting

Makes even us look new: yes, to-day it all looks so easy.

Will Ferdinand be as fond of a Miranda Familiar as a stocking? Will a Miranda who is

No longer a silly lovesick little goose, When Ferdinand and his brave world are her profession,

Go into raptures over existing at all? Probably I over-estimate their difficulties;

Just the same, I am very glad I shall never Be twenty and have to go through that business again, The hours of fuss and fury, the conceit, the expense.

Sing first that green remote Cockaigne

Where whiskey-rivers run, And every gorgeous number may

Be laid by anyone; For medicine and rhetoric

Lie mouldering on shelves, While sad young dogs and stomach-aches Love no one but themselves.

Tell then of witty angels who

Come only to the beasts, Of Heirs Apparent who prefer Low dives to formal feasts; For shameless Insecurity Prays for a boot to lick, And many a sore bottom finds A sorer one to -kick.

Wind up, though, on a moral note:—

That Glory will go bang, Schoolchildren shall co-operate, And honest rogues must hang; Because our sound committee man

Has murder in his heart: But should you catch a living eye, Just wink as you depart.

Now our partnership is dissolved, I feel so peculiar:

As if I had been on a drunk since I was born And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober,

With all my unanswered wishes and unwashed days Stacked up all around my life; as if through

the ages I had dreamed About some tremendous journey I was taking, Sketching imaginary landscapes, chasms and cities,

Cold walls, hot spaces, wild mouths, defeated backs, Jotting down fictional notes on secrets overheard

In theatres and privies, banks and mountain inns, 1

And now, in my old age, I wake, and this journey really exists, |

And I have actually to take it, inch by inch, Alone and on foot, without a cent in my pocket,

Through a universe where time is not foreshortened, No animals talk, and there is neither floating nor flying. ^

When I am safely home, oceans away in Milan, and t

Realise once and for all I shall never see you again,

Over there, maybe, it won't seem quite so dreadful Not to be interesting any more, but an old man Just like other old men, with eyes that water Easily in the wind, and a head that nods in the sunshine,

Forgetful, maladroit, a little grubby, i

And to like it. When the servants settle me into a chair

In some well-sheltered corner of the garden, And arrange my muffler and rugs, shall I ever be able

To stop myself from telling them what I am doing,— Sailing alone, out over seventy thousand fathoms—?

Yet if I speak, I shall sink without a sound Into unmeaning abysses. Can I learn to suffer

Without saying something ironic or funny On suffering? I never suspected the way of truth Was a way of silence where affectionate chat Is but a robbers' ambush and even good music

In shocking taste; and you, of course, never told me. If I peg away at it honestly every moment, And have luck, perhaps by the time death pounces

His stumping question, I shall just be getting to know The difference between moonshine and daylight.... I see you starting to fidget. I forgot. To you

That doesn't matter. My dear, here comes Gonzalo With a solemn face to fetch me. O Ariel, Ariel,

How I shall miss you. Enjoy your element. Good-bye.

Sing, Ariel, sing, Sweetly, dangerously Out of the sour And shiftless water, Lucidly out Of the dozing tree, Entrancing, rebuking The raging heart With a smoother song Than this rough world, Unfeeling god.

O brilliantly, lightly, Of separation, Of bodies and death, Unanxious one, sing To man, meaning me, As now, meaning always, In love or out, Whatever that mean, Trembling he takes The silent passage Into discomfort.

II The Supporting Cast, Sotta Voce /

ANTONIO f

As all the pigs have turned back into men ,

And the sky is auspicious and the sea Calm as a clock, we can all go home again.

i

Yes, it undoubtedly looks as if we Could take life as easily now as tales Write ever-after: not only are the

Two heads silhouetted against the sails —And kissing, of course—well-built, but the lean Fool is quite a person, the fingernails

Of the dear old butler for once quite clean, And the royal passengers quite as good As rustics, perhaps better, for they mean

What they say, without, as a rustic would, Casting reflections on the courtly crew. Yes, Brother Prospero, your grouping could

Not be more effective: given a few Incomplete objects and a nice warm day, What a lot a little music can do.

Dotted about the deck they doze or play, Your loyal subjects all, grateful enough To know their place and believe what you say.

Antonio, sweet brother, has to laugh. How easy you have made it to refuse Peace to your greatness! Break your wand in half,

The fragments will join; burn your books or lose Them in the sea, they will soon reappear, Not even damaged: as long as I choose

To wear my fashion, whatever you wear Is a magic robe; while I stand outside Your circle, the will to charm is still there.

As I exist so you shall be denied, Forced to remain our melancholy mentor, The grown-up man, the adult in his pride,

Never have time to curl up at the centre Time turns on when completely reconciled, Never become and therefore never enter The green occluded pasture as a child.

Your all is partial, Prospero;

My will is all my own: Your need to love shall never know Me: I am I, Antonio, By choice myself alone.

FERDINAND

Flesh, fair, unique, and you, warm secret that my kiss Follows into meaning Miranda, solitude Where my omissions are, still possible, still good, Dear Other at all times, retained as I do this,

From moment to moment as you enrich them so Inherit me, my cause, as I would cause you now With mine your sudden joy, two wonders as one vow Pre-empting all, here, there, for ever, long ago.

I would smile at no other promise than touch, taste, sight, Were there not, my enough, my exaltation, to bless As world is offered world, as I hear it to-night

n

H

Pleading with ours for us, another tenderness

That neitherwithout either could or would possess,

The Right Required Time, The Real Right Place, 0 Light. '

I

One bed is empty, Prospero, !

My person is my own; Hot Ferdinand will never know The flame with which Antonio Burns in the dark alone.

STEPHANO

Embrace me, belly, like a bride; Dear daughter, for the weight you drew From humble pie and swallowed pride, Believe the boast in which you grew: Where mind meets matter, both should woo; Together let us learn that game

The high play better than the blue: '

A lost thing looks for a lost name. j

Behind your skirts your son must hide

When disappointments bark and boo;

Brush my heroic ghosts aside, I

Wise nanny, with a vulgar pooh:

Exchanging cravings we pursue

Alternately a single aim:"

Between the bottle and the "loo"

A lost thing looks for a lost name.

Though in the long run satisfied, The will of one by being two At every moment is denied; Exhausted glasses wonder who Is self and sovereign, I or You? We cannot both be what we claim, The real Stephano—Which is true? A lost thing looks for a lost name.

Child? Mother? Either grief will do; The need for pardon is the same, The contradiction is not new: A lost thing looks for a lost name.

One glass is untouched, Prospero,

My nature is my own; Inert Stephano does not know The feast at which Antonio Toasts One and One alone.

GONZALO

Evening, grave, immense, and clear,

Overlooks our ship whose wake

Lingers undistorted on

Sea and silence; I look back

For the last time as the sun

Sets behind that island where

All our loves were altered: yes,

My prediction came to pass,

Yet I am not justified,

And I weep but not with pride.

Not in me the credit for

Words I uttered long ago

Whose glad meaning I betrayed;

Truths to-day admitted, owe

Nothing to the councillor

In whose booming eloquence

Honesty became untrue.

Am I not Gonzalo who

By his self-reflection made

Consolation an offence?

There was nothing to explain:

Had I trusted the Absurd

And straightforward note by note

Sung exactly what I heard, Such immediate delight

Would have taken there and then '

Our common welkin by surprise, |

All would have begun to dance

Jigs of self-deliverance. "

It was I prevented this,

Jealous of my native ear,

Mine the art which made the song

Sound ridiculous and wrong,

I whose interference broke

The gallop into jog-trot prose

And by speculation froze

Vision into an idea,

Irony into a joke, i

Till I stood convicted of

Doubt and insufficient love. |

Farewell, dear island of our wreck: |

All have been restored to health,

All have seen the Commonwealth,

There is nothing to forgive.

Since a storm's decision gave

His subjective passion back ,

To a meditative man, ,

Even reminiscence can

Comfort ambient troubles like

Some ruined tower by the sea

Whence boyhoods growing and afraid

Learn a formula they need

In solving their mortality, 5

Even rusting flesh can be

A simple locus now, a bell

The Already There can lay

Hands on if at any time

It should feel inclined to say

To the lonely—"Here I am," '

To the anxious—"All is well."

One tongue is silent, Prospera,

My language is my own; Decayed Gonzalo does not know The shadow that Antonio Talks to, at noon, alone.

ADRIAN AND FRANCISCO

Good little sunbeams must learn to fly, But it's madly ungay when the goldfish die.

One act is censored, Prospera,

My audience is my own; Nor Adrian nor Francisco know The drama that Antonio Plays in his head alone.

ALONSO

Dear Son, when the warm multitudes cry, Ascend your throne majestically, But keep in mind the waters where fish See sceptres descending with no wish To touch them; sit regal and erect, But imagine the sands where a crown Has the status of a broken-down Sofa or mutilated statue: Remember as bells and cannon boom The cold deep that does not envy you, The sunburnt superficial kingdom Where a king is an object.

Expect no help from others, for who Talk sense to princes or refer to The scorpion in official speeches As they unveil some granite Progress Leading a child and holding a bunch Of lilies? In their Royal Zoos the

Shark and the octopus are tactfully Omitted; synchronised clocks march on

Within their powers: without, remain ;

The ocean flats where no subscription '

Concerts are given, the desert plain j

Where there is nothing for lunch. '

Only your darkness can tell you what !

A prince's ornate mirror dare not,

Which you should fear more—the sea in which

A tyrant sinks entangled in rich

Robes while a mistress turns a white back

Upon his splutter, or the desert

Where an emperor stands in his shirt

While his diary is read by sneering

Beggars, and far off he notices '

A lean horror flapping and hopping

Toward him with inhuman swiftness: f

Learn from your dreams what you lack, '

For as your fears are, so must you hope. The Way of Justice is a tightrope Where no prince is safe for one instant Unless he trust his embarrassment, As in his left ear the siren sings Meltingly of water and a night Where all flesh had peace, and on his right The efreet offers a brilliant void Where his mind could be perfectly clear And all his limitations destroyed: Many young princes soon disappear To join all the unjust kings.

So, if you prosper, suspect those bright Mornings when you whistle with a light Heart. You are loved; you have never seen The harbour so still, the park so green, So many well-fed pigeons upon

Cupolas and triumphal arches, So many stags and slender ladies Beside the canals. Remember when Your climate seems a permanent home For marvellous creatures and great men, What griefs and convulsions startled Rome, Ecbatana, Babylon.

How narrow the space, how slight the chance

For civil pattern and importance

Between the watery vagueness and

The triviality of the sand,

How soon the lively trip is over

From loose craving to sharp aversion,

Aimless jelly to paralysed bone:

At the end of each successful day

Remember that the fire and the ice

Are never more than one step away

From the temperate city; it is

But a moment to either.

But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you, come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks For their desiccation of your lust, Thank the bitter treatment of the tide For its dissolution of your pride, That the whirlwind may arrange your will And the deluge release it to find The spring in the desert, the fruitful Island in the sea, where flesh and mind Are delivered from mistrust.

Blue the sky beyond her humming sail As I sit to-day by our ship's rail Watching exuberant porpoises Escort us homeward and writing this

For you to open when I am gone: Read it, Ferdinand, with the blessing

Of Alonso, your father, once King ,

Of Naples, now ready to welcome Death, but rejoicing in a new love,

A new peace, having heard the solemn \

Music strike and seen the statue move ,

To forgive our illusion. j

One crown is lacking, Prospera,

My empire is my own; Dying Aionso does not know The diadem Antonio

Wears in his worl d alone.

|

MASTER AND BOATSWAIN |

At Dirty Dick's and Sloppy Joe's j

We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery,

And some, alas, with Kate; And two by two like cat and mouse |

The homeless played at keeping house. -

There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor's Friend, |

And Marion, cow-eyed, Opened their arms to me but I

Refused to step inside; I was not looking for a cage In which to mope in my old age.

The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.

One gaze points elsewhere, Prospera,

My compass is my own; Nostalgic sailors do not know The waters where Antonio Sails on and on alone.

SEBASTIAN

My rioters all disappear, my dream Where Prudence flirted with a naked sword, Securely vicious, crumbles; it is day; Nothing has happened; we are all alive: I am Sebastian, wicked still, my proof Of mercy that I wake without a crown.

What sadness signalled to our children's day Where each believed all wishes wear a crown And anything pretended is alive, That one by one we plunged into that dream Of solitude and silence where no sword Will ever play once it is called a proof?

The arrant jewel singing in his crown Persuaded me my brother was a dream I should not love because I had no proof, Yet all my honesty assumed a sword; To think his death I thought myself alive And stalked infected through the blooming day.

The lie of Nothing is to promise proof To any shadow that there is no day Which cannot be extinguished with some sword, To want and weakness that the ancient crown Envies the childish head, murder a dream Wrong only while its victim is alive.

'-W

blessed be bleak Exposure on whose sword, Caught unawares, we prick ourselves alive!

Shake Failure's bruising fist! Who else would crown ,

Abominable error with a proof?

smile because I tremble, glad to-day |

To be ashamed, not anxious, not a dream. j

i

f

Children are playing, brothers are alive,

And not a heart or stomach asks for proof |

That all this dearness is no lovers' dream;

Just Now is what it might be every day, '•

Right Here is absolute and needs no crown,

Ermine or trumpets, protocol or sword.

In dream all sins are easy, but by day '

It is defeat gives proof we are alive; |

The sword we suffer is the guarded crown. j

One face cries nothing, Prospero,

My conscience is my own; Pallid Sebastian does not know j

The dream in which Antonio Fights the white bull alone. j

I

I

TRINCULO

Mechanic, merchant, king, Are warmed by the cold clown Whose head is in the clouds And never can get down.

Into a solitude Undreamed of by their fat Quick dreams have lifted me; The north wind steals my hat.

On clear days I can see Green acres far below, And the red roof where I Was Little Trinculo.

There lies that solid world These hands can never reach; My history, my love, Is but a choice of speech.

A terror shakes my tree, A flock of words fly out, Whereat a laughter shakes The busy and devout.

Wild images, come down Out of your freezing sky, That I, like shorter men, May get my joke and die.

One note is jarring, Prospera,

My humour is my own; Tense Trinculo will never know The paradox Antonio

Laughs at, in woods, alone.

MIRANDA

My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely, As the poor and sad are real to the good king, And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree, Turned a somersault and ran away waving; My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.

The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body Melted into light as water leaves a spring And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me; Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running: My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.

He kissed me awake, and no one was sorry; The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything, And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

So, to remember our changing garden, we Are linked as children in a circle dancing: My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely, And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

One link is missing, Prospera,

My magic is my own; Happy Miranda does not know The figure that Antonio, The Only One, Creation's O Dances for Death alone.

III Caliban to the Audience

If now, having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, you ask and, of course, notwithstanding the conscious fact of his irrevocable absence, you instinc­tively do ask for our so good, so great, so dead author to stand before the finally lowered curtain and take his shyly respon­sible bow for this, his latest, ripest production, it is I—my reluctance is, I can assure you, co-equal with your dismay— who will always loom thus wretchedly into your confused picture, for, in default of the all-wise, all-explaining master you would speak to, who else at least can, who else indeed

must respond to your bewildered cry, but its very echo, the

begged question you would speak to him about.

* * *

We must own [for the present I speak your echo] to a nervous perplexity not unmixed, frankly, with downright resentment. How can we grant the indulgence for which in his epilogue your personified type of the creative so lamely, tamely pleaded? Imprisoned, by you, in the mood doubtful, loaded, by you, with distressing embarrassments, we are, we submit, in no position to set anyone free.

Our native Muse, heaven knows and heaven be praised, is not exclusive. Whether out of the innocence of a childlike heart to whom all things are pure, or with the serenity of a status so majestic that the mere keeping up of tones and ap­pearances, the suburban wonder as to what the strait-laced Unities might possibly think, or sad sour Probability possibly say, are questions for which she doesn't because she needn't, she hasn't in her lofty maturity any longer to care a rap, she invites, dear generous-hearted creature that she is, just tout Ie monde to drop in at any time so that her famous, memo­rable, sought-after evenings present to the speculative eye an ever-shining, never-tarnished proof of her amazing unheard-of power to combine and happily contrast, to make every shade of the social and moral palette contribute to the gen­eral richness, of the skill, unapproached and unattempted by Grecian aunt or Gallic sister, with which she can skate full tilt toward the forbidden incoherence and then, in the last split second, on the shuddering edge of the bohemian standardless abyss effect her breathtaking triumphant turn.

No timid segregation by rank or taste for her, no prudent listing into those who will, who might, who certainly would not get on, no nicely graded scale of invitations to heroic formal Tuesdays, young comic Thursdays, al fresco farcical Saturdays. No, the real, the only test of the theatrical as of the gastronomic, her practice confidently wagers, is the mixed perfected brew.

As he looks in on her, so marvellously at home with all her cosy swarm about her, what accents will not assault the new arrival's ear, the magnificent tropes of tragic defiance and despair, the repartee of the high humour, the pun of the very low, cultured drawl and manly illiterate bellow, yet all I

of them gratefully doing their huge or tiny best to make the |

party go?

