by Mervyn Peake
The sunlight falls upon the grass;
It falls upon the tower;
Upon my spectacles of brass
It falls with all its power.
It falls on everything it can,
For that is how it’s made;
And it would fall on me, except,
That I am in the shade.
(1944)
The Crocodile
A Crocodile in ecstasy
Sat on the sofa next to me
As I poured out the Indian tea.
I stared at him with startled eyes,
And wondered at his bird-like cries –
Such little sounds, from such a size.
(1944)
The Giraffe
You may think that he’s rather slow
At seeing jokes, but O, dear no,
It isn’t that at all, and I
Will furnish you the reason why.
You see, with such a Normus Neck,
It takes his laughter half a week
To climb so very far from where
It started from, which isn’t fair –
Because, when it has reached his face,
He finds that he has lost the place,
And can’t remember what was so
Amusing half a week ago!
(1944)
My Uncle Paul of Pimlico
My Uncle Paul of Pimlico
Has seven cats as white as snow,
Who sit at his enormous feet
And watch him, as a special treat,
Play the piano upside-down,
In his delightful dressing-gown;
The firelight leaps, the parlour glows,
And, while the music ebbs and flows,
They smile (while purring the refrains),
At little thoughts that cross their brains.
(1944)
It Makes a Change
There’s nothing makes a Greenland Whale
Feel half so high-and-mighty,
As sitting on a mantelpiece
In Aunty Mabel’s nighty.
It makes a change from Freezing Seas,
(Of which a Whale can tire),
To warm his weary tail at ease
Before an English fire.
For this delight he leaves the sea,
(Unknown to Aunty Mabel),
Returning only when the dawn
Lights up the Breakfast Table.
(1944)
What a Day It’s Been!
Dear children, what a day it’s been!
The kind of day when days
Are not what they are meant to be
In several kind of ways.
My eyes are dim for I have sobbed
Twelve tears of Platform Brine,
There’ll never be another Niece
As innocent as mine!
Mine was the One! Mine was the Two;
Mine was the Three and Four,
And I have heard her parents say,
She rose to Seven or more!
So be it. She is gone, and I
Am left at Waterloo;
Half magical, half tragical,
And, half-an-hour… or two.
(1944)
How Mournful to Imagine
Our Ears, you know, have Other Uses,
For, when we are dead,
The Coloured Pirates swarm ashore
And chop them off one’s head!
Far out at sea, beneath the stars
They sew them into Sails,
So that their wicked ships can leap
Among the Killer whales.
How mournful to imagine
Our poor Ears being furled
By pirates in some purple bay
Half-way across the world!
(1944)
The Jailor and the Jaguar
The Jailor and the Jaguar
Keep wandering through the rain,
The Jailor with a Swaguar,
The Jaguar with a Pain.
They search for Warmth and Clothes to Mend,
But mostly for their Wives,
Who left them long ago to lend
More Colour to their Lives.
(1944)
The Camel
I saw a camel sit astride
A rainbow in the spring;
His arms were crossed, his yellow hide
Was of the finest string.
The rainbow light upon his twine
Had set it all aglow
With love and tinctures as divine
As one could wish to know.
He edged along the slender arc,
And then he rolled his eyes.
Below him the sepulchral dark
Surged past his hairy thighs…
And then, he sang! but as his voice
Was very far removed,
I first mistook it for the noise
Of those whom once I loved.
(1944)
I Wish I Could Remember
Along my weary whiskers
The tears flow fast and free,
They twinkle in the Arctic
And plop into the sea.
Alas! my weary whiskers!
Alas! my tearfulness!
I wish I could remember
The cause of my distress.
(1944)
I Waxes and I Wanes, Sir
I waxes, and I wanes, sir;
I ebbs’s and I flows;
Some says it be my Brains, sir,
Some says it be my Nose.
It isn’t as I’m slow, sir,
(To cut a story long),
It’s just I’d love to know, sir,
Which one of them is wrong.
(1944)
The Hippopotamus
The very nastiest grimace
You make upon the sly,
Is choice beside the Hippo’s face
Who doesn’t even try.
(1944)
A Languorous Life
A languorous life I lead, I do
Lead such a languorous life.
I lead it Here, I lead it There,
Together with my wife.
Sometimes we lead it Round-and-round,
And sometimes Through-and-through;
It is a life we recommend
To anyone like You.
(1944)
Sensitive, Seldom and Sad
Sensitive, Seldom and Sad are we,
As we wend our way to the sneezing sea,
With our hampers full of thistles and fronds
To plant round the edge of the dab-fish ponds;
O, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad –
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.
In the shambling shades of the shelving shore,
We will sing us a song of the Long Before,
And light a red fire and warm our paws
For it’s chilly, it is, on the Desolate shores,
For those who are Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
For those who are Seldom and Sad.
Sensitive, Seldom and Sad we are,
As we wander along through Lands Afar,
To the sneezing sea, where the sea-weeds be,
And the dab-fish ponds that are waiting for we
Who are, Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
Oh so Seldom and Sad.
(1944)
Roll Them Down
Roll them down
And down
And roll them
Down
Through the vales
Of the skulls
Where the
Winds
Bring the hails
To the valleys
Where the bulls
Roar hell
Through the alleys
Of the hills
Of rock
Stock-still
As the lock-
Jaw bones
That groan
To the tri-
Coloured sky
And the lean
White colt
> As halts
By the vaults
Of the green
Thunderbolts
Is seen
Quite plain
With stars
And little fishes
In his
Mane.
