Then sat to her glass, as women do, assuaging
Chaotic thoughts with the clear, known image there.
No blood at the lips, no scars on the limpid brow,
Her face gazed out, vacant and undistracted,
A mere proscenium – nothing to show
For the tragedy, or farce, lately enacted.
True, it was not the first time nor the second
That love had lured her into a dead end.
She knew it all: but on this she had not reckoned –
The trick of a mirror upon the wall behind
Which cast in hers an endless, ever-diminished
Sequence of selves rejected and alone,
Cast back in her teeth the falsehood that she was finished
With love’s calamities, having survived this one.
Seven devils, each worse than the one she had expelled,
Entering now that swept and garnished room,
Image on image on image in the glass she felt
Sucking her down into a vacuum,
A hell of narrowing circles. Time and again
Would she sit at the glass, helplessly reviling
The self that had linked her failures into a chain,
An ineluctable pattern. Love’s too willing
Victim and love’s unwilling poisoner, she
Would always kill the joys for which she died.
‘Deep within you,’ whispered the fiends, ‘must be
‘A double agent, false to either side. …’
Fallen at last, hurled beyond hope or terror,
Gathering doom about her, the girl now saw
Her hand, which had not strength to break the mirror,
Grope for the sleeping tablets in a drawer.
Love and Pity
Love without pity is a child’s hand reaching,
A behemoth trampling, a naked bulb within
A room of delicate tones, a clown outraging
The heart beneath the ravished, ravisher skin.
Pity without love is the dry soul retching,
The strained, weak azure of a dog-day sky,
The rescuer plunging through some thick-mined region
Who cannot rescue and is not to die.
Pitiless love will mean a death of love –
An innocent act, almost a mercy-killing:
But loveless pity makes a ghost of love,
Petrifies with remorse each vein of feeling.
Love can breed pity. Pity, when love’s gone,
Bleeds endlessly to no end – blood from stone.
The Tourists
Arriving was their passion.
Into the new place out of the blue
Flying, sailing, driving –
How well these veteran tourists knew
Each fashion of arriving.
Leaving a place behind them,
There was no sense of loss: they fed
Upon the act of leaving –
So hot their hearts for the land ahead –
As a kind of pre-conceiving.
Arrival has stern laws, though,
Condemning men to lose their eyes
If they have treated travel
As a brief necessary disease,
A pause before arrival.
And merciless the fate is
Of him who leaves nothing behind,
No hostage, no reversion:
He travels on, not only blind
But a stateless person.
Fleeing from love and hate,
Pursuing change, consumed by motion,
Such arrivistes, unseeing,
Forfeit through endless self-evasion
The estate of simple being.
In Memory of Dylan Thomas
‘it was Adam and maiden’
Too soon, it is all too soon
Laments our childhood’s horn
Husky and cool at the close
Of its dove-note afternoon.
Too soon, a red fox echoes
Old on the hunted hill
Where dewfall mirrors the dawn
And dawn rides out for a kill.
It is too soon, too soon
Wails the unripened barley
To flailing storms: too soon
Pipes the last frail leaf in the valley.
A poet can seem to show
Animal, child and leaf
In the light of eternity, though
It is but the afterglow
From his consuming love,
The spill of a fabulous dawn
Where animal, leaf and child,
Timelessly conceived,
With time are reconciled.
Now we lament one
Who danced on a plume of words,
Sang with a fountain’s panache,
Dazzled like slate roofs in sun
After rain, was flighty as birds
And alone as a mountain ash.
The ribald, inspired urchin
Leaning over the lip
Of his world, as over a rock pool
Or a lucky dip,
Found everything brilliant and virgin,
Like Adam who went to school
Only with God, and like Adam
He gave that world a tongue.
Already he has outsung
Our elegies, who always
Drew from creation’s fathomless
Grief a pure drop of praise.
Elegiac Sonnet
TO NOEL MEWTON-WOOD
A fountain plays no more: those pure cascades
And diamond plumes now sleep within their source.
A breath, a mist of joy, the woodsong fades –
The trill, the transport of his April force.
How well these hands, rippling from mood to mood,
Figured a brooding or a brilliant phrase!
Music’s dear child, how well he understood
His mother’s heart – the fury and the grace!
