The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Go down, go out to elemental wrong,

  Waste your too round limbs, tan your skin too white;

  The glass of comfort, ignorance, seems strong

  Today, and yet perhaps this very night

  You’ll wake to horror’s wrecking fire – your home

  Is wired within for this, in every room.

  LOUIS MACNEICE The Sunlight on the Garden

  The sunlight on the garden

  Hardens and grows cold,

  We cannot cage the minute

  Within its nets of gold,

  When all is told

  We cannot beg for pardon.

  Our freedom as free lances

  Advances towards its end;

  The earth compels, upon it

  Sonnets and birds descend;

  And soon, my friend,

  We shall have no time for dances.

  The sky was good for flying

  Defying the church bells

  And every evil iron

  Siren and what it tells:

  The earth compels,

  We are dying, Egypt, dying

  And not expecting pardon,

  Hardened in heart anew,

  But glad to have sat under

  Thunder and rain with you,

  And grateful too

  For sunlight on the garden.

  1939 W. B. YEATS Long-legged Fly

  That civilisation may not sink

  Its great battle lost,

  Quiet the dog, tether the pony

  To a distant post.

  Our master Caesar is in the tent

  Where the maps are spread,

  His eyes fixed upon nothing,

  A hand under his head.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  His mind moves upon silence.

  That the topless towers be burnt

  And men recall that face,

  Move most gently if move you must

  In this lonely place.

  She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

  That nobody looks; her feet

  Practise a tinker shuffle

  Picked up on the street.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  Her mind moves upon silence.

  That girls at puberty may find

  The first Adam in their thought,

  Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,

  Keep those children out.

  There on the scaffolding reclines

  Michael Angelo.

  With no more sound than the mice make

  His hand moves to and fro.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  His mind moves upon silence.

  W. H. AUDEN In Memory of W. B. Yeats

  I

  He disappeared in the dead of winter:

  The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,

  And snow disfigured the public statues;

  The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

  O all the instruments agree

  The day of his death was a dark cold day.

  Far from his illness

  The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

  The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

  By mourning tongues

  The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

  But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

  An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

  The provinces of his body revolted,

  The squares of his mind were empty,

  Silence invaded the suburbs,

  The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

  Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

  And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;

  To find his happiness in another kind of wood

  And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

  The words of a dead man

  Are modified in the guts of the living.

  But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

  When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the

  floor of the Bourse,

  And the poor have the sufferings to which

  they are fairly accustomed,

  And each in the cell of himself is almost

  convinced of his freedom;

  A few thousand will think of this day

  As one thinks of a day when one did something

  slightly unusual.

  O all the instruments agree

  The day of his death was a dark cold day.

  II

  You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;

  The parish of rich women, physical decay,

  Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

  Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

  For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

  In the valley of its saying where executives

  Would never want to tamper; it flows south

  From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

  Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

  A way of happening, a mouth.

  III

  Earth, receive an honoured guest;

  William Yeats is laid to rest:

  Let the Irish vessel lie

  Emptied of its poetry.

  Time that is intolerant

  Of the brave and innocent,

  And indifferent in a week

  To a beautiful physique,

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives;

  Pardons cowardice, conceit,

  Lays its honours at their feet.

  Time that with this strange excuse

  Pardoned Kipling and his views,

  And will pardon Paul Claudel,

  Pardons him for writing well.

  In the nightmare of the dark

  All the dogs of Europe bark,

  And the living nations wait,

  Each sequestered in its hate;

  Intellectual disgrace

  Stares from every human face,

  And the seas of pity lie

  Locked and frozen in each eye.

  Follow, poet, follow right

  To the bottom of the night,

  With your unconstraining voice

  Still persuade us to rejoice;

  With the farming of a verse

  Make a vineyard of the curse,

  Sing of human unsuccess

  In a rapture of distress;

  In the deserts of the heart

  Let the healing fountain start,

  In the prison of his days

  Teach the free man how to praise.

  LOUIS MACNEICE from Autumn Journal

  I

  Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,

  Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew

  Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals

  And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew

  And August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiums

  And the sunflowers’ Salvation Army blare of brass

  And the spinster sitting in a deckchair picking up stitches

  Not raising her eyes to the noise of the planes that pass

  Northward from Lee-on-Solent. Macrocarpa and cypress

  And roses on a rustic trellis and mulberry trees

  And bacon and eggs in a silver dish for breakfast

  And all the inherited assets of bodily ease

  And all the inherited worries, rheumatism and taxes,

  And whether Stella will marry and what to do with Dick

  And the branch of the family that lost their money in Hatry

  And the passing of the Morning Post and of life’s climacteric

  And the growth of vulgarity, cars that pass the gate-lodge

  And crowds undressing on the beach

  And the hiking cockney lovers with thoughts dir
ected

  Neither to God nor Nation but each to each.

