Were in the style and order, as when you say

  ‘Freedom alone confines’; but do they show a love,

  Fragmented everywhere by conscience and deceit,

  Ending on this coast of torn-out lighthouses?

  Or that neglected and unmerited Habit,

  The structure that so long informed our growth?

  Questions for a nursery wall! But are they true to these?

  I have passed all this day in what they would call patience.

  Not writing, alone in my window, with my flute,

  Having read in a letter that last immortal February

  That ‘Music is only love, looking for words’.

  1946/1945

  MAREOTIS

  For Diana Gould

  Now everywhere Spring opens

  Like an eyelid still unfocused,

  Unsharpened in expression yet or depth,

  But smiling and entire, stirring from sleep.

  Birds begin, swindlers of the morning.

  Flowers and the wild ways begin:

  And the body’s navigation in its love

  Through wings, messages, telegrams

  Loose and unbodied roam the world.

  Only we are held here on the

  Rationed love—a landscape like an eye,

  Where the wind gnashes by Mareotis,

  Stiffens the reeds and glistening salt,

  And in the ancient roads the wind,

  Not subtle, not confiding, touches once again

  The melancholy elbow cheek and paper.

  1946/1945

  CONON THE CRITIC ON THE SIX LANDSCAPE PAINTERS OF GREECE

  ON PETER OF THEBES

  ‘This landscape is not original in its own mode. First smells were born—of resin and pine. Then someone got drunk on arbutus berries. Finally as an explanatory text someone added this red staunch clay and roots. You cannot smell one without tasting the other—as with fish and red sauce.’

  ON MANOLI OF CRETE

  ‘After a lifetime of writing acrostics he took up a brush and everything became twice as attentive. Trees had been trees before. Distinctions had been in ideas. Now the old man went mad, for everything undressed and ran laughing into his arms.’

  ON JULIAN OF ARCADIA

  ‘Arcadia is original in a particular sense. There is no feeling of “Therefore” in it. Origin, reason, meaning it has none in the sense of recognizable past. In this, both Arcadia and all good poems are original.’

  ON SPIRIDON OF EPIRUS

  ‘You look at this landscape for five years. You see little but something attentive watching you. Another five and you remark a shape that is barely a shape; a shadow like the moon’s penumbra. Look a lifetime and you will see that the mountains lie like the covers of a bed; and you discern the form lying under them.’

  ON HERO OF CORINTH

  ‘Style is the cut of the mind. Hero was not much interested in his landscape, but by a perpetual self-confession in art removed both himself and his subject out of the reach of the people. Thus one day there remained only a picture-frame, an empty studio, and an idea of Hero the painter.’

  ON ALEXANDER OF ATHENS

  ‘Alexander was in love with Athens. He was a glutton and exhausted both himself and his subject in his art. Thus when he had smelt a flower it was quite used up, and when he painted a mountain it felt that living on could only be a useless competition against Alexander’s painting of it. Thus with him Athens ceased to exist, and we have been walking about inside his canvases ever since looking for a way back from art into life.’

  1946/1945

  WATER MUSIC

  Wrap your sulky beauty up,

  From sea-fever, from winterfall

  Out of the swing of the

  Swing of the sea.

  Keep safe from noonfall,

  Starlight and smokefall where

  Waves roll, waves toll but feel

  None of our roving fever.

  From dayfever and nightsadness

  Keep, bless, hold: from cold

  Wrap your sulky beauty into sleep

  Out of the swing of the

  Swing of sea.

  1946/1945

  DELOS

  For Diana Gould

  On charts they fall like lace,

  Islands consuming in a sea

  Born dense with its own blue:

  And like repairing mirrors holding up

  Small towns and trees and rivers

  To the still air, the lovely air:

  From the clear side of springing Time,

  In clement places where the windmills ride,

  Turning over grey springs in Mykonos,

  In shadows with a gesture of content.

  The statues of the dead here

  Embark on sunlight, sealed

  Each in her model with the sightless eyes:

  The modest stones of Greeks,

  Who gravely interrupted death by pleasure.

  And in harbours softly fallen

  The liver-coloured sails—

  Sharp-featured brigantines with eyes—

  Ride in reception so like women:

  The pathetic faculty of girls

  To register and utter a desire

  In the arms of men upon the new-mown waters,

  Follow the wind, with their long shining keels

  Aimed across Delos at a star.

  1946/1945

  THE PILOT

  To Dudley Honor

  Sure a lovely day and all weather

  Leading westward to Ireland and our childhood.