And if, assured by her smiling wave that of course he may, he should presently set out to explore her vast and rambling |

mansion, to do honour to its dear odd geniuses of local con­venience and proportion, its multiplied deities of mysterious stair and interesting alcove, not one of the laughing groups j

and engrossed warmed couples that he keeps "surprising"— I

the never-ending surprise for him is that he doesn't seem '

to—but affords some sharper instance of relations he would |

have been the last to guess at, choleric prince at his ease |

with lymphatic butler, moist hand taking so to dry, youth .

getting on quite famously with stingy cold old age, some I

stranger vision of the large loud liberty violently rocking yet never, he is persuaded, finally upsetting the jolly crowded boat. I

What, he may well ask, has the gracious goddess done to |

all these people that, at her most casual hint, they should so 1

trustingly, so immediately take off those heavy habits one I

thinks of them as having for their health and happiness day and night to wear, without in this unfamiliar unbuttoned state—the notable absence of the slightest shiver or not- quite-inhibited sneeze is indication positive—for a second feeling the draught? Is there, could there be, any miraculous suspension of the wearily historic, the dingily geographic, the dully drearily sensible beyond her faith, her charm, her love, to command? Yes, there could be, yes, alas, indeed yes, O there is, right here, right now before us, the situation present.

How could you, you who are one of the oldest habitues j

at these delightful functions, one, possibly the closest, of her (

trusted inner circle, how could you be guilty of the incredible unpardonable treachery of bringing along the one creature, as I

you above all men must have known, whom she cannot and

will not under any circumstances stand, the solitary exception she is not at any hour of the day or night at home to, the unique case that her attendant spirits have absolute instruc­tions never, neither at the front door nor at the back, to admit?

At Him and at Him only does she draw the line, not because there are any limits to her sympathy but precisely because there are none. Just because of all she is and all she means to be, she cannot conceivably tolerate in her presence the repre­sented principle of not sympathising, not associating, not amusing, the only child of her Awful Enemy, the rival whose real name she will never sully her lips with—"that envious witch" is sign sufficient—who does not rule but defiantly is the unrectored chaos.

All along and only too well she has known what would happen if, by any careless mischance—of conscious malice she never dreamed till now—He should ever manage to get in. She foresaw what He would do to the conversation, lying in wait for its vision of private love or public justice to warm to an Egyptian brilliance and then with some fishlike odour or bruit insolite snatching the visionaries back tongue-tied and blushing to the here and now; she foresaw what He would do to the arrangements, breaking, by a refusal to keep in step, the excellent order of the dancing ring, and ruining supper by knocking over the loaded appetising tray; worst of all, she foresaw, she dreaded what He would end up by doing to her, that, not content with upsetting her guests, with spoiling their fun, His progress from outrage to outrage would not relent before the gross climax of His making, horror unspeakable, a pass at her virgin self.

Let us suppose, even, that in your eyes she is by no means as we have always fondly imagined, your dear friend, that what we have just witnessed was not what it seemed to us, the inexplicable betrayal of a life-long sacred loyalty, but your long-premeditated just revenge, the final evening up of some ancient never-forgotten score, then even so, why make us suffer who have never, in all conscience, done you harm? Surely the theatrical relation, no less than the marital, is governed by the sanely decent general law that, before


visitors, in front of the children or the servants, there shall be no indiscreet revelation of animosity, no "scenes," that, no matter to what intolerable degrees of internal temperature and pressure restraint may raise both the injured and the guilty, nevertheless such restraint is applied to tones and |

topics, the exhibited picture must be still as always the calm and smiling one the most malicious observer can see nothing ' wrong with, and not until the last of those whom manifested |

anger or mistrust would embarrass or amuse or not be good for have gone away or out or up, is the voice raised, the table (

thumped, the suspicious letter snatched at or the outrageous I

bill furiously waved. |

For we, after all—you cannot have forgotten this—are .

strangers to her. We have never claimed her acquaintance, '

knowing as well as she that we do not and never could belong on her side of the curtain. All we have ever asked for is that for a few hours the curtain should be left undrawn, so as to allow our humble ragged selves the privilege of craning and j

gaping at the splendid goings-on inside. We most emphatically do not ask that she should speak to us, or try to understand us; on the contrary our one desire has always been that she should preserve for ever her old high strangeness, for what |

delights us about her world is just that it neither is nor pos- 1

sibly could become one in which we could breathe or behave, I

that in her house the right of innocent passage should remain so universal that the same neutral space accommodates the conspirator and his victim; the generals of both armies, the I

chorus of patriots and the choir of nuns, palace and farmyard, cathedral and smugglers' cave, that time should never revert to that intransigent element we are so ineluctably and only too familiarly in, but remain the passive good-natured creature 1

she and' her friends can by common consent do anything they like with—(it is not surprising that they should take advantage !

of their strange power and so frequently skip hours and days i

and even years: the dramatic mystery is that they should always so unanimously agree upon exactly how many hours and days and years to skip)—that upon their special constitu- I

tions the moral law should continue to operate so exactly that

the timid not only deserve but actually win the fair. and it is the socially and physically unemphatic David who lays low the gorilla-chested Goliath with one well-aimed custard pie, that in their blessed climate, the manifestation of the inner life should always remain so easy and habitual that a sudden erup­tion of musical and metaphorical power is instantly recog­nised as standing for grief and disgust, an elegant contrapposto for violent death, and that consequently the picture which they in there present to us out here is always that of the perfectly tidiable case of disorder, the beautiful and serious problem exquisitely set without a single superflous datum and insoluble with less, the expert landing of all the passengers with all their luggage safe and sound in the best of health and spirits and without so much as a scratch or a bruise.

Into that world of freedom without anxiety, sincerity with­out loss of vigour, feeling that loosens rather than ties the tongue, we are not, we reiterate, so blinded by presumption to our proper status and interest as to expect or even wish at any time to enter, far less to dwell there.

Must we—it seems oddly that we must—remind you that our existence does not, like hers, enjoy an infinitely indicative mood, an eternally present tense, a limitlessly active voice, for in our shambling, slovenly makeshift world any two persons whether domestic first or neighbourly second, require and necessarily presuppose, in both their numbers and in all their cases, the whole inflected gamut of an alien third since, with­out a despised or dreaded Them to turn the back on, there could be no intimate or affectionate Us to turn the eye to; that, chez nous, space is never the whole uninhibited circle but always some segment, its eminent domain upheld by two co-ordinates. There always has been and always will be not only the vertical boundary, the river on this side of which initiative and honesty stroll arm in arm wearing sensible clothes, and beyond which is a savage elsewhere swarming with contagious diseases, but also its horizontal counterpart, the railroad above which houses stand in their own grounds, each equipped with a garage and a beautiful woman, some­times with several, and below which huddled shacks provide


a squeezing shelter to collarless herds who eat blancmange and have never said anything witty. Make the case as special as you please; take the tamest congregation or the wildest faction; take, say, a college. What river and railroad did for the grosser instance, lawn and corridor do for the more refined, dividing the tender who value from the tough who measure, the superstitious who still sacrifice to causation from the here- 1

tics who have already reduced the worship of truth to bare I

description, and so creating the academic fields to be guarded |

with umbrella and learned periodical against the trespass of •

any unqualified stranger, not a whit less jealously than the !

game-preserve is protected from the poacher by the unamiable shot-gun. For without these prohibitive frontiers we should never know who we were or what we wanted. It is they who donate to neighbourhood all its accuracy and vehemence. It is 1

thanks to them that we do know with whom to associate, make love, exchange recipes and jokes, go mountain climbing or sit (

side by side fishing from piers. It is thanks to them, too, that we know against whom to rebel. We can shock our parents by visiting the dives below the railroad tracks, we can amuse our­selves on what would otherwise have been a very dull evening indeed, in plotting to seize the post office across the river. j

Of course, these several private regions must together com­prise one public whole—we would never deny that logic and i instinct require that—of course, We and They are united in the candid glare of the same commercial hope by day, and the soft refulgence of the same erotic nostalgia by night but—and this is our point—without our privacies of situation, our local idioms of triumph and mishap, our different doctrines concern­ing the transubstantiation of the larger pinker bun on the ter­restrial dish for which the mature sense may reasonably water and the adult fingers furtively or unabashedly go for, our spe­cific choices of which hill it would be romantic to fly away over or what sea it would be exciting to run away to, our peculiar visions of the absolute stranger with a spontaneous longing for the lost who will adopt our misery not out of desire but pure compassion, without, in short, our devoted pungent

expression of the partial and contrasted, the Whole would have no importance and its Day and Night no interest.

So, too, with Time who, in our auditorium, is not her dear old buffer so anxious to please everybody, but a prim magis­trate whose court never adjourns, and from whose decisions, as he laconically sentences one to loss of hair and talent, an­other to seven days' chastity, and a third to boredom for life, there is no appeal. We should not be sitting here now, washed, warm, well-fed, in seats we have paid for, unless there were others who are not here; our liveliness and good-humour, such as they are, are those of survivors, conscious that there are others who have not been so fortunate, others who did not succeed in navigating the narrow passage or to whom the na­tives were not friendly, others whose streets were chosen by the explosion or through whose country the famine turned aside from ours to go, others who failed to repel the invasion of bacteria or to crush the insurrection of their bowels, others who lost their suit against their parents or were ruined by wishes they could not adjust or murdered by resentments they could not control; aware of some who were better and bigger but from whom, only the other day, Fortune withdrew her hand in sudden disgust, now nervously playing chess with drunken sea-captains in sordid cafes on the equator or the Arctic Circle, or lying, only a few blocks away, strapped and screaming on iron beds or dropping to naked pieces in damp graves. And shouldn't you too, dear master, reflect—forgive us for mentioning it—that we might very well not have been attending a production of yours this evening, had not some other and maybe—who can tell?—brighter talent married a barmaid or turned religious and shy or gone down in a liner with all his manuscripts, the loss recorded only in the corner of some country newspaper below A Poultry Lover's Jottings?

You yourself, we seem to remember, have spoken of the conjured spectacle as "a mirror held up to nature," a phrase misleading in its aphoristic sweep but indicative at least of one aspect of the relation between the real and the imagined, their mutual reversal of value, for isn't the essential artistic strangeness to which your citation of the sinisterly biassed image would point just this: that on the far side of the mirror the general will to compose, to form at all costs a felicitous pattern becomes the necessary cause of any particular effort to live or act or love or triumph or vary, instead of being as, in so far as it emerges at all, it is on this side, their accidental effect?

Does Ariel—to nominate the spirit of reflection in your terms —call for manifestation? Then neither modesty nor fear of reprisals excuses the one so called on from publicly confess­ing that she cheated at croquet or that he committed incest in a dream. Does He demand concealment? Then their nearest and dearest must be deceived by disguises of sex and age which anywhere else would at once attract the attention of the police or the derisive whistle of the awful schoolboy. That is the price asked, and how promptly and gladly paid, for universal reconciliation and peace, for the privilege of all galloping to­gether past the finishing post neck and neck.

How then, we continue to wonder, knowing all this, could you act as if you did not, as if you did not realise that the embarrassing compresence of the absolutely natural, incor­rigibly right-handed, and, to any request for co-operation, utterly negative, with the enthusiastically self-effacing would be a simultaneous violation of both worlds, as if you were not perfectly well aware that the magical musical condition, the orphic spell that turns the fierce dumb greedy beasts into grateful guides and oracles who will gladly take one anywhere and tell one everything free of charge, is precisely and simply that of His finite immediate note not, under any circumstances, being struck, of its not being tentatively whispered, far less positively banged.

Are we not bound to conclude, then, that, whatever snub to the poetic you may have intended incidentally to administer, your profounder motive in so introducing Him to them among whom, because He doesn't belong, He couldn't appear as any­thing but His distorted parody, a deformed and savage slave, was to deal a mortal face-slapping insult to us among whom He does and is, moreover, all grossness turned to glory, no less a person than the nude august elated archer of our heaven, the darling single son of Her who, in her right milieu. is certainly no witch but the most sensible of all the gods, whose influence is as sound as it is pandemic, on the race-track no less than in the sleeping cars of the Orient Express, our great white Queen of Love herself?

But even that is not the worst we suspect you of. If your words have not buttered any parsnips, neither have they broken any bones.

He, after all, can come back to us now to be comforted and respected, perhaps, after the experience of finding Himself for a few hours and for the first time in His life not wanted, more fully and freshly appreciative of our affection than He has always been in the past; as for His dear mother, She is far too grand and far too busy to hear or care what you say ar think. If only we were certain that your malice was confined to the verbal affront, we should long ago have demanded our money back and gone whistling home to bed. Alas, in addition to resenting what you have openly said, we fear even more what you may secretly have done. Is it possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel's kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban's? We note with alarm that when the other members of the final tableau were dismissed. He was not returned to His arboreal confinement as He should have been. Where is He now? For if the intrusion of the real has discon­certed and incommoded the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down our picket fences in the name of fra­ternity, seducing our wives in the name of romance, and robbing us of our sacred pecuniary deposits in the name of justice. Where is Ariel? What have you done with Him? For we won't, we daren't leave until you give us a satisfactory answer.

* * *

Such [let me cease to play your echo and return to my officially natural role)—such are your questions, are they not,


but before I try to deal with them, I must ask for your patience, while I deliver a special message for our late author to those few among you, if indeed there be any—I have certainly heard no comment yet from them—who have come here, not to be entertained but to learn; that is, to any gay apprentice in the magical art who may have chosen this specimen of the prestidigitatory genus to study this evening in the hope of grasping more clearly just how the artistic contraption works, of observing some fresh detail in the complex process by which the heady wine of amusement is distilled from the grape of composition. The rest of you I must beg for a little while to sit back and relax as the remarks I have now to make do not

concern you; your turn will follow later.

* * *

So, strange young man,—it is at his command, remember, that I say this to you; whether I agree with it or not is neither here nor there—you have decided on the conjurer's profession. Somewhere, in the middle of a salt marsh or at the bottom of a kitchen garden or on the top of a bus, you heard imprisoned Ariel call for help, and it is now a liberator's face that congratu­lates you from your shaving mirror every morning. As you walk the cold streets hatless, or sit over coffee and doughnuts in the corner of a cheap restaurant, your secret has already set you apart from the howling merchants and transacting multitudes to watch with fascinated distaste the bellowing barging bang­ing passage of the awkward profit-seeking elbow, the dazed eye of the gregarious acquisitive condition. Lying awake at night in your single bed you are conscious of a power by which you will survive the wallpaper of your boardinghouse or the expensive bourgeois horrors of your home. Yes, Ariel is grateful; He does come when you call, He does tell you all the gossip He overhears on the stairs, all the goings-on He ob­serves through the keyhole; He really is willing to arrange anything you care to ask for, and you are rapidly finding out the right orders to give—who should be killed in the hunting accident, which couple to send into the cast-iron shelter, what scent will arouse a Norwegian engineer, how to get the young

hero from the country lawyer's office to the Princess' recep­tion, when to mislay the letter, where the cabinet minister should be reminded of his mother, why the dishonest valet must be a martyr to indigestion but immune from the common cold.

As the gay productive months slip by, in spite of fretful discouraged days, of awkward moments of misunderstanding or rather, seen retrospectively as happily cleared up and got over, verily because of them, you are definitely getting the hang of this, at first so novel and bewildering, relationship between magician and familiar, whose duty it is to sustain your infinite conceptual appetite with vivid concrete experi­ences. And, as the months turn into years, your wonder-work­ing romance into an economic habit, the encountered case of good or evil in our wide world of property and boredom which leaves you confessedly and unsympathetically at a loss, the aberrant phase in the whole human cycle of ecstasy and exhaustion with which you are imperfectly familiar, become increasingly rare. No perception however petite, no notion however subtle, escapes your attention or baffles your under­standing: on entering any room you immediately distinguish the wasters who throw away their fruit half-eaten from the preservers who bottle all the summer; as the passengers file down the ship's gangway you unerringly guess which suitcase contains indecent novels; a five-minute chat about the weather or the coming elections is all you require to diagnose any dis­temper, however self-assured, for by then your eye has already spotted the tremor of the lips in that infinitesimal moment while the lie was getting its balance, your ear already picked up the heart's low whimper which the capering legs were de­termined to stifle, your nose detected on love's breath the trace of ennui which foretells his early death, or the despair just starting to smoulder at the base of the scholar's brain which years hence will suddenly blow it up with one appalling laugh: in every case you can prescribe the saving treatment called for, knowing at once when it may be gentle and remedial, when all that is needed is soft music and a pretty girl. and when it must be drastic and surgical, when nothing will do any good

but political disgrace or financial and erotic failure. If I seem to attribute these powers to you when the eyes, the ears, the ;

nose, the putting two and two together are, of course, all His, j

and yours only the primitive wish to know, it is a rhetorical habit I have caught from your, in the main juvenile and fem­inine, admirers whose naive unawareness of whom they ought properly to thank and praise you see no point in, for mere accuracy's stuffy sake, correcting.

