1. The Watershed **
2. The Letter **
3. The Secret Agent *
4. Taller To-day *
5. A Free One **
6. The Questioner Who Sits So Sly **
7. Petition **
8. 1929 ***
9. Venus Will Now Say a Few Words *
10. Consider **
11. No Change of Place *
12. Let History Be My Judge
13. Never Stronger *
14. This Loved One
15. Easy Knowledge
16. Too Dear, Too Vague *
17. Between Adventure *
18. Too Dear, Too Vague *
19. A Free One **
20. Family Ghosts **
21. The Bonfires
22. On Sunday Walks *
23. Shorts *
24. Happy Ending
25. This Lunar Beauty **
26. The Question ***
27. The Wanderer *
28. Five Songs **
29.. Ode **
30. Prologue to On This Island **
31. O What is That Sound **
32. Hearing of Harvests **
33. Out on the lawn **
34. A shilling life*
35. Our hunting fathers**
36. A Bride in the 30's ***
37. The Summer holds ***
38. Nocturne **
Twelve Songs
39. I. Song of the Beggar ***
40. II **
41. III **
42. IV **
43. V **
44. VI. Autumn Song **
45. VII **
46. VIII *
47. IX. Funeral Blues (Stop All The Clocks) ****
48. X **
49. XI. Roman Wall Blues ***
50. XII. **
51. On the Island **
52. Night Mail ****
53. Casino *
54 Journey to Iceland *
55. Death's Echo ***
56. Lullaby ****
57. Spain ***
58. Orpheus *
59. Miss Gee ***
60. As he is **
61. As I Walked Out One Evening ****
62. Oxford **
63. In Time Of War ****
64. The Capital ***
65. Musée des Beaux Arts ***
66. Epitaph on a Tyrant **
67. In Memory of W. B. Yeats ***
68. Refugee Blues ***
69. The Unknown Citizen ***
70. September 1, 1939 ****
71. Law Like Love **
72. In Memory of Sigmund Freud ***
73. Lady, weeping at the crossroads **
74. Song for St. Cecilia's Day ***
75. The Quest
The Door **
The Preparations**
The Crossroads
The Traveller
The City
The First Temptation **
The Second Temptation **
The Third Temptation **
The Average **
Vocation *
The Useful **
The Way
The Lucky
The Hero
Adventure
The Adventurers
The Waters **
The Garden
76. But I Can't
77. In Sickness and in Health ***
78. Domesday Song *
79. Atlantis **
80. At the Grave of Henry James ***
81. Mundus et Infans ***
The Watershed.
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to the wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
At Cashwell raises water; for ten years
It lay in flooded workings until this,
Hs latter office, grudgingly performed,
And further here and there, though many dead
Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen
Taken from recent winters; two there were
Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand, clutching
The winch the gale would tear them from; one died
During a storm, the fells impassable,
Not at,his village, but in wooden shape
Through long abandoned levels nosed his way
And in his final valley went to ground.
Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,
Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:
This land, cut off, will not communicate,
Be no accessory content to one
Aimless for faces rather there than here.
Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,
They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind
Arriving driven from the ignorant sea
To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm
Where sap unbaffled rises, being Spring;
But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass,
Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.
August 1927
The Letter
From the very first coming down
Into a new valley with a frown
Because of the sun and a lost way,
You certainly remain: to-day
I, crouching behind a sheep-pen, heard
Travel across a sudden bird,
Cry out against the storm, and found
The year's arc a completed round
And love's worn circuit re-begun,
Endless with no dissenting turn.
Shall see, shall pass, as we have seen
The swallow on the tile, Spring's green
Preliminary shiver, passed
A solitary truck, the last
Of shunting in the Autumn. But now
To interrupt the homely brow,
Thought warmed to evening through and through
Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much but not to come.
Nor speech is close nor fingers numb,
If love not seldom has received
An unjust answer, was deceived.
I, decent with the seasons, move
Different or with a different love,
Nor question overmuch the nod,
The stone smile of this country god
That never was more reticent,
Always afraid to say more than it meant.
December 1927
The Secret Agent
Control of the passes was, he saw, the key
To this new district, but who would get it?
He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap
For a bogus guide, seduced with the old tricks.
At Greenhearth was a fine site for a dam
And easy power, had they pushed the rail
Some stations nearer. They ignored his wires.
The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming.
The street music seemed gracious now to one
For weeks up in the desert. Woken by water
Running away in the dark, he often had
Reproached the night for a companion
Dreamed of already. They would shoot, of course,
Parting easily who were never joined.
January 1928
Taller To-day
Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,
Walking together in the windless orchard
Where the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier.
Again in the room with the sofa hiding the grate,
Look down to the river when the rain is over,
See him turn to the window, hearing our last
Of Captain Ferguson.
It is seen how excellent hands have turned to commonness.
One staring too long, went blind in a tower,
One sold all his manors to fight, broke through, and faltered.
Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl
Under the headlands in their windy dwelling
Because the Adversary put too easy questions
On lonely roads.
But happy now, though no nearer each other,
We see the farms lighted all along the valley;
Down at the mill-shed the hammering stops
And men go home.
Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.
March 1928
A Free One
Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see
His dextrous handling of a wrap as he
Steps after into cars, the beggar's envy.
"There is a free one," many say, but err.
He is not that returning conqueror,
Nor ever the poles' circumnavigator.
But poised between shocking falls on razor-edge
Has taught himself this balancing subterfuge
Of the accosting profile, the erect carriage.
The song, the varied action of the blood
Would drown the warning from the iron wood
Would cancel the inertia of the buried:
Travelling by daylight on from house to house
The longest way to the intrinsic peace,
With love's fidelity and with love's weakness.
March 1929
The Questioner Who Sits So Sly
Will you turn a deaf ear
To what they said on the shore,
Interrogate their poises
In their rich houses;
Of stork-legged heaven-reachers
Of the compulsory touchers
The sensitive amusers
And masked amazers?
Yet wear no ruffian badge
Nor lie behind the hedge
Waiting with bombs of conspiracy
In arm-pit secrecy;
Carry no talisman
For germ or the abrupt pain
Needing no concrete shelter
Nor porcelain filter.
Will you wheel death anywhere
In his invalid chair,
With no affectionate instant
But his attendant?
For to be held for friend
By an undeveloped mind
To be joke for children is
Death's happiness:
Whose anecdotes betray
His favourite colour as blue
Colour of distant bells
And boys' overalls.
His tales of the bad lands
Disturb the sewing hands;
Hard to be superior
On parting nausea;
To accept the cushions from
Women against martyrdom,
Yet applauding the circuits
Of racing cyclists.
Never to make signs
Fear neither maelstrom nor zones
Salute with soldiers' wives
When the flag waves;
Remembering there is
No recognised gift for this;
No income, no bounty,
No promised country.
But to see brave sent home
Hermetically sealed with shame
And cold's victorious wrestle
With molten metal.
A neutralising peace
And an average disgrace
Are honour to discover
For later other.
September 1929
Petition
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning. the liar's quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward's stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
October 1929
1929
I
It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky
Season when lovers and writers find
An altering speech for altering things,
An emphasis on new names, on the arm
A fresh hand with fresh power.
But thinking so I came at once
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.
So I remember all of those whose death
Is necessary condition of the season's setting forth,
Who sorry in this time look only back
To Christmas intimacy, a winter dialogue
Fading in silence, leaving them in tears.
And recent particulars come to mind:
The death by cancer of a once hated master,
A friend's analysis of his own failure,
Listened to at intervals throughout the winter
At different hours and in different rooms.
But always with success of others for comparison,
The happiness, for instance, of my friend Kurt Groote,
Absence of fear in Gerhart Meyer
From the sea, the truly strong man.
A 'bus ran home then, on the public ground
Lay fallen bicycles like huddled corpses:
No chattering valves of laughter emphasised
Nor the swept gown ends of a gesture stirred
The sessile hush; until a sudden shower
Fell willing into grass and closed the day,
Making choice seem a necessary error.
April 1929
II
Coming out of me living is always thinking,
Thinking changing and changing living,
Am feeling as it was seeingIn city leaning on harbour parapet
To watch a colony of duck below
Sit, preen, and doze on buttresses
Or upright paddle on flickering stream,
Casually fishing at a passing straw.
Those find sun's luxury enough,
Shadow know not of homesick foreigner
Nor restlessness of intercepted growth.
All this time was anxiety at night,
Shooting and barricade in street.
Walking home late I listened to a friend
Talking excitedly of final war
Of proletariat against police
That one shot girl of nineteen through the knees,
They threw that one down concrete stair
Till I was angry, said I was pleased.
Time passes in Hessen, in Gutensberg,
With hill-top and evening holds me up,
Tiny observer of enormous world.
Smoke rises from factory in ' field,
Memory of fire: On all sides heard
Vanishing music of isolated larks:
From village square voices in hymn,
Men's voices, an old use.
And I above standing, saying in thinking:
"Is first baby, warm in mother,
Before born and is still mother,
Time passes and now is other,
Is knowledge in him now of other,
Cries in cold air, himself no friend.
In grown man also, may see in face
In his day-thinking and in his night-thinking
Is wareness and is fear of other,
Alone in flesh, himself no friend.
"He say 'We must forgive and forget.'
Forgetting saying but is unforgiving
And unforgiving is in his living;
Body reminds in him to loving.
Reminds but takes no further part.
Perfunctorily affectionate in hired room
But takes no part and is unloving
But loving death. May see in dead,
In face of dead that loving wish.
As one returns from Africa to wife
And his ancestral property in Wales."
