Or looked therein to be magnified; whose will was ever more
Love’s rentiers to live, in make-up still admired.
Earth shall disown them. Noah shall see drowning of many,
Compounded greed with charity, let wisdom out on hire,
Made freedom a trickster and passion a sick mechanical whore.
Their pride shall corrode, their shining look in the flood be tarnished.
What is in store
For Noah and the flood we foresee: unremitting war
And undisguised on all who are mad for the personal glory.
Call not the issue certain. But let the waters beware
Of deviation, the line of least resistance; ignore
The traitor’s sop; unclench those hands whose hold on the living
Has been an ice-age. Stone are those hearts, and only before
The stern and rhythmic assault of continual waves will they yield.
But when the floods shall cease,
When the earth knows she is clean and sends her love to Noah
By the raven of tenderness, when abides the dove of peace,
Down the hillsides then shall the waters tumble apace,
Finding their level, wearing the sun on their wide shoulders,
To wed the radiant valleys: that reconciled embrace
Shall raise – taller than sunflowers and record crops – the race
That Noah foresaw in the veiled face of the avenging waters.
The floods shall cease,
Though forgotten never the height of their triumphs, the truth of their source.
Delight shall Noah have, as a man returning from exile
Beholds a land greener, more great with growth and ease
Than dreams dared imagine; but most, to live among these
Who shared his exile, to work with, to have for enduring fellows
All rivers, rains and seas.
1936
OVERTURES TO DEATH
TO E. M. FORSTER
Maple and Sumach
Maple and sumach down this autumn ride –
Look, in what scarlet character they speak!
For this their russet and rejoicing week
Trees spend a year of sunsets on their pride.
You leaves drenched with the lifeblood of the year –
What flamingo dawns have wavered from the east,
What eves have crimsoned to their toppling crest
To give the fame and transience that you wear!
Leaf-low he shall lie soon: but no such blaze
Briefly can cheer man’s ashen, harsh decline;
His fall is short of pride, he bleeds within
And paler creeps to the dead end of his days.
O light’s abandon and the fire-crest sky
Speak in me now for all who are to die!
February 1936
Infirm and grey
This leaden-hearted day
Drags its lank hours, wishing itself away.
Grey as the skin
Of long-imprisoned men
The sky, and holds a poisoned thought within.
Whether to die,
Or live beneath fear’s eye –
Heavily hangs the sentence of this sky.
The unshed tears
Of frost on boughs and briers
Gathering wait discharge like our swoln fears.
Servant and host
Of this fog-bitter frost,
A carrion-crow flaps, shadowing the lost.
Now to the fire
From killing fells we bear
This new-born lamb, our premature desire.
We cannot meet
Our children’s mirth, at night
Who dream their blood upon a darkening street.
Stay away, Spring!
Since death is on the wing
To blast our seed and poison every thing.
Bombers
Through the vague morning, the heart preoccupied,
A deep in air buried grain of sound
Starts and grows, as yet unwarning –
The tremor of baited deepsea line.
Swells the seed, and now tight sound-buds
Vibrate, upholding their paean flowers
To the sun. There are bees in sky-bells droning,
Flares of crimson at the heart unfold.
Children look up, and the elms spring-garlanded
Tossing their heads and marked for the axe.
Gallant or woebegone, alike unlucky –
Earth shakes beneath us: we imagine loss.
Black as vermin, crawling in echelon
Beneath the cloud-floor, the bombers come:
The heavy angels, carrying harm in
Their wombs that ache to be rid of death.
This is the seed that grows for ruin,
The iron embryo conceived in fear.
Soon or late its need must be answered
In fear delivered and screeching fire.
Choose between your child and this fatal embryo.
Shall your guilt bear arms, and the children you want
Be condemned to die by the powers you paid for
And haunt the houses you never built?
A Parting Shot
He said, ‘Do not point your gun
At the dove in the judas tree:
It might go off, you see.’
So I fired, and the tree came down –
Limed leaf, branch and stock,
And the fantail swerving flew
Up like a shuttlecock
Released into the blue.
And he said, ‘I told you so’.
Newsreel
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving
Your debts asleep, your history at the door:
This is the home for heroes, and this loving
Darkness a fur you can afford.
