Collected Poems 1931-74

by Lawrence Durrell

  1946/1946

  ALEXANDRIA

  To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,

  Who move to their sweet undiscovered ends,

  Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,

  I wish these whirling autumn leaves:

  Promontories splashed by the salty sea,

  Groaned on in darkness by the tram

  To horizons of love or good luck or more love—

  As for me I now move

  Through many negatives to what I am.

  Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece

  And all I love, the lights confide

  A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide;

  Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside

  Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace:

  And so in furnished rooms revise

  The index of our lovers and our friends

  From gestures possibly forgotten, but the ends

  Of longings like unconnected nerves,

  And in this quiet rehearsal of their acts

  We dream of them and cherish them as Facts.

  Now when the sea grows restless as a conscript,

  Excited by fresh wind, climbs the sea-wall,

  I walk by it and think about you all:

  B. with his respect for the Object, and D.

  Searching in sex like a great pantry for jars

  Marked ‘Plum and apple’; and the small, fell

  Figure of Dorian ringing like a muffin-bell—

  All indeed whom war or time threw up

  On this littoral and tides could not move

  Were objects for my study and my love.

  And then turning where the last pale

  Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands

  And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands

  I think of you—indeed mostly of you,

  In whom a writer would only name and lose

  The dented boy’s lip and the close

  Archer’s shoulders; but here to rediscover

  By tides and faults of weather, by the rain

  Which washes everything, the critic and the lover.

  At the doors of Africa so many towns founded

  Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like

  The wife of Lot—a metaphor for tears;

  And the queer student in his poky hot

  Tenth floor room above the harbour hears

  The sirens shaking the tree of his heart,

  And shuts his books, while the most

  Inexpressible longings like wounds unstitched

  Stir in him some girl’s unquiet ghost.

  So we, learning to suffer and not condemn

  Can only wish you this great pure wind

  Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm

  Inland where it smokes the fires of men,

  Spins weathercocks on farms or catches

  The lovers at their quarrel in the sheets;

  Or like a walker in the darkness might,

  Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers

  Up there alone, upon the alps of night.

  1946/1946

  POGGIO

  The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts …

  The talent for entering rooms backwards

  Upon a roar of laughter, with his dumb

  Pained expression, wheeling there before him

  That mythological great hippo’s bum:

  ‘Who should it be but Poggio?’ The white face,

  Comical, flat, and hairless as a cheese.

  Nose like a member: something worn:

  A Tuscan fig, a leather can, or else,

  A phallus made of putty and slapped on.

  How should you know that behind

  All this the old buffoon concealed a fear—

  And reasonable enough—that he might be

  An artist after all? Always after this kind

  Of side-splitting evening, sitting there

  On a three-legged stool and writing, he

  Hoped poems might form upon the paper.

  But no. Dirty stories. The actress and the bishop.

  The ape and the eunuch. This crapula clung

  To him for many years between his dinners …

  He sweated at them like a ham unhung.

  And like the rest of us hoped for

  The transfigured story or the mantic line

  Of poetry free from this mortuary smell.

  For years slept badly—who does not?

  Took bribes, and drugs, ate far too much and dreamed.

  Married unwisely, yes, but died quite well.

  1946/1946

  BLIND HOMER

  A winter night again, and the moon

  Loosely inks in the marbles and retires.

  The six pines whistle and stretch and there,

  Eastward the loaded brush of morning pauses

  Where the few Grecian stars sink and revive

  Each night in glittering baths of sound.

  Now to the winter each has given up

  Deciduous stuff, the snakeskin and the antler,

  Cast skin of poetry and the grape.

  Blind Homer, the lizards still sup the heat

  From the rocks, and still the spring,

  Noiseless as coins on hair repeats

  Her diphthong after diphthong endlessly.

  Exchange a glance with one whose art

  Conspires with introspection against loneliness

  This February 1946, pulse normal, nerves at rest:

  Heir to a like disorder, only lately grown

  Much more uncertain of his gift with words,

  By this plate of olives, this dry inkwell.

  1948/1946

  FABRE

  The ants that passed

  Over the back of his hand,

  The cries of welcome, the tribes, the tribes!

  Happier men would have studied

  Children, more baffling than pupae,

  Their conversation when alone, their voices,

  The dream at the tea-table or at geography:

  The sense of intimacy when moving in lines

  Like caterpillars entering a cathedral.