Yet sometimes man look and say good
At strict beauty of locomotive,
Completeness of gesture or unclouded eye;
In me so absolute unity of evening
And field and distance was in me for peace,
Was over me in feeling without forgetting
Those ducks' indifference, that friend's hysteria,
Without wishing and with forgiving,
To love my life, not as other,
Not as bird's life, not as child's,
"Cannot," I said, "being no child now nor a bird."
May 1929
III
Order to stewards and the study of time,
Correct in books, was earlier than this
But j oined this by the wires I watched from train,
Slackening of wire and posts' sharp reprimand,
In month of August to a cottage coming.
Being alone, the frightened soul
Returns to this life of sheep and hay
No longer his: he every hour
Moves further from this and must so move,
As child is weaned from his mother and leaves home
But taking the first steps falters, is vexed,
Happy only to find home, a place
Where no tax is levied for being there.
So, insecure, he loves and love
Is insecure, gives less than he expects.
He knows not if it be seed in time to display
Luxuriantly in a wonderful fructification
Or whether it be but a degenerate remnant
Of something immense in the past but now
Surviving only as the infectiousness of disease
Or in the malicious caricature of drunkenness;
Its end glossed over by the careless but known long
To finer perception of the mad and ill.
Moving along the track which is himself,
He loves what he hopes will last, which gone,
Begins the difficult work of mourning,
And as foreign settlers to strange country come,
By mispronunciation of native words
And by intermarriage create a new race
And a new language, so may the soul
Be weaned at last to independent delight.
Startled by the violent laugh of a jay
I went from wood, from crunch underfoot,
Air between stems as under water;
As I shall leave the summer, see autumn come
Focusing stars more sharply in the sky,
See frozen buzzard flipped down the weir
And carried out to sea, leave autumn,
See winter, winter for earth and us,
A forethought of death that we may' find ourselves at death
Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.
August 1929
IV
It is time for the destruction of error.
The chairs are being brought in from the garden,
The summer talk stopped on that savage coast
Before the storms, after the guests and birds:
In sanatoriums they laugh less and less,
Less certain of cure; and the loud madman
Sinks now into a more terrible calm.
The falling leaves know it, the children,
At play on the fuming alkali-tip
Or by the flooded football ground, know it-
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's:
Orders are given to the enemy for a time
With underground proliferation of mould,
With constant whisper and the casual question,
To haunt the poisoned in his shunned house,
To destroy the efflorescence of the flesh,
To censor the play of the mind, to enforce
Conformity with the orthodox bone,
With organised fear, the articulated skeleton.
You whom I gladly walk with, touch,
Or wait for as one certain of good,
We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
Death of the old gang; would leave them
In sullen valley where is made no friend,
The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.
October 1929
Venus Will Now Say a Few Words
Since you are going to begin to-day
Let us consider what it is you do.
You are the one whose part it is to lean,
For whom it is not good to be alone.
Laugh warmly turning shyly in the hall
Or climb with bare knees the volcanic hill,
Acquire that flick of wrist and after strain
Relax in your darling's arms like a stone
Remembering everything you can confess,
Making the most of firelight, of hours of fuss;
But joy is mine not yours-to have come so far,
Whose cleverest invention was lately fur;
Lizards my best once who took years to breed,
Could not control the temperature of blood.
To reach that shape for your face to assume,
Pleasure to many and despair to some,
I shifted ranges, lived epochs handicapped
By climate, wars, or what the young men kept,
Modified theories on the types of dross,
Altered desire and history of dress.
You in the town now call the exile fool
That writes home once a year as last leaves fall,
Think-Romans had a language in their day
And ordered roads with it, but it had to die:
Your culture can but leave-forgot as sure
As place-name origins in favourite shire
Jottings for stories, some often-mentioned Jack,
And references in letters to a private joke,
Equipment rusting in unweeded lanes,
Virtues still advertised on local lines;
And your conviction shall help none to fly,
Cause rather a perversion on next floor.
Nor even is despair your own, when swiftly
Comes general assault on your ideas of safety:
That sense of famine, central anguish felt
For goodness wasted at peripheral fault,
Your shutting up the house and taking prow
To go into the wilderness to pray,
Means that I wish to leave and to pass on,
Select another form, perhaps your son;
Though he reject you, join opposing team
Be late or early at another time,
My treatment will not differ-he will be tipped,
Found weeping, signed for, made to answer, topped.
Do not imagine you can abdicate;
Before you reach the frontier you are caught;
Others have tried it and will try again
To finish that which they did not begin:
Their fate must always be the same as yours,
To suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,
Holders of one position, wrong for years.
November 1929
Consider
Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly-look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
Pass on, admire the view of the massif
Through plate-glass windows of the Sport Hotel;
Join there the insufficient units
Dangerous, easy, in furs, in uniform
And constellated at reserved tables
Supplied with feelings by an efficient band
Relayed elsewhere to farmers and their dogs
Sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens.
Long ago, supreme Antagonist,
More powerful than the great northern whale
Ancient and sorry at life's 'limiting defect,
In Cornwall, Mendip, or the Pennine moor
Your comments on the highborn mining-captains,
Found they no answer, made them wish to die
-Lie since in barrows out of harm.
You talk to your admirers every day
By silted harbours, derelict works,
In strangled orchards, and the silent comb
Where dogs have worried or a bird was shot.
Order the ill that they attack at once:
Visit the ports and, interrupting
The leisurely conversation in the bar
Within a stone's throw of the sunlit water,
Beckon'your chosen out. Summon
Those handsome and diseased youngsters, those women
Your solitary agents in the country parishes;
And mobilise the powerful forces latent
In soils that make the farmer brutal
In the infected sinus, and the eyes of stoats.
Then, ready, start your rumour, soft
But horrifying in its capacity to disgust
Which, spreading magnified, shall come to be
A polar peril, a prodigious alarm,
Scattering the people, as torn-up paper
Rags and utensils in a sudden gust,
Seized with immeasurable neurotic dread.
Financier, leaving your little room
Where the money is made but not spent,
You'll need your typist and your boy no more;
The game is up for you and for the others,
Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns .
Of College Quad or Cathedral Close,
Who are born nurses, who live in shorts
Sleeping with people and playing fives.
Seekers after happiness, all who follow
The convolutions of your simple wish,
It is later than you think; nearer that day
Far other than that distant afternoon
Amid rustle of frocks and stamping feet
They gave the prizes to the ruined boys.
You cannot be away, then, no
Not though you pack to leave within an hour,
Escaping humming down arterial roads:
The date was yours; the prey to fugues,
Irregular breathing and alternate ascendancies
After some haunted migratory years
To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of mania
Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue.
March 193O
No Change of Place
Who will endure
Heat of day and winter danger,
Journey from one place to another,
Nor be content to lie
Till evening upon headland over bay,
Between the land and sea
Or smoking wait till hour of food,
Leaning on chained-up gate
At edge of wood?
Metals run,
Burnished or rusty in the sun,
From town to town,
And signals all along are down;
Yet nothing passes
But envelopes between these places,
Snatched at the gate and panting read indoors,
And first spring flowers arriving smashed,
Disaster stammered over wires,
And pity flashed.
For should professional traveller come,
Asked at the fireside, he is dumb,
Declining with a secret smile,
And all the while
Conjectures on our maps grow stranger
And threaten danger.
There is no change of place:
No one will ever know
For what conversion brilliant capital is waiting,
What ugly feast may village band be celebrating;
For no one goes
Further than railhead or the ends of piers,
Will neither go nor send his son
Further through foothills than the rotting stack
Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun
Will shout "Turn back".
Summer 193O
Let History Be My Judge
We made all possible preparations,
Drew up a list of firms,
Constantly revised our calculations
And allotted the farms,
Issued all the orders expedient
In this kind of case:
Most, as was expected, were obedient,
Though there were murmurs, of course;
Chiefly against our exercising
Our old right to abuse:
Even some sort of attempt at rising,
But these were mere boys.
For never serious misgiving
Occurred to anyone,
Since there could be no question of living
If we did not win.
The generally accepted view teaches
That there was no excuse,
Though in the light of recent researches
Many would find the cause
In a not uncommon form of terror;
Others, still more astute,
Point to possibilities of error
At the very start.
As for ourselves there is left remaining
Our honour at least,
And a reasonable chance of retaining
Our faculties to the last.
December 1928
Never Stronger
Again in conversations
Speaking of fear
And throwing off reserve
The voice is nearer
But no clearer
Than first love
Than boys' imaginations.
For every news
Means pairing off in twos and twos,
Another I, another You,
Each knowing what to do
But of no use.
Never stronger
But younger and younger,
Saying good-bye but coming back, for fear
Is over there,
And the centre of anger
Is out of danger.
January 1929
This Loved One
Before this loved one
Was that one and that one,
A family
And history
And ghost's adversity,
Whose pleasing name
Was neighbourly shame.
Before this last one
Was much to be done,
Frontiers to cross
As clothes grew worse,
And coins to pass
In a cheaper house,
Before this last one,
Before this loved one.
Face that the sun
Is lively on
May stir but here
Is no new year;
This gratitude for gifts is less
Than the old loss,
Touching a shaking hands
On mortgaged lands,
And smiling of
This gracious greeting,
"Good day. Good luck",
Is no real meeting,
But instinctive look,
A backward love.
March 1929
Easy Knowledge
Between attention and attention,
The first and last decision,
Is mortal distraction
Of earth and air,
Further and nearer,
The vague wants
Of days and nights,
And personal error;
And the fatigued face,
Taking the strain
Of the horizontal force
And the vertical thrust,
Makes random answer
To the crucial test;
The uncertain flesh,
Scraping back chair
For the wrong train,
Falling in slush
Before a friend's friends
Or shaking hands
With a snub-nosed winner.
