Parents like mountains watching above their child,
Envallied here beneath them, also hold
Upon their frozen heights, the will that sends
Destruction into centres of the stones
Which concentrated locked centennial stillness
For human generations to indwell.
Hearing their daughter’s cry which is the speech
Of indistinguishable primal life,
They know the dark is filled with means which are
Men’s plots to murder children. They know too
No cause is just unless it guards the innocent
As sacred trust: no truth but that
Which reckons this child’s tears an argument.
[1953]
Sirmione Peninsula
Places I shared with her, things that she touched –
Could I ever have known
How untouchable these would become
The day after she was gone?
Sirmio’s peninsula stretches out into the lake
Like one spoke thrusting to the centre
Of the mountain-circled water: where
I stand now, through brush-branched olive trees
And ragged broken arches
Ancient Romans built so long ago,
I see the water’s bowl-edge round me, in an almost perfect O.
This I saw once before, with her, as long it seems now,
As though I were one of those Romans. I noticed then
The wings of the water flashing through torn-brick arches
The olive leaves turned by the sky from silver to blue
The lizards like shocks through the grass,
The mountains ringed glassily round the lake, seeming
Gray dolphins painted on glass.
I watched and watched then as I watch and watch now. And she who was with me seemed sad
Seeing me self-enclosed in my view of the view
That shut her out from me, as though at my desk in my room,
In the midst of our Lake Garda honeymoon.
Now the mountains might fall and crush me. All the wide rim
Of their up-diving shapes from the water, brings pain
Of unapproachable things
Making me conscious that I am unseeing alone
Since she with whom I would be is not by my side
With her hair blown back by the winds of the whole lake view,
Lips parted as though to greet the flight of a bird.
[1954]
Subject: Object: Sentence
A subject thought, because he had a verb
With several objects, that he ruled a sentence.
Had not Grammar willed to him substantives
Which he came into, as his just inheritance?
His objects were wine, women, wealth,
A whole subordinate clause – all life can give.
He grew so fond of having these that, finally,
He found himself becoming too subjective.
Subject, the dictionary warned, means being ruled by
Person or thing. Was he not passion’s slave?
To achieve detachment, he must be objective
Which meant to free himself from the verb have.
Seeking detachment, he studied the context
Around his sentence, to place it in perspective:
Then parsed it, made a critical analysis,
And then re-read it, feeling more objective.
Then, with a shock, he realized that sentence
Like subject-object is treacherously double.
A sentence is condemned to stay as written –
As in life- or death-sentence, for example.
[1958]
Middle East
One morning, between journeys, rising
From bed at an inn, I went out.
Half an hour after dawn
Already the sun had cut
Night – one shadow – into many
Shadows dissecting day – one light –
Into white squares white oblongs.
Palm trees were dull, figs electrically bright.
Downhill, tangled wires criss-crossed
Between roofs. At the street’s end
Beyond corners like prows I saw
The Mediterranean extend
Its line of absolute horizon
From which hung the sea, royal as clover.
Waves flashed lights through air
Pointillist as pollen all over.
I ran down the street past bicycles, donkeys,
Jangling, shouting, robed, turbaned crowd;
Past hollows of deep entrances
Through which rugs, copper, oranges glowed;
Past slaughtered cadavers
Of sheep and goat, hanging from hooks;
Succulent sweets fly-preempted,
Communist pamphlets, pornograhic books;
Till I’d descended to the ocean
Sliding parallelograms multilinear.
On the far shore, distant mountains
Curving like dolphins, rose clear.
Skeletal boys, pharaonically sculptured,
Stretched out rods from rocks, in wait
For fish, whose ancestors, stupid as these,
Took Cleopatra’s bait.
And the sun, pompous as God,
Sat enthroned in his central sky: to prove
He still melts unhygienic passions
In his furnace of hygienic love.
[1969]
from Diary Poems
26 JANUARY 1970
November, Auden came to stay in London.
Famous, much-photographed creased face
Netted in the past, his eyes can only tell
Their solitude. His talk
Is concentrated ‘I’, ‘I get up at eight,
Then I have cawfee and rolls, then I do
The Times Crossword, if I can get The Times.
