Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  Knowing his sweet new style was spare, refined,

  Tough, difficult, precise in every part,

  And therefore apt to be fudged in its gist

  By scribes half qualified and some half pissed.

  Such minds are rare, and often in disguise

  They come into the world. My only role

  In your brave saga is that I was wise

  Enough to see the brilliant scholar’s soul

  Shine through her beauty in the lecture hall

  Even before we met. I guessed it all.

  How could that be? Well, here is how it can:

  You took notes at the same speed that I ate,

  With an eye for truth unknown to mortal man,

  Especially this man. It was my fate

  To fish the surface but my luck to see

  You hungered for a deeper clarity.

  I saw you flower in Florence. That was where

  The bigwigs spotted you and marked your card.

  The sage Contini knew you were a rare

  Natural philologist worth his regard,

  And while you learned, you taught me. From the way

  You read me Dante I foretold today.

  Today, so far from our first years, I bless

  My judgment, which in any other case

  Is something we both know I don’t possess,

  But one thing I did know. I knew my place.

  I knew yours was the true gift that would bring

  Our house the honours that mean everything:

  The honour of our daughters raised to treat

  All people with your scrupulous respect,

  The honour of your laughter and the sweet

  Self-abnegation of an intellect

  That never vaunts itself though well it might,

  And this above all, lovely in my sight –

  Pursued through busy days in precious hours,

  Pored over word by word and line by line

  Year after year with concentrated powers

  Of selfless duty to the grand design

  Of someone long dead who was well aware

  That dreams of peace on earth must court despair –

  The honour of the necessary task

  Done well, not just for show, and done for keeps.

  Could I have helped you more? Don’t even ask.

  I can hear Dante, grunting as he sleeps:

  “You are the weakling and you always were.

  If you would sing for glory, sing of her.”

  Whitman and the Moth

  Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age

  Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,

  Crowding his final notebooks page by page

  With names of trees, birds, bugs and things like that.

  The war could never break him, though he’d seen

  Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.

  But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:

  Evangelising greed was in control.

  Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged

  By tracing how creation reigned supreme.

  A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:

  America, still unfolding from its dream.

  Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,

  Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.

  A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,

  Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.

  But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,

  The meeting point where great art comes to pass –

  Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,

  The moth, which had not written Leaves of Grass,

  Composed a picture of the interchange

  Between the mind and all that it transcends

  Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange

  In how he put his hand out to make friends

  With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.

  Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,

  He blessed new life, though it had only just

  Arrived in time to see the end of him.

  The Later Yeats

  Where he sought symbols, we, for him, must seek

  A metaphor, lest mere praise should fall short

  Of how the poems of his last years set

  Our standards for the speech that brings the real

  To integrated order dearly bought,

  Catching the way complexity would speak

  If it had one voice. This, he makes us feel,

  Is where all deeper meanings are well met,

  Contained in a majestic vessel made

  Out of the sea it sails on, yet so strong

  We never, watching it our whole lives long,

  Doubt its solidity. All else may fade,

  But this stands out as if it had been sent

  To prove it can have no equivalent.

  Even his first things were wind-driven boats.

  A coracle would have its speed enhanced

  By some queen elf who stood with gauze shift spread,

  Materialising from the twilight mist.

  Slim dhows, as his romantic urge advanced,

  Sliced through the East. A little navy floats

  In his early pages. Sleek sloops joined the list

  When more substantial things asked to be said.

  His wild-swan racing schooners heeled and ran

  Cargo from Athens, Bethlehem and Rome,

  Or the body of an Irish airman home

  Across the gale. The full soul of a man

  Was on display: sound craft of trim outline

  Criss-crossed the billows. All of his design,

  These would have been enough to make him great:

  The caravels that reached Byzantium

  Alone proved him unmatched. Then, at the heart

  Of this flotilla, as if light were haze,

  Something appeared to strike the viewer dumb:

  A huge three-decker fighting ship of state.

  Acres of air caught in her tiered arrays

  Of raw silk, she made clear, in every part,

  All of her million parts were cleanly wrought

  To fit together with no need of nails.

  From gun-decks upward to top-gallant sails

  She was one artefact, a cloud drawn taut

  By force, so far beyond its builder’s mind

  It felt for him, and saw where he was blind.

