I meet her every turn; the muffled part
The stilled applause, the pageant to appal,
Startle her shade to take birth in my heart:
I see her dancing through the solid wall!
XXVI Van der Lubbe
O staring eyes, searchlight disks,
Listen at my lips. I am louder than to
Swim an inhuman channel, be boy, or climb
A town’s notorious mast.
I throw you these words, I care not which I tear,
You must eat my scraps and dance.
I am glad I am glad that this people is mad:
Their eyes must drink my newspaper glance.
Why do you laugh? Sombre Judge asks.
I laugh at this trial, although it shall make
My life end at a dazzling steel gate,
Axe severing a stalk.
Yes, no, yes, no. Shall I tell you what I know?
Not to Goering, but, dear movietone, I whisper it to you.
I laugh because my laughter
Is like justice, twisted by a howitzer.
The senses are shaken from the judging heart:
The eye turned backwards and the outside world
Into the grave of the skull rolled:
With no stars riding heaven, and disparate.
The spitting at justice, the delight of mere guns
Exploding the trees, where in their branches
Truth greenly balances, are what I am
Who die with the dead and slobber with fun.
Speech from a Play
Possibility, possibility of happiness
If I might restore
To unquiet Europe at least the evening peace
That mantles villages: one by one
The lights appear in the numbed valley
When the sun drops down: the hand falls
From plough or hammer: human work
Like stoops of crops
Under winter roof, is garnered away.
Stars’ benediction remains, and above the turf
Hill, the unique pointing spire
Pins all the peace of sky to earth
As an assuaging cloak. And if
The hammer-headed cloud should threaten
Above the houses
Huddled like staring eyes of frightened life,
It is not we, but panic’s self
Destroyed in tears upon us.
[1936]
‘If it were not too late!’
If it were not too late!
If I could mould my thought
To the curved form of that woman
With gleaming eyes, raven hair,
Lips drawn too tight like a scar,
Eye sockets shadowed with migraine’s
Memory of earlier loves and wars
And her smile learnéd with being so human.
I imagined her lying naked at night
In warm rain when the breasts are watered
Through darkness by reflecting drops of light,
Which secret light accumulates
In pools on the skin as though on fruit.
Then her light blue dress she unloosed
Till light rose in rose and blue above the trees
Not to expel sad dreams, but to shine
On flesh that overflowed my eyes,
On life locking the senses with closeness,
O dawn of all my certainties!
If it were not too late.
If I could still concentrate
To clench my mind into a husk for love
I’d be too hot and ripe for ghosts,
Winds down side walks with swords of ice,
All betraying lies and lights.
For everything but she leads away
By brambles and along mechanic lines
To the suffering figures under trees
Of heroes who have wrecked happiness
And whose love is accomplished alone
In a spasm on the outer surface of the brain.
[1936]
In No Man’s Land
Only the world changes, and time its tense
Against the creeping inches of whose moons
He launches his rigid continual present.
The grass will grow its summer beard and beams
Of sunlight melt the iron slumber
Where soldiers lie locked in their final dreams.
His corpse be covered with the white December
And roots push through his skin as through a drum
When the years and fields forget, but the bones remember.
[1938]
Polar Exploration
Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron. As clerks in whited banks
With bird-claw pens column virgin paper,
To snow we added foot-prints.
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time’s suspended blank.
That was in Spring and Autumn. Summer struck
Water over rocks, and half the world
Became a ship with a deep keel, the booming floes
And icebergs with their little birds:
Twittering Snow Bunting, Greenland Wheatear,
Red-throated Divers; imagine butterflies
Sulphurous cloudy yellow; glory of bees
That suck from saxifrage; crowberry,
Bilberry, cranberry, Pyrola Uniflora.
There followed Winter in a frozen hut
Warm enough at the kernel, but dare to sleep
With head against the wall – ice gummed my hair!
Hate Culver’s loud breathing, despise Freeman’s
Fidget for washing: love only the dogs
That whine for scraps, and scratch. Notice
How they run better (on short journeys) with a bitch.
In that, different from us.
Return, return, you warn. We do. There is
A network of railways, money, words, words, words.
Meals, papers, exchanges, debates,
Cinema, wireless: the worst, is Marriage.
We cannot sleep. At night we watch
A speaking clearness through cloudy paranoia.
These questions are white rifts: – Was
Ice our anger transformed? The raw, the motionless
Skies, were these the Spirit’s hunger?
The continual and hypnotized march through snow,
The dropping nights of precious extinction, were these
Only the wide inventions of the will,
The frozen will’s evasion? If this exists
In us as madness here, as coldness
In these summer, civilized sheets: Is the North,
Over there, a tangible, real madness,
A glittering simpleton, one without towns,
Only with bears and fish, a staring eye,
A new and singular sex?
The Past Values
Alas for the sad standards
In the eyes of the old masters
Sprouting through glaze of their pictures!
For what we stare at through glass
Opens on to our running time:
As nature spilled before the summer mansion
Pours through windows in on our dimension.