Anyway, the partnership is a brilliant success. On you go together to ever greater and faster triumphs; ever more major grows the accumulated work, ever more masterly the manner, sound even at its pale sententious worst, and at its best the rich red personal flower of the grave and grand, until one day which you can never either at the time or later identify exactly, your strange fever reaches its crisis and from now on begins, ever so slowly, maybe to subside. At first you cannot tell what or why is the matter; you have only a vague feeling that it is no longer between you so smooth and sweet as it used to be. Sour silences appear, at first only for an occasional moment, [

but progressively more frequently and more prolonged, curdled j

moods in which you cannot for the life of you think of any request to make, and His dumb standing around, waiting for orders gets inexplicably but maddeningly on your nerves, until presently, to your amazement, you hear yourself asking Him if He wouldn't like a vacation and are shocked by your feeling of intense disappointment when He who has always hitherto so immediately and recklessly taken your slightest hint, says gauchely "No." So it goes on from exasperated bad to des­perate worst until you realise in despair that there is nothing for it but you two to part. Collecting all your strength for the distasteful task, you finally manage to stammer or shout "You are free. Good-bye," but to your dismay He whose obedience *

through all the enchanted years has never been less than per- |

fect, now refuses to budge. Striding up to Him in fury, you glare into His unblinking eyes and stop dead, transfixed with horror at seeing reflected there, not what you had always ex­pected to see, a conqueror smiling at a conqueror, both prom- ! ising mountains and marvels, but a gibbering fist-clenched J

creature with which you are all too unfamiliar, for this is the first time indeed that you have met the only subject that you have, who is not a dream amenable to magic but the all too solid flesh you must acknowledge as your own; at last you have come face to face with me, and are appalled to learn how far I am from beuig, in any sense, your dish; how completely lacking in that poise and calm and all-forgiving because all- understanding good nature which to the critical eye is so wonderfully and domestically present on every page of your published inventions.

But where, may I ask, should I have acquired them, when, like a society mother who, although she is, of course, as she^ tells everyone, absolutely devoted to her child, simply cannot leave the dinner table just now and really must be in Le Touquet to-morrow, and so leaves him in charge of servants she doesn't know or boarding schools she has never seen, you have never in all these years taken the faintest personal inter­est in me? "Oh!" you protestingly gasp, "but how can you say such a thing, after I've toiled and moiled and worked my fin­gers to the bone, trying to give you a good home, after all the hours I've spent planning wholesome nourishing meals for you, after all the things I've gone without so that you should have swimming lessons and piano lessons and a new bicycle. Have I ever let you go out in summer without your sun hat, or come in in winter without feeling your stockings and insisting, if they were the least bit damp, on your changing them at once? Haven't you always been allowed to do everything, in reason, that you liked?

Exactly: even deliberate ill-treatment would have been less unkind. Gallows and battlefields are, after all, no less places of mutual concern than sofa and bridal-bed; the dashing flirta­tions of fighter pilots and the coy tactics of twirled moustache and fluttered fan, the gasping mudcaked wooing of the coarsest foes and the reverent rage of the highest-powered romance, the ' lover's nip and the grip of the torturer's tongs are all,—ask Ariel,—variants of one common type, the bracket within which life and death with such passionate gusto cohabit, to be dis­tinguished solely by the plus or minus sign which stands

befare them, signs which He is able at any time and in either directian to switch, but the ane exceptian, the sum no magic af His can ever transmute, is the indifferent zero. Had yau tried to destray me, had we wrestled thraugh lang dark haurs, we might by daybreak have learnt something fram each other ; in some panting pause to recover breath for further more sav­age blaws or in the moment before your death ar mine, we might bath have heard together that music which explains and pardons all.

Had yau, on the other hand, really left me alone to go my whale free-wheeling way to disorder, to be drunk every day before lunch, to jump stark naked fram bed to bed, to have a fit every week or a major operation every other year, to forge checks or water the widow's stock, I might, after cauntless skids and punctures have come by the bumpy third-class road of guilt and remorse, smack into that very same truth which you were meanwhile admiring fram your distant camfortable veranda but would never point out to me. i

Such genuine escapades, thaugh, might have disturbed the master at his meditations and even involved him in trouble with the palice. The strains of oats, therefore, that you pru­dently permitted me to sow were each and all of an unmiti- | gatedly minor wildness: a quick cold clasp now and then in ) same louche hatel to calm me dawn while yau got on with the | so thorough documentation af your great unhappy lave for ane [ who by being bad ar dead or married pravided you with the " Gaod Right Subject that would never cease to bristle with im- ( portance; one bout af flu per winter, an occasional twinge of toathache, and enaugh tobacco to keep me in a good temper while you composed your melting eclogues of rustic piety ; licence to break my shoelaces, spill soup an my tie, burn cig­arette holes in the tableclath, lase letters and borrowed baoks, 15 and generally keep myself busy while you polished to a per- fectian your lyric praises of the more candid, more luxurious warld to came.

Can you wonder then, when, as was bound to happen sooner or later, yaur charms, because they no longer amuse you, have cracked and your spirits, because you are tired of giving or­ders, have ceased to obey, and you are left alone with me, the dark thing you could never abide to be with, if I do not yield you kind answer or admire you for the achievements I was never allowed to profit from, if I resent hearing you speak of your neglect of me as your "exile," of the pains you never took with me as "all lost"?

But why continue? From now on we shall have, as we both know only too well, no company but each other's, and if I have had, as I consider, a good deal to put up with from you, I must own that, after all, I am not just" the person I would have chosen for a life companion myself; so the only chance, which in any case is slim enough, of my getting a tolerably new master and you a tolerably new man, lies in our both learning, if possible and as soon as possible, to forgive and forget the past, and to keep our respective hopes for the future within moderate, very moderate, limits.

And now at last it is you, assorted, consorted specimens of the general popular type, the major flock who have trotted trustingly hither but found, you reproachfully baah, no graz­ing, that I turn to and address on behalf of Ariel and myself. To your questions I shall attempt no direct reply, for the mere fact that you have been able so anxiously to put them is in itself sufficient proof that you possess their answers. All your clamour signifies is this: that your first big crisis, the breaking of the childish spell in which, so long as it enclosed you, there was, for you, no mirror, no magic, for everything that hap­pened was a miracle—it was just as extraordinary for a chair to be a chair as for it to turn into a horse; it was no more absurd that the girding on of coal-scuttle and poker should transform you into noble Hector than that you should have a father and mother who called you Tommy—and it was there­fore only necessary for you to presuppose one genius, one unrivalled I to wish these wonders in all their endless pleni­tude and novelty to be, is, in relation to your present, behind, that your singular transparent globes of enchantment have shattered one by one, and you have now all come together in


the larger colder emptier room on this side of the mirror which does force your eyes to recognise and reckon with the two of us, your ears to detect the irreconcilable difference between my reiterated affirmation of what your furnished circumstances categorically are, and His successive propositions as to every- !

thing else which they conditionally might be. You have, as I ;

say, taken your first step.

The Journey of life—the down-at-heels disillusioned figure can still put its characterisation across—is infinitely long and its possible destinations infinitely distant from one another, but the time spent in actual travel is infinitesimally small. The hours the traveller measures are those in which he is at rest between the three or four decisive instants of transportation which are all he needs and all he gets to carry him the whole of his way; the scenery he observes is the view, gorgeous or drab, he glimpses from platform and siding; the incidents he thrills or blushes to remember take place in waiting and wash­rooms, ticket queues and parcels offices: it is in those promis­cuous places of random association, in that air of anticipatory fidget, that he makes friends and enemies, that he promises, confesses, kisses, and betrays until, either because it is the one he has been expecting, or because, losing his temper, he has vowed to take the first to come along, or because he has been given a free ticket, or simply by misdirection or mistake, a (

train arrives which he does get into: it whistles—at least he [

thinks afterwards he remembers it whistling—but before he ^

can blink, it has come to a standstill again and there he stands clutching his battered bags, surrounded by entirely strange smells and noises—yet in their smelliness and noisiness how familiar—one vast important stretch the nearer Nowhere, that still smashed terminus at which he will, in due course, be de­posited, seedy and by himself.

Yes, you have made a definite start; you have left your homes way back in the farming provinces or way out in the suburban tundras, but whether you have been hanging around for years or have barely and breathlessly got here on one of 1

those locals which keep arriving minute after minute, this is I

still only the main depot, the Grandly Average Place from I

which at odd hours the expresses leave seriously and som­brely for Somewhere, and where it is still possible for me to posit the suggestion that you go no farther. You will never, after all, feel better than in your present shaved and break­fasted state which there are restaurants and barber shops here indefinitely to preserve; you will never feel more secure than you do now in your knowledge that you have your ticket, your passport is in order, you have not forgotten to pack your pyjamas and an extra clean shirt; you will never have the same opportunity of learning about all the holy delectable spots of current or historic interest—an insistence on reaching one will necessarily exclude the others—than you have in these be- postered halls; you will never meet a jollier, more various crowd than you see around you here, sharing with you the throbbing, suppressed excitement of those to whom the excit­ing thing is still, perhaps, to happen. But once you leave, no matter in which direction, your next stop will be far outside this land of habit that so democratically stands up for your right to stagestruck hope, and well inside one of those, all equally foreign, uncomfortable and despotic, certainties of failure or success. Here at least I, and Ariel too, are free to warn you not, should we meet again there, to speak to either of us, not to engage either of us as your guide, but there we shall no longer be able to refuse you; then, unfortunately for you, we shall be compelled to say nothing and obey your fatal foolish commands. Here, whether you listen to me or not, and it's highly improbable that you will, I can at least warn you what will happen if at our next meeting you should insist— and that is all too probable—on putting one of us in charge.

"Release us," you will beg, then, supposing it is I whom you make for,—oh how awfully uniform, once one translates them out of your private lingoes of expression, all your sorrows are and how awfully well I know them—"release us from our minor roles. Carry me back, Master, to the cathedral town where the canons run through the water meadows with butter-


fly nets and the old women keep sweetshops in the cobbled side streets, or back to the upland mill town (gunpowder and plush) with its grope-movie and its poolroom lit by gas, carry me back to the days before my wife had put on weight, back to the years when beer was cheap and the rivers really froze j

in winter. Pity me, Captain, pity a poor old stranded sea-salt whom an unlucky voyage has wrecked on the desolate mahog­any coast of this bar with nothing left him but his big mous­tache. Give me my passage home, let me see that harbour once again just as it was before I learned the bad words. Patriarchs wiser than Abraham mended their nets on the modest wharf; white and wonderful beings undressed on the sand-dunes; sunset glittered on the plate-glass windows of the Marine Biological Station; far off on the extreme horizon a whale spouted. Look, Uncle, look. They have broken my glasses and 1

I have lost my silver whistle. Pick me up, Uncle, let little Johnny ride away on your massive shoulders to recover his green kingdom, where the steam rollers are as friendly as the farm dogs and it would never become necessary to look over one's left shoulder or clench one's right fist in one's pocket. You cannot miss it. Black currant bushes hide the ruined opera house where badgers are said to breed in great numbers; an i

old horse-tramway winds away westward through suave foot- '

hills crowned with stone circles—follow it and by nightfall |

one would come to a large good-natured waterwheel—to the (

north, beyond a forest inhabited by charcoal burners, one can see the Devil's Bedposts quite distinctly, to the east the mu­seum where for sixpence one can touch the ivory chessman. O Cupid, Cupid, howls the whole dim chorus, take us home. We have never felt really well in this climate of distinct ideas; we have never been able to follow the regulations properly; Business, Science, Religion, Art, and all the other fictitious im- ,

mortal persons who matter here have, frankly, not been very kind. We're so, so tired, the rewarding soup is stone cold, and over our blue wonders the grass grew long ago. O take us home with you, strong and swelling One, home to your promiscuous '

pastures where the minotaur of authority is just a roly-poly ruminant and nothing is at stake, those purring sites and amus- .

ing vistas where the fluctuating arabesques of sound, the continuous eruption of colours and scents, the whole rich incoherence of a nature made up of gaps and asymmetrical events plead beautifully and bravely for our undistress."

And in that very moment when you so cry for deliverance from any and every anxious possibility, I shall have no option but to be faithful to my oath of service and instantly transport you, not indeed to any cathedral town or mill town or harbour or hillside or jungle or other specific Eden which your mem­ory necessarily but falsely conceives of as the ultimately liberal condition, which in point of fact you have never known yet, but directly to that downright state itself. Here you are. This is it. Directly overhead a full moon casts a circle of dazzling light without any penumbra, exactly circumscribing its desolation in which every object is extraordinarily still and sharp. Cones of extinct volcanoes rise up abruptly from the lava plateau fissured by chasms and pitted with hot springs from which steam rises without interruption straight up into the windless rarefied atmosphere. Here and there a geyser erupts without warning, spouts furiously for a few seconds and as suddenly subsides. Here, where the possessive note is utterly silent and all events are tautological repetitions and no decision will ever alter the secular stagnation, at long last you are, as you have asked to be, the only subject. Who, When, Why, the poor tired little historic questions fall wilting into a hush of utter failure. Your tears splash down upon clinkers which will never be persuaded to recognise a neighbour and there is really and truly no one to appear with tea and help. You have indeed come all the way to the end of your bach­elor's journey where Liberty stands with her hands behind her back, not caring, not minding anything. Confronted by a straight and snubbing stare to which mythology is bosh, sur­rounded by an infinite passivity and purely arithmetrical dis­order which is only open to perception, and with nowhere to go on to, your existence is indeed free at last to choose its own meaning, that is, to plunge headlong into despair and fall through silence fathomless and dry, all fact your single drop, all value your pure alas.

* * *

But what of that other, smaller, but doubtless finer group among you, important persons at the top of the ladder, ex­hausted lions of the season, local authorities with their tense tired faces, elderly hermits of both sexes living gloomily in J

the delta of a great fortune, whose amour pro pre prefers to j

turn for help to my more spiritual colleague. ,

"0 yes," you will sigh, "we have had what once we would have called success. I moved the vices out of the city into a !

chain of re-conditioned lighthouses. I introduced statistical methods into the Liberal Arts. I revived the country dances and installed electric stoves in the mountain cottages. I saved i

democracy by buying steel. I gave the caesura its freedom. j

But this world is no better and it is now quite clear to us that "

there is nothing to be done with such a ship of fools, adrift on I

a sugarloaf sea in which it is going very soon and suitably to |

founder. Deliver us, dear Spirit, from the tantrums of our i

telephones and the whispers of our secretaries conspiring I

against Man; deliver us from these helpless agglomerations of |

dishevelled creatures with their bed-wetting, vomiting, weep­ing bodies, their giggling, fugitive, disappointing hearts, and scrawling, blotted, misspelt minds, to whom we have so fool­ishly tried to bring the light they did not want ; deliver us from all the litter of billets-doux, empty beer bottles, laundry lists, l

directives, promissory notes and broken toys, the terrible mess j

that this particularised life, which we have so futilely at- (

tempted to tidy, sullenly insists on leaving behind it; translate i

us, bright Angel, from this hell of inert and ailing matter, grow­ing steadily senile in a time for ever immature, to that blessed realm, so far above the twelve impertinent winds and the four unreliable seasons, that Heaven of the Really General Case where, tortured no longer by three dimensions and immune from temporal vertigo, Life turns into Light, absorbed for good into the permanently stationary, completely self-sufficient, absolutely reasonable One."

Obliged by the terms of His contract to gratify this other i

request of yours, the wish for freedom to transcend any con- 1

dition, for direct unentailed power without any, however secretly immanent, obligation to inherit or transmit, what can poor shoulder-shrugging Ariel do but lead you forthwith ihto a nightmare which has all the wealth of exciting action and all the emotional poverty of an adventure story for boys, a state of perpetual emergency and everlasting improvisation where all is need and change.

All the phenomena of an empirically ordinary world are given. Extended objects appear to which events happen—old men catch dreadful coughs, little girls get their arms twisted. flames run whooping through woods, round a river bend, as harmless looking as a dirty old bearskin rug, comes the gliding fury of a town-effacing wave, but these are merely elements in an allegorical landscape to which mathematical measure­ment and phenomenological analysis have no relevance.

All the voluntary movements are possible—crawling through flues and old sewers, sauntering past shop-fronts, tiptoeing through quicksands and mined areas, running through derelict factories and across empty plains, jumping over brooks, diving into pools or swimming along between banks of roses, pulling at manholes or pushing at revolving doors, clinging to rotten balustrades, sucking at straws or wounds; all the modes of transport, letters, oxcarts, canoes, hansom cabs, trains, trol­leys, cars, aeroplanes, balloons, are available, but any sense of direction, any knowledge of where on earth one has come from or where on earth one is going to is completely absent.

Religion and culture seem to be represented by a catholic belief that something is lacking which must be found, but as to what that something is, the keys of heaven, the missing heir, genius, the smells of childhood, or a sense of humour, why it is lacking, whether it has been deliberately stolen, or accidentally lost or just hidden for a lark, and who is respon­sible, our ancestors, ourselves, the social structure, or mys­terious wicked powers, there are as many faiths as there are searchers, and clues can be found behind every clock, under every stone, and in every hollow tree to support all of them.

