Sped the lithe God, the tall Grecian youth,
Dark of limb, and fleet,
With the ebony glitter of light in his hair,
And his full, lustrous eyes
Dim with unbidden searching.
1980/1931
ECHOES: I
Can you remember, oh so long ago,
How we wandered one twilight over the edge of the clouds
Over the pathway to the stars, and found
The cave …
The cave of the silver echoes,
And when I stood, breathless, and called your name,
It flung it back to me in little ripples
Of ecstatic, liquid sound.
Can you forget how you said mockingly,
Hand on my arm: ‘If you have need of me
In some dim afterwards, when the gaunt years
Have brought no fuller harvest, greater recompense:
Or if in your poor loneliness you need my comfort,
Come one twilight under these vacant leagues,
These drowsy blue immensities of sky,
And call my name,
And I will hear,’ ‘And answer me,’ laughed I.
1980/1931
FUTILITY
Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus,
Puffed to ripe unholy promise;
A vagueness unfulfilled lies in the venom.
Illimitable design
Weighed in a madman’s hand
Who swings destruction in the huge scales.
The broad vision of a Xerxes turns and cries,
Seeing his Nubian mercenaries,
The masked furies of a night,
Wreathe and twine into the tenebrous defiles,
A living snake of blindness …
And to hear that old, age-weary crying,
They are such dust before the wind.
1980/1931
LARGESSE
The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood,
And stirs the larches;
Startles the timid moorhen’s fluffy brood
Where the fern arches,
Pregnant with sudden, wide-eyed loneliness.
It touches the rounded nipples of the hills
With amorous fingers:
The tender crying of the wood it stills
With a touch that lingers
Silent and magic on the placid air.
It threads its dainty way to your lone bed,
And largesse throws …
White, wrinkled leaves on your bowed head,
White as the snows
That coldly smile on youth and life and love.
1980/1931
ECHOES: II
Last night I bowed before a destiny,
Deep in the night; bound with my huge grief,
Stooping beneath the desolation of my tears,
I climbed the forgotten pathway to the stars,
And knelt, half-man, half-child before our cave;
And the light fingers of the little winds
Touched my tired eyes and lips,
And the quaint fragrance of the clover ….
Stirred all the mournfulness of the old memories
And darkness was kind to me ….
When suddenly I cried in my great sorrow to the sky,
And heard your answer, growing quietly
Over the brimming silence of the deeps ….
So I gained comfort from one long-since dead.
1980/1931
CANDLE-LIGHT
So we have come to evening … graciously,
Through the bewildered churning of our dreams,
And found a day well spent; the candle-light
Gathers the living gloom, and wistfully
Cradles its arms about you as you sit …
Yet you who seek a flame, ponder and write
Bound by the hapless chatter of a quill.
While beauty grows and stirs about your chair,
Oh frail poet, under the candle-light …
1980/1931
CHRIST A MODERN
I who have lived in death, hemmed by the spears,
Born by grave victory, or by sore defeat,
Finding no vain or mercenary tears
In battle, lithe of body, fleet
To stem a wild, vainglorious afterflow,
I live that you may laugh, die that you may live;
Strew some rich largesse where the best may throw
Some broken toy, incalculably give
The widened harness of our peaceful years
Into your eager hands. I find no joy
In old wives’ adoration, women’s tears,
Or the reluctant praises of a boy,
… Being the faint shadow of a vanguard’s wave,
I die
That you may live, and fear the life.
1980/1931
A DEDICATION
To My Mother
Pity these lame and halting parodies
Of greater, better poems; from the dawn
And from the sunset I have fashioned them
From the white wonders of the seven seas;
And from the memories of hours forlorn
When I lived goodbyes, and crushed the stem
Of conscious sadness, pillaging the sap
Of tired youth.
Strange yearning that I’ve had
To climb the trough of some forgotten jest
Or cry, and lay a tired head on your lap;
Sing to the moon, or yet be silent lest
In deep woods I wake some sleeping dryad….
