Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life?
W. H. AUDEN
We take but three steps from feathers to iron.
JOHN KEATS
1
Suppose that we, tomorrow or the next day,
Came to an end – in storm the shafting broken,
Or a mistaken signal, the flange lifting –
Would that be premature, a text for sorrow?
Say what endurance gives or death denies us.
Love’s proved in its creation, not eternity:
Like leaf or linnet the true heart’s affection
Is born, dies later, asks no reassurance.
Over dark wood rises one dawn felicitous,
Bright through awakened shadows fall her crystal
Cadenzas, and once for all the wood is quickened.
So our joys visit us, and it suffices.
Nor fear we now to live who in the valley
Of the shadow of life have found a causeway;
For love restores the nerve and love is under
Our feet resilient. Shall we be weary?
Some say we walk out of Time altogether
This way into a region where the primrose
Shows an immortal dew, sun at meridian
Stands up for ever and in scent the lime tree.
This is a land which later we may tell of.
Here-now we know, what death cannot diminish
Needs no replenishing; yet certain are, though
Dying were well enough, to live is better.
Passion has grown full man by his first birthday.
Running across the bean-fields in a south wind,
Fording the river mouth to feel the tide-race –
Child’s play that was, though proof of our possessions.
Now our research is done, measured the shadow,
The plains mapped out, the hills a natural boundary.
Such and such is our country. There remains to
Plough up the meadowland, reclaim the marshes.
2
Let’s leave this town. Mutters of loom
Nor winding gear disturb
The flat and residential air –
A city all suburb.
Go not this road, for arc-lamps cramp
The dawn; sense fears to take
A mortal step, and body obeys
An automatic brake.
Ah, leave the wall-eyed town, and come
Where heaven keeps open house;
Watch not the markets but the stars;
Get shares of gilt-edged space.
For what we have in hand is no
Business of shop and street.
This is our strait, our Little Minch
Where wind and tide meet.
You are the tides running for ever
Along their ancient groove:
Such winds am I, pause not for breath
And to fresh shores will move.
3
Back to the countryside
That will not lose its pride
When the green flags of summer all are taken,
Having no mind to force
The seasons from their course
And no remorse for a front line forsaken.
Look how the athletic field
His flowery vest has peeled
To wrestle another fall with rain and sleet.
The rock will not relent
Nor desperate earth consent
Till the spent winter blows his long retreat.
Come, autumn, use the spur!
Let us not still defer
To drive slow furrows in the impatient soil:
Persuade us now these last
Silk summer shreds to cast
And fasten on the harsh habit of toil.
The swallows are all gone
Into the rising sun.
You leave tonight for the Americas.
Under the dropping days
Alone the labourer stays
And says that winter will be slow to pass.
4
Come on, the wind is whirling our summer away,
And air grows dizzy with leaves.
It is time to lay up for a winter day,
Conserve earth’s infant energy, water’s play,
Bind the sun down in sheaves.
Contact of sun and earth loads granary;
Stream’s frolic will grind flour;
Tree’s none the worse for fruit. Shall we
Insulate our strong currents of ecstasy
Or breed units of power?
Bodies we have, fabric and frame designed
To take the stress of love,
Buoyant on gust, multi-engined.
Experiment’s over. We must up and find
What trade-routes are above.
This is no pleasure trip. We carry freight
To a certain end; not whirled
Past earth’s pull, nosing at no star’s gate.
We’ll have fresh air; will serve, perhaps, the state;
Surely, enlarge our world.
Or, think. Tightens the darkness, the rails thrum
For night express is due.
Glory of steam and steel strikes dumb;
Sense sucked away swirls in the vacuum.
So passion passes through.
Here is love’s junction, no terminus.
He arrives at girl or boy.
Signal a clear line and let us
Give him the run of life: we shall get thus
A record of our joy.
5
Beauty’s end is in sight,
Terminus where all feather joys alight.
Wings that flew lightly
Fold and are iron. We see
The thin end of mortality.
We must a little part,
And sprouting seed crack our cemented heart.
Who would get an heir
Initial loss must bear:
A part of each will be elsewhere.
What life may now decide
Is past the clutch of caution, the range of pride.
