Complete Poems
Page 39
Cherubs shook down the chestnuts
From trees over a jetty, where fishing nets
Were sunshine hung out in skeins
To dry, and the fishing boats in their little harbour
Lay breathing asleep. Far
And free, the sun was writing, rewriting ceaselessly
Hieroglyphs on the lake –
Copying a million, million times one sacred
Vanishing word, peace.
The globed hours bloomed. It was grape-harvest season,
And time to go. They turned and hurried away
With never a look behind,
As if they were sure perfection could only stay
Perfect now in the mind,
And a backward glance would tarnish or quite devalue
That innocent, golden scene.
Though their hearts shrank, as if not till now they knew
It was paradise where they had been,
They broke from the circle of bliss, the sunlit haven.
Was it for guilt they fled?
From enchantment? Or was it simply that they were driven
By the migrant’s punctual need?
All these, but more – the demand felicity makes
For release from its own charmed sphere,
To be carried into the world of flaws and heartaches,
Reborn, though mortally, there.
So, then, they went, cherishing their brief vision.
One watcher smiled to see
Them go, and sheathed a flaming sword, his mission
A pure formality.
1 Torre del Benaco 1951. The first Italian visit after our marriage.
On a Dorset Upland
The floor of the high wood all smoking with bluebells,
Sap a-flare, wildfire weed, a here-and-gone wing,
Frecklings of sunlight and flickerings of shadowleaf –
How quick, how gustily kindles the spring,
Consumes our spring!
Tall is the forenoon of larks forever tingling:
A vapour trail, threading the blue, frays out
Slowly to a tasselled fringe; and from horizon
To horizon amble white eternities of cloud,
Sleepwalking cloud.
Here in this niche on the face of the May morning,
Fast between vale and sky, growth and decay,
Dream with the clouds, my love, throb to the awakened
Earth who has quickened a paradise from clay,
Sweet air and clay.
Now is a chink between two deaths, two eternities.
Seed here, root here, perennially cling!
Love me today and I shall live today always!
Blossom, my goldenmost, at-long-last spring,
My long, last spring!
Dedham Vale, Easter 1954
FOR E.J.H.
It was much the same, no doubt,
When nature first laid down
These forms in his youthful heart.
Only the windmill is gone
Which made a miller’s son
Attentive to the clouds.
This is the vale he knew –
Its games of sun and shower,
Willow and breeze, the truant
Here-and-there of the Stour;
And an immutable church tower
To polarize the view.
Yet, earnestly though we look
At such hard facts, the mill,
The lucid tower and the lock
Are something less than real.
For this was never the vale
He saw and showed unique –
A landscape of the heart,
Of passion nursed on calm,
Where cloud and stream drew out
His moods, and love became
A brush in his hand, and the elm tree
Lived like a stroke of art.
His sunburst inspiration
Made earthly forms so true
To life, so new to vision,
That now the actual view
Seems a mere phantom, through
Whose blur we glimpse creation.
It wears a golden fleece
Of light. However dull
The day, one only sees here
His fresh and flying colours –
A paradise vale where all is
Movement and all at peace.
The Great Magicians
To fish for pearls in Lethe,
Wash gold from age-long grief;
To give infinity a frame,
The may-fly a reprieve:
In a calm phrase to utter
The wild and wandering sky;
To reconcile a lover’s Eden
With a madman’s sty:
To mediate between
The candle and the moth;
To plug time’s dripping wound, or spin
A web across hell’s mouth:
Such feats the great magicians
Found within their powers,
Whose quick illusions bodied out
A world more whole than ours.
But the hollow in the breast
Where a God should be –
This is the fault they may not
Absolve nor remedy.
Moods of Love
1
The melting poles, the tongues that play at lightning,
All that gross hurricane hatched from a sigh –
These are the climax to his sure routine.
But first, a glance coins gold in the air, doves issue
From clasped hands, knots no one saw tied are tightening;
The card you chose, or were made to, wondrously
Turns up here there and anywhere like a djinn,
And borrowed time vanishes to amaze you.
Admire the ’fluence of this conjuring
As once again he runs the gamut through
Of tricks you can neither fathom nor resist,
Though well you know the old Illusionist
Employs for his whole repertoire only two
Simple properties – a rod, a ring.
