Collected Poems

by Anthony Burgess

  (Oscar Wilde said, “All art is perfectly useless.”)

  You can decorate a wall with a Da Vinci.

  You can use part of a Haydn string quartet for national anthem.

  That is making use of art, but that is not the essential purpose of art.

  Pure science is seeking to discover and manifest Truth.

  Art is seeking to discover and manifest Beauty.

  These are called Values. Their discovery and

  manifestation are considered to be valuable or

  worth while.

  No that Truth or Beauty exist.

  There are only true things and beautiful things.

  So no one should think that Science is on the trail of Ultimate Truth.

  Or Art on the trail of Ultimate Beauty.

  Both these quests are the job or Religion.

  * *

  What is Beauty?

  One says that the colour of a flower or the note of a

  bird is beautiful. This, however, cannot be

  the sense in which we are to take the beauty

  that art creates.

  Because this beauty is natural, not created by the artist.

  It is beautiful in that it is pleasing to the senses.

  A church father called St. Thomas Aquinas said

  that those things are beautiful the appre-hension

  of which is pleasing.

  So the beauty that art creates is also pleasing, but not only to the senses.

  This beauty is a beauty of form, not of texture.

  The business of the artist is to create new forms.

  The artist’s job is not purely a decorative one.

  Wallpaper has a pattern,

  But the pictorial art has form.

  The pictorial art takes over the raw material, the forms found in nature,

  And disposes them into a new and original form which is not found in nature.

  Which is pleasing and significant.

  (The artist does not copy nature. That is the photographer’s job.)

  In what way significant?

  * *

  Our minds are full of images, sounds, thoughts, and

  emotions which we never use.

  Which are chaotic, undigested, unarticulated.

  Art digests and articulates these.

  Makes them have meaning by giving them a form,

  Which has such balance and unity that the effect strikes us as beautiful.

  * *

  A poem takes over the emotions which we feel

  Vaguely but cannot express complete.

  It expresses those emotions in words completely,

  using everything that speech can give to attain

  that completeness.

  It binds words and balances them to a unity to

  Attain that completeness.

  Then we feel that the emotion has been mastered

  by being expressed,

  Objectified, separated from ourselves.

  * *

  And music makes something organised, new and

  original out of the chaotic rhythms and sound

  intervals of nature.

  * *

  So that the more we know about art and the more

  we learn to appreciate it, the more we feel

  that we have mastered nature and enriched our

  own experience through making something o

  nature’s into something of ours.

  * *

  Now you may read Shakespeare,

  Listen to Mozart,

  Look at Michael Angelo.

  DEAD LEAVES

  Lonely as the last batch of swallows that swing

  Desolate on the aerial, and taut

  With unthought memories, we bring

  Four figures only to the melody,

  And leave the dead note dead.

  We are not those whose life is blown away

  By the omission, not those for whom

  Normality is formal now, each day

  An exercise in self-control, but yet

  We feel regret for the abrupt

  Manner of going, cannot quite forget

  The lull when conversation for a moment stopped:

  We turned, with a remark half-said,

  To find a room grown suddenly dark,

  And you – fled.

  SONNET ON EXAMINATIONS

  Hard thing it is to sweat and strive and aim

  And feel the very task within consume

  All that is best in us, as the blown bloom

  Waits for full summer, but the blasts proclaim

  (Being like weak old men, feeble and lame,

  Yet envious and powerful) clouds to gloom

  And darken long, till like the crash of doom

  They burst, and these laugh loud and love their game.

  So it has been with us (seems for an age)

  And darken on us thoughts of high-born rage,

  Avenging anger lest we sink i’ the scale,

  It’s Judgment’s show and shadow: sot and sage,

  We build a narrow home fast in this cage

  And our on one song then ‘Is it pass or fail?’

  SIXTH-FORM TRIOLETS

  I.

  All agonies that torture us

  Find fast their home in H. S. C.

  The aching arm, the fevered fuss –

  All agonies that torture us.

  Words that won’t come and (what is wuss)

  Though learn’d with labour, thought that flee,

  All agonies that torture us

  Find fast their home in H. S. C.

  II.

  The strain of waiting for results

  Is really more than man can stand,

  It ages children to adults,

  The strain of waiting for results.

  ‘Mention, or space that just insults?’

  Turns in the mind on every hand; –

  The strain of waiting for results

  Is really more than man can stand.

  III.

  Regrets, those spectres faint and pale

  Were surely born in this exam.

  They see the truth too late and wail –

  Regrets, those spectres faint and pale.