Speaking from the snow
The crocus lets me know
That there is life to come, and go.
6
Now she is like the white tree-rose
That takes a blessing from the sun:
Summer has filled her veins with light,
And her warm heart is washed with noon.
Or as a poplar, ceaselessly
Gives a soft answer to the wind:
Cool on the light her leaves lie sleeping,
Folding a column of sweet sound.
Powder the stars. Forbid the night
To wear those brilliants for a brooch
So soon, dark death, you may close down
The mines that made this beauty rich.
Her thoughts are pleiads, stooping low
O’er glades where nightingale has flown:
And like the luminous night around her
She has at heart a certain dawn.
7
Rest from loving and be living.
Fallen is fallen past retrieving
The unique flyer dawn’s dove
Arrowing down feathered with fire.
Cease denying, begin knowing.
Comes peace this way here comes renewing
With dower of bird and bud knocks
Loud on winter wall on death’s door.
Here’s no meaning but of morning.
Naught soon of night but stars remaining,
Sink lower, fade, as dark womb
Recedes creation will step clear.
8
HE We whom a full tornado cast up high,
Two years marooned on self-sufficiency,
Kissing on an island out of the trade-routes
Nor glancing at horizon, – we’ll not dare
Outstay the welcome of our tropic sun.
SHE Here is the dark Interior, noon yet high,
/> Light to work by and a sufficiency
Of timber. Build then. We may reach the trade-routes.
We’ll take the winds at their word; yes, will dare
Wave’s curling lip, the hot looks of the sun.
HE Hull is finished. Now must the foraging eye
Take in provisions for a long journey:
Put by our summertime, the fruits, the sweet roots,
The virgin spring moss-shadowed near the shore,
And over idle sands the halcyon.
SHE No mark out there, no mainland meets the eye.
Horizon gapes; and yet must we journey
Beyond the bays of peace, pull up our sweet roots,
Cut the last cord links us to native shore,
Toil on waters too troubled for the halcyon.
BOTH Though we strike a new continent, it shall be
Our islet; a new world, our colony.
If we miss land, no matter. We’ve a stout boat
Provisioned for some years: we need endure
No further ill than to be still alone.
9
Waning is now the sensual eye
Allowed no flaw upon the skin
And burnt away wrinkle and feature,
Fed with pure spirit from within.
Nesciently that vision works.
Just so the pure night-eye, the moon,
Labours, a monumental mason,
To gloss over a world of stone.
Look how she marbled heath and terrace,
Effacing boundary and date.
She took the sky; earth was below her
A shining shell, a featherweight.
No more may pupil love bend over
A plane theorem, black and white.
The interlocking hours revolve,
The globe goes lumbering into light.
Admiral earth breaks out his colours
Bright at the forepeak of the day;
Hills in their hosts escort the sun
And valleys welcome him their way.
Shadow takes depth and shape turns solid:
Far-ranging, the creative eye
Sees arable, marsh, enclosed and common,
Assents to multiplicity.
10
Twenty weeks near past
Since the seed took to earth.
Winter has done his worst.
Let upland snow ignore;
Earth wears a smile betrays
What summer she has in store.
She feels insurgent forces
Gathering at the core,
And a spring rumour courses
Through her, till the cold extreme
Sleep of grove and grass is
Stirred, begins to dream.
So, when the violins gather
And soar to a final theme,
Broadcast on winds of ether
That golden seed extends
Beneath the sun-eye, the father,
To ear at the earth’s ends.
11
There is a dark room,
The locked and shuttered womb,
Where negative’s made positive.
Another dark room,
The blind, the bolted tomb,
Where positives change to negative.
We may not undo
That or escape this, who
Have birth and death coiled in our bones.
Nothing we can do
Will sweeten the real rue,
That we begin, and end, with groans.
12
As one who wanders into old workings
Dazed by the noonday, desiring coolness,
Has found retreat barred by fall of rockface;
Gropes through galleries where granite bruises
Taut palm and panic patters close at heel;
Must move forward as tide to the moon’s nod,
As mouth to breast in blindness is beckoned.
Nightmare nags at his elbow and narrows
Horizon to pinpoint, hope to hand’s breadth.
