A step – no further.
Is it hard to go?
Ask the melting snow,
The eddying feather.
What can I take there?
Not a hank, not a hair.
What shall I leave behind?
Ask the hastening wind,
The fainting star.
Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.
Who will say farewell?
The beating bell.
Will anyone miss me?
That I dare not tell –
Quick, Rose, and kiss me.
1 The third stanza is on CDL’s tombstone in Dorset.
New Year’s Eve
ODE
The moon slides through a whey of cloud; the running
Cloud thins over the moon, and again curdles.
Milk of the word, flow!
Shine forth, my shadowed clay!
A five-bell peal stumbles up from the valley;
The midnight constellations mass their fire.
Aspire, my blindworm heart!
Arrogant heart, be humble!
The midnight constellations hold their fire,
The bells ring up to volley a new year in.
Now comes the zero between
Desire and resignation,
Between cast-iron past and plastic future;
But equally, haunters of this unnatural pause,
Remorse for what is to be,
Doubt of all that has passed.
Moon-floods heighten the valley with glimmerings like
The feel of a memory before it is born:
The stars burn to deliver
Their pregnant souls of the dying.
We are caught, all of us, in time’s fine net,
Walled up in time: yet still we seek a secret
Spring, a weak mesh, where we may
Break out and be immortal.
So conscience, need, imagination pierce
An arbitrary point between two years:
The fabric tears; but in truth
It is we, not time, who bleed.
We lament not one year only
Gone with its chance and change
Disavowed, its range of blessings unbought or unpaid for,
But all our time lost, profitless, misspent.
Through this pinprick, like life-blood,
The ghosts of time we killed
Spill out – an age coarse custom has buried alive,
And sightless hours, and pallor of weeks unquickened.
Cuckoophrase of children
In their green enchantment
Where slanting beams fall warm and cool as larksong –
A woodnote rill unheard through afterdays.
Unseen the sunburst Aprils
And the bloomed Octobers –
Oh, tremulous rivers danced by primula light!
Oh, blaze of marigold where love has been!
The holly fire unfelt,
The snowmaid left asleep,
The cheap, the rare joy thrown away half-eaten,
The nimbus round each truth-pang unacknowledged.
Unfelt, unseen, unheard
So much that would have ripened
An open heart, and left a sweet taste there
After its blossomy aura was dispelled.
But, if the fluent senses
So often are benumbed,
What has our fumbling virtue to look back on?
How much has it passed up, mishandled, ruined!
Tonight, as flyers stranded
On a mountain, the battery fading, we tap out
Into a snow-capped void our weakening
Vocations and desires.
Bound by the curse of man –
To live in his future, which is to live surely
In his own death – we endure the embrace of the present
But yearn for a being beyond us;
Beyond our powers and our time,
Behind the pinnacle stars, the horizon sleep,
Beneath the deepest kiss of heaven’s azure
And the roots of Atlantis flowers.
Into the blue we project
Our dreaming shadows. And is the hope forlorn
That in them we may be reborn, that our images
More masterful are, more true
Than we? The bells upclamouring
Like hungry beaks from a nest, the eyes that strain
To read the stars – vainly still they implore
Eternity to reveal
The virgin truths it is sworn
By its own laws to guard. … Then turn away
Before the star-scape blinds or the moon maddens.
Earth is your talent. Use it.
Ring bells for here and now.
Time’s your condition; and in time alone
May man, full grown, reach out over the void
A rapt, creator’s wing.
MEDITATION
At a junction of years I stand, with the stars palsied
And the bells stumbling o’er me;
My life a pinprick in time, and half a lifetime
At the very most before me.
The trembling stars, the cracked bells tongue in chorus,
‘Begone! It is better to go
Not when the going but the staying is good.’
I have suspected so
Often enough, looking down from a height of love
On the flats it momently crowned,
Looking up from the workaday, golden, orthodox level
To the bluffs and the terrors beyond.
But living becomes a habit, like any other
No easier to break than to sanction;
It numbs the sense and dissembles the earth’s raw features
With action drifted on action:
Till at last, as a child picking flowers near home, from flower to
Flower enticed, will find
Himself the next moment lost in another country;
As, when a hill’s undermined,
A windowframe jammed or a door flying open tell one
The hill has invisibly moved: –
So we look up one day and see we are dying
From the difference in all we have loved.
If I balance the year’s account, in the right-hand column
What new assets are shown?
One cloud left behind in a cloudless sky, like a plume
From a white May-day long flown:
One elm ash-budded with starlings which brassily jingled
Like a sack of curtain-rings shaken:
Some nights when thought of my love was sweet as a child’s
Birthday to dream of, to wake on.
What can a few such casual entries amount to
Against the perpetual drain
Of the real into abstractions – life just jetting
And falling in a fountain’s rain?
And then, the expansive follies, the petty withdrawals
Swelling an overdraft
I must carry forward to next year, not to be cancelled
By any godsend or graft.
Look at this left-hand column! Does it read like
A soul whose credit is good? –
This mind wasting on wildcat speculation
Half it has understood;
This man for ever trimming, tacking and wearing.
His truth to keep the capricious
Wind of a woman’s favour; this heart by turns
Too gullible, too suspicious?
Lost, profitless, misspent – how can last year’s self
Gratify or engross,
Unless you believe that, by spiritual accountings,
The profit is in the loss?
Turn to the future, you say: plan to improve:
Tonight we make good resolutions.
But I would plan for the prese
nt, and this involves
Such a whirl of lightning decisions
And intuitions, that for the nearest distance
I’d have not a glance to spare.
Let them take their turn, I say – the unborn roses,
The morrows foul or fair;
Let them wait their turn, those siren hills exhaling
A violet fluorescence,
The one-eyed cannibals and the horned dilemmas –
All, all that is not Presence.
Our fear makes myths of the future, even as our love does
Of the past: and, I ask myself, how
Can I face a mythical future unless I am armed
Cap-à-pie in a magical Now?
Invulnerable Now, my saviour, always
Dying, but never dead!
My winged shoes, my clairvoyant shield, my cap of
Darkness upon the head!
Yet the Now is a ghost too, fleetingly glimpsed at the turn
Of an agony, or in the lee of
A joy, for ever vanishing through some secret
Door that I have not the key of-
An unborn thing, a ghost of the real miscarried
By accident or neglect –
Unless it is free to drink my living blood
And in my flesh to be decked:
My flesh and blood, themselves a web of experience
Discarded, renewed, amassed.
Ah no, the present is nothing unless it is spun from
A live thread out of the past,
As the clarinet airs of the early morn are echoed
By eve’s full-hearted strings,
As the stars and the bells in April grass foreshadow
Winter’s pure crystallings.
There are September mornings when every shrub
Sparkles an hour and dances
Spangled with diamond parures, for a heavy dew
Makes visible and enhances
The spider webs. Oh fleeting, magical Presence!
Oh time-drops caught in a few
Workaday filaments! Nevertheless, the spider
Spins not to catch the dew.
To live the present then, not to live for it –
Let this be one of today’s
Resolutions; and the other, its corollary,
To court the commonplace.
Whatever is common to life’s diversity must,
For me, be the one eternal
Truth, or if naught is for ever, at least the medium
Wherein I may best discern all
The products of time, embalmed, alive, or prefigured.
Let me brood on the face of a field,
The faces in streets, until each hero is honoured,
Each unique blade revealed.
Alluring the past, the future, their bright eyes veiled
Or enlarged in a mist of fable:
But he who can look with the naked eye of the Now –
He is the true seer, able,
To witness the rare in the common, and read the common
Theme for all time appointed
To link our variations … And though my todays are
Repetitive, dull, disjointed,
I must continue to practise them over and over
Like a five-finger exercise,
Hoping my hands at last will suddenly flower with
Passion, and harmonize.
Emily Brontë
All is the same still. Earth and heaven locked in
A wrestling dream the seasons cannot break:
Shrill the wind tormenting my obdurate thorn trees,
Moss-rose and stone-chat silent in its wake.
Time has not altered here the rhythms I was rocked in,
Creation’s throb and ache.
All is yet the same, for mine was a country
Stoic, unregenerate, beyond the power
Of man to mollify or God to disburden –
An ingrown landscape none might long endure
But one who could meet with a passion wilder-wintry
The scalding breath of the moor.
All is yet the same as when I roved the heather
Chained to a demon through the shrieking night,
Took him by the throat while he flailed my sibylline
Assenting breast, and won him to delight.
O truth and pain immortally bound together!