  They prompt us, when we fear a ‘fail’

  To cry ‘what a – – I am!’

  Regrets, those spectres faint and pale

  Were surely born in this exam.

  JACK’S STORY

  Browning made haunches, Rupert Brooke made branches stir,

  Both seeking rhymes for names of towns that rhyme,

  Though Grantchester could not be less like Manchester,

  Which city, in a rather distant time

  My muse invokes. Stir, Muse! Come, stir! Why can she stir?

  She’s bogged down, as a bird is bogged in lime,

  At the sheer prospect of our setting forth

  To engage the smoke and the vowels of the North.

  ‘PRUDENCE! PRUDENCE!’ THE PIGEONS CALL’

  ‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call.

  Serpents lurk in the gilded meadow.

  An eye is embossed on the island wall.

  The running tap casts a static shadow.

  ‘Caution caution’ the rooks proclaim,

  ‘The dear departed, the weeping widow

  Will meet in you in the core of flame.

  The running tap casts a static shadow.’

  ‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.

  ‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.

  Drain the sacrament of choice.

  The running tap casts a static shadow.’

  FISH AND HEROES

  A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.

  The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;

  The absolute was anybody’s pitch

  For, when a note was struck, we knew its name;

  That dark aborted any urge to tame

  Waters that day might prove to be a ditch

 
; But then were endless growling ocean, rich

  In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.

  Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock

  Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;

  A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,

  But it was morning: birds could not be liars.

  A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;

  Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

  ‘NYMPHS AND SATYRS, COME AWAY’

  Nymphs and satyrs, come away.

  Faunus, laughing from the hill,

  Rips the blanket of the day

  From the paunch of dirty Will.

  Each projector downs its snout,

  Truffling the blackened scene,

  Till the Wille’s lights gush out

  Vorstellungen on the screen.

  Doxies blanch to silverwhite;

  All their trappings of the sport,

  Lax and scattered, in this light

  Merge and lock to smooth and taut.

  See! The rockets shoot afar!

  Ah! The screen was tautest then.

  Tragic the parabola

  When the sticks reel down again.

  ‘AND IN THAT LAST DELIRIUM OF LUST’

  And in that last delirium of lust

  Your image glows. Love is a blinding rain,

  Love crow all the cocks, love lays the dust

  Of this cracked crying throat whose thirst is pain.

  ‘EPITHALAMION’

  The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,

  The alien planet’s heaven where seven moons

  Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and

  bloodstone.

  Or else binary suns

  Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,

  Bound, twisted and conjoined

  To an invertebrate love where selves are melted

  To the primal juice of a creator’s joy,

  Before matter was made,

  Two spheres in a single orbit

  Swollen with cream or honey

  The convalescent evening launches its rockets,

  Soaring above the rich man’s gala day,

  In the thousand parks of the kingdom

  Which radiate from this bed

  Anoint the ship with wine! On ample waters,

  Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled

  Only away from cities, let it dance and ride

  And you whose fear of maps

  Set buzzing the long processes of power,

  Resign your limbs at length to elements

  Friendly or neutral at least,

  Mirrors of the enemy

  And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet

  And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors

  Hung with undecipherable blazons

  For two at least can deny

  That the past has any odour. They can witness

  Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize

  That all the world’s guilt can sit like air

  On the bodies of these living.

  TO TIRZAH

  You being the gate

  Where the army went through

  Would you renew the triumph and have them decorate

  The arch and stone again?

  Surely those flowers are withered, the army

  Now on a distant plain.

  But some morning when you are washing up,

  Or some afternoon, taking a cup

  Of tea, possibly you will see

  The heavens opening and a lot

  Of saints singing, with bells swinging.

  But then again, possibly not.

  ‘YOUR PRESENCE SHINES ABOUT THE FUMES OF FAT’

  Your presence shines about the fumes of fat,

  Glows from the oven-door.

  Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat,

  Your image treads the floor

  Ennobling the potato-peel, the lumps

  Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps.

  ‘Love!’ cry the eggs a-whisk, and ‘Love!’ the beef

  Calls from the roasting-tin.

  The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf

  That hides the heart within

  Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie

  Are richly crammed with love, and so am I.

  ‘THE DRAGON’S MOUTH WILL CONSUMMATE OUR SEARCH’

  The Dragon’s mouth will consummate our search

  For pillars of the borough and the Church,

  Whose bar-side stance bespeaks their propping function.

  There stands the Vicar who, with extreme unction,

  To flesh and blood will transubstantiate

  The cups that Sunday abstinents donate.

