Collected Poems 1931-74
Page 14
Bearing in rivers upside down
The myrtle and the olive, in ruins
The faces of the innocents in wells.
Salt and garlic, water and dry bread,
Greek bread from the comb they knew
Like an element in sculpture:
By these red aerial cherries,
Or flawed grapes painted green
But pouted into breasts: as well
By those great quarries of the blood—
The beating crimson hearts of the grenades:
All far beyond the cupidity of verses
Or the lechery of images to tell.
Here worlds were confirmed in him.
Differences that matched like cloth
Between the darkness and the inner light,
Moved on the undivided breath of blue.
Formed moving, trees asserted here
Nothing but simple comparisons to
The artist’s endearing eye.
Sleep. Napkins folded after grace.
Veins of stealing water
By the unplumbed ruins, never finding peace.
A watershed, a valley of tombs,
Never finding peace.
‘Look’ she might say ‘Press here
With your fingers at the temples.
Are they not the blunt uncut horns
Of the small naked Ionian fauns?’
Much later, moving in a dark,
Snow-lit landscape softly
In her small frock walked his daughter
And a simile came into his mind
Of lovers, like swimmers lost at sea,
Exhausted in each other’s arms,
Urgent for land, but treading water.
IX
Red Polish mouth,
Lips that as for the flute unform,
Gone round on nouns or vowels,
To utter the accepting, calm
‘Yes’, or make terrible verbs
Like ‘I adore, adore’.
Persuader, so long hunted
By your wild pack of selves,
Past peace of mind or even sleep,
So longed for and so sought,
May the divider always keep
Like unshed tears in lashes
Love, the undeclarèd thought.
X
Athens. Katsimbalis, Wallace and Anna Southam.
Seferiades Stephanides
Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us,
Autumn with her wild packs
Comes down to the robbing of the flowers.
On this unstained sky, printless
Snow moves crisp as dreamers’ fingers,
And the rate of passion or tenderness
In this island house is absolute.
Within a time of reading
Here is all my growth
Through the bodies of other selves,
In books, by promise or perversity
My mutinous crew of furies—their pleading
Threw up at last the naked sprite
Whose flesh and noise I am,
Who is my jailor and my inward night.
‘Anya, my angel, my darling. This is an act of folly I’m committing, a feebleness, a crime, I know it, but …’
Dostoevsky’s Letters to his wife
In Europe, bound by Europe,
I saw them moving, the possessed
Fëdor and Anna, the last
Two vain explorers of our guilt,
Turn by turn holding the taws,
Made addicts of each other lacking love,
Friendless embittered and alone.
The lesser pities held them back
Like mice in secrecies,
Yet through introspection and disease,
Held on to the unflinching bone,
The sad worn ring of Anna,
Loyal to filth and weakness,
Hammered out on this slender bond,
Fëdor’s raw cartoons and episodes.
By marriage with this ring,
Companioned each their darkness.
In cracked voices we can hear
These hideous mommets now
Like westering angels over Europe sing.
XI
So knowledge has an end,
And virtue at the last an end,
In the dark field of sensibility
The unchanging and unbending;
As in aquariums gloomy
On the negative’s dark screen
Grow the shapes of other selves,
So groaned for by the heart,
So seldom grasped if seen.
Love bears you. Time stirs you.
Music at midnight makes a ground,
Or words on silence so perplex
In hidden meanings there like bogies
Waiting the expected sound.
Art has limits and life limits
Within the nerves that support them.
So better with the happy
Discover than with the wise
Who teach the sad valour
Of endurance through the seasons,
In change the unchanging
Death by compromise.
XII
Now darkness comes to Europe
Dedicated by a soft unearthly jazz.
The greater hearts contract their joys
By silence to the very gem,
While the impertinent reformers,
Barbarians with secretaries move,
Whom old Cavafy pictured,
Whom no war can remove.
Alexandria ‘The mythical Yellow Emperor, first exponent of the Tao’.
Classical Chinese Philosophy
Through the ambuscades of sex,
The follies of the will, the tears,
Turning, a personal world I go
To where the yellow emperor once
Sat out the summer and the snow,
And searching in himself struck oil,
Published the first great Tao
Which all confession can only gloze
And in the Consciousness can only spoil.