The opening window, closing door,
Open, close, but not
To finish or restore;
These wishes get
No further than
The edges of the town,
And leaning asking from the car
Cannot tell us where we are;
While the divided face
Has no grace
No discretion,
No occupation
But registering
Acreage, mileage,
The easy knowledge
Of the virtuous thing.
May 193O
Too Dear, Too Vague
Love by ambition
Of definition
Suffers partition
And cannot go
From yes to no,
For no is not love; no is no,
The shutting of a door,
The tightening jaw,
A wilful sorrow;
And saying yes
Turns love into success,
Views from the rail
Of land and happiness;
Assured of all,
The sofas creak,
And were this all, love were
But cheek to cheek
And dear to dear.
Voices explain
Love's pleasure and love's pain,
Still tap the knee
And cannot disagree,
Hushed for aggression
Of full confession,
Likeness to likeness
Of each old weakness;
Love is not there,
Love has moved to another chair,
Aware already
Of what stands next,
And is not vexed,
And is not giddy,
Leaves the North in place
With a good grace,
And would not gather
Another to another,
Designs his own unhappiness
Foretells his own death and is faithless.
March 1929
Between Adventure
Upon this line between adventure
Prolong the meeting out of good nature
Obvious in each agreeable feature.
Calling of each other by name,
Smiling, taking a willing arm,
Has the companionship of a game.
But should the walk do more than this
Out of bravado or drunkenness,
Forward or back are menaces.
On neither side let foot slip over,
Invading Always, exploring Never,
For this is hate and this is fear.
On narrowness stand, for sunlight is
Brightest only on surfaces;
No anger, no traitor, but peace.
June 1929
A Free One
Watch any day his nonchalant pauses, see
His dextrous handling of a wrap as he
Steps after into cars, the beggar's envy.
"There is a free one," many say, but err.
He is not that returning conqueror,
Nor ever the poles' circumnavigator.
But poised between shocking falls on razor-edge
Has taught himself this balancing subterfuge
Of the accosting profile, the erect carriage.
The song, the varied action of the blood
Would drown the warning from the iron wood
Would cancel the inertia of the buried:
Travelling by daylight on from house to house
The longest way to the intrinsic peace,
With love's fidelity and with love's weakness.
March 1929
Family Ghosts
The strings' excitement, the applauding drum,
Are but the initiating ceremony
That out of cloud the ancestral face may come,
And never hear their subaltern mockery,
Graffiti-writers, moss-grown with whimsies,
Loquacious when the watercourse is dry.
It is your face see, and morning's praise
Of you is ghost's approval of the choice,
Filtered through roots of the effacing grass.
Fear, taking me aside, would give advice
"To conquer her, the visible enemy,
It is enough to turn away the eyes."
Yet there's no peace in the assaulted city,
But speeches at the corners, hope for news,
Outside the watchfires of a stronger army.
And all emotions to expression come,
Recovering the archaic imagery:
This longing for assurance takes the form
Of a hawk's vertical stooping from the sky;
These tears, salt for a disobedient dream,
The lunatic agitation of the sea;
While this despair with hardened eyeballs cries
"A Golden Age, a Silver . . . rather this,
Massive and taciturn years, the Age of Ice".
April 1929
The Bonfires
Look there! The sunk road winding
To the fortified farm.
Listen! The cock's alarm
In the strange valley.
Are we the stubborn athletes;
Are we then to begin
The run between the gin
And bloody falcon?
The horns of the dark squadron
Converging to attack;
The sound behind our back
Of glaciers calving.
In legend all were simple,
And held the straitened spot;
But we in legend not,
Are not simple.
In weakness how much further;
Along what crooked route
By hedgehog's gradual foot,
Or fish's fathom.
Bitter the blue smoke rises
From garden bonfires lit,
To where we burning sit:
Good, if it's thorough,
Leaving no double traitor
In days of luck and heat,
To time the double beat,
At last together.
January 1931
On Sunday Walks
On Sunday walks
Past the shut gates of works
The conquerors come
And are handsome.
Sitting all day
By the open window,
Say what they say,
Know what to know,
Who brought and taught
Unusual images
And new tunes to old cottages,
With so much done,
Without a thought
Of the anonymous lampoon,
The cellar counterplot,
Though in the night,
Pursued by eaters,
They clutch at gaiters
That straddle and deny
Escape that way,
Though in the night
Is waking fright.
Father by son
Lives on and on,
Though over date
And motto on the gate
The lichen grows
From year to year,
Still here and there
That Roman nose
Is noticed in the villages,
And father's son
Knows what they said
And what they did.
Not meaning to deceive,
Wish to give suck
Enforces make-believe,
And what was fear
Of fever and bad-luck
Is now a scare
At certain names,
A need for charms,
For certain words
At certain fords,
And what was livelihood
Is tallness, strongness,
Words and longness,
All glory and all story,
Solemn and not so good.
August 1929
Shorts
Pick a quarrel, go to war,
Leave the hero in the bar;
Hunt the lion, climb the peak:
No one guesses you are weak.
The friends of the born nurse
Are always getting worse.
When he is well
She gives him hell,
But she's a brick
When he is sick.
You're a long way off becoming a saint
So long as you suffer from any complaint;
But, if you don't, there's no denying
The chances are that you're not trying.
I'm afraid there's many a spectacled sod
Prefers the British Museum to God.
I'm beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations:
They are not deep,
And they are not cheap.
Those who will not reason
Perish in the act:
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.
Let us honour if we can
The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
These had stopped seeking
But went on speaking,
Have not contributed
But have diluted.
These ordered light
But had no right,
These handed on
War and a son.
Wishing no harm
But to be warm,
These fell asleep
On the burning heap.
Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places.
1929-1931
Happy Ending
The silly fool, the silly fool
Was sillier in school
But beat the bully as a rule.
The youngest son, the youngest son
Was certainly no wise one
Yet could surprise one.
Or rather, or rather,
To be posh, we gather,
One should have no father.
Simple to prove
That deeds indeed
In life succeed,
But love in love,
And tales in tales
Where no one fails.
August 1929
This Lunar Beauty
This lunar beauty
Has no history,
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.
This like a dream
Keeps other time,
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted,
Lost and wanted.
But this was never
A ghost's endeavour
Nor, finished this,
Was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.
April 193O
The Question
To ask the hard question is simple;
Asking at meeting
With the simple glance of acquaintance
To what these go
And how these do:
To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.
But the answer
Is hard and hard to remember:
On steps or on shore
The ears listening
To words at meeting,
The eyes looking
At the hands helping,
Are never sure
Of what they learn
From how these things are done.
And forgetting to listen or see
Makes forgetting easy;
Only remembering the method of remembering,
Remembering only in another way,
Only the strangely exciting lie,
Afraid
To remember what the fish ignored,
How the bird escaped, or if the sheep obeyed.
Till, losing memory,
Bird, fish, and sheep are ghostly,
And ghosts must do again
What gives them pain.
Cowardice cries
For windy skies,
Coldness for water,
Obedience for a master.
Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;
Shall the bird live,
Shall the fish dive,
And sheep obey
In a sheep's way;
Can love remember
The question and the answer,
For love recover
What has been dark and rich and warm all over?
August 193O
The Wanderer
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house,
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.
There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome.
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him. through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.
Save him from hostile c'apture,
From sudden tiger's spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring j oy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.
August 193O
Five Songs
I
What's in your mind, my dove, my coney;
Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life;
Is it making of love or counting of money,
Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
Open your eyes, my dearest dallier;
Let hunt with your hands for escaping me;
Go through the motions of exploring the familiar;
Stand on the brink of the warm white day
.
Rise with the wind, my great big serpent;
Silence the birds and darken the air;
Change me with terror, alive in a moment;
Strike for the heart and have me there.
II
That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's levelled gun.
But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grown credulous of peace,
As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.
November 1931
III
For what as easy
For what though small,
For what is well
Because between,
To you simply
From me I mean.
Who goes with who
The bedclothes say,
As I and you
Go kissed away,
The data given,
The senses even.
Fate is not late,
Nor the speech rewritten,
Nor one word forgotten,
Said at the start
About heart,
By heart, for heart.
October 1931
IV
Seen when nights are silent,
The bean-shaped island,
And our ugly comic servant,
Who was observant.
O the veranda and the fruit,
The tiny steamer in the bay
Startling summer with its hoot:--
You have gone away.
V
"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."
"O do ,you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"
"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease?"
"Out of this house"-said rider to reader
"Yours never will"-said farer to fearer
"They're looking for you"-said hearer to horror
As he left them there, as he left them there.
from "The Orators": October 1931
Ode
(TO MY PUPILS)
Though aware of our rank and alert to obey orders,
Watching with binoculars the movement of the grass for an
ambush,
The pistol cocked, the code-word committed to memory;
The youngest drummer
Knows all the peace-time stories like the oldest soldier,
Though frontier-conscious,
About the tall white gods who landed from their open boat.
Skilled in the working of copper. appointing our feast-days.
Before the islands were submerged. when the
weather was calm.
The maned lion common
An open wishing-well in every garden;
When love came easy.
Perfectly certain. all of us. but not from the records.
Not from the unshaven agent who returned to the camp;
The pillar dug from the desert recorded only
The sack of a city.
The agent clutching his side collapsed at our feet.
"Sorry ! They got me !"
Yes. they were living here once but do not now.
Yes. they are living still but do not here;
Lying awake after Lights Out a recruit may speak up:
"Who told you all this?"