  On the quarters of heaven, held by stars,

  The Hunter and Arcturus getting ready—

  The elect of heaven all burning on the wheel.

  This lovely morning must the pilot leaning

  In the eye of heaven feel the island

  Turning beneath him, burning soft and blue—

  And all this mortal globe like a great lamp

  With spines of rivers, families of cities

  Seeming to the solitary boy so

  Local and queer yet so much part of him.

  The enemies of silence have come nearer.

  Turn, turn to the morning on wild elbows:

  Look down through the five senses like stars

  To where our lives lie small and equal like two grains

  Before Chance—the hawk’s eye or the pilot’s

  Round and shining on the open sky,

  Reflecting back the innocent world in it.

  1946/1945

  THE PARTHENON

  For T. S. Eliot

  Στερɩὲς και vησιὰ

  Put it more simply: say the city

  Swam up here swan-like to the shallows,

  Or whiteness from an overflowing jar

  Settled into this grassy violet space,

  Theorem for three hills,

  Went soft with brickdust, clay and whitewash,

  On a plastered porch one morning wrote

  Human names, think of it, men became the roads.

  The academy was given over

  To the investigation of shade an idle boy

  Invented, tearing out the heart

  Of a new loaf, put up these slender columns.

  Later the Parthenon’s small catafalque

  Simple and congruent as a wish grew up,

  Snow-blind, the marbles built upon a pause

  Made smoke seem less surprising, being white.

  Now syntax settled round the orderless,

  Joining action and reflection in the arch,

  Then adding desire and will: four walls:

  Four walls, a house. ‘How simple’ people said.

  Man entered it and woman was the roof.

  A vexing history, Geros, that becomes

  More and more simple as it ends, not less;

  And nothing has redeemed it: art

  Moved back from pleasure-giver to a humour

  As with us … I see you smile …

/>   Footloose on the inclining earth

  The long ships moved through cities

  Made of loaf-sugar, tamed by gardens,

  Lying hanging by the hair within the waters

  And quickened by self-knowledge

  Men of linen sat on marble chairs

  In self-indulgence murmuring ‘I am, I am’.

  Chapters of clay and whitewash. Others here

  Find only a jar of red clay, a Pan

  The superstitious whipped and overturned.

  Yet nothing of ourselves can equal it

  Though grown from causes we still share,

  The natural lovely order, as where water

  Touches earth, a tree grows up,

  A needle touching wax, a human voice.

  But for us the brush, the cone, the candle,

  The spinning-wheel and clay are only

  Amendments to an original joy.

  Lost even the flawless finishing strokes,

  White bones among the almonds prophesying

  A death itself that seemed a coming-of-age.

  Lastly the capes and islands hold us,

  Tame as a handclasp,

  Causes locked within effects, the land—

  This vexed clitoris of the continental body,

  Pumice and clay and whitewash

  Only the darkness ever compromises

  Or an eagle softly mowing on the blue …

  And yet, Geros, who knows? Within the space

  Of our own seed might some day rise,

  Shriek truth, punish the blue with statues.

  1948/1945/6

  IN EUROPE

  Recitative for a Radio Play

  To Elie

  Three Voices to the accompaniment of a drum and bells, and the faint grunt and thud of a dancing bear.

  MAN

  The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.

  We are getting the refugee habit,

  WOMEN

  Moving from island to island,

  Where the boundaries are clouds,

  Where the frontiers of the land are water.

  OLD MAN

  We are getting the refugee habit,

  WOMAN

  We are only anonymous feet moving,

  Without friends any more, without books

  Or companionship any more. We are getting—

  MAN

  The refugee habit. There’s no end

  To the forest and no end to the moors:

  Between the just and the unjust

  There is little distinction.

  OLD MAN

  Bodies like houses, without windows and doors:

  WOMAN

  The children have become so brown,

  Their skins have become dark with sunlight,

  MAN

  They have learned to eat standing.

  OLD MAN

  When we come upon men crucified,

  Or women hanging downward from the trees,

  They no longer understand.

  WOMAN

  How merciful is memory with its fantasies.

  They are getting the refugee habit …

  OLD MAN

  How weary are the roads of the blood.

  Walking forwards towards death in my mind

  I am walking backwards again into my youth;

  A mother, a father, and a house.

  One street, a certain town, a particular place:

  And the feeling of belonging somewhere,

  Of being appropriate to certain fields and trees.

  WOMAN

  Now our address is the world. Walls

  Constrain us. O do you remember

  The peninsula where we so nearly died,

  And the way the trees looked owned,

  Human and domestic like a group of horses?

