Sir, I’d not make so bold as to lack all
Respect for one whose prowess in the bed and the battlefield
Have excited (and justly) universal comment.
Nor could I, if I wished –
Who, in the small hours and the talkative
Reception, have felt you ticking within my belly –
Pretend there’s any worse ordeal to come.
You and I, my friend, are antagonists
And the fight’s framed: for this I blame not you
But the absentee promoter. If I seem to treat
Your titles, stamina, skill with levity,
Call it the rat’s bad-loser snarl, the madman
Humouring the two doctors, the point declaring
War on the calm circumference. …
You have appeared to us in many guises –
Pale priest, black camel, the bemedalled sergeant
Of general conscription, a bugbear to affright
Second childhood, or the curtain drawn so deftly
To show that diamond-tiered tree
Evergreen with bliss for all good boys and girls.
You have been called the Leveller: but little
That meant to the aristos you transferred
Straight from one rotten borough to another;
Nor can our state, hollow and cold as theirs,
Much envy the drab democrats of the grave.
Happiest, in our nervous time, who name you
Peace. You are the peace that millions die for.
If there’s a moment’s solace, laid like the bloom
Of dew upon our meadows; if honeysuckle
Clings to its sweetened hour, and the appealing
Beauty of flesh makes time falter in his stride;
If anywhere love-lips, flower-flaunt, crimson of cloud-crest
With flames impassioned hold off the pacing shadows –
You can rest indulgent: soon enough
They shall be all, all of your complexion.
I grant you the last word. But what of these –
The criminal agents of a dying will
Who, frantic with defeat, conspire to force your
Earlier intervention?
It is they, your damned auxiliaries, must answer
For the self-slain in the foodless, fireless room,
For stunted hearts that droop by our olive-green
Canals, the blossom of children untimely shattered
By their crazed, random fire, and the fear like a black frost
Foreshortening our prospect, metallic on our tongues.
If I am too familiar with you, sir,
It is that these have brought you into contempt.
You are in nature. These are most unnatural.
We shall desire your peace in our own time:
But with those, your free-lance and officious gunmen,
Our war is life itself and shall not fail.
4
Forgive us, that we ever thought
You could with innocence be bought,
Or, puffed with queasy power, have tried
Your register to override.
Such diamond-faced and equal laws
Allow no chink or saving clause:
Besotted may-fly, bobbish wren
Count in your books as much as men.
No North-West Passage can be found
To sail those freezing capes around,
Nor no smooth by-pass ever laid
Shall that metropolis evade.
The tampering hand, the jealous eye
That overlooked our infancy –
Forgiven soon, they sank their trust
And our reproach into the dust.
We also, whom a bawdy spring
Tempted to order everything,
Shall shrink beneath your first caress
Into a modest nothingness.
The meshes of the imperious blood,
The wind-flown tower, the poet’s word
Can catch no more than a weak sigh
And ghost of immortality.
O lord of leisure, since we know
Your image we shall ne’er outgrow,
Teach us the value of our stay
Lest we insult the living clay.
This clay that binds the roots of man
And firmly foots his flying span –
Only this clay can voice, invest,
Measure and frame our mortal best.
O lord of night, bid us beware
The wistful ghost that speaks us fair:
Once let him in – he clots the veins
And makes a still-birth of our pains.
Now we at last have crossed the line
Where’s earth’s exuberant fields begin,
That green illusion in the sky
Born of our desert years can die.
No longer let predestined need
Cramp our design, or hunger breed
Its windy dreams, or life distil
Rare personal good from common ill.
Lord of us all, now it is true
That we are lords of all but you,
Teach us the order of our day
Lest we deface the honoured clay.
5
The sun came out in April,
The hawthorn in May:
We thought the year, like other years,
Would go the Christmas way.
In June we picked the clover,
And sea-shells in July:
There was no silence at the door,
No word from the sky.
A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray.
Where he had been, was only
An effigy on a bed
To ask us searching questions or
Hear what we’d left unsaid.
Only that stained parchment
Set out what he had been –
A face we might have learned better,
But now must read unseen.
