Collected Poems 1931-74
Page 11
Were in the style and order, as when you say
‘Freedom alone confines’; but do they show a love,
Fragmented everywhere by conscience and deceit,
Ending on this coast of torn-out lighthouses?
Or that neglected and unmerited Habit,
The structure that so long informed our growth?
Questions for a nursery wall! But are they true to these?
I have passed all this day in what they would call patience.
Not writing, alone in my window, with my flute,
Having read in a letter that last immortal February
That ‘Music is only love, looking for words’.
1946/1945
MAREOTIS
For Diana Gould
Now everywhere Spring opens
Like an eyelid still unfocused,
Unsharpened in expression yet or depth,
But smiling and entire, stirring from sleep.
Birds begin, swindlers of the morning.
Flowers and the wild ways begin:
And the body’s navigation in its love
Through wings, messages, telegrams
Loose and unbodied roam the world.
Only we are held here on the
Rationed love—a landscape like an eye,
Where the wind gnashes by Mareotis,
Stiffens the reeds and glistening salt,
And in the ancient roads the wind,
Not subtle, not confiding, touches once again
The melancholy elbow cheek and paper.
1946/1945
CONON THE CRITIC ON THE SIX LANDSCAPE PAINTERS OF GREECE
ON PETER OF THEBES
‘This landscape is not original in its own mode. First smells were born—of resin and pine. Then someone got drunk on arbutus berries. Finally as an explanatory text someone added this red staunch clay and roots. You cannot smell one without tasting the other—as with fish and red sauce.’
ON MANOLI OF CRETE
‘After a lifetime of writing acrostics he took up a brush and everything became twice as attentive. Trees had been trees before. Distinctions had been in ideas. Now the old man went mad, for everything undressed and ran laughing into his arms.’
ON JULIAN OF ARCADIA
‘Arcadia is original in a particular sense. There is no feeling of “Therefore” in it. Origin, reason, meaning it has none in the sense of recognizable past. In this, both Arcadia and all good poems are original.’
ON SPIRIDON OF EPIRUS
‘You look at this landscape for five years. You see little but something attentive watching you. Another five and you remark a shape that is barely a shape; a shadow like the moon’s penumbra. Look a lifetime and you will see that the mountains lie like the covers of a bed; and you discern the form lying under them.’
ON HERO OF CORINTH
‘Style is the cut of the mind. Hero was not much interested in his landscape, but by a perpetual self-confession in art removed both himself and his subject out of the reach of the people. Thus one day there remained only a picture-frame, an empty studio, and an idea of Hero the painter.’
ON ALEXANDER OF ATHENS
‘Alexander was in love with Athens. He was a glutton and exhausted both himself and his subject in his art. Thus when he had smelt a flower it was quite used up, and when he painted a mountain it felt that living on could only be a useless competition against Alexander’s painting of it. Thus with him Athens ceased to exist, and we have been walking about inside his canvases ever since looking for a way back from art into life.’
1946/1945
WATER MUSIC
Wrap your sulky beauty up,
From sea-fever, from winterfall
Out of the swing of the
Swing of the sea.
Keep safe from noonfall,
Starlight and smokefall where
Waves roll, waves toll but feel
None of our roving fever.
From dayfever and nightsadness
Keep, bless, hold: from cold
Wrap your sulky beauty into sleep
Out of the swing of the
Swing of sea.
1946/1945
DELOS
For Diana Gould
On charts they fall like lace,
Islands consuming in a sea
Born dense with its own blue:
And like repairing mirrors holding up
Small towns and trees and rivers
To the still air, the lovely air:
From the clear side of springing Time,
In clement places where the windmills ride,
Turning over grey springs in Mykonos,
In shadows with a gesture of content.
The statues of the dead here
Embark on sunlight, sealed
Each in her model with the sightless eyes:
The modest stones of Greeks,
Who gravely interrupted death by pleasure.
And in harbours softly fallen
The liver-coloured sails—
Sharp-featured brigantines with eyes—
Ride in reception so like women:
The pathetic faculty of girls
To register and utter a desire
In the arms of men upon the new-mown waters,
Follow the wind, with their long shining keels
Aimed across Delos at a star.