Partly because I’m writing this to you
Perhaps because I’m only human too,
I make excuse for each strange, hopeless song:
For all this unintelligible throng
Of words inadequate. I only plead
That I have lived them all these lonely few
And made them personal … quaint offering
Each one some little magic that belongs to you.
1980/1931
FINIS
There is a great heart-break in an evening sea;
Remoteness in the sudden naked shafts
Of light that die, tremulous, quivering
Into cool ripples of blue and silver …
So it is with these songs:
the ink has dried,
And found its own perpetual circuit here,
Cast its own net
Of little, formless mimicry around itself.
And you must turn away, smile …
and forget.
1980/1931
TREASURE
Seal up the treasury and bar the gate.
We have enough of wonders in our store
To sit awhile at evening and relate
Wonderingly, what we did not have before.
Here in the counting-house, while daylight speeds
Nearer to us and nearer, let us tell,
Soft-voiced, with reverence, as a monk tells beads,
All the possessions that we love so well;
And fear not. In the hour before the dawn,
When cressets tremble in the icy wind
That shumbles in the parched and sleepy corn,
These will be safe for other’s hands to find.
These treasures that are hoarded in our trust
Others will touch with hands, but find them dust.
1980/1932
DISCOVERY OF LOVE
I turned and found a new-moon at my feet:
All the long day and night made measureless:
New glamour in the traffick of the street,
And in your glance a secret holiness.
Here is a wonder that has made us wise,
Discovered all creation in a song.
We have found light and shining of the eyes,
And loyalty is with us all day long.
Most merciful, since you have turned your face,
And given this perfection to my hand,
Earth has become an autumn dancing place,
And I a traveller in enchanted land;
And all the rumour of the earth’s decay
Remoter than to-morrow seems to-day.
1980/1932
PLEA
There must be some slow ending to this pain:
Surely some pitying god will give release,
Guerdon for service, leaving us again
The old magnificence and peace?
May we who serve such cruel apprenticeship
Find no more answer than an empty guess,
Knowing that every lip to questing lip
Must give for answer ‘Yes’?
Oh turn your mind from such ungodly thought,
Let your dear, trembling mouth no longer guess:
Pleasure is greatest pain so dearly bought,
And love unfaithfulness.
1980/1932
LOST
For Nancy
‘Angels desire an alms.’ MASSINGER
We had endured vicissitude and change,
Laughter and lanterns, colours in the grass,
And all the foreign music of the earth:
Starlight and glamour: every subtle range
Of motion, rhythm, and power that gave us birth.
Now that the ink has dried and left its rust
On the forgotten words, the growing rhythms
Have thundered into peace; shaken to dust
Are all the restless, savage, drowsy hymns:
Vanished the echo where the music was,
Faded the lanterns: colours in the grass
Died with the laughter of the old foolish rhymes …
Quietly we stand aside and let them pass.
1980/1932
QUESTION
You have so dressed your eyes with love for me
That all my mind’s entangled in a flame,
Crying the old despair for all to see,
The wonder of your name.
I must believe the passion of your mouth
And all its living treasure has no dearth,
But lives, exultant, through the season’s drouth
In the old hiding places of the earth.
How can the anguished world remain the same;
The crowds still pass on unreturning feet
When we have cupped our hands about a flame?
1980/1932
LOVE’S INABILITY
In all the sad seduction of your ways
I wander as a player tries a part,
Seeking a perfect gesture all his days,
Roving the widest margins of his art.
I would drink this perfection as a wine,
Leash the wild thirst that bids me more than taste:
Hoard up the great possession that is mine,
Not squander as a drunkard makes his waste.
I will be patient if the world be wise,
And you be bountiful as you are curt,
Until a song awakes those distant eyes,
And all your weary gestures cease to hurt.
1980/1932
Cueillez dès Aujourd’huy les Roses de la Vie
RONSARD, Sonnets
You will have no more beauty in that day
When all the slow destruction of the mind,
Encompassed in a single clot of clay,
Is dust on dust, with flower-roots entwined.
No use to say ‘She was both cruel and kind.
Though all her limbs have crumbled to decay,
Yet we, remembering, gather up and bind
The harvest that was all her yesterday.’
