Selected Poems of Stephen Spender

by Stephen Spender

  As though the characters sought for some clue

  To their being so perfectly living and dead

  In your story, worse than theirs, but true.

  Set in the mind of their poet, they compare

  Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair

  And they have fingers which accuse

  You of the double way of shame.

  At first you did not love enough

  And afterwards you loved too much

  And you lacked the confidence to choose

  And you have only yourself to blame.

  No Orpheus, No Eurydice

  Nipples of bullets, precipices,

  Ropes, knives, all

  Now would seem as gentle

  As the far away kisses

  Of her these days remove

  – To the dervish of his mind

  Lost to her love.

  There where his thoughts alone

  Dance round his walls,

  They paint his pale darling

  In a piteous attitude standing

  Amongst blowing winds of space,

  Dead, and waiting in sweet grace

  For him to follow, when she calls.

  For how can he believe

  Her loss less than his?

  ‘True it is that she did leave

  Me for another’s kiss;

  Yet our lives did so entwine

  That the blank space of my heart

  Torn from hers apart,

  Tore hers too from mine.’

  O, but if he started

  Upon that long journey

  Of the newly departed

  Where one and all are born poor

  Into death naked,

  Like a slum Bank Holiday

  Of bathers on a desolate shore;

  If, with nerves strung to a harp,

  He searched among the spirits there,

  Looking and singing for his wife

  To follow him back into life

  Out of this dull leaden place,

  He would never find there

  Her cold, starry, wondering face.

  For he is no Orpheus,

  She no Eurydice.

  She has truly packed and gone

  To live with someone

  Else, in pleasures of the sun,

  Far from his kingdoms of despair

  Here, there, or anywhere.

  The Drowned

  They still vibrate with the sound

  Of electric bells,

  The sailors who drown

  While their mouths and ships fill

  With wells of silence

  And horizons of distance.

  Kate and Mary were the city

  Where they lingered on shore

  To mingle with the beauty

  Of the girls: they’re still there –

  Where no numbness nor dumbness

  Appals dance hall and bar.

  No letters reach wrecks;

  Corpses have no telephone;

  Gold tides cut the nerves

  The desires are frozen

  While the blurred sky

  Rubs bitter medals on the eyes.

  Jack sees her with another

  And he knows how she smiles

  At the light facile rival

  Who so easily beguiles

  Dancing and doing

  What he never will now.

  Cut off unfairly

  By the doom of doom

  Which makes heroes and serious

  Skulls of men all,

  Where under waves we roll

  Whose one dream was to play

  And forget death all day.

  The Barn

  Half-hidden by trees, the sheer roof of the barn

  Is warped to a river of tiles

  By currents of the sky’s weather

  Through long damp years.

  Under the leaves, a great butterfly’s wing

  Seems its brilliant red, streaked with dark lines

  Of lichen and rust, an underwing

  Of winter leaves.

  A sapling, with a jet of flaming

  Foliage, cancels with its branches

  The guttered lower base of the roof, reflecting

  The tiles in a cup of green.

  Under the crashing vault of sky,

  At the side of the road flashing past

  With a rumour of smoke and steel,

  Hushed by whispers of leaves, and bird song,

  The barn from its dark throat

  Gurgitates with a gentle booming murmur.

  This ghost of a noise suggests a gust

  Caught in its rafters aloft long ago,

  The turn of a winch, the wood of a wheel.

  Tangled in the sound, as in a girl’s hair

  Is the enthusiastic scent

  Of vivid yellow straw, lit by a sun-beam

  Laden with motes, on the boards of a floor.

  To Natasha

  You, whom such fragments do surround

  Of childhood straying through your face

  Leaving two signs of hair there as your name –

  Through the loneliness

  Of my long look past the darkness

  At the tunnel’s end, I watch your curving neck,

  The wondering colours marvel in your eyes,

  My space of silence touch your dawn that lights

  My life’s emerging line.

  You, who are afraid of fear,

  Whose past has moulded hollows in your cheeks,

  Who murmur ‘mercy’, turning in your sleep,

  Whose glances touch me with shy voices:

  Your fingers of music

  Pressing down a rebellion of mistakes

  Raise here our devout tower of mutual prayer.

  I am one who knows each day his past

  Tear out the links from an achieving chain;

  Daily through vigorous imagining

  I summon my being again

  Out of a chaos of nothing.

