– And behind me
The candles of thoughtful nights,
And the green months, solitary,
Across dividing seas –
And again behind me, the cities
Rising on the inexpressible meaning of their streets,
Unaltering – and the eyes lifting over a wine glass,
Holding the inexpressible, playing terror against acceptance –
Eyes, and siren voices lost at dawn…
Only the empty dawn
Comes, over the harbour; with the getting-back to day,
The resumed love-songs and the rhythms of illusion.
– And around me
Legend of other times on dry gold background,
Pitted with slow insinuations
Probings of now defunct animalculae…
Worm, mighty and dead, established in the paint and the
tapestries,
Having ended your statements.
Only the statement, the unalterable deed only
Stands, and is no more than a halt on the track –
– And at last, before me
In fierce rise and fall of impetuous seasons,
The articulate skeleton
In clothes grown one with the frame,
At the finger-post waiting, aureoled with lamentations.
‘Hail partner, that went as I
In towns, in wastes – I, shadow,
Meet with you – I that have walked with recording eyes
Through a rich bitter world, and seen
The heart close with the brain, the brain crossed by the heart –
I that have made, seeing all,
Nothing, and nothing kept, nor understood
Of the empty hands, the hands impotent through time that lift and fall
Along a question –
Nor of passing and re-passing
By the twin affirmations of never and forever,
In doubt, in shame, in silence.’
from
Poems Two 1925
1930
Simultaneous
At one time
The bottle-hyacinths under Orvieto –
At one time
A letter a letter and a letter –
At one time, sleepless,
Through rain the nightingale sang from the river island –
At one time, Montparnasse,
And all night’s gloss,
Splendour of shadow on shadow,
With the exact flower
Of the liqueur glass in its glass.
Time runs,
But thought (or what?) comes
Seated between these damaged table-tops,
Sense of what zones, what simultaneous time-sense?
…Then in Ravenna
The dust is turned to dew
By moonlight, and the exact
Splayed ox-feet sleep that dragged the sugar-beet
To dry maremmas
Past Sant’ Apollinare,
Fuori Mura.
In Calais Roads
The foam-quilt sags and swells,
Exact are the land’s beacons to the sea –
Twin arms crossed, thrown across sleep and a night-wind.
Time falls from unseen bells
On Calais quays (that were sometimes a heart’s keys).
Red bryony
Steeps in loose night-air, swelling –
October crumples the hedge –
Or the wind’s in the ash, opening the seed-pods.
(The revolution in the weeds –
Rain somewhere. Rain suggests
Their dissolution to the seeds.)
Midnight,
While some protect their trades
Forcing the line – sleep takes them.
But the baker
Cools at the sill, yeast raising auburn flour.
Midnight,
And trains perambulate (o noctis equi);
Faust is in hell that would have stopped the horses of night
In their gallops, that would have galloped atop of them,
But was outpaced, overthrown for too exact questioning.
And in Albi
Les orguilleux sus des roues continuellement
(hell’s fading fresco),
And in Torcello
The mud-fogs now, and on all unknown
Ripe watery wastes
the rich dead silence.
Silence – or a night-wind on a lawn
Turning the pages one by one of a forgotten book.
In Provins
So he ran out knocking down the brigadier –
Mince alors: said the officers to each other
In the hotel at the end of the Sunday meal, fumant la pipe.
And rain ran in new ditches
Beating on sooty walls where the ramparts are falling
In Provins, ville-haute – with the gale up the winter’s watery veins
In clipped crooked fields – wind in the nerves of winter
(The black branches) – in the streets’ draughty funnels.
Next morning the lieutenants cantered out in clear sunlight
Past the Jardin Public, a place of shallow waters rising.
What is left of old carvings… seamed fragments in an odour of violets,
And from a café crept the unexplained scent of frezias.
Sun descends on the streams, travelling down the green water.
Against écarlate de Gand and bleu de Nicole they matched their ners, noir de Provins,
Famous cloth, fast-dyed in the Durteint, hard river-water.
And Abelard
In these level meadows for two years was teaching.
And Thibaut leaned
From the high-town over a murmuring valley,
Thibaut, lord and love-singer who ordered the walls and a monastery.
Word and gesture all one now, dispersed by the unrecording wind,
Other footsteps now, patterning the soundless mould.
Dome on the sunset, blue dome on high hill-distance
Where the ramparts are falling – only a Caesar’s tower
Catches the wind still and the rain’s minute deteriorations.
The moon collects on puddle-water –
Lilac and prune-flush, suffusions then shadows of nightfall,
Wing-rustle in quickset… and suddenly that hunting-music,
Delaying chords of horns, suspended chords
After silence.
