The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

Whether as learned bard or gifted child;

  To it all lines or lesser gauds belong

  That startle with their shining

  Such common stories as they stray into.

  Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,

  Or strange beasts that beset you,

  Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?

  Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns

  Below the Boreal Crown,

  Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

  Water to water, ark again to ark,

  From woman back to woman:

  So each new victim treads unfalteringly

  The never altered circuit of his fate,

  Bringing twelve peers as witness

  Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

  Or is it of the Virgin’s silver beauty,

  All fish below the thighs?

  She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;

  When with her right she crooks a finger, smiling,

  How may the King hold back?

  Royally then he barters life for love.

  Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,

  Whose coils contain the ocean,

  Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,

  Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,

  Battles three days and nights,

  To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

  Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,

  The owl hoots from the elder,

  Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:

  Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.

  The log groans and confesses:

  There is one story and one story only.

  Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,

  Do not forget what flowers

  The great boar trampled down in ivy time.

  Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,

  Her sea-grey eyes were wild

  But nothing promised that is not performed.

  DYLAN THOMAS Poem in October

  It was my thirtieth year to heaven

  Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

  And the mussel pooled and the heron

  Priested shore

  The morning beckon

  With water praying and call of seagull and rook

  And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

  Myself to set foot

  That second

  In the still sleeping town and set forth.

  My birthday began with the water-

  Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

  Above the farms and the white horses

  And I rose

  In rainy autumn

  And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

  High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

  Over the border

  And the gates

  Of the town closed as the town awoke.

  A springful of larks in a rolling

  Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

  Blackbirds and the sun of October

  Summery

  On the hill’s shoulder,

  Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

  Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

  To the rain wringing

  Wind blow cold

  In the wood faraway under me.

  Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

  And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

  With its horns through mist and the castle

  Brown as owls

  But all the gardens

  Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

  Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

  There could I marvel

  My birthday

  Away but the weather turned around.

  It turned away from the blithe country

  And down the other air and the blue altered sky

  Streamed again a wonder of summer

  With apples

  Pears and red currants

  And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

  Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

  Through the parables

  Of sun light

  And the legends of the green chapels

  And the twice told fields of infancy

  That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

  These were the woods the river and sea

  Where a boy

  In the listening

  Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

  To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

  And the mystery

  Sang alive

  Still in the water and singingbirds.

  And there could I marvel my birthday

  Away but the weather turned around. And the true

  Joy of the long dead child sang burning

  In the sun.

  It was my thirtieth

  Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

  Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

  O may my heart’s truth

  Still be sung

  On this high hill in a year’s turning.

  W. H. AUDEN from The Sea and the Mirror

  Miranda

  My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely,

  As the poor and sad are real to the good king,

  And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

  Up jumped the Black Man behind the elder tree,

  Turned a somersault and ran away waving;

  My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.

  The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body

  Melted into light as water leaves a spring

  And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

  At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me;

  Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running:

  My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.

  He kissed me awake, and no one was sorry;

  The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,

  And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

  So, to remember our changing garden, we

  Are linked as children in a circle dancing:

  My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely,

  And the high green hill sits always by the sea.

  RUTH PITTER But for Lust

  But for lust we could be friends,

  On each other’s necks could weep:

  In each other’s arms could sleep

  In the calm the cradle lends:

  Lends awhile, and takes away.

  But for hunger, but for fear,

  Calm could be our day and year

  From the yellow to the grey:

  From the gold to the grey hair,

  But for passion we could rest,

  But for passion we could feast

  On compassion everywhere.

  Even in this night I know

  By the awful living dead,

  By this craving tear I shed,

  Somewhere, somewhere it is so.

  WILLIAM EMPSON Let It Go

  It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.

  The more things happen to you the more you can’t

  Tell or remember even what they were.

  The contradictions cover such a range.

  The talk would talk and go so far aslant.

  You don’t want madhouse and the whole thing there.

  SAMUEL BECKETT Saint-Lô 1946

  Vire will wind in other shadows

  unborn through the bright ways tremble

  and the old mind ghost-forsaken

  sink into its havoc

  KEITH DOUGLAS How to Kill

  Under the parabola of a ball,

  a child turning into a man,

  I looked into the air too long.

