She was like a spoilt girl in ermine:
She tipped a negligent wing to some
And treated the rest as vermin.
Now we have seen the way she goes on,
Our self-possession wavers:
We’d fear a hanging judge far less than
That bitch’s casual favours.
Airmen Broadcast
Speak for the air, your element, you hunters
Who range across the ribbed and shifting sky:
Speak for whatever gives you mastery –
Wings that bear out your purpose, quick-responsive
Fingers, a fighting heart, a kestrel’s eye.
Speak of the rough and tumble in the blue,
The mast-high run, the flak, the battering gales:
You that, until the life you love prevails,
Must follow death’s impersonal vocation –
Speak from the air, and tell your hunters’ tales.
Lidice
Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom.
WALT WHITMAN
Cry to us, murdered village. While your grave
Aches raw on history, make us understand
What freedom asks of us. Strengthen our hand
Against the arrogant dogmas that deprave
And have no proof but death at their command.
Must the innocent bleed for ever to remedy
These fanatic fits that tear mankind apart?
The pangs we felt from your atrocious hurt
Promise a time when even the killer shall see
His sword is aimed at his own naked heart.
Ode to Fear
The lustre bowl of the sky
Sounds and sustains
A throbbing cello-drone of planes.
Entombed beneath this caving liberty,
We note how doom endorses
Our devious fraud and folly where skeins
Of wild geese flew direct on visionary courses.
Now Fear has come again
To live with us
In poisoned intimacy like pus,
Hourly extending the area of our pain,
It seems I must make the most
Of fever’s pulsing dreams and thus
Live to allay this evil or dying lay its ghost.
Fear has so many symptoms –
Planes throbbing above
Like headache, rumours that glibly move
Along the bloodstream, sleep’s prophetic phantoms
Condemning what we have built,
Heartburn anxiety for those we love –
And all, yes all, are proof of an endemic guilt.
The bones, the stalwart spine,
The legs like bastions,
The nerves, the heart’s natural combustions,
The head that hives our active thoughts – all pine,
Are quenched or paralysed
When Fear puts unexpected questions
And makes the heroic body freeze like a beast surprised.
The sap will rise anew in
Both man and brute:
Wild virtues even now can shoot
From the reviled interstices of ruin.
But oh, what drug, what knife
Can wither up our guilt at the root,
Cure our discoloured days and cleanse the blood of life?
Today, I can but record
In truth and patience
This high delirium of nations
And hold to it the reflecting, fragile word.
Come to my heart then, Fear,
With all your linked humiliations,
As wild geese flight and settle on a submissive mere.
The Dead
They lie in the sunday street
Like effigies thrown down after a fête
Among the bare-faced houses frankly yawning revulsion,
Fag-ends of fires, litter of rubble, stale
Confetti-sprinkle of blood. Was it defeat
With them, or triumph? Purification
Or All Fools’ Day? On this they remain silent.
Their eyes are closed to honour and hate.
We cannot blame the great
Alone – the mad, the calculating or effete
Rulers. Whatever grotesque scuffle and piercing
Indignant orgasm of pain took them,
All that enforced activity of death
Did answer and compensate
Some voluntary inaction, soft option, dream retreat.
Each man died for the sins of a whole world:
For the ant’s self-abdication, the fat-stock’s patience
Are sweet goodbye to human nations.
Still, they have made us eat
Our knowing words, who rose and paid
The bill for the whole party with their uncounted courage.
And if they chose the dearer consolations
Of living – the bar, the dog race, the discreet
Establishment – and let Karl Marx and Freud go hang,
Now they are dead, who can dispute their choice?
Not I, nor even Fate.
Reconciliation
All day beside the shattered tank he’d lain
Like a limp creature hacked out of its shell,
Now shrivelling on the desert’s grid,
Now floating above a sharp-set ridge of pain.
There came a roar, like water, in his ear.
The mortal dust was laid. He seemed to be lying
In a cool coffin of stone walls,
While memory slid towards a plunging weir.
The time that was, the time that might have been
Find in this shell of stone a chance to kiss
Before they part eternally:
He feels a world without, a world within
Wrestle like old antagonists, until each is
Balancing each. Then, in a heavenly calm,
The lock gates open, and beyond
Appear the argent, swan-assemblied reaches.
Will it be so again?
