Selected Poems of Stephen Spender

by Stephen Spender

  STEPHEN SPENDER

  Selected Poems

  EDITED BY Grey Gowrie

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  PART ONE Poems (1933)

  I ‘He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye’

  II ‘Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars’

  III ‘Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.’

  IV ‘Not to you I sighed. No, not a word’

  V ‘Acts passed beyond the boundary of mere wishing’

  VI ‘I hear the cries of evening, while the paw’

  VII ‘Different living is not living in different places’

  VIII ‘An “I” can never be a great man’

  IX Beethoven’s Death Mask

  X ‘Never being, but always at the edge of Being’

  XI ‘My parents quarrel in the neighbour room’

  XII ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’

  XIII ‘What I expected was’

  XIV In 1929

  XV The Port

  XVI ‘Moving through the silent crowd’

  XVII ‘Who live under the shadow of a war’

  XVIII ‘How strangely this sun reminds me of my love!’

  XIX ‘Your body is stars whose million glitter here’

  XX The Prisoners

  XXI ‘Without that once clear aim, the path of flight’

  XXII ‘oh young men oh young comrades’

  XXIII ‘I think continually of those who were truly great.’

  XXIV ‘After they have tired of the brilliance of cities’

  XXV The Funeral

  XXVI The Express

  XXVII The Landscape near an Aerodrome

  XXVIII The Pylons

  XXIX ‘Abrupt and charming mover’

  XXX ‘In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic’

  XXXI ‘Those fireballs, those ashes’

  XXXII ‘From all these events, from the slump, from the war, from the

  boom’

  XXXIII ‘Not palaces, an era’s crown’

  PART TWO

  ‘Lying awake at night’

  ‘That girl who laughed and had black eyes’

  XXVI Van der Lubbe

  Speech from a Play

  ‘If it were not too late!’

  In No Man’s Land

  Polar Exploration

  The Past Values

  An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum

  Hampstead Autumn

  The Room above the Square

  View from a Train

  Two Armies

  Ultima Ratio Regum

  The Coward

  A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map

  War Photograph

  Fall of a City

  At Castellon

  The Bombed Happiness

  Darkness and Light

  The Separation

  To a Spanish Poet

  Auf dem Wasser zu Singen

  The Vase of Tears

  The Double Shame

  No Orpheus, No Eurydice

  The Drowned

  The Barn

  To Natasha

  from Elegy for Margaret II, V

  Man and Woman

  Lost

  Seascape

  To My Daughter

  Missing My Daughter

  Nocturne

  Sirmione Peninsula

  Subject: Object: Sentence

  Middle East

  from Diary Poems: 26 January 1970

  A Father in Time of War

  Air Raid

  The Generous Days

  A First War Childhood

  PART THREE

  Orpheus Eurydice Hermes (Rilke)

  from The Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (Rilke)

  from The Duino Elegies: The Fifth Elegy (Rilke)

  Paris (Aragon)

  Ballad of the Exterior Life (Hofmannsthal)

  from Antigone

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  Stephen Spender was the survivor among poets who made their reputation in the 1930s and whose early work is forever associated with the tension and foreboding of W. H. Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’. Spender outlived his friends and occasional dedicatees: Auden himself, Louis MacNeice (the first to go) and Cecil Day-Lewis. He also outlived the caustic and remarkable William Empson and the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood helped form his outlook on life during the time they spent together in Berlin during the last years of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler came to power. Spender’s longevity, however, and the distinction of his career as a public intellectual both in Britain and America, have been at the expense of the poetic talent which launched that career and on which it was always based. He is not much taught in schools now, in the way of Philip Larkin or Seamus Heaney. He is footnoted, all too frequently, in relation to the overarching genius of Auden. He influenced no successor generation of poets, as Louis MacNeice influenced Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. He is omitted altogether from Paul Keegan’s generation-defining New Penguin Book of English Verse.

  This centenary selection is designed above all to rescue Stephen Spender’s best poems and restore his reputation as a great lyric poet of the twentieth century. Secondary purposes are, of course, to celebrate him and direct admirers of his work to two books of weight and consequence. Michael Brett’s edition New Collected Poems (Faber, 2004) and John Sutherland’s authorised biography (Penguin, 2005) are essential. Spender produced two ‘definitive’ Collected Poems in his life-time. Like Auden, though less radically, he was prone both to revise poems and change his mind about them. Michael Brett provides an archaeological reconstruction of the poet’s overall intentions, one borne out by a recreation of the man himself in Sutherland’s Life. As a friend and former colleague of Spender, I can vouch for the liveliness of the Sutherland portrait and my selection is drawn from the Brett edition, adding only a few of Spender’s translations of Rilke. (The first Duino Elegy, by the way, anticipates the conversational mode of John Ashbery’s mature style so completely it is hard not to conjecture that Ashbery knows and loves this version.) Admirers should also turn to Christopher Isherwood’s quasi-fictional memoir Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (Hogarth Press, 1938; Methuen, 1953). Here are deft and amusing likenesses of Auden (Hugh Weston) and Spender (Stephen Savage) as well as a portrait of that other extraordinary survivor of the period, the Marxist intellectual Edward Upward (Chalmers), whose 105th birthday took place while this preface was being written.