  My grasp on nothing builds my everything

  Lest what I am should relapse into pieces.

  Darling, this kiss of great serenity

  Has cast no sheet anchor of security

  But balances upon the faith that lies

  In the timeless loving of your eyes

  Our terrible peace, where all that was

  Certain and stated, falls apart

  Into original meanings, and the words

  That weighed like boulders on us from the past

  Are displaced by an earthquake of the heart.

  from Elegy for Margaret

  II

  (To H.S.)

  Dearest and nearest brother,

  No word can turn to day

  The freezing night of silence

  Where all your dawns delay

  Watching flesh of your Margaret

  Wither in sickness away.

  Yet those we lose, we learn

  With singleness to love:

  Regret stronger than passion holds

  Her the times remove:

  All those past doubts of life, her death

  One happiness does prove.

  Better in death to know

  The happiness we lose

  Than die in life in meaningless

  Misery of those

  Who lie beside chosen

  Companions they never choose.

  Orpheus, maker of music,

  Clasped his pale bride

  Upon that terrible river

  Of the ghosts who have died.

  Then of his poems, the uttermost

  Laurel sprang from his side.

  When your red eyes follow

  Her body dazed and hurt

  Under the torrid mirage

  Of delirious desert,

  Her breasts break with white lilies,

  Her eyes with Margaret.

  As child, of those who played

  With me, I sought you most:

  Our twining hands
and leafy eyes

  Under world-schemes are lost;

  And the kiss that reconciled

  No longer spares the cost.

  I bring no consolation

  Of the weeping shower

  Whose final dropping jewel deletes

  All grief in the sun’s power:

  You must watch these things grow worse

  Day after day, hour after hour.

  Yet to accept the worst

  Is finally to revive

  When we are equal with the force

  Of that with which we strive

  And having almost lost, at last

  Know that such was to live.

  As she will live who, candle-lit,

  Floats upon her final breath,

  The ceiling of the frosty night

  And her high room beneath,

  Wearing not like destruction, but

  Like a white dress, her death.

  V

  (i)

  Already you are beginning to become

  Fallen tree-trunk with sun-burnished limbs

  In an infinite landscape among tribal bones

  Encircled by encroaching ritualistic stones.

  (ii)

  Those that begin to cease to be your eyes

  Are flowers parched of their honey where memories

  Crowd over and fly out like avid butterflies.

  The striped and glittering colours of lost days,

  Swallow-tail, Red Admiral, fritillaries,

  Feed on your eyes and then fly from our gaze.

  (iii)

  In the corner of the bed you are already partly ghost

  A whispering scratching existence almost lost

  To our blatant life which spreads through all the rooms

  Our contrast transient as heaped consoling blooms.

  (iv)

  You are so quiet; your hand on the sheet seems a mouse.

  Yet when we look away, the flails

  Which pound and beat you down with ceaseless pulse

  Shake like a steam hammer through the house.

  (v)

  Evening brings the opening of the windows.

  Now your last sunset throws

  Shadows from the roots of all the trees,

  Atrean hounds it unleashes

  In front of a sky in which there burns a rose.

  The Furies point and strain forwards.

  The pack of night is crowding towards us.

  Man and Woman

  Through man’s love and woman’s love

  Moons and tides move

  Which fuse those islands, lying face to face.

  Mixing in naked passion

  Those who naked new life fashion

  Are themselves reborn in naked grace.

  Lost

  Horizontal on amber air three boughs of green

  Lift slotted sleeves. Beyond them, the house glows.

  Straight mouldings delineate tall windows.

  Glass panes weigh the balance between

  Garden mirrored and interior darkly seen.

  That cracked stucco wall seems the rind

  Of miles and days from here to what I savour:

  My thought, biting it, penetrates the flavour

  Of a shining withheld day behind

  Where sweetness entered me, body and mind.

  Against that wall my eating memories press

  As though through my own flesh into my heart.

  One room, my heart, holds a girl with lips apart

  Watching a child starred in his nakedness.

  Her gaze covers him like a fleecy dress.

  That is the room where the world was most precious

  Where jewelled silence on their eyes collects

  The light which each from each reflects.

  Here lamp and wooden furniture are gracious.

  All other times and places seem atrocious.

  My spirit shut outside them is a ghost

  Gazing through clay and gales at his warm past.

  From out my empty everywhere I cast

  My seeing unseen eyes through the time lost

  Back to that one room where life was life most.