Will it be so again
That the brave, the gifted are lost from view,
And empty, scheming men
Are left in peace their lunatic age to renew?
Will it be so again?
Must it be always so
That the best are chosen to fall and sleep
Like seeds, and we too slow
In claiming the earth they quicken, and the old usurpers reap
What they could not sow?
Will it be so again –
The jungle code and the hypocrite gesture?
A poppy wreath for the slain
And a cut-throat world for the living? that stale imposture
Played on us once again?
Will it be as before –
Peace, with no heart or mind to ensue it,
Guttering down to war
Like a libertine to his grave? We should not be surprised: we knew it
Happen before.
Shall it be so again?
Call not upon the glorious dead
To be your witnesses then.
The living alone can nail to their promise the ones who said
It shall not be so again.
PART THREE
The Innocent
A forward child, a sullen boy,
My living image in the pool,
The glass that made me look a fool –
He was my judgement and my joy.
The bells that chimed above the lake,
The swans asleep in evening’s eye,
Bright transfers pressed on memory
From him their gloss and anguish take.
When I was desolate, he came
A wizard way to charm my toys:
But when he heard a stranger’s voice
He broke the toys, I bore the shame.
I built a house of crystal tears
Amid the myrtles for my friend:
He said, no man has ever f
eigned
Or kept the lustre of my years.
Later, a girl and I descried
His shadow on the fern-flecked hill,
His double near our bed: and still
The more I lived, the more he died.
Now a revenant slips between
The fine-meshed minutes of the clock
To weep the time we lost and mock
All that my desperate ditties mean.
One and One
I remember, as if it were yesterday,
Watching that girl from the village lay
The fire in a room where sunlight poured,
And seeing, in the annexe beyond, M. play
A prelude of Bach on his harpischord.
I can see his face now, heavy and numb
With resignation to the powers that come
At his touch meticulous, smooth as satin,
Firm as hammers: I can hear the air thrum
With notes like sun-motes in a twinkling pattern.
Her task there fetched from a girl the innate
Tingling response of glass to a note:
She fitted the moment, too, like a glove,
Who deft and submissive knelt by the grate
Bowed as if in the labour of love.
Their orbits touched not: but the pure submission
Of each gave value and definition
To a snapshot printed in that morning’s sun.
From any odd corner we may start a vision
Proving that one and one make One.
Windy Day in August
Over the vale, the sunburnt fields
A wind from the sea like as streamer unreels:
Dust leaps up, apples thud down,
The river’s caught between a smile and a frown.
An inn-sign swinging, swinging to the wind,
Whines and whinges like a dog confined,
Round his paddock gallops the colt,
Dinghies at moorings curvet and jolt.
Sunlight and shadow in the copse play tig,
While the wallowing clouds talk big
About their travels, and thistledown blows
Ghosting above the rank hedgerows.
Cornfield, orchard and fernland hail
Each other, waving from hill to hill:
They change their colours from morn to night
In play with the lissom, engaging light.
The wind roars endlessly past my ears,
Racing my heart as in earlier years.
Here and everywhere, then and now
Earth moves like a wanton, breathes like a vow.
After the Storm
Have you seen clouds drifting across a night sky
After storm’s blown out, when the wind that urged them
Lies asleep elsewhere and the earth is buoyed in
Moon-locked oblivion?
Slow the clouds march: only the moon is wakeful,
Watching them trail past in their brown battalions
Spent as storm-troops after defeat or triumph
Deeply indifferent.
No, not storm-troops now, but as crowds that wander
Vague and sluggish down the disordered boulevardes
After a football match or a coronation,
Riot or lynching.
Done the act which tied them together, all its
Ebbing excitement leaves the heart a quicksand:
So betrayed by passion they move, remembering
Each his aloneness.
Clouds are not men. Yet, if I saw men move like
Clouds the wind inspires and abandons, I should
Feel that wakeful sympathy, feel the moon’s wild
Ache for oblivion.
Fame
Spurred towards horizons
Beyond the common round,
Trained in ambition’s cruellest ring,
Their powers grew muscle-bound
Like those equestrian public statues
Pawing the sky, that rear
And snort with furious nostrils
Nobly, and get nowhere:
A target for birds, a suntrap
For the elderly or infirm,
Children bowl hoops around them, a plaque
Nails them to their fame,
Whose strenuous flanks the sunlight grooms
While sculptured hyacinths
Breathe an odour of worship
Bedded below their plinths.
