No man before or since tuned music’s tongue
To depths of tenderness
Or heights of grandeur like to his.
Deafness, a fog chilling and thickening, clung
About his ears while he
Climbed on to immortality.
Then, at the end, from absolute silence sprang
The last quartets, his music’s apogee.
Hear the adagio
Of the A minor – how life’s low
Drudge and drone breaks into ecstasy,
Lark-tongued a violin soaring
On hopes ineffable, aspiring
To its pure essence – love’s epiphany.
1 On December 16th, 1970, during the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 1970–71 season, a Beethoven bicentenary concert took place in which his Missa Solemnis was performed by soloists and the New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus under Carlo Maria Giulini. On page three of the anniversary programme appeared the tribute to Beethoven.
St. Paul’s – Old and New1
A famous photograph comes to mind – your dome
Breasting hurricane waves of smoke and flame
Thirty one years ago.
You who rose up, a phoenix, after one
Fire of London, braved another then –
War’s crash and undertow.
Weather, war, traffic, age have weakened you.
High time is it for us now to renew
The fabric of Wren’s dream,
Shielding as best we may the solid grace,
And aerial soarings of his masterpiece
From envious, nibbling time.
Here was no matter of just making good
A stately pile of stone, lead, glass and wood,
But active piety
Towards them by whose quickness time was outpaced –
Donne, Nelson, Churchill, all who this way passed
To immortality.
No less we honour each mute generation,
Which kept this place alive by their devotion,
Then, as obscurely, died:
Whose worshipping – high ceremonials
And humble prayers alike – upheld St. Paul’s,
Our city’s, nation’s pride.
City and nation, rich and poor who joined
To swell this fund, have passed the halfway point.
Now look we to the hour
Your bells shall utter, peal on jubilant peal,
A song of restoration, and reveal
Wren’s vision made secure.
1 On November 8th, 1971, an evening of renaissance entertainment was held at the Mansion House in the City of London as a tribute to the outgoing Lord Mayor for his inspiring leadership in the Save St. Paul’s appeal. It was attended by the Queen Mother. As well as renaissance music for voice and instruments there was a poetry recital given by Jill Balcon which included the poem specially written for the occasion. The poem appeared in the Daily Telegraph on the morning of the entertainment.
Hymn for Shakespeare’s Birthday1
The Word was the beginning,
Spirit’s and Reason’s sire –
Sent the chartered planets spinning
Down their tracks of fire.
After that fiery birth
What endless aeons throng
Before this green and troubled earth
Can grow to her full song!
The all-creative Word
Surveying earth’s huge span
From every maker there preferred
One man to speak for Man –
Gifted with art beyond
The best who’d worn the bays,
Sure pilot still on the profound
Heart’s uncharted ways.
This man, whose vision ranged
Life’s whole from bliss to woe,
Perceived how love, warped or estranged,
Will bring the highest low.
Today his birthday fell.
But he is born once more
Each time we come beneath his spell
And to his genius soar.
1 Mr. Sam Wanamaker, as Executive Director of the Globe Playhouse Trust, planned a Gala Birthday Concert in Southwark Cathedral as one of the first among a series of events to be held during the week beginning 23rd April, 1972. He invited a number of distinguished poets and composers to contribute. The Poet Laureate’s Hymn was set to music by Sir Lennox Berkeley for chorus and organ and was sung by the Exultate Singers. CDL was, by then, too ill to leave his room, so the poem was read by JB.
Another Day1
Through the hand’s skill gradually
The head learnt its identity.
The shaping hand was touched and led
By the poem in the head.
Head and hand each went its own
Way, yet in strange unison.
Certainly the pair had set
Out by different routes; and yet
Their destination was the same.
A demon, jealous of the fame
That crowns the hard creative game,
BLEW – and turned back to brutish clay
The breathing replica of Day.
But Day survived and K. contrived
To keep her head and bring Day’s head
To life again another day.
1 In May 1970 we were staying with the late Kathleen and Johannes Schwarzenberg in their Tuscan villa (celebrated in The Whispering Roots). In the Cortile. our hostess was modelling CDL’s head in clay, preparatory to casting it. A storm blew up and completely wrecked the head. Undaunted, the sculptor started again from scratch, successfully. The finished head is still there, and she captured completely C.’s expression when composing.
A Short Dirge for St. Trinian’s1
Where are the girls of yesteryear? How strange
To think they’re scattered East, South, West and North –
Those pale Medusas of the Upper Fourth,
Those Marihuanas of the Moated Grange.
