Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  Held in the vise of sense about to die.

  1950

  THE HOUSE AT THE CASCADES

  All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled

  By infantries of ants, by roots and storms,

  The pillars tugged by vines, the porte-cochère

  A passageway for winds, the solemn porches

  Warped into caricatures.

  We came at evening

  After the rain, when every drunken leaf

  Was straining, swelling in a riot of green.

  Only the house was dying in all that life,

  As if a triumph of emerald energy

  Had fixed its mouth upon the walls and stones.

  The tamest shrub remembered anarchy

  And joined in appetite with the demagogue weed

  That springs where order falls; together there

  They stormed the defenseless handiwork of man

  Whose empire wars against him when he turns

  A moment from the yoke. So, turning back,

  He sees his rooftree fall to furious green,

  His yard despoiled, and out of innocent noon

  The insect-cloud like thunder on the land.

  1951

  THE DIAMOND

  CUTTERS

  (1955)

  For A.H.C.

  THE ROADWAY

  When the footbridge washes away,

  And the lights along the bank

  Accost each other no longer,

  But the wild grass grows up rank,

  And no one comes to stand

  Where neighbor and neighbor stood,

  And each house is drawn in to itself

  And shuttered against the road,

  Under each separate roof

  The familiar life goes on:

  The hearth is swept up at night,

  The table laid in the dawn,

  And man and woman and child

  Eat their accustomed meal,

  Give thanks and turn to their day

  As if by an act of will.

  Nowhere is evil spoken,

  Though something deep in the heart

  Refuses to mend the bridge

  And can never make a start

  Along the abandoned path

  To the house at left or at right,

  Where neighbor and neighbor’s children

  Awake to the same daylight.

  Good men grown long accustomed

  To inflexible ways of mind—

  Which of them could say clearly

  What first drove kind from kind?

  Courteous to any stranger,

  Forbearing with wife and child—

  Yet along the common roadway

  The wild grass still grows wild.

  PICTURES BY VUILLARD

  Now we remember all: the wild pear-tree,

  The broken ribbons of the green-and-gold

  Portfolio, with sketches from an old

  Algerian campaign; the placid three

  Women at coffee by the window, fates

  Of nothing ominous, waiting for the ring

  Of the postman’s bell; we harbor everything—

  The cores of fruit left on the luncheon plates.

  We are led back where we have never been,

  Midday where nothing’s tragic, all’s delayed

  As it should have been for us as well—that shade

  Of summer always, Neuilly dappled green!

  But we, the destined readers of Stendhal,

  In monstrous change such consolations find

  As restless mockery sets before the mind

  To deal with what must anger and appall.

  Much of the time we scarcely think of sighing

  For afternoons that found us born too late.

  Our prudent envy rarely paces spying

  Under those walls, that lilac-shadowed gate.

  Yet at this moment, in our private view,

  A breath of common peace, like memory,

  Rustles the branches of the wild pear-tree—

  Air that we should have known, and cannot know.

  ORIENT WHEAT

  Our fathers in their books and speech

  Have made the matter plain:

  The green fields they walked in once

  Will never grow again.

  The corn lies under the locust’s tooth

  Or blistered in the sun;

  The faces of the old proud stock

  Are gone where their years are gone.

  The park where stags lay down at noon

  Under the great trees

  Is shrill with Sunday strollers now,

  Littered with their lees.

  Poachers have trampled down the maze

  And choked the fountains dry;

  The last swan of a score and ten

  Goes among reeds to die.

  We were born to smells of plague,

  Chalk-marks on every door;

  We never have heard the hunting-horn

  Or feet on the gallery floor—

  The high-arched feet of dancers

  Who knew how to step and stand.

  We were born of a leaning house

  In a changed, uneasy land.

  Our fathers curse the crooked time

  And go to their graves at last;

  While some of us laugh at doting men,

  And others sigh for the past.

  And the dazzled lovers lie

  Where summer burns blue and green,

  In the green fields they’ll be saying

  Can never grow again.

