by Paul Keegan
The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries
And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.
I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
A. E. HOUSMAN from More Poems
XXIII
Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.
The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.
XXXI
Because I liked you better
Than suits a man to say,
It irked you, and I promised
To throw the thought away.
To put the world between us
We parted, stiff and dry;
‘Good-bye,’ said you, ‘forget me.’
‘I will, no fear,’ said I.
If here, where clover whitens
The dead man’s knoll, you pass,
And no tall flower to meet you
Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred,
And say the lad that loved you
Was one that kept his word.
1937 A. E. HOUSMAN
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?
And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?
And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?
Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;
In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;
Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair
For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair.
Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,
And they’re haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.
Now ’tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.
(written 1895)
JOHN BETJEMAN The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?
To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed,
‘I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand –
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?
‘So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.
‘More hock, Robbie – where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.
‘One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s –
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.’
A thump, and a murmur of voices –
(‘Oh why must they make such a din?’)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:
‘Mr. Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.’
He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered – and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the palms on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.
DAVID JONES from In Parenthesis
from Part 3
And the deepened stillness as a calm, cast over us – a potent
influence over us and him – dead-calm for this Sargasso dank,
and for the creeping things.
You can hear the silence of it:
you can hear the rat of no-man’s-land
rut-out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings,
scrut, scrut, sscrut,
harrow-out earthly, trowel his cunning paw;
redeem the time of our uncharity, to sap his own amphibious
paradise.
You can hear this carrying-parties rustle our corruptions
through the night-weeds – contest the choicest morsels in his
tiny conduits, bead-eyed feast on us; by a rule of his nature, at
night-feast on the broken of us.
Those broad-pinioned;
blue-burnished, or brinded-back;
whose proud eyes watched
the broken emblems
droop and drag dust,
suffer with us this metamorphosis.
These too have shed their fine feathers; these too have slimed
their dark-bright coats; these too have condescended to dig in.
The white-tailed eagle at the battle ebb,
where the sea wars against the river
the speckled kite of Maldon
and the crow
have naturally selected to be un-winged;
to go on the belly, to
sap sap sap
with festered spines, arched under the moon; furrit with
whiskered snouts the secret parts of us.
When it’s all quiet you can hear them:
scrut scrut scrut
when it’s as quiet as this is.
It’s so very still.
Your body fits the crevice of the bay in the most comfortable
fashion imaginable.
It’s cushy enough.
The relief elbows him on the fire-step: All quiet china? –
bugger all to report? – kipping mate? – christ, mate – you’ll ’ave
’em all over.
(… )
from Part 7
But sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on
this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling
of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts
discovered.
By one and one the line gaps, where her fancy will – howsoever
they may howl for their virginity
she holds them – who impinge less on space
sink limply to a heap
nourish a lesser category of being
like those other who fructify the land
like Tristram
Lamorak de Galis
Alisand le Orphelin
Beaumains who was youngest
or all of them in shaft-shade
at strait Thermopylae
embraced beneath their single monument.
Jonathan my lovely one
on Gelboe mountain
and the young man Absalom.
White Hart transfixed in his dark lodge.
Peredur of steel arms
and he who with intention took grass of that field to be for
him the Species of Bread.
Taillefer the maker,
and on the same day,
thirty thousand other ranks.
And in the country of Béarn – Oliver
and all the rest – so many without memento
beneath the tumuli on the high hills
and under the harvest places.
But how intolerably bright the morning is where we who are
alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective
word.
(… )
The secret princes between the leaning trees have diadems given
them.
Life the leveller hugs her impudent equality – she may proceed
at once to less discriminating zones.
The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various
flowering.
These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can
pluck for each their fragile prize.
She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what’s
due to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-men. She
knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open
down.
Some she gives white berries
some she gives brown
Emil has a curious crown it’s
made of golden saxifrage.
Fatty wears sweet-briar,
he will reign with her for a thousand years.
For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.
Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand.
That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain – you’d hardly
credit it.
She plaits torques of equal splendour for Mr. Jenkins and Billy
Crower.
Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they
lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.
Siôn gets St. John’s Wort – that’s fair enough.
Dai Great-coat, she can’t find him anywhere – she calls both
high and low, she had a very special one for him.
Among this July noblesse she is mindful of December wood
when the trees of the forest beat against each other because of
him.
She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah a rowan sprig, for the
glory of Guenedota. You couldn’t hear what she said to him,
because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars.
AUSTIN CLARKE The Straying Student 1938
On a holy day when sails were blowing southward,
A bishop sang the Mass at Inishmore,
Men took one side, their wives were on the other
But I heard the woman coming from the shore:
And wild in despair my parents cried aloud
For they saw the vision draw me to the doorway.
Long had she lived in Rome when Popes were bad,
The wealth of every age she makes her own,
Yet smiled on me in eager admiration,
And for a summer taught me all I know,
Banishing shame with her great laugh that rang
As if a pillar caught it back alone.
I learned the prouder counsel of her throat,
My mind was growing bold as light in Greece;
And when in sleep her stirring limbs were shown,
I blessed the noonday rock that knew no tree:
And for an hour the mountain was her throne,
Although her eyes were bright with mockery.
They say I was sent back from Salamanca
And failed in logic, but I wrote her praise
Nine times upon a college wall in France.
She laid her hand at darkfall on my page
That I might read the heavens in a glance
And I knew every star the Moors have named.
Awake or in my sleep, I have no peace now,
Before the ball is struck, my breath has gone,
And yet I tremble lest she may deceive me
And leave me in this land, where every woman’s son
Must carry his own coffin and believe,
In dread, all that the clergy teach the young.
ROBERT GRAVES To Evoke Posterity
To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn:
‘Would you were present in flesh, hero!
What wreaths and junketings!’
And the punishment is fixed:
To be found fully ancestral,
To be cast in bronze for a city square,
To dribble green in times of rain
And stain the pedestal.
Spiders in the spread beard;
A life proverbial
On clergy lips a-cackle;
Eponymous institutes,
Their luckless architecture.
Two more dates of life and birth
For the hour of special study
From which all boys and girls of mettle
Twice a week play truant
And worn excuses try.
Alive, you have abhorred
The crowds on holiday
Jostling and whistling – yet would you air
Your death-mask, smoothly lidded,
Along the promenade?
ELIZABETH DARYUSH
Children of wealth in your warm nursery,
Set in the cushioned window-seat to watch
The volleying snow, guarded invisibly
By the clear double pane through which no touch
Untimely penetrates, you cannot tell
What winter means; its cruel truths to you
Are only sound and sight; your citadel
Is safe from feeling, and from knowledge too.
