Tonight, a tingle of life at the nerve-ends.
* * *
But I may be the poorer for
Not admitting souls
Into this human company:
The dead have nothing else
For entrance-fee. Though bloodless, they
Are brothers of the blood.
If they persist, how could I bar
Such a convivial crowd?
Not willy-nilly thistledowns
I fancy them, but as air
Viewless, dimensionless, pervasive,
Here there and everywhere.
Born with souls, or soul-makers –
Who knows? What I’m protesting
Is the idea that, if souls we have,
They have to be everlasting.
I do not want an eternity
Of self, rubbed clean or cluttered
With past. But it’s unlikely that
My wishes would be considered.
* * *
Welcome, all you intangible whose touch,
Impressing my own death upon my heart,
Leaves there a ghost of sweetness, like wood-ash
After the fires are out and the rooms aired.
To linger so, or as a horn that echoes
Out of the lost defiles, the sure defeat,
Heartening a few to courage and acceptance,
Is the short afterlife I’d want of fate.
Come then, dead friends, bringing your waft of wood-smoke,
Your gift of echoes. Sit by the bedside.
Graceless to ask just what I am invoking,
For this is the official visiting night.
Existences, consoling lies, or phantom
Dolls of tradition, enter into me.
Welcome, invisibles! We have this in common –
Whatever you are, I presently shall be.
Hero and Saint
Sad if no one provoked us any more
To do the improbable –
Catch a winged horse, muck out a preposterous stable,
Or even some unsensational chore
Like becoming a saint. Those adversaries knew
The form, to be sure: small use for one
Who after an hour of effort would throw down
Cross, shovel or lassoo.
It gave more prestige to each prince of lies
And his far-fetched ordeal
That an attested hero should just fail
One little finger’s breadth from the prize.
Setting for Heracles and Bellerophon
Such tasks, they judged it a winning gamble,
Forgetting they lived in a world of myth where all
Conclusions are foregone.
A saint knows patience alone will see him through
Ordeals which lure, disfigure, numb:
And this (the heroes proved) can only come
From a star kept in view.
But he forgoes the confidence, the hallowed
Air of an antique hero:
He never will see himself but as a zero
Following a One that gives it value.
Hero imagined himself in the constellations,
Saint as a numbered grain of wheat.
Nowhere but in aspiring do they meet
And discipline of patience.
He rose to a trial of wit and sinew, he
To improbable heights of loving.
Both, it seems, might have been good for nothing
Without a consummate adversary.
Sunday Afternoon
‘It was like being a child again, listening and thinking of something else and hearing the voices-endless, inevitable and restful, like Sunday afternoon.’
JEAN RHYS
An inch beyond my groping fingertips,
Lurking just round the corner of the eye.
Bouquet from an empty phial. A sensual ellipse
So it eludes – the quicksilver quarry.
I stretch my hands out to the farther shore,
Between, the fog of Lethe: no river – a mere thread
Bars me from the self I would re-explore:
Powerless I am to break it as the dead.
Yet a picture forms. Summer it must be. Sunlight
Fixes deck-chairs and grass in its motionless torrents.
The rest are shadows. I am the real: but I could run
To those familiar shades for reassurance.
Light slithers from leaf to leaf. Gossip of aspens.
Cool voices blow about, sprinkling the lawn.
Bells hum like a windrush chime of bees: a tolling hastens
Long-skirted loiterers to evensong.
Flowers nod themselves to sleep at last. I smell
Roses – or is it an Irish nursemaid’s florin scent?
Gold afternoon rounds to a breast … Ah well,
A picture came, though not the one I meant.
Make what you can of it, to recompense
For the real thing, the whole thing vanished beyond recall.
Gauge from a few chance-found and cherished fragments
The genius of the lost original.
A Privileged Moment
Released from hospital, only half alive still,
Cautiously feeling the way back into himself,
Propped up in bed like a guy, he presently ventured
A glance at the ornaments on his mantelshelf.
White, Wedgwood blue, dark lilac coloured or ruby –
Things, you could say, which had known their place and price,
Gleamed out at him with the urgency of angels
Eager for him to see through their disguise.
Slowly he turned his head. By gust-flung snatches
A shower announced itself on the windowpane:
He saw unquestioning, not even astonished,
Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain.
Gently at last the angels settled back now
Into mere ornaments, the unearthly sheen
And spill of diamond into familiar raindrops,
It was enough. He’d seen what he had seen.