  He refused to examine the world except

  Through the stoutest glasses;

  A finger of ground covered with pioneers.

  A continent on a bay-leaf moving.

  If real women were like moths he didn’t notice.

  There was not a looking-glass in the whole house.

  Ah! but one day he might dress

  In this black discarded business suit,

  Fly heavily out on to the lawn at Arles.

  What friendships lay among the flowers!

  If he could be a commuter among the bees,

  This pollen-hunter of the exact observation!

  1946/1946

  CITIES, PLAINS AND PEOPLE

  (Beirut 1943)

  I

  Once in idleness was my beginning,

  Night was to the mortal boy

  Innocent of surface like a new mind

  Upon whose edges once he walked

  In idleness, in perfect idleness.

  O world of little mirrors in the light.

  The sun’s rough wick for everybody’s day:

  Saw the Himalayas like lambs there

  Stir their huge joints and lay

  Against his innocent thigh a stony thigh.

  Combs of wind drew through this grass

  To bushes and pure lakes

  On this tasteless wind

  Went leopards, feathers fell or flew:

  Yet all went north with the prayer-wheel,

  By the road, the quotation of nightingales.

  Quick of sympathy with springs

  Where the stone gushed water

  Women made their water like thieves.

  Caravans paused here to drink Tibet.

  On draughty corridors to Lhasa

  Was my first school


  In faces lifted from saddles to the snows:

  Words caught by the soft klaxons crying

  Down to the plains and settled cities.

  So once in idleness was my beginning.

  Little known of better then or worse

  But in the lens of this great patience

  Sex was small,

  Death was small,

  Were qualities held in a deathless essence,

  Yet subjects of the wheel, burned clear

  And immortal to my seventh year.

  To all who turn and start descending

  The long sad river of their growth:

  The tidebound, tepid, causeless

  Continuum of terrors in the spirit,

  I give you here unending

  In idleness an innocent beginning

  Until your pain become a literature.

  II

  Nine marches to Lhasa.

  Kùrseong: India The Nepalese ayah Kasim

  Those who went forward

  Into this honeycomb of silence often

  Gained the whole world: but often lost each other.

  In the complexion of this country tears

  Found no harbour in the breast of rock.

  Death marched beside the living as a friend

  With no sad punctuation by the clock.

  But he for whom steel and running water

  Were roads, went westward only

  To the prudish cliffs and the sad green home

  Of Pudding Island o’er the Victorian foam.

  Here all as poets were pariahs.

  Some sharpened little follies into hooks

  To pick upon the language and survive.

  Some in search could only found

  Pulpits of smoke like Blake’s Jerusalem.

  For this person it was never landfall,

  With so many representative young men

  And all the old being obvious in feeling,

  But like good crafty men

  He saw the business witches in their bowlers,

  The blackened Samsons of the green estate,

  The earls from their cockney-boxes calling,

  And knew before it was too late, London

  Could only be a promise-giving kingdom.

  Yet here was a window

  Into the great sick-room, Europe,

  With its dull set-books,

  The Cartesian imperatives, Dante and Homer,

  To impress the lame and awkward newcomer.

  ‘In Rimbaud the sense of guilt was atrophied, not conquered’ Henry Miller

  Here he saw Bede who softly

  Blew out desire and went to bed,

  So much greater than so many less

  Who made their unconquered guilt in atrophy

  A passport to the dead.

  Here St. Augustine took the holy cue

  Of bells in an English valley; and mad Jerome

  Made of his longing half a home from home.

  Scythes here faithfully mark

  In their supple practice paths

  For the lucky and unambitious owners.

  But not a world as yet. Not a world.

  Death like autumn falls

  On the lakes its sudden forms, on walls

  Where everything is made more marginal

  By the ruling planes of the snow;

  Reflect how Prospero was born to a green cell

  While those who noted the weather-vane

  In Beatrice’s shadow sang

  With the dying Emily: ‘We shall never

  Return, never be young again’.

  The defeat of purpose in days and lichens.

  Some here unexpectedly put on the citizen,

  Go walking to a church

  By landscape rubbed in rain to grey

  As wool on glass,

  Thinking of spring which never comes to stay.

