Collected Poems 1931-74
Page 3
All the embalmer’s poor artifice was this:
To strip me of the cogs and wheels of sense—
Those inner toys of motion,
Purse up my dead lips in a kiss,
And freeze the small shell of me,
Freeze me so stiff and regimental,
Then launch me in this vault’s aquarium
Upon a tide of spices.
Pity me, swimming here.
Pity me, Cicero’s daughter,
Partnered by inner darkness and one solemn light.
1980/1934
LYRIC
I am this spring,
This interlocked torment of growth.
I am leaf folding,
Leaves falling and folding,
Leaf upon leaf upon spray,
Sweet pod and sticky:
Buds that are speckled, bursting, breaking-
I am this hour.
O unbearable sliding and twining
Sinews of creeper,
Unbearable fret in the burdenous mould!
I am seed pressing,
Seeds straining and scoring
A runnel to dayshine:
All seed and all potence,
Invincible growth,
Clamped in the moist clog of soil.
I am the surge:
The shaking and loosing of strands:
Weed creaking,
Earth slipping from fingers of tendrils
And bindings of moss.
Hear me you earth-drums
Babbing and drubbing
Invincibly onward to life!
Hear me!
I am this spring,
I am this forest in flux,
Urging and burgeoning.
1980/1934
WHEAT-FIELD
For Leslie
And all this standing butter-coloured flood
Where the vast field goes tilting to the sky,
Tilting and lifting to a red dancing sun,
A man destroys, destroys….
Old arms, brown arms,
Twinkles the grinning scythe-blade in the wheat….
Though the dry wind, defensive,
Break cover and descend,
Shuffling the yellow heads like cards,
Hampered and driving:
Though there is consternation and amaze,
A man destroys, destroys,
While the sun freckles the orchard
A man in a red cloak destroys.
I have been so in dreams: rooted
And standing with the warm male sperm in me,
Hideously wary of death.
I have been rooted wheat—
A legless stalk hanging on the ground
While a destroyer roves
Nearer and always nearer: oblivious:
Twisting the wicked sickle in my roots—
An old man
Who destroys
Under a dancing sun.
1980/1934
FACES
For F. A.
I
So many masks, the people that I meet,
So many coloured faces—
Carnival idols wagging in a lanterned street,
Plaster and pigment grimaces.
Not one but wears smooth porcelain for a frown,
Not one the livelong daytime,
Can I say: ‘Here loveliness’? or ‘Here walks guile’?
Always beneath the smile
I know the apparatus of the bone,
The structure pinned with ligament,
The sliding gristle, coil of artery:
All, all, delicate, nimble, wired, machinery,
Snugly buttoned in
A supple glove of flesh,
A snake-smooth film of skin,
Smooth, smooth, flawless and bland as rubber….
II
And, if I smile
What can you see, what guess?
Your own, your little idiot uniformity
Reciprocates a perfect puppet nothingness;
A null collision of minute desires
Transliterated thus by muscle-play….
Behold,
Behold your mincing jowls a-swing on wires!
No, no. My friend
We are void idols still,
Ridiculous clicking dolls,
Mumming the silly ciphers of pretence:
Always intent to end
Our awful emptiness by alphabets.
Our speech, our hapless intercourse
Seems always just removed from actual sense.
Can you deny me that the laughter-mask
Clamps back upon itself to trace
Only the raving jaw-line of the skeleton?
That in your hanging face
A smile is an expression of despairs,
With mouth a hanging flap,
A slip of skin twiddled by subcutaneous hairs,
A juggling parody of what you say?
In fine,
Your mouth’s a letter-box,
A hippo’s bun-trap …
Your mouth, my friend … and mine!
III
So many masks …
So very many faces….
Will you remember, then, when next we walk
Among the lanterns and the lights,
Among the half-light of your chance desires
We are but carnival idols still—
Poor rag-dolls twitched on wincing wires
Fingered by impulse?
A couple of barking cattle
With a fool rictus gouged upon our faces!
Will you remember as we yapp and boom
How poor a condolence
The formal utterance is
For being two bloody zeros,
Mnemotechnic heroes:
Sick hack-satires on meaning by Infinity,
With not one working sense
That does not illustrate our own
And all humanity’s impertinence?