  Seascape

  (in memoriam M.A.S.)

  There are some days the happy ocean lies

  Like an unfingered harp, below the land.

  Afternoon gilds all the silent wires

  Into a burning music of the eyes.

  On mirroring paths between those fine-strung fires

  The shore, laden with roses, horses, spires,

  Wanders in water, imaged above ribbed sand.

  The azure vibrancy of the air tires

  And a sigh, like a woman’s, from inland

  Brushes the golden wires with shadowing hand

  Drawing across their chords some gull’s sharp cries

  Or bell, or gasp from distant hedged-in shires:

  These, deep as anchors, the silent wave buries.

  Then, from the shore, two zig-zag butterflies,

  Like errant dog-roses cross the hot strand

  And on the ocean face in spiralling gyres

  Search for foam-honey in reflected skies.

  They drown. Witnesses understand

  Such wings torn in such ritual sacrifice,

  Remembering ships, treasures and cities.

  Legendary heroes, plumed with flame like pyres

  On flesh-winged ships fluttered from their island

  And them the sea engulfed. Their coins and eyes

  Twisted by the timeless waves’ desires,

  Are, through the muscular water, scarcely scanned

  While, above them, the harp assumes their sighs.

  To My Daughter

  Bright clasp of her whole hand around my finger,

  My daughter, as we walk together now,

  All my life I’ll feel a ring invisibly

  Circle this bone with shining: when she is grown

  Far from today as her eyes are far already.

  [1953]

  Missing My Daughter

  This wall-paper has lines that rise

  Upright like bars, and overhead,

  The ceiling’s patterned with red roses.

  On the wall opposite the bed

  The staring looking-glass encloses

  Six roses in its white of eyes.

  Here at my desk, with note-book open

  Missing my daughter, makes those bars

  Draw their lines upward through my mind.

  This blank page stares at me like glass

  Where stared-at roses wish to pass

  Through petalling of my pen.

  An hour ago, there came an image

  Of a beast that pressed its muzzle

  Between bars. Next, through tick and tock

  Of the reiterating clock

  A second glared with the wide dazzle

  Of deserts. The door, in a green mirage,

  Opened. In my daughter came.

  Her eyes were wide as those she has,

  The round gaze of her childhood was

  White as the distance in the glass

  Or on a white page, a white poem.

  The roses raced around her name.

  [1953]

  Nocturne

  Their six-weeks-old daughter lies

  in her cot, crying out the night. Their hearts

  Are sprung like armies, waiting

  To cross the gap to where her loneliness

  Lies infinite between them. This child’s cry

  Sends rays of a star’s pain through endless dark;

  And the sole purpose of their loving

  Is to disprove her demonstration

  Of all love’s aidlessness. Words unspoken

  Out of her mouth unsaying, prove unhappiness

  Pure as innocence, virgin of tragedy,

  Unknowing reason. Star on star of pain

  Surround her cry to make a constellation

  Where human tears of victims are the
same

  As griefs of the unconscious animals.

  Listening, the parents know this primal cry

  Out of the gates of life, hollows such emptiness,

  It proves that all men’s aims should be, all times,

  To fill the gap of pain with consolation

  Poured from the mountain-sided adult lives

  Whose minds like peaks attain to heights of snow:

  The snow should stoop to wash away such grief.

  Unceasing love should lave the feet of victims.

  Yet, when they lift their heads out of such truths,

  Today mocks at their prayers. To think this even

  Suffices to remind them of far worse

  Man-made man-destroying ills which threaten

  While they try to lull a child. For she

  Who cries for milk, for rocking, and a shawl,

  Is also subject to the rage of causes

  Dividing peoples. Even at this moment

  Eyes might fly between them and the moon,

  And a hand touch a lever to let fall

  That which would make the street of begging roofs

  Pulverize and creep skywards in a tower:

  Down would fall baby, cradle, and them all.

  That which sent out the pilot to destroy them

  Was the same will as that with which they send

  An enemy to kill their enemy. Even in this love

  Running in shoals on each side of her bed,

  Is fear, and hate. If they shift their glances

  From her who weeps, their eyes meet other eyes

  Willed with death, also theirs. All would destroy

  New-born, innocent streets. Necessity,

  With abstract head and searing feet, men’s god

  Unseeing the poor amulets of flesh,

  Unhearing the minutiae of prayer.