  VERSAILLES

  (Petit Trianon)

  Merely the landscape of a vanished whim,

  An artifice that lasts beyond the wish:

  The grotto by the pond, the gulping fish

  That round and round pretended islands swim,

  The creamery abandoned to its doves,

  The empty shrine the guidebooks say is love’s.

  What wind can bleaken this, what weather chasten

  Those balustrades of stone, that sky stone-pale?

  A fountain triton idly soaks his tail

  In the last puddle of a drying basin;

  A leisure that no human will can hasten

  Drips from the hollow of his lifted shell.

  When we were younger gardens were for games,

  But now across the sungilt lawn of kings

  We drift, consulting catalogues for names

  Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings

  For us and for the couples in the wood

  And all good children who are all too good.

  O children, next year, children, you will play

  With only half your hearts; be wild today.

  And lovers, take one long and fast embrace

  Before the sun that tarnished queens goes down,

  And evening finds you in a restless town

  Where each has back his old restricted face.

  ANNOTATION FOR AN EPITAPH

  A fairer person lost not heaven.

  —Paradise Lost

  These are the sins for which they cast out angels,

  The bagatelles by which the lovely fall:

  A hand that disappoints, an eye dissembling—

  These and a few besides: you had them all.

  Beneath this cherubed stone reclines the beauty

  That cherubs at the Chair will never see,

  Shut out forever by the gold battalions

  Stern to forgive, more rigorous than we.

  Oh, we were quick to hide our eyes from foible

  And call such beauty truth; what though we knew?

  Never was truth so sweet and so outrageous;

  We loved you all the more because untrue.

  But in the baroque corridors of heaven

  Your lively coming is a hope destroyed.

  Squadrons of seraphs pass the news and ponder,

  And all their luxury glitters grand and void.

  IDEAL L
ANDSCAPE

  We had to take the world as it was given:

  The nursemaid sitting passive in the park

  Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.

  The mornings happened similar and stark

  In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay

  Watching today unfold like yesterday.

  Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,

  Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered

  Now and again when most we sought perfection,

  Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.

  The human rose to haunt us everywhere,

  Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

  And always time was rushing like a tram

  Through streets of a foreign city, streets we saw

  Opening into great and sunny squares

  We could not find again, no map could show—

  Never those fountains tossed in that same light,

  Those gilded trees, those statues green and white.

  THE CELEBRATION

  IN THE PLAZA

  The sentimentalist sends his mauve balloon

  Meandering into air. The crowd applauds.

  The mayor eats ices with a cardboard spoon.

  See how that color charms the sunset air;

  A touch of lavender is what was needed.—

  Then, pop! no floating lavender anywhere.

  Hurrah, the pyrotechnic engineer

  Comes with his sparkling tricks, consults the sky,

  Waits for the perfect instant to appear.

  Bouquets of gold splash into bloom and pour

  Their hissing pollen downward on the dusk.

  Nothing like this was ever seen before.

  The viceroy of fireworks goes his way,

  Leaving us with a sky so dull and bare

  The crowd thins out: what conjures them to stay?

  The road is cold with dew, and by and by

  We see the constellations overhead.

  But is that all? some little children cry.

  All we have left, their pedagogues reply.

  THE TOURIST AND THE TOWN

  (San Miniato al Monte)

  Those clarities detached us, gave us form,

  Made us like architecture. Now no more

  Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,

  We knew where we began and ended. There

  We were the campanile and the dome,

  Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,

  Climate whose light reformed our random line,

  Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.

  Could it be always so—a week of sunlight,

  Walks with a guidebook, picking out our way

  Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all

  The promised vista, once!—The light has changed

  Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:

  We are only tourists under that blue sky,

  Reading the posters on the station wall—

  Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

  There is a mystery that floats between

  The tourist and the town. Imagination

  Estranges it from her. She need not suffer

  Or die here. It is none of her affair,

  Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.

  Her bargains with disaster have been sealed

  In another country. Here she goes untouched,

  And this is alienation. Only sometimes

  In certain towns she opens certain letters

  Forwarded on from bitter origins,

  That send her walking, sick and haunted, through

  Mysterious and ordinary streets

  That are no more than streets to walk and walk—

  And then the tourist and the town are one.

  To work and suffer is to be at home.