  But the home is still a sanctum under the pelmets,

  All quiet on the Family Front,

  Farmyard noises across the fields at evening

  While the trucks of the Southern Railway dawdle… shunt

  Into poppy sidings for the night – night which knows no passion

  No assault of hands or tongue

  For all is old as flint or chalk or pine-needles

  And the rebels and the young

  Have taken the train to town or the two-seater

  Unravelling rails or road,

  Losing the thread deliberately behind them –

  Autumnal palinode.

  And I am in the train too now and summer is going

  South as I go north

  Bound for the dead leaves falling, the burning bonfire,

  The dying that brings forth

  The harder life, revealing the trees’ girders,

  The frost that kills the germs of laissez-faire;

  West Meon, Tisted, Farnham, Woking, Weybridge,

  Then London’s packed and stale and pregnant air.

  My dog, a symbol of the abandoned order,

  Lies on the carriage floor,

  Her eyes inept and glamorous as a film star’s,

  Who wants to live, i.e. wants more

  Presents, jewellery, furs, gadgets, solicitations

  As if to live were not

  Following the curve of a planet or controlled water

  But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.

  It is this we learn after so many failures,

  The building of castles in sand, of queens in snow,

  That we cannot make any corner in life or in life’s beauty,

  That no river is a river which does not flow.

  Surbiton, and a woman gets in, painted

  With dyed hair but a ladder in her stocking and eyes

  Patient beneath the calculated lashes,

  Inured for ever to surprise;

  And the train’s rhythm becomes the ad nauseam repetition

  Of every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal,

  The faded airs of sexual attraction

  Wandering like dead leaves along a warehouse wall:

  ‘I loved my love with a platform ticket,

  A jazz song,

  A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand –

  I loved her long.

  I loved her between the lines and against the clock,

  Not until death

  But till life did us part I loved her with paper money

  And with whisky on the breath.

  I loved her with peacock’s eyes and the wares of Carthage,

  With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff

  With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado

  And lots of other stuff.

  I loved my love with the wings of angels

  Dipped in henna, unearthly red,

  With my office hours, with flowers and sirens,

  With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.’

  And so to London and down the ever-moving

  Stairs

  Where a warm wind blows the bodies of men together

  And blows apart their complexes and cares.

  XV

  Shelley and jazz and lieder and love and hymn-tunes

  And day returns too soon;

  We’ll get drunk among the roses

  In the valley of the moon.

  Give me an aphrodisiac, give me lotus,

  Give me the same again;

  Make all the erotic poets of Rome and Ionia

  And Florence and Provence and Spain

  Pay a tithe of their sugar to my potion

  And ferment my days

  With the twang of Hawaii and the boom of the Congo,

  Let the old Muse loosen her stays

  Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders

  And a smile like a cat,

  With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine

  And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat.

  Let the aces run riot round Brooklands,

  Let the tape-machines go drunk,

  Turn on the purple spotlight, pull out the Vox Humana,

  Dig up somebody’s body in a cloakroom trunk.

  Give us sensations and then again sensations –

  Strip-tease, fireworks, all-in wrestling, gin;

  Spend your capital, open your house and pawn your padlocks,

  Let the critical sense go out and the Roaring Boys come in.

  Give me a houri but houris are too easy,

  Give me a nun;

  We’ll rape the angels off the golden reredos

  Before we’re done.

  Tiger-women and Lesbos, drums and entrails,

  And let the skies rotate,

  We’ll play roulette with the stars, we’ll sit out drinking

  At the Hangman’s Gate.

  O look who comes here. I cannot see their faces

  Walking in file, slowly in file;

  They have no shoes on their feet, the knobs of their ankles

  Catch the moonlight as they pass the stile

  And cross the moor among the skeletons of bog-oak

  Following the track from the gallows back to the town;

  Each has the end of a rope around his neck. I wonder

  Who let these men come back, who cut them down –

  And now they reach the gate and line up opposite

  The neon lights on the medieval wall

  And underneath the sky-signs

  Each one takes his cowl and lets it fall

  And we see their faces, each the same as the other,

  Men and women, each like a closed door,

  But something about their faces is familiar;

  Where have we seen them before?

  Was it the murderer on the nursery ceiling

  Or Judas Iscariot in the Field of Blood

  Or someone at Gallipoli or in Flanders

  Caught in the end-all mud?

  But take no notice of them, out with the ukulele,

  The saxophone and the dice;

  They are sure to go away if we take no notice;

  Another round of drinks or make it twice.