The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  The heron and I,

  I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle

  Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant

  Crystal harbour vale

  Where the sea cobbles sail,

  And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.

  It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John’s elmed

  Hill, tell-tale the knelled

  Guilt

  Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,

  Have mercy on.

  God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,

  For their souls’ song.

  Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge. Through windows

  Of dusk and water I see the tilting whispering

  Heron, mirrored, go,

  As the snapt feathers snow,

  Fishing in the tear of the Towy. Only a hoot owl

  Hollows, a grassblade blown in cupped hands, in the looted elms,

  And no green cocks or hens

  Shout

  Now on Sir John’s hill. The heron, ankling the scaly

  Lowlands of the waves,

  Makes all the music; and I who hear the tune of the slow,

  Wear-willow river, grave,

  Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken

  Stone for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.

  1952 DYLAN THOMAS Do not go gentle into that good night

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

  Because their words had forked no lightning they

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  W. H. AUDEN The Fall of Rome

  The piers are pummelled by the waves;

  In a lonely field the rain

  Lashes an abandoned train;

  Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

  Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

  Agents of the Fisc pursue

  Absconding tax-defaulters through

  The sewers of provincial towns.

  Private rites of magic send

  The temple prostitutes to sleep;

  All the literati keep

  An imaginary friend.

  Cerebrotonic Cato may

  Extoll the Ancient Disciplines,

  But the muscle-bound Marines

  Mutiny for food and pay.

  Caesar’s double-bed is warm

  As an unimportant clerk

  Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

  On a pink official form.

  Unendowed with wealth or pity,

  Little birds with scarlet legs,

  Sitting on their speckled eggs,

  Eye each flu-infected city.

  Altogether elsewhere, vast

  Herds of reindeer move across

  Miles and miles of golden moss,

  Silently and very fast.

  W. H. AUDEN The Shield of Achilles

  She looked over his shoulder

  For vines and olive trees,

  Marble well-governed cities,

  And ships upon untamed seas,

  But there on the shining metal

  His hands had put instead

  An artificial wilderness

  And a sky like lead.

  A plain without a feature, bare and brown,

  No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,

  Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,

  Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood

  An unintelligible multitude,

  A million eyes, a million boots in line,

  Without expression, waiting for a sign.

  Out of the air a voice without a face

  Proved by statistics that some cause was just

  In tones as dry and level as the place:

  No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;

  Column by column in a cloud of dust

  They marched away enduring a belief

  Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

  She looked over his shoulder

  For ritual pieties,

  White flower-garlanded heifers,

  Libation and sacrifice,

  But there on the shining metal

  Where the altar should have been,

  She saw by his flickering forge-light

  Quite another scene.

  Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

  Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

  And sentries sweated, for the day was hot:

  A crowd of ordinary decent folk

  Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke

  As three pale figures were led forth and bound

  To three posts driven upright in the ground.

  The mass and majesty of this world, all

  That carries weight and always weighs the same,

  Lay in the hands of others; they were small

  And could not hope for help and no help came:

  What their foes liked to do was done, their shame

  Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride

  And died as men before their bodies died.

  She looked over his shoulder

  For athletes at their games,

  Men and women in a dance

  Moving their sweet limbs

  Quick, quick, to music,

  But there on the shining shield

  His hands had set no dancing-floor

  But a weed-choked field.

  A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

  Loitered about that vacancy; a bird

  Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:

  That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,

  Were axioms to him, who’d never heard

  Of any world where promises were kept

  Or one could weep because another wept.

  The thin-lipped armorer,

  Hephaestos, hobbled away;

  Thetis of the shining breasts

  Cried out in dismay

  At what the god had wrought

  To please her son, the strong

  Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles

  Who would not live long.

  JOHN BETJEMAN Devonshire Street W.11954

  The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen

  Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet.

  The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene

  With Edwardian faience adornments – Devonshire Street.

  No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm

  Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by.

  The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm

  Its chimneys steady against a mackerel sky.