2
Think of his transformations; thirsty babe,
Secret companion, devil, confidante,
Lapdog and sphinx – each hides that king whose orb
Is the whole earth grasped in a bare ‘I want’.
Redder the rose for him, sadder the fall,
Who swells a trivial word into a portent,
Turns dust to diamond, shows the bantam tall,
The giant weak: nevertheless, most potent
When he comes back insidious and subdued
As an old jailbird begging one more chance.
Whether you trust him then, or look askance,
Or slam your door, at least don’t act the prude:
He’s what you’ve made of him: plausible, lewd
Or tough, he’s your flesh – was a pure child once.
3
‘Oh shelter me from the invisible rain
Corrodes my flesh piecemeal! Oh take me in –
I’ll be your god, your man, your mannikin!’
Cry the gaunt lecher and the ignorant swain.
Dipped in eternity now, they find nowhere
A flaw in the magic circle of their embracing:
Two are reborn as one: where all is passing
They dream a now for ever and set fair.
Reborn! The very word is like a bell.
From the warm trance, the virgin arms awoken,
Each turns to his sole self. Out of the shell
They step, unchanged. Only a spell is broken.
Though there’s no cure, no making whole, no fusion,
Live while you can the merciful illusion.
4
See, at a turn of her wrist, paradise open;
Dote, lover, upon a turquoise vein;
Feel how the blood flowers and the nerves go lilting
Like butterflies through an immortal blue.
Thi
s is creation morning. What could happen
But miracles here? The god you entertain,
The pure legend you breathe, no desert silting
Over your garden ever makes untrue.
New-seen, first-named, your own to hurt and heal,
This commonplace of skin, bone, habit, sense
Is now a place that never was before.
Lose and possess yourself therein: adore
The ideal clay, the carnal innocence.
Where all’s miraculous, all is most real.
5
Inert, blanched, naked, at the gale’s last gasp
Out of their drowning bliss flung high and dry
Above the undertow, the breakers’ rasp,
With shells and weed and shining wrack they lie.
Or, as an isle asleep with its reflection
Upon the absolute calm, each answers each
In the twin trance of an unflawed affection
That shows the substance clear, the dream in reach.
By one arched, hollowing, toppling wave uptossed
Together on the gentle dunes, they know
A world more lucid for lust’s afterglow,
Where, fondly separate, blind passion fused
To a reflective glass, each holds in trust
The other’s peace, and finds his real self so.
6
The dance, the plumage, all that flaunting day
Of blood’s clairvoyance and enchanter’s wit
Making trite things unique – you reckon it
Tells more than brute necessity at play?
Unwise. Another tedious, piteous woman
Was Helen, got by heart. Can you adore
The human animal’s ecstasy, yet ignore
The ground and primitive logic of being human? –
Deplore that closest viewed is clearliest changing,
And least enduring is the most enthralling?
That love breeds habit, habit brings estranging?
That highest flown means most abysmal falling?
When the flushed hour goes down, what residue
From its broad-glittering flood remains to you?
7
Shells, weed, discoloured wrack – a spring tide’s litter
Dully recalling its lost element,
And one you live with, quarrelsome or complying,
Are all that’s left of Aphrodite’s birth.
Gone is the power she gave you to delight her,
The period of grace, so quickly spent,
When the day’s walk was a white dream of flying,
Earth a far cry, she a sufficient earth.
Whether long use has now choked your desire
With its own clinker, or, abruptly parted
At love’s high noon, incredulous you have stood
Suffering her absence like a loss of blood
Week after week, still, by the god deserted,
You worship relics of a sacred fire.
8
Beware! Such idolizing can divorce
Body and mind: the foam-bright fiction drains
Purpose away and sings you from your course.
Better a brutal twitching of the reins
And off, than this devouring pious whore
Who in a soft regret will twine you fast
Where thigh-bones mope along the tainted shore
And crazed beachcombers pick over their past.
Love is the venturing on: think – as you fare
Among strange islands, each a phantasy
Of home, giving your strength to what must be
Found and new-found through doubt, mirage, despair –
Weaving, unweaving her true self somewhere
Deep in your heart grows a Penelope.
9
If love means exploration – the divine
Growth of a new discoverer first conceived
In flesh, only the stranger can be loved:
Familiar loving grooves its own decline.
If change alone is true – the ever-shifting
Base of each real or illusive show,
Inconstancy’s a law: the you that now
Loves her, to otherness is blindly drifting.
