Gaudete

by Ted Hughes

  Mrs Holroyd emerges, with dazzled eyes,

  Carrying a basket, and adjusting her skirt,

  And dusting herself down.

  The Reverend Nicholas Lumb

  Materialises out of the darkness behind her.

  Mrs Holroyd, at twenty-seven, is a fresh-faced abundant

  woman

  With an easy laugh.

  Estridge treasures her among his collection of ideals –

  She reminds him of the country love of his youth, who

  never appeared.

  Now he watches Lumb

  Following her closely to the house-door.

  Within the hallway, within the magnified circle,

  Turning, she sets Lumb’s hands on her breasts and bites

  his neck.

  His hands gather up her skirts

  As his foot closes the door

  And Estridge’s brain wrings

  To a needling pang, as if a wire might snap.

  His bulging eye

  Hammers the blunt limits of objects and light.

  Till a scream

  Amplifies over his head’s pain –

  A repeated approaching scream, then a silence.

  His younger daughter has left her piano.

  She is running between the shrubs towards him.

  He puts on his spectacles.

  He quickly tries to think what could be the worst

  possible.

  He finds only helpless fear.

  His daughter is screaming something at him

  As if in perfect silence.

  Lumb

  Is looking at the land.

  This is the unalterably strange earth.

  He is looking at the sky. He looks down at the soil,

  between the grass.

  He looks at the trees

  Which clamber in a tangle up the slope towards him,

  from the river, out of the swell of land beyond.

  He listens to all this, and listens into the emptiness beyond it

  And the emptiness within it.

  And the soft hollow air noises among it.

  It feels very like safety. If the trees were trees only, wood only, were simple roots and boles and boughs and leaves, and that only, as the stones should be stones. If the stones were simple stones. This would be safe. All this would be safety.

  But he knows everything he looks at,

  Even the substance of his fingers, and the near-wall of his

  skin,

  He knows it is vibrant with peril, like a blurred speed-

  vibration.

  He knows the blood in his veins

  Is like heated petrol, as if it were stirring closer and

  closer to explosion,

  As if his whole body were a hot engine, growing hotter

  Connected to the world, which is out of control,

  And to the grass under his feet, the trees whose shadows

  reach for him.

  He breathes deeply and strongly to confirm his solidity,

  To cool his outline and his solidity

  To fill his strength

  Against the power that beats up against him, beating at

  the soles of his feet,

  Beating through his thoughts

  And the obscure convulsions and blunderings of a music

  that lurches through him

  With brightenings and darkenings, and rendings and

  caressings,

  With tiny crowded farness and near sudden hugeness

  And hot twisting roughness, and vast cantileverings of

  star-balance.

  He looks out across the quilt and embroidery of the

  landscape,

  The hazings of distance, and the watery horizons folded

  like fingers,

  And tries to imagine simple freedom –

  His possible freedoms, his other lives, hypothetical and

  foregone, his lost freedoms.

  As each person carries the whole world, like a halo,

  Albeit a dim and mostly provisional world, but with a

  brightly focused centre, under the sun,

  Considering their millions

  All mutually exclusive, all conjunct and co-extensive,

  He sees in among them,

  In among all the tiny millions of worlds of this world

  Millions of yet other, alternative worlds, uninhabited,

  unnoticed, still empty,

  Each open at every point to every other and yet distinct,

  Each waiting for him to escape into it, to explore it and

  possess it,

  Each with a bed at the centre. A name. A pair of shoes.

  And a door.

  And surrounded by still-empty, never-used limitless freedom.

  He yields to his favourite meditation.

  Forlorn, desperate meditation.

  Between the root in immovable earth

  And the coming and going leaf

  Stands the tree

  Of what he cannot alter.

  As his heart surges after his reverie, with lofty cries and

  lifting wingbeats

  Suddenly he comes against the old trees

  And feels the branches in his throat, and the leaves at his

  lips.

  He sees the grass

  And feels the wind pulse over his skin.

  He feels the hill he stands on, hunched, swelling,

  Piling through him, complete and permanent with stone,

  Filling his skull, squeezing his thoughts out from his eyes

  To fritter away across surfaces.

  Till the one presence of world crushes him from himself,

  and sits on him like an iron crown on a stone pillar,

  Studded with baleful stones,

  As if he were a child king, hoisted on to a granite throne,

  surrounded by eyes of sharpened metal.

  For a half hour he stands, alert

  Imprisoned in the globe’s stoniness

  And the thin skin, the thin painting of mother-soil,

  And the hair-fine umbilicus of life in the stalk of grass.

  His life returns as a fly. It lands on his eyelid and trickles

  down to his mouth-corner.

  He moves to free himself.

  Some animal is pushing noisily below in the wood.