1946/1945
THE PILOT
To Dudley Honor
Sure a lovely day and all weather
Leading westward to Ireland and our childhood.
On the quarters of heaven, held by stars,
The Hunter and Arcturus getting ready—
The elect of heaven all burning on the wheel.
This lovely morning must the pilot leaning
In the eye of heaven feel the island
Turning beneath him, burning soft and blue—
And all this mortal globe like a great lamp
With spines of rivers, families of cities
Seeming to the solitary boy so
Local and queer yet so much part of him.
The enemies of silence have come nearer.
Turn, turn to the morning on wild elbows:
Look down through the five senses like stars
To where our lives lie small and equal like two grains
Before Chance—the hawk’s eye or the pilot’s
Round and shining on the open sky,
Reflecting back the innocent world in it.
1946/1945
THE PARTHENON
For T. S. Eliot
Στερɩὲς και vησιὰ
Put it more simply: say the city
Swam up here swan-like to the shallows,
Or whiteness from an overflowing jar
Settled into this grassy violet space,
Theorem for three hills,
Went soft with brickdust, clay and whitewash,
On a plastered porch one morning wrote
Human names, think of it, men became the roads.
The academy was given over
To the investigation of shade an idle boy
Invented, tearing out the heart
Of a new loaf, put up these slender columns.
Later the Parthenon’s small catafalque
Simple and congruent as a wish grew up,
Snow-blind, the marbles built upon a pause
Made smoke seem less surprising, being white.
Now syntax settled round the orderless,
Joining action and reflection in the arch,
Then adding desire and will: four walls:
Four walls, a house. ‘How simple’ people said.
Man entered it and woman was the roof.
A vexing history, Geros, that becomes
More and more simple as it ends, not less;
And nothing has redeemed it: art
Moved back from pleasure-giver to a humour
As with us … I see you smile …
The long ships moved through cities
Made of loaf-sugar, tamed by gardens,
Lying hanging by the hair within the waters
And quickened by self-knowledge
Men of linen sat on marble chairs
In self-indulgence murmuring ‘I am, I am’.
Chapters of clay and whitewash. Others here
Find only a jar of red clay, a Pan
The superstitious whipped and overturned.
Yet nothing of ourselves can equal it
Though grown from causes we still share,
The natural lovely order, as where water
Touches earth, a tree grows up,
A needle touching wax, a human voice.
But for us the brush, the cone, the candle,
The spinning-wheel and clay are only
Amendments to an original joy.
Lost even the flawless finishing strokes,
White bones among the almonds prophesying
A death itself that seemed a coming-of-age.
Lastly the capes and islands hold us,
Tame as a handclasp,
Causes locked within effects, the land—
This vexed clitoris of the continental body,
Pumice and clay and whitewash
Only the darkness ever compromises
Or an eagle softly mowing on the blue …
And yet, Geros, who knows? Within the space
Of our own seed might some day rise,
Shriek truth, punish the blue with statues.
1948/1945/6
IN EUROPE
Recitative for a Radio Play
To Elie
Three Voices to the accompaniment of a drum and bells, and the faint grunt and thud of a dancing bear.
MAN
The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.
We are getting the refugee habit,
WOMEN
Moving from island to island,
Where the boundaries are clouds,
Where the frontiers of the land are water.
OLD MAN
We are getting the refugee habit,
WOMAN
We are only anonymous feet moving,
Without friends any more, without books
Or companionship any more. We are getting—
MAN
The refugee habit. There’s no end
To the forest and no end to the moors:
Between the just and the unjust
There is little distinction.
OLD MAN
Bodies like houses, without windows and doors:
WOMAN
The children have become so brown,
Their skins have become dark with sunlight,
MAN
They have learned to eat standing.
OLD MAN
When we come upon men crucified,
Or women hanging downward from the trees,
They no longer understand.
WOMAN
How merciful is memory with its fantasies.
They are getting the refugee habit …
OLD MAN
How weary are the roads of the blood.
Walking forwards towards death in my mind
I am walking backwards again into my youth;
A mother, a father, and a house.
One street, a certain town, a particular place:
And the feeling of belonging somewhere,
Of being appropriate to certain fields and trees.
WOMAN
Now our address is the world. Walls
Constrain us. O do you remember
The peninsula where we so nearly died,
And the way the trees looked owned,
Human and domestic like a group of horses?