  No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade

  So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he

  ‘Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made

  For the long and the painful deathbed coming to me?’

  She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly,

  At long-past Kensington da
nces she used to do

  ‘It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly

  And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.’

  ROBERT GARIOCH Elegy

  They are lang deid, folk that I used to ken,

  their firm-set lips aa mowdert and agley,

  sherp-tempert een rusty amang the cley:

  they are baith deid, thae wycelike, bienlie men,

  5

  heidmaisters, that had been in pouer for ten

  or twenty year afore fate’s taiglie wey

  brocht me, a young, weill-harnit, blate and fey

  new-cleckit dominie, intill their den.

  Ane tellt me it was time I learnt to write –

  10

  round-haund, he meant – and saw about my hair:

  I mind of him, beld-heidit, wi a kyte.

  Ane sneerit quarterly – I cuidna square

  my savings bank – and sniftert in his spite.

  Weill, gin they arena deid, it’s time they were.

  THOM GUNN The Wound

  The huge wound in my head began to heal

  About the beginning of the seventh week.

  Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:

  For joy I did not move and dared not speak,

  Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient skill.

  And constantly my mind returned to Troy.

  After I sailed the seas I fought in turn

  On both sides, sharing even Helen’s joy

  Of place, and growing up – to see Troy burn –

  As Neoptolemus, that stubborn boy.

  I lay and rested as prescription said.

  Manoeuvered with the Greeks, or sallied out

  Each day with Hector. Finally my bed

  Became Achilles’ tent, to which the lout

  Thersites came reporting numbers dead.

  I was myself: subject to no man’s breath:

  My own commander was my enemy.

  And while my belt hung up, sword in the sheath,

  Thersites shambled in and breathlessly

  Cackled about my friend Patroclus’ death.

  I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

  But, when I thought, rage at his noble pain

  Flew to my head, and turning I could feel

  My wound break open wide. Over again

  I had to let those storm-lit valleys heal.

  PHILIP LARKIN At Grass

  The eye can hardly pick them out

  From the cold shade they shelter in,

  Till wind distresses tail and mane;

  Then one crops grass, and moves about

  – The other seeming to look on –

  And stands anonymous again.

  Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps

  Two dozen distances sufficed

  To fable them: faint afternoons

  Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,

  Whereby their names were artificed

  To inlay faded, classic Junes –

  Silks at the start: against the sky

  Numbers and parasols: outside,

  Squadrons of empty cars, and heat,

  And littered grass: then the long cry

  Hanging unhushed till it subside

  To stop-press columns on the street.

  Do memories plague their ears like flies?

  They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows.

  Summer by summer all stole away,

  The starting-gates, the crowds and cries –

  All but the unmolesting meadows.

  Almanacked, their names live; they

  Have slipped their names, and stand at ease,

  Or gallop for what must be joy,

  And not a fieldglass sees them home,

  Or curious stop-watch prophesies:

  Only the groom, and the groom’s boy,

  With bridles in the evening come.

  1955 NORMAN MACCAIG Summer Farm

  Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass

  And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass

  The water in the horse-trough shines.

  Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.

  A hen stares at nothing with one eye,

  Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky

  A swallow falls and, flickering through

  The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.

  I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,

  Afraid of where a thought might take me – as

  This grasshopper with plated face

  Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

  Self under self, a pile of selves I stand

  Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand

  Lift the farm like a lid and see

  Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

  EDWIN MUIR The Horses 1956

  Barely a twelvemonth after

  The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

  Late in the evening the strange horses came.

  By then we had made our covenant with silence,

  But in the first few days it was so still

  We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

  On the second day

  The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

  On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

  Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

  A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

  Nothing. The radios dumb;

  And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,

  And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms

  All over the world. But now if they should speak,

  If on a sudden they should speak again,

  If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,

  We would not listen, we would not let it bring

  That old bad world that swallowed its children quick

  At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

  Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,

  Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,

  And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

  The tractors lie about our fields; at evening