The teapot with the nook.

  The Rib is slowly waking

  Within the side of Man

  And le guignol is making

  Its faces while it can.

  Compose us in the finder

  Our organs upside down,

  The parson in his widow’s weeds,

  The doctor in his gown.

  What Yang and Yin divided

  In one disastrous blunder

  Must one day be united and

  Let no man put asunder.

  1948/1948

  POLITICS

  To George Seferis

  Chemists might compare their properties:

  The Englishman with his Apologising Bag,

  The Ainu with interesting stone-age cuffs,

  Or whoever invented stars as a witness:

  Nations which through excess of sensibility

  Repose in opium under a great leaf:

  The French with their elastic manual code:

  And so comparing, find the three common desires,

  Of hunger, smiling, and of being loved.

  Outside, I mean, the penumbra of the real

  Mystery, the whole world as a Why.

  Living purely in the naked How, so join

  As the writer unites dissimilars

  Or the doctor with his womb-bag joins

  The cumbersome ends of broken bones in

  A simple perishable function,

  To exhale like a smoke ring the O: Joy.

  1948/1948

  THE DAILY MIRROR

  Writing this stuff should not have been like

  Suicide over some ordinary misapprehension:

  A man going into his own house, say,

  Turning out all the lights before undressing,

  At the bedside of some lovely ignoramus

  Whispering: ‘Tomorrow I swear is the last time.’

  Or: ‘Believe, and I swear you will never die.’

  This nib dragged out like the late train

  Racing on iron bars for the north.

  Target: another world, not necessarily better,

  Of course, but different, completely different.

  The hour-glass shifting its trash of seconds.

  If it does not end this way perhaps some other.

  Gossip lying in a furnished room, blinds drawn.

  A poem with its throat cut from ear to ear.

  1948/1948

  SONG

  Proffer the loaves of pain

  Forward and back again,

  By time’s inflexible quantum

  They shall not meet this autumn.

  Stone islets, stars in stations,

  Crab up their false equations,

  Whether they run or saunter

  They shall not meet this winter.

  Boredom of breathless swan

  Whiteness they gazed upon,

  At skylight a roamer.

  They shall not meet in summer.

  Fast on these capes of green

  Silence falls in between

  Finger and wedding-ring.

  They shall not meet in spring.

  1948/1948

  PENELOPE

  Look, on that hill we met

  On this shoreline parted.

  The experts sailed off northwards

  With their spears, with the connivance

  Of oracles to back them. I remained.

  Tears weigh little upon the hands,

  Tears weigh less in the eye than seeds

  Shaken from the feverish totals

  Blossoming on time’s pronouncing tree.

  The seasons file their summaries

  Overheard by the echoes in the wells,

  Overlooked by the mirrors shod in horn,

  Copied by spies, interpreters or witnesses.

  The augurs in the delta have not once

  Foreseen this dust upon an ageing eyeball,

  Vitreous as sea-spun glass, this black

  Sperm of winter sea we walk beside,

  The marble onanism of these nymphs.

  1948/1948

  SWANS

  Fraudulent perhaps in that they gave

  No sense of muscle but a swollen languor

  Though moved by webs: yet idly, idly

  As soap-bubbles drift from a clay-pipe

  They mowed the lake in tapestry,

  Passing in regal exhaustion by us,

  King, queen and cygnets, one by one.

  Did one dare to remember other swans

  In anecdotes of Gauguin or of Rabelais?

  Some became bolsters for the Greeks,

  Some rubber Lohengrins provided comedy.

  The flapping of the wings excited Leda.

  The procession is over and what is now

  Alarming is more the mirror split

  From end to end by the harsh clap

  Of the wooden beaks, than the empty space

  Which follows them about,

  Stained by their whiteness when they pass.

  We sit like drunkards and inhale the swans.

  1948/1948

  BERE REGIS

  The colonial, the expatriate walking here

  Awkwardly enclosing the commonwealth of his love

  Stoops to this lovely expurgated prose-land

  Where winter with its holly locks the schools

  And spring with nature improvises

  With the thrush on ploughland, with the scarecrow.

  Moss walls, woollen forests, Shakespear, desuetude:

  Roots of his language as familiar as salt

  Inhaling cattle lick in this mnemonic valley

  Where the gnats assort, the thrush familiarises,

  And over his cottage a colloquial moon.