They said it was Greece.
MAN
Through Prussia into Russia,
Through Holland to Poland,
Through Rumania into Albania.
WOMAN
Following the rotation of the seasons.
OLD MAN
We are getting the refugee habit:
The past and the future are not enough,
Are two walls only between which to die:
Who can live in a house with two walls?
MAN
The present is an eternal journey;
In one country winter, in another spring.
OLD MAN
I am sick of the general deaths:
We have seen them impersonally dying:
Everything I had hoped for, fireside and hearth,
And death by compromise some summer evening.
MAN
You are getting the refugee habit:
You are carrying the past in you
Like a precious vessel, remembering
Its essence, ownership and ordinary loving.
WOMAN
We are too young to remember.
OLD MAN
Nothing disturbed such life as I remember
But telephone or telegram,
Such death-bringers to the man among the roses
In the garden of his house, smoking a pipe.
WOMAN
We are the dispossessed, sharing
With gulls and flowers our lives of accident:
No time for love, no room for love:
If only the children—
MAN
Were less wild and unkept, belonged
To the human family, not speechless,
OLD MAN
And shy as the squirrels in the trees:
WOMAN
If only the children
OLD MAN
Recognized their father, smiled once more.
OLD MAN + WOMAN
They have got the refugee habit,
Walking about in the rain hunting for food,
Looking at their faces in the bottom of wells:
OLD MAN
They are living the popular life.
All Europe is moving out of winter
Into spring with all boundaries being
Broken down, dissolving, vanishing.
Migrations are beginning, a new habit
From where the icebergs rise in the sky
To valleys where corn is spread like butter …
WOMAN
So many men and women: each one a soul.
MAN
So many souls crossing the world,
OLD MAN
So many bridges to the end of the world.
Frontiers mean nothing any more …
WOMAN
Peoples and possessions,
Lands, rights,
Titles, holdings,
Trusts, Bonds …
OLD MAN
Mean nothing any more, nothing.
A whistle, a box, a shawl, a cup,
A broken sword wrapped in newspaper.
WOMAN
All we have left us, out of context,
OLD MAN
A jar, a mousetrap, a broken umbrella,
A coin, a pipe, a pressed flower
WOMAN
To make an alphabet for our children.
OLD MAN
A chain, a whip, a lock,
A drum and a dancing bear …
WOMAN
We have got the refugee habit.
Beyond tears at last, into some sort of safety
From fear of wanting, fear of hoping,
Fear of everything but dying.
We can die now.
OLD MAN
Frontiers mean nothing any more. Dear Greece!
MAN
Yes. We can die now.
1946/1946
PRESSMARKED URGENT
‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ Motto for Press Corps
DESPATCH ADGENERAL PUBLICS EXTHE WEST
PERPETUAL MOTION QUITE UNFINDING REST
ADVANCES ETRETREATS UPON ILLUSION
PREPARES NEW METAPHYSICS PERCONFUSION
PARA PERDISPOSI
TION ADNEW EVIL
ETREFUSAL ADCONCEDE OUR ACTS ADDEVIL
NEITHER PROFIT SHOWS NOR LOSS
SEDSOME MORE PROPHETS NAILED ADCROSS
ATTACK IN FORCE SURMEANS NONENDS
BY MULTIPLYING CONFUSION TENDS
ADCLOUD THE ISSUES WHICH ARE PLAIN
COLON DISTINGUISH PROFIT EXGAIN
ETBY SMALL CONCEPTS LONG NEGLECTED
FIND VIRTUE SUBACTION CLEAR REFLECTED
ETWEIGHING THE QUANTUM OF THE SIN
BEGIN TO BE REPEAT BEGIN.
1946/1946
TWO POEMS IN BASIC ENGLISH
I
SHIPS. ISLANDS. TREES
These ships, these islands, these simple trees
Are our rewards in substance, being poor.
This earth a dictionary is
To the root and growth of seeing,
And to the servant heart a door.
Some on the green surface of the land
With all their canvas up in leaf and flower,
And some empty of influence
But from the water-winds,
Free as love’s green attractions are.
Smoke bitter and blue from farms.
And points of feeble light in houses