  This generation, wiser than the luminous,

  Thus gains vicarious contact with the numinous.

  Here ruined farmers, in new hacking-coats,

  Pour Scotch and ram fat bacon down their throats;

  And children, obdurately red and flaxen,

  Proclaim the crass inbreeding of the Saxon.

  Observe the maidens who, with brawny arms,

  Gush the seductive fragrance of the farms.

  They feel the body should be mainly meat,

  That ankles have no function and that feet,

  Disdaining shape and glorying in size,

  Should shout a curious kinship to the thighs.

  But lest with so much weight the streets should rock,

  The desiccated matrons of good stock

  (Though not for soup) tune their patrician tweeds,

  Then hog the pavements with their barking spouses

  Before they seek their deathwatch-rotting houses,

  Where flies die in the port and rabbit, stewed,

  Provides for dog and man a basic food.

  The manor gates are down, the past is dead.

  American police patrol instead,

  Save there, where feudalism’s greasy scraps

  Still touch the villagers who touch their caps

  To soap king’s lady or to upstart lord

  Who licked the party’s boots or swelled its hoard,

  Trimming like mad or clinging like a louse

  To be translated to the Upper House,

  Whence now he comes to dogmatise and hector,

  Sway the church sycophants and hound the rector.

  ‘WHERE SWEAT STARTS, NOTHING STARTS. TRUE, LIFE RUNS’

  Where sweat starts, nothing starts. True, life runs

  On in a way, in rings of dust like Saturn’s,

  And creating is creating arid patterns

  Whose signature prove, always, the arid sun’s.

  ‘LAND WHERE THE BIRDS HAVE NO SONG, THE FLOWERS’

  Land where the birds have no song, the flowers

  No scent, and time no movement; here

  The rhythms of northern earth are frozen, the hours

  Set like ice-cubes; the running of the year

  I stopped and comma’d only by the moon’s feasts,

  And the sun is Allah, never an avatar;

  In sight of that constant eye life crumbles, wastes

  To the contented champing patterns of the beasts

  Which live in day’s denomination. Far

  The life of years and works that yet a day’s

  Flight can restore…

  ‘CRACKS OPEN THE LEADEN CORNCRAKE SKY WITH CRASS, ANGELIC’

  …Cracks open the leaden corncrake sky with crass, angelic

  Wails as round

  as cornfruit, sharp as crowfoot, clawfoot,

  Rash, brash, loutish gouts of lime or vinegar strokes

  Till the crinkled fish start from their lace of bone

  But loss, too, is at least a thing which, in the dark,

  We can hold, feeling a sharpness, knowing that a knife

  Is a double-edged weapon, for carving as well as killin
g.

  The knife in the abattoir is also the knife on the table,

  The corpse becomes meat, the dead stone heart the raw

  Stuff of the sculptor’s art.

  In moments of crisis hunger comes, welling

  Up through the groaning tubes, and feeding-time

  Is the time of waking of perhaps the time before

  Night settles on the land, endless night.

  Light, whether of dawn or evening, turns

  The river to glow-gold syrup, the trees

  To a fairyland of fruit.

  ‘THE AFTERNOON HOUR HAS STRUCK FOR YOU TO’

  The afternoon hour has struck for you to

  Enter, become your body, pay

  The forced grin of affection due to

  What is now you. That is to say:

  You are this pate and mouth of missing teeth.

  You are these sagging bulbs and bags beneath,

  And the leering social face in that far mirror

  Recognized with sock (but no, no error) –

  That is you, too.

  Youth was a knife and lakes and air,

  Metal and glass; you could bestow

  Your body as a gift of swords to spare.

  It was different then. It was not you –

  Be patient. I will learn to be concise

  Again, the hot room shrinks to austere ice.

  The silver will evoke a salmon’s leap,

  And bone-rungs strong enough for a single step

  Will make a one-way stair.

  ‘RICE-PAPER LAND, O LOTUS-FOOTED’

  Rice-paper land, O lotus-footed,

  Whose tiny trees are tiny-rooted,

  And cherry-blossom bells tingle over the lakes

  And old Fujiyama shakes and quakes.

  ‘YOU TAKE MY HEART WITH SUCH UNFORMED GRACE’

  You take my heart with such unformed grace,

  One, at times, with the heartbreak earth

  And its children, fur or bone – fawn, mouse,

  Palpitating duckling, stumbling calf.

  In touching you, silk, silver, I touch half

  Of the whole dreadful mystery of birth.

  I dread you faring forward into the world,

  Carrying your beauty like an innocent gift