A Picture by Renoir
Two stocky young girls in the foreground stoop
For a ball – red dress, white pinafore.
Toned with the sunburnt grass, two more
Follow in beige. That wayward troupe
Is the butterfly soul of summer.
Beyond them a stripe of azure-blue
Distance fades to the kind of sky
That calls for larks. In the blend of high
Colour and hazy line is a clue
To the heart of childhood summer.
So lively they are, I can all but see
Those halycon girls elude the frame
And fly off the picture, intent on their game
Wherever the ball may go, set free
Into eternal summer.
It does what pictures are meant to do –
Grasp a moment and throw it clear
Beyond the reach of time. Those four
Maidens will play for ever, true
To all our youthful summers.
A Tuscan Villa
(FOR KATHLEEN AND JOHANNES)
We took to your villa on trust and sight unseen
As the journey’s dreamed-of height; had guessed it
A jewel framed in silver, nested in May-time green,
How the real thing surpassed it!
From the loggia, mountain ranges are seen renewing
Their mystery in the haze: a wedge
Of hill solid with jostled trees, cypresses queueing
Like travellers on their verge:
And at my feet in a lather of silvery fleece
An olive grove silently breaking.
Only a cuckoo, a child’s cry breaks on the sylvan peace
And only to reawaken
The charm of silence. A burbling from the spaces
Up there reminds us that too soon
Bearing a s
pray of forget-me-not, leaving few traces
Behind, we shall move on.
But wrong it is, yearning to recompose
Feature on feature, petal by petal,
A blurring Paradise, the spectre of a rose.
I think they come too late – all
Gifts but the moment’s. If we are quick and catch them,
We shall not grudge to let them fly.
Others will sojourn here: it will enrich them
With a present for ear and eye –
Silence and nightingales; the grace and knowledge
Of friends; acacia, lemon flowers,
Lemony tulips; a vista genial with vine and olive.
Today, be glad it is ours.
Merry-go-round
Here is a gallant merry-go-round.
The children all, entranced or queasy,
Cling to saddlebows, crazily fancy the
Circular tour is a free and easy
Gallop into a world without end.
Now their undulating time is up.
Horses, music slow to a stop.
Time’s last inches running out,
A vortex, only guessable
Before by the circus ring of bubbles
Sedately riding, now turns visible –
A hole, an ulcer, a waterspout.
Bubbles twirl faster as closer they come
To the brink of the vacuum.
And my thoughts revolve upon death’s
Twisted attraction. As limbs move slower,
Time runs more quickly towards the undoer
Of all. I feel each day devour
My future. Still, to the lattermost breath
Let me rejoice in the world I was lent –
The rainbow bubbles, the dappled mount.
Philosophy Lectures1
He goes about it and about,
By elegant indirections clears a route
To the inmost truth.
Cutting the ground from underneath
Rogue analogies, dialectic tares,
See how he bares
And shames the indulgent, weed-choked soil,
Shaving his field to the strictly meaningful!
Now breathless we
Await, await the epiphany –
A miracle crop to leap from the bald ground.
Not one green shoot, however, is discerned.
Well, watch this reaper-and-binder bumbling round
A shuddered field. Proud sheaves collapse
In narrowing squares. A coarser job, perhaps –
Corn, com cockle and poppy lie
Corded, inseparable. Now each eye
Fastens on that last stand of corn:
Hares, partridge? – no, surely a unicorn
Or phoenix will be harbouring there,
Ripe for revelation. Harvest forgot, I stare
From the field’s verge as the last ears fall.
Not even a rabbit emerges. Nothing at all.
Are the two fields identical,
Only the reapers different? Misdirected
Or out of our minds, we expected
A wrong thing – the impossible
Or merely absurd; creatures of fire and fable
Where bread was the intention,
Harvest where harvest was not meant.
Yet in both fields we saw a right end furthered:
Something was gathered.
1 The lecturer was Professor Bernard Williams. We were in the audience at the British Academy.
After an Encaenia
This afternoon the working sparrows, glum
Of plumage, nondescript, flurried, quarrelsome,
Appear as cardinal, kingfisher, hoopoe, bird
Of paradise. They stalk the sward
With gait somnambulous beside their not
So colourful hens, or heart to gorgeous heart
Absently confer together
In tones that do not change to match their feathers
Will no one tell me what they chirp? I’d say
Their minds are very far away
From this cloud-cuckoo lawn, impatient to
Resume the drudgery sparrows pursue.
