Complete Poems: Muriel Spark

  Why did they say ‘Good morning’?

  Well, I said ‘Good morning’ back to them,

  This in my dream being the right thing to do.

  Verlaine Villanelle

  Like poor Verlaine, whom God defend,

  I see the sky above the roof,

  And write my book till summer’s end.

  When tree, town, bell and birdnote blend,

  I feel, since summer sails aloof

  Like poor Verlaine, whom God defend,

  Who went to jail but did not mend.

  I taste the pity sure enough

  And write my book till summer’s end.

  I see a tree, and won’t pretend

  I’m warped on that nostalgic woof

  Like poor Verlaine, whom God defend.

  But rue the crooked dividend

  These days will yield of galley-proof,

  And write my book till summer’s end.

  Therefore I see the sky and spend

  An hour of lyrical reproof,

  Like poor Verlaine, whom God defend,

  And write my book till summer’s end.

  Edinburgh Villanelle

  These eyes that saw the saturnine

  Glance in my back, refused the null

  Heart of Midlothian, never mine.

  Hostile High Street gave the sign.

  Hollyrood made unmerciful

  These eyes that saw the saturnine

  Watchmen of murky Leith begin

  To pump amiss the never-full

  Heart of Midlothian, never mine.

  Withal they left the North Sea brine

  Seeping the slums and did not fool

  These eyes that saw the saturnine

  Waters no provident whim made wine

  Fail to infuriate the dull

  Heart of Midlothian, never mine.

  Municipal monuments confine

  What ghosts return to ridicule

  These eyes that saw the saturnine

  Heart of Midlothian, never mine.

  Holy Water Rondel

  For salt, no word seems apposite;

  Its common wisdom would defy

  All praise, so far as meets the eye,

  Salt is so meek a hypocrite.

  And not the most selective wit

  Has words to measure water by,

  Because, so far as meets the eye,

  Water is exquisite.

  But cited sacerdotally,

  Multiple evils up and quit,

  Which proves that water and salt commit

  Pathetic faults beyond the eye;

  And shows a happy flaw whereby

  The fabric is bereft of it,

  Since there is nothing left of it

  But mercies more than meet the eye.

  Therefore I rate the creatures high

  Whose salt and watery features knit

  So strict and strange a composite

  Of blessings and of brine thereby.

  No wonder that the clergy ply

  The people every week with it,

  Who are of virtue infinite

  So far as meets the eye.

  The Creative Writing Class

  ‘There is,’ he declared.

  ‘Really?’ she grinned.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ he stated.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she burbled.

  ‘A majority,’ he chortled.

  ‘The statues?’ she enquired.

  ‘Public health,’ he opined.

  ‘The signature,’ she ventured.

  ‘Miss Universe,’ he emoted.

  ‘The confederation,’ she growled.

  ‘Hostile ethics!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘The Tears of Time,’ she choked.

  ‘Everything entire,’ he warbled.

  ‘It’s a mere obsession,’ she roared.

  ‘Develop the wolf,’ he demanded.

  ‘Done,’ she snarled.

  ‘On with the job,’ he guffawed.

  ‘Not unanimous,’ she yelled.

  ‘You’re breaking my jaw,’ he groaned.

  ‘Silence!’ she sneered.

  Authors’ Ghosts

  I think that authors’ ghosts creep back

  Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves

  And find the books they wrote.

  Those authors put final, semi-final touches,

  Sometimes whole paragraphs.

  Whole pages are added, re-written, revised,

  So deeply by night those authors employ

  Themselves with those old books of theirs.

  How otherwise

  Explain the fact that maybe after years

  Have passed, the reader

  Picks up the book—But was it like that?

  I don’t remember this . . . Where

  Did this ending come from?

  I recall quite another.

  Oh yes, it has been tampered with

  No doubt about it—

  The author’s very touch is here, there and there,

  Where it wasn’t before, and

  What’s more, something’s missing—

  I could have sworn . . .

  That Bad Cold

  That hand, a tiny one, first at my throat;

  That thump in the chest.

  I know you of old, you’re a bad cold

  Come to stay for a few days,

  Unwanted visitor—a week perhaps.

  Nobody asked him to come. (Yes,

  He is masculine, but otherwise

  Don’t try to parse the situation.)

  Everything stops. Perhaps

  He is providentially intended to

  Make cease and desist an overworking

  State of mind. Yes, there is a certain

  Respite. Friends mean merely a bed

  And a hot drink. Enemies and all

  Paranoias, however justified, lose their way

  In the fog. And the desk diary

  Lies open with a vacant grin.

