Complete Poems
Page 23
Among the low pastures –
In my crystal read
Your real wish and features:
May no accident
Of flood or mist be flawing
The chaste, prophetic reed,
The child-face stream’s flowing –
Says winding Trent
Among the low pastures.
Say the three cloud-maidens
Over the soiled valley –
To reproach you we rise
Wind-flushed and early:
The mist that maddens,
The clumsy floods that hurt
Innocence, all arise
Out of your shallow heart –
Say the three cloud-maidens
Over the soiled valley.
Behold the Swan
Behold the swan
Riding at her image, anchored there
Complacent, a water-lily upon
The ornamental water:
Queen of the mute October air,
She broods in that unbroken
Reverie of reed and water.
Now from the stricken
Pool she hoists and flurries,
And passes overhead
In hoarse, expressive flight:
Her wings bear hard
On the vibrant air: unhurried
The threat and pulse of wings, the throat
Levelled towards the horizon, see –
They are prophecy.
Song
It was not far through the pinewoods
That day to the lodge gate,
But far enough for the wind to phrase
My ten-year-long regret.
It was not far by the cornfield,
The tall ears looked alive:
But my heart, like corn, was broken for
A harvest I could not have.
From husk of words unspoken
I’ll winnow a ripe seed:
From woods where love was shy to trespass
I’ll learn the airs I need.
Oh here and unlamenting
Her graceful ghost shall shine –
In the heart mature as fruited fields,
The singing words of pine.
The Escapist
Before a rumour stirred, he fled the country
Preferring blank disgrace to any gesture
That could wipe out his failure with himself.
A warmer man no doubt had realized
His assets in our buoyant love, and taken
Some bonds to gild an unromantic exile.
Before their first reproach could reach his ears,
He had set up a private court, accepted
Full responsibility, and passed judgement.
The man whom later they reviled because
He would not face their music, was already
Self-flayed and branded in his heart for ever.
Before the story broke, he had sat down
To write it out, determined that no vestige
Of guilt be missed, no tiniest false inflection
Of heroism creep in to justify
The ugly tale. They said he was too proud to
Trust other hands even with his dishonour.
Before you heap quick-lime upon that felon
Memory, think how nothing you can do
Could touch his self-vindictiveness, and nothing
You did to cure the cowardice it avenged for.
Say, if you like, escape was in his blood –
Escape’s as good a word as any other.
Passage from Childhood
His earliest memory, the mood
Fingered and frail as maidenhair,
Was this – a china cup somewhere
In a green, deep wood.
He lives to find again somewhere
That wood, that homely cup; to taste all
Its chill, imagined dews; to dare
The dangerous crystal.
Who can say what misfeatured elf
First led him into that lifelong
Passage of mirrors where, so young,
He saw himself
Balanced as Blondin, more headstrong
Than baby Hercules, rare as a one-
Cent British Guiana, above the wrong
And common run?
He knew the secrecy of squirrels,
The foolish doves’ antiphony,
And what wrens fear. He was gun-shy,
Hating all quarrels.
Life was a hostile land to spy,
Full of questions he dared not ask
Lest the answer in mockery
Or worse unmask.
Quick to injustice, quick he grew
This hermit and contorted shell.
Self-pity like a thin rain fell,
Fouling the view:
Then tree-trunks seemed wet roots of hell,
Wren or catkin might turn vicious,
The dandelion clock could tell
Nothing auspicious.
No exile has ever looked so glum
With the pines fretful overhead,
Yet he felt at home in the gothic glade –
More than at home.
You will forgive him that he played
Bumble-puppy on the small mossed lawn
All by himself for hours, afraid
Of being born.
Lying awake one night, he saw
Eternity stretched like a howl of pain:
He was tiny and terrible, a new pin
On a glacier’s floor.
Very few they are who have lain
With eternity and lived to tell it:
There’s a secret process in his brain
And he cannot sell it.
Now, beyond reach of sense or reason,
His life walks in a glacial sleep
For ever, since he drank that cup
And found it poison.
He’s one more ghost, engaged to keep
Eternity’s long hours and mewed
Up in live flesh with no escape
From solitude.