  Tea-clipper-tall but at the waterline

  Three times the width, she had the looks to quell

  Resistance instantly by show of might:

  Empires would knuckle under. Ireland

  Itself would kneel to see her breast the swell

  With such bulk. But develop and refine

  This image as we may, and as we planned –

  Down to the shining brass, sheets chalky white,

  Glazed lanterns, mullioned windows, oaken rails –

  It will not serve the turn without a sense

  Of brute strength tempered by benevolence.

  The monarch reigns supreme because her sails,

  From cinquecento chapel walls low down

  On up through salon panels to her crown

  Of screens, woodcuts and painted fans, are all

  Unchallenged masterpieces. Her curved hull

  Was moulded by the cave walls of Lascaux

  And stamped with its motifs. But what we hear,

  Not what we see, confirms the miracle

  And makes the metaphor. We’re held in thrall

  By music. Music lush, music austere,

  All music ever heartfelt, holds the flow

  Of splendour in one place. Not thought alone –

  Thought least of all, because it was his fate

  To grow more infantile as it grew late –

  Could build this thing, nor was it cut and sewn

  Or hewn solely by touch, or sealed by skill.

  A feat of the self
-sacrificing will,

  The peaceful man-of-war is here to prove

  Any attempt to emulate her air

  Of grandeur invites ridicule, unless

  We, too, pour everything into the task

  Of building something that will still be there

  When we are gone. And that means all we love

  And more, as Yeats knew when he wore a mask

  To quell the self, thinking its pettiness

  Could be faced down. It can’t, but it can be

  Tapped and diverted to an empty space

  Where something permanent can take its place,

  Shaped for the voyage to eternity

  Out of our tears of weakness at the way

  The thing we mean means more than we can say.

  Worse than absurd, then – witless, in the end –

  To trace him through his visionary schemes

  And systems, or pay grave attention to

  Those last affairs, boosted by monkey glands,

  His patient wife scorned as a dotard’s dreams

  If more unreal. No scholarship can mend

  The error of not seeing all demands

  For human truth are vain. Few things are true

  About the life except the work. Yeats found

  His final glory when his jade and gold

  Were joined by rag and bones to sink and fold

  Into the flux of images and sound

  That formed a magic ship to win the war

  Against time, which is just a metaphor

  For the battle to make sense of growing old,

  And bless the ebb tide. It is outward bound,

  Fit for the launch of what we have to give

  The future, though that be a paltry thing.

  Our house is flooded and our books are drowned,

  The embers of our passion are stone cold,

  We count the minutes we have left to live,

  Yet even now it is of love we sing,

  And for a paragon we have the vast

  Swan-songs of Yeats that brought his depths to light.

  Among school children or on All Souls’ Night,

  Humble or proud, he saved the best for last

  And gave it to the waves – but no. There is

  No ship. Just words, and all of them are his.

  Habitués

  Some older people like the ship so much

  They pay again and go wherever it goes –

  Which means that for a large part of the year

  They just steam back and forth across the Atlantic –

  Until they die, while other older people

  Are there for one performance after another

  Of The Sound of Music. They know every word.

  “How” they smile wryly as they sing along,

  “Do you solve a problem like Maria?” If

  They conk out before the interval, are they

  Removed? Surely the mark of the habitués

  Is that they’re dead already. When I noticed

  That my club was full of men who had become

  Stuffed armchairs and oak tables for school food

  I resigned to save my skin. They liked the place

  Too much. They thought the ship’s Entertainment

  Officer was entertaining. They were dewy-eyed

  Instead of loud with scorn when Liesl’s suitor

  Expressed in terms of chaste and tender love

  His youthful urge to get into her pants.

  Dull death, the minimum of information –

  Where entropy, to steal a phrase from S. J.

  Perelman, fills every nook of Granny –

  Will come when it will come, but while we’re waiting

  Beware the lapse into familiar comfort,

  All outlines softened. In that cloud lies proof

  Your life was lost on you, though I suppose

  It isn’t only easier but better

  To echo an ecstatic singing nun –

  Transfigured like Bernini’s St Teresa

  At the mere prospect of an edelweiss –

  Than to puzzle out the dialogue of, say,

  Act I, Scene IV of Cymbeline, which no one

  Has remotely, since the day that it was written,

  Enjoyed or even partly understood.

  And are there no more thrills? In the fjord

  The wrinklies crowd the rail to hear their voices

  Come back from walls of ice. Couples hold hands.