  Spender himself published an autobiography, World Within World, in 1952, in his forties. It is a kind of prose version of Wordsworth’s Prelude, a meditation on events and people rather than a literal account of them. It is also an important piece of social history. Like many privately educated, upper-middle-class men of his generation, Spender was drawn emotionally and physically to his own gender. Published more than fifteen years before homosexual behaviour between consenting adults ceased to be an imprisonable offence in England, Spender charts the course of his emotional development with delicacy and care but without, or so it seems from our very different social perspective more than fifty years on, fudging it. As readers, we become as absorbed in, and as exasperated by, Spender’s special friendships as he does. The book is also an account, not of conversion exactly, but adaptation to a different course of life. In Vienna, he feels guilty when he betrays a man friend through his first love affair with a remarkable woman; later she became a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance. One aspect of life’s way is irredeemably altered. The love affair ends, but when he falls in love agai
n with a woman he marries her. Inez, to whom he dedicates his 1939 collection The Still Centre, subsequently falls for someone else. Third time lucky to an allegorical degree, he meets and marries the pianist Natasha Litvin. Loudon Road in St John’s Wood in London becomes an Ithaca constantly revisited over a peripatetic Anglo-American career of writing, lecturing and teaching. The union with Natasha lasts nearly fifty-five years and produces two gifted children, a boy and a girl. Spender reaps, too, an extraordinary and additional blessing. I have never met anyone who weathered old age and physical decay so well. He retained his figure, his rather un-grown-up sly humour, his curiosity and his desire for what each day might bring.

  As the autobiography of someone still young, World Within World is pertinent to this selection because the poems which made Spender famous were written and published when he himself was very young, just twenty-three. They are lyric poems: by definition, therefore, rhythmic re-creations of real and imaginary emotions. From our perspective, they are gay love poems – like Cavafy’s and not much less oblique. They differ from Cavafy in two important ways. Spender was always an exceptionally open person, absorbed by his friends’ as well as his own emotions, ideas and difficulties. Like the dedicatee of World Within World, Isaiah Berlin, he was a person of immediate and engaging sympathies. He made new friends each decade of his long life and held on to them. The excitements of secrecy, furtiveness, obliquity which illumine Cavafy are foreign to the young Spender, and Cavafy’s poems were written when he was not so young. Then again, Poems (1933) is extraordinarily confident in tone, whereas Cavafy conjures music from hesitation. The twenty-three-year-old takes on a long tradition of love poetry in English and makes it new. Sometimes he only makes it seem new, perhaps, but we are left with a self-aware and accomplished book nonetheless.

  Lyrical poems that map the weather and geography of being in love still generate poetic energy and determine why people write poems or read them. Yet lyrical poems in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century melodic tradition are not much taught and not much written at present. The distance between Byron’s ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ and Spender’s ‘Your body is stars whose millions glitter here’ is not great. Nor do we travel far from a Spender lyric like ‘I hear the cries of evening while the paw/ Of dark creeps up the turf’ to Tennyson’s ‘Sunset and evening star,/ And one clear call for me’. To relate well to poems of this kind, you need to know dozens of them by heart, so changes rung on conventional tunes and cadences of English verse become part of your mental equipment. Current teaching, in my experience, tends to treat a poem (and literature generally sometimes) as a message in need of decoding. Poems are explained, translated into prose as it were. Yet poetry is not a code but a sui generis way of looking at the world, or listening to it. Nor are poems little parcels from the past, simply, which you unwrap for whatever they may tell you about another person or another time. Interior, hummable, verbal music is on the wane.

  To re-discover Stephen Spender, and recover a sense of his importance, you need to immerse or re-immerse yourself in a tradition he redefined: the romantic beat of Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and, most especially, Matthew Arnold.

  Spender’s best poems are, quite simply, beautiful to recite. As with the very different poems of Dylan Thomas, they need to be read with the mind’s ear as well as the mind’s eye. If opening bars like ‘Moving through the silent crowd/ Who stand behind dull cigarettes’ or ‘Death is another milestone on their way’ or ‘In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic’ or ‘Not palaces, an era’s crown’ don’t call to you and require you read on, it might be best to move to a rougher, rhetorically more arresting lyrical talent like John Berryman’s. ‘I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation’ or ‘Filling her compact & delicious body/ with chicken paprika’ are examples. Yet Berryman and Spender are still within the tradition, closer to each other than either is to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.