  A squirrel flees up through a beech, like a lashing rocket,

  and rips into the outermost leaf-net with a crash.

  Voices recede, snatch back their words and meanings,

  Become bramble stem, leaf hollows, reticulation of twigs.

  He is clearly aware of himself, on the hill in clear light, from the eye of a soaring, reconnoitring and downsliding far crow.

  He prays

  To be guided. He feels his prayer claw at the air, as at

  glass

  Like a beetle in a bottle.

  He tries to pray with the sun –

  Feeling it break off, dry in his mouth

  He tries to find in himself the muscle-root of prayer.

  He takes a few brisk steps

  To tear free of his fear, to shake his limbs

  Out of their crawling horror, their fly-tiny helplessness.

  He makes an effort

  To feel his plans steady. He fixes, hard and firm, phrasing

  it clearly,

  His decision to escape before night.

  This very day. To carry his body, with all its belongings,

  Right to the end of its decision. Surely that is simple

  enough.

  What is wrong with this idea? He only has to do it.

  Surely it is all he wants to do.

  He is afraid

  As if he were asleep and dreaming the first warnings of

  smoke-smell

  In a burning room, where everything is already spluttering and banging into flames, cores of fury drumming flames,

  The flames swarming up, leaping like rats,

&nb
sp; A torrent of devils twisting upwards above the tops of

  everything,

  As if everything –

  The whole world and day where he stands, trying to

  awake,

  Were a giant aircraft out of control, shaking itself to pieces, already losing height, spinning slowly down in space

  Scattering burning chunks,

  The air sprayed with blazing fuel, full of an inaudible

  screaming, sprayed with fine blood –

  He leans his forehead to an ash tree, clasping his hands

  over his skull.

  He presses his brow to the ridged bark.

  He closes his eyes, searching.

  He tries to make this ash-tree his prayer.

  He searches upward and downward with his prayer,

  reaching upwards and downwards through the capillaries,

  Groping to feel the sure return grasp

  The sure embrace and return gaze of a listener –

  He sinks his prayer into the strong tree and the tree

  stands as his prayer.

  The Bridge Inn bar

  Is gleaming, the mopped floor drying

  In the morning’s leisured vacancy.

  The door standing open, to ventilate last-night’s beer-

  smell,

  Admits the conversation of the river and its stones.

  The fleeing needle-cry of a dipper going downstream

  Pierces the company of empty chairs.

  Betty, the girl behind the bar,

  Is making the last few preparations

  For the first lunchtime regulars.

  She is lean as a skinny boy and blonde as straw.

  She takes a hot pie from the counter-oven

  With pink bony hands

  And goes back through the house.

  The usual word to the pub-owner’s wife, Mrs Walsall,

  Who is peeling potatoes in the kitchen.

  She is just slipping home with this lunch for her old mum

  Before the first customers.

  She cycles out of the yard, Mrs Walsall watches the

  window.

  Betty does not pass the window.

  Mrs Walsall opens the latch and leans out. Betty

  Is cycling along the lane beside the river, away from the

  village.

  Mrs Walsall’s starved Syrian face

  Has the religious pallor, the blue-socketed eyes

  Of a mediaeval portrait.

  Betty’s bicycle departure

  Is in line with the perfunctory lips

  Dried and leathered

  By long night wakefulness, by blank morning hopelessness.

  Mrs Walsall is in love

  And has lost interest in everything else.

  She wants to dedicate herself, like a sacrifice, to her great

  love.

  She does not know how.

  She knows she is unacceptably ugly.

  The child inside her is a growing

  Fungus of jealousy

  Displacing her from her body. A great hurt,

  Like a coulter sewn into her stomach

  That she cannot void or vomit.

  As Betty rides into the silk-fringed hazel leaves, on the

  chirping saddle,

  Mrs Walsall lets the cold tapwater

  Numb her hands, and escapes thinking.

  She tries to let the water

  Numb her body. She fixes her mind

  Under the numbing water.

  She stands at the sink, numbed.

  Doctor Westlake

  Has informed Commander Estridge that his elder daughter is indeed dead. Estridge is sitting near the window, small and still, stunned by the event, and by the incomprehensible blunt fact that his daughter was pregnant.

  Westlake’s delight in such facts, his opportunistic sense of theatre, his lust to uncover the worst and reveal it, could not let the chance pass.

  Now Westlake

  Has settled his professionally baleful stare,

  His congenitally baleful stare,

  On Jennifer, who is curled on the couch.

  Her words flood and strew

  In tangled sweetness and sharp fragments

  Like a flower-vase just broken.

  Old Estridge is trying vainly to reckon her words up,

  As if they were some gibberish formula of huge numerals

  Into which his whole family fortune is vanishing.