But chance and fretting time and your love change her
Subtly from year to year, from known to new:
So she will always be the elusive stranger,
If you can hold her present self in view.
Find here, in constant change, faithful perceiving,
The paradox and mode of all true loving.
Last Words
Suppose, they asked,
You are on your death-bed (this is just the game
For a man of words),
With what definitive sentence will you sum
And end your being?… Last words: but which of me
Shall utter them?
– The child, who in London’s infinite, intimate darkness
Out of time’s reach,
Heard nightly an engine whistle, remote and pure
As a call from the edge
Of nothing, and soon in the music of departure
Had perfect pitch?
– The romantic youth
For whom horizons were the daily round,
Near things unbiddable and inane as dreams,
Till he had learned
Through his hoodwinked orbit of clay what Eldorados
Lie close to hand?
– Or the ageing man, seeing his lifelong travel
And toil scaled down
To a flimsy web
Stranded on two dark boughs, dissolving soon,
And only the vanishing dew makes visible now
Its haunted span?
Let this man say,
Blest be the dew that graced my homespun web.
Let this youth say,
Prairies bow to the treadmill: do not weep.
Let this child say,
I hear the night bird, I can go to sleep.
1957
THE GATE
and other poems
TO PEGGY AND JEREMY
Acknowledgments are due to the editors of periodicals in which a number of these poems have appeared – the Critical Quarterly, Encounter, the Listener, the London Magazine, the New Yorker, Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, the Transatlantic Review, the Twentieth Century, Unicorn. The verses on pp. 578–9 are reproduced by permission of the proprietors of Punch.
‘The Disabused’ and ‘Not Proven’ were broadcast on the Third Programme of the B.B.C. in May 1960.
‘The Unexploded Bomb’ is part of the Prologue written for a midnight matinée, held in the Royal Festival Hall, in aid of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
‘The Christmas Rose’, in a setting by Alan Ridout, was sung by the University of London Musical Society in St Paul’s Cathedral on December 7th, 1961.
‘Requiem for the Living’ was written for music, and set by Donald Swann.
Bread and Wine
A cornfield, moon-bemused
And crocketed with stooks,
Or shining spheres upon the vine
Are food and drink to one who looks
Beyond his nose. Another
May draw some aliment,
Estimating what’s the yield of
Matured existence they present.
We labourers in this field
Have not the same concern,
Being strictly bound to melt into
The shoots we tend, the earth we turn.
Our dirt, our drought have grown
That heady stuff they pour you:
It is our hunger makes the bread,
We who are blessed and broken for you.
These staple foods ignore,
Take, or spit out like phlegm;
But do not think to isolate
What was absorbed in making them.
Your uttermost communion
With us labouring men
Is in t
he joy that we rejoiced with,
Being consumed by grape and grain.
The Gate
FOR TREKKIE
In the foreground, clots of cream-white flowers (meadow-sweet?
Guelder? Cow parsley?): a patch of green: then a gate
Dividing the green from a brown field; and beyond,
By steps of mustard and sainfoin-pink, the distance
Climbs right-handed away
Up to an olive hilltop and the sky.
The gate it is, dead-centre, ghost-amethyst-hued,
Fastens the whole together like a brooch.
It is all arranged, all there, for the gate’s sake
Or for what may come through the gate. But those white flowers,
Craning their necks, putting their heads together,
Like a crowd that holds itself back from surging forward,
Have their own point of balance – poised, it seems,
On the airy brink of whatever it is they await.
And I, gazing over their heads from outside the picture,
Question what we are waiting for: not summer –
Summer is here in charlock, grass and sainfoin.
A human event? – but there’s no path to the gate,
Nor does it look as if it was meant to open.
The ghost of one who often came this way
When there was a path? I do not know. But I think,
If I could go deep into the heart of the picture
From the flowers’ point of view, all I would ask is
Not that the gate should open, but that it should
Stay there, holding the coloured folds together.
We expect nothing (the flowers might add), we only
Await: this pure awaiting –
It is the kind of worship we are taught.
View From An Upper Window1
FOR KENNETH AND JANE CLARK
From where I am sitting, my windowframe
Offers a slate roof, four chimneypots,
One aerial, half of a leafless tree,
And sky the colour of dejection. I could
Move my chair; but, London being
What it is, all would look much the same
Except that I’d have the whole of that tree.