The tent-talk pauses a little till a veteran answers
"Go to sleep. Sonny!"
Turning over he closes his eyes. and then in a moment
Sees the sun at midnight bright over cornfield and pasture.
Our hope .... Someone jostles him. fumbling for boots.
Time to change guard:
Boy. the quarrel was before your time. the aggressor
No one you know.
Your childish moments of awareness were all of our world.
At five you sprang. already a tiger in the garden.
At night your mother taught you to pray for our Daddy
Far away fighting.
One morning you fell off a horse and your brother mocked you:
"Just like a girl!"
You've got their names to live up to and questions won't help,
You've a very full programme, first aid, gunnery, tactics,
The technique to master of raids and hand-to-hand fighting;
Are you in training?
Are you taking care of yourself? Are you sure of passing
The endurance test?
Now we're due to parade on the square in front of the
Cathedral,
When the bishop has blessed us, to file in after the choir-boys,
To stand with the wine-dark conquerors in the roped-off pews,
Shout ourselves hoarse:
"They ran like hares;we have broken them up like firewood;
They fought against God,"
While in a great rift in the limestone miles away
At the same hour they gather, tethering their horses
beside them;
A scarecrow prophet from a boulder foresees our judgement,
Their oppressors howling;
And the bitter psalm is caught by the gale from the rocks:
"How long shall they flourish?"
What have we all been doing to have made from Fear
That laconic war-bitten captain addressing them now
"Heart and head shall be keener, mood the more
As our might lessens":
To have caused their shout "We will fight till
we lie down beside
The Lord we have loved"?
There's Wrath who has learnt every trick of guerilla warfare,
The shamming .dead, the night-raid, the feinted retreat;
Envy their brilliant pamphleteer, to lying
As husband true,
Expert impersonator and linguist, proud of his power
To hoodwink sentries.
Gluttony living alone, austerer than us,
Big simple Greed, Acedia famed with them all
For her stamina, keeping the outposts, and somewhere Lust
With his sapper's skill,
Muttering to his fuses in a tunnel "Could I meet here with Love,
I would hug him to death."
There are faces there for which for a very long time
We've been on the look-out, though often at home we imagined,
Catching sight of a back or hearing a voice through a doorway,
We had found them at last;
Put our arms round their necks
and looked in their eyes and discovered
We were unlucky.
And some of them, surely, we seem to have seen before:
Why, that girl who rode off on her bicycle one fine
summer evening
And never returned, she's there;and the banker we'd noticed
Worried for weeks;
Till he failed to arrive one morning and his room was empty,
Gone with a suitcase.
They speak of things done on the frontier we were never told,
The hidden path to their squat Pictish tower
They will never reveal though kept without
sleep, for their code is
"Death to the squealer":
They are brave, yes, though our newspapers
mention their bravery
In inverted commas.
But careful; back to our lines;it is unsafe there,
Passports are issued no longer; that area is closed;
There's no fire in the waiting-room now
at the climbers' junction,
And all this year
Work has been stopped on the power-house;
the wind whistles under
The half-built culverts.
Do you think that because you have heard that on
Christmas Eve
In a quiet sector they walked about on the skyline,
Exchanged cigarettes, both learning the words for "I love you"
In either language,
You can stroll across for a smoke and a chat any evening?
Try it and see.
That rifle-sight you're designing; is it ready yet?
You're holding us up;the office is getting impatient;
The square munition works out on the old allotments
Needs stricter watching;
If you see any loiterers there you may shoot without warning,
We must stop that leakage.
All leave is cancelled to-night;we must say good-bye.
We entrain at once for the North; we shall see in the morning
The headlands we're doomed to attack; snow
down to the tide-line:
Though the bunting signals
"Indoors before it's too late; cut peat for your fires,"
We shall lie out there.
from "The Orators": November 1931
Prologue to On This Island
O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven,
Make simpler daily the beating of man's heart; within,
There in the ring where name and image meet,
Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought
Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings
Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;
Here too on our little reef display your power,
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp,
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England, became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
For now that dream which so long has contented our will,
I mean, of uniting the dead into a splendid empire,
Under whose fertilising flood the Lancashire moss
Sprouted up chimneys, and Glamorgan hid a life
Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys,
Is already retreating into her maternal shadow;
Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air,
The flotsam at which Dumbarton gapes and hungers;
While upon wind-loved Rowley no hammer shakes
The cluster of mounds like a midget golf course, graves
Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels;
Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory.
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future;
For the seed in their loins were hostile, though
afraid of their pride,
And, tall with a shadow now, inertly wait.
In bar, in netted chicken-farm, in lighthouse,
Standing on these impoverished constricting acres,
The ladies and gentlemen apart, too much alone,
Consider the years of the measured world begun,
The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.
Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh
When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are
watching these islands,
As children in Chester look to Moel Fammau to decide
On picnics by the clearness or withdrawal of her
treeless crown,
Some possible dream, long coiled in the ammonite's slumber
Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness
Its military silence, its surgeon's idea of pain;
And out of the Future into actual History,
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn
For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.
May 1932
O what is that sound
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.
O what is that light I see flashing so clear
Over the distance brightly, brightly?
Only the sun on their weapons, dear,
As they step lightly.
O what are they doing with all that gear;
What are they doing this morning, this morning?
Only the usual manoeuvres, dear,
Or perhaps a warning.
O why have they left the road down there;
Why are they suddenly wheeling, wheeling?
Perhaps a change in the orders, dear;
Why are you kneeling?
O haven't they stopped for the doctor's care;
Haven't they reined their horses, their horses?
Why, they are none of them wounded, dear,
None of these forces.
O is it the parson they want with white hair;
Is it the parson, is it, is it?
No, they are passing his gateway, dear,
Without a visit.
O it must be the farmer who lives so near;
It must be the farmer so cunning, so cunning?
They have passed the farm already, dear,
And now they are funning.
O where are you going? stay with me here!
Were the vows you swore me deceiving, deceiving?
No, I promised to love you, dear,
But I must be leaving.
O it's broken the lock and splintered the door,
O it's the gate where they're turning, turning;
Their feet are heavy on the floor
And their eyes are burning.
October 1932
Hearing of harvests
Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities,
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow.
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities,
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them that craved for water.
They built by rivers and at night the water
Running past windows comforted their sorrow;
Each in his little bed conceived of islands
Where every day was dancing in the valleys,
And all the year trees blossomed on the mountains,
Where love was innocent, being far from cities.
But dawn came back and they were still in cities;
No marvellous creature rose up from the water,
There was still gold and silver in the mountains,
And hunger was a more immediate sorrow;
Although to moping villagers in valleys
Some waving pilgrims were describing islands.
"The gods." they promised. "visit us from islands.
Are stalking head-up. lovely through the cities;
Now is the time to leave your wretched valleys
And sail with them across the lime-green water;
Sitting at their white sides. forget your sorrow.
The shadow cast across your lives by mountains."
So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains
Climbing up crags to get a view of islands;
So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow
Which stayed them when they reached unhappy cities;
So many, careless, dived and drowned in water;
So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys.
It is the sorrow; shall it melt? Ah, water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.
May 1933
Out on the lawn
(TO GEOF FREY HOYLAND)
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June;
Forests of green have done complete
The day's activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon.
Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working place;
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The leisured drives through a land of farms,
Are good to the newcomer.
Equal with colleagues in a ring
I sit on each calm evening,
Enchanted as the flowers
The opening light draws out of hiding
From leaves with all its dove-like pleading
Its logic and its powers.
That later we, though parted then
May still recall these evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid,
And Death put down his book.
Moreover, eyes in which I learn
That I am glad to look, return
My glances every day;
And when the birds and rising sun
Waken me, I shall speak with one
Who has not gone away.
Now North and South and East and West
Those I love lie down to rest;
The moon looks on them all:
The healers and the brilliant talkers,
The eccentrics and the silent walkers,
The dumpy and the tall.
She climbs the European sky;
Churches and power stations lie
Alike among earth's fixtures:
Into the galleries she peers,
And blankly as an orphan stares
Upon the marvellous pictures.
To gravity attentive, she
Can notice nothing here; though we
Whom hunger cannot move,
From gardens where we feel secure
Look up, and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done;
Nor ask what doubtful act allows
Our freedom in this English house,
Our picnics in the sun.
The creepered wall stands up to hide
The gathering multitudes outside
Whose glances hunger worsens;
Concealing from their wretchedness
Our metaphysical distress,
Our kindness to ten persons.
And now no path on which we move
But shows already traces of
Intentions not our own,
Thoroughly able to achieve
What our excitement could conceive,
But our hands left alone.
For what by nature and by training
We loved, has little strength remaining:
Though we would gladly give
The Oxford colleges, Big Ben,
And all the birds in Wicken Fen,
It has no wish to live.
Soon through the dykes of our content
The crumpling flood will force a rent,
And, taller than a tree,
Hold sudden death before our eyes
Whose river-dreams long hid the size
And vigours of the sea.
But when the waters make retreat
And through the black mud first the wheat
In shy green stalks appears;
When stranded monsters gasping lie,
And sounds of riveting terrify
Their whorled unsubtle ears:
May this for which we dread to lose
Our privacy, need no excuse
But to that strength belong;
As through a child's rash happy cries
The drowned voices of his parents rise
In unlamenting song.
After discharges of alarm,
All unpredicted may it calm
The pulse of nervous nations;
Forgive the murderer in his glass,
Tough in its patience to surpass
The tigress her swift motions.