All day I have had memories coming back at me with their
gesture of meetings and partings,
And the sense of some moment in this place that is a memory to be.
By the roadside, what’s past… Then the now with its hotel bedroom
Where one traveller replaces another – one traveller the abstraction of all –
Time’s seasons or shadows put forward, remembered in the wallpaper –
Sad spring still frigid, summer with flies, then the harvests beyond the octroi,
And the long sheet of winter wrinkled and knotted with branches…
After the soldiers…shuffle and stamp in the clotted sawdust… the commercial gentry:
‘Splendeurs et Misères’? Mais mon vieux, tu n’es pas de ton temps!
from
Relève into Maquis
1944
Relève into Maquis
The mayors put up the Order on the walls:
‘Labour, well paid, in Germany today.’
Laval found better with these words: ‘France calls
All men of France… Each man who goes will free
One prisoner… Duty… Brothers … Gratitude …’
Three generations looked at it, and said:
‘Grandfather, father, self – we fought the Boches
Each in his youth, then prime – shall yet, today.
It’s NO. The Relève, this “changing of the guard”
Is planned for dupes, by Vichy’s fear of us;
They wan
t a France unmanned. We shall not go.’
And a mean wind blew doubt – ‘Can one claim a son?
If so one takes his place.’ But no. Meanwhile
A million and a quarter prisoners stay in the Reich,
In France come hunger and threats between nerve and flesh;
In July of ’42 the first prisoner-train,
The barter of the Relève: three hundred, packed
Like a load of curses, sick, and half un-limbed.
Man sits in a fireless kitchen head in hands,
‘From under our feet the ground… and France is done…
Is done? Is down. But I live. I’ll fight against that.’
Just before dawn he unearthed the rabbit gun
And his old revolver, blessed by Spain, and went –
To the high lands by the goat track, a wind of decision
Blowing dawn into day. ‘Wife and life now these two…’
Gun and pistol under knee after the four-hour trek he sat
Till a boy surged calling ‘Password?’ ‘Not a hundred miles from Vichy’
‘Nor a hundred months from freedom.’ So into Maquis,
Hidden camp of partisans, francs-tireurs, guerrillas –
‘Refractories to law and order’ Vichy calls them;
Into the Secret Army the months have made them.
They swore him in: Enlisted until war’s end –
Not to see folks or friends again – Don’t count on any pay –
Death if your weapon’s lost – Total secrecy, death if not –
Tolerance of each man’s views, religious, political – and
Obedience to Maquis discipline in its very hard totality.
Marseille, Lorraine, Angoulême, Lille, Savoie, Franche-Comté,
Paris, Bretagne, Languedoc, Normandie – here is all France.
Loam and letters, student, shepherd, mason, agronomist,
Army-captain, priest, mechanic, and a lawyer-poet. Today comes a veteran
Of Spain and of the other two wars each side of that.
As yet there’s a gun for every twentieth man –
‘Always you hold your hand till the strategy’s ripe.
You time your fuse for success. You hold your hand
Till it finds Death’s hand responding as an ally.
This is the start. When we have won we shall build
Not out of hope, but out of strength,
Freedom – signed, FRANCE.’
Man Ship Tank Gun Plane
1944
Man Ship Tank Gun Plane
To Edward Thompson
GUNS far away – then last, closest. And ring-wise or splayed out? Like London
Arc, 50 by 30. At night. How uncharted the problem of sound,
Though the middle-ear’s filter salutes, comes up at the double to solve,
Hurt most by a break in the scurry, by the pause that resembles a wound.
No thing is confused; all’s in order. Time noted. Last lares penates Pressed finally after long years in small bag on the couch wait the hand,
Ready for ‘smartly’… ’fare onward’. So, pacing, sireenly… (O sister,
You turned one, telling the Yanks ‘’alf a blitz ’alf a mo’ on the Strand)…
Come mine, mine-mine… mine, between 10 and 10.1, the all-closest (guns I mean)
And the heart of it nears, yes? It does. It breaks up and the pattern is lost,
Lost, no, but scattered, forked-out now; ah look, the sound cedes it to vision –
Have we storm? We have storm… peak, maybe – (keep it patterned whatever the cost),
Storm-at-sea… Round this Horn yet… All’s relative… Mount, climax, then decrescendo…
Peak – only fools wave-count – it’s peak counts, thrust up through this giant tattoo…
Percentage of average… 8 million… but for soldiers in battle, this, always,
Who say: ‘If your name’s not on it why then it is never for you.’
Rage rave in your high loft majestic – for look, now the wild horses have it
Burst loose in the dizzy skies in their crazy mad gallopade,
Rearing-careering – like planes, yes… can hear them – and roaring-careening,
Part-sound, part-vision, part-sensed – planes sniped in an air enfilade.