No more the shrieks of victims, and no more
The fiendish chuckle borne along the breeze!
Gone are the basilisk eyes, the bony knees.
Mice, and not blood, run down each corridor.
Now poison ivy twines the dorm where casks
Were broached and music mistresses were flayed,
While on the sports ground where the pupils played
The relatively harmless adder basks.
Toll for St. Trinian’s, nurse of frightful girls!
St. Trinian’s, mother of the far too free!
No age to come (thank God) will ever see
Such an academy as Dr. Searle’s.
1 A poem written on the occasion of Ronald Searle’s decision to kill off St. Trinian’s. From Souls in Torment by Ronald Searle, 1953.
Cat
Tearaway kitten or staid mother of fifty,
Persian, Chinchilla, Siamese
Or backstreet brawler – you all have tiger in your blood
And eyes opaque as the sacred mysteries.
The hunter’s instinct sends you pouncing, dallying,
Formal and wild as a temple dance.
You take from man what is your due – the fireside saucer,
And give him his – a purr of tolerance.
Like poets you wrap your solitude around you
And catch your meaning unawares:
With consequential trot or frantic tarantella
You follow up your top-secret affairs.
Simpkin, our pretty cat, assumes my lap
As a princess her rightful throne,
Pads round and drops asleep there. Each is a familiar
Warmth to the other, each no less alone.
Tuscany1
Tuscany, long endeared to English hearts –
Vine, olive, maize, glories of song and stone –
We mourned your dead when chaos broke upon
That ordered life of husbandry and arts.
And we lament your treasu
res so defaced.
All beauty which the vandal floods have blurred,
All wrecked originals of brush and wood
Are pages torn for ever out of our living past.
The muddied inundations fall away
From cities and man’s heart. He’ll count the score,
Then put his house to rights and turn once more
To face the mountainous challenges. Nature may
Still overwhelm us: but from nature’s hand
Issues the clay we shape to an immortal end.
1 This poem was written for Laurence Olivier to read at a gala performance in aid of the Florentine Flood appeal.
Keats, 1821–19711
Dying in Rome, mocked by the wraith
Of fame, lungs burnt out, heart consumed
With love-longing, could he have dreamed
His life had not been waste of breath?
The sanguine youth could yet despair
That poetry’s great age was passed,
Her future pinched and overcast –
All said, all better said, before.
After much groping a year came
When genius took his feverish hand,
Urgently pointing to the ground
Where he would strike a richest seam.
That year is gone. Today he lies
As by a losing race quite drained,
Heeds not the laurels unattained,
Comforts a sorrowing friend, and dies.
Fate took that hard death for its fee,
Then eased him into immortality.
1 Written for the 150th anniversary of the death of Keats, and read in Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome, in February 1971, when JB and CDL gave a recital there. My gratitude to the curator, Bathsheba Abse, for sending me a typescript of this.
Index of first lines
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
A boy among the reeds on Severn shore 573
A chance word, and you sat there at the table 16
A cornfield, moon-bemused 537
A famous photograph comes to mind – your dome 729
A forward child, a sullen boy 341
A fountain plays no more: those pure cascades 510
A frost came in the night and stole my world 393
A hairy ghost, sent packing or appeased 679
A hill flank overlooking the Axe valley 331
A mole first, out of riddling passages 129
A shepherd stands at one end of the arena 542
A stony stretch. Grey boulders 658
A word with you, my friends. High summer is scorching up 469
A world seems to end at the top of this hill 391
A world of speechless time until man came 723
Above my table three magnolia flowers 713
Admit then and be glad 193
After the light decision 347
All day beside the shattered tank he’d lain 339
All day the spirit have we breathed 22
All is the same still. Earth and heaven locked in 387
Always, along that path hawthorn and lilac 701
An elegant, shabby, white-washed house 513, 653
An inch beyond my groping fingertips 683
And since, though young, I know 124
Animal, fish, fowl 727
Arriving was their passion 508
As I came to the sea wall that August day 398
As one who wanders into old workings 113
Ass 666
At the far end of a bemusing village 692
At the head of Lough Carra the royal abbey stands 671
At her charmed height of summer 623
At the training depot that first morning 405
Autumn met me today as I walked over Castle Hill 332
Back to the countryside 107
Beauty breaks ground, oh, in strange places 125
Beauty’s end is in sight 109
Before a rumour stirred, he fled the country 306
Behold the swan 304
Between the hero’s going and the god’s coming 494
Bicycling around Dublin with the ruddy, anonymous face 664