Again, other selves undoubtedly exist, but though everyone's


pocket is bulging with birth certificates, insurance policies, passports and letters of credit, there is no way of proving whether they are genuine or planted or forged, so that no one knows whether another is his friend disguised as an enemy j

or his enemy disguised as a friend (there is probably no one j

whose real name is Brown), or whether the police who here as elsewhere are grimly busy, are crushing a criminal revolt or upholding a vicious tyranny, any more than he knows |

whether he himself is a victim of the theft, or the thief, or a f

rival thief, a professionally interested detective or a profes- (

sionally impartial journalist. (

Even the circumstances of the tender passion, the long- |

distance calls, the assignation at the aquarium, the farewell embrace under the fish-tail burner on the landing, are con- l

tinually present, but since, each time it goes through its per- (

formance, it never knows whether it is saving a life, or obtain­ing secret information, or forgetting or spiting its real love, the I heart feels nothing but a dull percussion of conceptual fore- | boding. Everything, in short, suggests Mind but, surrounded by an infinite extension of the adolescent difficulty, a rising of the subjective and subjunctive to ever steeper, stormier heights, the panting frozen expressive gift has collapsed under i the strain of its communicative anxiety, and contributes noth- 1 ing by way of meaning but a series of staccato barks or a j delirious gush of glossolalia. (

And from this nightmare of public solitude, this everlasting Not Yet, what relief have you but in an ever giddier collective ;

gallop, with bisson eye and bevel course, toward the grey horizon of the bleaker vision, what landmarks but the four dead rivers, the Joyless, the Flaming, the Mournful, and the i

Swamp of Tears, what goal but the black stone on which the bones are cracked, for only there in its cry of agony can your existence find at last an unequivocal meaning and your refusal I

to be yourself become a serious despair, the love nothing, the

fear all?

Such are the alternative routes, the facile glad-handed high­way or the virtuous averted track, by which the human effort

to make its own fortune arrives all eager at its abruptly dread­ful end. I have tried—the opportunity was not to be neglected —to raise the admonitory forefinger, to ring thealarming bell, but with so little confidence of producing the right result, so certain that the open eye and attentive ear will always inter­pret any sight and any sound to their advantage, every rebuff as a consolation, every prohibition as a rescue—that is what they open and attend for—that I find myself almost hoping, for your sake, that I have had the futile honour of addressing the blind and the deaf.

Having learnt his language, I begin to feel something of the serio-comic embarrassment of the dedicated dramatist, who, in representing to you your condition of estrangement from the truth, is doomed to fail the more he succeeds, for the more truthfully he paints the condition, the less clearly can he indi­cate the truth from which it is estranged, the brighter his revelation of the truth in its order, its justice, its joy, the fainter shows his picture of your actual condition in all its drabness and sham, and, worse still, the more sharply he defines the estrangement itself—and, ultimately, what other aim and justification has he, what else exactly is the artistic gift which he is forbidden to hide, if not to make you unfor­gettably conscious of the ungarnished offended gap between- what you so questionably are and what you are commanded without any question to become, of the unqualified No that' opposes your every step in any direction?—the more he must strengthen your delusion that an awareness of the gap is in itself a bridge, your interest in your imprisonment a release, so that, far from your being led by him to contrition and sur­render, the regarding of your defects in his mirror, your dia­logue, using his words, with yourself about yourself, becomes the one activity which never, like devouring or collecting or spending, lets you down, the one game which can be guaran­teed, whatever the company, to catch on, a madness of which you can only be cured by some shock quite outside his control, an unpredictable misting over of his glass or an absurd mis­print in his text.

Our unfortunate dramatist, therefore, is placed in the un­seemly predicament of having to give all his passion, all his skill, all his time to the task of "doing" life—consciously to give anything less than all would be a gross betrayal of his gift and an unpardonable presumption—as if it lay in his power to solve this dilemma—yet of having at the same time to hope that some unforeseen mishap will intervene to ruin his effect, without, however, obliterating your disappointment, the expectation aroused by him that there was an effect to ruin, that, if the smiling interest never did arrive, it must, through no fault of its own, have got stuck somewhere; that, exhausted, ravenous, delayed by fog, mobbed and mauled by a thousand irrelevancies, it has, nevertheless, not forgotten its promise but is still trying desperately to get a connection.

Beating about for some large loose image to define the original drama which aroused his imitative passion, the first performance in which the players were their own audience, the worldly stage on which their behaving flesh was really sore and sorry—for the floods of tears were not caused by onions, the deformities and wounds did not come off after a good wash, the self-stabbed heroine could not pick herself up again to make a gracious bow nor her seducer go demurely home to his plain and middle-aged spouse—the fancy immedi­ately flushed is of the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company indeed.

Our performance—for Ariel and I are, you know this now, just as deeply involved as any of you—which we were obliged, all of us, to go on with and sit through right to the final dissonant chord, has been so indescribably inexcusably awful. Sweating and shivering in our moth-eaten ill-fitting stock costumes which, with only a change of hat and re­arrangement of safety-pins, had to do for the landsknecht and the Parisian art-student, bumping into, now a rippling palace, now a primeval forest full of holes, at cross purposes with the scraping bleating orchestra we could scarcely hear for half the instruments were missing and the cottage piano which was filling-out must have stood for too many years in some damp parlour, we floundered on from fiasco to fiasco, the schmalz tenor never quite able at his big moments to get right up nor the ham bass right down, the stud contralto gargling through her maternal grief, the ravished coloratura trilling madly off-key and the re-united lovers half a bar apart, the knock-kneed armies shuffling limply through their bloody battles, the unearthly harvesters hysterically entangled in their honest fugato.

Now it is over. No, we have not dreamt it. Here we really stand, down stage with red faces and no applause; no effect, however simple, no piece of business, however unimportant, came off; there was not a single aspect of our whole produc­tion, not even the huge stuffed bird of happiness, for which a kind word could, however patronisingly, be said.

Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as we ate, neither cosy nor playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void—we have never stood anywhere else,—when our rea­sons are silenced by the heavy huge derision,—There is nothing to say. There never has been,—and our wills chuck in their hands—There is no way out. There never was,—it is at this moment that for the first time in our lives we hear, not the sounds which, as born actors, we have hitherto con­descended to use as an excellent vehicle for displaying our personalities and looks, but the real Word which is our only raison d'etre. Not that we have improved; everything, the massacres, the whippings, the lies, the twaddle, and all their carbon copies are still present, more obviously than ever; nothing has been reconstructed; our shame, our fear, our incorrigible staginess, all wish and no resolve, are still, and more intensely than ever, all we have: only now it is not in spite of them but with them that we are blessed by that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essen­tial emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and proscenium arch—we understand them at last—are feebly figurative signs, so that all our meanings are reversed and it is precisely in its negative image of Judgement that we can positively envisage Mercy; it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours. Its great coherences stand out through our secular blur in all their overwhelmingly righteous obligation; its voice speaks through our muffling banks of artificial flowers and un­flinchingly delivers its authentic molar pardon; its spaces greet us with all their grand old prospect of wonder and width; the working charm is the full bloom of the unbothered state; the sounded note is the restored relation.

Postscript

(Ariel to Caliban. Echo by the Prompter]

Weep no more but pity me, Fleet persistent shadow cast By your lameness, caught at last, Helplessly in love with you, Elegance, art, fascination, Fascinated by Drab mortality; Spare me a humiliation, ' To your faults be true: I can sing as you reply

Wish for nothing lest you mar The perfection in these eyes Whose entire devotion lies At the mercy of your will; Tempt not your sworn comrade,—only As I am can I Love you as you are— For my company be lonely

For my health be ill: I will sing if you will cry

Never hope to say farewell, For our lethargy is such Heaven's kindness cannot touch Nor earth's frankly brutal drum; This was long ago decided, Both of us know why, Can, alas, foretell, When our falsehoods are divided,

What we shall become, One evaporating sigh

. . . I

August 1942-February 1944

61

Noon

How still it is; the horses

Have moved into the shade, the mothers

Have followed their migrating gardens.

Curlews on kettle moraines Foretell the end of time, The doom of paradox.

But lovelorn sighs ascend From wretched-greedy regions Which cannot include themselves.

And the freckled orphan flinging Ducks and drakes at the pond Stops looking for stones,

And wishes he were a steamboat, Or Lugalzaggisi the loud Tyrant of Erech and Umma.

from "The Age of Anxiety": ? 1945

n

: tfm

Lament for a Lawgiver

Sob, heavy world, Sob as you spin Mantled in mist, remote from the happy: The washerwomen have wailed all night, The disconsolate clocks are crying together,

And the bells toll and toll For tall Agrippa who touched the sky:

Shut is that shining eye Which enlightened the lampless and lifted up The flat and foundering, reformed the weeds Into civil cereals and sobered the bulls;

Away the cylinder seal, The didactic digit and dreaded voice Which imposed peace on the pullulating Primordial mess. Mourn for him now, Our lost dad, Our colossal father.

I

For seven cycles For seven years Past vice and virtue, surviving both, Through pluvial periods, paroxysms Of wind and wet, through whirlpools of heat,

And comas of deadly cold, On an old white horse, an ugly nag,

In his faithful youth he followed The black ball as it bowled downhill On the spotted spirit's spiral journey, Its purgative path to that point of rest Where longing leaves it, and saw Shimmering in the shade the shrine of gold, The magical marvel no man dare touch, Between the towers the tree of life And the well of wishes, The waters of joy.

Then he harrowed hell, Healed'the abyss Of torpid instinct and trifling flux, Laundered it, lighted it, made it lovable with Cathedrals and theories; thanks to him

Brisker smells abet us, Cleaner clouds accost our vision And honest sounds our ears. For he ignored the Nightmares and annexed their ranges, Put the clawing Chimaeras in cold storage, Berated the Riddle till it roared and fled,

Won the Battle of Whispers, Stopped the Stupids, stormed into The Fumblers' Forts, confined the Sulky To their drab ditches and drove the Crashing Bores to their bogs, Their beastly moor.

In the high heavens, The ageless places, The gods are wringing their great worn hands For their watchman is away, their world-engine Creaking and cracking, Conjured no more

By his master music to wed Their truths to times, the Eternal Objects

Drift about in a daze: O the lepers are loose in Lombard Street, The rents are rising in the river basins, The insects are angry. Who will dust The cobwebbed kingdoms now? For our lawgiver lies below his people. Bigger bones of a better kind, Unwarped by their weight, as white limestone Under green grass, The grass that fades.

from "The Age of Anxiety" : ? 1946

Under Which Lyre

A Reactionary Tract for the Times

( PHI BE T A K A P PA P O EM, H A R V A R D, 1 9 4 6 )

Ares at last has quit the field, The bloodstains on the bushes yield

To seeping showers, And in their convalescent state The fractured towns associate With summer flowers.

j

Encamped upon the college plain Raw veterans already train '

As freshman forces; i

Instructors with sarcastic tongue Shepherd the battle-weary young Through basic courses,

Among bewildering appliances

For mastering the arts and sciences »

They stroll or run, 1

And nerves that never flinched at slaughter Are shot to pieces by the shorter Poems of Donne.

Professors back from secret missions Resume their proper eruditions,

Though some regret it; They liked their dictaphones a lot, They met some big wheels, and do not Let you forget it.

But Zeus' inscrutable decree Permits the will-to-disagree To be pandemic,

Ordains that vaudeville shall preach And every commencement speech Be a polemic.

Let Ares doze, that other war Is instantly declared once more 'Twixt those who follow Precocious Hermes all the way And those who without qualms obey Pompous Apollo.

Brutal like all Olympic games,

Though fought with smiles and Christian names

And less dramatic, This dialectic strife between The civil gods is just as mean, And more fanatic.

What high immortals do in mirth Is life and death on Middle Earth;

Their a-historic Antipathy forever gripes All ages and somatic types, The sophomoric

Who face the future's darkest hints With giggles or with prairie squints

As stout as Cortez, And those who like myself turn pale As we approach with ragged sail The fattening forties.

The sons of Hermes love to play, And only do their best when they

' Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important.

Related by antithesis, A compromise between us is Impossible;

Respect perhaps but friendship never: |

Falstaff the fool confronts forever The prig Prince Hal.

If he would leave the self alone, Apollo's welcome to the throne,

Fasces and falcons; He loves to rule, has always done it; The earth would soon, did Hermes run it, Be like the Balkans.

i

But jealous of our god of dreams, His common-sense in secret schemes

To rule the heart; Unable to invent the lyre,

Creates with simulated fire 1

Official art.

And when he occupies a college, Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;

He pays particular '

Attention to Commercial Thought, Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport, In his curricula.

Athletic, extrovert and crude, For him, to work in solitude

Is the offence, The goal a populous Nirvana: His shield bears this device: Mens sana Qui maJ y pense.

Today his arms, we must confess, From Right to Left have met success, His banners wave

From Yale to Princeton, and the news From Broadway to the Book Reviews Is very grave.

His radio Homers all day long In over-Whitmanated song

That does not scan, With adjectives laid end to end, Extol the doughnut and commend The Common Man.

His, too, each homely lyric thing On sport or spousal love or spring

Or dogs or dusters, Invented by some court-house bard For recitation by the yard In filibusters.

To him ascend the prize orations And sets of fugal variations

On some folk-ballad, While dietitians sacrifice A glass of prune-juice or a nice Marsh-mallow salad.

Charged with his compound of sensational Sex plus some undenominational

Religious matter, Enormous novels by co-eds Rain down on our defenceless heads Till our teeth chatter.

In fake Hermetic uniforms Behind our battle-line, in swarms

That keep alighting, His existentialists declare That they are in complete despair, Yet go on writing.

No matter; He shall be defied; White Aphrodite is on our side:

What though his threat To organize us grow more critical? Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical, Shall beat him yet.

Lone scholars, sniping from the walls Of learned periodicals, Our facts defend, Our intellectual marines, Landing in little magazines Capture a trend.

By night our student Underground At cocktail parties whisper round

From ear to ear; Fat figures in the public eye Collapse next morning, ambushed by Some witty sneer.

In our morale must lie our strength: So, that we may behold at length

Routed Apollo's Battalions melt away like fog, Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue, Which runs as follows:—

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis

On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms With guys in advertising firms,

Nor speak with such As read the Bible for its prose, Nor, above all, make love to those Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens.

If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views.

1946

64

The Fall of Rome

(FOR CYRIL CONNOLLY)

The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may Extoll the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, i

Silently and very fast. ♦

January 1947 (

65

In Praise of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones

Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes

With their surface fragrance of thyme and beneath A secret system of caves and conduits; hear these springs That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle

Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving

Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region

Of short distances and definite places: What could be more like Mother or a fitter background

For her son, for the nude young male who lounges Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting

That for all his faults he is loved, whose works are but Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop

To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,

Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish To receive more attention than his brothers, whether By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, sometimes Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged

On the shady side of a square at midday in Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think

There are any important secrets, unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral

And not to be pacified by a clever line Or a good lay: for, accustomed to a stone that responds,

They have never had to veil their faces in awe Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;

Adjusted to the local needs of valleys Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,

Their eyes have never looked into infinite space Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,

Their legs have never encountered the fungi And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives

With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common. So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works

Remains comprehensible: to become a pimp Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice

For effects that bring down the house could happen to all But the best and the worst of us ...

That is why, I suppose, The best and worst never stayed here long but sought Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,

The light less public and the meaning of life Something more than a mad camp. "Come!" cried

the granite wastes, "How evasive is your humor, how accidental i

Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be

Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels, "On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both

Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: i

"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;

That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; I

There are only the various envies, all of them sad." j

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,

Nor its peace the historical calm of a site Where something was settled once and for all: A backward j

And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain

Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite: f

It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,

Admired for his earnest habit of calling The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy

By these solid statues which so obviously doubt His antimythological myth; and these gamins, j

Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's

Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught, \ Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble 5

The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water

Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music

Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward

To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,

These modifications of matter into Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,

Made solely for pleasure, make a further point: The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,

Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

May 1948

66

Song

Deftly, admiral, cast your fly Into the slow deep hover, Till the wise old trout mistake and die; Salt are the deeps that cover The glittering fleets you led, White is your head.

Read on, ambassador, engrossed

In your favourite Stendhal; The Outer Provinces are lost, Unshaven horsemen swill The great wines of the Chateaux Where you danced long ago.

Do not turn, do not lift, your eyes

Toward the still pair standing On the bridge between your properties, Indifferent to your minding: In its glory, in its power, This is their hour.

Nothing your strength, your skill, could do

Can alter their embrace Or dispersuade the Furies who At the appointed place With claw and dreadful brow Wait for them now.

June 1948

67

A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring; |

After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be as shocking as they said If that would still be there After the shocked were dead.

Now, unready to die

But already at the stage

When one starts to dislike the young,

I am glad those points in the sky May also be counted among The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like The stoic manner in which The classical authors wrote, Only the young and the rich Have the nerve or the figure to strike The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night

By no established rule,

Some event may already have hurled

Its first little No at the right

Of the laws we accept to school

Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead, Unconscious of final ends, As I walk home to bed, Asking what judgement waits My person, all my friends, And these United States.

August 1948

Memorial for the City

In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning.