Thus he resigned his interest
And claims, all in a breath,
Leaving us the long office work
And winding-up of death:
The ordinary anguish,
The stairs, the awkward turn,
The bearers’ hats like black mushrooms
Placed upon the lawn.
As a migrant remembers
The sting and warmth of home,
As the fruit bears out the blossom’s word,
We remember him.
He loved the sun in April,
The hawthorn in May:
Our tree will not light up for him
Another Christmas Day.
6
It is not you I fear, but the humiliations
You mercifully use to deaden grief –
The downward graph of natural joys,
Imagination’s slump, the blunted ear.
I hate this cold and politic self-defence
Of hardening arteries and nerves
Grown dull with time-serving. I see that the heart lives
By self-betrayal, by circumspection is killed.
That boy, whose glance makes heaven open and edges
Each dawning pain with gold, must learn to disbelieve:
The wildfire lust of the eyes will gutter down
To age’s dim recalcitrance.
Have we not seen how quick this young girl’s thoughts,
Wayward and burning as a charm of goldfinches
Alarmed from thistle-tops, turn into
Spite or a cupboard love or clipped routine?
Nearing the watershed and the difficult passes,
Man wraps up closer against the chill
In his familiar habits; and at the top
Pauses, seeing your kingdom like a net beneath him spread.
Some climbed to this momentous peak of the world
And facing the horizon – th
at notorious pure woman
Who lures to cheat the last embrace
Hurled themselves down upon an easier doom.
One the rare air made dizzy renounced
Earth, and the avalanche took him at his word:
One wooed perfection – he’s bedded deep in the glacier, perfect
And null, the prince and image of despair.
The best, neither hoarding nor squandering
The radiant flesh and the receptive
Spirit, stepped on together in the rhythm of comrades who
Have found a route on earth’s true reckoning based.
They have not known the false humility,
The shamming-dead of the senses beneath your hunter’s hand;
But life’s green standards they’ve advanced
To the limit of your salt unyielding zone.
7
For us, born into a still
Unsweetened world, of sparse
Breathing-room, alleys brackish as hell’s pit
And heaven-accusing spires,
You were never far nor fable,
Judgement nor happy end:
We have come to think of you, mister, as
Almost the family friend.
Our kiddies play tag with you often
Among the tornado wheels;
Through fevered nights you sit up with them,
You serve their little meals.
You lean with us at street-corners,
We have met you in the mine;
Your eyes are the foundry’s glare, you beckon
From the snake-tooth, sly machine.
Low in the flooded engine room,
High on the yawing steeple –
Wherever we are, we begin to fancy
That we’re your chosen people.
They came to us with charity,
They came to us with whips,
They came with chains behind their back
And freedom on their lips:
Castle and field and city –
Ours is a noble land,
Let us work for its fame together, they said;
But we don’t quite understand.
For they took the land and the credit,
Took virtue and double-crossed her;
They left us the scrag-end of the luck
And the brunt of their disaster.
And now like horses they fidget
Smelling death in the air:
But we are your chosen people, and
We’ve little to lose or fear.
When the time comes for a clearance,
When light brims over the hill,
Mister, you can rely on us
To execute your will.
When they have Lost
When they have lost the little that they looked for,
The poor allotment of ease, custom, fame:
When the consuming star their fathers worked for
Has guttered into death, a fatuous flame:
When love’s a cripple, faith a bed-time story,
Hope eats her heart out and peace walks on knives,
And suffering men cry an end to this sorry
World of whose children want alone still thrives:
Then shall the mounting stages of oppression
Like mazed and makeshift scaffolding torn down
Reveal his unexampled, best creation –
The shape of man’s necessity full-grown.
Built from their bone, I see a power-house stand
To warm men’s hearts again and light the land.
In the Heart of Contemplation
In the heart of contemplation –
Admiring, say, the frost-flowers of the white lilac,
Or lark’s song busily sifting like sand-crystals
Through the pleased hourglass an afternoon of summer,
Or your beauty, dearer to me than these –
Discreetly a whisper in the ear,
The glance of one passing my window recall me
From lark, lilac, you, grown suddenly strangers.
