But next day stumbling, panting up dark stairs,
Rushing in room and door flung wide, I knew.
Oh empty walls, book-carcases, blank chairs
All splintered in my head and cried for you.
V
Acts passed beyond the boundary of mere wishing
Not privy looks, hedged words, at times you saw.
These blundering, heart-surrendered troopers were
Small presents made, and waiting for the tram.
Then once you said ‘Waiting was very kind’
And looked surprised: surprising for me too
Whose every movement had been missionary,
A pleading tongue unheard. I had not thought
That you, who nothing else saw, would see this.
So ‘very kind’ was merest overflow
Something I had not reckoned in myself,
A chance deserter from my force. When we touched hands
I felt the whole rebel, feared mutiny
And turned away,
Thinking, if these were tricklings through a dam,
I must have love enough to run a factory on,
Or give a city power, or drive a train.
VI
I hear the cries of evening, while the paw
Of dark creeps up the turf;
Sheep’s bleating, swaying gulls’ cry, the rook’s caw,
The hammering surf.
I am inconstant yet this constancy
Of natural rest twangs at my heart;
Town-bred, I feel the roots of each earth-cry
Tear me apart.
These are the creakings of the dusty day
When the dog night bites sharp,
These fingers grip my soul and tear away
And pluck me like a harp.
I feel this huge sphere turn, the great wheel sing
While beasts move to their ease:
Sheep’s love, gulls’ peace – I feel my chattering
Uncared by these.
VII
Different living is not living in different places
But creating in the mind a map
Creating in the mind a desert
An isolated mountain or a kinder health-resort.
When I frowned, creating desert, Time only
Shook once his rigid column, as when Ape
Centuries before, with furrowed hand
Grabbed at stone, discerning a new use:
Putting a notch against the mind’s progress:
Shaking Time, but with no change of Place.
VIII
An ‘I’ can never be great man.
This known great one has weakness
To friends is most remarkable for weakness
His ill-temper at meals, his dislike of being contradicted,
His only real pleasure fishing in ponds,
His only real desire – forgetting.
To advance from friends to the composite self
Central ‘I’ is surrounded by ‘I eating’,
‘I loving’, ‘I angry’, ‘I excreting’,
And the ‘great I’ planted in him
Has nothing to do with all these,
It can never claim its true place
Resting in the forehead, and secure in his gaze.
The ‘great I’ is an unfortunate intruder
Quarrelling with ‘I tiring’ and ‘I sleeping’
And all those other ‘I’s who long for ‘We dying’.
IX Beethoven’s Death Mask
I imagine him still with heavy brow.
Huge, black, with bent head and falling hair
He ploughs the landscape. His face
Is this hanging mask transfigured,
This mask of death which the white lights make stare.
I see the thick hands clasped; the scare-crow coat;
The light strike upwards at the holes for eyes;
The beast squat in that mouth, whose opening is
The hollow opening of an organ pipe:
There the wind sings and the harsh longing cries.
He moves across my vision like a ship.
What else is iron but he? The fields divide
And, heaving, are changing waters of the sea.
He is prisoned, masked, shut off from being;
Life like a fountain he sees leap – outside.
Yet, in that head there twists the roaring cloud
And coils, as in a shell, the roaring wave.
The damp leaves whisper; bending to the rain
The April rises in him, chokes his lungs
And climbs the torturing passage of his brain.
Then the drums move away, the Distance shows;
Now cloudy peaks are bared; the mystic One
Horizons haze, as the blue incense heaven.
Peace, peace … Then splitting skull and dream, there comes,
Blotting our lights, the trumpeter, the sun.
X
Never being, but always at the edge of Being
My head, like Death-mask is brought into the sun.
The shadow pointing finger across cheek,
I move lips for tasting, I move hands for touching,
But never am nearer than touching
Though the spirit lean outward for seeing.
Observing rose, gold, eyes, an admired landscape,
My senses record the act of wishing,
Wishing to be
Rose, gold, landscape or another.
I claim fulfilment in the fact of loving.
XI
My parents quarrel in the neighbour room.
‘How did you sleep last night?’ ‘I woke at four
To hear the wind that sulks along the floor
Blowing up dust like ashes from the tomb.’
‘I was awake at three.’ ‘I heard the moth
Breed perilous worms.’ ‘I wept
All night, watching your rest.’ ‘I never slept
Nor sleep at all.’ Thus ghastly they speak, both.
How can they sleep, who eat upon their fear
And watch their dreadful love fade as it grows?
Their life flowers, like an antique lovers’ rose
Set puff’d and spreading in the chemist’s jar.
I am your son, and from bad dreams arise.
My sight is fixed with horror, as I pass
Before the transitory glass
And watch the fungus cover up my eyes.
XII
My parents kept me from children who were rough
And who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes.
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.
I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
And their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms.
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.
They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at our world. They threw mud
And I looked another way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them, yet they never smiled.
XIII
What I expected was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long.
What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch
The fading of body and soul
Like smoke before wind
Corrupt, unsubstantial.
The wearing of Time,
And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth –
These, I could not foresee.
For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust;
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem
Or the dazzling crystal.
XIV In 1929
A whim of Time, the general arbiter,
Proclaims the love instead of death of friends.
Under the domed sky and athletic sun
The three stand naked: the new, bronzed German,
The communist clerk, and myself, being English.
Yet to unwind the travelled sphere twelve years
Then two take arms, spring to a ghostly posture.
Or else roll on the thing a further ten
And this poor clerk with world-offended eyes
Builds with red hands his heaven; makes our bones
The necessary scaffolding to peace.