Juliana of Norwich

I

The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open

Onto Homer's world, not ours. First and last

They magnify earth, the abiding

Mother of gods and men; if they notice either

It is only in passing: gods behave, men die,

Both feel in their own small way, but She

Does nothing and does not care,

She alone is seriously there.

The crow on the crematorium chimney

And the camera roving the battle

Record a space where time has no place.

On the right a village is burning, in a market-town to the left

The soldiers fire, the mayor bursts into tears,

The captives are led away, while far in the distance

A tanker sinks into a dedolent sea.

That is the way things happen; for ever and ever

Plum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers

The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers

And the hard bright light composes

A meaningless moment into an eternal fact

Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:

One enjoys glory, one endures shame;

He may, she must. There is no one to blame.

The steady eyes of the crow and the camera's candid eye See as honestly as they know how, but they lie. The crime of life is not time. Even now, in this night Among the ruins of the Post-Virgilian City Where our past is a chaos of graves

and the barbed-wire stretches ahead Into our future till it is lost to sight, Our grief is not Greek: As we bury our dead We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear, That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity Neither ourselves nor our city; Whoever the searchlights catch,

whatever the loudspeakers blare, We are not to despair.

II

Alone in a room Pope Gregory whispered his name

While the Emperor shone on a centreless world From wherever he happened to be; the New City rose

Upon their opposition, the yes and no Of a rival allegiance; the sword, the local lord

Were not all; there was home and Rome; Fear of the stranger was lost on the way to the shrine.

The facts, the acts of the City bore a double meaning:

Limbs became hymns; embraces expressed in jest A more permanent tie; infidel faces replaced The family foe in the choleric's nightmare; The children of water parodied in their postures

The infinite patience of heaven; Those born under Saturn felt the gloom of the day of doom.

Scribes and innkeepers prospered; suspicious tribes combined

To rescue Jerusalem from a dull god, And disciplined logicians fought to recover thought

From the eccentricities of the private brain For the Sane City; framed in her windows, orchards, ports,

Wild beasts, deep rivers and dry rocks Lay nursed on the smile of a merciful Madonna.

In a sandy. province Luther denounced as obscene

The machine that so smoothly forgave and saved If paid; he announced to the Sinful City a grinning gap

No rite could cross; he abased her before the Grace: Henceforth division was also to be her condition;

Her conclusions were to include doubt, Her loves were to bear with her fear; insecure, she endured.

Saints tamed, poets acclaimed the raging herod of the will;

The groundlings wept as on a secular stage The grand and the bad went to ruin in thundering verse;

Sundered by reason and treason the City Found invisible ground for concord in measured sound,

While wood and stone learned the shameless Games of man, to flatter, to show off, be pompous, to romp.

Nature was put to the question in the Prince's name;

She confessed, what he wished to hear, that she had no soul; Between his scaffold and her coldness the restrained style,

The ironic smile became the worldly and devout, Civility a city grown rich: in his own snob way

The unarmed gentleman did his job As a judge to her children, as a father to her forests.

In a national capital Mirabeau and his set

Attacked mystery; the packed galleries roared And history marched to the drums of a clear idea,

The aim of the Rational City. quick to admire, Quick to tire: she used up Napoleon and threw him away;

Her pallid affected heroes Began their hectic quest for the prelapsarian man.

The deserts were dangerous. the waters rough, their clothes

Absurd but, changing their Beatrices often, Sleeping little, they pushed on, raised the flag of the Word

Upon lawless spots denied or forgotten By the fear or the pride of the Glittering City;

Guided by hated parental shades, They invaded and harrowed the hell of her natural self.

Chimeras mauled them, they wasted away with the spleen,

Suicide picked them off, sunk off Cape Consumption, Lost on the Tosspot Seas, wrecked on the Gibbering Isles

Or trapped in the ice of despair at the Soul's Pole, They died, unfinished, alone; but now the forbidden,

The hidden, the wild outside were known: Faithful without faith, they died for the Conscious City.

III

Across the square, Between the burnt-out Law Courts and Police Headquarters, Past the Cathedral far too damaged to repair, Around the Grand Hotel patched up to hold reporters, Near huts of some Emergency Committee, The barbed wire runs through the abolished City.

Across the plains, Between two hills, two villages, two trees, two friends, The barbed wire runs which neither argues nor explains But where it likes a place, a path, a railroad ends, The humor, the cuisine, the rites, the taste, " The pattern of the City, are erased.

Across our sleep The barbed wire also runs: It trips us so we fall And white ships sail without us though the others weep, It makes our sorry fig-leaf at the Sneerers Ball, It ties the smiler to the double bed, It keeps on growing from the witch's head.

Behind the wire Which is behind the mirror, our Image is the same Awake or dreaming: It has no image to admire, No age, no sex, no memory, no creed, no name, It can be counted. multiplied, employed In any place, at any time destroyed.

i


Is It our friend? No; that is our hope; that we weep and It does not grieve, That for It the wire and the ruins are not the end: This is the flesh we are but never would believe, !

The flesh we die but it is death to pity;

This is Adam waiting for His City.

\

Let Our Weakness speak IV

Without me Adam would have fallen irrevocably with Lucifer;

he would never have been able to cry O felix culpa. i

It was I who suggested his theft to Prometheus; my frailty !

cost Adonis his life. 4

I heard Orpheus sing; I was not quite as moved as they say. 1

I was not taken in by the sheep's-eyes of Narcissus; I was j

angry with Psyche when she struck a light. I was in Hector's confidence; so far as it went.

Had he listened to me Oedipus would never have left Corinth; |

I cast no vote at the trial of Orestes. I fell asleep when Diotima spoke of love; I was not responsible

for the monsters which tempted St. Anthony. To me the Saviour permitted His Fifth Word from the cross;

to be a stumbling-block to the stoics. .

I was the unwelcome third at the meetings of Tristan with ■

Isolda; they tried to poison me. (

I rode with Galahad on his Quest for the San Graal; without

understanding I kept his vow. ^

I was the just impediment to the marriage of Faustus with

Helen; I know a ghost when I see one. With Hamlet I had no patience; but I forgave Don Quixote all I

for his admission in the cart. j

I was the missing entry in Don Giovanni's list; for which he I

could never account. I

I assisted Figaro the Barber in all his intrigues; when Prince |

Tamino arrived at wisdom I too obtained my reward. 1

I was innocent of the sin of the Ancient Mariner; time after |

time I warned Captain Ahab to accept happiness.

As for Metropolis, that too-great city; her delusions are not mine.

Her speeches impress me little, her statistics less; to all who

dwell on the public side of her mirrors resentments and no peace.

At the place of my passion her photographers are gathered together; but I shall rise again to hear her judged.

June 1949

69

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog-days, Fortunatus: The heather lies limp and dead On the mountain, the baltering torrent Shrunk to a soodling thread;

Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain, Vacant the scholar's brain Under his great hat, Drug as she may the Sibyl utters A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach, Lying in bed till noon, Your bills unpaid, your much advertised Epic not yet begun,

Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish Some earthquake would astonish Or the wind of the Comforter's wing Unlock the prisons and translate The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed

of that bright blue morning,The hawthorn hedges in bloom, When, serene in their ivory vessels, The three wise Maries come,

Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in By sea-horse and fluent dolphin: Ah! how the cannons roar, How jocular the bells as They

Indulge the peccant shore. ^

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe That all in the end shall be well, But first of all, remember, So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense If today were that moment of silence Before it break and drown When the insurrected eagre hangs I

Over the sleeping town? |

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt Tombs of the sorcerers shatter And their guardian megalopods ..

Come after you pitter-patter? I

How will you answer when from their qualming spring The immortal nymphs fly shrieking And out of the open sky The pantocratic riddle breaks— "Who are you and why?" n

For when in a carol under the apple-trees The reborn featly dance, There will also, Fortunatus, Be those who refused their chance,

|

Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,

And mawkish in their wits, i

To whom these dull dog-days Between event seem crowned with olive And golden with self-praise.

Fleet Visit

The sailors come ashore Out of their hollow ships, Mild-looking middle-class boys Who read the comic strips; One baseball game is more To them than fifty Troys.

They look a bit lost, set down In this unamerican place Where natives pass with laws And futures of their own; They are not here because But only just-in-case.

The whore and ne'er-do-well Who pester them with junk In their grubby ways at least Are serving the Social Beast; They neither make nor sell— No wonder they get drunk.

But the ships on the dazzling blue Of the harbor actually gain From having nothing to do; Without a human will To tell them whom to kill Their structures are humane

' And, far from looking lost, Look as if they were meant To be pure abstract design By some master of pattern and line, Certainly worth every cent Of the millions they must have cost.

1951

The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder

For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities,

And ships upon untamed seas, 1

But there on the shining metal

His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown, ]

No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, '

Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood i

An unintelligible multitude, ;

A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face

Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place:

No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; Column by column in a cloud of dust They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them. somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties, White flower-garlanded heifers, •

Libation and sacrifice, But there on the shining metal I

Where the altar should have been, She saw by his flickering forge-light j

Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated, for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same, Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came : What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music,

But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy; a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,

Hephaestos, hobbled away; Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay

At what the god had wrought

To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.

'I

1952

72

The Willow-Wren and the Stare

A starling and a willow-wren,

On a may-tree by a weir, Saw them meet and heard him say:

"Dearest of my dear, More lively than these waters chortling

As they leap the dam, My sweetest duck, my precious goose,

My white lascivious lamb." With a smile she listened to him,

Talking to her there: What does he want? said the willow-wren; Much too much, said the stare.

"Forgive these loves who dwell in me,

These brats of greed and fear, The honking bottom-pinching clown,

The snivelling sonneteer, That so, between us, even these,

Who till the grave are mine, For all they fall so short of may,

Dear heart, be still a sign." With a smile she closed her eyes,

Silent she lay there: Does he mean what he says? said the willow-wren; Some of it, said the stare.

"Hark! Wild Robin winds his horn And, as his notes require, Now our laughter-loving spirits

Must in awe retire And let their kinder partners,

Speechless with desire, Go in their holy selfishness,

Unfunny to the fire." Smiling, silently she threw

Her arms about him there : Is it only that? said the willow-wren; It's that as well, said the stare.

Waking in her arms he cried. Utterly content: "I have heard the high good noises, Promoted for an instant, Stood upon the shining outskirts'

Of that Joy I thank For you, my dog and every goody."

There on the grass bank She laughed, he laughed, they laughed together,

Then they ate and drank: Did he know what he meant? said the willow-wren; God only knows, said the stare.

1953

73

Nocturne

Make this night loveable, Moon, and with eye single Looking down from up there, Bless me, One especial And friends everywhere.

With a cloudless brightness Surround our absences; Innocent be our sleeps, Watched by great still spaces, White hills, glittering deeps.

Parted by circumstance, Grant each your indulgence That we may meet in dreams For talk, for dalliance, By warm hearths, by cool streams.

Shine lest tonight any, In the dark suddenly, Wake alone in a bed To hear his own fury Wishing his love were dead.

October 1953

74

Bucolics

I Winds

(FOR ALEXIS LEGER)

Deep below our violences, Quite still, lie our First Dad, his watch

And many little maids, But the boneless winds that blow

Round law-court and temple Recall to Metropolis

That Pliocene Friday when,

At His holy insufflation

(Had He picked a teleost Or an arthropod to inspire,

Would our death also have come?), One bubble-brained creature said—

"I am loved, therefore I am"—: And well by now might the lion

Be lying down with the kid, Had he stuck to that logic.

Winds make weather; weather Is what nasty people are

Nasty about and the nice Show a common joy in observing:

When I seek an image For our Authentic City

(Across what brigs of dread, Down what gloomy galleries,

Must we stagger or crawl Before we may cry—O look!?),

I see old men in hallways Tapping their barometers,

Or a lawn over which, The first thing after breakfast,

A paterfamilias Hurries to inspect his rain-gauge.

Goddess of winds and wisdom, When, on some windless day Of dejection, unable

To name or to structure, Your poet with bodily tics,

Scratching, tapping his teeth, Tugging the lobe of an ear,

Unconsciously invokes You, Show Your good nature, allow Rooster or whistling maid

To fetch him Arthur O'Bower;

Then, if moon-faced Nonsense, That erudite forger, stalk

Through the seven kingdoms, Set Your poplars a-shiver ;

To warn Your clerk lest he Die like an Old Believer

For some spurious reading: And in all winds, no matter

Which of Your twelve he may hear, Equinox gales at midnight

Howling through marram grass, Or a faint susurration

Of pines on a cloudless Afternoon in midsummer, !

Let him feel You present, That every verbal rite

May be fittingly done, And done in anamnesis Of what is excellent Yet a visible creature,

Earth, Sky, a few dear names.

September 1953

i

II Woods j

(FOR NICOLAS NABOKOV) i

Sylvan meant savage in those primal woods

Piero di Cosima so loved to draw,

Where nudes, bears, lions, sows with women's heads

Mounted and murdered and ate each other raw,

Nor thought the lightning-kindled bush to tame

But, flabbergasted, fled the useful flame. '

Reduced to patches owned by hunting squires j

Of villages with ovens and stocks,

They whispered still of most unsocial fires,

Though Crown and Mitre warned their silly flocks The pasture's humdrum rhythms to approve And to abhor the license of the grove.

Guilty intention still looks for a hotel That wants no details and surrenders none; A wood is that, and throws in charm as well, And many a semi-innocent, undone, Has blamed its nightingales who round the deed Sang with such sweetness of a happy greed.

Those birds, of course, did nothing of the sort, And, as for sylvan nature, if you take A snapshot at a picnic, O how short And lower-ordersy the Gang will look By those vast lives that never took another And are not scared of gods, ghosts, or stepmother.

Among these coffins of its by-and-by The Public can (it cannot on a coast) Bridle its skirt-and-bargain-chasing eye, And where should an austere philologist Relax but in the very world of shade From which the matter of his field was made.

Old sounds re-educate an ear grown coarse, As Pan's green father suddenly raps out A burst of undecipherable Morse, And cuckoos mock in Welsh, and doves create In rustic English over all they do To rear their modern family of two.

Now here, now there, some loosened element, A fruit in vigor or a dying leaf, Utters its private idiom for descent, , And late man, listening through his latter grief, Hears, close or far, the oldest of his joys, Exactly as it was, the water noise.

A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady's grace; Someone is not disgusted, or at least Is laying bets upon the human race Retaining enough decency to last; The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul.

A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods! A culture is no better than its woods.

August 1952

III Mountains I

(FOR HEDWIG PETZOLD)

I know a retired dentist who only paints mountains, ' But the Masters seldom care

That much, who sketch them in beyond a holy face

Or a highly dangerous chair; While a normal eye perceives them as a wall *

Between worse and better, like a child, scolded in France, j

Who wishes he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps: Caesar does not rejoice when high ground Makes a darker map, Nor does Madam. Why should they? A serious being Cries out for a gap.

And it is curious how often in steep places

You meet someone short who frowns, ,

A type you catch beheading daisies with a stick:

Small crooks flourish in big towns, But perfect monsters—remember Dracula— Are bred on crags in castles; those unsmiling parties,

Clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery For points up, are a bit alarming; They have the balance, nerve And habit of the Spiritual, but what God Does their Order serve?

A civil man is a citizen. Am I

To see in the Lake District, then, Another bourgeois invention like the piano?

Well, I won't. How can I, when I wish I stood now on a platform at Penrith, Zurich, or any junction at which you leave the express For a local that swerves off soon into a cutting? Soon Tunnels begin, red farms disappear, Hedges turn to walls, Cows become sheep, you smell peat or pinewood, you hear Your first waterfalls,

And what looked like a wall turns out to be a world

With measurements of its own And a style of gossip. To manage the Flesh,

When angels of ice and stone Stand over her day and night who make it so plain They detest any kind of growth, does not encourage Euphemisms for the effort: here wayside crucifixes Bear witness to a physical outrage, And serenades too Stick to bare fact :—"0 my girl has a goitre, I've a hole in my shoe!"

Dour. Still, a fine refuge. That boy behind his goats

Has the round skull of a clan That fled with bronze before a tougher metal.

And that quiet old gentleman With a cheap room at the Black Eagle used to own Three papers but is not received in Society now:

These farms can always see a panting government coming; I'm nordic myself, but even so I'd much rather stay Where the nearest person who could have me hung is Some ridges away.

I

To be sitting in privacy, like a cat

On the warm roof of a loft, Where the high-spirited son of some gloomy tarn

Comes sprinting down through a green croft, Bright with flowers laid out in exquisite splodges Like a Chinese poem, while, near enough, a real darling Is cooking a delicious lunch, would keep me happy for What? Five minutes? For an uncatlike Creature who has gone wrong, Five minutes on even the nicest mountain Is awfully long.

? July 1952

IV Lakes

(FOR ISAIAH BERLIN)

A lake allows an average father, walking slowly,

To circumvent it in an afternoon, And any healthy mother to halloo the children

Back to her bedtime from their games across: (Anything bigger than that, like Michigan or Baikal, Though potable, is an "estranging sea").

Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;

They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:

A month in a lacustrine atmosphere Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.

No wonder Christendom did not get really started

Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails, Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake

And by that stork-infested shore invented The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure Of three small fishes in a triangle.