  Explosions from different directions have left him little

  more than mere outline.

  He props his brow between finger and thumb

  And rests his incomprehension on the sunlit pattern of the

  carpet.

  Westlake, deeply stirred, listens.

  The perfumed upheaval of all this ringing emotion and

  physical beauty

  Is exciting him.

  He follows what he can of her cascading explanations.

  Her creamy satin blouse, stretching and flexing like a

  skin,

  Her dark-haired ankles,

  Her sandals askew, her helpless uncontrol,

  Her giddy mathematics

  Which are constructing an abyss –

  The corpse is absent.

  It lies on Janet’s stripped bed upstairs, a shape under a

  sheet

  Like an article of furniture no longer required, stored

  And waiting for removal.

  Jennifer is telling

  That her sister was in love with the minister Mr Lumb

  Just as he had been in love with her

  And they were going to disappear together to Australia

  Because his religious work had become impossible for him

  But then quite suddenly he no longer loved Janet.

  Instead he loved herself, Jennifer, much, much more deeply

  As he still does love her

  And she loves him the same, there is nothing they can do

  about it.

  And so she undeceived her sister for her own good and

  told her of this alteration

  And so Janet has killed herself and that is the extent of it.

  Westlake

  Keeps losing Jennifer’s words

  As he gazes fascinated

  Into the turbulence of her body and features.

  He jerks back into detachment

  Noting again, between the inflamed eyelids,

  Her irises clear and nimble-delicate as a baboon’s,

  And the insanity there, the steel-cutting acetylene

  Of religious mania.

  And immersing himself in her voice, which flows so full of

  thrilling touches

  And which sobs so nakedly in its narration,

  He is scorched by the hard fieriness,

  A jagged, opposite lightning

  Running along the edge of it

  Like an insane laughter –

  Something in his marrow shrivels with fear.

  Mrs Holroyd

  Is sunbathing in the orchard, between cloudshadows.

  Snow-topped blue raininess masses low to the West,

  bulging slant and forward.

  She squints up, calculating whether the bursting bleached edges of that mattress are going to wipe out the sun.

  The apple trees dazzle. The air shifts and stirs the black undershadows, caressing the fur of glow on her throat and forearm.

  Inside, in the wide white kitchen,

  Her husband chews cheese and bread dryly. Makes

  himself tea.

  She watches the honey bees, bumping at apple blossoms, groping and clambering into the hot interiors of the blood and milk clots.

  In what continues of the sun

  she knows she is happy. She is suspended, as in a warm solution, in the confidence of it. She lies back in her deck-chair, helpless in the languor of it, just as the chill-edged sun holds her, for these moments, unable to move.

  Her transistor
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br />   Bedded in the tussocky moist grass, among milky maids

  and new nettles,

  Squirts out a sizzle of music

  And transatlantic happy chat.

  She even hums a little, as a melody draws clear,

  Letting her round-fleshed, long arm

  Dangle behind her head

  Over the back of the chair.

  She squirms her toes, feeling inside her shoes the faint clammy cold of the dew, which will hide all day in the dense grass.

  She turns her freckled face shallowly

  In the doubtful sun

  And watches through her eyelashes a dewball jangling its

  colours, like an enormous ear-jewel, among the blades.

  Closing her eyes

  Concentrating on the sun’s weight against her cheek,

  She lets herself sink.

  Her own rosy private darkness embraces her.

  A softness, like a warm sea, undulating, lifts her,

  Like a slower, stronger heart, lifting her,

  A luxury

  Signalling to the looseness of her hips and vertebrae,

  Washing its heavy eerie pleasure

  Through her and through her.

  She wants it to go on. She lies there, with a slightly foolish smile on her face. She wants nothing to change. She does not want to think about anything, or to open her eyes.

  The slow plan of the young corn, advancing

  Its glistening pennons,

  The satisfaction of the calf’s masseter

  Moving in the sun, beneath half-closed eyes,

  The grass feathering,

  The muscled Atlas of the land

  Resting in the noon, always strengthening, supporting,

  assuring –

  And she is like a plant.

  The sun settles the quilt of comfort

  Over her sleepy contentment with herself –

  Which is like the darkness, secret and happy

  Inside the down soft skull

  Of a new suckling baby.

  Through half-opened eyes, she watches a dark, giant bulk rocking behind nettles and cow-parsley. Her bull heaves to his feet. He leans forward, neck buffaloed, tightening his spine and stretching his thighs, belly deep in the flowering grass, black under leaf shadow. He sets his neck to a tree-bole, then jerks up his head, driving it down and jerking it up again, with alarming ease and lightness, scratching his neck and shoulder, while the whole tree shudders. The blossoms snow down, settling along his shoulders and loins and buttocks, like a confetti.