Slow drip the seconds, time is stalactite,
For nothing intrudes here to tell the time,
Sun marches not, nor moon with muffled step.
He wants an opening, – only to break out,
To see the dark glass cut by day’s diamond,
To relax again in the lap of light.
But we seek a new world through old workings,
Whose hope lies like seed in the loins of earth,
Whose dawn draws gold from the roots of darkness.
Not shy of light nor shrinking from shadow
Like Jesuits in jungle we journey
Deliberately bearing to brutish tribes
Christ’s assurance, arts of agriculture.
As a train that travels underground track
Feels current flashed from far-off dynamos,
Our wheels whirling with impetus elsewhere
Generated we run, are ruled by rails.
Train shall spring from tunnel to terminus,
Out on to plain shall the pioneer plunge,
Earth reveal what veins fed, what hill covered.
Lovely the leap, explosion into light.
13
But think of passion and pain.
Those absolute dictators will enchain
The low, exile the princely parts:
They close a door between the closest hearts:
Their verdict stands in steel,
From whose blank rigour kings may not appeal.
When in love’s airs we’d lie,
Like elms we leaned together with a sigh
And sighing severed, and no rest
Had till that wind was past:
Then drooped in a green sickness over the plain
Wanting our wind again.
Now pain will come for you,
Take you into a desert without dew,
Labouring through the unshadowed day
To blast the sharp scarps, open up a way
There for the future line.
But I shall wait afar off and alone.
Small comfort may be found,
Though our embraced roots grope in the same ground;
Though on one permanent way we run,
Yes, under the same sun.
Contact the means, but travellers report
The ends are poles apart.
14
Now the full-throated daffodils,
Our trumpeters in gold,
Call resurrection from the ground
And bid the year be bold.
Today the almond tree turns pink,
The first flush of the spring;
Winds loll and gossip through the town
Her secret whispering.
Now too the bird must try his voice
Upon the morning air;
Down drowsy avenues he cries
A novel great affair.
He tells of royalty to be;
How with her train of rose
Summer to coronation comes
Through waving wild hedgerows.
Today crowds quicken in a street,
The fish leaps in the flood:
Look there, gasometer rises,
And here bough swells to bud.
For our love’s luck, our stowaway,
Stretches in his cabin;
Our youngster joy barely conceived
Shows up beneath the skin.
Our joy was but a gusty thing
Without sinew or wit,
An infant flyaway; but now
We make a man of it.
15
I have come so far upon my journey.
This is the frontier, this is where I change,
And wait between two worlds to take refreshment.
I see the mating plover at play
Blowing themselves about over the green wheat,
And in a bank I catch
The shy scent of the primrose that prevails
Strangely upon the he
art. Here is
The last flutter of the wind-errant soul,
Earth’s first faint tug at the earthbound soul.
So, waiting here between winter and summer,
Conception and fruition, I
Take what refreshment may be had from skies
Uncertain as the wind, prepare
For a new route, a change of constitution.
Some change of constitution, where
Has been for years an indeterminate quarrel
Between a fevered head and a cold heart;
Rulers who cannot rule, rebels who will not
Rebel; an age divided
Between tomorrow’s wink, yesterday’s warning.
And yet this self, contains
Tides continents and stars – a myriad selves,
Is small and solitary as one grass-blade
Passed over by the wind
Amongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
You in there, my son, my daughter,
Will you become dictator, resolve the factions?
Will you be my ambassador
And make my peace with the adjacent empires?
16
More than all else might you,
My son, my daughter,
Be metal to bore through
The impermeable clay
And rock that overlay
The living water.
Through that artesian well
Myself may out,
Finding its own level.
This way the waste land turns
To arable, and towns
Are rid of drought.
17
Down hidden causeways of the universe
Through space-time’s cold
Indifferent airs I strolled,
A pointless star: till in my course
I happened on the sun
And in a spurt of fire to her did run.
That heavenly body as I neared began
To make response,
And heaved with fire at once.
One wave of gathered heat o’er-ran
Her all and came to a head,
A mountain based upon an ardent bed.
(Faith may move mountains; but love’s twice as strong,
Complete Poems Page 9
