Your missions and fashions, your synthetic passions;
We don’t want to bed you and we’d rather not board you:
Weedy, greedy, unsatisfied, unsexed,
You’re not living in this world, and as for the next –
You could hand white feathers on the judgement day
And give the damned a charity matinée.
Our holy intellectuals – what are they at?
Filling in hard times with literary chat,
Laying down the law where no one listens,
Finding the flaw in long-scrapped systems
And short cuts to places no more on the map:
Though off their feed now and inclined to mope.
Nasties, nudists, bedlamites, buddhists,
Too feeble to follow, unable to guide,
It’s time we asked them to step aside.
Children of the sahib, the flag and the mater,
Grim on golf-courses and haggard on horses
They try to live but they’ve ceased to matter:
Who’ll give a penny to the poor old guy?
These were the best that money could buy
And it isn’t good enough. For what can they fight? –
The silver spoon, the touched hat, the expensive seat:
Marching at the orders of a mad physician
Down private roads to common perdition.
Where is the bourgeois, the backbone of our race?
Bent double with lackeying, the joints out of place;
Behind bluffs and lucky charms hiding to evade
An overdue audit, anæmic, afraid.
Trimmers and schemers, pusillanimous dreamers,
At cinemas, shop-windows and arenas we’ve found them
Bearing witness to a life beyond them.
They’re paying for death on the instalment plan
Who hoped to go higher and failed to be men.
We’d like to fight but we fear defeat,
We’d like to work but we’re feeling too weak,
We’d like to be sick but we’d get the sack,
We’d like to behave, we’d like to believe,
We’d like to love, but we’ve lost the knack.
34
(FOR FRANCES WARNER)
What do we ask for, then?
Not for pity’s pence nor pursy affluence,
Only to set up house again:
Neither a coward’s heaven, cessation of pain,
Nor a new world of sense,
But that we may be given the chance to be men.
For what, then, do we hope?
Not longer sight at once but enlarged scope;
Miraculous no seed or growth of soul, but soil
Cleared of weed, prepared for good:
We shall expected no birth-hour without blood
Nor fire without recoil.
Publish the vision, broadcast and screen it,
Of a world where the will of all shall be raised to highest power,
Village or factory shall form the unit.
Control shall be from the centres, quick brain, warm heart,
And the bearings bathed in a pure
Fluid of sympathy. There possessions no more shall be part
Of the man, where riches and sacrifice
Are of flesh and blood, sex, muscles, limbs and eyes.
Each shall give of his best. It shall seem proper
For all to share what all produced.
Men shall be glad of company, love shall be more than a guest
And the bond no more of paper.
Open your eyes, for vision
Is here of a world that has ceased to be bought and sold
With traitor silver and fairy gold;
But the diamond of endurance, the wrought-iron of passion
Is all their currency.
As the body that knows through action they are splendid,
Feeling head and heart agree;
Young men proud of their output, women no longer stale
With deferred crisis; the old, a full day ended,
Able to stand down and sit still.
Only the exploiter, the public nuisance, the quitter
Receive no quarter.
Here they do not need
To flee the birthplace. There’s room for growing and working.
Bright of eye, champions for speed,
They sing their own songs, they are active, they play not watch:
Happy at night talking
Of the demon bowler cracked over the elm-trees,
The reverse pass that won the match.
At festivals knowing themselves normal and well-born
They remember the ancestors that gave them ease,
Harris who fought the bully at Melbourne,
What Wainwright wrote with his blood, Rosa in prison –
All who sucked out the poison.
35
In these our winter days
Death’s iron tongue is glib
Numbing with fear all flesh upon
A fiery-hearted globe.
An age once green is buried,
Numbered the hours of light;
Blood-red across the snow our sun
Still trails his faint retreat.
Spring through death’s iron guard
Her million blades shall thrust;
Love that was sleeping, not extinct,
Throw off the nightmare crust.
Eyes, though not ours, shall see
Sky-high a signal flame,
The sun returned to power above
A world, but not the same.
36
Now raise your voices for a final chorus,
Lift the glasses, drink tomorrow’s health –
Success to the doctor who is going to cure us
And those who will die no more in bearing wealth.
On our magnetic mountain a beacon burning
Shall sign the peace we hoped for, soon or late,
Clear over a clean earth, and all men turning
Like infants’ eyes like sunflowers to the light.