1980/1934
LOVE POEMS
I
Lost, you may not smile upon me now:
You, nor that grey-eyed counterpart of you
Inhabiting the sunlight in still places:
Substant always in the netted moonshine.
‘Remember’ is a lost cry on a wind:
A hollow nothing-heard,
Most memorable, in a deaf night
That does not heed.
I have forgot even, dear pagan,
The holding of hands, the beseeching,
Intolerable darling!
No more do the loose hands of devilry
Tangle your fingers like nets in my soul.
You … I …
They are such very little faces—
Flowers in a stippled moonshine
Only recalled when the moon’s a mad farthing,
The sky a december of steel.
II
I cannot fix the very moment or the hour,
But an inevitable sometime I shall meet
One face, your face among the faces,
Notice one step
Among the winding footfalls of a hollow street.
Perhaps at evening in smooth rain
That runs all silver-shod among the houses,
In a void gathering of men and women
Who tread their lives out on the jointed stones,
I shall be challenged by your smile again:
Your voice above the loaded gutter’s monotones.
Voice among voices …
Face among faces….
I cannot fix the moment, and my present clock,
The dandelion-puff, lies cruelly;
Yet, in the action of that hour’s surprise
What will you do, or I?
Catch hands and laugh upon each other’s eyes?
Or will some imp of the spontaneous moment
Devise some other signal than this?
Shall I, perhaps, put hands upon your elbows,
Outface you
r consternation with a kiss?
III
What would you have me write?
Scraps, an attentive phrase or two
To soothe your vanity’s delight?
Pay down a fee of words to you,
That lesser you, who dwindle, shrink
When formal sentences of fine desire
Fix your minute reflection in a shining ink?
Would you have all of this:
A macaroni payment for a wink?
A pastiche for a kiss?
No. I’ll not devise such nothings:
Not countenance dissection with my pen:
Make an essay on torment when
Ink is for fixing fables.
O! can anything
Engendered of the mind be more than this:
A hazard flight on an imperfect wing?
The motion of the muscle in a kiss;
Features aligned for laughter; can the mind
Transliterate such metamorphosis
Evoking thence
More than a leaning pothook for a sense?
Words? They are not large enough.
The sense is never minion to the word.
IV
Absent from you, I say:
‘Let there be no more songs,
Those faulty units of the heart.’
Let them defer to senses they can know,
Be pander to air’s comprehended graces—
Daffodil smells and the turned earth and snow.
Let them disseminate and prove
The mere music’s overture to love
Whose dear vicissitudes may never show
Upon the surface of thought’s countenance.
Sure that I’ve tried and tried,
Leading my ink across this acreage
Of vacant pages.
I can glean nothing from the scars of heart.
Always the finer fabric of the sense protests:
‘Let there be no more songs
Lest an obscuring music’s overtone
Disperse the purer meaning of the words.’
V
You too will pass as other lovers pass.
There will no more be hands to hold you by.
Love, like wet fingers dabbled on a glass,
Traces a soon disfigured charactery.
As there is end to every narrative,
So must the string fall silent on the air.
Dear, these poor suppliant hands may only give
Scant loveliness to cast before despair.
To hold you will not make creation young,
Nor all the pattern of the planets new.
Time may not grant what beauty I have sung
More lease than sunlight to a last night’s dew.
Unbearable enchantment! All and all of this
Will slip to nothingness beneath a kiss.
VI
There is no strict being in this hour,
No scent nor dust that moves:
Only this dawdling clock
Clapping a tireless knuckle at the doors
Of cogent thought:
Reviving echoes in the wasted mind.
The night-time swings resentment like a hammer—
Murderous long minutes, pendulous over me,
And all the dark divorces of the mind and body
Are cancelled quite, devoured by this hot nothing,
Night.
I am become my thought’s compositor
And the laborious darkness here my devil.
I, lapt in the vacuum of this hot white bed,
What can I see beyond the triple wall?
What sense beyond soul’s damage—
Your absence, white Compassionate?
The mind is windle-straws
Herded in regiments by the poignant wind:
A thimble-full of restless lava contemplating
Only the motionless elbows of these trees
Swagged hard with fruit,
Nudging the neighbour wall like a boor at table.
Marble realities!
These, only these.
Yet somewhere thoughts conspire to show you standing,
The obedient evening at your elbow,
Upon a terrace in that southern land,
Free of these dread devices of discomfort—
Silence—this hot blank silence and this bed—
My youth’s warm winding-sheet—
Free of them all!
O! dear my saint, sometime I vision you,
As summer lightning winking in my brain—
All your youth’s shapely arrogance!
You, limb-lusting, Pan-fleet!
Leaning upon a terrace in the south,
Forgetting and forgetting.
The wind’s your only Romeo.
1980/1934
MASS FOR THE OLD YEAR
‘Sur le Noel, morte saison’ VILLON
Since you must pass to-night
Old year, since you must vanish and fall,
What shall we do or devise for you
To celebrate temporal death?
Will you need cakes and poor potsherds
Huddled and stale beside you—
Shall we portion you food and a leather of wine?
Since you must go and we must follow you—
Lamenting and spectral companions,
My lover’s dead self and my own—
What shall we make for the three of us,
Tombstones and talismans?
Toys for our comfort in darkness,
Toys for our pillows, we three sleeping children
Now fallen and cold?
Old year, sweet year, I have laid her beside you—
Simple magnificent marble,
Parcelled in cere-cloth, oils and warm ointments:
Pure and delightful our ghostly companion,
Clenched in clean winding-cloth
Close from the mould.
Since we must go together, hand in hand,
Lead our frail steps in the darkness:
Guide our drugged limbs in the shades and the silences,
Tenebrous places—O! cherish our youth.
Old year, kind year,
Image of sunshine and nightingale-passion
Urge us so gently and smoothly away,
My lovely accomplice and I,
To the dead selves of lovers,
The voiceless, forgotten, the faded companions:
Old year, lost year, lead us away.
1980/ New Year, 1935
THE DEATH OF GENERAL UNCEBUNKE: A BIOGRAPHY IN LITTLE
(1938)
To Kay in Tahiti: now dead
‘Not satire but an exercise in ironic compassion, celebrating a simplicity of heart which is proof against superiority or the tooth of the dog … After all, we may have had other criteria, but they were only criteria.’
The Argument
General Uncebunke, named Konrad after his famous ancestor the medieval schoolman (see epistolœ obscurorum virorum), was born in 1880, and baptised in the same year at the village church, Uncebunke, Devon, England. On leaving Oxford he served with distinction in two wars.
In the intervals he travelled extensively in Peru, Siberia, Tibet, and Baffin Land and wrote many travel books of which Roughing It in Tibet is the best known to-day.
In 1925 he came home from his travels for good and settled down to country life in England, becoming Tory M.P. for Uncebunke, and increasing his literary reputation by his books of nature essays.
In 1930, owing to the death of his only daughter, he suffered from a temporary derangement of his mind and published that extraordinary volume of memoirs known as Spernere Mundum. He remained Tory member for Uncebunke, however, until his death on 2 April 1937.
He was laid in state for three days in the family vault; and the body was finally cremated according to his wish. His widow who survived him but three months is said to have scattered his ashes in the Channel as a tribute to a very galla
nt explorer and noble man.
Author’s Note
You must know that this is one organic whole and must be read like a novel to be really appreciated. Also it is quite serious and should be read with the inner voice, preferably in some dialect.
FOURTEEN CAROLS
I
My uncle sleeps in the image of death.
In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed
The wrens junket: the old girl with the trowel
Is a pillar of salt, insufferably brittle.
His not to reason why, though a thinking man.
Beside his mesmeric incomprehension
The little mouse mopping and mowing,
The giraffe and the spin-turtle, these can
On my picture-book look insufferably little
But knowing, incredibly Knowing.
II
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy.
He sleeps in the music-room of the Host.
Voyage was always his entertainment
Who followed a crooked needle under Orion,
Saw the griffin, left notes on the baobab,
Charted the Yellow Coast.
He like a faultless liner, finer never took air,
But snow on the wings altered the altitude,
She paused in a hollow pocket, faltered:
The enormous lighted bird is dashed in snow.
Now in the labyrinth God will put him wise,
Correct the instruments, will alter even
The impetuous stance, the focus of the eyes.
III
Aunt Prudence, she was the eye of the needle.
Sleeping, a shepherdess of ghostly sheep.
‘Thy will be done in Baden Baden.
In Ouchy, Lord, and in Vichy.’
In the garden of the vicarage sorting stamps
Was given merit of the poor in spirit
For dusting a cinquefoil, tuning the little lamps.