He summoned up his youth, his conscious art
To tire or trick the beast, criss-crossing the meadow
With web of patient moves, circling apart,
Nearing, and pouncing, but only upon its shadow.
What skill and passion weave the subtle net!
But Pegasus goes free, unmounted yet.
All day he tried for this radiant creature. The more he
Persevered, the less he thought of the task
For which he required it, and the ultimate glory.
So it let him draw close, closer – nearly to grasp
Its mane; but that instant it broke out wings like a spread
Of canvas, and sailed off easily overhead.
He cursed Pegasus then. Anger arose
With a new desire, as if it were some white girl
To stretch, mount, master, exhaust in shuddering throes.
The animal gave him a different look: it swirled
Towards him, circled him round in a dazzling mist,
And one light hoof just knocked upon his breast.
The pale sky yawns to its uttermost concave,
Flowers open their eyes, rivulets prance
Again, and over the mountainside a wave
Of sparkling air tumbles. Now from its trance
That holy ground is deeply sighing and stirring.
The heights take back their eagles, cicadas are whirring.
The furious art, the pursuer’s rhythmic pace
Failed in him now. Another self had awoken,
Which knew – but felt no chagrin, no disgrace –
That he, not the winged horse, was being broken:
It was his lode, his lord, his appointed star,
He but its shadow and familiar.
So he lay down to sleep. Argos, Chimaera,
Athene in one solution were immersed.
Around him, on bush and blade, each dewdrop mirrored
A star, his riding star, his universe,
While on the moonlit flowers at his side
Pegasus grazed, palpable, undenied.
A golden bridle came to him in sleep –
A mesh of immortal fire and sensual earth,
Pliant as love, compulsive as the sweep
Of light-years, brilliant as truth, perfect as death.
He dreamed a magic bridle, and next day
When he awoke, there to his hand it lay.
Wings furled, on printless feet through the dews of morn
Pegasus stepped, in majesty and submission,
Towards him. Mane of tempest, delicate mien,
It was all brides, all thoroughbreds, all pent passion.
Breathing flowers upon him, it arched a superb
Neck to receive the visionary curb.
Pegasus said, ‘The bridle that you found
‘In sleep, you yourself made. Your hard pursuit,
‘Your game with me upon this hallowed ground
‘Forged it, your failures tempered it. I am brute
‘And angel. He alone, who taps the source
‘Of both, can ride me. Bellerophon, I am yours.’
1 LBL was the poet Lilian Bowes Lyon.
Psyche
He came to her that night, as every night,
Through the dark palace in a shape of darkness –
Or rather, it seemed to her, of light made invisible;
Came in a torrential swoop of feet
Or wings, and taking her filled her with sweetness:
Then slept, as the gods sleep who have no need
To dream. But she, awake in that dream palace
Where the wine poured itself and instruments played
At their own sweet will, began to feel afraid
That it was all some trick of the Love-Queen’s malice.
A virgin once I roamed – my thoughts were vague
As a mother-of-pearl sky – before this beauty
Had grown to isolate me like a plague
From men, and set my sisters in jealous league.
It was I then who envied Aphrodite.
‘Your husband,’ they say, ‘your husband is a dragon
‘Sent to devour you.’ And truly I am devoured
With love. But the daytimes drag, the tongues wag,
Distorting his unseen face; and I grow weak.
Can it be love that makes me such a coward?
Timidly then she touched his flank, which flowed
Like a river dreaming of rapids. Flesh it was,
Not scales. Each limb retraced was a midnight road
Humming with memories: each warm breath sighed
‘Foolish girl, to believe only her eyes!’
Drowsing she closed her petals over this new
Delicate trust. But a quick remorse pierced her
That, doubting him, she had clouded her own love too;
And with it a seeming-pure desire to know
The facts of him who had so divinely possessed her.
Flesh of my flesh – yet between me and him
This maidenhead of dark. A voice, a stir,
A touch – no more, and yet my spirit’s home.
Man, god, or fiend – blindly I worship him:
But he will tire of a blind worshipper.
‘You must not look,’ he said: but now I believe
Without seeing, what harm can it be to gaze?
He said, ‘It is a secret.’ Oh but in love
There are no secrets! and how can I ever prove
My love till I know what it is I might betray?
So ran the fatal argument; and so,
Closer than night, equivocal as a spy,
Into bed between them stole the lie …
She rose and lit her lamp. In the hall below
The harp strings broke, the wine jars all ran dry.
Heavy with sight, alarmed at new-born shadows,
She groped towards him. Night drew back in awe,
And the light became a clear, impassable window
Through which her love could gaze but never go.
The lamp burned brighter, inflamed by what it saw.
O moon-white brow and milky way of flesh!
Wings like a butterfly’s on a warm stone
Trembling asleep! O rod and fount of passion,
Godlike in act, estranged in revelation! –
Once you were mine, were me, for me alone.
O naked light upon our marriage bed,
Let me touch you again and be consumed!
No reaching through the radiance you shed?
Breaking my faith, myself I have betrayed.
We that were one are two. Thus am I doomed.
She grasped her knife, but it refused the breast
She offered. Trying a finger on his arrows
She pricked herself, and love was dispossessed
By love of love, which means self-love. Unblest,
Unchecked – what a serpent flame letched at her marrow!
Darkness she craved now – but oblivion’s pall
Not the true night of union. Anyway
The lamp would not blow out. Along the wall
A taloned shadow-beast began to crawl
Fawning and glum toward its naked prey.
A drop of burning oil upon his bare
Shoulder awoke him. Shuddering he beheld
Crusted over that face so innocent-fair,
The hangdog look, the dissolute anxious glare
Of lust, and knew his treasure had been spoiled.
So he passed from her, and at last she learnt
How blind she had been, how blank the world can be
When self-love breaks into that dark room meant
For love alone, and on the innocent
Their nakedness dawns, outraging mystery.
Followed the tasks – millet seed, poppy seed
And all. They keep her fingers busy, bind
A gaping heart. She tells the grain like beads:
&n
bsp; Yet it is not her penance, it is her need
Moves mercy, proves and touches the Divine.
Dear souls, be told by me. I would not take
Love as a gift, and so I had to learn
In the cold school of absence, memory’s ache,
The busy, barren world of mend and make,
That my god’s love is given but never earned.
Baucis and Philemon
You see those trees on the hillside over the lake
Standing together – a lime tree and an oak –
With a stone circle around them? A strange thing
To find two trees wearing a marriage ring,
You say? You would not, if you knew their story. Yes,
They are wedded: the roots embrace, the leaves caress
One another still. You can hear them gossip together,
Murmuring commonplaces about the weather,
Rocked by gusts of memory, like the old.
In this evening light their wall is a hoop of gold. …
Philemon gazed into the cooling hearth,
And the hearth stared listlessly back at one whose fire
Was all but ash. His hands hung down like dry leaves
Motionless in a summer’s aftermath –
Planter’s hands, they could make anything grow.
So labourers sit at the end of a day or a lifetime.
The old man drowsed by the fire, feeling his death
Ripen within him, feeling his lifetime gone
Like a may-fly’s day, and nothing to show for all
The works and days of his hands but a beaten path
Leading nowhere and soon to be overgrown.
Beside him, Baucis absently traced her memories
Which seemed a brood of children scattered long since
Among far lands; but always in him, her own –
Husband and child – where they began, they ended.
Knuckled like bark, palmed thin as a saint’s relics,
Her hands rested from love. There was love in the shine
Of the copper pans, the thrift of a mended coverlet,
The scrubbed and sabbath face of the elm-wood table.
But now this wordless love, which could divine
Even in sleep his qualms and cares, awoke
And out of the speaking silence between them, heard
To dwindle down, to gutter and go out,
Consenting to the dark or jerking agonized
Shadows on the white faces round me!
The year goes out in a flash of chrysanthemum:
But we, who cell by cell and
Pang upon pang are dragged to execution,
Live out the full dishonour of the clay.
A bright bewildered April, a trance-eyed summer –
Mirage of immortality: then
The mildew mists, the numbing frosts, and we
Are rotting on the bough, who ripen to no end
But a maggot’s appetite.
Where are my memories? Who has taken the memories
I stored against these winter nights, to keep me warm?
My past is under snow – seed-beds, bud-grafts,
Flowering blood, globed hours, all shrouded, erased:
There I lie, buried alive before my own eyes.
Are we not poor enough already
That the gods must take away –
‘Hush, my dear,’
Said Baucis, and laid her finger upon his lips
Like a holy wafer. ‘We must not even dream
Ill of the gods. I too fear Death, but I fear
Him most because he will take one of us first
And leave the other alive. I fear his cruelty
Less than his charity.’
There was a knock at the door.
Her heart cried out – He has come for us both, bless him!
But it was only a couple of tramps or tinkers,
A bearded one and a younger, begging food,
All other doors in the village closed against them.
‘You are welcome. It’s nice to have company once in a while,’
She said to the grimy wayfarers, and strewed
Clean coverlets on the willow-wood couch for them
To rest while she blew up the fire again. Philemon
Brought out a well-smoked ham and his autumn fruit –
Radishes, endives, apples and plums, a honeycomb.
‘You wandering folk see much of the world,’ he said.