June 1933
A shilling life
A shilling life will give you all the facts:
How Father beat him, how he ran away,
What were the struggles of his youth, what acts
Made him the greatest figure of his day:
Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,
Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:
Some of the last researchers even write
Love made him weep his pints like you and me.
With all his honours on, he sighed for one
Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;
Did little j obs about the house with skill
And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still
Or potter round the garden; answered some
Of his long marvellous letters but kept none.
? 1934
Our hunting fathers
Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures,
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features.;
Saw in the lion's intolerant look,
Behind the quarry's dying glare,
Love raging for the personal glory
That reason's gift would add,
The liberal appetite and power,
The rightness of a god.
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result,
Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt?
That human ligaments could so
His southern gestures modify,
And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours,
To hunger, work illegally,
And be anonymous?
? May 1934
A Bride in the 30's
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head
And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album Im led
Through the nights delights and the days impressions,
Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood;
Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe
And the Danube flood.
Looking and loving our behaviours pass
The stones, the steels and the polished glass;
Lucky to Love the new pansy railway,
The sterile farms where his looks are fed,
And in the policed unlucky city
Lucky his bed.
He from these lands of terrifying mottoes
Makes worlds as innocent as Beatrix Potters;
Through bankrupt countries where they mend the roads
Along the endless plains his will is
Intent as a collector to pursue
His greens and lilies.
Easy for him to find in your face
The pool of silence and the tower of grace,
To conjure a camera into a wishing rose;
Simple to excite in the air from a glance
The horses, the fountains, the sidedrum, the trombone
And the dance, the dance.
Summoned by such a music from our time,
Such images to audience come
As vanity cannot dispel nor bless:
Hunger and love in their variations
Grouped invalids watching the flight of the birds
And single assassins.
Ten thousand of the desperate marching by
Five feet, six feet, seven feet high:
Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses
Churchill acknowledging the voters greeting
Roosevelt at the microphone, Van der Lubbe laughing
And our first meeting.
But love, except at our proposal,
Will do no trick at his disposal;
Without opinions of his own, performs
The programme that we think of merit.
And through our private stuff must work
His public spirit.
Certain it became while we were still incomplete
There were certain prizes for which we would never compete;
A choice was killed by every childish illness.
The boiling tears among the hothouse plants.
The rigid promise fractured in the garden.
And the long aunts.
And every day there bolted from the field
Desires to which we could not yield;
Fewer and clearer grew the plans.
Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred.
And early among my interesting scrawls
Appeared your portrait.
You stand now before me. flesh and bone
These ghosts would like to make their own.
Are they your choices? O. be deaf
When hatred would proffer her immediate pleasure.
And glory swap her fascinating rubbish
For your one treasure.
Be deaf too. standing uncertain now.
A pine tree shadow across your brow.
To what I hear and wish I did not:
The voice of love saying lightly. brightly
"Be Lubbe. be Hitler. but be my good
Daily. nightly."
The power that corrupts. that power to excess
The beautiful quite naturally possess:
To them the fathers and the children turn:
And all who long for their destruction.
The arrogant and self-insulted. wait
The looked instruction.
Shall idleness ring then your eyes like the pest?
O will you unnoticed and mildly like the rest,
Will you join the lost in their sneering circles,
Forfeit the beautiful interest and fall
Where the engaging face is the face of the betrayer,
And the pang is all?
Wind shakes the tree; the mountains darken;
And the heart repeats though we would not hearken:
"Yours is the choice, to whom the gods awarded
The language of learning and the language of love,
Crooked to move as a moneybug or a cancer
Or straight as a dove."
November 1934
The Summer holds
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake
Lie Europe and the islands; many rivers
Wrinkling its surface like a ploughmans palm.
Under the bellies of the grazing horses
On the far side of posts and bridges
The vigorous shadows dwindle; nothing wavers.
Calm at this moment the Dutch sea so shallow
That sunk St. Pauls would ever show its golden cross
And still the deep water that divides us still from Norway.
We would show you at first an English village: You shall
choose its location
Wherever your heart directs you most longingly to look; you
are loving towards it:
Whether north to Scots Gap and Bellingham where the black
rams defy the panting engine: "
Or west to the Welsh Marches; to the lilting speech and the
magicians faces:
Wherever you were a child or had your first affair
There it stands amidst your darling scenery:
A parish bounded by the wreckers cliff; or meadows where
browse the Shorthorn and maplike Frisian
As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out of
green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.
Hiker with sunburn blisters on your office pallor,
Cross-country champion with corks in your hands,
When you have eaten
your sandwich, your salt and your apple,
When you have begged
your glass of milk from the ill-kept farm,
What is it you see?
I see barns falling, fences broken,
Pasture not ploughland, weeds not wheat.
The great houses remain but only half are inhabited,
Dusty the gunrooms and the stable clocks stationary.
Some have been turned into prep-schools where the diet is in
the hands of an experienced matron,
Others into club-houses for the golf-bore and the top-hole.
Those who sang in the inns at evening have departed; they
saw their hope in another country,
Their children have entered the service of the suburban areas;
they have become typists, mannequins and factory
operatives; they desired a different rhythm of life.
But their places are taken by another population, with views
about nature,
Brought in charabanc and saloon along arterial roads;
Tourists to whom the Tudor cafes
Offer Bovril and buns upon Breton ware
With leather-work as a sideline: Filling stations
Supplying petrol from rustic pumps.
Those who fancy themselves as foxes or desire a
special setting for spooning
Erect their villas at the right places,
Airtight, lighted, elaborately warmed;
And nervous people who will never marry
Live upon dividends in the old-world cottages
With an animal for a friend or a volume of memoirs.
Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough.
His concern to-day is for that which yesterday did not occur.
In the hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his
thoughts are appropriate to the years of the
Penny Farthing:
He tosses at night who at noonday found no truth.
Stand aside now: The play is beginning
In the village of which we have spoken; called Pressan Ambo:
Here too corruption spreads its peculiar and emphatic odours
And Life lurks, evil, out of its epoch.
The young men in Pressan to-night
Toss on their beds
Their pillows do not comfort
Their uneasy heads.
The lot that decides their fate
Is cast to-morrow,
One must depart and face
Danger and sorrow.
Is it me? Is it me? Is it ... me?
Look in your heart and see:
There lies the answer.
Though the heart like a clever
Conjuror or dancer
Deceive you often into many
A curious sleight
And motives like stowaways
Are found too late.
What shall he do, whose heart
Chooses to depart?
He shall against his peace
Feel his heart harden.
Envy the heavy birds
At home in a garden.
For walk he must the empty
Selfish journey
Between the needless risk
And the endless safety.
Will he safe and sound
Return to his own ground?
Clouds and lions stand
Before him dangerous
And the hostility of dreams.
O let him honour us
Lest he should be ashamed
In the hour of crisis.
In the valleys of corrosion
Tarnish his brightness.
Who are you, whose speech
Sounds for out of reach?
You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock.
The Two.
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.
Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.
Climb up the crane, learn the sailors' words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
Come in.
Tell your stories of fishing and other men's wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
In the lighted inn.
But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won't show
At a glance.
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don't make the mistake of believing us dead:
I shouldn't dance.
We're afraid in that case you'll have a fall.
We've been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain,
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won't be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black remov-
ers van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the women in dark glasses and the
humpbacked surgeons
And the scissor man.
This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two.
from "The Dog Beneath the Skin"; 1932, ? 1934
Nocturne
Now through night's caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip,
Capes of China slide away
From her fingers into day
And the Americas incline
Coasts towards her shadow line.
Now the ragged vagrants creep
Into crooked holes to sleep:
Just and unjust, worst and best,
Change their places as they rest:
Awkward lovers lie in fields
Where disdainful beauty yields:
While the splendid and the proud
Naked stand before the crowd
And the losing gambler gains
And the beggar entertains:
May sleep's healing power extend
Through these hours to our friend.
Unpursued by hostile force,
Traction engine, bull or horse
Or revolting succubus;
Calmly till the morning break
Let him lie, then gently wake.
from "The Dog Beneath the Skin": ? 1935
Twelve Songs
I. Song of the Beggar
O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges
To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma on the
platinum benches,
With the somersaults and fireworks, the roast and the
smacking kisses
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
And Garbo's and Cleopatra's wits to go astraying,
In a feather ocean with me to go fishing and playing
Still jolly when the cock has burst himself with crowing
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
And to stand on green turf among the craning yellow faces,
Dependent on the chestnut, the sable, and Arabian horses,
And me with a magic crystal to foresee their places
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
And this square to be a deck. and these pigeons sails to rig
And to follow the delicious breeze like a tan tony pig
To the shaded feverless islands where the melons are big
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
And these shops to be turned to tulips in a garden bed,
And me with my stick to thrash each merchant dead
As he pokes from a flower his bald and wicked head
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
And a hole in the bottom of heaven, and Peter and Paul
And each smug surprised saint like parachutes to fall.
And every one-legged beggar to have no legs at all
Cried the six cripples to the silent statue,
The six beggared cripples.
? Spring 1935
II
O lurcher-loving collier, black as night,
Follow your love across the smokeless hill;
Your lamp is out, the cages all are still;
Course for her heart and do not miss,
For Sunday soon is past and, Kate, fly not so fast,
For Monday comes when none may kiss:
Be marble to his soot, and to his black be white.
June 1935
III
Let a florid music praise,
The flute and the trumpet,
Beauty's conquest of your face:
In that land of flesh and bone,
Where from citadels on high
Her imperial standards fly,
Let the hot sun
Shine on, shine on.
