sparkling on waves and spangled under trees
It is too late to stay in great houses where the ghosts are prisoned
– those ladies like flies perfect in amber
those financiers like fossils of bones in coal.
Oh comrades, step beautifully from the solid wall
advance to rebuild and sleep with friend on hill
advance to rebel and remember what you have
no ghost ever had, immured in his hall.
XXIII
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air singed with their honour.
XXIV
After they have tired of the brilliance of cities
And of striving for office where at last they may languish
Hung round with easy chains until
Death and Jerusalem glorify also the crossing-sweeper:
Then those streets the rich built and their easy love
Fade like old cloths, and it is death stalks through life
Grinning white through all faces
Clean and equal like the shine from snow.
In this time when grief pours freezing over us,
When the hard light of pain gleams at every street corner,
When those who were pillars of that day’s gold roof
Shrink in their clothes; surely from hunger
We may strike fire, like fire from flint?
And our strength is now the strength of our bones
Clean and equal like the shine from snow
And the strength of famine and of our enforced idleness,
And it is the strength of our love for each other.
Readers of this strange language,
We have come at last to a country
Where light equal, like the shine from snow, strikes all faces,
Here you may wonder
How it was that works, money, interest, building, could ever hide
The palpable and obvious love of man for man.
Oh comrades, let not those who follow after
– The beautiful generation that shall spring from our sides –
Let not them wonder how after the failure of banks,
The failure of cathedrals and the declared insanity of our rulers,
We lacked the Spring-like resources of the tiger
Or of plants who strike out new roots to gushing waters.
But through torn-down portions of old fabric let their eyes
Watch the admiring dawn explode like a shell
Around us, dazing us with its light like snow.
XXV The Funeral
Death is another milestone on their way.
With laughter on their lips and with winds blowing round them
They record simply
How this one excelled all others in making driving belts.
This is festivity, it is the time of statistics
When they record what one unit contributed:
They are glad as they lay him back in the earth
And thank him for what he gave them.
They walk home remembering the straining red flags,
And with pennons of song still fluttering through their blood
They speak of the world state
With its towns like brain-centres and its pulsing arteries.
They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden and singing hive:
Like spark from fire, its task happily achieved,
It falls away quietly.
No more are they haunted by the individual grief
Nor the crocodile tears of European genius,
The decline of a culture
Mourned by scholars who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys.
XXVI The Express
After the first powerful plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing – at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness –
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath
Goes the elate metre of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low streamline brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is white.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
XXVII The Landscape near an Aerodrome
More beautiful and soft than any moth
With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path
Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines
Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.
Lulled by descent, the travellers across sea
And across feminine land indulging its easy limbs
In miles of softness, now let their eyes trained by watching
Penetrate through dusk the outskirts of this town
Here where industry shows a fraying edge.
Here they may see what is being done.
Beyond the winking masthead light
And the landing-ground, they observe the outposts
Of work: chimneys like lank black fingers
Or figures frightening and mad: and squat buildings
With their strange air behind trees, like women’s faces
Shattered by grief. Here where few houses
Moan with faint light behind their blinds
They remark the unhomely sense of complaint, like a dog
Shut out and shivering at the foreign moon.
In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, w
here boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds,
Settle upon the nearest roofs
But soon are hid under the loud city.
Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria
To where, larger than all the charcoaled batteries
And imaged towers against that dying sky,
Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.
XXVIII The Pylons
The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages.
Now over these small hills they have built the concrete
That trails black wire:
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.
The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.
But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning’s danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.
This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy:
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.
XXIX
Abrupt and charming mover,
Your pointed eyes under lit leaves,
Your light hair, your smile,
I watch burn in a land
Bright in the cave of night
And protected by my hand.
Beneath the ribs, in Jonah’s whale,
All night I hold you: from day
I have recalled your play
Disturbing as birds’ flying
And with the Spring’s infection
And denial of satisfaction.
You dance, forgetting all: in joy
Sustaining that instant of the eye
Which like a flaming wheel can be:
Your games of cards, hockey with toughs,
Winking at girls, shoes cribbed from toffs,
Like the encircling summer dew
Glaze me from head to toe.
By night I hold you, but by day
I watch you weave the silk cocoon
Of a son’s, or a skater’s, play:
We have no meeting place
Beneath that dancing, glassy surface:
The outward figure of delight
Creates no warm and sanguine image
Answering my language.
XXX
In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.
No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
To make them birds upon my singing-tree:
Time merely drives these lives which do not live
As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.