Sly Foreign Ministers should always meet beside one,

For, whether they walk widdershins or deasil, Its path will yoke their shoulders to one liquid centre

Like two old donkeys pumping as they plod; Such physical compassion may not guarantee A marriage for their armies, but it helps.

Only a very wicked or conceited man,

About to sink somewhere in mid-Atlantic, Could think Poseidon's frown was meant for him in person,

But it is only human to believe The little lady of the glacier lake has fallen

In love with the rare bather whom she drowns.

The drinking water of the city where one panics

At nothing noticing how real one is May come from reservoirs whose guards are all too conscious

Of being followed: Webster's cardinal Saw in a fish-pool something horrid with a hay-rake; I know a Sussex hammer-pond like that.

A haunted lake is sick, though; normally, they doctor

Our tactile fevers with a visual world Where beaks are dumb like boughs and faces safe like houses;

The water-scorpion finds it quite unticklish, And, if it shudder slightly when caressed by boats, It never asks for water or a loan.

Liking one's Nature, as lake-lovers do, benign

Goes with a wish for savage dogs and man-traps: One Fall, one dispossession, is enough, I'm sorry;


Why should I give Lake Eden to the Nation Just because every mortal Jack and Jill has been The genius of some amniotic mere?

It is unlikely I shall ever keep a swan

Or build a tower on any small tombolo, But that's not going to stop me wondering what sort

Of lake I would decide on if I should. Moraine, pot, oxbow, glint, sink, crater, piedmont, dimple ... ? Just reeling off their names is ever so comfy.

? September 1952

V Islands

(FOR GIOCONDO SACCHETTI)

Old saints on millstones float with cats To islands out at sea,

Whereon no female pelvis can

Threaten their agape. j

Beyond the long arm of the Law, l

Close to a shipping road, |

Pirates in their island lairs Observe the pirate code.

Obsession with security In Sovereigns prevails;

His Highness and The People both Pick islands for their jails.

Once, where detected worldlings now i

Do penitential jobs,

Exterminated species played Who had not read their Hobbes.

His continental damage done, Laid on an island shelf,

Napoleon has five years more To talk about himself.

How fascinating is that class Whose only member is Me!

Sappho, Tiberius and I Hold forth beside the sea.

What is cosier than the shore Of a lake turned inside out?

How do all these other people Dare to be about?

In democratic nudity Their sexes lie; except

By age or weight you could not tell The keeping from the kept.

They go, she goes, thou goest, I go To a mainland livelihood:

Farmer and fisherman complain The other has it good.

? August 1953

VI Plains

(FOR WENDELL JOHNSON)

I can imagine quite easily ending up

In a decaying port on a desolate coast, Cadging drinks from the unwary, a quarrelsome,

Disreputable old man; I can picture A second childhood in a valley, scribbling

Reams of edifying and unreadable verse; But I cannot see a plain without a shudder:— "O God, please, please, don't ever make me live there!"

It's horrible to think what peaks come down to,

That pecking rain and squelching glacier defeat Tall pomps of stone where goddesses lay sleeping, Dreaming of being woken by some chisel's kiss, That what those blind brutes leave when they are

through is nothing But a mere substance, a clay that meekly takes The potter's cuff, a gravel that as concrete Will unsex any space which it encloses.

And think of growing where all elsewheres are equal!

So long as there's a hill-ridge somewhere the dreamer Can place his land of marvels; in poor valleys

Orphans can head downstream to seek a million: Here nothing points; to choose between Art and Science

An embryo genius would have to spin a stick. What could these farms do if set loose but drift like clouds? What goal of unrest is there but the Navy?

Romance? Not in this weather. Ovid's charmer Who leads the quadrilles in Arcady, boy-lord Of hearts who can call their Yes and No their own,

Would, madcap that he is, soon die of cold or sunstroke: These lives are in firmer hands; that old grim She

Who makes the blind dates for the hatless genera Creates their country matters. (Woe to the child-bed, Woe to the strawberries if She's in Her moods!)

And on these attend, greedy as fowl and harsher

Than any climate, Caesar with all his They. If a tax-collector disappear in the hills,

If, now and then, a keeper is shot in the forest, No thunder follows, but where roads run level,

How swift to the point of protest strides the Crown. It hangs, it flogs, it fines, it goes. There is drink.

There are wives to beat. But Zeus is with the strong,

Born as a rule in some small place (an island,

Quite often, where a smart lad can spot the bluff Whence cannon would put the harbor at his mercy),

Though it is here they chamber with Clio. At this brook The Christian cross-bow stopped the Heathen scimitar;

Here is a windmill whence an emperor saw His right wing crumple; across these cabbage fields A pretender's Light Horse made their final charge.

If I were a plainsman I should hate us all,

From the mechanic rioting for a cheap loaf To the fastidious palate, hate the painter

Who steals my wrinkles for his Twelve Apostles, Hate the priest who cannot even make it shower.

What could I smile at as I trudged behind my harrow But bloodshot images of rivers screaming,

Marbles in panic, and Don't-Care made to care?

As it is, though, I know them personally

Only as a landscape common to two nightmares: Across them, spotted by spiders from afar,

I have tried to run, knowing there was no hiding and no help; On them, in brilliant moonlight, I have lost my way .

And stood without a shadow at the dead centre Of an abominable desolation,

Like Tarquin ravished by his post-coital sadness.

Which goes to show I've reason to be frightened

Not of plains, of course, but of me. I should like —Who wouldn't?—to shoot beautifully and be obeyed

(I should also like to own a cave with two exits); I wish I weren't so silly. Though I can't pretend To think these flats poetic, it's as well at times To be reminded that nothing is lovely, Not even in poetry, which is not the case.

? July 19 53

VII Streams

[FOR ELIZABETH DREW)

Dear water, clear water, playful in all your streams,

As you dash or loiter through life who does not love To sit beside you, to hear you and see you, Pure being, perfect in music and movement?

Air is boastful at times, earth slovenly, fire rude,

But you in your bearing are always immaculate, The most well-spoken of all the older Servants in the household of Mrs. Nature.

Nobody suspects you of mocking him, for you still

Use the same vocables you were using the day Before that unexpected row which Downed every hod on half-finished Babel,

And still talk to yourself: nowhere are you disliked;

Arching your torso, you dive from a basalt sill, Canter across white chalk, slog forward Through red marls, the aboriginal pilgrim,

At home in all sections, but for whom we should be

Idolaters of a single rock, kept apart

By our landscapes, excluding as alien The tales and diets of all other strata.

How could we love the absent one if you did not keep

Coming from a distance, or quite directly assist, As when past Iseult's tower you floated The willow pash-notes of wanted Tristram?

And Homo Ludens, surely, is your child, who make

Fun of our feuds by opposing identical banks, Transferring the loam from Huppim To Muppim and back each time you crankle.

Growth cannot add to your song: as unchristened brooks Already you whisper to ants what, as Brahma's son, Descending his titanic staircase Into Assam, to Himalayan bears you thunder.

And not even man can spoil you: his company Coarsens roses and dogs but. should he herd

you through a sluice To toil at a turbine, or keep you Leaping in gardens for his amusement,

Innocent still is your outcry, water, and there Even, to his soiled heart raging at what it is, Tells of a sort of world, quite other, Altogether different from this one

With its envies and passports, a polis like that To which, in the name of scholars everywhere, Gaston Paris pledged his allegiance As Bismarck's siege-guns came within earshot.

Lately, in that dale of all Yorkshire's the loveliest, Where, off its fell-side helter-skelter, Kisdon Beck Jumps into Swale with a boyish shouting, Sprawled out on grass, I dozed for a second,.

And found myself following a croquet tournament In a calm enclosure with thrushes popular: Of all the players in that cool valley The best with the mallet was my darling.

While, on the wolds that begirdled it, wild old men Hunted with spades and hammers, monomaniac each, For a megalith or a fossil, And bird-watchers stalked the mossy beech-woods.

Suddenly, over the lawn we started to run For, 1o, through the trees in a cream and golden coach Drawn by two baby locomotives, The god of mortal doting approached us,

Flanked by his bodyguard, those hairy armigers in green Who laugh at thunderstorms and weep at a blue sky: He thanked us for our cheers of homage, And promised X and Y a passion undying.

i

With a wave of his torch he commanded a dance; So round in a ring we flew, my dear on my right, When I awoke. But fortunate seemed that Day because of my dream and enlightened,

And dearer, water, than ever your voice, as if Glad—though goodness knows why—to run with

the human race, Wishing, I thought, the least of men their Figures of splendor, their holy places.

7 July 1953

75

Horae Canonicae

"Immolatus vicerit"

I Prime

Simultaneously, as soundlessly,

Spontaneously, suddenly As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind

Gates of the body fly open To its world beyond, the gates of the mind,

The horn gate and the ivory gate, Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously Quell the nocturnal rummage

Of its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,

Ill-natured and second-rate, Disenfranchised. widowed and orphaned

By an historical mistake: Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,

From absence to be on display, Without a name or history I wake Between my body and the day.

Holy this moment, wholly in the right,

As, in complete obedience To the light's laconic outcry, next

As a sheet, near as a wall, Out there as a mountain's poise of stone,

The world is present, about, And I know that I am, here, not alone

But with a world, and rejoice Unvexed, for the will has still to claim

This adjacent arm as my own, The memory to name me, resume Its routine of praise and blame, And smiling to me is this instant while

Still the day is intact, and I The Adam sinless in our beginning, Adam still previous to any act.

I draw breath; that is of course to wish

No matter what, to be wise, To be different, to die and the cost,

No matter how, is Paradise Lost of course and myself owing a death:

The eager ridge, the steady sea, The flat roofs of the fishing village

Still asleep in its bunny, Though as fresh and sunny still, are not friends

But things to hand, this ready flesh No honest equalbut my accomplice now, My assassin to be, and my name

Stands for my historical share of care

For a lying self-made city, Afraid of our living task, the dying Which the coming day will ask.

1949

II Terce

After shaking paws with his dog (Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind),

The hangman sets off briskly over the heath; He does not know yet who will be provided To do the high works of Justice with: Gently closing the door of his wife's bedroom

(Today she has one of her headaches), With a sigh the judge descends his marble stair; „

He does not know by what sentence He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars:

And the poet, taking a breather Round his garden before starting his eclogue,

Does not know whose Truth he will tell. f

Sprites of hearth and store-room, godlings f

Of professional mysteries, the Big Ones

Who can annihilate a city, Cannot be bothered with this moment: we are left,

Each to his secret cult, now each of us Prays to an image of his image of himself:

"Let me get through this coming day g

Without a dressing down from a superior, ^

Being worsted in a repartee, Or behaving like an ass in front of the girls; I

Let something exciting happen, 1

Let me find a lucky coin on a sidewalk, I

Let me hear a new funny story." 4

At this hour we all might be anyone: It is only our victim who is without a wish,

Who knows already (that is what We can never forgive. If he knows the answers,

Then why are we here, why is there even dust?), Knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,

That not one of us will slip up, That the machinery of our world will function

Without a hitch, that today, for once, There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,

No Chthonian mutters of unrest, But no other miracle, knows that by sundown We shall have had a good Friday.

October 1953

III Sext 1

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation,

you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,

that eye-on-the-object look.

To ignore the appetitive goddesses, to desert the formidable shrines

of Rhea, Aphrodite, Demeter, Diana, to pray instead to St. Phocas,

St. Barbara, San Saturnino,

or whoever one's patron is, j

that one may be worthy of their mystery, what a prodigious step to have taken.

There should be monuments, there should be odes, to the nameless heroes who took it first,

to the first flaker of flints who forgot his dinner,

the first collector of sea-shells to remain celibate.

Where should we be but for them? Feral still, un-housetrained, still

wandering through forests without a consonant to our names,

slaves of Dame Kind, lacking all notion of a city

and, at this noon, for this death, there would be no agents.

2

You need not hear what orders he is giving to know if someone has authority,

you have only to watch his mouth: when a besieging general sees

a city wallbreached by his troops, when a bacteriologist

realizes in a flash what was wrong with his hypothesis, when,

from a glance at the jury, the prosecutor knows the defendant willhang,

their lips and the lines around them relax, assuming an expression,

not of simple pleasure at getting their own sweet way but of satisfaction

at being right, an incarnation of Fortitudo, Justicia, Nous.

You may not like them much (who does?) but we owe them

basilicas, divas, dictionaries, pastoral verse,

the courtesies of the city: without these judicial mouths

(which belong for the most part to very great scoundrels)

how squalid existence would be, tethered for life to some hut village,

afraid of the local snake or the local ford demon,

speaking the local patois of some three hundred words

(think of the family squabbles and the poison-pens, think of the inbreeding) and, at this noon, there would be no authority to command this death.

3

Anywhere you like, somewhere on broad-chested life-giving Earth,

anywhere between her thirstlands and undrinkable Ocean,

the crowd stands perfectly still,

its eyes (which seem one) and its mouths

(which seem infinite^ many) expressionless, perfectly blank.

The crowd does not see (what everyone sees) a boxing match, a train wreck,

a battleship being launched,

does not wonder (as everyone wonders)

who will win, what flag she will fly, how many will be burned alive,

is never distracted

(as everyone is always distracted)

by a barking dog, a smell of fish, a mosquito on a bald head:

the crowd sees only one thing (which only the crowd can see),

an epiphany of that which does whatever is done.

Whatever god a person believes in, in whatever way he believes (no two are exactly alike), as one of the crowd he believes

and only believes in that

in which there is only one way of believing.

Few people accept each other and most will never do anything properly,

but the crowd rejects no one, joining the crowd is the only thing all men can do.

Only because of that can we say all men are our brothers,

superior, because of that,

to the social exoskeletons: When

have they ever ignored their queens, for one second stopped work

on their provincial cities, to worship The Prince of this world like us,

at this noon, on this hill, in the occasion of this dying.

Spring 1954

IV Nones

What we know to be not possible, Though time after time foretold By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil

Gibbering in their trances, Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme

Like wiJJ and kill, comes to pass Before we realize it: we are surprised At the ease and speed of our deed

And uneasy: It is barely three, Mid-afternoon, yet the blood Of our sacrifice is already .

Dry on the grass; we are not prepared |

For silence so sudden and so soon; (

The day is too hot, too bright, too still, Too ever, the dead remains too nothing. What shall we do till nightfall?

The wind has dropped and we have lost our public.

The faceless many who always Collect when any world is to be wrecked,

Blown up, burnt down, cracked open, Felled, sawn in two, hacked through, torn apart,

Have all melted away: not one Of these who in the shade of walls and trees

Lie sprawled now, calmly sleeping, Harmless as sheep, can remember why

He shouted or what about So loudly in the sunshine this morning;

All if challenged would reply —"It was a monster with one red eye, A crowd that saw him die, not L"— The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat: We are left alone with our feat.

The Madonna with the green woodpecker,

The Madonna of the fig-tree, The Madonna beside the yellow dam,

Turn their kind faces from us And our projects under construction,

Look only in one direction, Fix their gaze on our completed work:

Pile-driver, concrete-mixer, Crane and pickaxe wait to be used again,

But how can we repeat this? Outliving our act, we stand where we are, As disregarded as some

Discarded artifact of our own,

Like torn gloves, rusted kettles, Abandoned branch-lines, worn lop-sided Grindstones buried in nettles.

This mutilated flesh, our victim,

Explains too nakedly, too well, The spell of the asparagus garden,

The aim of our chalk-pit game; stamps, Birds' eggs are not the same, behind the wonder

Of tow-paths and sunken lanes, Behind the rapture on the spiral stair,

We shall always now be aware Of the deed into which they lead, under

The mock chase and mock capture, The racing and tussling and splashing,

The panting and the laughter, Be listening for the cry and stillness

To follow after: wherever The sun shines, brooks run, books are written, There will also be this death.

Soon cool tramontana will stir the leaves,

The shops will re-open at four, The empty blue bus in the empty pink square

Fill up and depart: we have time To misrepresent, excuse, deny,

Mythify, use this event While, under a hotel bed, in prison,

Down wrong turnings, its meaning Waits for our lives: sooner than we would choose,

Bread will melt, water will burn, And the great quell begin, Abaddon

Set up his triple gallows At our seven gates, fat Belial make

Our wives waltz naked; meanwhile It would be best to go home, if we have a home, In any case good to rest.

That our dreaming wills may seem to escape

This dead calm, wander instead On knife edges, on black and white squares, i

Across moss, baize, velvet, boards, '

Over cracks and hillocks, in mazes

Of string and penitent cones, Down granite ramps and damp passages,

Through gates that will not relatch And doors marked Private, pursued by Moors

And watched by latent robbers, To hostile villages at the heads of fjords,

To dark chateaux where wind sobs In the pine-trees and telephones ring,

Inviting trouble, to a room, Lit by one weak bulb, where our Double sits Writing and does not look up.

That, while we are thus away, our own wronged flesh

May work undisturbed, restoring The order we try to destroy, the rhythm

We spoil out of spite: valves close And open exactly, glands secrete, - Vessels contract and expand At the right moment, essential fluids

Flow to renew'exhausted cells, Not knowing quite what has happened, but awed

By death like all the creatures Now watching this spot, like the hawk looking down

Without blinking, the smug hens Passing close by in their pecking order,

The bug whose view is balked by grass, Or the deer who shyly from afar Peer through chinks in the forest.