O but the unloved have had power,
The weeping and striking,
Always: time will bring their hour;
Their secretive children walk
Through your vigilance of breath
To unpardonable Death,
And my vows break
Before his look.
February 1936
IV
Dear, though the night is gone,
Its dream still haunts to-day,
That brought us to a room
Cavernous, lofty as
A railway terminus,
And crowded in that gloom
Were beds, and we in one
In a far corner lay.
Our whisper woke no clocks,
We kissed and I was glad
At everything you did,
Indifferent to those
Who sat with hostile eyes
In pairs on every bed,
Arms round each other's necks,
Inert and vaguely sad.
What hidden worm of guilt
Or what malignant doubt
Am I the victim of,
That you then, unabashed,
Did what I never wished,
Confessed another love;
And I, submissive, felt
Unwanted and went out.
March 1936
V
Fish in the unruffled lakes
Their swarming colours wear,
Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have,
And the great lion walks
Through his innocent grove;
Lion, fish and swan
Act, and are gone
Upon Time's toppling wave.
We, till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock,
The goodness carefully worn
For atonement or for luck;
We must lose our loves,
On each beast and bird that moves
Turn an envious look.
Sighs for folly done and said
Twist our narrow days,
But I must bless, I must praise.
That you, my swan, who have
All gifts that to the swan
Impulsive Nature gave,
The majesty and pride,
Last right should add
Your voluntary love.
March 1936
VI. AUTUMN SONG
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.
Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.
Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
March 1936
VII.
Underneath an abject willow,
Lover, sulk no more:
Act from thought should quickly follow.
What is thinking for?
Your unique and moping station
Proves you cold;
Stand up and fold
Your map of desolation.
Bells that toll across the meadows
From the sombre spire
Toll for these unloving shadows
Love does not require.
All that lives may love; why longer
Bow to loss
With arms across?
Strike and you shall conquer.
Geese in flocks above you flying,
Their direction know,
Icy brooks beneath you flowing,
To their ocean go.
Dark and dull is your distraction:
Walk then, come,
No longer numb
Into your satisfaction.
March 1936
VIII
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a.wicked secret, a private reason for this.
April 1936
IX. Funeral Blues (Stop All The Clocks)
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
April 1936
X.
O the valley in the summer where I and my John
Beside the deep river would walk on and on
While the flowers at our feet and the birds up above
Argued so sweetly on reciprocal love,
And I leaned on his shoulder; "O Johnny, let's play":
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O that Friday near Christmas as I well recall
When we went to the Charity Matinee Ball,
The floor was so smooth and the band was so loud
And Johnny so handsome I felt so proud;
"Squeeze me tighter, dear Johnny, let's dance till it's day":
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
Shall I ever forget at the Grand Opera
When music poured out of each wonderful star?
Diamonds and pearls they hung dazzling down
Over each silver or golden silk gown;
"O John I'm in heaven," I whispered to say:
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O but he was as fair as a garden in flower,
As slender and tall as the great Eiffel Tower,
When the waltz throbbed out on the long promenade
O his eyes and his smile they went straight to my heart;
"O marry me, Johnny, I'll love and obey":
But he frowned like thunder and he went away.
O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover,
You'd the sun on one arm and the moon on the other,
The sea it was blue and the grass it was green,
Every star rattled a round tambourine;
Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay:
But you frowned like thunder and you went away.
April 1937
XI. ROMAN WALL BLUES
Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.
Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
October 1937
XII
Some say that love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.
Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a. Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.
I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.
Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.
When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
January 1938
His Excellency
As it is, plenty;
As it's admitted
The children happy,
And the car, the car
That goes so far,
And the wife devoted:
To this as it is,
To the work and the banks
Let his thinning hair
And his hauteur
Give thanks, give thanks.
All that was thought
As like as not, is not;
When nothing was enough
But love, but love,
And the rough future
Of an intransigeant nature,
And the betraying smile,
Betraying, but a smile:
That that is not, is not;
Forget, forget.
Let him not cease to praise,
Then, his lordly days;
Yes, and the success
Let him bless, let him bless:
Let him see in this
The profit larger
And the sin venial,
Lest he see as it is
The loss as major
And final, final.
On the Island
Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at the small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf, and the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
November 1935
Night Mail
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film)
I
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily, she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
II
Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green locks,
Men long for news.
III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands,
Notes from overseas for Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
July 1935
29
Casino
Only the hands are living; to the wheel attracted,
Are moved, as deer trek desperately towards a creek
Through the dust and scrub of the desert, or gently
As sunflowers turn to the light.
And as the night takes up the cries of feverish children,
The cravings of lions in dens, the loves of dons,
Gathers them all and remains the night, the
Great room is full of their prayers.
To the last feast of isolation, self-invited,
They flock, and in the rite of disbelief are joined;
From numbers all their stars are recreated,
The enchanted, the world, the sad.
Without, the rivers flow among the wholly living,
Quite near their trysts; and the mountains part them;
and the bird.
Deep in the greens and moistures of summer,
Sings towards their work.
But here no nymph comes naked to the youngest shepherd,
The fountain is deserted, the laurel will not grow;
The labyrinth is safe but endless, and broken
Is Ariadne's thread.
As deeper in these hands is grooved their fortune: "Lucky
Were few, and it is possible that none were loved;
And what was godlike in this generation
Was never to be born."
April 1936
Journey to Iceland
And the traveller hopes: "Let me be far from any
Physician"; and the ports have names for the sea;
The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;
And North means to all: "Reject!"
And the great plains are for ever where the cold fish is hunted,
And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt;
Under the scolding flag the lover
Of islands may see at last,
Faintly, his limited hope; and he nears the glitter
Of glaciers, the sterile immature mountains intense
In the abnormal day of this world, and a river's
Fan-like polyp of sand.
Then let the good citizen here find natural marvels:
The horse-shoe ravine, the issue of steam from a cleft
In the rock, and rocks, and waterfalls brushing the
Rocks, and among the rocks birds.
And the student of prose and conduct, places to visit;
The site of a church where a bishop was put in a bag.
The bath of a great historian, the rock where
An outlaw dreaded the dark.
Remember the doomed man thrown by his horse and crying:
"Beautiful is the hillside. I will not go";
The old woman confessing: "He that I loved the
Best" to him I was worst,"
For Europe is absent. This is an island and therefore
Unreal. And the steadfast affections of its dead may be bought
By those whose dreams accuse them of being
Spitefully alive, and the pale
From too much passion of kissing feel pure in its deserts.
Can they? For the world is, and the present, and the lie.
And the narrow bridge over the torrent,
And the small farm under the crag
Are the natural setting for the jealousies of a province;
And the weak vow of fidelity is formed by the cairn;
And within the indigenous figure on horseback
On the bridle path down by the lake
The blood moves also by crooked and furtive inches.
Asks all your questions: "Where is the homage? When
Shall justice be done? a who is against me?
Why am I always alone?"
Present then the world to the world with its mendicant shadow;
Let the suits be flash, the Minister of Commerce insane;
Let jazz be bestowed on the huts, and the beauty's
Set cosmopolitan smile.
For our time has no favourite suburb; no local features
Are those of the young for whom all wish to care;
The promise is only a promise, the fabulous
Country impartially far.
Tears fall in all the rivers. Again the driver
Pulls on his gloves and in a blinding snowstorm starts
Upon his deadly j ourney; and again the writer
Runs howling to his art.
July 1936
Death's Echo
"O who can ever gaze his fill,"
Farmer and fisherman say,
"On native shore and local hill,
Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
Fathers, grandfathers stood upon this land,
And here the pilgrims from our loins shall stand."
So farmer and fisherman say
In their fortunate heyday:
But Death's soft answer drifts across
Empty catch or harvest loss
Or an unlucky May:
The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it
Not to be born is the best tor man
The end of toil is a bailiff's order
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
"O life's too short for friends who share,"
Travellers think in their hearts,
"The city's common bed, the air,
The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
Where incidents draw every day from each
Memorable gesture and witty speech."
So travellers think in their hearts,
Till malice or circumstance parts
Them from their constant humour:
And slyly Death's coercive rumour
In the silence starts:
A friend is the old tale of Narcissus
Not to be born is the best for man
An active partner in something disgraceful
Change your partner, dance while you can.
"O stretch your hands across the sea,"
The impassioned lover cries,
"Stretch them towards your harm and me.
Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,
The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed."
So the impassioned lover cries
Till his storm of pleasure dies:
From the bedpost and the rocks
Death's enticing echo mocks,
And his voice replies:
The greater the love, the more false to its object
Not to be born is the best for man
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle
Break the embraces, dance while you can.
"I see the guilty world forgiven,"
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
"The ladders let down out of heaven;
The laurel springing from the martyr's blood;
The children skipping where the weepers stood;
The lovers natural, and the beasts all good."
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with death's reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring:
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
The second best is a formal order
The dance's pattern, dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy
The tune is catching and wilI not stop
Dance till the stars come down with the rafters
Dance, dance, dance tilI you drop.
September 1936
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
January 1937
Spain
Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.
Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;
The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.
Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.
As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. a send me the luck of the sailor."
And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, a show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."
And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,
"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the
shops and squares of the city:
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."
Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city,
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night,
through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever
Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad. and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin
Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.
To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and
breathing.
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the
struggle.
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
April 1937
Orpheus
What does the song hope for? And the moved hands
A little way from the birds, the shy, the delightful?
To be bewildered and happy,
Or most of alI the knowledge of life?
But the beautiful are content with the sharp notes of the air;
The warmth is enough. O if winter really
Oppose, if the weak snowflake,
What will the wish, what will the dance do?
