Found symmetry:
Seek the spring rather
Whence thy true image well’d,
Plumbing the heart from shallow
Glances withheld.
Stoop, stoop thou over
Thy pool, a constant sun
In pearls of dew updrawing
Its benison:
And like a sun so
Let down the beams of thine
Own love to stab the pool with
Their leonine
Radiance. O surely
Of fire and water blent
There’ll leap to lovely birth a
New element.
Retrospect: From a Street in Chelsea
Here are the houses: this is the house. No smile
Lingers on the staid countenance to mark
It from its fellows, though beauty breathless and stark
As a rout of maenads kept carnival here awhile.
House, are the ghosts of our felicity
Haunting together still in you, as linger
Hands when the dance is done, finger to finger,
Loth to forsake their strange complicity?
Surely you harbour one poor frustrate ghost,
The child of fancy erring unreproved,
Conceived in the hour when she and I almost
Forgot we were not lovers, and almost loved.
(Her breath comes on the twilight here and brushes
My face with music elfin and remote:
I marvel once again that only the thrushes
And she should have sweet April in their throat.)
House, you are thridded with spectres. See, they press
Around me – ghosts of her mouth, her breasts, her eyes,
Her body’s lilt. Yet would I exorcise
Them all, though it left us companionless.
If the heart could, if the mind knew how, then I
Would curse and scatter these lovely ghosts at random;
For wheresoever they go follows the phantom
Of love that died before its epiphany.
The only Pretty Ring-Time
See now, where Spring has put young leaves
Fluttering like an emerald snow
Round the beech-trunks, and lovers enacting
Earth’s quaint mythologies below.
Another Venus, another Mars,
Before the Vulcan-net of crude
Fact mews them up, believe Creation
Was only built to frame their mood.
And now the green goes out of the Spring:
The lovers quarrel: one mind jolts
Upon its mate. But still, it is Hera
And Zeus playing at thunderbolts.
Disgruntled fools, you would think yourselves
Fortunate, did you guess how soon
Love, its Olympian discords vanished,
Becomes a barrel-organ tune.
Under the Willow
I
The willows by the waterside
Gather their green above their feet
Like lissom, finicky ladies
Before they cross over a wet street.
We will anchor our boat under this willow,
And under the willow ask of To-day
No dearer thing than thus to be cradled
With the stream’s indolent lullay.
Dear, for one day let us yield to Fate,
And so forget him; and so forget
That our halcyon time is a dalliance
Under the brow of Olivet.
Come, let us turn our backs on the sword-flash
Sentinelling a Paradise
We have never known. Is your heart cold? – Then
We’ll hew an Eden out of ice.
II
And now each common sight
Assumes a diadem
Of crystalline delight,
And trails a purple hem.
The meadows all are paven
With gold the stream along;
Dangles a lark from heaven
On silver threads of song.
Delight floats over us
Awhile, ethereally
As floats the nautilus –
That rare wild-rose of the sea.
Sure, we have found a glass
To focus mind with matter
In a microcosm of bliss
The tiniest mote will shatter.
Yet Beauty, that can bring
Sense to this razor-edge,
Is arrogant as a king
Guarding his privilege:
He lends your loveliness,
So I but contemplate;
’Tis yearning to possess
Hurls me from his estate.
III
It is late. The thrush drops few of his hoarded notes –
Pinpricks through a pall of silence, epitome
Of those rare times when from the desert we
Sniff Love’s banquet, and know we are scapegoats.
O that the noisy day was here again!
For now, Earth’s minor keys predominant,
Ripple on leaf and water, gnat’s whine and scant
Starlight all come to orchestrate our pain.
I’d brook no comfort watering down desire,
Yet I cannot think my love a document
That one handclasp will, when the paper is spent,
Scrawl ‘finis’ to and toss upon the fire.
Your throat bent back upon the cool half-light
Is white as a moonbeam frozen into flesh:
Small comfort, for lips throbbing with one wild wish,
That kisses could not make it more lovely white.
We must divine some cosmic cruelty
When there’s no article of beauty but
Renders the heart more vulnerable to regret
With hints of a Beauty that can never be.
Even prisoners on Pisgah may share some
Austere delights; but O, how brief their span,
When yearns the heart toward its Canaan!