Drink to the ordered nerves, the sight restored;
A day when power for all shall radiate
From the sovereign centres, and the blood is stirred
To flow in its ancient courses of love and hate:
When the country vision is ours that like a barn
Fills the heart with slow-matured delight,
Absorbing wind and summer, till we turn
Like infants’ eyes like sunflowers to the light.
For us to dream the birthday, but they shall act it –
Bells over fields, the hooters from the mine,
On New Year’s Eve under the brideroom’s attic
Chorus of coastguards singing Auld Lang Syne.
Now at hope’s horizon that day is dawning,
We guess at glory from a mountain height,
But then in valley towns they will be turning
Like infants’ eyes like sunflowers to the light.
Beckon O beacon, and O sun be soon!
Hollo, bells, over a melting earth!
Let man be many and his sons all sane,
Fearless with fellows, handsome by the hearth.
Break from your trance: start dancing now in town,
And, fences down, the ploughing match with mate.
This is your day: so turn, my comrades, turn
Like infants’ eyes like sunflowers to the light.
1933
A TIME TO DANCE
Learning to Talk
See this small one, tiptoe on
The green foothills of the years,
Views a younger world than yours;
When you go down, he’ll be the tall one.
Dawn’s dew is on his tongue –
No word for what’s behind the sky,
Naming all that meets the eye,
Pleased with sunlight over a lawn.
Hear his laughter. He ca
n’t contain
The exquisite moment overflowing.
Limbs leaping, woodpecker flying
Are for him and not hereafter.
Tongue trips, recovers, triumphs,
Turning all ways to express
What the forward eye can guess –
That time is his and earth young.
We are growing too like trees
To give the rising wind a voice:
Eagles shall build upon our verse,
Our winged seeds are tomorrow’s sowing.
Yes, we learn to speak for all
Whose hearts here are not at home,
All who march to a better time
And breed the world for which they burn.
Though we fall once, though we often,
Though we fall to rise not again,
From our horizon sons begin;
When we go down, they will be tall ones.
Moving In
Is it your hope, hope’s hearth, heart’s home, here at the lane’s end?
Deeds are signed, structure is sound though century-old;
Redecorated throughout, all modern convenience, the cable extended;
Need grope no more in corners nor cower from dark and cold.
Who between town and country dreams of contact with the two worlds
Earthquake will wake, a chasm at his feet, crack of doom overhead.
What deeds can survive, what stone can shoulder the shock of a new world?
Dark and cold, dancing no spark, when the cable is dead.
Fear you not ghosts of former tenants, a fell visitation
From them whose haunts you have sealed, whose secrets you haled to light?
Gay as grass are you? Tough as granite? But they are patient,
Waiting for you to weaken, awaiting a sleepless night.
You have cut down the yews, say you, for a broader view? No churchyard
Emblems shall bind or blind you? But see, the imperative brow
Frowns of the hills, offers no compromise, means far harder
Visions than valley steeples call to, a stricter vow.
Though your wife is chaste, though your children lustily throng, though laughing
Raise you a record crop, yet do you wrong your powers,
Flattered no longer by isolation nor satisfied loving.
Not box hedge where the birds nest, not embankments of flowers.
Guard from regret. No private good will let you forget all
Those, time’s accessories, whose all is a leaden arc
Between work and sleep; who might have been men, brighter metal,
Proudly reaped the light, passed peacefully into dark.
The Conflict
I sang as one
Who on a tilting deck sings
To keep men’s courage up, though the wave hangs
That shall cut off their sun.
As storm-cocks sing,
Flinging their natural answer in the wind’s teeth,
And care not if it is waste of breath
Or birth-carol of spring.
As ocean-flyer clings
To height, to the last drop of spirit driving on
While yet ahead is land to be won
And work for wings.
Singing I was at peace,
Above the clouds, outside the ring:
For sorrow finds a swift release in song
And pride its poise.
Yet living here,
As one between two massing powers I live
Whom neutrality cannot save
Not occupation cheer.
None such shall be left alive:
The innocent wing is soon shot down,
And private stars fade in the blood-red dawn
Where two worlds strive.
The red advance of life
Contracts pride, calls out the common blood,
Beats song into a single blade,
Makes a depth-charge of grief.
Move then with new desires,
For where we used to build and love
Is no man’s land, and only ghosts can live
Between two fires.