Then I go to the john, and then I work
Until elevenses, when I have tea.
I have to have lunch at one precisely.
At six precisely I fix up Martinis
90 per cent vodka 70 proof.
Dinner at 7.30 not one moment later
Or I tend to become repetitive.
Then at nine byebyes like mother taught me.
Oh! the relief of getting between the sheets!’
‘How should I educate my 4-year-old son?’
Marianne asks. He hoists his face towards her
Then blandly says: ‘Send him to boarding school
As soon as he’s 7. That’s what happened with me.
Teach him Latin. If he makes a false quantity
Beat him like I was beaten if I did.’ She tells him
Of her suicide attempt. ‘I took a hundred tablets
In Sydney.’ ‘Now that’s naughty.
I take one every night
For sleeping and a Benzedrine each morning
For working.’ He clicks his mouth shut.
I say: ‘You talk of nothing but yourself.’
He looks full at me with a kind of sweetness
And says: ‘What else should I talk about then?
What else do I know about?’ Now Chris produces
A magazine called Suck. ‘Will you autograph this, please, sir?
Your wonderful poem called “The Platonic Blow Job”.’
‘I wrote that as an exercise in scazons.’
They smile. He can say what he likes, they know
He has written the sexiest beautifullest openest
Poem about a pick-up in Greenwich Village
The knock-out that makes all their sex soap-opera.
Back home, he says to me: ‘Promise me one thing,
Promise me this one thing, you’ll never
However she may ask you, show to Lizzie
That poem.’ Under the net of lines, he smiles
Under the lines the heart ever the same.
A Fath
er in Time of War
I
On a winter night I took her to the hospital.
Lying in bed, she clasped my hand
In her two hands. I watched the smile
Float on her pain-torn happy face –
Light stretched on the surface of a well
At the bottom of which, hidden from sight,
Curled a minute human phantom.
II
Next morning, I went to hospital
On a bus that drove through streets
Unwinding back to the First Day.
A solitary street cleaner
Hosed water over hopeless rubble.
In front of her charred and splintered door
A woman scrubbed
A doorstep whiter than her hair.
A ladder lifted up into the air
Arms that bore a minute human phantom.
III
Now we watch him lying in the grass
In the garden. His eyes
See branches sway. Birds fly forward
Against the backwards-flying clouds.
Brushing yellow flowers, green leaves, his eyes
Pout like his mouth across her breast:
Voluptuous wondering, drinking in
The dizzy spinning tilting upside-
down flags of the world new born.
Air Raid
In this room like a bowl of flowers filled with light
Family eyes look down on the white
Pages of a book, and the white ceiling
Like starch of a nurse, reflects a calm feeling.
The daughter, with hands outstretched to the fire,
Transmits through her veins the peaceful desire
Of the family tree, from which she was born,
To push tendrils through dark to a happier dawn.
In the ancient house or the glass-and-steel flat
The vertical descendants of the genes that
Go back far in the past, are supported by floors
And protected by walls from the weather outdoors.
In their complex stage settings they act out the parts
Of their bodies enclosing their human hearts
With limbs utilizing chairs, tables, cups,
All the necessities and props.
They wear the right clothes and go the right ways,
Read the news, and play golf, and fill out their days
With hobbies, meals brought from the kitchen range.
And no one sees anything eerie or strange
In all this. And perhaps they are right. Nothing is
Until an unreasoning fury impinges
From an enemy’s vision of life, on their hearth.
And explodes. And tears their loved home down to earth.
Then the inside-turned-outside faces the street.
Rubble decently buries the dead human meat.
Piled above it, a bath, wardrobe, books, telephone
Though all who could answer its ringing have gone.
Standing unscathed is one solitary wall,
Half a floor attached, forgotten to fall.
Convolvulus patterns of pink and blue line
That rectangle high up where they once used to dine.
Bemused passers-by are bound to observe
That inside-shown-outside like the deep curve
Of mother-o’-pearl exposed in a shell
Where a mollusc, long smashed, at one time did dwell.