Fish in their tank electrically heated
Nose without envy the glass wall: for them
Clerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,
Move in a mute day-dream,
Bathed in this common source, you gape incurious
At what your active hours have willed –
Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious
Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world.
There is the mayor opening the oyster season:
A society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:
An old crocks’ race, and a politician
In fishing-waders to prove that all is well.
Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble
In the long power-drive, like gannets they fall steep.
But what are they to trouble –
These silver shadows to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep?
See the big guns, rising, groping, erected
To plant death in your world’s soft womb.
Fire-bud, smoke blossom, iron seed projected –
Are these exotics? They will grow nearer home.
Grow nearer home – and out of the dream-house stumbling
One night into a strangling air and the flung
Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling,
You’ll know you slept too long.
Regency Houses
In the abandoned heaven
Light shrinks like pools on sand –
One in a million days
That dying where they stand
Image our last and leave an
Adored light behind.
Autumn is soon. We gaze
At a Regency terrace, curved
Like the ritual smile, resigned
And formidable, that’s carved
On the stone face of the dead.
Shallow a breath divides us
From the formal-smiling dead.
Light leaves this shore, these shells,
The windows glazed in death,
And soon on us beneath
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A first leaf falls,
And then the next night hides us.
We who in younger days,
Hoping too much, tried on
The habit of perfection,
Have learnt how it betrays
Our shrinking flesh: we have seen
The praised transparent will
Living now by reflection.
The panes darken: but still
We have seen peering out
The mad, too mobile face
Under the floral hat.
Are we living – we too,
Living extravagant farce
In the finery of spent passions?
Is all we do and shall do
But the glib, habitual breathing
Of clocks where time means nothing,
In a condemned mansion?
Landscapes
1
This autumn park, the sequin glitter of leaves
Upon its withering bosom, the lake a moonstone –
O light mellifluous, glossing the stone-blind mansion,
October light, a godsend to these groves!
These unkempt groves, blind vistas, mark the defeat
Of men who imposed on Nature a private elegance
And died of dropsy. Let still the gay ghosts dance,
They are heartless ones we should wish nor fear to meet.
A ruin now, but here the Folly grinned –
The mad memento that one joker built:
Mocking their reasoned crops, a fabulous guilt
Towered up and cursed them fruitless from the ground.
Light drops, the hush of fallen ash, submission
Of a dying face now muted for the grave:
Through mansion, lake and the lacklustre groves
We see the landscape of their dissolution.
2
A landscape, now, with no remorse
Or symmetry, hacked out by those
Whom versatile history later chose –
Her ugliest, cash Conquistadors.
An inflamed sky reflects the wrath
Of babes from whom they hid the sun:
Disease and slag-tip smoulder on
With rancour round their narrowing path.
Towns there are choked with desperate men,
Scrap-iron gluts the sidings here:
Iron and men they mould for war,
But in their death that war will end.
From the gashed hills of desolation
Our life-blood springs to liberty,
And in the callous eyes we see
The landscape of their dissolution.
Sex-Crime
For one, the sudden fantastic grimace
Above, the red clown’s-grin ripping the chalk sad sky,
Hailstones hatched out of midsummer, a face
Blanched with love’s vile reversal.
The spirit died
First – such blank amazement took away its breath,
And let the body cry
Through the short scuffle and infamy of death.
For the other, who knows what nice proportion of loathing
And lust conjured the deep devil, created
That chance of incandescence? Figures here prove nothing.
One step took him through the roaring waterfall
That closed like a bead-curtain, left him alone with the writhing
Of what he loved or hated.
His hands leapt out: they took vengeance for all
Denials and soft answers. There was one who said
Long since, ‘rough play will end in tears’. There was Cain
In the picture-book. Forgotten. Here is one dead,
And one could never be whole again.
The news
Broke a Sunday inertia: ring after ring
Across that smug mirror went echoing
And fainting out to the dim margins of incredulity.
A few raw souls accuse
Themselves of this felony and find not guilty –
Acquitted on a mere alibi or technical point.
