Straddle a chaos and beget a world.
Peals of the New Year once for me came tumbling
Out of the narrow night like clusters of humming-
Birds loosed from a black bag, and rose again
Irresponsibly to silence: but now I strain
To follow them and see for miles around
Men square or shrug their shoulders at the sound.
Then I remember the pure and granite hills
Where first I caught an ideal tone that stills,
Like the beloved’s breath asleep, all din
Of earth at traffic: silence’s first-born,
Carrying over each sensual ravine
To inform the seer and uniform the seen.
So from this ark, this closet of the brain,
The dove emerges and flies back again
With a Messiah sprig of certitude –
Promise of ground below the sprawling flood.
15
Desire is a witch
And runs against the clock.
It can unstitch
The decent hem
Where space tacks on to time:
It can unlock
Pandora’s privacies.
It puffs in these
Top-gallants of the mind,
And away I stand
On the elemental gale
Into an ocean
That the liar Lucian
Had never dared retail.
When my love leans with all
Her shining breast and shoulder,
I know she is older
Than Ararat the hill,
And yet more young
Than the first daffodil
That ever shews a spring.
When her eyes delay
On me, so deep are they
Tunnelled by love, although
You poured Atlantic
In this one and Pacific
In the other, I know
They would not overflow.
Desire clicks back
Like cuckoo into clock;
Leaves me to explain
Eyes that a tear will drown
And a body where youth
Nor age will long remain
To implicate the truth.
It seems that we must call
Anything truth whose well
Is deep enough;
For the essential
Philosopher-stone, desire,
Needs no other proof
Than its own fire.
16
Remembering how between
Embrace and ultimate bone
Always have interposed
Strata undiagnosed
In Love’s geology;
And even memory
Is bullied by the flesh
Out of its usual dish;
I railed upon desire,
The silly self-betrayer
Whose Cronic appetite6
Gobbles up all his brood;
And I found, in body’s despite,
A moral to clinch the mood.
They say that a mathematician
Once fell to such a passion
For x and y, he locked
His door to keep outside
Whatever might distract
Him from his heavenly bride:
And presently died
In the keenest of blisses
With a dozen untasted dishes
Outside his door.
O man,
Feed Cronos with a stone.
He’s easily decoyed
Who, perched on any throne,
Happily gnaws the void.
From this theoric tower
Corn-land and city seem7
A lovely skiagram:
You could not guess what sour8
Contagion has outworn
Those streets of men and corn.
Let body doubt: the pure
Shadow will reassure,
For shadow gives a free
Licence to lunacy. –
And yet fools say it is
The heart that’s credulous …
For once, O sceptic heart,
Will you not play your part?
17
When nature plays hedge-schoolmaster,
Shakes out the gaudy map of summer
And shows me charabanc, rose, barley-ear
And every bright-winged hummer,
He only would require of me
To be the sponge of natural laws
And learn no more of that cosmography
Than passes through the pores.
Why must I then unleash my brain
To sweat after some revelation
Behind the rose, heedless if truth maintain
On the rose-bloom her station?
When bullying April bruised mine eyes
With sleet-bound appetites and crude
Experiments of green, I still was wise
And kissed the blossoming rod.
Now summer brings what April took,
Riding with fanfares from the south,
And I should be no Solomon to look
My Sheba in the mouth.
Charabancs shout along the lane
And summer gales bay in the wood
No less superbly because I can’t explain
What I have understood.
Let logic analyse the hive,
Wisdom’s content to have the honey:
So I’ll go bite the crust of things and thrive
While hedgerows still are sunny.
Part III
‘But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still centrally disport in mute calm.’
HERMAN MELVILLE.
18
On my right are trees and a lank stream sliding
Impervious as Anaconda to the suns
Of autumn; and the boughs are vipers writhing
To slough the summer from their brittle bones.
Here is the Trojan meadow, here Scamander;
And I, the counterfeit Achilles, feel
A river-god surge up to tear me asunder,
A serpent melancholy bruise my heel.