But the house has been cracked in an enemy’s claws,
Years of love ground down to rubble in jaws,
And the tender sensitive life thrown away
By the high-flying will of the enemy’s day.
[Horizon, February 1941. 1993]
The Generous Days
I
His are the generous days that balance
Soul and body. Should he hear the trumpet
Shout justice from a sky of ice
– Lightning through the marrow –
At once one with that cause, he’d throw
Himself across some far, sad parapet –
Soul fly up from body’s sacrifice,
Immolated in the summons.
II
But his, too, are the days when should he greet
Her who goes walking, looking for a brooch
Under plantains at dusk beside the path,
And sidelong looks at him as though she thought
His glance might hide the gleam she sought –
He would run up to her, and each
Find the lost clasp hid in them both,
Mindless of soul, so their two bodies meet.
III
Body soul – soul body – are his breath
– Or light or shadow cast before his will –
In these, his generous days. They prove
His utmost being simply is to give.
Wholly to die, or wholly, else, to live!
If the cause ask for death, then let it kill.
If the blood ask for life, then let it love.
Giving is all to life or all to death.
IV
After, of course, will come a time not this
When he’ll be taken, stripped, strapped to a wheel
That is a world, and has the power to change
The brooch’s gold, the trumpet’s golden blaze
– The lightning through the blood those generous days –
Into what drives a system, like a fuel.
Then to himself he will seem loathed and strange,
Have thoughts still colder than the thing he is.
A First War Childhood
March 1916,
The middle of a war
– One night long
As all my life –
A child, I lay awake
On my bed under
The slant ceiling
Of the attic of The Bluff,
Our parents’ house
On the Norfolk coast.
Beyond the garden
Rain-matted fields
Stretched to the edge
Of the cliff, below which
A roaring Nor’easter
Heaped up waves –
White-maned horses
Charging over rocks
(I thought: ‘Deep down under sea
Submarines nose
Among shoals of fish
And waving seaweed
While high above
Zeppelins
Intent to bomb London
Throb through the night.
And near the cliff edge
Soldiers in a dugout
Keep watch on our lives.’)
Wrapped in my blanket
– A chrysalis
Wings not yet sprouted –
I stared up at
The ceiling skylight
Where, mile on mile,
Tons of dark weighed
Pressing on glass,
And stars like jewels
In cogs of a watch
Divided time
Into minutes and seconds.
Out of that Nowhere
Surrounding all
So that any point anywhere
Was at the centre,
There fell a voice
Like a waterfall
Speaking through space
I AM I AM I AM
Then a bomb exploded –
The night went up
In flame that shook
The shrubbery leaves,
And soldiers came
Out of dark speared with flame,
And carried us children
Into their dugout
Below the earth.
Ear pressed against
The khaki uniform
Of mine, in his arms,
I could hear his heart beat –
With the blood of all England.
PART THREE
Orpheus Eurydice Hermes
(after Rilke)
That was the s
ingular mine of souls.
Like still silver ores they went
as veins travelling its dark. Between roots
was the source of the blood that goes forth to men,
and heavy like porphyry it seemed in the dark.
Further, nothing red.
Rocks were there
and unreal woods. Bridges over voids
and yonder huge, grey, blind loch,
that over its far background hung
like rainy skies above a landscape.
And between meadows, of mild and full forbearance
appeared the pale strip of the single road
laid in like a long pallor.
And on this single road they came.
Foremost the slender man in the blue mantle,
who stared in front of him, dumb and impatient.
Without chewing, his pace devoured the way
in great bites: his hands hung
heavy and clenched, out of the fall of folds.
And nothing more they knew of the light lyre,
which in the left had grown ingrown
like rose-tendrils in the olive tree bough.
And his senses were as if in two:
for whilst his glance ran before him like a dog,
turned round, went back and then away again
and waiting at the next corner stood –
his hearing hung back like an odour.
Sometimes it seemed to him as if it stretched
right to the walking of those other two,
who were to follow this whole climb.
At other times it was his climbing echo
only, and his mantle’s draught, that were behind him.
He told himself, however, they’d surely come:
said it aloud, and heard his voice die away.
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 7