  Leaning Over an Old Wall

  Leaning over an old wall, gazing

  into a dark pool, waiting like a moonling to see

  only the water traffic, fish and frogs

  I saw my image stare at me, appraising.

  Suddenly a voice spoke from a stone

  in the bed of the pool, saying

  it is the pebble on the path you tread,

  it is the tomb’s substance,

  it pillows your head,

  it is the cold heart lamenting alone,

  it is all these things, the stone said.

  A willow moaned, it is your despair,

  it is your unrest and your grieving,

  your fears that have been and those that are to be,

  it is your unbelieving

  and the wanhope of your days, said the tree.

  And the roots of the willow, lying

  under the bed of the pool were crying,

  it is the twisted cord that feeds this tree

  which is your clay and entity;

  it is the filament that fed your birth;

  from your wanton seed

  into the faithful earth

  impulsive tendons lead.

  But the green reeds sang, it is the voice

  of your life’s joy.

  It is the green word that springs

  amazing from your frost, it flings

  arms to the sky so that the clouds rejoice

  and the sun sings.

  Flower Into Animal

  This is the pain that sea anemones bear

  in the fear of aberration but wilfully

  aspiring to respire in another

  more difficult way, and turning

  flower into animal interminably.

  It is a pain to choke with, when the best

  of a species gets lost somewhere.

  Different, indifferent pain—

  to be never the one again to act like the rest

  but answer to the least of another kind;

  to be here
no more to savour nor desist,

  but to identify maybe the grains of sand

  and call anonymous grasses by their name,

  to find remembrance if the streets run seabound;

  when the tide enters the room, when the roof gives flower

  cry Credo to the obdurate weed.

  And to have to put up with the pain and process,

  nor look back to delight the eyes

  that ache with the displacement of all sights.

  And to have to alter the trunk of a tree to a dragon

  if it should be required, or the river to a swan.

  Abroad

  Abroad is peculiar names above the shops.

  Strange, too, the cookery and the cops. The people

  Prattle with tongues there, they rattle

  Inscrutable money, and with foreign eyes

  Follow your foreign eccentricities.

  Going up to Sotheby’s

  This was the wine. It stained the top of the page

  when she knocked over the glass accidentally. A pity, she said,

  to lose that drop. For the wine was a treat.

  Here’s a coffee-cup ring, and another. He preferred coffee to tea.

  Some pages re-written entirely, scored through, cancelled over

  and over

  on this, his most important manuscript.

  That winter they took a croft in Perthshire,

  living on oats and rabbits bought for a few pence from

  the madman.

  The children thrived, and she got them to school daily,

  mostly by trudge.

  He was glad to get the children out of the way, but always

  felt cold

  while working on his book. This

  is his most important manuscript, completed 1929.

  ‘Children, go and play outside. Your father’s trying to work.

  But keep away from the madman’s house.’

  He looked up from his book. ‘There’s nothing

  wrong with the madman.’ Which was true.

  She typed out the chapters in the afternoons. He looked

  happily at her.

  He worked best late at night.

  ‘Aren’t you ever coming to bed? I often wonder,

  are you married to me or to your bloody book?’

  A smudge on the page, still sticky after all these years.

  Something greasy on the last page.

  This is that manuscript, finished in the late spring,

  crossed-out, dog-eared; this, the original,

  passed through several literary hands while

  the pages she had typed were at the publishers’.

  One personage has marked a passage with red ink,

  has written in the margin, ‘Are you sure?’

  Five publishers rejected it in spite of recommendations.

  The sixth decided to risk his pounds sterling down the drain

  for the sake of prestige. The author was a difficult customer.

  However,

  they got the book published at last.

  Her parents looked after the children while the couple went

  to France

  for a short trip. This bundle of paper, the original manuscript,

  went into a fibre trunk, got damp into it, got mouldy and furled.

  It took fifteen more years for him to make his reputation,

  by which time the children had grown up, Agnes as a

  secretary at the BBC, Leo as a teacher.

  The author died in ’48, his wife in ’68.

  Agnes and Leo married and begat.

  And now the grandchildren are selling the manuscript.

  Bound and proud, documented and glossed

  by scholars of the land, smoothed out

  and precious, these leaves of paper

  are going up to Sotheby’s. The wine-stained,

  stew-stained and mould-smelly papers are

  going up to Sotheby’s. They occupy the front seat

  of the Renault, beside the driver.