Come, dear, your hand in mine. We’d best go home.
Photograph of a Bacchante
When for long weeks this mind,
This bladder of ambition and inhibition,
Had sulked, swollen, bravadoed, whined
After its pigmy fashion;
One day I took up the photograph of you
Dancing the dance Bacchante
With all your body, from eager head to toe,
Vibrant and beautiful as a line from Dante.
And I felt the pangs of one distressed
In mortal sickness who, starting from his pillow,
Sees trenchant upon the West
The mountains, and a halo
Of saffron empassioned light behind –
The mountains he will never now be treading,
Nor take one waft of their myrtle-scented wind
Where he is speeding.
At Greenlanes
(An Epistle)
Do you remember, Margaret, how we came
Out on the heath our first evening
Together? How the pines rose like a name
Cried once by a dying man; and whirriting
Nearby the nightjar’s bell
Rang down reluctant curtain on the day?
Do you remember the brute smell
Of bracken that heaved at the darkness where we lay?
I could hear my heart like a lupin pod
Rattle its wizened dreams. (What now could rally
Hope grown dead pale feeding on its own blood?)
And then I heard your voice say ‘Tell me!’
It was the dew that falls on the castaway –
Honest and small as the dew but far more tender –
A sweetness drugging his dismay,
Though yet no rescuer sail flares up from under
The parched horizon.
So I was happier
Than I had been since loneliness began,
Secure with you, my
wise and witty dear,
And Douglas the rabelaisian keen man.
Honeysuckle tuned our world
To roundelays that made the stiff sun nod;
All the summers of Arcady were revealed
In a blackbird’s period.
This hollow, where noon lay down to drowse and blink,
Every night became a bowl
Brimmed by the moon with nectar for me to drink
Rapt in the clear refectory of your soul.
I felt your thought reach out sure fingers
For mine, that had groped so long, so emptily,
Finding no flame but a touch turned it to cinders.
Your hands on mine, we worked the key
(How rustily it stammered!) of this dark mind,
This cupboard crammed with sour forgotten
Live skeletons yammering underground –
Fantastic fears in strait-jackets, all sodden
With solitude.
We turned the key. We let
The brave, bird-echoing sunlight in.
No monster showed: there was only Margaret,
And love, and a dead most laughable mannequin.
My Love came to Me
I
In a windless garden
At the time of plum-gathering
When the hedge is plumy
With Traveller’s Joy,
Beautiful gay candid
My love came to me.
Autumn closed around her,
But her breath was all daffodils
And her face all springtime:
And now she has laid
On my heart perennial
Spring to renew me.
In a windless garden
At the time of plum-gathering
My love came to me.
II
So long Love cramped in the chrysalis
And hopeless of the sun had lain,
He could not dream there how one kiss
Cancels a century of pain.
How could he guess, then, that the first
Encounter of the flesh but quells
One thirst with another thirst
And builds, beneath new heavens, new hells.
Love’s eye is grown too clear, too clear:
He sees in play of mouth or wrist
Enough to split a hemisphere;
And then, turning anatomist,
Pins happiness upon the table
With scalpels to lay bare its law: –
He’d better try to stick a label
On the flash of a meteor.
They are all gone into the past,
The sands we lay and laughed upon,
The heathery mountains where we kissed,
And the stars round your head are gone.
From their ebb I have saved but this –
How on the stroke of love you drew
Breath swift and sweet and laborious
As the sweeps of a racing crew.
Yet if Love’s spring-tide left no more
Than this brief flurry of pulses, thrown
Like driftwood high upon the shore,
Residue of one hurricane;
I think it would take root, and where
Was wrack a tree would be upspringing,
Surprising all the vacuous air
With salvoes of green and with bird-singing.
III
My love, she is gone.
But this low whitewashed house,
Ringed round with fuchsia and the drone
Of bees continually,
Bears witness that in each one
Of all our dumb tremendous kisses
The dayspring was, the sun
That rides above eclipse.
My love is a fine house
Wherein are flowers and kettles,
Buccaneers holding carouse,
Cradles, and persons of quality
Dancing a minuet sedately:
I will so ring her round
With coloured love, singing love,
She will not notice even the sound
Death makes upon the casement.