Apparent opposition of the two
Where unlocked numbers show their fabric,
He laid his finger to the map,
And where the signs confuse,
Defined the Many and the None
As base reflections of the One.
‘Duality, the great European art-subject, which is resolved by the Taoist formulas’.
Anaïs Nin
What bifid Hamlet in the maze
Wept to find; the döppelgänger
Goethe saw one morning go
Over the hill ahead; the man
So gnawed by promises who shared
The magnificent responses of Rimbaud.
All that we have sought in us,
The artist by his greater cowardice
In sudden brush-strokes gave us clues—
Hamlet and Faust as front-page news.
The yellow emperor first confirmed
By one Unknown the human calculus,
Where feeling and idea,
Must fall within this space,
This personal landscape built
Within the Chinese circle’s calm embrace.
‘The Continuous I behind discontinuous Me’s’.
E. Graham Howe
Dark Spirit, sum of all
That has remained unloved,
Gone crying through the world:
Source of all manufacture and repair,
Quicken the giving-spring
In ferns and birds and ordinary people
That all deeds done may share,
By this our temporal sun,
The part of living that is loving,
Your dancing, a beautiful behaviour.
Darkness, who contain
The source of all this corporal music,
On the great table of the Breath
Our opposites in pity bear,
Our measure of perfection or of pain,
Both trespassers in you, that then
Our Here and Now become your Everywhere.
XIII
The old yellow Emperor
With defective sight and matted hair
His palace fell to ruins
But his heart was in repair.
Veins like imperfect plumbing
On his flesh described a leaf.
His palms were mapped with cunning
Like geodesies of grief.
His soul became a vapour
And his limbs became a stake
But his ancient heart still visits us
In Lawrence or in Blake.
XIV
All cities plains and people
Reach upwards to the affirming sun,
All that’s vertical and shining,
Lives well lived,
Deeds perfectly done,
Reach upwards to the royal pure
Affirming sun.
Accident or error conquered
By the gods of luck or grace,
Form and face,
Tribe or caste or habit,
All are aspects of the one
Affirming race.
Ego, my dear, and id
Lie so profoundly hid
In space-time void, though feeling,
While contemporary, slow,
We conventional lovers cheek to cheek
Inhaling and exhaling go.
The rose that Nostradamus
In his divining saw
Break open as the world;
The city that Augustine
Founded in moral law,
By our anguish were compelled
To urge, to beckon and implore.
Dear Spirit, should I reach,
By touch or speech corrupt,
The inner suffering word,
By weakness or idea,
Though you might suffer
Feel and know,
Pretend you do not hear.
XV
Bombers bursting like pods go down
And the seed of Man stars
This landscape, ancient but no longer known.
Only the critic perseveres
Within his ant-like formalism
By deduction and destruction steers;
Only the trite reformer holds his own.
See looking down motionless
How clear Athens or Bremen seem
A mass of rotten vegetables
Firm on the diagram of earth can lie;
And here you may reflect how genus epileptoid
Knows his stuff; and where rivers
Have thrown their switches and enlarged
Our mercy or our knowledge of each other
Wonder who walks beside them now and why,
And what they talk about.
There is nothing to hope for, my Brother.
We have tried hoping for a future in the past.
Nothing came out of that past
But the reflected distortion and some
Enduring, and understanding, and some brave.
Into their cool embrace the awkward and the sinful
Must be put for they alone
Know who and what to save.
XVI
Small temptations now—to slumber and to sleep,
Where the lime-green, odourless
And pathless island waters
Crossing and uncrossing, partnerless
By hills alone and quite incurious
Their pastures of reflection keep.
For Prospero remains the evergreen
Cell by the margin of the sea and land,
Who many cities, plains, and people saw
Yet by his open door
In sunlight fell asleep
One summer with the Apple in his hand.
1946/1946
RODINI
Windless plane-trees above Rodini
To the pencil or the eye are tempters
Where of late trees have become ears in leaf
Curved for the cicada’s first monotony.