Losers
Those are judged losers and fortune-flouted
Whose flighted hopes fell down short of satisfaction;
The killed in action, the blasted in beauty, all choosers
Of the wrong channel for love’s seasonal spate:
Cheerless some amid rock or rank forest life-long
Laboured to hew an estate, but they died childless:
Those within hail of home by blizzard o’ertaken;
Those awakening from vision with truth on tongue, struck dumb:
Are deemed yet to have been transfigured in failure.
Men mourn their beauty and promise, publish the diaries;
Medals are given; the graves are evergreen with pity:
Their fire is forwarded through the hearts of the living.
What can we say of these, from the womb wasted,
Whose nerve was never tested in act, who fell at the start,
Who had no beauty to lose, born out of season?
Early an iron frost clamped down their flowing
Desires. They were lost at once: they failed and died in the whirling
Snow, bewildered, homeless from first to last.
Frightened we stop our ears to the truth they are telling
Who toil to remain alive, whose children start from sleep
Weeping into a world worse than nightmares.
Splendour of cities they built cannot ennoble
The barely living, ambitious for bread alone. Pity
Trails not her robe for these and their despairs.
In Me Two Worlds
In me two worlds at war
Trample the patient flesh,
This lighted ring of sense where clinch
Heir and ancestor.
This moving point of dust
Where past and future meet
Traces their battle-line and shows
Each thrust and counterthrust.
The armies of the dead
Are trenched within my bones,
My blood’s their semaphore, their wings
Are watchers overhead.
Their captains stand at ease
As on familiar ground,
The veteran longings of the heart
Serve them for mercenaries.
Conscious of power and pride
Imperially they move
To pacify an unsettled zone –
The life for which they died.
But see, from vision’s height
March down the men to come,
And in my body rebel cells
Look forward to the fight.
The insolence of the dead
Breaks on their solid front:
They tap my nerves for power, my veins
To stain their banners red.
These have the spirit’s range,
The measure of the mind:
Out of the dawn their fire comes fast
To conquer and to change.
So heir and ancestor
Pursue the inveterate feud,
Making my senses’ darkened fields
A theatre of war.
A Warning to those who Live on Mountains
You inhabit the mountains, half-way to heaven;
Wind carries your wishes like winged seeds
Over the valley, not sowing in vain:
Breathe rarest air, with the pure red rowan
Have graceful grown and calm as glaciers.
You are proud of the view; on plateau and peak
Rampant your telescopes rake the horizon,
Make nothing of the distance to nearest or next world.
You have made your mark on the stony-hearted massif,
Galleried granite and worked for gold
Till a solid world turned to fantastic tracery:
In snow-line receding your power we se
e,
Your heraldic pride hewn on the hillface.
Remember the ringed ammonite, running
Crazy, was killed for being too clever.
Impatient grow the peoples of the plain,
They wait for a word, the helio winking
As it talks of truce, the exile’s return.
Labouring aloft you forget plain language,
Simple the password that disarms suspicion:
Starved are your roots, and still would you strain
The tie between brain and body to breaking-point?
Your power’s by-products have poisoned their streams,
Their vision grows short as your shadow lengthens,
And your will walls them in. Beware, for a heavy
Charge is laid against you, Oh little longer
Will the hand be withheld that hesitates at the wire’s end,
And your time totters like a tenement condemned.
Famous that fall, or shall they tell how in the final
Moment remaining you changed your mind?
Johnny Head-In-Air
It was an evening late in the year
When the frost stings again,
Hard-bitten was the face of the hills
And harsh breathed the plain.
Along a stony watershed
Surly and peaked with cold
I saw a company straggling over,
Over an endless wold.
The plain breathed up in smoke: its breath
Like a dying curse did freeze:
The fingers of the fog reached up
And took them by the knees.
Cruel, cruel look the stars
Fixed in a bitter frown:
Here at our feet to left and right
The silly streams run down.
We have left the ice-fields far behind,
Jungle, desert and fen;
We have passed the place of the temperate race
And the land of the one-eyed men.
The road reels back a million miles,
It is high time we came
Dropping down to the rich valleys
Where each can stake his claim.
Iron, iron rang the road,
All iron to the tread:
Heaven’s face was barred with steel
Star-bolted overhead.
The well, the ill, on foot or on wheel,
The shattered, the shamed, the proud –
And limousines like painted queans
Went curving through the crowd.
What are these shapes that drive them on?
Complete Poems Page 14