On my left is the city famed for talk
And tolerance. Its old men run about
Chasing reality, chasing the Auk
With butterfly-nets. Its young men swell the rout
Gaping at Helen in the restaurant,
Mocking at Helen from monastic towers.
Boy Achilles, who has known Helen too long
To scold or worship, stands outside and glowers.
Between the stream and city a rubbish heap
Proclaims the pleasant norm with smouldering stenches.
See! the pathetic pyre where Trojans keep
Well out of sight the prey of time’s revenges;
Old butterfly-nets, couches where lovers lay –
All furniture out of fashion. So the fire
Guts the proud champions of the real: so Troy
Cremates her dead selves and ascends to higher.
Grecians awake, salute the happy norm!
Now may Achilles find employment still;
And once again the blood-lust will grow warm,
Gloating on champions he could never kill.
And if Scamander rears up and pursues,
This ring of rubbish fire will baffle all
His rage. Hero, you’re safe, in the purlieus
Of God’s infernal acre king and thrall.
19
When April comes alive
Out of the small bird’s throat,
Achilles in the sunshine
Kept on his overcoat.
Trojan and Greek at battle,
Helen wantoning –
None but heroic metal
Could ignore the spring.
When honeysuckle and summer
Suffocate the lane,
That sulky boil was broken
And I at last a man.
I’d have str
ipped off my skin to
The impacts of hate and love –
Rebel alone because I
Could not be slave enough.
Bodies now, not shadows,
Intercept the sun:
It takes no rod to tell me
That discipline’s begun.
Seeking the fabled fusion
From love’s last chemical,
I found the experiment
Makes monads of us all;
For love still keeps apart,
And all its vanities
But emphasise higher heaven,
As February trees
When rooks begin their noisy
Coronation of the wood
Are turreted with folly
Yet grow toward some good.
I thought, since love can harness
Pole with contrary pole,
It must be earthed in darkness
Deeper than mine or mole.
Now that I have loved
A while and not gone blind,
I think love’s terminals
Are fixed in fire and wind.
20
How often, watching the windy boughs
Juggle with the moon, or leaning
My body against a wind
That sets all earth careening;
Or when I have seen flames browsing
On the prairie of night and tossing
Their muzzles up at Orion;
Or the sun’s hot arsenal spent
On a cloud salient
Till the air explodes with light;
How often have I perceived a delight
Which parallels the racing mind,
But never rides it off the course.
Another fire, another wind
Now take the air, and I
Am matched with a stricter ecstasy.
For he whom love and fear enlist
To comb his universe
For what Protagoras missed,
Needs be reborn hermaphrodite
And put himself out to nurse
With a syren and a sybil.
So the spider gradually,
Drawing fine systems from his belly,
Includes creation with a thread
And squats on the navel of his world.
Yet even that arch-fakir must feed
Austerity on warm blood.
The tracks of love and fear
Lead back till I disappear
Into that ample terminus
From which all trains draw out
Snorting towards an Ultima Thule.
Nothing is altered about
The place, except its gloom is newly
Lacquered by an unaccustomed eye,
Yet cannot blunt mine eyes now
To the clear finality
Of all beginnings.
Outside
In the diamond air of day
The engines simmer with delay,
Desiring a steely discipline
No less, though now quite satisfied
They travel a loop-line.
21
My lover is so happy, you well might say
One of the Hellene summers had lost its way
And taken shelter underneath her breast.
None but its proper fear can now arrest
Our meteoric love: but still we grieve
That curves of mind and body should outlive
All expectation, and the heart become
A blunt habitual arc, a pendulum
Wagged by the ghost of its first impetus.
Love keeps the bogey slave to admonish us
Of vanity, yet through this fear we scrawl
Our sky with love’s vain comets ere it fall.
And then, up on High Stoy standing alone,
We saw the excellence of the serious down
That shakes the seasons from its back, and bears
No obligation but to wind and stars.
What paroxysm of green can crack those huge
Ribs grown from Chaos, stamped by the Deluge?
