The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster,

  Made with no loss of time,

  A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

  Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.

  IV

  These fought in any case,

  and some believing,

  pro domo, in any case…

  Some quick to arm,

  some for adventure,

  some from fear of weakness,

  some from fear of censure,

  some for love of slaughter, in imagination,

  learning later…

  some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

  Died some, pro patria,

  non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’…

  walked eye-deep in hell

  believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving

  came home, home to a lie,

  home to many deceits,

  home to old lies and new infamy;

  usury age-old and age-thick

  and liars in public places.

  Daring as never before, wastage as never before.

  Young blood and high blood,

  fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

  fortitude as never before

  frankness as never before,

  disillusions as never told in the old days,

  hysterias, trench confessions,

  laughter out of dead bellies.

  V

  There died a myriad,

  And of the best, among them,

  For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

  For a botched civilization,

  Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

  Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

  For two gross of broken statues,

  For a few thousand battered books.

  W. B. YEATS Easter, 1916

  I have met them at close of day

  Coming with vivid faces

  From counter or desk among grey

  Eighteenth-century houses.

  I have passed with a nod of the head

  Or polite meaningless words,

  Or have lingered awhile and said

  Polite meaningless words,

  And thought before I had done

  Of a mocking tale or a gibe

  To please a companion

  Around the fire at the club,

  Being certain that they and I

  But lived where motley is worn:

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  That woman’s days were spent

  In ignorant good-will,

  Her nights in argument

  Until her voice grew shrill.

  What voice more sweet than hers

  When, young and beautiful,

  She rode to harriers?

  This man had kept a school

  And rode our wingèd horse;

  This other his helper and friend

  Was coming into his force;

  He might have won fame in the end,

  So sensitive his nature seemed,

  So daring and sweet his thought.

  This other man I had dreamed

  A drunken, vainglorious lout.

  He had done most bitter wrong

  To some who are near my heart,

  Yet I number him in the song;

  He, too, has resigned his part

  In the casual comedy;

  He, too, has been changed in his turn,

  Transformed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  Hearts with one purpose alone

  Through summer and winter seem

  Enchanted to a stone

  To trouble the living stream.

  The horse that comes from the road,

  The rider, the birds that range

  From cloud to tumbling cloud,

  Minute by minute they change;

  A shadow of cloud on the stream

  Changes minute by minute;

  A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

  And a horse plashes within it;

  The long-legged moor-hens dive,

  And hens to moor-cocks call;

  Minute by minute they live:

  The stone’s in the midst of all.

  Too long a sacrifice

  Can make a stone of the heart.

  O when may it suffice?

  That is Heaven’s part, our part

  To murmur name upon name,

  As a mother names her child

  When sleep at last has come

  On limbs that had run wild.

  What is it but nightfall?

  No, no, not night but death;

  Was it needless death after all?

  For England may keep faith

  For all that is done and said.

  We know their dream; enough

  To know they dreamed and are dead;

  And what if excess of love

  Bewildered them till they died?

  I write it out in a verse –

  MacDonagh and MacBride

  And Connolly and Pearse

  Now and in time to be,

  Wherever green is worn,

  Are changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  (written 1916)

  T. S. ELIOT Gerontion

  Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both.

  Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

  Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

  I was neither at the hot gates

  Nor fought in the warm rain

  Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

  Bitten by flies, fought.

  My house is a decayed house,

  And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner,

  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

  The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;

  Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

  The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

  Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

  I an old man,

  A dull head among windy spaces.

  Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’

  The word within a word, unable to speak a word,

  Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year

  Came Christ the tiger

  In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,

  To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

  Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

  With caressing hands, at Limoges

  Who walked all night in the next room;

  By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;

  By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

  Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp

  Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles

  Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,

  An old man in a draughty house

  Under a windy knob.

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities. Think now

  She gives when our attention is distracted

  And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

  That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

  What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

  In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

  Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

  Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

  Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

  Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

  Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

  These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

  The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at lastr />
  We have not reached conclusion, when I

  Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last

  I have not made this show purposelessly

  And it is not by any concitation

  Of the backward devils.

  I would meet you upon this honestly.

  I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

  To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

  I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

  Since what is kept must be adulterated?

  I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

  How should I use them for your closer contact?

  These with a thousand small deliberations

  Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

  Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

  With pungent sauces, multiply variety

  In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

  Suspend its operations, will the weevil

  Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled

  Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

  In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

  Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.

  White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

  And an old man driven by the Trades

  To a sleepy corner.

  Tenants of the house,

  Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

  A. E. HOUSMAN from Last Poems

  XII

  The laws of God, the laws of man,

  He may keep that will and can;

  Not I: let God and man decree

  Laws for themselves and not for me;

  And if my ways are not as theirs

  Let them mind their own affairs.

  Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

  Yet when did I make laws for them?

  Please yourselves, say I, and they

  Need only look the other way.

  But no, they will not; they must still

  Wrest their neighbour to their will,

  And make me dance as they desire

  With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

  And how am I to face the odds

  Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?

  I, a stranger and afraid

  In a world I never made.

  They will be master, right or wrong;

  Though both are foolish, both are strong.

  And since, my soul, we cannot fly

  To Saturn nor to Mercury,

  Keep we must, if keep we can,

  These foreign laws of God and man.

  (written c. 1900)

  XXXIII

  When the eye of day is shut,

  And the stars deny their beams,

  And about the forest hut

  Blows the roaring wood of dreams,

  From deep clay, from desert rock,

  From the sunk sands of the main,

  Come not at my door to knock,

  Hearts that loved me not again.

  Sleep, be still, turn to your rest

  In the lands where you are laid;

  In far lodgings east and west

  Lie down on the beds you made.

  In gross marl, in blowing dust,

  In the drowned ooze of the sea,

  Where you would not, lie you must,

  Lie you must, and not with me.

  XXXVII

  Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

  These, in the day when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

  Followed their mercenary calling

  And took their wages and are dead.

  Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

  They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;

  What God abandoned, these defended,

  And saved the sum of things for pay.

  XL

  Tell me not here, it needs not saying,

  What tune the enchantress plays

  In aftermaths of soft September

  Or under blanching mays,

  For she and I were long acquainted

  And I knew all her ways.

  On russet floors, by waters idle,

  The pine lets fall its cone;

  The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing

  In leafy dells alone;

  And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn

  Hearts that have lost their own.

  On acres of the seeded grasses

  The changing burnish heaves;

  Or marshalled under moons of harvest

  Stand still all night the sheaves;

  Or beeches strip in storms for winter

  And stain the wind with leaves.

  Possess, as I possessed a season,

  The countries I resign,

  Where over elmy plains the highway

  Would mount the hills and shine

  And full of shade the pillared forest

  Would murmur and be mine.

  For nature, heartless, witless nature,

  Will neither care nor know

  What stranger’s feet may find the meadow

  And trespass there and go,

  Nor ask amid the dews of morning

  If they are mine or no.

  A. E. HOUSMAN

  It is a fearful thing to be

  The Pope.

  That cross will not be laid on me,

  I hope.

  A righteous God would not permit

  It.

  The Pope himself must often say,

  After the labours of the day,

  ‘It is a fearful thing to be

  Me.’

  (1940)

  1922T. S. ELIOT from The Waste Land

  I The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring