Now as I look back, how vividly, how gracefully
Ghosting there, she breathes me not the ghost of a reproach.
Happiness, it seems, can be the best haunter.
You later ones, should you see that wraith divulged for a moment
Through the sleep-haze of plumbago, glancing out from the loggia’s
Vain dream of permanence as from a page
Time is already turning again, will you thus comment? –
‘She is some dead beauty, no doubt, who queened here awhile
‘And clasped her bouquets, and shrinks to leave the lighted stage:
‘Not quite of the villa’s classic period, though –
‘Something more wistful, ironic, unstable in act and style,
‘A minor masterpiece of a silver age.’
But to me she stands out tall as the Torcello madonna
Against a mosaic of sunlight, for ever upholding
My small, redeeming love. But ‘love is all’,
She says; and the mortal scene of planets and tides,
Animals, grass and men is transformed, proved, steadied around me.
But her I begin to view through a thickening veil,
A gauze of tears, till the figure inscrutably fades –
As every vision must vanish, if we and it keep faith,
Into the racked, unappeasable flesh of the real.
* * *
But look, the garden storm is stilled, the flood
Blinked away like a tear, earth reconciled to
Her molten birth-bed’s long prophetic throes!
Her hills are lizards in their solid trance
Of sun and stone: upon each hill
Vine and olive hold the archaic pose:
Below, the bubble dome looks everlasting
As heaven’s womb, and threading the eyes of bridges
Arno endlessly into the loom of oblivion flows.
A ghost, the mere thought of a shade, has done it.
Testing the shifty face of the Now with a dove, I found
Terra firma. Whatever in me was born to praise
Life’s heart of blood or stone here reached its zenith,
Conjuring, staying, measuring all by that meek shade …
Now, love, you have tried on your phantom dress,
Return to nakedness!
Be breathing again beside me, real, imperfect!
Enmesh, enact my dream till it vanishes!
The oranges are going out? Tomorrow
Will light them up again. Tomorrow will call you
With nightingales; tomorrow will leave
A rose by your plate, and freshen the plumbago’s
Blue millinery and open a parasol
Of cedar for you, as it did for the first, ignorant Eve
Before exile or death was thought of. But we know well
On what tenure we have this garden. Each day’s a livelier
Paradise when each dawn is a reprieve.
I imagine you really gone for ever. Clocks stop.
Clouds bleed. Flames numb. My world shrunk to an echoing
Memorial skull. (A child playing at hide-
And-seek suddenly feels the whole terrible truth of Absence.)
Too keen the imagined grief, too dearly gained
Its proof of love. I would let all else slide,
Dissolve and perish into the old enigma,
If that could keep you here, if it could keep
Even your sad ghost at my side.
But gold and green and blue still glows before us
This leaf of Italy, the colours fixed
The characters formed by love. It is love’s way
To shine most through the slow dusk of adieu.
Long may it glow within us, that timeless, halcyon halt
On our rough journey back to clay.
Oh, may my farewell word, may this your elegy
Written in life blood from a condemned heart
Be quick and haunting even beyond our day.
PART SEVEN
The Homeward Prospect
TOM A word with you, my friends. High summer is scorching up
Northwards through poplared Umbria to these foothills of Tuscany.
But I notice a nip in the air, a recession in all around me –
Statues and groves and fountains adopting a cooler attitude,
As if they were already waiving their claims upon us.
DICK I feel – oh look at the stream’s face, innocently asleep
But twitching as if a nightmare coursed it! Stagnant as ice,
Bland as silver it seems now: but fast and faster the drift of
Objects inexorably drawn onward unmasks it. I feel
Time’s force. It is a last reach. I know the tug of the weir.
HARRY You should not take it to heart so, Dick. It is merely one more
Holiday ending. Now is a chance to count the change,
To check the income against the outgoings, and find our balance.
We shall come back some day – if only to demonstrate
Upon our person the law of diminishing returns.
TOM Coming or going, I care not, when poised, alert and shimmering
Like angels on a pinpoint, we stand at the tip of departure.
DICK A point that is equidistant between two fields of attraction
And thus, for me, the extreme agony.
HARRY One or the other
Proves always the stronger field. You should regard such occasions,
Dick, as limberings-up and rehearsals for a deathbed.
TOM Well, God save us all! What a way to encourage the queasy
Traveller! We go home enriched.
DICK Sobered
HARRY Lightened:
Lightened of one illusion, and therefore one truth the richer.
TOM Enriched with extravagant draughts of the strange: after them, soberer.
DICK Sobered through sense of gain, by knowledge of loss enlightened –
Though what we have gained or lost is not yet apparent to me,
Nor do I get any answer from these implausible word-plays.
HARRY Time will tell. In the meantime, let us imagine what Tom,
The boyish and indiscriminate collector, has filled our trunk With.
TOM Sapphires of lakes I declare, a tiara of diamond fireflies,
Emerald valleys aglow in platinum dawns, mosaic of
Noondays, ivory evenings with voices flowing like thick silk:
Illuminated leaves torn from an Italian
Book of hours: frescoes and canvases by the masters;
A landscape with figures alive yet touched by the same genius:
Perfumes of contraband moments, essences of antiquity:
Nightingales, oxen, a hoopoe, cicadas and frogs – miscellaneous
Curios rare as dirt and cheap as gold. I declare, too,
The wines of the country, the olive and maize of women’s flesh.
DICK That will do to go on with. And such of these acquisitions
As we get past the paternal customs and heavy duties
Which await our return, I shall unpack in the front parlour
Where Harry will arrange them in the pattern his latest aesthetic
Or ethic requires, to show off to our guests, like any travel-bore.
Presently, chipped and tarnished, or crowded out, they will find
Their way to the attic: and there, one morbid afternoon
When rooks are eddying round a backwater of brackish sky
And a blight smears over the streets, morosely rummaging I
Shall cut myself to the bone on some poignant cobwebbed souvenir.
HARRY Let it be so. What Tom acquires for us has no absolute
Value; nor, I admit, have the elegant systems wherein
I am disposed to compose it. There’s no way even of telling
Which objects are really kin to us, which we’ve partaken of life with,
Until, deep buried, they draw blood from us and are eloquent.
Home is where we inter our travels, but equally give them
A chance to germinate beneath the dust and the housework,
The preoccupied face of routine, the protective sleep of the heart.
Thence, on a gust of travail, something is born, crying
‘I am your flesh and blood!’… Let us look homeward, then.
TOM I see, as the plane booms into the beetling, vertical dark,
Gold and green and blue, amber and red, the lights of
A city like uncut gems in a jeweller’s tray, tempting
And myriad below me. How precious now are the stones of London!
How deeply caressing the velvet blackness in which they are bedded!
DICK Soon my bees will be swarming, swirling and swarming upward
Like bonfire sparks in a gale. Let the early flowers be consumed,
The new cells built. I feel – and my harebell heart windlessly
Quivers with far-flown tremors – the tramp, tramp of Atlantic,
A funeral march plangent upon my uttermost shore.
HARRY I imagine our house repainted by absence, the windowpanes cleaned,
A clearer view of the tangled streets, and the flowerbeds tidier.
I return to myself as it were to a son who, in the interval,
Has grown perceptibly older, filled out; or like the astral
Self flying back to a body refreshed by the night’s vacation.
TOM Happy the natural nomad, sees home in a series of new lights!
DICK Blessed the born settler, whom all roads lead to home!
HARRY Can the human animal ever return, though, to its old form?
TOM Never. The form may remain; but the animal, being a mere sequence
Of current sensations, could not recognize it.
DICK You’re wrong.
The human animal carries his form
HARRY Like a shell?
TOM Like a prison –
Where, but for me, you’d be starving in solitary confinement.
DICK Neither a shell nor a prison. Say rather an x, a potential
Within him that cell by cell he has to incarnate, until
It sloughs him off one day and emerges, more or less perfect.
HARRY That is not quite what I meant. I wonder, to be explicit,
If the home to which our traveller returns may seem, not only
Changed by his prodigal experience, but estranged from him.
TOM Why yes. And that is surely one of the points of travelling:
The exotic veils we bring back and drape over the form of
The too familiar charmer, reviving her value, her mystery,
Compel us to woo her again.
DICK I cannot take part in such make-believe.
Home, for me, is simply the place you can never quit;
An ideal home, if you like, which you spend a lifetime building
Out of whatever comes to hand – dropped bricks, last straws,
Love’s mortar, the timbre and rubble of today, old stones from Italy.
HARRY I agree with you both, but will add this: our going abroad is
Only a shift in space, a projection of home’s shadow,
Unless it enlarges us with a new concept whereby
We may reassemble the known in a different, more luminous pattern,
The better to guide or follow our fateful thread of becoming.
TOM Must every holiday end in a kind of Royal Commission?
I myself, like a sun-warmed stone or a satisfied lover,
Am purely grateful. Cannot one say so, and leave it at that?
DICK Grateful exactly for what? Italy waits a tribute.
HARRY Let us sharpen our recollections and write in her visitors’ book.
TOM On the sill of languorous autumn a tortoise-shell or red admiral
Called by a sunbeam opens the eyes of its dreamless wings,
Longs for a last flutter, rustles against the windowpane
Trembling in the draught of a heliotrope desire.
Italy was the sun that awoke me, the hand that opened
A window and released me into a new playground.
I spread my wings on her basking stones, with her bells I quivered,
Then sipped the violet mountains and the lilies of her valleys:
On dome after dome alighting, pirouetting through grave arcades,
Dithering over the fruit in a marketplace, pinned to a frieze or
Skimming the dew of flesh, I wilfully everywhere wafted
Like a soul freed from a body yet fraught with the body’s enthralments.
I have no call to improve myself or the shining hour:
There was only the dance, the butterfly kiss on each of a thousand
Adorable things. That dance is the tribute I pay to Italy.
DICK On a flank of the hard-faced Apennines, on the threshold of sheer desolation,
I see a few acres of terraced farmland, ruled with olives
And ridged between for cereal, not a foot nor a clod wasted,
All snug and rooted against the barbarian hordes of boulders.
It is a composite picture: many such have I seen here –
Places where generation on generation labouring
Up to the last instant before the rock takes over,
Ploughing their legends back into the heart’s fibre,
Hammering their need to a tool and an emblem of primary virtue,
Have kept man’s nature green. It’s here, and not in some absolute
Immaculate distance or lawn of idyllic dance, I have found
The piety glimpsed by my youth, the deity under the fable.
And whenever, amid the vapours and topheavy crags of the present,
I feel a handhold or lifeline, and grasp in myself the classical
Lineage of man’s endurance, I shall remember Italy.
HARRY On a lap of the road to Florence we passed a Tuscan graveyard
Out in the fields at the far end of a cortege of cypresses,
Insulated and distanced from life, yet part of a frieze where
Living and dead are one to love’s creative eye,
Embryos each of the other … I took our most cherished possession
And offered her to death. I took a ghost for my glass
And focused through it the inchoate, atomized face of becoming.
Then, from the tower in the sky to the tiniest flower on the earth’s hem,
All was distinct, illustrious, full-formed in the light of necessity,
Time’s cocoon fallen away from the truth and kinship of all things.
For one immeasurable moment the world’s hands stood still
And the worm that ticks at the heart of the golden hoard was silent.
Losing my heart to this alien land, I renewed my true love:
Lending my love to death, I gained this grain of vision.
I took my pen. What I wrote is thanks to her and to Italy.
1953
PEGASUS
and other poems
TO JILL
PART ONE
Pegasus
(IN MEMORIAM: L. B. L.)1
It was there on the hillside, no tall traveller’s story.
A cloud caught on a whin-bush, an airing of bleached
Linen, a swan, the cliff of a marble quarry –
It could have been any of these: but as he approached,
He saw that it was indeed what he had cause
Both to doubt and believe in – a horse, a winged white horse.
It filled the pasture with essence of solitude.
The wind tiptoed away like an interloper,
The sunlight there became a transparent hood
Estranging what it revealed; and the bold horse-coper,
The invincible hero, trudging up Helicon,
Knew he had never before been truly alone.
It stood there, s
olid as ivory, dreamy as smoke;
Or moved, and its hooves went dewdropping so lightly
That even the wild cyclamen were not broken:
But when those hooves struck rock, such was their might
They tapped a crystal vein which flowed into song
As it ran through thyme and grasses down-along.
‘Pegasus,’ he called, ‘Pegasus’ – with the surprise
Of one for the first time naming his naked lover.
The creature turned its lordly, incurious eyes
Upon the young man; but they seemed to pass him over
As something beneath their pride or beyond their ken.
It returned to cropping the violets and cyclamen.
Such meekness, indifference frightened him more than any
Rumoured Chimaera. He wavered, remembering how
This milk-white beast was born from the blood of uncanny
Medusa, the nightmare-eyed: and at once, although
Its brief glance had been mild, he felt a cringing
And pinched himself to make sure he was not changing
Into a stone. The animal tossed its head;
The white mane lifted and fell like an arrogant whinny.
‘Horses are meant to be ridden,’ the hero said,
‘Wings or no wings, and men to mount them. Athene
‘Ordered my mission, besides, and certainly you
‘Must obey that goddess,’ he cried, and flung the lassoo.
The cyclamen bow their heads, the cicadas pause.
The mountain shivers from flank to snowy top,
Shaking off eagles as a pastured horse
Shakes off a cloud of flies. The faint airs drop.
Pegasus, with a movement of light on water,
Shimmers aside, is elsewhere, mocking the halter.
So there began the contest. A young man
Challenging, coaxing, pursuing, always pursuing
The dream of those dewfall hooves: a horse which ran
Quicksilver from his touch, sliding and slewing
Away, then immobile a moment, derisively tame,
Almost as if it entered into a game.
Complete Poems Page 35