In the plump and pastoral valley
Of a leisure time, among the trees like seabirds
Asleep on a glass calm, one shadow moves –
The sly reminder of the forgotten appointment.
All the shining pleasures, born to be innocent,
Grow dark with a truant’s guilt:
The day’s high heart falls flat, the oaks tremble,
And the shadow sliding over your face divides us.
In the act of decision only,
In the hearts cleared for action like lovers naked
For love, this shadow vanishes: there alone
There is nothing between our lives for it to thrive on.
You and I with lilac, lark and oak-leafed
Valley are bound together
As in the astounded clarity before death.
Nothing is innocent now but to act for life’s sake.
Sonnet for a Political Worker
Is this what wears you out – having to weigh
One mote against another, the time spent
Fitting each thumbed and jig-saw argument
Into a pattern clear to you as day?
Boredom, the dull repetitive delay,
Opponents’ tricky call, the discontent
Of friends, seem to deny what history meant
When first she showed her hand for you to play.
Do you not see that history’s high tension
Must so be broken down to each man’s need
And his frail filaments, that it may feed
Not blast all patience, love and warm invention?
On lines beyond your single comprehension
The circuit and full day of power proceed.
Questions
How long will you keep this pose of self-confessed
And aspen hesitation
Dithering on the brink, obsessed
Immobilized by the feminine fascination
Of an image all your own,
Or doubting which is shadow, which is bone?
Will you wait womanish, while the flattering stream
Glosses your faults away?
Or would you find within that dream
Courage to break the dream, wisdom to say
That wisdom is not there?
Or is it simply the first shock you fear?
Do you need the horn in your ear, the hounds at your heel,
Gadflies to sting you sore,
The lightning’s angry feint, and all
The horizon clouds boiling like lead, before
You’ll risk your javelin dive
And pierce reflection’s heart, and come alive?
The Volunteer
Tell them in England, if they ask
What brought us to these wars,
To this plateau beneath the night’s
Grave manifold of stars –
It was not fraud or foolishness,
Glory, revenge, or pay:
We came because our open eyes
Could see no other way.
There was no other way to keep
Man’s flickering truth alight:
These stars will witness that our course
Burned briefer, not less bright.
Beyond the wasted olive-groves,
The furthest lift of land,
There calls a country that was ours
And here shall be regained.
Shine to us, memoried and real,
Green-water-silken meads:
Rivers of home, refresh our path
Whom here your influence leads.
Here in a parched and stranger place
We fight for England free,
The good our fathers won for her,
The land they hoped to see.
The Nabara1
They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender.2
PHASE ONE
Freedom is more
than a word, more than the base coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad
Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made
In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage
But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.
Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:
She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird
To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:
Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes
The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.
I see man’s heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.
As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone
Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one –
So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation
To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.
Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting
For those I tell of – men used to the tolerable joy and hurt
Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;
But history’s hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting
Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.
The year, Nineteen-thirty-seven: month, March: the men, descendants
Of those Iberian fathers, the inquiring ones who would go
Wherever the sea-ways led: a pacific people, slow
To feel ambition, loving their laws and their independence –
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Fishermen, with no guile outside their craft, they had weathered
Often the sierra-ranked Biscayan surges, the wet
Fog of the Newfoundland Banks: they were fond of pelota: they met
No game beyond their skill as they swept the sea together,
Until the morning they found the leviathan in their net.
Government trawlers Nabara, Guipuzkoa, Bizkaya,
Donostia, escorting across blockaded seas
Galdames with her cargo of nickel and refugees
From Bayonne to Bilbao, while the crest of war curled higher
Inland over the glacial valleys, the ancient ease.
On the morning of March the fifth, a chill North-Wester fanned them,
Fogging the glassy waves: what uncharted doom lay low
There in the fog athwart their course, they could not know:
Stout were the armed trawlers, redoubtable those who manned them –
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Complete Poems Page 21