Blank walls, dead grates, obliterated pages 678
Born of my voiceless time, your steps 407
But think of passion and pain 114
By the glim of a midwinterish early morning 516
By a windrowed field she made me stop 554
Careful of his poetic p’s and q’s 638
Child running wild in woods of Lissadell 663
Children, in love with maps and gravings, know 640
Cold chisels of wind, ice-age-edged 499
Come, dust, spread thy oblivion above 5
Come to the orangery. Sit down awhile 461
Come out in the sun, for a man is born today! 127
Come out for a while and look from the outside in 517
Come on, the wind is whirling our summer away 107
Consider the boy that you were, although you would hardly 358
Cry to us, murdered village. While your grave 336
Curtain up on this dear, honoured scene! 721
Dancing and revelling shouted the earth 21
Days before a journey 606
Dear, do not think that I 40
Did I meet you again? 378
Did you notice at all as you entered the house? 376
Do not expect again a phoenix hour 119
Do you remember, Margaret, how we came 47
Do you remember that hour? 379
Do you remember those mornings after the blitzes? 719
Down hidden causeways of the universe 117
Down in the lost and April days 348
Down the night-scented borders of sleep 303
Dropping the few last days, are drops of lead 125
Dying in Rome, mocked by the wraith 735
Eleven o’clock. My house creaks and settles 555
Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving 270
Eye of the wind, whose bearing in 570
Faultlessly those antique heroes 578
Floods and the voluble winds 302
Florence, father of Michelangelo 452
For infants time is like a humming shell 321
For me there is no dismay 328
For one, the sudden fantastic grimace 273
For sacrifice, there are certain principles 511
For those who had the power 197
For us, born into a world 276
Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage 290
From all my childhood voyages back to Ireland 608, 655
From far, she seemed to lie like a stone on the sick horizon 327
From the unerring chisel at fall of shadow 6
From where I am sitting, my windowframe 539
Girl of the musing mouth 374
Give me your eyes, give me your hands 14
‘Goodbye’ – the number of times each day one says it! 571
Grant us untroubled rest. Our sleep is fretted 583
Great poet, friend of my later days, you first 709
Had she lived in perilous days 14
Half moon of moon-pale sand 668
Have you seen clouds drifting across a night sky? 344
He came to her that night, as every night 486
He goes about it and about 687
He raged at critic, moralist – all 639
He said, ‘Do not point your gun’ 269
Here are the houses: this is the house. No smile 42
Here is a gallant merry-go-round 686
Here is green lacquer 32
Here is nothing singular 54
Here is the unremembered gate 654
Here’s Abbey Way; here are the rooms 394
Hero musician, two hundred years 728
His
earliest memory, the mood 307
Horse at pool’s edge drinking its own reflection 704
How long will you keep this pose of self-confessed 288
How many children starving, did you say? 722
How pretty it looks, thought a passer-by 404
How to retrace the bygone track 705
Hundreds went down to the ocean bed 397
I am an arrow, I am a bow 317
‘I dreamed love was an angel’ 610
I have come so far upon my journey 116
I lingered in that unfriended room 13
I met an old man in a wood 8
I remember, as if it were yesterday 342
I sang as one 183
I see her against the pearl sky of Dublin 633
I see you, a child 316
I thought, ‘Had I this body of my Hope’ 38
I will remember this night. So long as mind 39
In the abandoned heaven 271
In beds of municipal parks the flowers 703
In a fisherman’s hat and a macintosh 669
In the foreground, clots of cream-white flowers (meadowsweet?) 538
In the heart of contemplation 287
In me two worlds at war 185
In a shelter one night, when death was taking the air 406
In a sun-crazed orchard 636
In this sector when barrage lifts and we 122
In the white piazza Today is barely awake 445
In a windless garden 48
Infirm and grey 267
Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul? 388
Is it far to go? 379
Is it your hope, hope’s hearth, heart’s home, here at the lane’s end? 182
is never for keeps, never truly assured 689
Is this what wears you out – having to weigh 288
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day 546
It is I who touch with wonder 11
It is out at last 364
It is time to think of you 118
It mounted up behind his cowardice 617
It was always so, always 309
It was an evening late in the year 188
It was much the same, no doubt 522
It was not far through the pinewoods 305
It was there on the hillside, no tall traveller’s story 483
It would be strange 330
I’ve heard them lilting at loom and belting 195
Lark, skylark, spilling your rubbed and round 193
Let up the curtain 29
Let us not call it progress: movement certainly 706
Complete Poems Page 53