  Although Auden is the great poet usually associated with Stephen Spender, it was T. S. Eliot who recognised Spender’s gifts right away. John Sutherland tells an amusing and revelatory story. When Eliot accepted Poems (1933) for publication by Faber, Christopher Isherwood, a little jealous perhaps, being five years older, complained to Spender about the blurb. He described it as ‘portentous tripe’ and asked ‘what idiot wrote it?’. The idiot was almost certainly Eliot himself.

  If Auden is the satirist of this poetical renasance Spender is its lyric poet. In his work the experimentalism of the last two decades is beginning to find its reward … Technically, these poems appear to make a definite step forward in modern English poetry. Their passionate and obvious sincerity ranks them in a tradition which reaches back to the early Greek poets.

  The blurb is surely on the button. Greekishness has to do with the way the lyrics are linked to love, homoerotic in the case of Spender’s early verse. Modernity, the step forward, lies in Spender’s very un-Georgian refusal to register an impulse and then chomp away at it meditatively.

  Marston dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.

  Nothing hung on this, it was no symbol

  Ludicrous for calamity, but merely ludicrous.

  Impulse, feeling, event and Marston are real; significance always just padding. The poem is the impulse: its own subject and first cause. Such is modernity; the contemporaneous, by contrast, reveals itself in the cigarettes, trains, railway stations and pylons of life lived more than one hundred years after romantic cadences were first employed. ‘Time’s ambition, huge as space, will hang its flags/ In distant worlds, and in years on this world as distant.’ T. S. Eliot must have felt a real kinship with this twenty-three-year-old tackling tradition.

  I have included Poems (1933) in its entirety for I believe it to be an immaculate book containing, even comprising, Spender’s greatest work. But it does not follow that after the age of twenty-four Spender ‘went off’, that the talent fell away. The book displays, simply, material Spender wove into his poems for the rest of his life. Auden expelled from his canon a magnificent elegy for Spain after the Civil War. Doing so was part of a ruthless drive to move from the high, priestly, oratorical style which made Yeats an object of suspicion to him, and stick to ‘the wry, the sotto-voce/ ironic and monotone.’ We need not obey Auden, for his Spain is on the record. But it is good to revisit that tragic time with Spender’s ‘The guns spell money’s ultimate reason’ or ‘A stopwatch and an ordnance map’. It seems wrong that most anthologies of twentieth-century verse do not include them.

  I read the rather more abstract poem ‘Darkness and Light’ from Spender’s 1939 collection The Still Centre as a mental journey from homosexual to heterosexual love. The most forceful evidence for this is Spender’s use of the poem as preface to World Within World. Be that interpretation as it may, in later years Spender tried to flatten his style and lessen the English nineteenth-century influence. He followed D. H. Lawrence, who followed Whitman, when writing narrative verse like the Diary poems. The sketch of Auden in this selection is taken from one of these. But whenever Spender is moved by something, and he was an abnormally sensitive man, the lyric beat keeps bouncing back. We turn to lyric poems for an exchange of intense emotion or for the chance to borrow some. ‘Missing My Daughter’, for example, reads a little like Larkin, but it was written before Larkin developed the style we associate with him. It has Spender’s own immediacy, intimacy and skill as well as the special courage needed to look ordinary emotions, diurnal ones, in the eye.

  GREY GOWRIE

  PART ONE Poems (1933)

  To Christopher Isherwood

  I

  He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye

  Or pitifully;

  Nor on those eagles that so feared him, now

  Will strain his brow;

  Weapons men use, stone, sling and strong-thewed bow

  He will not know.

  This aristocrat, superb of all instinct,

  With death close linked

 
Had paced the enormous cloud, almost had won

  War on the sun;

  Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,

  Hands, wings, are found.

  II

  Rolled over on Europe: the sharp dew frozen to stars

  Below us: above our heads the night

  Frozen again to stars: the stars

  In pools between our coats, and that charmed moon:

  Ah, what supports? What cross draws out our arms

  Heaves up our bodies towards the wind

  And hammers us between the mirrored lights?

  Only my body is real: which wolves

  Are free to oppress and gnaw. Only this rose

  My friend laid on my breast, and these few lines

  Written from home, are real.

  III

  Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.

  Nothing hung on this act, it was no symbol

  Ludicrous for calamity, but merely ludicrous.

  That heavy-wrought briar with the great pine face

  Now split across like a boxer’s hanging dream

  Of punishing a nigger, he brought from the continent;

  It was his absurd relic, like bones,

  Of stamping on the white-faced mountains,

  Early beds in huts, and other journeys.

  To hold the banks of the Danube, the slow barges down the river,

  Those coracles with faces painted on,

  Demanded his last money,

  A foodless journey home, as pilgrimage.

  IV

  Not to you I sighed. No, not a word.

  We climbed together. Any feeling was

  Formed with the hills. It was like trees’ unheard

  And monumental sign of country peace.