July 1950

V Vespers

If the hill overlooking our city has always been known as Adam's Grave, only at dusk can you see the recumbent giant, his head turned to the west, his right arm resting for ever on Eve's haunch,

can you learn, from the way he looks up at the scandalous pair, what a citizen really thinks of his citizenship,

just as now you can hear in a drunkard's caterwaul his rebel sorrows crying for a parental discipline, in lustful eyes per­ceive a disconsolate soul,

scanning with desperation all passing limbs for some vestige of her faceless angel who in that long ago when wishing was a help mounted her once and vanished:

For Sun and Moon supply their conforming masks, but in this hour of civil twilight all must wear their own faces.

And it is now that our two paths cross.

Both simultaneously recognize his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian.

He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion's mouth.

He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet.

Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?

Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy: He observes it is too expensive fora peasant to buy.

Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way: He looks the other way if he passes a chubby one.

I hope our senators will behave like saints, provided they don't reform me: He hopes they will behave like baritoni cattivi, and, when lights burn late in the Citadel,

I (who have never seen the inside of a police station) am shocked and think: "Were the city as free as they say, after sundown all her bureaus would be huge black stones.":

He (who has been beaten up several times) is not shocked at all but thinks: "One fine night our boys will be working up there."

You can see, then, why, between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is negotiable.

In my Eden a person who dislikes Bellini has the good man­ners not to get born: In his New Jerusalem a person who dis­likes work will be very sorry he was born.

In my Eden we have a few beam-engines, saddle-tank loco­motives, overshot waterwheels and other beautiful pieces of obsolete machinery to play with: In his New Jerusalem even chefs will be cucumber-cool machine minders.

In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip: In his New Jerusalem there will be a special daily in simplified spelling for non-verbal types.

In my Eden each observes his compulsive rituals and super­stitious tabus but we have no morals: In his New Jerusalem the temples will be empty but all will practice the rational virtues.

One reason for his contempt is that I have only to close my eyes, cross the iron footbridge to the tow-path, take the barge through the short brick tunnel and

there I stand in Eden again, welcomed back by the krum- horns. doppions, sordumes of jolly miners and a bob major from the Cathedral (romanesque) of St. Sophie (Die Kalte):

One reason for my alarm is that. when he closes his eyes, he arrives. not in New Jerusalem. but on some august day of out­rage when hellikins cavort through ruined drawing-rooms and fish-wives intervene in the Chamber or

some autumn night of delations and noyades when the un­repentant thieves (including me) are sequestered and those he hates shall hate themselves instead.

So with a passing glance we take the other's posture: Already our steps recede, heading. incorrigible each, towards his kind of meal and evening.

Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths. loyal to different fibs,

or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting

to remind the other (do both, at bottom. desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget,

forcing us lxlth. for a fraction of a second. to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood. but for me he could forget the innocence)

on whose immolation (call him Abel. Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias. utopias. our dear old bag of a democracy. are alike founded:

For without a cement of blood (it must be human. it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.

June 1954

VI Compline

Now, as desire and the things desired

Cease to require attention, As, seizing its chance, the body escapes,

Section by section, to join Plants in their chaster peace which is more

To its real taste, now a day is its past, Its last deed and feeling in, should come

The instant of recollection When the whole thing makes sense: it comes, but all

I recall are doors banging, Two housewives scolding, an old man gobbling, ■

A child's wild look of envy, Actions, words, that could fit any tale,

And I fail to see either plot Or meaning; I cannot remember

A thing between noon and three. |

Nothing is with me now but a sound, A heart's rhythm, a sense of stars Leisurely walking around, and both

Talk a language of motion I can measure but not read: maybe

My heart is confessing her part In what happened to us from noon to three,

That constellations indeed Sing of some hilarity beyond

All liking and happening, But, knowing I neither know what they know

Nor what I ought to know, scorning All vain fornications of fancy,

Now let me, blessing them both For the sweetness of their cassations, Accept our separations.

A stride from now will take me into dream, Leave me, without a status,

Among its unwashed tribes of wishes Who have no dances and no jokes But a magic cult to propitiate

What happens from noon till three, Odd rites which they hide from me—should I chance,

Say, on youths in an oak-wood Insulting a white deer, bribes nor threats

Will get them to blab—and then Past untruth is one step to nothing, For the end, for me as for cities, Is total absence: what comes to be

Must go back into non-being For the sake of the equity, the rhythm Past measure or comprehending.

Can poets (can men in television)

Be saved? It is not easy To believe in unknowable justice

Or pray in the name of a love Whose name one's forgotten: libera

Me, libera C (dear C) And all poor s-o-b's who never Do anything properly, spare Us in the youngest day when all are

Shaken awake, facts are facts (And I shall know exactly what happened

Today between noon and three), That we, too, may come to the picnic

With nothing to hide, join the dance As it moves in perichoresis, Turns about the abiding tree.

Spring 1954

VII Lauds

Among the leaves the small birds sing; The crow of the cock commands awaking: In solitude, for company.

Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal; Men of their neighbors become sensible: In solitude, for company.

The crow of the cock commands awaking; I

Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding: In solitude, for company.

Men of their neighbors become sensible; God bless the Realm, God bless the People: In solitude, for company.

Already the mass-bell goes dong-ding; The dripping mill-wheel is again turning: In. solitude, for company.

God bless the Realm, God bless the People; God bless this green world temporal: In solitude, for company.

The dripping mill-wheel is again turning; Among the leaves the small birds sing: In solitude, for company.

1952

76

Homage to Clio

Our hill has made its submission and the green

Swept on into the north: around me, From morning to night, flowers duel incessantly, Color against color, in combats

Which they all win, and at any hour from some point else

May come another tribal outcry Of a new generation of birds who chirp Not for effect but because chirping

Is the thing to do. More lives than I perceive

Are aware of mine this May morning As I sit reading a book, sharper senses Keep watch on an inedible patch

Of unsatisfactory smell, unsafe as

So many areas are: to observation My book is dead, and by observations they live In space, as unaware of silence

As Provocative Aphrodite or her twin,

Virago Artemis, the Tall Sisters Whose subjects they are. That is why, in their Dual Realm, Banalities can be beautiful,

Why nothing is too big or too small or the wrong

Color, and the roar of an earthquake Rearranging the whispers of streams a loud sound Not a din: but we, at haphazard

And unseasonably, are brought face to face

By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that Nothing is easy. We may dream as we wish Of phallic pillar or navel-stone

With twelve nymphs twirling about it, but pictures

Are no help: your silence already is there Between us and any magical center

Where things are taken in hand. Besides,

Are we so sorry? Woken at sun-up to hear

A cock pronouncing himself himself Though all his sons had been castrated and eaten, I was glad I could be unhappy: if

I don't know how I shall manage, at least I know

The beast-with-two-backs may be a species Evenly distributed but Mum and Dad Were not two other people. To visit

The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene,

To count the loves one has grown out of, Is not nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird, As though no one dies in particular

And gossip were never true, unthinkable: If it were, forgiveness would be no use, One-eye-for-one would be just and the innocent Would not have to suffer. Artemis,

Aphrodite, are Major Powers and all wise

Castellans will mind their p's and q's, But it is you, who never have spoken up, Madonna of silences, to whom we turn

When we have lost control, your eyes, Clio, into which

We look for recognition after We have been found out. How shall I describe you? They Can be represented in granite

(One guesses at once from the perfect buttocks, The flawless mouth too grand to have corners, Whom the colossus must be), but what icon Have the arts for you, who look like any

Girl one has not noticed and show no special

Affinity with a beast? I have seen Your photo, I think, in the papers, nursing A baby or mourning a corpse: each time

You had nothing to say and did not, one could see,

Observe where you were, Muse of the unique Historical fact, defending with silence Some world of your beholding, a silence

No explosion can conquer but a lover's Yes Has been known to fill. So few of the Big Ever listen: that is why you have a great host Of superfluous screams to care for and

Why, up and down like the Duke of Cumberland,

Or round and round like the Laxey Wheel, The Short, The Bald, The Pious, The Stammerer went, As the children of Artemis go,

Not yours. Lives that obey you move like music,

Becoming now what they only can be once, Making of silence decisive sound: it sounds Easy, but one must find the time. Clio,

Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence

Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder, whose kindness never Is taken in, forgive our noises

And teach us our recollections: to throw away

The tiniest fault of someone we love Is out of the question, says Aphrodite,

Who should know, yet one has known people

Who have done just that. Approachable as you seem,

I dare not ask you if you bless the poets, For you do not look as if you ever read them Nor can I see a reason why you should.

June 1955

First Things First !

Woken, I layin the arms of my own warmth and listened To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober, Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar, Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in

your praise,

Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters, Likening your poise of being to an upland county, Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,

It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence

When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking

On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless

As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly

So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only too often A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English, Predicting a world where every sacred location Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do, Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides, And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say How much it believed of what I said the storm had said But quietly drew my attention to what had been done —So many cubic metres the more in my cistern Against a leonine summer—putting first things first: Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

7 1957

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

? September 1957

Friday's Child

(IN MEMORY OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, MARTYRED AT FLOSSENBURG, A PRIL 9TH, 1945)

He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— "Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort

On those too bumptious to repent"— Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said.

Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems idle to discuss If anger or compassion leaves The bigger bangs to us.

What reverence is rightly paid To a Divinity so odd He lets the Adam whom He made Perform the Acts of God?

It might be jolly if we felt Awe at this Universal Man (When kings were local, people knelt); Some try to, but who can?

The self-observed observing Mind We meet when we observe at all Is not alarming or unkind But utterly banal.

Though instruments at Its command Make wish and counterwish come true, It clearly cannot understand What It can clearly do.

Since the analogies are rot Our senses based belief upon, We have no means of learning what Is really going on,

And must put up with having learned All proofs or disproofs that we tender Of His existence are returned Unopened to the sender

Now, did He really break the seal And rise again? We dare not say; But conscious unbelievers feel Quite sure of Judgement Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, As dead as we shall ever be, Speaks of some total gain or loss, And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face Just what Appearances He saves By suffering in a public place A death reserved for slaves.

? 1958

80

Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno

(FOR CARLO lZZ0)

Out of a gothic North, the pallid children

Of a potato, beer-or-whiskey Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere

Of vineyards, baroque, 1a bella figura,

To these feminine townships where men Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless Verbal in-fighting as it is taught

In Protestant rectories upon drizzling

Sunday afternoons—no more as unwashed Barbarians out for gold, nor as profiteers, Hot for Old Masters, but for plunder

Nevertheless—some believing amore

Is better down South and much cheaper (Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure To strong sunlight is lethal to germs

(Which is patently false) and others, like me,

In middle-age hoping to twig from What we are not what we might be next, a question The South seems never to raise. Perhaps

A tongue in which Nestor and Apemantus,

Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni make Equally beautiful sounds is unequipped To frame it, or perhaps in this heat

It is nonsense: the Myth of an Open Road

Which runs past the orchard gate and beckons- Three brothers in turn to set out over the hills And far away, is an invention

Of a climate where it is a pleasure to walk

And a landscape less populated Than this one. Even so, to us it looks very odd Never to see an only child engrossed

In a game it has made up, a pair of friends

Making fun in a private lingo, Or a body sauntering by himself who is not Wanting, even as it perplexes

Our ears when cats are called Cat and dogs either

Lupo, Nero or Bobby. Their dining Puts us to shame: we can only envy people So frugal by nature it costs them

No effort not to guzzle and swill. Yet (if I Read their faces rightly after ten years) They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where

Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,

I can see what they meant: his unwinking Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion Of change or escape, and a silent

Ex-volcano, without a stream or a bird,

Echoes that laugh. This could be a reason Why they take the silencers off their Vespas, Turn their radios up to full volume,

And a minim saint can expect rockets—noise

As a countermagic, a way of saying Boo to the Three Sisters: "Mortal we may be,

But we are still here!" might cause them to hanker

After proximities—in streets packed solid

With human flesh, their souls feel immune To all metaphysical threats. We are rather shocked, But we need shocking: to accept space, to own

That surfaces need not be superficial Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really Be taught within earshot of running water Or in sight of a cloud. As pupils

We are not bad, but hopeless as tutors: Goethe,

Tapping Homeric hexameters On the shoulder blade of a Roman girl, is (I wish it were someone else) the figure

Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,

But one would draw the line at calling The Helena begotten on that occasion, Queen of his Second Walpurgisnacht,

Her baby: between those who mean by a life a

Bildungsroman and those to whom living Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf Embraces cannot bridge. If we try

To "go southern," we spoil in no time, we grow

Flabby, dingily lecherous, and Forget to pay bills: that no one has heard of them Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga

Is a comforting thought—in that case, for all

The spiritual loot we tuck away, We do them no harm—and entitles us, I think To one little scream at A piacere!,

Not two. Go I must, but I go grateful (even

To a certain Monte) and invoking My sacred meridian names, Pirandello, Croce, Vico, Verga, Bellini,

To bless this region, its vendages, and those

Who call it home : though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

September 1958

81

Dame Kind

Steatopygous, sow-dugged

and owl-headed, To Whom—Whom else?—the first innocent blood

was formally shed By a chinned mammal that hard times

had turned carnivore. From Whom his first promiscuous orgy

begged a downpour To speed the body-building cereals

of a warmer age: Now who put us, we should like to know,

in Her manage?

Strait-laced She never was

and has not grown more so " Since the skeptical academies got wind

of the Chi-Rho; St. Cuckoo's wooden church for Her

where on Green Sundays Bald hermits celebrate a wordless

cult in Her praise: So pocket your fifty sonnets, Bud;

tell Her a myth Of unpunishable gods and all the girls

they interfered with.

Haven't we spotted Her Picked Winners

whom She cossets, ramparts And does the handsome by? Didn't the darlings

have cold hearts? .. . ONE BOMB WOULD BE ENOUGH. ... Now look

who's thinking gruesome! Brother, you're worse than a lonesome Peeper

or a He-Virgin Who nightly abhors the Primal Scene

in medical Latin: She mayn't be all She might be but

She is our Mum.

You can't tell us your hypochondriac

Blue-Stocking from Provence Who makes the clockwork arcadies go round

is worth twopence; You won't find a steady in that museum

unless you prefer Tea with a shapeless angel to bedtime

with a lovely monster: Before you catch it for your mim look

and gnostic chirrup, Ask the Kind Lady who fitted you out

to fix you up.

Supposing even (through misdirections

or your own mischief] You do land in that anomalous duchy,

Her remotest fief, Where four eyes encounter in two

one mirror perilous As the clear rock-basin that stultified

frigid Narcissus, Where tongues stammer on a First Name,

bereft of guile, And common snub-nosed creatures are abashed

at a face in profile,

Even there, as your blushes invoke its Guardian

(whose true invocable Name is singular for each true heart

and false to tell] To sacre your courtship ritual so

it deserves a music More solemn than the he-hawing

of a salesman's limerick, Do a bow to the Coarse Old Party that wrought you

an alderliefest Of the same verbose and sentient kidney,

grateful not least

For all the dirty work She did.

How many hundreds Of lawful, unlawful, both equally

loveless beds, Of lying endearments, crooked questions,

crookeder answers, Of bawling matches, sarcastic silences,

megrims, tears, How much half-witted horseplay and sheer

bloody misrule It took to bring you two together

both on schedule?

You

Really, must you, Over-familiar Dense companion, Be there always? The bond between us Is chimerical surely: Yet I cannot break it.

Must I, born for Sacred play, Turn base mechanic So you may worship Your secular bread, With no thought Of the value of time?

Thus far I have known your Character only From its pleasanter side, But you know I know A day will come When you grow savage And hurt me badly.

Totally stupid?

Would that you were:

But, no, you plague me

With tastes I was fool enough

Once to believe in.

Bah!, blockhead:

I know where you learned them.

Can I trust you even On creaturely fact?

I suspect strongly You hold some dogma Of positive truth, And feed me fictions: I shall never prove it.

Oh, I know how you came by A sinner's cranium, How between two glaciers The master-chronometer Of an innocent primate Altered its tempi: That explains nothing.

Who tinkered and why? Why am I certain, Whatever your faults are, The fault is mine, Why is loneliness not A chemical discomfort, Nor Being a smell?

September 1960

83

After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics

If all a top physicist knows About the Truth be true, Then, for all the so-and-so's, Futility and grime, Our common world contains, We have a better time Than the Greater Nebulae do, Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare While shaving it be cruel For, year after year, it repels An ageing suitor, it has, Thank God, sufficient mass To be altogether there, Not an indeterminate gruel Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose That a habitable place Has a geocentric view, That architects enclose A quiet Euclidean space: Exploded myths—but who Would feel at home astraddle An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind For the process of finding out Is a fact one can hardly doubt, But I would rejoice in it more If I knew more clearly what We wanted the knowledge for, Felt certain still that the mind Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems, And whether our concern

For magnitude's extremes Really becomes a creature Who comes in a median size, Or politicizing Nature Be altogether wise, Is something we shall learn.