Self-Criticism and Answer
It was always so, always –
My too meticulous words
Mocked by the unhinged cries
Of playground, mouse or gull,
By throats of nestling birds
Like bells upturned in a peal –
All that has innocence
To praise and far to fall.
I fear this careful art
Would never storm the sense:
Its agonies are but the eager
Retching of an empty heart;
It never was possessed
By divine incontinence,
And for him whom that eygre1
Sweeps not, silence were best.
Your politicians pray silence
For the ribald trumpeter,
The falsetto crook, the twitching
Unappeasable dictator.
For any else you should be pleased
To hold your tongue: but Satan
Himself would disown his teaching
And turn to spit on these.
When madmen play the piper
And knaves call the tune,
Honesty’s a right passion –
She must call to her own.
Let yours be the start and stir
Of a flooding indignation
That channels the dry heart deeper
And sings through the dry bone.
1938
1 A tidal wave of unusual height caused by the rushing of the tide up a narrowing estuary.
WORD OVER ALL
TO ROSAMOND LEHMANN
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world.
WALT WHITMAN
PART ONE
The Lighted House
One
night they saw the big house, some time untenanted
But for its hand-to-mouth recluse, room after room
Light up, as when Primavera herself has spirited
A procession of crocuses out of their winter tomb.
Revels unearthly are going forward, one did remark –
He has conjured a thing of air or fire for his crazed delight:
Another said, It is only a traveller lost in the dark
He welcomes for mercy’s sake. Each, in a way, was right.
You were the magic answer, the sprite fire-fingered who came
To lighten my heart, my house, my heirlooms; you are the wax
That melts at my touch and still supports my prodigal flame:
But you were also the dead-beat traveller out of the storm
Returned to yourself by almost obliterated tracks,
Peeling off fear after fear, revealing love’s true form.
The Album
I see you, a child
In a garden sheltered for buds and playtime,
Listening as if beguiled
By a fancy beyond your years and the flowering maytime.
The print is faded: soon there will be
No trace of that pose enthralling,
Nor visible echo of my voice distantly calling
‘Wait! Wait for me!’
Then I turn the page
To a girl who stands like a questioning iris
By the waterside, at an age
That asks every mirror to tell what the heart’s desire is.
The answer she finds in that oracle stream
Only time could affirm or disprove,
Yet I wish I was there to venture a warning, ‘Love
Is not what you dream.’
Next, you appear
As if garlands of wild felicity crowned you –
Courted, caressed, you wear
Like immortelles the lovers and friends around you.
‘They will not last you, rain or shine,
They are but straws and shadows,’
I cry: ‘Give not to those charming desperadoes
What was made to be mine.’
One picture is missing –
The last. It would show me a tree stripped bare
By intemperate gales, her amazing
Noonday of blossom spoilt which promised so fair.
Yet, scanning those scenes at your heyday taken,
I tremble, as one who must view
In the crystal a doom he could never deflect – yes, I too
Am fruitlessly shaken.
I close the book;
But the past slides out of its leaves to haunt me
And it seems, wherever I look,
Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.
Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours,
Beside me – ‘All you love most there
Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed there
Has grown to be yours.’
The Hunter’s Game
I am an arrow, I am a bow –
The bow sings fierce and deep,
The arrow’s tipped with cruel flame,
Feathered with passionate sleep.
When you play the hunter’s game,
I am your arrow and your bow.
Only my love can bend the bow:
When the bow leaps to kill
And darkly as a nerve of night
The string throbs out, you are the skill
That drew the impulsive bowstring tight,
The hand that bent the bow.
What is the air that floats my arrow
Smoothly aloft and bears
It up to the sun, down to the dark?
You are the wanton airs
Which shape and hold its shining arc,
The innocent air that flights the arrow.
What is the victim of this arrow
That flies so fast and true?
Deep in the close, fawn-dappled glade,
Pierced by a shaft of light are you
The huntress, white and smiling, laid –
The victim of your arrow.
Departure in the Dark
Nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal
As leaving a place
In a winter morning’s dark, the air on his face
Unkind as the touch of sweating metal:
Simple goodbyes to children or friends become
A felon’s numb
Farewell, and love that was a warm, a meeting place –
Love is the suicide’s grave under the nettles.