  1948/1948

  ON SEEMING TO PRESUME

  On seeming to presume

  Where earth and water plan

  No place for him, no home

  Outside the confining womb,

  Mistake him if you can.

  The rubber forceps do their job

  And here at least stands man.

  Refined by no technique

  Beyond the great ‘I will’,

  They pour the poison in,

  Confuse the middle ear

  Of his tormented dust,

  Before the brute can speak

  ‘I will’ becomes ‘I must’.

  Excluded from the true

  Participating love

  His conscience takes its due

  From this excluding sense

  His condemnation brought.

  From past to future tense

  He mutters on ‘I ought’.

  He mutters on ‘I ought’.

  Yet daring to presume

  He follows to the stews

  His sense of loathsomeness,

  Frustration, daily news.

  A scholarship in hate

  Endows him limb by limb.

  ‘My mother pushed me from behind,

  And so I learned to swim.’

  The bunsen’s head of hair,

  All fancy free and passion,

  Till iron circumstance

  Confirms him in his lies,

  To walk the Hamlet fashion.

  He wrings his hands and cries

  ‘I want to live’, but dies.

  He wants to live but dies.

  Return, return and find

  Beneath what bed or table

  The lovers first in mind

  Composed this poor unstable

  Derivative of clay,

  By passion or by play,

  That bears the human label.

  What king or saint could guide

  This caliban of gloom

  So swaddled in despair

  To breathe the factory’s air,

  Or locked in furnished room

  Weep out his threescore there

  For daring to presume,

  For daring to presume?

  1948/1948

  SELF TO NOT-SELF

&nbsp
; Darkness, divulge my share in light

  As man in name though not in nature.

  Lay down truth’s black hermetic wings

  For less substantial things

  To call my weight my own

  By love’s nomenclature:

  Matriculate by harmlessness

  From this tuistic zone,

  Possessing what I almost own.

  And where each heap of music falls

  Burns like a star below the sea

  To light the ocean’s cracked saloons

  And mirror its plurality

  Through nature’s tideless nights and noons

  Teach me the mastery of the curse,

  The bending circumstance to free,

  And mix my better with my worse.

  1960/1948

  PATMOS

  Early one morning unremarked

  She walked abroad to see

  Black bitumen and roses

  Upon the island shelf

  To hear those inexperienced

  Thrushes repeat their clauses

  From some corruptible tree

  All copied in herself.

  When from the Grecian meadows

  Responsive rose the larks,

  Stiffly as if on strings,

  Ebbing, drew thin as tops

  While each in rising squeezed

  His spire of singing drops

  On that renewed landscape

  Like semen from the grape.

  1948/1948

  THE LOST CITIES

  For Paddy and Xan

  One she floats as Venice might,

  Bloated among her ambiguities:

  What hebetude or carelessness shored up

  Goths were not smart enough to capture.

  The city, yes: the water: not the style.

  Her dispossession now may seem to us

  Idle and ridiculous, quivering

  In the swollen woodwork of these

  Floating carcases of the doges,

  Dissolving into spires and cages of water:

  Venice blown up, and turning green.

  Another wears out humbly like a craft:

  Red wells where the potter’s thumb

  Sealed his jars of guaranteed oil.

  That fluent thumb which presses

  On history’s vibrating string,

  Pressing here, there, in a wounded place.

  Some have left names only: Carthage:

  Where the traveller may squeeze out

  A few drops of ink or salt,

  On deserted promontories may think:

  ‘No wonder. A river once turned over

  In its sleep and all the cities fled.’

  Now in Greece which is not yet Greece

  The adversary was also strong.

  Yet here the serfs have built their discontents

  As spiders do their junctions, here,

  This orchard, painted tables set outside

  A whitewashed house,

  And on a rusty nail the violin

  Is hanging by one wrist, still ownerless:

  Disowned by the devastator and as yet

  Uncherished by its tenants in the old

  Human smells of excrement and cooking:

  Waiting till the spades press through to us,

  To be discovered, standing in our lives,

  Rhodes, death-mask of a Greek town.