1961

84

On the Circuit

Among pelagian travelers, Lost on their lewd conceited way To Massachusetts, Michigan, Miami or L.A.,

An airborne instrument I sit, Predestined nightly to fulfill Columbia-Giesen-Management's Unfathomable will,

By whose election justified, I bring my gospel of the Muse To fundamentalists, to nuns, To Gentiles and to Jews,

And daily, seven days a week, Before a local sense has jelled, From talking-site to talking-site Am jet-or-prop-propelled.

Though warm my welcome everywhere, I shift so frequently, so fast, I cannot now say where I was The evening before last,

Unless some singular event Should intervene to save the place, A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face,

Or blessed encounter, full of joy, Unscheduled on the Giesen Plan, With, here, an addict of Tolkien, There, a Charles Williams fan.

Since Merit but a dunghill is, I mount the rostrum unafraid: Indeed, 'twere damnable to ask If I am overpaid.

Spirit is willing to repeat Without a qualm the same old talk, But Flesh is homesick for our snug Apartment in New York.

A sulky fifty-six, he finds A change of mealtime utter hell, Grown far too crotchety to like A luxury hotel.

The Bible is a goodly book I always can peruse with zest, But really cannot say the same For Hilton's Be My Guest,

Nor bear with equanimity The radio in students' cars, Musak at breakfast, or—dear God!— Girl-organists in bars.

Then, worst of all, the anxious thought, Each time my plane begins to sink And the No Smoking sign comes on: What will there be to drink?

Is this a milieu where I must How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig! Snatch from the bottle in my bag An analeptic swig?

Another morning comes: I see, Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although I don't remember which was which: God bless the U.S.A., so large, So friendly, and so rich.

? June 1963'

85

Et in Arcadia Ego

Who, now, seeing Her so Happily married, Housewife, helpmate to Man,

Can imagine the screeching Virago, the Amazon, Earth Mother was?

Her jungle growths Are abated, Her exorbitant Monsters abashed,

Her soil mumbled,

Where crops, aligned precisely,

Will soon be orient:

Levant or couchant, Well-daunted thoroughbreds Graze on mead and pasture,

A church clock subdivides the day, Up the lane at sundown Geese podge home.

As for Him:

What has happened to the Brute Epics and nightmares tell of?

No bishops pursue

Their archdeacons with axes,

In the crumbling lair

Of a robber baron Sightseers picnic Who carry no daggers.

I well might think myself A humanist,

Could I manage not to see

How the autobahn Thwarts the landscape In godless Roman arrogance,

The farmer's children

Tiptoe past the shed

Where the gelding knife is kept.

? May 1964

Thanksgiving for a Habitat

Funes ceciderunt mihi in praeclaris: etenim hereditas mea praeciara est mihi.

Psalm XVI, 6

I Prologue: The Birth of Architecture

(FOR JOHN BAYLEY]

From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king

to Low Mass and trailer camp is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I

don't count that way nor do you: already itis millions of heartbeats ago

back to the Bicycle Age, before which is no After for me to measure,

just a still prehistoric Once where anything could happen. To you, to me,

Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral, the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial

are works by the same Old Man under different names: we know what He did,

what, even, He thought He thought, but we don't see why. (To get that, one would have

to be selfish in His way, without concrete or grapefruit.) It's our turn now

to puzzle the unborn. No world wears as well as it should but, mortal or not,

a world has still to be built because of what we can see from our windows,

that Immortal Commonwealth which is there regardless: It's in perfect taste

and it's never boring but it won't quite do. Among its populations are masons and carpenters

who build the most exquisite shelters and safes,

but no architects, any more than there are heretics or bounders: to take

umbrage at death, to construct a second nature of tomb and temple, lives must know the meaning of If.

? Spring 1962

II Thanksgiving for a Habitat

(FOR GEOFFREY GORER)

Nobody I know would like to be buried

with a silver cocktail shaker, a transistor radio and a strangled daily help, or keep his word because

of a great-great-grandmother who got laid

by a sacred beast. Only a press lord could have built San Simeon: no unearned income can buy us back the gait and gestures

to manage a baroque staircase, or the art

of believing footmen don't hear human speech. (In adulterine castles our half-strong might hang their j ackets

while mending their lethal bicycle chains:

luckily, there are not enough crags to go round.) Still, Hetty Pegler's Tump is worth a visit, so is Schonbrunn,

to look at someone's idea of the body

that should have been his, as the flesh Mum formulated shouldn't: that whatever he does or feels in the mood for,

stocktaking, horseplay, worship, making love,

he stays the same shape, disgraces a Royal l. To be overadmired is not good enough: although a fine figure

is rare in either sex, others like it have existed before. One may be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian democrat, but which of us wants

to be touched inadvertently, even

by his beloved? We know all about graphs and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer superhumanize, but earnest

city planners are mistaken: a pen

for a rational animal is no fitting habitat for Adam's sovereign clone. I, a transplant

from overseas, at last am dominant over three acres and a blooming conurbation of country lives, few of whom I shall ever meet, and with fewer

converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia

as a naked gruesome rabble, Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools who deface their emblem of guilt

are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders

shall be allowed their webs. I should like to be to my water-brethren as a spell of fine weather: Many are stupid,

and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not

vulnerable, easy to scare, and jealous of his privacy? (1 am glad the blackbird, for instance, cannot

tell if I'm talking English, German or

just typewriting: that what he utters I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole.) I ought to outlast the limber dragonflies

as the muscle-bound firs are certainly going to outlast me: I shall not end down any esophagus, though I may succumb to a filter-passing predator,

shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge

of nitrogen to the World Fund with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod of some jittery commander

I be translated in a nano-second to a c.c. of poisonous nothing in a giga-death). Should conventional blunderbuss war and its routiers

invest my bailiwick, I shall of course

assume the submissive posture: but men are not wolves and it probably won't help. Territory, status,

and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:

what I dared not hope or fight for is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft where I needn't, ever, be at home to

those I am not at home with, not a cradle,

a magic Eden without clocks, and not a windowless grave, but a place I may go both in and out of.

August 1962

III The Cave of Making

(IN MEMORIAM LOUIS M ACNEICE]

For this and for all enclosures like it the archetype

is Weland's Stithy, an antre more private than a bedroom even, for neither lovers nor

maids are welcome, but without a bedroom's secrets: from the Olivetti portable,

the dictionaries (the very best money can buy), the heaps of paper, it is evident

what must go on. Devoid of flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate

here to a function, designed to discourage daydreams—hence windows averted from plausible

videnda but admitting a light one could mend a watch by—and to sharpen hearing: reached by an

outside staircase, domestic noises and odors, the vast background of natural

life are shut off. Here silence is turned into objects.

I wish, Louis, I could have shown it you while you were still in public, and the house and garden: lover of women and Donegal,

from your perspective you'd notice sights I overlook, and in turn take a scholar's interest

in facts I could tell you (for instance, four miles to our east, at a wood palisade, Carolingian

Bavaria stopped, beyond it unknowable nomads). Friends we became by personal

choice, but fate had already made us neighbors. For Grammar we both inherited

good mongrel barbarian English which never completely succumbed to the Roman rhetoric

or the Roman gravity, that nonsense which stood none. Though neither of our d(ids, like Horace's,

wiped his nose on his forearm, neither was porphyry-born, and our ancestors probably were among those plentiful subjects

/

it cost less money to murder. Born so, both of us

became self-conscious at a moment when locomotives were named after knights in Malory,

Science to schoolboys was known as Stinks, and the Manor still was politically numinous:

both watched with mixed feelings the sack of Silence, the churches empty, the cavalry

go, the Cosmic Model become German, and any faith, if we had it, in immanent

virtue died. More than ever life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable, but we shan't, not since Stalin and Hitler, trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively, all is possible.

To you, though, ever since, last Fall, you quietly slipped out of Granusion,

our moist garden, into the Country of Unconcern, no possibility

matters. I wish you hadn't caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier

to talk to: with those no longer tensed by problems one cannot feel shy and, anyway,

when playing cards or drinking or pulling faces are out of the question, what else is there

to do but talk to the voices of conscience they have become? From now on, as a visitor

who needn't be met at the station, your influence is welcome at any hour in my ubity,

especially here, where titles from Poems to The Burning Perch offer proof positive

of the maker you were, with whom I once collaborated, once at a weird Symposium

exchanged winks as a juggins went on about Alienation.

Who would, for preference, be a bard in an oral culture, obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner.

giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a

Baroque Prince, expected, like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it's rather a privilege

amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into

. background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,

cannot be "done" like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon

being read or ignored: our handful of clients at least can rune. (It's heartless to forget about

the underdeveloped countries, but a starving ear is as deaf as a suburban optimist's:

to stomachs only the Hindu integers truthfully speak.) Our forerunners might envy us

our remnant still able to listen : as Nietzsche said they would, the plebs have got steadily

denser, the optimates quicker still on the uptake. (Today, even Talleyrand

might seem a naif: he had so little to cope with.) I should like to become, if possible,

a minor atlantic Goethe, with his passion for weather and stones but without his silliness

re the Cross: at times a bore, but, while knowing Speech can at best. a shadow echoing

the silent light, bear witness to the Truth it is not, he wished it were, as the Francophile

gaggle of pure songsters are too vain to. We're not musicans: to stink of Poetry

is unbecoming, and never to be dull shows a lack of taste. Even a limerick

ought to be something a man of honor, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad,

could read without contempt: (at that frontier I wouldn't dare speak to anyone

in either a prophet's bellow or a diplomat's whisper).

Seeing you know our mystery from the inside and therefore how much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionship

of our good dead, to give us comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity

dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking

imps of mawk and hooey write with us what they will, you won't think me imposing if

I ask you to stay at my elbow until cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegy

I should have been able to manage something more like you than this egocentric monologue, but accept it for friendship's sake.

July 1964

IV Down There

(FOR IRVING WEISS)

A cellar underneath the house, though not lived in, Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings, A providential shelter when the Great Cold came, Which woke our feel for somewhere fixed to come back to, A hole by occupation made to smell human.

Self-walled, we sleep aloft, but still, at safe anchor, Ride there on caves; lamplit we dine at street level: But, deep in Mother Earth, beneath her key-cold cloak, Where light and heat can never spoil what sun ripened, In barrels, bottles, jars, we mew her kind commons, Wine, beer, conserves and pickles, good at all seasons.

Encrust with years of clammy grime, the lair, maybe, Of creepy-crawlies or a ghost, its flagstoned vault Is not for girls: sometimes, to test their male courage,

A father sends the younger boys to fetch something For Mother from down there; ashamed to whimper,

hearts pounding, They dare the dank steps, re-emerge with proud faces.

The rooms we talk and work in always look injured When trunks are being packed, and when, without warning, We drive up in the dark, unlock and switch lights on, They seem put out: a cellar never takes umbrage; It takes us as we are, explorers, homebodies, Who seldom visit others when we don't need them.

July 1963

V Up There

(FOR ANNE WEI S S)

Men would never have come to need an attic.

Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build

Special cabinets for them, dote on, index

Each new specimen: only women cling to

Items out of their past they have no use for,

Can't name now what they couldn't bear to part with.

Up there, under the eaves, in bulging boxes, Hats, veils, ribbons, galoshes, programs, letters Wait unworshiped [a starving spider spins for The occasional fly): no clock recalls it Once an hour to the household it's a part of, No Saint's Day is devoted to its function.

All it knows of a changing world it has to

Guess from children, who conjure in its plenum,

Now an eyrie for two excited sisters,

Where, when Mother is bad, her rage can't reach them,

Now a schooner on which a lonely only

Boy sails north or approaches coral islands.

July 1963

VI The Geography of the House

(FO R C HRIS TOPHER ISHER WOOD)

Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs call the House wh ere Everybody goes, Even melancholies Raise a cheer to Mrs. Nature for the primal Pleasures She bestows.

Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un­-til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, but This She guarantees from Cradle unto grave.

Lifted off the potty, Infants from their mothers Hear their first impartial Words of worldly praise: Hence, to start the morning With a satisfactory Dump is a good omen All our adult days.

Revelation came to Luther in a privy

(Crosswords have been solved there):

Rodin was no fool

When he cast his Thinker,

Cogitating deeply,

Crouched in the position

Of a man at stool.

All the Arts derive from This ur-act of making, Private to the artist: Makers' lives are spent Striving in their chosen Medium to produce a De-narcissus-ized en- -during excrement.

Freud did not invent the Constipated miser: Banks have letter boxes Built in their far;ade, Marked For Night Deposits, Stocks are firm or liquid, Currencies of nations Either soft or hard.

Global Mother, keep our Bowels of compassion Open through our lifetime, Purge our minds as well: Grant us a kind ending, Not a second childhood, Petulant, weak-sphinctered, In a cheap hotel.

Keep us in our station: When we get pound-noteish, When we seem about to Take up Higher Thought, Send us some deflating Image like the pained ex-

-pression on a Major Prophet taken short.

(Orthodoxy ought to Bless our modern plumbing:

Swift and St. Augustine Lived in centuries When a stench of sewage Ever in the nostrils Made a strong debating Point for Manichees.)

Mind and Body run on Different timetables: Not until our morning Visit here can we Leave the dead concerns of Yesterday behind us, Face with all our courage What is now to be.

July 1964

VII Encomium Balnei

(FOR NEIL LITTLE) it is odd that the English

a rather dirty people should have invented the slogan Cleanliness is next to Godliness

meaning by that a gentleman smells faintly of tar persuaded themselves that constant cold hydropathy

would make the sons of gentlemen pure in heart

(not that papa or his chilblained offspring can hope to be gentry)

still John Bull's

hip-bath it was

that made one carnal pleasure lawful for the first time since we quarreled

over Faith and Works

(Shakespeare probably stank

Le Grand

Monarque certainly did)

thanks to him

shrines where a subarctic fire-cult could meet and marry

a river-cult from torrid Greece rose again

resweetened the hirsute West

a Roman though

bath addict

amphitheater fan would be puzzled

seeing the caracallan acreage compressed into such a few square feet mistake them for hideouts

warrens of some outlawed sect who mortify their flesh with strange implements

he is not that wrong

if the tepidarium's barrel vaulting has migrated to churches and railroad stations

if we no longer

go there to wrestle or gossip or make love

(you cannot purchase a conjugal tub) St. Anthony and his wild brethren (for them ablutions were tabu

a habit of that doomed behavioral sink this world)

have been

just as he thought

at work

we are no more chaste

obedient

nor

if we can possibly help it 264

poor than he was but

enthusiasts who were have taught us (besides showing lovers of nature how to carry binoculars instead of a gun)

the unclassical wonder of being all by oneself

though our dwellings may still have a master who owns the front-door key

a bathroom

has only an inside lock

belongs today to whoever

is taking a bath

among us to withdraw from the tribe at will

be neither Parent

Spouse nor Guest

is a sacrosanct

political right

where else shall the Average Ego find its peace

not in sleep surely the several worlds we invent are quite as pugnacious

as the one into which we are born and even more public

on Oxford Street or Broadway I may escape notice

but never

on roads I dream of

what Eden is there for the lapsed

but hot water

snug in its caul

widows

orphans

exiles may feel as self-important as an only child

and a sage be silly without shame

present a Lieder Abend 265

f'vT'

f.: f

to a captive audience of his toes retreat from rhyme and reason into some mallarmesque syllabic fog

for half an hour it is wise to forget the time

our daily peril

and each other

good for the soul once in the twenty-four hour cycle of her body

whether according to our schedule as we sit down to breakfast

or stand up to welcome

folk for dinner

to feel as if

the Pilgrim's Way

or as some choose to call it

the War Path

were now a square in the Holy City that what was wrong has been put right

as if Von Hugel's

hoggers and lumpers were extinct thinking the same as thanking

all military hardware already slighted and submerged

April 1962

VIII Grub First, Then Ethics

-Brecht

(FOR MARGARET GARDINER)

Should the shade of Plato visit us, anxious to know how anthropos is, we could say to him: "Well, we can read to ourselves, our use of holy numbers would shock you, and a poet may lament—"where is Telford

whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory,

where Muir who on a Douglas spruce rode out a storm and called an earthquake noble,

where Mr. Vynyian Board, thanks to whose lifelong fuss the hunted whale now suffers

a quicker death?'—without being called an idiot, though none of them bore arms or made a public splash," then "Look!" we would point, for a dig at Athens, "Here is the place where we cook."

Though built in Lower Austria, do-it-yourself America prophetically blueprinted this palace kitchen for kingdoms where royalty would be incognito, for an age when

Courtesy might think: "'From your voice and the back of your neck I know we shall get on

but cannot tell from your thumbs who is to give the orders." The right note is harder

to hear than in the Age of Poise when She talked shamelessly to her maid and sang

noble lies with Him, but struck it can be still in New Cnossos where if I am banned by a shrug it is my fault, not Father's, as it is my taste whom I put below the salt.

The prehistoric hearthstone, round as a birthday-button and sacred to Granny, is as old stuff as the bowel-loosening nasal war cry, but this all-electric room

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