  They are a national event. They are going up

  to make their fortune at last,

  which once were so humble, tattered, and so truly working class.

  On the Lack of Sleep

  Lying on the roof of everything I listen

  To the breath of ambition in her sleep, to the gasp of rancour

  Turning in her dream. And the parting of lovers, the

  coming together

  Of old divisions, the meeting and retreating of partners

  Cease, though I do not sleep.

  Already I have wandered through fields of Michaelmas

  flowers. Tired

  As I am, I remember the counting of all souls, think of their

  blue faces

  Asleep, though I do not cease,

  Though I persist into the day without motive as in the first hour

  Of my life, tired as I am, I see the innocence I am left with.

  Honour yawns, vanity foams in her coma, charity stretches

  A sham, luxurious limb.

  Until I gather you again when I come into my own,

  Lie low, my sleepy fortunes.

  The Grave that Time Dug

  This is the grave that time dug.

  This is the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  This is the hand

  that rapped on the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  This is the stove

  that warmed the hand

  that rapped on the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  This is the child an instant born

  that lit the stove

  that warmed the hand

  that rapped on the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  This is the pink deceptive thorn

  that bled the child an instant born

  that lit the stove

  that warmed the hand

  that rapped on the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  This is the alderman bound and sworn

  that planted the pink deceptive thorn

  that bled the child an instant born

  that lit the stove

  that warmed the hand

  that rapped on the box

  that lay in the grave that time dug.

  The Pearl-Miners

  By night I watch a fitful tribe

  Along the street advance and halt.

  Time and again their limbs describe

  A proud protracted somersault.

  Blank-eyed beneath the lamp they steer

  Compliant hips with hands of chalk.

  I know them by their grief, and hear

  Convulsions tolling in their talk.

  They come, contemptuous and fleet

  In tartan jeans, in ochre tights,

  To make overt their counterfeit

  Drowsy exotic appetites.

  They are asleep and cannot rest,

  Dismayed in far delirium.

  Elaborately they attest

  The dreaded labours still to come.

  I know them by the lights of fear

  On their elliptic faces falling.

  This way and that, they haul the gear

  And apparatus of their calling.

  So obsolete, the block they drag,

  So bitterly they drill and grind,

  So deep beneath the pavement flag

  They dig for pearls and do not find.

  So freakish, they descend and storm

  The black foundations, and in vain

  They rise distracted to perform

  Their supplicating rites again.

  High-style they flash, akimbo fall,

  Entreating on their shaken heads

  That pale magnetic mineral

  Which lugged them from their sundry beds.

  Full-wheel the rounds revolve alike:

  The sleepers tur
n, and cheek by cheek,

  Dig up the road and do not strike

  The lustrous milky seam they seek.

  I recognise them by their fear;

  So fair the dream, so far the sight.

  The lambent virtues are not here

  In Kensington of dreadful night.

  You boys of amber, quit your load;

  You emerald, you marble girls,

  Not underneath Old Brompton Road

  Nestle the subterranean pearls.

  I know these miners comfortless,

  And by their pain identify

  Pearl within pearl, since I possess

  None but my bane to measure by,

  None but their sleep to waken me,

  None but their sorrow to confide

  What pleasures have forsaken me,

  None but my foe to be my guide.

  I reckon only by their lack,

  Rich within perfection furled,

  And, by the sepulchre they hack,

  Perceive the living underworld.

  Here they have come, my fake, my lost,

  My own familiars to their grave.

  By vicious lights like elm-trees tossed,

  Their bright pathetic branches wave.

  So high the fault, the dream so true;

  So low, the lovely mind persists

  Immaculate, but not for you,

  Dissevered, sad somnambulists.

  Omen

  Here is the time of watching birds;

  senses mingle and show their hands.

  Now is the place where the signal stands

  that points an omen from both my doors;

  though the street shall talk like a hammer,

  walls keep silence over my shoulder.

  The wrong key in the right door

  ponders the portent. Which window

  saw where I have been to-morrow?

  where I rocked my house on the water;

  doors moved like an ark turning

  back her face, and this is a meaning.

  For the unlucky eye never shall taste

  the bright bow of my vision again,

  but this error, bitter as brine,

  shall blind the eyes that heard the day

  before my fairweather foes came,

  those that crossed my fingers dumb.

  Fault, fault, on both my houses—

  Speed, bonny ark, and change your shape

  until the ominous birds fly up.

  My Kingdom for a Horse

  Having considered the place, having decided

  There was not room enough, nevertheless