Gloomed and clemmed as if by an imminent ice-age
Lies the dear world
Of your street-strolling, field-faring. The senses, curled
At the dead end of a shrinking passage,
Care not if close the inveterate hunters creep,
And memories sleep
Like mammoths in lost caves. Drear, extinct is the world,
And has no voice for consolation or presage.
There is always something at such times of the passover,
When the dazed heart
Beats for it knows not what, whether you part
From home or prison, acquaintance or lover –
Something wrong with the time-table, something unreal
In the scrambled meal
And the bag ready packed by the door, as though the heart
Has gone ahead, or is staying here for ever.
No doubt for the Israelites that early morning
It was hard to be sure
If home were prison or prison home: the desire
Going forth meets the desire returning.
This land, that had cut their pride down to the bone
Was now their own
By ancient deeds of sorrow. Beyond, there was nothing sure
But a desert of freedom to quench their fugitive yearnings.
At this blind hour the heart is informed of nature’s
Ruling that man
Should be nowhere a more tenacious settler than
Among wry thorns and ruins, yet nurture
A seed of discontent in his ripest ease.
There’s a kind of release
And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man
And will be, even to the last of his dark departures.
Cornet Solo
Thirty years ago lying awake,
Lying awake
In London at night when childhood barred me
From livelier pastimes, I’d hear a street-band break
Into old favourites – ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘Killarney’
Or ‘Angels Guard Thee’.
That was the music for such an hour –
A deciduous hour
Of leaf-wan drizzle, of solitude
And gaslight bronzing the gloom like an autumn flower –
The time and music for a boy imbrued
With the pensive mood.
I could have lain for hours together,
Sweet hours together,
Listening to the cornet’s cry
Down wet streets gleaming like patent leather
Where beauties jaunted in cabs to their revelry,
Jewelled and spry.
Plaintive its melody rose or waned
Like an autumn wind
Blowing the rain on beds of aster,
On man’s last bed: mournful and proud it complained
As a woman who dreams of the charms that graced her,
In young days graced her.
Strange how those yearning airs could sweeten
And still enlighten
The hours when solitude gave me her breast.
Strange they could tell a mere child how hearts may beat in
The self-same tune for the once-possessed
And the unpossessed.
Last night, when I heard a cornet’s strain,
It seemed a refrain
Wafted from t
hirty years back – so remote an
Echo it bore: but I felt again
The prophetic mood of a child, too long forgotten,
Too lightly forgotten.
O Dreams, O Destinations
1
For infants time is like a humming shell
Heard between sleep and sleep, wherein the shores
Foam-fringed, wind-fluted of the strange earth dwell
And the sea’s cavernous hunger faintly roars.
It is the humming pole of summer lanes
Whose sound quivers like heart-haze endlessly
Over the corn, over the poppied plains –
An emanation from the earth or sky.
Faintly they hear, through the womb’s lingering haze,
A rumour of that sea to which they are born:
They hear the ringing pole of summer days,
But need not know what hungers for the corn.
They are the lisping rushes in a stream –
Grace-notes of a profound, legato dream.
2
Children look down upon the morning-grey
Tissue of mist that veils a valley’s lap:
Their fingers itch to tear it and unwrap
The flags, the roundabouts, the gala day.
They watch the spring rise inexhaustibly –
A breathing thread out of the eddied sand,
Sufficient to their day: but half their mind
Is on the sailed and glittering estuary.
Fondly we wish their mist might never break,
Knowing it hides so much that best were hidden:
We’d chain them by the spring, lest it should broaden
For them into a quicksand and a wreck.
But they slip through our fingers like the source,
Like mist, like time that has flagged out their course.
3
That was the fatal move, the ruination
Of innocence so innocently begun,
When in the lawless orchard of creation
The child left this fruit for that rosier one.
Reaching towards the far thing, we begin it;
Looking beyond, or backward, more and more
We grow unfaithful to the unique minute
Till, from neglect, its features stale and blur.
Fish, bird or beast was never thus unfaithful –
Man only casts the image of his joys
Beyond his senses’ reach; and by this fateful
Act, he confirms the ambiguous power of choice.