  The ba
ll fell in my hand, it sang

  in the closed fist: Open Open

  Behold a gift designed to kill.

  Now in my dial of glass appears

  the soldier who is going to die.

  He smiles, and moves about in ways

  his mother knows, habits of his.

  The wires touch his face: I cry

  NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

  and look, has made a man of dust

  of a man of flesh. This sorcery

  I do. Being damned, I am amused

  to see the centre of love diffused

  and the waves of love travel into vacancy.

  How easy it is to make a ghost.

  The weightless mosquito touches

  her tiny shadow on the stone,

  and with how like, how infinite

  a lightness, man and shadow meet.

  They fuse. A shadow is a man

  when the mosquito death approaches.

  1949 EDWIN MUIR The Interrogation

  We could have crossed the road but hesitated,

  And then came the patrol;

  The leader conscientious and intent,

  The men surly, indifferent.

  While we stood by and waited

  The interrogation began. He says the whole

  Must come out now, who, what we are,

  Where we have come from, with what purpose, whose

  Country or camp we plot for or betray.

  Question on question.

  We have stood and answered through the standing day

  And watched across the road beyond the hedge

  The careless lovers in pairs go by,

  Hand linked in hand, wandering another star,

  So near we could shout to them. We cannot choose

  Answer or action here,

  Though still the careless lovers saunter by

  And the thoughtless field is near.

  We are on the very edge,

  Endurance almost done,

  And still the interrogation is going on.

  MARION ANGUS Alas! Poor Queen 1950

  She was skilled in music and the dance

  And the old arts of love

  At the court of the poisoned rose

  And the perfumed glove,

  And gave her beautiful hand

  To the pale Dauphin

  A triple crown to win –

  And she loved little dogs

  And parrots

  And red-legged partridges

  And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise

  And a pigeon with a blue ruff

  She had from Monsieur d’Elbœuf.

  Master John Knox was no friend to her;

  She spoke him soft and kind,

  Her honeyed words were Satan’s lure

  The unwary soul to bind

  ‘Good sir, doth a lissome shape

  And a comely face

  Offend your God His Grace

  Whose Wisdom maketh these

  Golden fishes of the Duc de Guise?’

  She rode through Liddesdale with a song;

  ‘Ye streams sae wondrous strang,

  Oh, mak’ me a wrack as I come back

  But spare me as I gang,’

  While a hill-bird cried and cried

  Like a spirit lost

  By the grey storm-wind tost.

  Consider the way she had to go.

  Think of the hungry snare,

  The net she herself had woven,

  Aware or unaware,

  Of the dancing feet grown still,

  The blinded eyes –

  Queens should be cold and wise,

  And she loved little things,

  Parrots

  And red-legged partridges

  And the golden fishes of the Duc de Guise

  And the pigeon with the blue ruff

  She had from Monsieur d’Elbœuf.

  STEVIE SMITH Pad, Pad

  I always remember your beautiful flowers

  And the beautiful kimono you wore

  When you sat on the couch

  With that tigerish crouch

  And told me you loved me no more.

  What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind

  All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.

  Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad

  The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

  1951 DYLAN THOMAS Over Sir John’s Hill

  Over Sir John’s hill,

  The hawk on fire hangs still;

  In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws

  And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay

  And the shrill child’s play

  Wars

  Of the sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges.

  And blithely they squawk

  To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until

  The flash the noosed hawk

  Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron

  In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

  Flash, and the plumes crack,

  And a black cap of Jack-

  Daws Sir John’s just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare

  To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy’s fins,

  In a whack of wind.

  There

  Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles

  In the pebbly dab filled

  Shallow and sedge, and ‘dilly dilly,’ calls the loft hawk,

  ‘Come and be killed.’

  I open the leaves of the water at a passage

  Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing

  And read, in a shell,

  Death clear as a buoy’s bell:

  All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,

  When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand

  Wing, and blest shall

  Young

  Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, ‘dilly dilly,

  Come let us die.’

  We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,