Scavengers are they? Gathering crumbs,
Nibbling at particles and old conundrums,
Pouncing on orts never observed before,
They justify their stay-at-home exploring.
I like these scrap-collectors: and to see
Their hard-earned plumes worn without vanity
Hints that a scholar’s search for evidence
Is selfless as the lives of saints.
Truth, knowledge even, seems too grandiose
A word for the flair and flutterings of those
Whose ambition is no more wide
Than to get, once for all, one small thing right.
Tenure
is never for keeps, never truly assured
(tick on, you geological clocks)
though some things almost have it, or seem to have it.
For example, rocks
in a shivering sea: the castaway who has clawed himself on
to one:
a bull’s tenacious horn:
archaic myths: the heroin habit.
Even the sun or a dead man’s skull among the cactus
does not quite have it.
I turn now to American university practice.
Tenure there is pronounced ‘Shangri-
La’: once you have it, however spurious
your fame, not even the angriest
trustees, except for certified madness or moral turpitude,
can ever dislodge you. I salute
all those tenurious
professors. But I would not wish to be
one, though the life may be happy and sometimes not inglorious
Tenure is not for me.
I want to be able to drop out of my head,
or off my rock and swim to another, ringed with a roundelay
of sirens. I should not care to be a dead
man’s skull, or a myth, or a junkie:
or the too energetic sun.
Since heaven and earth, we are told, shall pass away
(hell, sneers the blonde, is off already)
I would live each day as if it were my last and first day.
Epitaph for a Drug-Addict
Mourn this young girl. Weep for society
Which gave her little to esteem but kicks.
Impatient of its code, cant, cruelty,
Indifferent, she kicked against all pricks
But the dream-loaded hypodermic’s. She
Has now obtained an everlasting fix.
A Marriage Song
FOR ALBERT AND BARBARA1
Midsummer, time of golden views and hazes,
Advance in genial air,
Bring out your best for this charmed pair –
Let fly a flamingo dawn, throw open all your roses,
Crimson the day for them and start the dancing.
June-month fruits, yield up your delicate favours
Entrancing them, and be
Foretastes of ripe felicity:
Peach bloom and orange flower, ravish these happy lovers,
Sweeten the hour for them and start the dancing.
Tune to our joy, grass, breezes, philomels,
Enhancing their bright weather
Of inward blessedness; together
With honeying bees and silver waterfalls of bells
Carol our hopes for them, oh start the dancing.
In well-deep looks of love and soft-as-foam
Glances they plight their troth.
Midsummer stars, be kind to both
Through the warm dark when they shall come into their own,
Light your candles for them, start the dance.
1 Albert and Barbara Gelpi – friends at Harvard, now at Stanford University.
At East Coker
At the far end of a bemusing village
Wh
ich has kept losing finding and losing itself
Along the lane, as if to exercise a pilgrim’s
Faith, you see it at last. Blocked by a hill
The traffic, if there was any, must swerve aside:
Riding the hilltop, confidently saddled,
A serviceable English church.
Climb on foot now, past white lilac and
The alms-house terrace; beneath yew and cedar
Screening the red-roof blur of Yeovil; through
The peaceable aroma of June grasses,
The churchyard where old Eliots lie. Enter.
A brass on the south wall commemorates
William Dampier, son of this unhorizoned village,
Who thrice circumnavigated the globe, was
First of all Englishmen to explore
The coast of Australia … An exact observer
Of all things in Earth, Sea and Air. Another
Exploring man has joined his company.
In the north-west corner, sealed, his ashes are
(Remember him at a party, diffident,
Or masking his fire behind an affable mien):
Above them, today, paeonies glow like bowls of
Wine held up to the blessing light.
Where an inscription bids us pray
For the repose of the soul of T. S. Eliot, poet –
A small fee in return for the new worlds
He opened us. ‘Where prayer is valid’, yes,
Though mine beats vainly against death’s stone front,
And all our temporal tributes only scratch
Graffiti on its monumental silence.
* * *
But soon obituary yields
To the real spirit, livelier and more true.
There breathes a sweetness from his honoured stone,
A discipline of long virtue,
As in that farmside chapel among fields
At Little Gidding. We rejoice for one
Whose heart a midsummer’s long winter,
Though ashen-skied and droughtful, could not harden
Against the melting of midwinter spring,
Complete Poems Page 50