– There is no consolation, no, none
In the curving beauty of that line
Traced on our graphs through history, where the oppressor
Starves and deprives the poor.
Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds
Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity.
But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds
This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.
XXXI
Those fireballs, those ashes,
Those cloudbursts, those whirling madman hurricanes
The palatial sky breathes, make men’s organic change.
Some, extinguished by horror, leap into the thinnest air,
Inevitable delight is theirs, no sweeter delight
Than to be keener than knives, invisible to run
Around the endless earth, for ever to blow upon
The lips of their loved friends.
Others shake in bed whilst the sorrowing elements
Twist them to shapes of dreadful grief,
Only the mirror knows their traitorous joy.
Man must rejoice, misfortune cannot fall,
Him I delight in accepts joy as joy;
He is richened by sorrow as a river by its bends,
He is the swallower of fire,
His bowels are molten fire; when he leaves his friend
He takes pleasure in icy solitude; he is the dandy;
He is the swimmer, waves only lift him higher,
He is the rose, sultry loveliness does not oppress him;
The clouds of our obscuring disillusion
Are thoughts which shade his brow, and then he smiles.
I stand far from him, but I wish that these
Slanting iron hail pattern no stigmata
Showing me sadder than those poor, and rarer.
Let the elements that fall make me of finer mixture
Not struck from sorrow, but vast joys, and learning laughter.
XXXII
From all these events, from the slump, from the war, from the boom,
From the Italian holiday, from the skirring
Of the revolving light for an adventurer,
From the crowds in the square at dusk, from the shooting,
From the loving, from the dying, however we prosper in death
Whether lying under twin lilies and branched candles
Or stiffened on the pavement like a frozen sack, hidden
From night and peace by the lamps:
From all these events, Time solitary will emerge
Like a rocket bursting from mist: above the trouble,
Untangled with our pasts, be sure Time will leave us.
At first growing up in us more nakedly than our own nature,
Driving us beyond what seemed the final choking swamp,
Ruin, the all-covering illness, to a new and empty air;
Singling us from the war which killed ten millions;
Carrying us elate through the happy summer fields;
Nesting us in high rooms of a house where voices
Murmured at night from the garden, as if flowering from water;
Then sending us to lean days after the years of fulfilment;
At last dropping us into the hard, bright crater of the dead.
Our universal ally, but larger than our purpose, whose flanks
Stretch to planets unknown in our brief, particular battle,
Tomorrow Time’s progress will forget us even here,
When our bodies are rejected like the beetle’s shard, today
Already, now, we are forgotten on those stellar shores.
Time’s ambition, huge as space, will hang its flags
In distant worlds, and in years on this world as distant.
XXXIII
Not palaces, an era’s crown
Where the mind dwells, intrigues, rests;
The architectural gold-leaved flower
From people ordered like a single mind,
I build. This only what I tell:
It is too late for rare accumulation,
For family pride, for beauty’s filtered dusts;
I say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink from here energy and only energy,
As from the electric charge of a battery,
To will this Time’s change.
Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses;
Leave your gardens, your singing feasts,
Your dreams of suns circling before our sun,
Of heaven after our world.
Instead, watch images of flashing brass
That strike the outward sense, the polished will,
Flag of our purpose whi
ch the wind engraves.
No spirit seek here rest. But this: No man
Shall hunger: Man shall spend equally.
Our goal which we compel: Man shall be man.
– That programme of the antique Satan
Bristling with guns on the indented page,
With battleship towering from hilly waves:
For what? Drive of a ruining purpose
Destroying all but its age-long exploiters.
Our programme like this, yet opposite,
Death to the killers, bringing light to life.
PART TWO
‘Lying awake at night’
Lying awake at night
Shows again the difference
Between me, and his innocence.
I vow he was born of light
And that dark gradually
Closed each eye,
He woke, he sleeps so naturally.
So, born of nature, amongst men most divine,
He copied, and was our sun.
And his mood was thunder
For anger,
But mostly a calm, English one.
‘That girl who laughed and had black eyes’
That girl who laughed and had black eyes
Spoke here ten days ago. She smiles
Still in my thought; the lip still promises
The body lives, and the quick eye beguiles.
Now that she’s dead, I feel the living flame
Move across walls and twist across my sight:
Through tilting, smothering waters of Death’s name,
Through the transparent grave, I see her bright.
She lives beneath our common objects, dust
And chairs, and her few poems about the room.
Although death play its tricks, and the earth’s crust
Swallow her up in the enormous tomb,
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 3