So! Down-come of satellite steels, cascade of the shrapnel olives,
Casual flora of lead bloomed on street, iron spawn from the sky’s black breast,
The up-gash of incandescence, and crystalline chandelier
Christmassing down from 12,000 (the purpose amidst the feast).
I told you: sound yields it to vision – Then the guns, flares, glass, crash, tracers
Condense of a sudden on ‘There?’ Do the flames sit in west or east?
More like in the south – no, Soho – somewhere back of the plays and Eros,
(Superb is the fireman’s skill)… And what now? The whole night’s at rest.
I know – you hate these things written – wanting bluebell a-quiver in heather,
The secular flight of lone heron in lieu of massed iron wing,
Seeking olive at peace in grey stone-land, and glint on wild fur and feather
From sunrise and sunset, and ruins where only the long-dead sing.
Bat into seagull, welcome! Delft on its old shelf safely,
With only for trepidations those of the sewing machine;
Turn fresco of flames into tide-piece, match gull’s wing with stone-white on Downland,
Some time hence scarred turf will renew battle-slough revert to March green.
Some time hence they will come, I suppose, mood and time to weigh and consider
What metre best fits what matter… If the Love-Courts were just in their day…
Man will study old specious disputes, things like ‘the sex of angels’…
Some, turn to the pink in a flint, and the artisan’s osier way.
* * * * * *
But now, no. None of such. All’s at war. In front of me sea, and it’s FRANCE;
And beyond that, the past, and it’s SPAIN. Death hurls down a comrade’s lyre:
Mid-March it is Alun Lewis, death precedes him with Nordhal Grieg;
The whole face of one dream is SMOKE, and the voice in the next shouts FIRE
Loud, loud, in the ear. Long, terrible, gaunt the enforcement of waiting –
Does the wind from above blow chill, is there sign to vouchsafe us a date?
Here day after week and month after year, an in vassalled countries,
Man burns: ‘It is I, one being, but I in my millions, I wait,
And… nought?’ Nought, nought, and nought, nothing – impeccable Nothing.
Round as the total circle with zero at full in the midst,
Hinged to invisible vacuum, suspended in seasonless ether,
Greater than unlaned ocean, static, no ‘last’ nor ‘first’
In its nature, like Time. Like Time? Ah! But Time is live too, is imperfect,
Subject to change, has springs, and when they are darkly pressed
UP, peoples! haste history; come, dictators and traitors, to trial –
Convulsed are the panoramas, and see, when they fall to rest
Cuts through the dust-cloud THE TRUTH, as spare and white as pure bone is.
All must march in appointed order: Man flies across the West,
Man triumphs on in the East; when the South is dynamited
The North skirls down convergent – so must it come at last.
Dèpart à zéro. Our say. The fifth spring. The initial and ultimate
Surge, that the feet have learned and the years have stored up – till it come
With its roar and tornado, its science, its vigour, its fury, its lava,
At last, like a mistral-boreal – CHARGE – sure as the African drum.
THEN, YES – to the arts of peace, to their modes and themes and values,
When the armies have battled throug
h, and the dragons’ teeth have sprung
Sown wide by the conscript millions exiled in teuton death-land,
And the worker clasps the soldier, and the Marseillaise has swung
Freedom into fulfilment. Then yes, to a measure of heart’s ease,
In a room at The Rising Sun, with a drink to all races’ increase –
The landscape no longer khakied, the man on the rick with the hayfork,
And the tank led out with the horse to furrow – Piers Plowman at peace.
from the
Bodleian Manuscript
Love’s Alba Against Time, Time’s Against Love
Time counts the lovers’ strokes,
Each, stringing his knots along endeavour.
Devil – what have I to say to thee?
Wij beminnen elkander…
we love, love, we love on, in dutch, so.
Who says unsays much later;
Who all unsays has all said once.
O n c e? Is that treachery or is it time?
De fil en aiguille, au fil de l’heure…
Filles et fils de l’heure, écoutez:
‘Il y eut une fois’… Ay, that’s my enemy,
‘Once a time’, ‘ago’,
And as Aragon as it
‘Aima, ai-ma’ –
You need no other histories.
So in the blue room
What’s mine’s yours, ours, in fief hilden
For that himself Time is;
So it’s not ‘you and I’, it’s Time’s sport…
Time’s foe, my friend,
Gin, the white king –
In his ermines lives possibility,
His card-houses are my Spanish castles
To which the thread of Ariadne is
What will have been.
Time like a Mexican, a mask on a desert;
Selected Poems Page 14