Fine for the public statues amid
Those noonday crowds: but when
Nights falls and the park is emptied,
What do they think of then?
Does expectation still cast
Its overweening shadow
Onwards? Or do they look back in grief
To a foal of the green meadow? –
That foal with its mane like a carpet-fringe
And its hobbledehoy hooves;
That colt of the restive eye
Whose breast in amazement heaves –
Or, clamped to the sky in a tortured
Pose of the haute école,
Have they lost all kinship, horse and rider,
With the dead, the impatient foal?
Jig
That winter love spoke and we raised no objection, at
Easter ’twas daisies all light and affectionate,
June sent us crazy for natural selection – not
Four traction-engines could tear us apart.
Autumn then coloured the map of our land.
Oaks shuddered and apples came ripe to the hand,
In the gap of the hills we played happily, happily,
Even the moon couldn’t tell us apart.
Grave winter drew near and said, ‘This will not do at all –
If you continue, I fear you will rue it all.’
So at the New Year we vowed to eschew it
Although we both knew it would break our heart.
But spring made hay of our good resolutions –
Lovers, you may be as wise as Confucians,
Yet once love betrays you he plays you and plays you
Life fishes for ever, so take it to heart.
Hornpipe
Now the peak of summer’s past, the sky is overcast
And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit:
Paler is the guelder since the day we first beheld her
In blush beside the elder drifting sweet, drifting sweet.
Oh quickly they fade – the sunny esplanade,
Speed-boats, wooden spades, and the dunes where we’ve lain:
Others will be lying amid the sea-pinks sighing
For love to be undying, and they’ll sigh in vain.
It’s hurrah for each night we have spent our love so lightly
And never dreamed there might be no more to spend at all.
It’s goodbye to every lover who thinks he’ll live in clover
All his life, for noon is over soon and night-dews fall.
If I could keep you there with the berries in your hair
And your lacy fingers fair as the may, sweet may,
I’d have no heart to do it, for to stay love is to rue it
And the harder we pursue it, the faster it’s away.
The Fault
After the light decision
Made by the blood in a moon-blanched lane,
Whatever weariness or contrition
May come, I could never see you plain;
No, never again
See you whose body I’m wed to
Distinct, but always dappled, enhanced
By a montage of all that moment led to –
Dunes where heat-haze and sea-pinks glanced,
The roads that danced
Ahead of our aimless car,
Scandal biting the dust behind us,
The feel of being on a luckier star,
Each quarrel that came like a night to blind us
And closer to bind us.
Others will journey over
Our hill up along this lane like a rift
Loaded with moon-gold, many a lover
Sleepwalking through the moon’s white drift,
Loved or bereft.
But for me it is love’s volcanic
Too fertile fault, and will mark always
The first shock of that yielding mood, where satanic
Bryony twines and frail flowers blaze
Through our tangled days.
The Rebuke
Down in the lost and April days
What lies we told, what lies we told!
Nakedness seemed the one disgrace,
And there’d be time enough to praise
The truth when we were old.
The irresponsible poets sung
What came into their head:
Time to pick and choose among
The bold profusions of our tongue
When we were dead, when we were dead.
Oh wild the words we uttered then
In woman’s ear, in woman’s ear,
Believing all we promised when
Each kiss created earth again
And every far was near.
Little we guessed, who spoke the word
Of hope and freedom high
Spontaneously as wind or bird
To crowds like cornfields still or stirred,
It was a lie, a heart-felt lie.
Now the years advance into
A calmer stream, a colder stream,
We doubt the flame that once we knew,
Heroic words sound all untrue
As love-lies in a dream.
Yet fools are the old who won’t be taught
Modesty by their youth:
That pandemonium of the heart,
That sensual arrogance did impart
A kind of truth, a kindling truth.
Where are the sparks at random sown,
The spendthrift fire, the holy fire?
Who cares a damn for truth that’s grown
Exhausted haggling for its own
And speaks without desire?
1943
POEMS 1943–1947
TO LAURIE LEE
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon …
THOMAS HARDY
Le vent se lève … il faut tenter de vivre!
PAUL VALÉRY
Complete Poems Page 25
