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The Penguin Book of English Verse

Page 116

by Paul Keegan


  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We are closed in, and the key is turned

  On our uncertainty; somewhere

  A man is killed, or a house burned,

  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  A barricade of stone or of wood;

  Some fourteen days of civil war;

  Last night they trundled down the road

  That dead young soldier in his blood:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,

  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;

  More substance in our enmities

  Than in our love; O honey-bees,

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  W. B. YEATS Among School Children

  I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

  A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

  The children learn to cipher and to sing,

  To study reading-books and histories,

  To cut and sew, be neat in everything

  In the best modern way – the children’s eyes

  In momentary wonder stare upon

  A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

  I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

  Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

  Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

  That changed some childish day to tragedy –

  Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

  Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

  Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,

  Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

  And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

  I look upon one child or t’other there

  And wonder if she stood so at that age –

  For even daughters of the swan can share

  Something of every paddler’s heritage –

  And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

  And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

  She stands before me as a living child.

  Her present image floats into the mind –

  Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

  Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

  And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

  And I though never of Ledaean kind

  Had pretty plumage once – enough of that,

  Better to smile on all that smile, and show

  There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

  What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

  Honey of generation had betrayed,

  And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

  As recollection or the drug decide,

  Would think her son, did she but see that shape

  With sixty or more winters on its head,

  A compensation for the pang of his birth,

  Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

  Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

  Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

  Solider Aristotle played the taws

  Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

  World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

  Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

  What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

  Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

  Both nuns and mothers worship images,

  But those the candles light are not as those

  That animate a mother’s reveries,

  But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

  And yet they too break hearts – O Presences

  That passion, piety or affection knows,

  And that all heavenly glory symbolise –

  O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

  Labour is blossoming or dancing where

  The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

  Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

  Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

  O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

  Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

  O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  W. H. AUDEN

  Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings,

  Walking together in the windless orchard

  Where the brook runs over the gravel, far from the glacier.

  Again in the room with the sofa hiding the grate,

  Look down to the river when the rain is over,

  See him turn to the window, hearing our last

  Of Captain Ferguson.

  It is seen how excellent hands have turned to commonness.

  One staring too long, went blind in a tower,

  One sold all his manors to fight, broke through, and faltered.

  Nights come bringing the snow, and the dead howl

  Under the headlands in their windy dwelling

  Because the Adversary put too easy questions

  On lonely roads.

  But happy now, though no nearer each other,

  We see the farms lighted all along the valley;

  Down at the mill-shed the hammering stops

  And men go home.

  Noises at dawn will bring

  Freedom for some, but not this peace

  No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now

  For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.

  D. H. LAWRENCE The Mosquito Knows 1929

  The mosquito knows full well, small as he is

  he’s a beast of prey.

  But after all

  he only takes his bellyful,

  he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

  D. H. LAWRENCE To Women, As Far As I’m Concerned

  The feelings I don’t have I don’t have.

  The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have.

  The feelings you say you have, you don’t have.

  The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

  The feelings people ought to have, they never have.

  If people say they’ve got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven’t got them.

  So if you want either of us to feel anything at all

  you’d better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.

  D. H. LAWRENCE Innocent England

  Oh what a pity, Oh! don’t you agree

  that figs aren’t found in the land of the free!

  Fig-trees don’t grow in my native land;

  there’s never a fig-leaf near at hand

  when you want one; so I did without;

  and that is what the row’s about.

  Virginal, pure policemen came

  and hid their faces for very shame,

  while they carried the shameless things away

  to gaol, to be hid from the light of day.

  And Mr Mead, that old, old lily

  said: ‘Gross! coarse! hideous!’ – and I, like a silly,

  thought he meant the faces of the police-court officials,

  and how right he was, and I signed my initials

  to confirm what he said; but alas, he meant

  my pictures, and on the proceedings went.

  The upshot was, my picture must burn

  that English artists might finally learn

  when they painted a nude, to put a cache sexe on,

  a cache sexe, a cache sexe, or else begone!

  A fig-leaf; or, if you cannot find it

  a wreath of mist, with nothing behind it.