O lamp the storm made bright!
Still on those heights prophetic winds are raving,
Heath and harebell intone a plainsong grief:
‘Shrink, soul of man, shrink into your valleys –
Too sharp that agony, that spring too brief!
Love, though your love is but the forged engraving
Of hope on a stricken leaf!’
Is there one whom blizzards warm and rains enkindle
And the bitterest furnace could no more refine?
Anywhere one too proud for consolation,
Burning for pure freedom so that he will pine,
Yes, to the grave without her? Let him mingle
His barren dust with mine.
But is there one who faithfully has planted
His seed of light in the heart’s deepest scar?
When the night is darkest, when the wind is keenest,
He, he shall find upclimbing from afar
Over his pain my chaste, my disenchanted
And death-rebuking star.
Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy
Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way,
With tall moon-daisies alight, and the mole
Busy, and elegant hares at play
By meadow paths where once you would stroll
In the flush of day?
I fancy the beasts and flowers there beguiled
By a visitation
That casts no shadow, a friend whose mild
Inquisitive glance lights with compassion,
Beyond the tomb, on all of this wild
And humbled creation.
It’s hard to believe a spirit could die
Of such generous glow,
Or to doubt that somewhere a bird-sharp eye
Still broods on the capers of men below,
A stern voice asks the Immortals why
They should plague us so.
Dear poet, wherever you are, I greet you.
Much irony, wrong,
Innocence you’d find here to tease or entreat you,
And many the fate-fires have tempered strong,
But none that in ripeness of soul could meet you
Or magic of song.
Great brow, frail frame – gone. Yet you abide
In the shadow and sheen,
All the mellowing traits of a countryside
That nursed your tragi-comical scene;
And in us, warmer-hearted and brisker-eyed
Since you have been.
Who Goes There?
(FOR WALTER DE LA MARE, ON HIS 75TH BIRTHDAY)
Who goes there?
What sequestered vale at the back of beyond
Do you come from – you with the moonbeam wand,
The innocent air?
And how got you here, spirited on like a bubble of silence past
The quickset ears, the hair-trigger nerves at each post?
My staff is cut from the knowledge tree.
My place no infidel eye can see.
My way is a nonchalant one,
Wilful as wind yet true as the line of a bee.
My name is – Anon,
Are you aware
That you’re trespassing, sir, on a battleground?
It’s hard to see what excuse can be found
For magicians where
All light and airy ways must endanger the men’s morale.
What business have you with the sturdy ranks of the real?
I bring them dew from earth’s dayspring.
Fire from the first wild ros
e I bring.
And this – my deepest art –
I bring them word from their own hungering
Beleaguered heart.
Pass, friend. You bear
Gifts that, although men commonly flout them
Being hardened, or born, to live without them,
Are none the less rare.
Pass, friend, and fare you well, and may all such travellers be speeded
Who bring us news we had almost forgot we needed.
Lines for Edmund Blunden on his Fiftieth Birthday
Your fiftieth birthday. What shall we give you?
An illuminated address
Would be hard on one who was never at home with
Pomp or pretentiousness.
Here is a loving-cup made from verse,
For verse is your favourite of metals:
Imagine its stem like a tulip stalk,
Its bowl a tulip’s petals
And the whole as gracefully formed and charactered
As a poem of your own.
What shall the toast be? Fifty years more?
A century? Let it be known
That a true poet’s age is truthfully reckoned
Not in years but in song:
So we drink instead to that happy girl
Your Muse – may she live long!
But we pledge our love, our love for one
Who never has burned or bowed
To popular gods, and when fame beckons
Modestly melts in the crowd.
Into the crowd of your haunting fancies –
The streams, the airs, the dews,
The soldier shades and the solacing heartbeams –
You melt, and fame pursues;
And our good wishes follow you, even
To the fortunate meadows where
Tonight your loving-cup is raised
By Shelley, Hunt and Clare.
Buzzards Over Castle Hill
A world seems to end at the top of this hill.
Across it, clouds and thistle-clocks fly,
And ragged hedges are running down from the sky,
As though the wild had begun to spill
Over a rampart soon to be drowned
With all it guards of domesticated ground.
It was silent here on the slope of the hill.
But now, now, as if the wild grass
And the wild sky had found their voices at last
And they were one voice, there comes a shrill
Complete Poems Page 28