Most see it as an island eruption, viewed
From the safe continent; not dreaming the same fire pent
Within their clay that warps
The night with fluent alarm, their own wrath spewed
Through the red craters of that undistinguished corpse.
All that has reached them is the seismic thrill:
The ornaments vibrate on the shelf; then they are still.
Snugly we settle down
Into our velvet and legitimate bed,
While news-sheets are yet falling all over the town
Like a white ash. Falling on one dead
And one can never be whole again.
You watch him
Pulpited in the dock, preaching repentance
While the two professionals in fancy dress
Manœuvre formally to score off him or catch him.
But grief has her conventions –
The opaque mask of misery will confess
Nothing, nor plead moving extenuations.
But you who crowd the court-room, will you never be called
To witness for the defence?
Accomplices,
All of you, now – though now is still too late –
Bring on the missing evidence! Reveal the coiled
Venom, the curse that needs
Only a touch to be articulate.
You, Judge, strip off! Show us the abscess boiling
Beneath your scarlet. Oh point, someone, to where it spreads
On every hand – the red, collusive stain …
All too well you have done your work: for one is dead,
And the other will not be whole again.
The Bells that Signed
The bells that signed a conqueror in
Or franked the lovers’ bed, now mean
Nothing more heavenly than their
Own impulse and recoil of air.
But still at eve, when the wind swells
Out of the west, those rocking bells
Buoy up the sunken light, or mark
What rots unfathomed in the dark.
Broods the stone-lipped conqueror still
Abject upon his iron hill,
And lovers in the naked beds
Cry for more than maidenheads.
A Happy View
… So take a happy view –
This lawn graced with the candle-flames of crocus,
Frail-handed girls under the flowering chestnut,
Or anything will do
That time takes back before it seems untrue:
And, if the truth were told,
You’d count it luck, perceiving in what shallow
Crevices and few crumbling grains of comfort
Man’s joy will seed, his cold
And hardy fingers find an eagle’s hold.
Overtures to Death
1
For us, born into a world
Of fledged, instinctive trees,
Of lengthening days, snowfall at Christmas
And sentried palaces,
You were the one our parents
Could not forget or forgive –
A remittance man, a very very
Distant relative.
We read your name in the family
Bible. It was tabu
At meals and lessons, but in church sometimes
They seemed to be praying for you.
You lived overseas, we gathered:
And often lying safe
In bed we thought of you, hearing the indrawn
Breath of the outcast surf.
Later we heard them saying
You had done well in the War.
And, though you never came home to us,
We saw your name everywhere.
When home grew unsympathetic,
You were all the rage for a while –
The favourite uncle with the blank-cheque-book
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br /> And the understanding smile.
Some of us went to look for you
In aeroplanes and fast cars:
Some tried the hospitals, some took to vice,
Others consulted the stars.
But now, sir, that you may be going
To visit us any night,
We watch the french windows, picturing you
In rather a different light.
The house, we perceive, is shabby,
There’s dry-rot in the wood:
It’s a poor welcome and it won’t keep you out
And we wish we had been good.
But there’s no time now for spring-cleaning
Or mending the broken lock.
We are here in the shrouded drawing-room till
Your first, your final knock.
2
When all the sky is skimming
And lovers frisk in the hay,
When it’s easy forgiving the dead or the living,
He is not so far away.
When love’s hands are too hot, too cold,
And justice turns a deaf ear,
When springs congeal and the skies are sealed,
We know that he is near.
Now here was a property, on all sides
Considered quite imposing:
Take a good look round at house and grounds –
The mortgage is foreclosing.
Now Death he is the bailiff
And he sits in our best room
Appraising chintz and ornaments
And the child in the womb.
We were not shysters or loonies,
Our spirit was up to proof:
Simpler far is the reason for our
Notice to quit this roof.
We paid for our lease and rule of life
In hard cash; and one day
The news got through to you-know-who
That we’d ceased to pay our way.
Oh what will happen to our dear sons,
Our dreams of pensioned ease?
They are downed and shredded for the wind we dreaded
Worries the blossom trees.
Oh Death he is the bailiff
And his men wait outside:
We shall sleep well in our handsome shell
While he auctions away our pride.
3
Complete Poems Page 20