(c. 1946)
One Day When They Had Settled Down
Deliria was seven foot five
And Jones was five foot seven
Deliria she gobbled fruit,
And Jones – he dreamed of heaven.
In great thick dusty books he read
And hardly ever went to bed
Before it was eleven.
One day when they had settled down
To face the other way,
A yellow lion in his prime
Crept through the mountains grey,
And – smiling like a buttercup,
Pulled off his socks and ate them up –
There is no more to say.
(1946)
Again! Again! and Yet Again
Again! again! and yet again
I find my skull’s too small
For all the jokes that throng my Brain
And have no point at all!
(1946)
Uncle George
Uncle George became so nosey
That we bought him a tea-cosy
To defend ourselves, and bring
Confusion to the evil Thing;
Which angered him so much, we had
To tie him to a blotting pad
Which soaks his energy away
From dawn to dusk, and dusk to day,
Until he’s now so out of joint
That he can never see the point.
(1946)
The King of Ranga-Tanga-Roon
The King of Ranga-Tanga-Roon
Ate catfish with a golden spoon
And growled beneath the steaming sun
Until his wife was ninety-one.
The bright blue waters danced about
His island till the fish came out
And sang ‘O Ranga-Tanga-Roo,
Your wife will soon be ninety-two!’
(1946)
I Cannot Give You Reasons
I cannot give you reasons
But I can give you Facts
About the way that grocers plunge
Through bubbling cataracts.
I saw them in the moonlight
A hundred miles from home –
Their pockets full of goldfish,
Their trousers full of foam.
What is the use of hiding
The secret any more?
I saw them, though I’m glad to say,
They didn’t see I saw.
(1946)
The Ballad of Sweet Pighead
1
Sweet Pighead, youngest of the family,
Loved with a secret, scared embarrassment
By her startled mother, throve, and grew to be
The toast of a divided continent.
2
Her father, when he saw her in her cot,
Recovered slowly and then hanged himself.
Her only sister, rooted to the spot,
Tore off her clothes and swore she was an elf –
3
By contrast she was human but no elf
So to the black asylum she was taken –
Of this sweet Pighead knew no more than Ralph
Her uncle, long since dead, whom none can waken.
4
Her brothers saw in her, this new born child,
A family disgrace, something indecent.
One hid himself in Greece, where he reviled
The Saxon race – another, northward bent,
5
Brooded in igloos, or to staunch this wound
To everything his soul believed in, swam
From floe to floe, or with peculiar bounds
Pursued the Arctic sun as red as jam.
6
The third burned incense in the dark of night
To shrive himself of such a carnal sister.
By day he was a draper, with his white
Impassive face of razor cuts and plaster.
7
He left the red brick house where he’d been born
With all its thirty well appointed rooms
And took a flat in Palmer’s Green alone
Beside a brand new graveyard of bright tombs.
8
And so the family, reduced to two,
Lived on in Fairmould Square, the frightened mother
Eyeing her little child who gently grew
From hour to hour like roses in mild weather.
9
The mother dropped her friends, she locked her doors,
Dismissed her servants – drew her curtains close,
Appalled and puzzled, but without a pause
In her maternal succour, tended her rose.
10
She was a perfect child, dressed in her long
White silken nightdress – how could anyone
But say that she was perfect as a song
Of delphic rapture lifting to the moon?
11
Sweet Pighead grew – still hidden from men’s sight:
Her little snout, her delicate, dawn-lit ears,
Her alabaster skin that lapped the light,
Her tiny eyes, her amber coloured tears.
12
Her nursery was spacious, and the air
Balmy, that through the open skylight swam.
The walls were ducks-egg blue, the furniture
Was lemon yellow, with a hint of cream.
From Figures of Speech. The Key to the drawing is on p. 234.
13
It was not long before her mother saw
Her porcine babe with less of fear than pride.
At six weeks old she’d learned to semaphore,
And took the seven times table in her stride.
14
At eighteen months, with Euclid at her back,
And Plato in the pocket of her nighty,
Her mother realized the gulphous lack
Of her own brain in face of this almighty
15
Proffering that lay there in the cot,
A charming smile upon its delicate lips,
The gentle wrinkling of the satin snout,
The wise eyes toying with apocalypse.
16
Her mother, gushing with a naked pride,
Doted upon the brilliant freak she bore,
Yet awed by this uncalculable tide
Of sentience, was terrified the more.
17
One day, in Pighead’s second year, the child
Spoke quietly, ‘Come, come, you’re overwrought,
Let us go out, the air is soft and mild.
I’d like to see the world I’ve read about.’
18
Her mother wrung her hands, and knelt beside
The infant sitting cross legged on the floor.
‘Dear mother,’ said Sweet Pighead, ‘do not hide
Your thoughts from me, because they show the more.
19
‘Of my uniqueness I’m aware, and that
Though I’m conventionally formed elsewhere
My poor head is a pig’s.’ She touched her snout
And lifted up the tips of either ear.
20
‘I’ve given deep and serious thought, dear mother,
And know how I shall probably affect
And shock the populace – why bother
To palliate their lack of intellect?
21
‘I have considered how I shall be shunned
And how I shall be gaped upon, and how
The answer to the problem, I have found,
Demands unflinching courage, blow for blow…’
(10 March 1947)
Hold Fast
Hold fast
To the law
Cold tome,
Where the earth
Of the truth
Lies thick
On the page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The Child
For the tomb
The thrush