*
Now I suppose that the once-envious dead
Have learnt a strict philosophy of clay
After these centuries, to haunt us no longer
In the churchyard or at the end of the lane
Or howling at the edge of the city
Beyond the last beanrows, near the new factory.
Our fathers killed. And yet there lives no feud
Like prompting Hamlet on the castle stair;
There falls no shade across our blank of peace,
We being together, struck across our path,
Or taper finger threatening solitude.
Our fathers’ misery, the dead man’s mercy,
The cynic’s mystery, weave a philosophy
That the history of man traced purely from dust
Was lipping skulls on the revolving rim
Or the posture of genius with the granite head bowed:
Lives risen a moment, joined or separate,
Fall heavily, then are always separate,
A stratum unreckoned by geologists,
Sod lifted, turned, slapped back again with spade.
XV The Port
Hopelessly wound round with the cords of street
Men wander down their lines of level graves.
Sometimes the maze knots into flaring caves
Where magic-lantern faces skew for greeting.
Smile dawns with a harsh lightning, there’s no speaking
And, far from lapping laughter, all’s parched and hard.
Here the pale lily boys flaunt their bright lips,
Such pretty cups for money, and older whores
Skuttle rat-toothed into the dark outdoors.
Northwards the sea exerts his huge mandate.
His guardians, candles stand, the furnace beam,
Blinking pharos, and ringing from the yards.
In their fat gardens the merchants dwell, Southwards.
Well-fed, well-lit, well-spoken men are these,
With bronze-faced sons, and happy in their daughters.
XVI
Moving through the silent crowd
Who stand behind dull cigarettes
These men who idle in the road,
I have the sense of falling light.
They lounge at corners of the street
And greet friends with a shrug of shoulder
And turn their empty pockets out,
The cynical gestures of the poor.
Now they’ve no work, like better men
Who sit at desks and take much pay
They sleep long nights and rise at ten
To watch the hours that drain away.
I’m jealous of the weeping hours
They stare through with such hungry eyes.
I’m haunted by these images,
I’m haunted by their emptiness.
XVII
Who live under the shadow of a war,
What can I do that matters?
My pen stops, and my laughter, dancing, stop
Or ride to a gap.
How often, on the powerful crest of pride,
I am shot with thought
That halts the untamed horses of the blood,
The grip on good.
That moving whimpering and mating bear
Tunes to deaf ears:
Stuffed with the realer passions of the earth
Beneath this hearth.
XVIII
How strangely this sun reminds me of my love!
Of my walk alone at evening, when like the cottage smoke
Hope vanished, written amongst red wastes of sky.
I remember my strained listening to his voice
My staring at his face and taking the photograph
With the river behind and the woods touched by Spring;
Till the identification of a morning –
Expansive sheets of blue rising from fields
Roaring movements of light observed under shadow –
With his figure leaning over a map, is now complete.
What is left of that smoke which the wind blew away?
I corrupted his confidence and his sunlike happiness
So that even now in his turning of bolts or driving a machine
His hand will show error. That is for him.
For me this memory which now I behold,
When, from the pasturage, azure rounds me in rings
And the lark ascends, and his voice still rings, still rings.
XIX
Your body is stars whose million glitter here:
I am lost amongst the branches of this sky
Here near my breast, here in my nostrils, here
Where our vast arms like streams of fire lie.
How can this end? My healing fills the night
And hangs its flags in worlds I cannot near.
Our movements range through miles, and when we kiss
The moment widens to enclose long years.
*
Beholders of the promised dawn of truth
The explorers of immense and simple lines,
Here is our goal, men cried, but it was lost
Amongst the mountain mists and mountain pines.
So with this face of love, whose breathings are
A mystery shadowed on the desert floor:
The promise hangs, this swarm of stars and flowers,
And then there comes the shutting of a door.
XX The Prisoners
Far far the least of all, in want,
Are these,
The prisoners
Turned massive with their vaults and dark with dark.
They raise no hands, which rest upon their knees,
But lean their solid eyes against the night,
Dimly they feel
Only the furniture they use in cells.
Their Time is almost Death. The silted flow
Of years on years
Is marked by dawns
As faint as cracks on mud-flats of despair.
My pity moves amongst them like a breeze
On walls of stone
Fretting for summer leaves, or like a tune
On ears of stone.
Then, when I raise my hands to strike,
It is too late,
There are no chains that fall
Nor visionary liquid door
Melted with anger.
When have their lives been free from walls and dark
And airs that choke?
And where less prisoner to let my anger
Like a sun strike?
If I could follow them from room to womb
To plant some hope
Through the black silk of the big-bellied gown
There would I win.
No, no, no,
It is too late for anger,
Nothing prevails
But pity
for the grief they cannot feel.
XXI
Without that once clear aim, the path of flight
To follow for a life-time through white air,
This century chokes me under roots of night,
I suffer like history in Dark Ages, where
Truth lies in dungeons, from which drifts no whisper:
We hear of towers long broken off from sight
And tortures and war, in dark and smoky rumour,
But on men’s buried lives there falls no light.
Watch me who walk through coiling streets where rain
And fog drown every cry: at corners of day
Road drills explore new areas of pain,
Nor summer nor light may reach down here to play.
The city builds its horror in my brain,
This writing is my only wings away.
XXII
oh young men oh young comrades
it is too late now to stay in those houses
your fathers built where they built you to build to breed
money on money – it is too late
to make or even to count what has been made
Count rather those fabulous possessions
which begin with your body and your fiery soul: –
the hairs on your head the muscles extending
in ranges with their lakes across your limbs
Count your eyes as jewels and your valued sex
then count the sun and the innumerable coined light
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 2