Later, within the wood sweetly reclining
On bluebell and primrose, we loved; whose shining
Made a poor fiction of the royal skies,
But were to love alone repositories
Of what by-product wonder it could spare
From lips and eyes. Yet nothing had such power
As prattle of small flowers within the brake
To mount the panic heart and rein it back
From the world’s edge. For they, whose virtue lies
In a brief act of beauty, summarize
Earth’s annual passion and leave the naked earth
Still dearer by their death than by their birth.
So we, who are love’s hemispheres hiding
Beneath the coloured ordeal of our spring,
Shall be disclosed, and I shall see your face
An autumn evening certain of its peace.
22
It is an easier thing
To give up great possessions
Than to forego one farthing
Of the rare unpossessed.
But I’ve been satellite
Long enough to this moon,
The pharisee of night
Shining by tradition
There’s no star in the sky
But gazing makes it double
And the infatuate eye
Can breed dilemmas on it.
Wiser it were to sheath
My burning heart in clay
Than by this double breath
To magnify the tomb.
I’d live like grass and trees,
Familiar of the earth,
Proving its basalt peace
Till I was unperturbed
By synod of the suns
Or a moon’s insolence
As the ant when he runs
Beneath sky-scraping grass.
23
You’ve trafficked with no beast but unicorn
Who dare hold me in scorn
For my dilemmas. Nor have you perceived
The compass-point suggest
An east by pointing to the west,
Or you’d not call me thus deceived
For fixing my desire
On this magnetic north to gyre
Under the sheer authority of ice.
I have seen what impertinence
Stokes up the dingy rhetoric of sense:
I’ve seen your subaltern ambitions rise
Yellow and parallel
As smoke from garden cities that soon fades
In air it cannot even defile. Poor shades,9
Not black enough for hell,
Learn of this poplar which beyond its height
Aspires not, and will bend beneath the thumb
Of every wind; yet when the stars come
It is an omen darker than the night.
The rest may go. No satisfaction lies
In such. And you alone shall hear
My pride, whose love’s the accurate frontier
Of all my enterprise.
While your beauties’ succession
Holds my adventure in a flowery chain
As the spring hedgerows hold the lane,
How can I care whether it ends upon
Marsh or metropolis?
But look within my heart, see there
The tough stoic ghost of a pride was too severe
To risk an armistice
With lesser powers than death; but rather died
Welcoming that iron in the soul
Which keeps the spirit whole,
Since none but ghosts are satisfied
To see a glory passing and let it pass.
For I had been a modern moth and hurled
Myself on many a flaming world,
To find its globe was glass.
In you alone
I met the naked light, by you became
Veteran of a flame
That burns away all bu
t the warrior bone.
And I shall know, if time should falsify
This star the company of my night,
Mine is the heron’s flight
Which makes a solitude of any sky.
24
Farewell again to this adolescent moon;
I say it is a bottle
For papless poets to feed their fancy on.
Once mine sucked there, and I dreamed
The heart a record for the gramophone –
One scratch upon the surface,
And the best music of that sphere is gone.
So I put passion away
In a cold storage and took its tune on trust,
While proper men with church-bells
Signal a practised or a dreamt-of lust …
No fear could sublimate
The ennui of a tomb where music slept
In artificial frost,
Nor could it long persuade me to accept
Rigidity for peace,
Moon-stricken I worked out a solitude
Of sand and sun, believing
No other soil could bear the genuine rood.
But nothing grew except
The shadow at my heels. Now I confess10
There’s no virtue in sand:
It is the rose that makes the wilderness.
I thought integrity
Needed a desert air; I saw it plain,
A chimney of stone at evening,
A monolith on the skyline after rain.
Instead, the witless sun
Fertilised that old succubus and bred
A skeleton in a shadow.
Let cactus spring where hermits go to bed
With those they come to kill.
Three-legged I ran with that importunate curse,
Till I guessed (in the sexual trance
Or playing darts with drunken schoolmasters)
The integrity that’s laid bare
Upon the edge of common furniture.
Now to the town returning
I accept the blind collisions that ensure
Soul’s ektogenesis.
25
Where is the true, the central stone
That clay and vapour zone,
That earthquakes budge nor vinegar bites away,
That rivets man against Doomsday?
You will not find it there, although
Complete Poems Page 7