‘Ah yes, there’s nothing my father has not seen
In his time,’ the young man answered: ‘except perhaps
An eagle nesting with two turtle doves.’
The other smiled in his beard: his gaze, serene
As if it could weigh the gods and find them wanting,
Weighed now those hands like skeleton leaves, the bird-boned
Pair and the crumbs they shared, a copper pan
Gleaming, a rickety table freshened with mint.
All was amenity there, a calm sunshine
Of the heart. The young stranger, whose grey eyes
Were full of mischief and messages, winked at the elder:
‘They could not treat us handsomer if we were gods.’
His companion nodded – at once the windless trees
In the orchard danced a fandango – and raised his cup
Of beechwood, charged to the brim with home-made wine:
‘Philemon, a toast! I give you-your memories.’
He drained the cup; and when he had put it down,
It was still brimming. And in Philemon’s soul
Welled up a miraculous spring, the wished release.
I am blind no longer. My joys have come home to me
Dancing in gipsy colours from oblivion.
Back on their boughs are the fruits of all my seasons
Rosy from sleep still, ripened to the core.
Look at the autumn trees content with their workaday
Russet and the grass rejoicing for mere greenness,
As the spring paths I trod through garden, through orchard,
Were content with violets. Oh chime and charm
Of remembered Junes, of killer frosts returning
To smile and be forgiven! Oh temperate haze
Maturing my yesterdays, promise of good morrows! –
Seventy years have I lived with Contentment,
And now for the first time I see her face.
Now I can thank the gods, who mercifully
Changed my despair into a cup full of blessings
And made a vision grow where a doubt was planted.
Baucis, weeping and smiling, knelt to adore
The elder god: who said, ‘You had a wish too?’
With a glance at her husband’s shadowless face, she replied,
‘You have done one miracle. How could I ask more?
He is content. What more did 1 ever ask?’
‘Nevertheless, an unspoken prayer shall be answered
When the prayer is good, and not to have voiced the prayer
Is better. Death shall not part you. Now follow me.’
They helped each other up the slow hillside
Like pilgrims, while the two gods went before.
When they looked back, their cottage in the combe below
Was changed – cob walls to pearl and thatch to gold –
A lodge for deity, almost as marvellous
As the wonder in their eyes. ‘Ah, that is no
Miracle,’ Hermes said, ‘or if it is,
The miracle is yours.’ Then Zeus affirmed, ‘The seed
Hears not the harvest anthem. I only show you
A jewel your clay has formed, the immortal face
Of the good works and days of your own hands:
A shrine after my heart. Because I know you
Faithful in love to serve my hearth, my earth,
You shall stay here together when you go. …’
They cli
mbed that hill each evening of their lives
Until, one day, their clasped hands uttered leaves
And the tired feet were taken underground.
‘Goodbye, dear wife,’ he called as the bark closed round,
And his branches upheld the cry in a carol of birds.
She yearned to his oaken heart, with her last words
Sweet as lime blossom whispering on the air –
‘It’s not goodbye.’
We found them growing there
And built the wall around them; not that they need
A ring to show their love, or ever did.
Ariadne on Naxos
(A Dramatic Monologue)
Between the hero’s going and the god’s coming
She paced a flinty shore, her windflower feet
Shredded and bleeding, but the flesh was numb
Or the mind too delirious to heed
Its whimpers. From the shore she vainly dredged
The deep horizon with a streaming eye,
And her strained ears like seashells only fetched
A pure pale blare of distance. Listlessly
She turned inland. Berries on bushes there
Watched her like feral eyes: she was alone:
The darkening thicket seemed a monster’s fur,
And thorn trees writhed into a threat of horns.
She walks a knife-edge here, between the woe
Of what is gone and what will never go.
O many-mooded One, you with the bared
Horizons in your eye, death in your womb,
Who draw the mariner down to a choked bed
And write his name upon an empty tomb –
Strangle him! Flay the flesh from his dishonoured
Bones, and kiss out his eyes with limpets! – No,
Drown my words! Who is the faithless now? Those eyes
Were true, my love. Last night, beside the myrtle,
You said ‘For ever’, and I saw the stars
Over your head, and then the stars were lost in
The flare and deluge of my body’s dawn.
False dawn. I awoke. Still dark. Your print upon me
Warm still. A wind, chilling my nakedness,
Lisped with the sound of oars. It was too dark
To see the wake of your bold, scuttling ship,
Or I’d have reeled you back on that white line,
As once … Is it because I saved you then
That you run from me as from a place accursed?
What is it in the bushes frightens me so?
A hide for nothing human. Coalfire eyes
Penning me on the beach. You had a kingdom
Complete Poems Page 36
