Complete Poems: Muriel Spark

  a memorandum. Something I have

  forgotten to remember,

  that there are always

  mysteries in life. That shoes

  do not always go in pairs, any more

  than we do. That one fits;

  the other, not. That children can

  thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion

  chuck out someone’s shoe, split up

  someone’s life.

  But usually that shoe that I

  see is a man’s, old, worn, the sole

  parted from the upper.

  Then why did the owner keep the other,

  keep it to himself? Was he

  afraid (as I so often am with

  inanimate objects) to hurt its feelings?

  That one shoe in the road invokes

  my awe and my sad pity.

  The Victoria Falls

  So hushed, so hot, the broad Zambesi lies

  Above the Falls, and on her weedy isles

  Swing antic monkeys swarm malignant flies,

  And seeming-lazy lurk long crocodiles.

  But somewhere down the river does the hush

  Become a sibilance that hints a sigh,

  A murmur, mounting as the currents rush

  Faster, and while the murmur is a cry

  The cry becomes a shout, the shout a thunder

  Until the whole Zambesi waters pour

  Into the earth’s side, agitating under

  Infinite spray mists, pounding the world’s floor.

  Wrapped in this liquid turmoil who can say

  Which is the mighty echo, which the spray?

  Conversation Piece

  It occurs to me, perversely perhaps, but unmistakably,

  That it would be so nice to be seized like that

  And taken away.

  Why?

  I’m not sure why, but it occurs to me

  That it would be so nice to have a change of problems,

  And such a relief to be in the right for once

  In the face of the interrogators which are everywhere, anyway.

  Solitary confinement sounds nice, too.

  I like that word, used in the reports, ‘incommunicado’.

  Why?

  Well, why are you asking? I’m only just saying it occurs to me

  That one might be able to take a spiritual

  Retreat out of it, such as I’ve never managed

  To achieve in the atmosphere of monasteries and convents.

  Unworldliness is such a distraction, you see.

  Of course, the idea of being seized is

  A prehistoric female urge, probably, rising

  Up from the Cave, which must have been exciting.

  And perhaps one would hope for a charming interrogator.

  Yes, I do agree, I wouldn’t like it really.

  It’s only just an idea. Yes, I know you don’t follow.

  Because, in fact, I’m not leading anywhere. Only talking,

  That’s all. I think I’d put up a fight, actually,

  If taken away off the street. And it occurs to me that maybe

  I would like a fight, but not really.

  Neither would they, perhaps.

  Why?

  I don’t know. Why are you asking questions

  Like this and trying to put me in the wrong?

  I’ve exhausted the idea, anyhow, with all this talking.

  Elementary

  Night, the wet, the onyx-faced

  Over the street was shining where

  I saw an object all displaced

  In black water and black air.

  Was it myself? If so I found

  An odd capacity for vision.

  Capacity, I understand

  Is limited by fixed precision,

  Being the measure of displacement:

  The void exists as bulk defined it,

  The cat subsiding down a basement

  Leaves a catlessness behind it.

  That vision then, shall I concede is

  Proved by a void capacity?

  What’s good enough for Archimedes

  Ought to be good enough for me.

  But knowing little of natural law

  I can’t describe what happens after

  You weigh a body such as I saw,

  First in air and then in water.

  Against the Transcendentalists

  There are more visionaries

  Than poets and less

  Poets than missionaries,

  Poets are a meagre species.

  There is more vanity, more charity,

  There is more of everything than poetry

  Which, for personal purposes,

  I wish may preserve

  Identity from any other commodity

  Also from Delphic insanity,

  Drunkenness and discrepancy

  Of which there’s already a great plenty.

  And so I reserve

  The right not to try to

  Fulfil the wilderness or fly to

  Empyreal vacuity with an eye to

  Publication, for what am I to

  Byzantium or Byzantium

  To me? I live in Kensington

  And walk about, and work in Kensington

  And do not foresee departing from Kensington.

  So if there’s no law in Kensington

  Adaptable to verse without contravening

  The letter to prove

  The law, I’ll make one.

  The first text is

  The word. The next is

  (Since morals prevent quarrels

  And writers make poor fighters)

  Love your neighbour, meaning

  Your neighbour, let him love

  His neighbour, and he his.

  Who is Everyman, what is he

  That he should stand in lieu of

  A poem? What is Truth true of?

  And what good’s a God’s-eye-view of

  Anyone to anyone

  But God? In the Abstraction

  Many angels make sweet moan

  But never write a stanza down.

  Poets are few and they are better

  Equipped to love and animate the letter.

  I therefore resign

  The seven-league line

  In footwear of super-cosmic design

  To the global hops

  Of wizards and wops;

  Hoping that if Byzantium

  Should appear in Kensington

  The city will fit the size

  Of the perimeter of my eyes

  And of the span of my hand:

  Hands and eyes that understand

  This law of which the third

  Text is the thing defined,

  The flesh made word.