  All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,

  The skaters in the sunset on the lake

  At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,

  The singular clear stars at Castellane.

  To work and suffer is to come to know

  The angles of a room, light in a square,

  As convalescents know the face of one

  Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street,

  The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells

  Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,

  The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road

  To the post-office. Once upon a time

  All these for you were fiction. Now, made free

  You live among them. Your breath is on this air,

  And you are theirs and of their mystery.

  BEARS

  Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,

  Where are you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,

  Your eyes’ veiled imperious light?

  Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,

  White opalescent bears whose fur stood out

  Electric in the deepening dusk,

  And great black bears who seemed more blue than black,

  More violet than blue against the dark—

  Where are you now? upon what track

  Mutter your muffled paws, that used to tread

  So softly, surely, up the creakless stair

  While I lay listening in bed?

  When did I lose you? whose have you become?

  Why do I wait and wait and never hear

  Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?

  My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?

  THE INSUSCEPTIBLES

  Then the long sunlight lying on the sea

  Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we

  Took up our decks of cards, our parasols,

  The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls

  And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two

  Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do,

  And took a different road. For us the night

  Was final, and by artificial light

  We came indoors to sleep. No envy there

  Of those who might be watching anywhere

  The lustres of the summer dark, to trace

  Some vagrant splinter blazing out of space.

  No thought of them, save in a lower room

  To leave a light for them when they should come.

  LUCIFER IN THE TRAIN

  Riding the black express from heaven to hell

  He bit his fingers, watched the countryside,

  Vernal and crystalline, forever slide

  Beyond his gaze: the long cascades that fell

  Ribboned in sunshine from their sparkling height,

  The fishers fastened to their pools of green

  By silver lines; the birds in sudden flight—

  All things the diabolic eye had seen

  Since heaven’s cockcrow. Imperceptibly

  That landscape altered: now in paler air

  Tree, hill and rock stood out resigned, severe,

  Beside the strangled field, the stream run dry.

  Lucifer, we are yours who stiff and mute

  Ride out of worlds we shall not see again,

  And watch from windows of a smoking train

  The ashen prairies of the absolute.

  Once out of heaven, to an angel’s eye

  Where is the bush or cloud without a flaw?

  What bird but feeds upon mortality,

  Flies to its young with carrion in its claw?

  O foundered angel, first and loneliest

  To turn this bitter sand beneath your hoe,

  Teach us, the newly-landed, what you know;

  After our weary transit, find us rest.

  RECORDERS IN ITALY

  It was amusing on that antique grass,

  Seated halfway between the green and blue,

  To waken music gentle and extinct

  Under the old walls where the daisies grew

  Sprinkled in cinquecento style
, as though

  Archangels might have stepped there yesterday.

  But it was we, mortal and young, who strolled

  And fluted quavering music, for a day

  Casual heirs of all we looked upon.

  Such pipers of the emerald afternoon

  Could only be the heirs of perfect time

  When every leaf distinctly brushed with gold

  Listened to Primavera speaking flowers.

  Those scherzos stumble now; our journeys run

  To harsher hillsides, rockier declensions.

  Obligatory climates call us home.

  And so shall clarity of cypresses,

  Unfingered by necessity, become

  Merely the ghost of half-remembered trees,

  A trick of sunlight flattering the mind?—

  There were four recorders sweet upon the wind.

  AT HERTFORD HOUSE

  Perfection now is tended and observed,

  Not used; we hire the spawn of Caliban

  For daily service. In our careful world

  Inlay of purple-wood and tulip, curved

  To mime the sheen of plumes and peacocks’ eyes,

  Exists for inspection only. And the jars

  Of apple-green and white, where wooing’s done

  In panels after Boucher—such we prize

  Too well to fill with roses. Chocolate, too,

  Will not again be frothed in cups like these;

  We move meticulously, ill at ease

  Amid perfections. Why should a porcelain plaque

  Where Venus pulls her pouting Adon on

  Through beds of blushing flowers, seem unfit

  For casual thumbprint? Ease is what we lack.

  There’s a division nothing can make sweet

  Between the clods of usage and the toys

  We strum our senses with. But Antoinette

  Ran her long tortoise-shell and silver comb