Hollow the comb, mellow the sweetness
Amber the honey-spoil, drink, drink.
In these windless unechoing valleys
The mind slips like a chisel-hand
Touching the surface of this clement blue
Yet must not damage the solitary Turk
Gathering his team and singing, in whose brain
The same disorder and the loneliness—
The what-we-have-in-common of us all.
Is there enough perhaps to found a world?
Then of what you said once, the passing
Of something on the road beyond the tombstones
Reflecting on dark hair with its sudden theft
Of blue from the darkness of violets
And below the nape of the neck a mole
All mixed in this odourless water-clock of hours.
So one is grateful, yes, to the ancient Greeks
For the invention of time, lustration of penitents,
Not so much for what they were
But for where we lie under the windless planes.
1948/1946
IN THE GARDEN: VILLA CLEOBOLUS
The mixtures of this garden
Conduct at night the pine and oleander,
Perhaps married to dust’s thin edge
Or lime where the cork-tree rubs
The quiet house, bruising the wall:
And dense the block of thrush’s notes
Press like a bulb and keeping time
In this exposure to the leaves,
And as we wait the servant comes,
A candle shielded in the warm
Coarse coral of her hand, she weaves
A pathway for her in the golden leaves,
Gathers the books and ashtrays in her arm
Walking towards the lighted house,
Brings with her from the uninhabited
Frontiers of the darkness to the known
Table and tree and chair
Some half-remembered passage from a fugue
Played from some neighbour’s garden
On an old horn-gramophone,
And you think: if given once
Authority over the word,
Then how to capture, praise or measure
The full round of this simple garden,
All its nonchalance at being,
How to adopt and raise its pleasure?
Press as on a palate this observed
And simple shape, like wine?
And from the many undeserved
Tastes of the mouth select the crude
Flavour of fruit in pottery
Coloured among this lovely neighbourhood?
Beyond, I mean, this treasure hunt
Of selves, the pains we sort to be
Confined within the loving chamber of a form,
Within a poem locked and launched
Along the hairline of the normal mind?
Perhaps not this: but somehow, yes,
To outflank the personal neurasthenia
That lies beyond in each expiring kiss:
Bring joy, as lustrous on this dish
The painted dancers motionless in play
Spin for eternity, describing for us all
The natural history of the human wish.
1948/1947
ETERNAL CONTEMPORARIES: SIX PORTRAITS
I
MANOLI OF COS
Down there below the temple
Where the penitents scattered
Ashes of dead birds, Manoli goes
In his leaky boat, a rose tied to the rudder.
This is not the rose of all the world,
Nor the rose of Nostradamus or of Malory:
Nor is it Eliot’s clear northern rose of the mind,
But precisely and unequivocally
The red rose Manoli picked himself
From the vocabulary of roses on the hill by Cefalû.
1948/1947
; II
MARK OF PATMOS
Mark has crossed over to Mount Olivet,
Putting aside the banneret and the drum.
He inhabits now that part of himself
Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonized.
He works that what is to pass may come
And the birth of the common heart be realized.
What passed with him? A flower dropped
In the boat by a friend, the cakes
His sister brought with the unposted letter.
Yet all the island loafers watched, disturbed,
The red sails melt into the sky, distended,
And each turned angrily to his lighted house
Feeling, not that something momentous
Had begun, but that their common childhood
Had foundered in the Syrian seas and ended.
1948/1947
III
BASIL THE HERMIT
Banished from the old roof-tree Patmos
Where the dynasts gathered honey,
Like dancing bears, with smoking rituals,
Or skimmed the fat of towns with levy-money,
Uncaring whether God or Paradise exist,
Laid up themselves estates in providence
While greed crouched in each hairy fist,
Basil, the troubled flower of scepticism,
Chose him a pelt, and a cairn of chilly stone,
Became the author of a famous schism:
A wick for oil, a knife, a broken stool
Were all, this side of hell, he dared to own.
For twenty years in Jesus went to school.
Often, looking up, he saw them there
As from some prism-stained pool:
Dark dots like birds along the battlements,