  So quick to guess their last heat is long gone,

  How sure are we the failing is not ours,

  Our cold contempt a portent of the void

  Which is the closed heart and begins within us?

  It doesn’t always take time to go nowhere.

  Castle in the Air

  We never built our grand house on the edge

  Of the Pacific, close to where we first

  Drew breath, but high up in the cliffs, a ledge

  Glassed in, with balconies where we would be

  Enthralled to watch it hit the rocks and burst –

  The ocean that still flows through you and me

  Like blood, though many years have passed since we

  Sailed separately away to keep our pledge

  Of seeing what the world was like. Since then

  We’ve been together and done pretty well:

  You by your scholarship, I by my pen,

  Both earned a living and our two careers

  Paid for a house and garden we could sell

  For just enough to spend our final years

  Out there where the last landscape disappears

  Eastward above the waves, and once again

  We would be home. We’ve talked about that view

  So often we can watch the seagulls fly

  Below us by the thousand. There’s the clue

  Perhaps, to what we might do for the best:

  Merely imagine it. The place to die

  Is where you find your feet and come to rest.

  Here, all we built is by our lost youth blessed.

  This is your gift to me, and mine to you:

  Front windows on a trimly English park,

  A back yard we can bask in, but not burn

  As we loll in our liner chairs. The bark

  Stays on the trees, no wood-pile is a lair

  For funnelwebs. Small prospect of return

  Once you’re accustomed to the change of air,

  The calm of being here instead of there –

  The slow but steady way that it grows dark.

  Sleep late then, while I do my meds and dress

  For the creaking mile that keeps my legs alive.

  In hospital I’d lie there and obsess

  About the beauty of this house, and still

  I love it. But I feel the waves arrive

  Like earthquakes as I walk, and not until

  I’m gone for good will I forget the thrill –

  Nor will the urge to start again grow less

  As always in my dreams I spread my chart

  In the great room of the grand house on the cliffs

  And plot my course. Once more I will depart

  Alone, to none beholden, full of fight

  To quell the decapods and hippogryphs,

  Take maidens here and there as is my right,

  And voyage even to eternal night

  As the hero does, made strong by his cold heart.

  A Spray of Jasmine

  Political developments in South East Asia, 2010

  The day of her release, Suu Kyi wound flowers

  Into the hair behind her head: a spray

  Of jasmine. She looked lovely doing so,

  Something a man my age can safely say,

  For she is no child. Who knows if her powers

  Extend to the real world? We have to go

  On what we see, the people’s thirst for her.

  Today no junta general would look good

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  Made music by the crowds, and if it were,

  The reason would be drearily the same

  As always, and too readily understood:

  The crowds would be afraid. Her graceful calm

  Means gentleness, as long as we recall

  That Comrade Duch, who also has his poise

  And clean-cut looks, for all he lacks her charm,

  To most of us meant nothing much at all

  When separating children from their toys

  In his quiet way. Brought to the killing tree

  And smashed to death, they saw a face to trust.

  As cool as ever, all humility,

  He now denies his guilt. Because we must –

  Led by the hand of history as we are

  Into the prison where the innocent

  Die of their agony so very far

  From all our thoughts, no matter how well meant –

  We give our hearts to her for being there.

  Such beauty has to be benevolent:

  Look at her face, the flowers in her hair.

  Madagascar Full-Tilt Boogie

  The lemur that bit a piece out of my daughter

  When she was a student here

  By now is dead and gone,

  But the island still has lemurs of every size.

  A lemur not much bigger than a cicada

  Swallows the cicada

  As you just might park a Humvee in your hallway.

  The cicada gets tons of time, on its way down,

  To think “Sod this for a game of soldiers.”

  Larger lemurs, aloft in the spiny forest,

  After feet-first triple-jumps through the parched air,

  Land on a booby-trapped branch without their pads

  Being even slightly punctured.

  It must be done by quick adjustments,

  Unless the spines go in and out and leave

  No wounds. But then where would be the point,

  If that’s the phrase we want, of so many needles

  Even being there? It would be as if, at Anzio,

  Schu-mines had popped up only to serve coffee.

  In this dried mud nothing pops up at all

  Until it rains, and hey! It’s mating day.

  A million brown frogs magically appear.

  Then half the brown frogs suddenly turn yellow

  To indicate their wholesale macho readiness