Patient to bear the stem ordeal of art,
Keyed to her ideal strain, he found too hard
The simple exercise of human loss.
He took the grief away, and we are less.
Laurels enough he had. Lay on his heart
A flower he never knew – the rose called Peace.
Final Instructions
For sacrifice, there are certain principles –
Few, but essential.
I do not mean your ritual. This you have learnt –
The garland, the salt, a correct use of the knife,
And what to do with the blood:
Though it is worth reminding you that no two
Sacrifices ever turn out alike –
Not where this god is concerned.
The celebrant’s approach may be summed up
In three words – patience, joy,
Disinterestedness. Remember, you do not sacrifice
For your own glory or peace of mind:
You are there to assist the clients and please the god.
It goes without saying
That only the best is good enough for the god.
But the best – I must emphasize it – even your best
Will by no means always be found acceptable.
Do not be discouraged:
Some lizard or passing cat may taste your sacrifice
And bless the god: it will not be entirely wasted.
But the crucial point is this:
You are called only to make the sacrifice:
Whether or no he enters into it
Is the god’s affair; and whatever the handbooks say,
You can neither command his presence nor explain it –
All you can do is to make it possible.
If the sacrifice catches fire of its own accord
On the altar, well and good. But do not
Flatter yourself that discipline and devotion
Have wrought the miracle: they have only allowed it.
So luck is all I can wish you, or need wish y
ou.
And every time you prepare to lay yourself
On the altar and offer again what you have to offer,
Remember, my son,
Those words – patience, joy, disinterestedness.
PART THREE
The House Where I Was Born
An elegant, shabby, white-washed house
With a slate roof. Two rows
Of tall sash windows. Below the porch, at the foot of
The steps, my father, posed
In his pony trap and round clerical hat.
This is all the photograph shows.
No one is left alive to tell me
In which of those rooms I was born,
Or what my mother could see, looking out one April
Morning, her agony done,
Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings
From that tree to the left of the lawn.
Elegant house, how well you speak
For the one who fathered me there,
With your sanguine face, your moody provincial charm,
And that Anglo-Irish air
Of living beyond one’s means to keep up
An era beyond repair.
Reticent house in the far Queen’s County,1
How much you leave unsaid.
Not a ghost of a hint appears at your placid windows
That she, so youthfully wed,
Who bore me, would move elsewhere very soon
And in four years be dead.
I know that we left you before my seedling
Memory could root and twine
Within you. Perhaps that is why so often I gaze
At your picture, and try to divine
Through it the buried treasure, the lost life –
Reclaim what was yours, and mine.
I put up the curtains for them again
And light a fire in their grate:
I bring the young father and mother to lean above me,
Ignorant, loving, complete:
I ask the questions I never could ask them
Until it was too late.
1 Queen’s County: now Co. Laois.
Father to Sons1
That is the house you were born in. Around it
A high old box-hedge inked out the view:
And this the garden it buxomly bounded,
Where salvia, syringa, tobacco plants grew
Sheltered like you.
From snapshot to snapshot you can see yourselves growing
And changing like figures on a dawn-struck frieze.
Ah, swift enough for my after-knowing
That growth: but then you seemed to increase
By mere coral degrees.
So, to my fondness, you still may linger
There at your romps and poker-faced ploys
Under the sweet pale downpour of syringa,
Brief and sweet as all natural joys
In pathos and poise.
But you – what will you think of me, say of me,
Turning these photographs over, years hence,
When I am dead? What shadow or ray of me
Lingering for you then will cloud or enhance
Their brilliance?
Not the garden idyll, but a serpent mood it
Concealed from the lens; not the innocent fall
Of light, but how I would often occlude it
With guardian stance: is it this, above all,
That you must recall?
How often did words of mine, words out of season,
Leave smouldering chagrin like fag-ends to char
Your fresh-painted sill of life! my unreason
Or too much reason chill the air
For your tendril career!
If such bewilderments made your Eden
A state you could not be sorry to slough,
Forgive. I still had much that even
A god only gets at through mortal stuff
To learn about love.
1 The house was Box Cottage, Charlton Kings. CDL was, for once, inexact in this poem in his use of the beautiful word Syringa – given to mock orange or philadelphus in those days. Syringa is the lilac genus.
