The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  knowledge

  by way of despair that has

  no place

  to lay its glossy head –

  Save only – Not alone!

  Never, if possible

  alone! to escape the accepted

  chopping block

  and a square hat! –

  And as reverie gains and

  your joints loosen

  the trick’s done!

  Day is covered and we see you –

  but not alone!

  drunk and bedraggled to release

  the strictness of beauty

  under a sky full of stars

  Beautiful Thing

  and a slow moon –

  The car

  had stopped long since

  when the others

  came and dragged those out

  who had you there

  indifferent

  to whatever the anesthetic

  Beautiful Thing

  might slum away the bars –

  Reek of it!

  What does it matter?

  could set free

  only the one thing –

  But you!

  – in your white lace dress

  ‘the dying swan’

  and high heeled slippers – tall

  as you already were –

  till your head

  through fruitful exaggeration

  was reaching the sky and the

  prickles of its ecstasy

  Beautiful Thing!

  And the guys from Paterson

  beat up

  the guys from Newark and told

  them to stay the hell out

  of their territory and then

  socked you one

  across the nose

  Beautiful Thing

  for good luck and emphasis

  cracking it

  till I must believe that all

  desired women have had each

  in the end

  a busted nose

  and live afterward marked up

  Beautiful Thing

  for memory’s sake

  to be credible in their deeds

  Then back to the party!

  and they maled

  and femaled you jealously

  Beautiful Thing

  as if to discover when and

  by what miracle

  there should escape what?

  still to be possessed

  out of what part

  Beautiful Thing

  should it look?

  or be extinguished –

  Three days in the same dress

  up and down –

  It would take

  a Dominie to be patient

  Beautiful Thing

  with you –

  The stroke begins again –

  regularly

  automatic

  contrapuntal to

  the flogging

  like the beat of famous lines

  in the few excellent poems

  woven to make you

  gracious

  and on frequent occasions

  foul drunk

  Beautiful Thing

  pulse of release

  to the attentive

  and obedient mind.

  The Dance

  In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,

  the dancers go round, they go round and

  around, the squeal and the blare and the

  tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

  tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

  sided glasses whose wash they impound)

  their hips and their bellies off balance

  to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

  the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

  shanks must be sound to bear up under such

  rollicking measures, prance as they dance

  in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

  The Ivy Crown

  The whole process is a lie,

  unless,

  crowned by excess,

  it break forcefully,

  one way or another,

  from its confinement –

  or find a deeper well.

  Anthony and Cleopatra

  were right;

  they have shown

  the way. I love you

  or I do not live

  at all.

  Daffodil time

  is past. This is

  summer, summer!

  the heart says,

  and not even the full of it.

  no doubts

  are permitted –

  though they will come

  and may

  before our time

  overwhelm us.

  We are only mortal

  but being mortal

  can defy our fate.

  We may

  by an outside chance

  even win! We do not

  look to see

  jonquils and violets

  come again

  but there are,

  still,

  the roses!

  Romance has no part in it.

  The business of love is

  cruelty which,

  by our wills,

  we transform

  to live together.

  It has its seasons,

  for and against,

  whatever the heart

  fumbles in the dark

  to assert

  toward the end of May.

  Just as the nature of briars

  is to tear flesh,

  I have proceeded

  through them.

  Keep

  the briars out,

  they say.

  You cannot live

  and keep free of

  briars.

  Children pick flowers.

  Let them.

  Though having them

  in hand they have

  no further use for them

  but leave them crumpled

  at the curb’s edge.

  At our age the imagination

  across the sorry facts

  lifts us

  to make roses

  stand before thorns.

  Sure

  love is cruel

  and selfish

  and totally obtuse –

  at least, blinded by the light,

  young love is.

  But we are older,

  I to love

  and you to be loved,

  we have,

  no matter how,

  by our wills survived

  to keep

  the jeweled prize

  always

  at our finger tips.

  We will it so

  and so it is

  past all accident.

  Ezra Pound 1885–1972

  The Seafarer

  FROM THE ANGLO-SAXON

  May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,

  Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days

  Hardship endured oft.

  Bitter breast-cares have I abided,

  Known on my keel many a care’s hold,

  And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent

  Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head

  While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,

  My feet were by frost benumbed.

  Chill its chains are; chafing sighs

  Hew my heart round and hunger begot

  Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not

  That he on dry land loveliest liveth,

  List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,

  Weathered the winter, wretched outcast

  Deprived of my kinsmen;

  Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

  There I heard naught save the harsh sea

  And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,

  Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,

  Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter,

 
The mews’ singing all my mead-drink.

  Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern

  In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed

  With spray on his pinion.

  Not any protector

  May make merry man faring needy.

  This he little believes, who aye in winsome life

  Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,

  Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft

  Must bide above brine.

  Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,

  Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then.

  Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now

  The heart’s thought that I on high streams

  The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.

  Moaneth alway my mind’s lust

  That I fare forth, that I afar hence

  Seek out a foreign fastness.

  For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,

  Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;

  Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful

  But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare

  Whatever his lord will.

  He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having

  Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world’s delight

  Nor any whit else save the wave’s slash,

  Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.

  Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,

  Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,

  All this admonisheth man eager of mood,

  The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks

  On flood-ways to be far departing.

  Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,

  He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,

  The bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not –

  He the prosperous man – what some perform

  Where wandering them widest draweth.

  So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock,

  My mood ’mid the mere-flood,

  Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.

  On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,

  Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,

  Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,

  O’er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow

  My lord deems to me this dead life

  On loan and on land, I believe not

  That any earth-weal eternal standeth

  Save there be somewhat calamitous

  That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.

  Disease or oldness or sword-hate

  Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.

  And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after –

  Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,

  That he will work ere he pass onward,

  Frame on the fair earth ’gainst foes his malice,

  Daring ado,…

  So that all men shall honour him after

  And his laud beyond them remain ’mid the English,

  Aye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,

  Delight ’mid the doughty.

  Days little durable,

  And all arrogance of earthen riches,

  There come now no kings nor Cæsars

  Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.

  Howe’er in mirth most magnified,

  Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,

  Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!

  Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.

  Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.

  Earthly glory ageth and seareth.

  No man at all going the earth’s gait,

  But age fares against him, his face paleth,

  Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,

  Lordly men, are to earth o’ergiven,

  Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,

  Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,

  Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,

  And though he strew the grave with gold,

  His born brothers, their buried bodies

  Be an unlikely treasure hoard.

  The Garden

  En robe de parade

  – Samain

  Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall

  She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,

  And she is dying piece-meal

  of a sort of emotional anæmia.

  And round about there is a rabble

  Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.

  They shall inherit the earth.

  In her is the end of breeding.

  Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

  She would like some one to speak to her,

  And is almost afraid that I

  will commit that indiscretion.

  A Pact

  I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –

  I have detested you long enough.

  I come to you as a grown child

  Who has had a pig-headed father;

  I am old enough now to make friends.

  It was you that broke the new wood,

  Now is a time for carving.

  We have one sap and one root –

  Let there be commerce between us.

  The Temperaments

  Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and something approaching a rape

  Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend Florialis,

  And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in demeanour

  That he passes for both bloodless and sexless.

  Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and writes of nothing save copulation,

  Has become the father of twins,

  But he accomplished this feat at some cost;

  He had to be four times cuckold.

  In a Station of the Metro

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet, black bough.

  Alba

  As cool as the pale wet leaves

  of lily-of-the-valley

  She lay beside me in the dawn.

  The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

  While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

  I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

  You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

  You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

  And we went on living in the village of Chokan:

  Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

  At fourteen I married My Lord you.

  I never laughed, being bashful.

  Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

  Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

  At fifteen I stopped scowling,

  I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

  Forever and forever and forever.

  Why should I climb the look out?

  At sixteen you departed,

  You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,

  And you have been gone five months.

  The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

  You dragged your feet when you went out.

  By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

  Too deep to clear them away!

  The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

  The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

  Over the grass in the West garden;

  They hurt me. I grow older.

  If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

  Please let me know beforehand,

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud’

  ‘WET SPRINGTIME,’ SAYS TO-EM-MEI,

  ‘WET SPRING IN THE GARDEN.’

  I


  The clouds have gathered, and gathered,

  and the rain falls and falls,

  The eight ply of the heavens

  are all folded into one darkness,

  And the wide, flat road stretches out.

  I stop in my room toward the East, quiet, quiet,

  I pat my new cask of wine.

  My friends are estranged, or far distant,

  I bow my head and stand still.

  II

  Rain, rain, and the clouds have gathered,

  The eight ply of the heavens are darkness,

  The flat land is turned into river.

  ‘Wine, wine, here is wine!’

  I drink by my eastern window.

  I think of talking and man,

  And no boat, no carriage, approaches.

  III

  The trees in my east-looking garden

  are bursting out with new twigs,

  They try to stir new affection,

  And men say the sun and moon keep on moving

  because they can’t find a soft seat.

  The birds flutter to rest in my tree,

  and I think I have heard them saying,

  ‘It is not that there are no other men

  But we like this fellow the best,

  But however we long to speak

  He can not know of our sorrow.’

  Provincia Deserta

  At Rochecoart,

  Where the hills part

  in three ways,

  And three valleys, full of winding roads,

  Fork out to south and north,

  There is a place of trees … gray with lichen.

  I have walked there

  thinking of old days.

  At Chalais

  is a pleached arbour;

  Old pensioners and old protected women

  Have the right there –

  it is charity.

  I have crept over old rafters,

  peering down

  Over the Dronne,

  over a stream full of lilies.

  Eastward the road lies,

  Aubeterre is eastward,

  With a garrulous old man at the inn.

  I know the roads in that place:

  Mareuil to the north-east,

  La Tour,

  There are three keeps near Mareuil,

  And an old woman,

  glad to hear Arnaut,

  Glad to lend one dry clothing.

  I have walked

  into Perigord,

  I have seen the torch-flames, high-leaping,

  Painting the front of that church;

  Heard, under the dark, whirling laughter.

  I have looked back over the stream

  and seen the high building,

  Seen the long minarets, the white shafts.

  I have gone in Ribeyrac

  and in Sarlat,

  I have climbed rickety stairs, heard talk of Croy,