  1948/1948

  FUNCHAL

  At Funchal the blackish yeast

  Of the winter sea I hated rubbed

  And gobbled on a thousand capes,

  That crumble with the traveller’s confidence

  In being alone, some who still tread

  Decks as if they were green lawns;

  But the water coiled backwards

  Like a spring to press its tides

  Idle and uniform as grapes in presses

  Descrying a horizontal mood,

  The weather slowing like a pedal,

  Smelling of sick and spices,

  Red leather and the spermy polish

  Men in boots rub boldly on to brass.

  But night is always night even here,

  Beyond the introspective glare

  Of the green islands on the awnings,

  St. Vincent copied in the pupils,

  Marrow of romance and old sea-fevers,

  Seen from a sanded rail above the sharks

  On this half-deck polished like a nape.

  1955/1948

  HIGH SIERRA

  The grass they cropped converting into speed

  Made green the concert of their hooves

  Over the long serene sierras turning

  In the axle of the sun’s eye

  To legs as delicate as spiders’, picking out

  Pathways for shadows mounted on them:

  Enigma, Fosforos, and Indigo, which rumbled

  Through the pursuing quarries like a wind

  To where the paths fall, and we all of us

  Go down with the sun, sierra by sierra, held

  A moment rising in the stirrups, then abandoned

  To where the black valleys from their shoes

  Subtract sparks upon flints, and the long

  Quivering swish of tails on flesh

  Try to say ‘sleep’, try to say ‘food’ and ‘home’.

  1960/1948

  GREEN COCONUTS: RIO

  At insular café tables under awnings

  Bemused benighted half-castes pause

  To stretch upon a table yawning

  Ten yellow claws and

  Order green coconuts to drink with straws.

  Milk of the green loaf-coconuts

  Which soon before them amputated stand,

  Broken, you think, from some great tree of breasts,

  Or the green skulls of savages trepanned.

  Lips that are curved to taste this albumen,

  To dredge with some blue spoon among the curds

  Which drying on tongue or on moustache are tasteless

  As droppings of bats or birds.

  Re-enacting here a theory out of Darwin

  They cup their yellow mandibles to shape

  Their nuts, tilt them in drinking poses,

  To drain them slowly from the very nape:

  Green coconuts, green

  Coconuts, patrimony of the ape.

  1948/1948

  CHRIST IN BRAZIL

  Further from him whose head of woman’s hair

  Grew down his slender back

  Or whose soft palms were puckered where

  The nails were driven in,

  Rising, denounced the dust they were,

  Became white lofts of witness to the sin.

  Both here and on that partworn map

  The legionary darned for Rome,

  Further from Europe even, in Brazil

  Warmed by the jungle’s sap,

  Finding no home from home became

  Dark consul for the countries of the Will.

  Here named, there honoured, nowhere understood,

  Riding over Rio on his cliffs of stone

  Whose small original was wood,

  In gradual petrifaction of his pain,

  He spreads the conscript’s slow barbaric stain

  Over the cities of the flesh, his widowhood.

  1948/1948

  THE ANECDOTES

  I

  IN CAIRO

  Garcia, when you drew off those two

  White bullfighting gloves your hairy

  Fingers spread themselves apart,

  And then contracted to a hand again,

  Attached to an arm, leading to a heart,

  And I suddenly saw the cottage scene

  Where the knocking on the door is repeated

  Nobody answers it: but inside the room

  The fox has its head under the madman’s shirt.

  II

  IN CAIRO

  Nostos home: algos pain: nostalgia …

  The homing pain f
or such as are attached:

  Odours that hit and rebuff in some garden

  Behind the consul’s house, the shutters drawn:

  In the dark street brushed by a woman’s laugh.

  Ursa Major to the sailor could spell wounds,

  More than the mauling of the northern bear,

  At the hub of the green wheel, standing on the sea.

  Home for most is what you can least bear.

  Ego gigno lumen, I beget light

  But darkness is also of my nature.

  (For such as sail out beyond

  The proper limits of their own freewill.)

  III

  AT RHODES

  Anonymous hand, record one afternoon,

  In May, some time before the fig-leaf:

  Boats lying idle in the sky, a town

  Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,

  Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,

  A sheet of glass leading down into the sea …

  Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:

  Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister’s cloak

  In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.

  Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,

  Conspire and join each other here,

  In twelve sad lines against the dark.

  IV

  AT RHODES