by Paul Keegan
A decade on her lip,
At four o’clock, taking a cup
Of lukewarm water, sip
By sip, but still her daily food
Repeated and the bile
Tormented her. In a blue hood,
The Virgin sadly smiled.
When she looked up, the Saviour showed
His Heart, daggered with flame
And, from the mantle-shelf, St Joseph
Bent, disapproving. Vainly
She prayed, for in the whatnot corner
The new Pope was frowning. Night
And day, dull pain, as in her corns,
Recounted every bite.
She thought of St Teresa, floating
On motes of a sunbeam,
Carmelite with scatterful robes,
Surrounded by demons,
Small black boys in their skin. She gaped
At Hell: a muddy passage
That led to nothing, queer in shape,
A cupboard closely fastened.
Sometimes, the walls of the parlour
Would fade away. No plod
Of feet, rattle of van, in Garville
Road. Soul now gone abroad
Where saints, like medieval serfs,
Had laboured. Great sun-flower shone.
Our Lady’s Chapel was borne by seraphs,
Three leagues beyond Ancona.
High towns of Italy, the plain
Of France, were known to Martha
As she read in a holy book. The sky-blaze
Nooned at Padua,
Marble grotto of Bernadette.
Rose-scatterers. New saints
In tropical Africa where the tsetse
Fly probes, the forest taints.
Teresa had heard the Lutherans
Howling on red-hot spit,
And grill, men who had searched for truth
Alone in Holy Writ.
So Martha, fearful of flame lashing
Those heretics, each instant,
Never dealt in the haberdashery
Shop, owned by two Protestants.
In ambush of night, an angel wounded
The Spaniard to the heart
With iron tip on fire. Swooning
With pain and bliss as a dart
Moved up and down within her bowels
Quicker, quicker, each cell
Sweating as if rubbed up with towels,
Her spirit rose and fell.
St John of the Cross, her friend, in prison
Awaits the bridal night,
Paler than lilies, his wizened skin
Flowers. In fifths of flight,
Senses beyond seraphic thought,
In that divinest clasp,
Enfolding of kisses that cauterize,
Yield to the soul-spasm.
Cunning in body had come to hate
All this and stirred by mischief
Haled Martha from heaven. Heart palpitates
And terror in her stiffens.
Heart misses one beat, two… flutters… stops.
Her ears are full of sound.
Half fainting, she stares at the grandfather clock
As if it were overwound.
The fit had come. Ill-natured flesh
Despised her soul. No bending
Could ease rib. Around her heart, pressure
Of wind grew worse. Again,
Again, armchaired without relief,
She eructated, phlegm
In mouth, forgot the woe, the grief,
Foretold at Bethlehem.
Tired of the same faces, side-altars,
She went to the Carmelite Church
At Johnson’s Court, confessed her faults,
There, once a week, purchased
Tea, butter in Chatham St. The pond
In St Stephen’s Green was grand.
She watched the seagulls, ducks, black swan,
Went home by the 15 tram.
Her beads in hand, Martha became
A member of the Third Order,
Saved from long purgatorial pain,
Brown habit and white cord
Her own when cerges had been lit
Around her coffin. She got
Ninety-five pounds on loan for her bit
Of clay in the common plot.
Often she thought of a quiet sick-ward,
Nuns, with delicious ways,
Consoling the miserable: quick
Tea, toast on trays. Wishing
To rid themselves of her, kind neighbours
Sent for the ambulance,
Before her brother and sister could hurry
To help her. Big gate clanged.
No medical examination
For the new patient. Doctor
Had gone to Cork on holidays.
Telephone sprang. Hall-clock
Proclaimed the quarters. Clatter of heels
On tiles. Corridor, ward,
A-whirr with the electric cleaner,
The creak of window cord.
She could not sleep at night. Feeble
And old, two women raved
And cried to God. She held her beads.
O how could she be saved?
The hospital had this and that rule.
Day-chill unshuttered. Nun, with
Thermometer in reticule,
Went by. The women mumbled.
Mother Superior believed
That she was obstinate, self-willed.
Sisters ignored her, hands-in-sleeves,
Beside a pantry shelf
Or counting pillow-case, soiled sheet.
They gave her purgatives.
Soul-less, she tottered to the toilet.
Only her body lived.
Wasted by colitis, refused
The daily sacrament
By regulation, forbidden use
Of bed-pan, when meals were sent up,
Behind a screen, she lay, shivering,
Unable to eat. The soup
Was greasy, mutton, beef or liver,
Cold. Kitchen has no scruples.
The Nuns had let the field in front
As an Amusement Park,
Merry-go-round, a noisy month, all
Heltering-skeltering at darkfall,
Mechanical music, dipper, hold-tights,
Rifle-crack, crash of dodgems.
The ward, godless with shadow, lights,
How could she pray to God?
Unpitied, wasting with diarrhea
And the constant strain,
Poor Child of Mary with one idea,
She ruptured a small vein,
Bled inwardly to jazz. No priest
Came. She had been anointed
Two days before, yet knew no peace:
Her last breath, disappointed.
1964PHILIP LARKIN Mr Bleaney
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags –
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits – what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways –
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched
the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
(written 1955)
PHILIP LARKIN Here
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
PHILIP LARKIN Days
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
(written 1953)
PHILIP LARKIN Afternoons
Summer is fading:
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering
The new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.
Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
Our Wedding, lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places
That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all in school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
DONALD DAVIE The Hill Field
Look there! What a wheaten
Half-loaf, halfway to bread,
A cornfield is, that is eaten
Away, and harvested:
How like a loaf, where the knife
Has cut and come again,
Jagged where the farmer’s wife
Has served the farmer’s men,
That steep field is, where the reaping
Has only just begun
On a wedge-shaped front, and the creeping
Steel edges glint in the sun.
See the cheese-like shape it is taking,
The sliced-off walls of the wheat
And the cheese-mite reapers making
Inroads there, in the heat?
It is Brueghel or Samuel Palmer,
Some painter, coming between
My eye and the truth of a farmer,
So massively sculpts the scene.
The sickles of poets dazzle
These eyes that were filmed from birth;
And the miller comes with an easel
To grind the fruits of earth.
1965SYLVIA PLATH Sheep in Fog
The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the color of rust,
Hooves, dolorous bells –
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
SYLVIA PLATH The Arrival of the Bee Box
I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