Son and Father
By the glim of a midwinterish early morning
Following habit’s track over comatose fields,
A path of bleak reminder, I go to receive
The sacraments from my father, thirty years back.
Afterwards, walking home, unannealed, implacable,
I knew in the bones of my age this numb, flayed air,
These frozen grassblades rasping the foot, those hoar-drops
Which hung from a branch all day like unredeemed pledges.
Oh, black frost of my youth, recalcitrant time
When love’s seed was benighted and gave no ear
To others’ need, you were seasonable, you were
In nature: but were you as well my nature’s blight?
That was thirty years back. The father is dead whose image
And superscription upon me I had to efface
Or myself be erased. Did I thus, denying him, grow
Quite dead to the Father’s grace, the Son’s redemption?
Ungenerous to him no more, but unregenerate,
Still on a frozen earth I stumble after
Each glimmer of God, although it lights up my lack,
And lift my maimed creations to beg rebirth.
Christmas Eve
Come out for a while and look from the outside in
At a room you know
As the firelight fitfully beats on the windowpane –
An old heart sinking low,
And the whispering melting kisses of the snow
Soothe time from your brow.
It is Christmastide. Does the festival promise as fairly
As ever to you? ‘I feel
The numbness of one whose drifted years conceal
His original landmarks of good and ill.
For a heart weighed down by its own and the world’s folly
This season has little appeal.’
But tomorrow is Christmas Day. Can it really mean
Nothing to you? ‘It is hard
To see it as more than a time-worn, tinsel routine,
Or else a night incredibly starred,
Angels, oxen, a Babe – the recurrent dream
Of a Christmas card.’
You must try again. Say ‘Christmas Eve’. Now, quick,
What do you see?
‘I see in the firelit room a child is awake,
Mute with expectancy
For the berried day, the presents, the Christmas cake.
Is he mine? or me?’
He is you, and yours. Desiring for him tomorrow’s
Feast – the crackers, the Tree, the piled
Presents – you lose your self in his yearning, and borrow
His eyes to behold
Your own young world again. Love’s mystery is revealed
When the father becomes the child.
‘Yet would it not make those carolling angels weep
To think how incarnate Love
Means such trivial joys to us children of unbelief?’
No. It’s a miracle great enough
If through centuries, clouded and dingy, this Day can keep
Expectation alive.
‘The Years O’
The days are drawing in,
A casual leaf falls.
They sag – the heroic walls;
Bloomless the wrinkled skin
Your firm delusions filled.
What once was all to build
Now you shall underpin.
The day has fewer hours,
The hours have less to show
For what you toil at now
Than when long life was yours
To cut and come again,
To ride on a loose rein –
A youth’s unbroken years.
Far back, through was
tes of ennui
The child you were plods on,
Hero and simpleton
Of his own timeless story,
Yet sure that somewhere beyond
Mirage and shifting sand
A real self must be.
Is it a second childhood,
No wiser than the first,
That we so rage and thirst
For some unchangeable good?
Should not a wise man laugh
At desires that are only proof
Of slackening flesh and blood?
Faster though time will race
As the blood runs more slow,
Another force we know:
Fiercer through narrowing days
Leaps the impetuous jet,
And tossing a dancer’s head
Taller it grows in grace.
Lot 961
Lot 96: a brass-rimmed ironwork fender.
It had stood guard for years, where it used to belong,
Over the hearth of a couple who loved tenderly.
Now it will go for a song.
Night upon winter night, as she gossiped with him
Or was silent, he watched the talkative firelight send
Its reflections twittering over that burnished rim
Like a language of world without end.
Death, which unclasped their hearts, dismantled all.
The world they made is as if it had never been true –
That firelit bubble of warmth, serene, magical,
Ageless in form and hue.
Now there stands, dulled in an auction room,
This iron thing – a far too durable irony,
Reflecting never a ghost of the lives that illumed it,
No hint of the sacred fire.
This lot was part of their precious bond, almost
A property of its meaning. Here, in the litter
Washed up by death, values are re-assessed
At a nod from the highest bidder.
1 From 1953–1957 we lived at 96 Campden Hill Road, London.
Time to Go1
The day they had to go
Was brilliant after rain. Persimmons glowed
In the garden behind the castle.
Upon its wall lizards immutably basked
Like vitrified remains
Of an archaic, molten summer. Bronze
Complete Poems Page 38