No use to shake that dear, unhappy head,
And pray for fresh beginnings, time makes one
Of all the prayers of Syria’s sleeping dead,
All the choked dust of fallen Babylon.
There is no lamentation but the hours
Mourning the silent watches of the grave.
Always the gaunt reflection of the stars
Whispers ‘Mad lovers, these you may not save.’
1980/1932
RETURN
There is some corner of a lover’s brain
That holds this famous treasure, some dim room
That love has not forgotten, where the sane
Plant of this magic burgeons in the gloom,
And pushes out its roots into the mind,
Grown rich on the turned soil of days that pass.
I know there is enchantment yet to find:
April and whip-showers and the heavy grass
Leaning to the lance-points of the rain …
Oh we will turn someday, and find again
The pageant of the lilies as they pass
In slow procession by the lonely lake,
Down by the crying waters of the plain.
Always, to the end, these will remain,
A thirst that all our passions may not slake
April and whip-showers and the crying rain.
1980/1932
Je Deviens Immortel dans tes Bras
OVIDE, Les Amours
We have no more of time nor growing old,
Nor memory of lovers that are dead
While blood is on our lips; and while you hold
Those frail and tenebrous hands about my head.
Time is snuffed out as candles in a church,
And all the fume in darkness is your hair;
Licence these burning lips and let them search
For passion that lies nearest to despair.
Let us set up a gravestone in the dark,
We who are laughing sinners, let us hold
One moment as a monument to mark
The hour from which God ceased to make us old.
1980/1932
RETREAT
I would be rid of you who bind me so,
Thoughtless to the stars: I would refrain and turn
Along the unforgotten paths I used to know
Before these eyes were governed to discern
All beauty and all transcience in love.
I would return, hungry, inviolate,
To the sequestered woodland, arched above
With the unchanging skies that graciously await
My sure return from such inconstant love.
I would return … yet would there ever be
The same clear current at the root of things?
The same resistless tides born of the sea?
The old slurred whisper of the swallow’s wings?
1980/1932
BALLADE OF SLOW DECAY
This business grows more dreary year by year,
The season with its seasonable joys,
When there is so much extra now on beer,
And therefore so much less to spend on toys:
And now that Auntie Maud’s had twins (both boys),
And all the family is knitting clothes—
It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:
I wish that George would pay me what he owes.
I realise that Cousin Jane is ‘dear’,
And that sweet Minnie has such ‘grace and poise’,
But why should they be planning to come here,
When Winifred my manuscript destroys,
And dearest little Bertie mis-employs
His time by crying when he sees my nose—
It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:
I wish that George would pay me what he owes.
How can a man withstand the atmosphere,
This hell compounded of such strange alloys?
Grandma’s too old to do a thing but leer,
And call the home-made mince-pies ‘saveloys’.
Grandpa keeps drooling on about sepoys,
The Indian situation and the snows—
It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:
I wish that George would pay me what he owes.
ENVOI
Prince, if I once disturbed your equipois
e,
By sending you my old discarded hose—
Perhaps you’d help me stamp and make a noise,
And wish that George would pay me what he owes?
1980/Christmas, 1932
TULLIOLA
‘… there was found the body of a young lady swimming in a kind of bath of precious oyle or liquor, fresh and entire as if she had been living, neither her face discolour’d, nor her hair disorder’d: at her feete burnt a lamp which suddainely expir’d at the opening of the vault; having flam’d, as was computed, now 1,500 yeares, by the conjecture that she was Tulliola, the daughter of Cicero whose body was thus found, as the inscription testified.’
Only the night remains now, only the dark.
This my forever and my nevermore.
Impalpable eclipse!
Persistent as the muzzle of a dog,
Nosing me out for ever and for ever….
God! that my body slips
Between smooth liquors like a floating log,
Spinning on tides of wine
So slow that not a flaw can shift
The symmetry of liquid in this basin:
Nor a chaotic wave can lift
My nostrils to the surface-fume of spice,
Bitter and odorous in gloom.
Pity me, swimming here.
Pity me, Cicero’s daughter.
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 2