  They said it was Greece.

  MAN

  Through Prussia into Russia,

  Through Holland to Poland,

  Through Rumania into Albania.

  WOMAN

  Following the rotation of the seasons.

  OLD MAN

  We are getting the refugee habit:

  The past and the future are not enough,

  Are two walls only between which to die:

  Who can live in a house with two walls?

  MAN

  The present is an eternal journey;

  In one country winter, in another spring.

  OLD MAN

  I am sick of the general deaths:

  We have seen them impersonally dying:

  Everything I had hoped for, fireside and hearth,

  And death by compromise some summer evening.

  MAN

  You are getting the refugee habit:

  You are carrying the past in you

  Like a precious vessel, remembering

  Its essence, ownership and ordinary loving.

  WOMAN

  We are too young to remember.

  OLD MAN

  Nothing disturbed such life as I remember

  But telephone or telegram,

  Such death-bringers to the man among the roses

  In the garden of his house, smoking a pipe.

  WOMAN

  We are the dispossessed, sharing

  With gulls and flowers our lives of accident:

  No time for love, no room for love:

  If only the children—

  MAN

  Were less wild and unkept, belonged

  To the human family, not speechless,

  OLD MAN

  And shy as the squirrels in the trees:

  WOMAN

  If only the children

  OLD MAN

  Recognized their father, smiled once more.

  OLD MAN + WOMAN

  They have got the refugee habit,

  Walking about in the rain hunting for food,

  Looking at their faces in the bottom of wells:

  OLD MAN

  They are living the popular life.

  All Europe is moving out of winter

  Into spring with all boundaries being

  Broken down, dissolving, vanishing.

  Migrations are beginning, a new habit

  From where the icebergs rise in the sky

  To valleys where corn is spread like butter …

  WOMAN

  So many men and women: each one a soul.

  MAN

  So many souls crossing the world,

  OLD MAN

  So many bridges to the end of the world.

  Frontiers mean nothing any more …

  WOMAN

  Peoples and possessions,

  Lands, rights,

  Titles, holdings,

  Trusts, Bonds …

  OLD MAN

  Mean nothing any more, nothing.

  A whistle, a box, a shawl, a cup,

  A broken sword wrapped in newspaper.

  WOMAN

  All we have left us, out of context,

  OLD MAN

  A jar, a mousetrap, a broken umbrella,

  A coin, a pipe, a pressed flower

  WOMAN

  To make an alphabet for our children.

  OLD MAN

  A chain, a whip, a lock,

  A drum and a dancing bear …

  WOMAN

  We have got the refugee habit.

  Beyond tears at last, into some sort of safety

  From fear of wanting, fear of hoping,

  Fear of everything but dying.

  We can die now.

  OLD MAN

  Frontiers mean nothing any more. Dear Greece!

  MAN

  Yes. We can die now.

  1946/1946

  PRESSMARKED URGENT

  ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ Motto for Press Corps

  DESPATCH ADGENERAL PUBLICS EXTHE WEST

  PERPETUAL MOTION QUITE UNFINDING REST

  ADVANCES ETRETREATS UPON ILLUSION

  PREPARES NEW METAPHYSICS PERCONFUSION

  PARA PERDISPOSI
TION ADNEW EVIL

  ETREFUSAL ADCONCEDE OUR ACTS ADDEVIL

  NEITHER PROFIT SHOWS NOR LOSS

  SEDSOME MORE PROPHETS NAILED ADCROSS

  ATTACK IN FORCE SURMEANS NONENDS

  BY MULTIPLYING CONFUSION TENDS

  ADCLOUD THE ISSUES WHICH ARE PLAIN

  COLON DISTINGUISH PROFIT EXGAIN

  ETBY SMALL CONCEPTS LONG NEGLECTED

  FIND VIRTUE SUBACTION CLEAR REFLECTED

  ETWEIGHING THE QUANTUM OF THE SIN

  BEGIN TO BE REPEAT BEGIN.

  1946/1946

  TWO POEMS IN BASIC ENGLISH

  I

  SHIPS. ISLANDS. TREES

  These ships, these islands, these simple trees

  Are our rewards in substance, being poor.

  This earth a dictionary is

  To the root and growth of seeing,

  And to the servant heart a door.

  Some on the green surface of the land

  With all their canvas up in leaf and flower,

  And some empty of influence

  But from the water-winds,

  Free as love’s green attractions are.

  Smoke bitter and blue from farms.

  And points of feeble light in houses