Wreck near Ballinacarig
Your voyaging past,
Lie you forsaken,
Repining like an
Ariadne cast
Away on the dune
By a false sea-lover,
All but the fervour
Of freedom gone.
Two buccaneering
Children laugh
On your deck, far off
To a Blessed Isle steering:
Their first fond breath
Wrecked them on life, no less
Than you the apprentices
Of Master Death.
Now your rudder
Is ruled by the sand
Whose fluent hand
Very soon will smother
The last spar, standing
Lorn as a prayer
That whimpers on air,
And no God heeding.
Time silting over
The brave, the merry,
Dune-deep doth bury
Every sweet rover –
Keel, cabin, spars;
Leaving but shore and sea
To keep stern colloquy
Under the stars.
Arcadian
We will buy an old house
When we are richer;
One to arouse
The pen of an etcher:
Seeming – so mellow –
To have grown from the ground,
Sown in a hollow
With birches around.
Under an oaken
Quiet of beams
By the years unshaken
We’ll dream our dreams.
Beyond the lintel
We’ll see a mere
Keeping its crystal
Silences near;
Whence for our drink
Will flow a freshet
With primrosed brink,
And coo like a cushat.
And since at ten-forty
Each clock will be set,
Time must report by
The twinkling bat,
By thrushes’ orison,
Birch-leaf’s fall,
And the plumpening of cherries on
Lichened wall.
Not that we’d bother
With seasons or clocks,
While our hearts shone together
In love’s equinox.
Our youth, poised finely
Thus, would believe
That age can be only
Midsummer eve.
To his Mistress
(With a ring of jade and silver)
Winter oak with boughs akimbo,
Beech of autumn, summer willow,
Star-light, dew-light gave this stone:
Tell her, ring, that while our seasons
Fit each to each – mirths, dreams and passions –
Love at heyday will remain.
Glutton Time, be not so greedy
For my slim and subtle lady,
Forget your appetite until
I have learnt with mouth and finger
Each mortal inch of her my hunger
Made heroic as the Grail.
The Perverse
Love being denied, he turned in his despair
And couched with the Absolute a summer through;
He got small joy of the skimpy bedfellow –
Formulas gave no body to lay bare.
His pretty came among the primroses
With open breast for him. No more denied
Seemed no more ideal. He was unsatisfied
Till he strained her flesh to thin philosophies.
Love being remote, dreams at the midnight gave
A chill enchanted image of her flesh;
Such phantoms but inflamed his waking wish
For the quick beauty no dream-chisels grave.
Now she was won. But our Pygmalion –
If so he
could have graven like a kiss
On Time’s blank shoulder that hour of loveliness
– He would have changed her body into stone.
Apologue
Here is nothing singular.
Night has Orion –
Needs she the lesser star?
Ravish divinity
If you can, Actaeon:
Never just play the spy.
Here are no estimable riches:
A mind, now hot now cold,
Turning all it touches
Into quicksilver;
The heart that looked for gold
Has found a garden of myrrh.
On Artemis pondering,
That inaccessible sprite,
I gazed at a slumbering
World from the lattice of my despairs:
The night was large enough, the night
Pastured a million stars.
‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.’
DANTE: Inferno.
1928
TRANSITIONAL POEM
TO
R. E. WARNER
Part I
‘Ira brevis, longa est pietas, recidiva voluptas;
Et cum posse perit, mens tamen una manet.’
MAXIMIAN.
1
Now I have come to reason
And cast my schoolboy clout,
Disorder I see is without,1
And the mind must sweat a poison2
Keener than Thessaly’s brew;
A pus that, discharged not thence,
Gangrenes the vital sense
And makes disorder true.
It is certain we shall attain
No life till we stamp on all
Life the tetragonal
Pure symmetry of brain.
I felt, in my scorning
Of common poet’s talk,
As arrogant as the hawk
When he mounts above the morning.
‘Behold man’s droll appearance,
Faith wriggling upon his hooks,
Chin-deep in Eternal Flux
Angling for reassurance!’
I care not if he retorts –
‘Of all that labour and wive
And worship, who would give
A fiddlestick for these thoughts
That sluggishly yaw and bend,
Fat strings of barges drawn
By a tug they have never seen
Complete Poems Page 5