  (The potential passion hidden, Wordsworth

  In the desiccated bodies of postmistresses.

  The scarlet splash of campion, Keats.

  Ignorant suffering that closes like a lock.)

  So here at last we did outgrow ourselves.

  As the green stalk is taken from the earth,

  With a great juicy sob, I turned him from a Man

  To Mandrake, in Whose awful hand I am.

  III

  Prospero upon his island

  Cast in a romantic form,

  When his love was fully grown

  He laid his magic down.

  Truth within the tribal wells,

  Innocent inviting creature

  Does not rise to human spells

  But by paradox

  Teaches all who seek for her

  That no saint or seer unlocks

  The wells of truth unless he first

  Conquer for the truth his thirst.

  IV

  So one fine year to where the roads

  Dividing Europe meet in Paris.

  Paris H.V.M. Anaïs Nancy Teresa

  The gnome was here and the small

  Unacted temptations. Tessa was here whose dark

  Quickened hair had brushed back rivers,

  Trembling with stars by Buda,

  In whose inconstant arms he waited

  For black-hearted Descartes to seek him out

  With all his sterile apparatus.

  Now man for him became a thinking lobe,

  Through endless permutations sought repose.

  By frigid latinisms he mated now

  To the hard frame of prose the cogent verb.

  To many luck may give for merit

  More profitable teachers. To the heart

  A critic and a nymph:

  And an unflinching doctor to the spirit.

  All these he confined in metaphors,

  She sleeping in his awkward mind

  Taught of the pace of women or birds

  Through the leafy body of man

  Enduring like the mammoth, like speech

  From the dry clicking of the greater apes

  To these hot moments in a reference of stars

  Beauty and death, how sex became

  A lesser sort of speech, and the members doors.

  V

  Faces may settle sadly

  Each into its private death

  By business travel or fortune,

  Like the fat congealing on a plate

  Or the fogged negative of labour

  Whose dumb fastidious rectitude

  Brings death in living as a sort of mate.

  ‘All bearings are true’.

  The Admiralty Pilot

  Here however man might botch his way

  To God via Valéry, Gide or Rabelais.

  All rules obtain upon the pilot’s plan

  So long as man, not manners, makyth man.

  Some like the great Victorians of the past

  Through old Moll Flanders sailed before the mast,

  While savage Chatterleys of the new romance

  Get carried off in Sex, the ambulance.

  All rules obtain upon the pilot’s chart

  If governed by the scripture of the heart.

  VI

  Now November visiting with rain

  Surprises and humbles with its taste of elsewhere,

  Licks in the draughty galleries there,

  Like a country member quickened by a province,

  Turning over books and leaves in haste,

  Takes at last her slow stains of waste

  Down the stone stairs into the rivers.

  And in the personal heart, weary

  Of the piercing innocents in parks

  Who sail the rapt subconscious there like swans,

  Disturbs and brightens with her tears, thinking:

  ‘Perhaps after all it is we who are blind,

  While the unconscious eaters of the apple

  Are whole as ingots of a process

  Punched in matter by the promiscuous Mind.’

  VII
<
br />   By the waters of Buda

  We surrendered arms, hearts, hands,

  Lips for counting of kisses,

  Fingers for money or touch,

  Eyes for the hourglass sands.

  Uncut and unloosened

  Swift hair by the waters of Buda

  In the shabby balcony rooms

  Where the pulses waken and wonder

  The churches bluff one as heart-beats

  On the river their dull boom booms.

  By the waters of Buda

  Uncomb and unlock then,

  Abandon and nevermore cherish

  Queer lips, queer heart, hands.

  There to futurity leave

  The luckier lover who’s waiting,

  As, like a spring coiled up,

  In the bones of Adam, lay Eve.

  VIII

  Corfu:

  Greece

  So Time, the lovely and mysterious

  With promises and blessings moves

  Through her swift degrees,

  So gladly does he bear

  Towards the sad perfect wife,

  The rocky island and the cypress-trees.

  Taken in the pattern of all solitaries,

  An only child, of introspection got,

  Her only playmates, lovers, in herself.

  Nets were too coarse to hold her

  Where the nymph broke through

  And only the encircling arms of pleasure held.

  Here for the five lean dogs of sense

  Greece moved in calm memorial

  Through her own unruffled blue,