And the propeller’s rigid transparent flicker
To airman over continental ranges
Between him and the towns and river
Spells dynamics of this rotating
Age of invention, too rapid for sight.
Varnish over paint and dust across glass:
Stare back, remote, the static drum;
The locked ripeness of the Centaurs’ feast;
The blowing flags, frozen stiff
In a cracked fog, and the facing
Reproach of self-portraits.
Alas for the sad standards
&nbs
p; In the eyes of the freshly dead young
Sprawled in the mud of battle.
Stare back, stare back, with dust over glazed
Eyes, their gaze at partridges,
Their dreams of girls, and their collected
Faith in home, wound up like a little watch.
To ram them outside time, violence
Of wills that ride the cresting day
Struck them with lead so swift
Their falling sight stared through its glass.
Our sight stares back on death, like glass
Infringing the rigid eyes with toneless glaze,
Sinking stretched bodies inch-deep in their frames.
Through glass their eyes meet ours
Like standards of the masters
That shock us with their peace.
An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum
Far far from gusty waves, these children’s faces.
Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy with rat’s eyes. The stunted unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class,
One unnoted, sweet and young: his eyes live in a dream
Of squirrels’ game, in tree room, other than this.
On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belted, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this world, are world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.
Surely Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal –
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.
Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That open on their lives like crouching tombs
Break, O break open, till they break the town
And show the children to the fields and all their world
Azure on their sands, to let their tongues
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open
The history theirs whose language is the sun.
Hampstead Autumn
In the fat autumn evening street
Hands from my childhood stretch out
And ring muffin bells. The Hampstead
Incandescence burns behind windows
With talk and gold warmth.
Those brothers who we were lie wrapped in flannel,
And how like a vase looks my time then
Rounded with meals laid on by servants
With reading alone in a high room and looking down on
The pleasures of the spoiled pets in the garden –
A vase now broken into fragments,
Little walks which quickly reach their ends,
The islands in the traffic. To questions – I know not what –
Answers hurry back from the world,
But now I reject them all.
I assemble an evening with space
Pinned above the four walls of the garden,
A glowing smell of being under canvas,
The sunset tall above the chimneys,
From behind the smoke-screen of poplar leaves
A piano cutting out its images,
Continuous and fragile as china.
The Room above the Square
The light in the window seemed perpetual
Where you stayed in the high room for me;
It flowered above the trees through leaves
Like my certainty.
The light is fallen and you are hidden
In sunbright peninsulas of the sword:
Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace
Which through me flowed.
Now I climb alone to the dark room
Which hangs above the square
Where among stones and roots the other
Peaceful lovers are.
View from a Train
The face of the landscape is a mask
Of bone and iron lines where time
Has ploughed its character.
I look and look to read a sign,
Through errors of light and eyes of water
Beneath the land’s will, of a fear
And the memory of chaos,
As man behind his mask still wears a child.
Two Armies
Deep in the winter plain, two armies
Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
These have their leave; while new battalions wait
On time at last to bring them violent peace.
All have become so nervous and so cold
That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
Once a boy hummed a popular marching song,
Once a novice hand flapped the salute;
The voice was choked, the lifted hand fell,
Shot through the wrist by those of his own side.
From their numb harvest all would flee, except
For discipline drilled once in an iron school
Which holds them at the point of a revolver.
Yet when they sleep, the images of home
Ride wishing horses of escape
Which herd the plain in a mass unspoken poem.
Finally, they cease to hate: for although hate
Bursts from the air and whips the earth like hail
Or pours it up in fountains to marvel at,
And although hundreds fall, who can connect
The inexhaustible anger of the guns
With the dumb patience of these tormented animals?
Clean silence drops at night when a little walk
Divides the sleeping armies, each
Huddled in linen woven by remote hands.
When the machines are stilled, a common suffering
Whitens the air with breath and makes both one
As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms.
Only the lucid friend to aerial raiders,
The brilliant pilot moon, stares down
Upon the plain she makes a shining bone
Cut by the shadow of many thousand bones.
Where amber clouds scatter on no-man’s-land
She regards death and time throw up
The furious words and minerals which kill life.
Ultima Ratio Regum
The guns spell money’s ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.
When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.
O too lightly he threw down his cap
> One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.
Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive trees, O world, O death?
The Coward
Under the olive trees, from the ground
Grows this flower, which is a wound.
It is easier to ignore
Than the heroes’ sunset fire
Of death plunged in their willed desire
Raging with flags on the world’s shore.
Its opened petals have no name
Except the coward’s nameless shame
Whose inexpiable blood
For his unhealing wound is food.
A man was killed, not like a soldier
With lead but with rings of terror;
To him, that instant was the birth
Of the final hidden truth
When the troopship at the quay,
The mother’s care, the lover’s kiss,
The following handkerchiefs of spray,
All led to the bullet and to this.
Flesh, bone, muscle and eyes
Assembled in a tower of lies
Were scattered on an icy breeze
When the deceiving past betrayed
All their perceptions in one instant,
And his true gaze, the sum of present,
Saw his guts lie beneath the trees.
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 4