Apri1 1937
Miss Gee
Let me tell you a little story
About Miss Edith Gee;
She lived in Clevedon Terrace
At Number 83.
She'd a slight squint in her left eye,
Her lips they were thin and small,
She had narrow sloping should.ers
And she had no bust at all.
She'd a velvet hat with trimmings,
And a dark-grey serge costume;
She lived in Cleve don Terrace
In a small bed-sitting room.
She'd a purple mac for wet days,
A green umbrella too to take,
She'd a bicycle with shopping basket
And a harsh back-pedal brake.
The Church of Saint Aloysius
Was not so very far;
She did a lot of knitting,
Knitting for that Church Bazaar.
Miss Gee looked up at the starlight
And said: "Does anyone care
That I live in Cleve don Terrace
On one hundred pounds a year?"
She dreamed a dream one evening
That she was the Queen of France
And the Vicar of Saint Aloysius
Asked Her Majesty to dance.
But a storm blew down the palace,
She was biking through a field of corn,
And a bull with the face of the Vicar
Was charging with lowered horn.
She could feel his hot breath behind her,
He was going to overtake;
And the bicycle went slower and slower
Because of that back-pedal brake.
Summer made the trees a picture,
Winter made them a wreck;
She bicycled to the evening service
With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She passed by the loving couples,
She turned her head away;
She passed by the loving couples
And they didn't ask her to stay.
Miss Gee sat down in the side-aisle,
She heard the organ play;
And the choir it sang so sweetly
At the ending of the day.
Miss Gee knelt down in the side-aisle,
She knelt down on her knees;
"Lead me not into temptation
But make me a good girl, please."
The days and nights went by her
Like waves round a Cornish wreck;
She bicycled down to the doctor
With her clothes buttoned up to her neck.
She bicycled down to the doctor,
And rang the surgery bell;
"O, doctor, I've a pain inside me,
And I don't feel very well."
Doctor Thomas looked her over,
And then he looked some more;
Walked over to his wash-basin,
Said: "Why didn't you come before?"
Doctor Thomas sat over his dinner,
Though his wife was waiting to ring;
Rolling his bread into pellets,
Said: "Cancer's a funny thing.
"Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It's like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.
"Childless women get it,
And men when they retire;
It's as if there had to be some outlet
For their foiled creative fire."
His wife she rang for the servant,
Said: "Don't be so morbid, dear";
He said: "I saw Miss Gee this evening
And she's a goner, I fear."
They took Miss Gee to the hospital,
She lay there a total wreck,
Lay in the ward for women
With the bedclothes right up to her neck.
They laid her on the table,
The students began to laugh;
And Mr. Rose the surgeon
He cut Miss Gee in half.
Mr. Rose he turned to his students,
Said: "Gentlemen, if you please,
We seldom see a sarcoma
As far advanced as this."
They took her off the table,
They wheeled away Miss Gee
Down to another department
Where they study Anatomy.
They hung her from the ceiling,
Yes, they hung up Miss Gee;
And a couple of Oxford Groupers
Carefully dissected her knee.
April 1937
As he is
Wrapped in a yielding air, beside
The flower's soundless hunger,
Close to the tree's clandestine tide,
Close to the bird's high fever,
Loud in his hope and anger,
Erect about his skeleton,
Stands the expressive lover,
Stands the deliberate man.
Beneath the hot incurious sun,
Past stronger beasts and fairer
He picks his way, a living gun,
With gun and lens and bible,
A militant enquirer,
The friend, the rash, the enemy,
The essayist, the able,
Able at times to cry.
The friendless and unhated stone
Lies everywhere about him,
The Brothered-One, the Not-Alone,
The brothered and the hated
Whose family have taught him
To set against the large and dumb,
The timeless and the rooted,
His money and his time.
For mother's fading hopes become
Dull wives to his dull spirits
Soon dulled by nurse's moral thumb,
That dullard fond betrayer,
And, childish, he inherits,
So soon by legal father tricked,
The tall and gorgeous tower,
Gorgeous but locked, but locked.
And ruled by dead men never met,
By pious guess deluded,
Upon the stool of madness set
Or stool of desolation,
Sits murderous and clear-headed;
Enormous beauties round him move,
For grandiose is his vision
And grandiose his love.
Determined on Time's honest shield
The lamb must face the tigress,
Their faithful quarrel never healed
Though, faithless, he consider
His dream of vaguer ages,
Hunter and victim reconciled,
The lion and the adder,
The adder and the child.
Fresh loves betray him, every day
Over his green horizon
A fresh deserter rides away,
And miles away birds mutter
Of ambush and of treason;
To fresh defeats he still must move,
To further griefs and greater,
And the defeat of grief.
May 1937
As I Walked Out One Evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street.
"I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.
November 1937
Oxford
Nature is so near: the rooks in the college garden
Like agile babies still speak the language of feeling;
By the tower the river still runs to the sea and will run,
And the stones in that tower are utterly
Satisfied still with their weight.
And the minerals and creatures, so deeply
in love with their lives
Their sin of accidie excludes all others,
Challenge the nervous students with a careless beauty,
Setting a single error
Against their countless faults.
O in these quadrangles where Wisdom honours herself
Does the original stone merely echo that praise
Shallowly, or utter a bland hymn of comfort,
The founder's equivocal blessing
On all who worship Success?
Promising to the sharp sword all the glittering prizes,
The cars, the hotels, the service, the boisterous bed,
Then power to silence outrage with a testament,
The widow's tears forgotten,
The fatherless unheard.
Whispering to chauffeurs and little girls, to tourists and dons.
That Knowledge is conceived in the hot womb of Violence
Who in a late hour of apprehension and exhaustion
Strains to her weeping breast
That blue-eyed darling head.
And is that child happy with his box of lucky books
And all the jokes of learning? Birds cannot grieve:
Wisdom is a beautiful bird; but to the wise
Often, often is it denied
To be beautiful or good.
Without are the shops, the works, the whole green county
Where a cigarette comforts the guilty and a kiss the weak;
There thousands fidget and poke and spend their money:
Eros Paidagogos
Weeps on his virginal bed.
Ah, if that thoughtless almost natural world
Would snatch his sorrow to her loving sensual heart!
But he is Eros and must hate what most he loves;
And she is of Nature; Nature
Can only love herself.
And over the talkative city like any other
Weep the non-attached angels. Here too the knowledge of death
Is a consuming love: And the natural heart refuses
The low unflattering voice
That rests not till it find a hearing.
December 1937
In Time of War
I
So from the years the gifts were showered; each
Ran off with his at once into his life:
Bee took the politics that make a hive,
Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach.
And were successful at the first endeavour;
The hour of birth their only time at college,
They were content with their precocious knowledge,
And knew their station and were good for ever.
Till finally there came a childish creature
On whom the years could model any feature,
And fake with ease a leopard or a dove;
Who by the lightest wind was changed and shaken,
And looked for truth and was continually mistaken,
And envied his few friends and chose his love.
II
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden;
It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride,
But did not listen much when they were chidden;
They knew exactly what to do outside.
They left: immediately the memory faded
Of all they'd learnt; they could not understand
The dogs now who, before, had always aided;
The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned.
They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild.
In front, maturity, as he ascended,
Retired like a horizon from the child;
The dangers and the punishments grew greater;
And the way back by angels was defended
Against the poet and the legislator.
III
Only a smell had feelings to make known,
Only an eye could point in a direction;
The fountain's utterance was itself alone;
The bird meant nothing: that was his projection
Who named it as he hunted it for food.
He felt the interest in his throat, and found
That he could send his servant to the wood,
Or kiss his bride to rapture with a sound.
They bred like locusts till they hid the green
And edges of the world: and he was abject,
And to his own creation became subject;
And shook with hate for things he'd never seen,
And knew of love without love's proper object,
And was oppressed as he had never been.
IV
He stayed: and was imprisoned in possession.
The seasons stood like guards about his ways,
The mountains chose the mother of his children,
And like a conscience the sun ruled his days.
Beyond him his young cousins in the city
Pursued their rapid and unnatural course,
Believed in nothing but were easy-going,
And treated strangers like a favourite horse.
And he changed little,
But took his colour from the earth,
And grew in likeness to his sheep and cattle.
The townsman thought him miserly and simple,
The poet wept and saw in him the truth,
And the oppressor held him up as an example.
V
His generuus bearing was a new invention:
For life was slow; earth needed to be careless:
With horse and sword he drew the girls' attention;
He was the Rich, the Bountiful, the Fearless.
And to the young he came as a salvation;
They needed him to free them from their mothers,
And grew sharp-witted in the long migration,
And round his camp fires learnt all men are brothers.
But suddenly the earth was full: he was not wanted.
And he became the shabby and demented.
And took to drink to screw his nerves to murder;
Or sat in offices and stole.
And spoke approvingly of Law and Order,
And hated life with all his soul.
VI
He watched the stars and noted birds in flight;
The rivers flooded or the Empire fell:
He made predictions and was sometimes right;
His lucky guesses were rewarded well.
And fell in love with Truth before he knew her,
And rode into imaginary lands.
With solitude and fasting hoped to woo her.
And mocked at those who served her with their hands.
But her he never wanted to despise.
But listened always for her voice; and when
She beckoned to him, he obeyed in meekness.
And followed her and looked into her eyes;
Saw there reflected every human weakness,
And saw himself as one of many men.
VII
He was their servant-some say he was blind-
And moved among their faces and their things;
Their feeling gathered in him like a wind
And sang: they cried-"It is a God that sings"-
And worshipped him and set him up apart,
And made him vain, till he mistook for song
The little tremors of his mind and heart
At each domestic wrong.