  A wreath of mist is the usual thing

  in the north, to hide where the turtles sing.

  Though they never sing, they never sing,

  don’t you dare to suggest such a thing

  or Mr Mead will be after you.

  – But what a pity I never knew

  A wreath of English mist would do

  as a cache
sexe! I’d have put a whole fog.

  But once and forever barks the old dog,

  so my pictures are in prison, instead of in the Zoo.

  E. C. BENTLEY [Clerihews]

  George the Third

  Ought never to have occurred.

  One can only wonder

  At so grotesque a blunder.

  Nell

  Fell

  When Charles the Second

  Beckoned.

  EDMUND BLUNDEN Report on Experience

  I have been young, and now am not too old;

  And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

  His health, his honour and his quality taken.

  This is not what we were formerly told.

  I have seen a green country, useful to the race,

  Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

  Even the last rat and the last kestrel banished –

  God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

  I knew Seraphina; Nature gave her hue,

  Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

  I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

  She turned to harlotry; – this I took to be new.

  Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

  These disillusions are His curious proving

  That He loves humanity and will go on loving;

  Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

  ROBERT GRAVES Sick Love

  O Love, be fed with apples while you may,

  And feel the sun and go in royal array,

  A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,

  Though in what listening horror for the cry

  That soars in outer blackness dismally,

  The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:

  Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,

  Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,

  That shivering glory not to be despised.

  Take your delight in momentariness,

  Walk between dark and dark – a shining space

  With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.

  ROBERT GRAVES Warning to Children

  Children, if you dare to think

  Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,

  Fewness of this precious only

  Endless world in which you say

  You live, you think of things like this:

  Blocks of slate enclosing dappled

  Red and green, enclosing tawny

  Yellow nets, enclosing white

  And black acres of dominoes,

  Where a neat brown paper parcel

  Tempts you to untie the string.

  In the parcel a small island,

  On the island a large tree,

  On the tree a husky fruit.

  Strip the husk and pare the rind off:

  In the kernel you will see

  Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled

  Red and green, enclosed by tawny

  Yellow nets, enclosed by white

  And black acres of dominoes,

  Where the same brown paper parcel –

  Children, leave the string alone!

  For who dares undo the parcel

  Finds himself at once inside it,

  On the island, in the fruit,

  Blocks of slate about his head,

  Finds himself enclosed by dappled

  Green and red, enclosed by yellow

  Tawny nets, enclosed by black

  And white acres of dominoes,

  With the same brown paper parcel

  Still unopened on his knee.

  And, if he then should dare to think

  Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,

  Greatness of this endless only

  Precious world in which he says

  He lives – he then unties the string.

  ROBERT GRAVES It Was All Very Tidy

  When I reached his place,

  The grass was smooth,

  The wind was delicate,

  The wit well timed,

  The limbs well formed,

  The pictures straight on the wall:

  It was all very tidy.

  He was cancelling out

  The last row of figures,

  He had his beard tied up in ribbons,

  There was no dust on his shoe,

  Everyone nodded:

  It was all very tidy.

  Music was not playing,

  There were no sudden noises,

  The sun shone blandly,

  The clock ticked:

  It was all very tidy.

  ‘Apart from and above all this,’

  I reassured myself,

  ‘There is now myself.’

  It was all very tidy.

  Death did not address me,

  He had nearly done:

  It was all very tidy.

  They asked, did I not think

  It was all very tidy?

  I could not bring myself

  To laugh, or untie

  His beard’s neat ribbons,

  Or jog his elbow,

  Or whistle, or sing,

  Or make disturbance.

  I consented, frozenly,

  He was unexceptionable:

  It was all very tidy.

  1930 W. H. AUDEN

  This lunar beauty

  Has no history

  Is complete and early;

  If beauty later

  Bear any feature

  It had a lover

  And is another.

  This like a dream

  Keeps other time

  And daytime is

  The loss of this;

  For time is inches

  And the heart’s changes

  Where ghost has haunted

  Lost and wanted.

  But this was never

  A ghost’s endeavour

  Nor finished this,

  Was ghost at ease;

 

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