Songs came no more: he had to make them.
With what precision was each strophe planned.
He hugged his sorrow like a plot of land,
And walked like an assassin through the town,
And looked at men and did not like them,
But trembled if one passed him with a frown.
VIII
He turned his field into a meeting-place,
And grew the tolerant ironic eye,
And formed the mobile money-changer's face,
And found the notion of equality.
And strangers were as brothers to his clocks,
And with his spires he made a human sky;
Museums stored his learning like a box,
And paper watched his money like a spy.
It grew so fast his life was overgrown,
And he forgot what once it had been made for,
And gathered into crowds and was alone,
And lived expensively and did without,
And could not find the earth which he had paid for,
Nor feel the love that he knew all about.
IX
They died and entered the closed life like nuns:
Even the very poor lost something; oppression
Was no more a fact; and the self-centred ones
Took up an even more extreme position.
And the kingly and the saintly also were
Distributed among the woods and oceans,
And touch our open sorrow everywhere,
Airs, waters, places, round our sex and reasons;
Are what we feed on as we make our choice.
We bring them back with promises to free them,
But as ourselves continually betray them:
They hear their deaths lamented in our voice,
But in our knowledge know we could restore them;
They could return to freedom; they would rejoice.
X
As a young child the wisest could adore him;
He felt familiar to them like their wives:
The very poor saved up their pennies for him,
And martyrs brought him presents of their lives.
But who could sit and play with him all day?
Their other needs were pressing, work, and bed:
The beautiful stone courts were built where they
Could leave him to be worshipped and well fed.
But he escaped. They were too blind to tell
That it was he who came with them to labour,
And talked and grew up with them like a neighbour:
To fear and greed those courts became a centre;
The poor saw there the tyrant's citadel,
And martyrs the lost face of the tormentor.
XI
He looked in all His wisdom from the throne
Down on the humble boy who kept the sheep,
And sent a dove; the dove returned alone:
Youth liked the music, but soon fell asleep.
But He had planned such future for the youth:
Surely His duty now was to compel;
For later he would come to love the truth,
And own his gratitude. The eagle fell.
It did not work: His conversation bored
The boy who yawned and whistled and made faces,
And wriggled free from fatherly embraces;
But with the eagle he was always willing
To go where it suggested, and adored
And learnt from it the many ways of killing.
XII
And the age ended, and the last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of the giant's enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk across the lawn outside.
They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath;
The kobold's knocking in the mountain petered out.
Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue from the magician's house
Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers
were glad
To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed into their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.
XIII
Certainly praise: let the song mount again and again
For life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face,
For the vegetable patience, the animal grace;
Some people have been happy; there have been great men.
But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why:
Cities and men have fallen; the will of the Unjust
Has never lost its power; still, all princes must
Employ the Fairly-Noble unifying Lie.
History opposes its grief to our buoyant song:
The Good Place has not been; our star has warmed to birth
A race of promise that has never proved its worth;
The quick new West is false; and prodigious, but wrong
This passive flower-like people who for so long
In the Eighteen Provinces have constructed the earth.
XIV
Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky
Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real;
The groping searchlights suddenly reveal
The little natures that will make us cry,
Who never quite believed they could exist,
Not where we were. They take us by surprise
Like ugly long-forgotten memories,
And like a conscience all the guns resist.
Behind each sociable home-loving eye
The private massacres are taking place;
All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.
The mountains cannot judge us when we lie:
We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys
The intelligent and evil till they die.
XV
Engines bear them through the sky: they're free
And isolated like the very rich;
Remote like savants, they can only see
The breathing city as a target which
Requires their skill; will never see how flying
Is the creation of ideas they hate,
Nor how their own machines are always trying
To push through into life. They chose a fate
The islands where they live did not compel.
Though earth may teach our proper discipline,
At any time it will be possible
To turn away from freedom and become
Bound like the heiress in her mother's womb,
And helpless as the poor have always been.
XVI
Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.
But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.
XVII
They are and suffer; that is all they do:
A bandage hides the place where each i s living,
His knowledge of the world restricted to
The treatment that the instruments are giving.
And lie apart like epochs from each other
-Truth in their sense is how much they can bear;
It is not talk like ours, but groans they smother
And are remote as plants; we stand elsewhere.
For who when healthy can become a foot?
Even a scratch we can't recall when cured,
But are boisterous in a moment and believe
In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot
Imagine isolation. Only happiness is shared,
And anger, and the idea of love.
XVIII
Far from the heart of culture he was used:
Abandoned by his general and his lice,
Under a padded quilt he closed his eyes
And vanished. He will not be introduced
When this campaign is tidied into books:
No vital knowledge perished in his skull;
His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull;
His name is lost for ever like his looks.
He neither knew nor chose the Good, but taught us,
And added meaning like a comma, when
He turned to dust in China that our daughters
Be fit to love the earth, and not again
Disgraced before the dogs; that, where are waters,
Mountains and houses, may be also men.
XIX
But in the evening the oppression lifted;
The peaks came into focus; it had rained:
Across the lawns and cultured flowers drifted
The conversation of the highly trained.
The gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,
For them to finish their exchange of views;
It seemed a picture of the private life.
Far off, no matter what good they intended,
The armies waited for a verbal error
With all the instruments for causing pain:
And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste, with all its young men slain,
The women weeping, and the towns in terror.
XX
They carry terror with them like a purse,
And flinch from the horizon like a gun;
And all the rivers and the railways run
Away from Neighbourhood as from a curse.
They cling and huddle in the new disaster
Like children sent to school, and cry in tum;
For Space has rules they cannot hope to learn,
Time speaks a language they will never master.
We live here. We lie in the Present's unopened
Sorrow; its limits are what we are.
The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell.
Can future ages ever escape so far,
Yet feel derived from everything that happened,
Even from us, that even this was well?
XXI
The life of man is never quite completed;
The daring and the chatter will go on:
But, as an artist feels his power gone,
These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.
Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for
The wounded myths that once made nations good,
Some lost a world they never understood,
Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety
Receives them like a grand hotel; but where
They may regret they must; their life, to hear.
The call of the forbidden cities, see
The stranger watch them with a happy stare,
And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.
XXII
Simple like all dream wishes, they employ
The elementary language of the heart,
And speak to muscles of the need for joy:
The dying and the lovers soon to part
Hear them and have to whistle. Always new,
They mirror every change in our position;
They are our evidence of what we do;
They speak directly. to our lost condition.
Think in this year what pleased the dancers best:
When Austria died and China was forsaken,
Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken,
France put her case before the world: "Partout
II y a de la joie." America addressed
The earth: "Do you love me as I love you?"
XXIII
When all the apparatus of report
Confirms the triumph of our enemies;
Our bastion pierced, our army in retreat,
Violence successful like a new disease,
And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited;
When we regret that we were ever born:
Let us remember all who seemed deserted.
To-night in China let me think of one,
Who through ten years of silence worked and waited,
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke,
And everything was given once for all:
And with the gratitude of the Completed
He went out in the winter night to stroke
That little tower like a great animal.
XXIV
No, not their names. It was the others who built
Each great coercive avenue and square,
Where men can only recollect and stare,
The really lonely with the sense of guilt
Who wanted to persist like that for ever;
The unloved had to leave material traces:
But these need nothing but our better faces,
And dwell in them, and know that we shall never
Remember who we are nor why we're needed.
Earth grew them as a bay grows fishermen
Or hills a shepherd; they grew ripe and seeded;
And the seeds clung to us; even our blood
Was able to revive them; and they grew again;
Happy their wish and mild to flower and flood.
XXV
Nothing is given: we must find our law.
Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination;
Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation
The low recessive houses of the poor.
We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.
Children are really loved here, even by police:
They speak of years before the big were lonely,
And will be lost.
And only
The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell
Some future reign of happiness and peace.
We learn to pity and rebel.
XXVI
Always far from the centre of our names,
The little workshop of love: yes, but how wrong
We were about the old manors and the long
Abandoned Folly and the children's games.
Only the acquisitive expects a quaint
Unsaleable product, something to please
An artistic girl; it's the selfish who sees
In every impractical beggar a saint.
We can't believe that we ourselves designed it,
A minor item of our daring plan
That caused no trouble; we took no notice of it.
Disaster comes, and we're amazed to find it
The single project that since work began
Through all the cycle showed a steady profit.
XXVII
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice,
Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,
For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,
For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth.
Asleep in our huts, how we dream of a part
In the glorious balls of the future; each intricate maze
Has a plan, and the disciplined movements of the heart
Can follow for ever and ever its harmless ways.
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains;
We live in freedom by necessity,
A mountain people dwelling among mountains.
1938 (except XII, 1936)
The Capital
Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting,
Waiting expensively for miracles to happen,
O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other,
Cafe where exiles have established a malicious village;
You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished
The strictness of winter and spring's compulsion;
Far from your lights the outraged punitive father,
The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.
Yet with orchestras and glances, O, you betray us
To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent
Unobservant offender falls in a moment
Victim to his heart's invisible furies.
In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling;
Factories where lives are made for a temporary use
Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered
Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.
But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far
Into the dark countryside, the enormous, the frozen,
Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle,
Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the
floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which
they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost
convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something
slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Refugee Blues
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.
The consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.
Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
The Unknown Citizen
To /SI071M1378
This Marble Monument is Erected by the State
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint.
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That. in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word.
he was a saint.
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired.
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues.
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in
every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured.
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but
left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man.
A gramophone. a radio. a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace ; when there
was war. he went.
He was married and added five children to the population.
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with
their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
March 1939