  Shipton-under-Wychwood

  Under Wychwood the growth and undergrowth

  contend and do not mind how things exceptional

  meander into landscape. They are drenched under

  and under the repetitive green at last.

  Fetched into chastity are fond extravagant

  and noticeable doings and undertakings

  whereover all the rhythms of Cotswold ride.

  Ride, and have struck an ever-receding camp

  over and over again, redundant time and tenses

  disposing of themselves. What horses overtake them?

  and what will become of the rare and royal hunters?

  Prebend plunges over Plantagenet; it is all

  over, then, with the legions of Rome before

  finality, split-hooved, has taken over

  Shipton under the forest, concealed in summer.

  Conversations

  Two or three on the winter pavement talking,

  One or two in the stubble field,

  Idle, concerning miracles.

  Voices are butter, but the eyes overtly

  Detest another’s dubious lips;

  Eyes are blades where fancy breeds.

  In boredom
breeds, meanwhile remains to each

  Enemy his friend, to every lying

  Tongue an angel apiece.

  The conversation therefore is in heaven,

  Here on the streets of understanding

  Here in the fields of bread.

  When men are magic and air their advocates

  Bide by the human grain and yet,

  Though these offences needs must come,

  Agree, sincere as light.

  Blessed is the child of indiscretion talking,

  And the orphan of indignation,

  And before their Father’s face, their conversations

  Continually dancing.

  Blessed are sons enticed to sea, and the mother

  Constrained by wonder and by sign,

  Their angels cover the face of the water,

  And the water singeth a quiet tune.

  Two or three must argue these contentions;

  One or two in a winter season

  Herein long since have plucked a sentiment or scandal.

  But our conversation is in heaven.

  The Card Party

  Pacified, smooth as milk, by cakes and tea,

  Four ladies took their chairs accordingly;

  Each, picking up her cards in slow suspense,

  Preened up her creamy neck to Providence.

  Somewhat apart from this important four,

  Two sisters, knitting, settled near the door,

  Cautioned each other, bending eye to eye,

  Then watched the game together in rivalry.

  Each player felt reluctantly compelled

  To know what mystery the other held;

  As one white neck rose taller with desire

  The other three stretched likewise snakier.

  And all the afternoon, discomfited,

  Those four swans turned disdainful head from head;

  Erect, they cast their cards throughout the night.

  Each throat thinned upwards like a stalagmite.

  By dawn they bent and buried their flexible

  Extending isthmuses beneath the table,

  Upraising with apologetic pride

  Those graceful members at the other side.

  And what about the two beside the door?

  They veered from cross to curious, hour by hour.

  The knitting tangled, bound both necks askew,

  And from this loggerhead a spiral grew

  From which the sister-heads peered forth to pry—

  What cards? All six coiled there, finally.

  Set in a formal knot and inextricable,

  Two died beside the door, four at the table.

  How brave these darlings, and how marvellous

  That all their lovely necks should mingle thus.

  Thus twined it was in death they coincided

  Who always in their lives had been divided.

  Chrysalis

  We found it on a bunch of grapes and put it

  In cotton-wool, in a matchbox partly open,

  In a room in London in winter-time, and in

  A safe place, and then forgot it.

  Early in the cold spring we said, ‘See this!

  Where on earth has the butterfly come from?’

  It looked so unnatural whisking about the curtain:

  Then we remembered the chrysalis.

  There was the broken shell with what was once

  The head askew; and what was once the worm

  Was away out of the window, out of the warm,

  Out of the scene of the small violence.

  Not strange, that the pretty creature formalised

  The virtue of its dark unconscious wait

  For pincers of light to come and pick it out.

  But it was a bad business, our being surprised.

  Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard

  Lady who lies beneath this stone,

  Pupil of Time pragmatical,

  Though in a lifetime’s cultivation

  You did not blossom, summer shall.

  The fierce activity of grass

  Assaults a century’s constraint.

  Vigour survives the vigorous,

  Meek as you were, or proud as paint.

  And bares its fist for insurrection

  Clenched in the bud; lady who lies

  Those leaves will spend in disaffection

  Your fond estate and purposes.

  Death’s a contagion: spring’s a bright

  Green fit; the blight will overcome

  The plague that overcame the blight

  That laid this lady low and dumb,

  And laid a parish on its back

  So soon amazed, so long enticed

  Into an earthy almanack,

  And musters now the spring attack;

  Which render passive, latent Christ.

  Evelyn Cavallo

  This person never came to pass,

  Being the momentary name I gave

  To a slight stir in a fictitious grave

  Wherein I found no form and face, alas,

  Of Evelyn Cavallo, Evelyn of grass.

  Therefore, therefore, Evelyn,

  Why do you assert your so non-evident history

  While all your feminine motives make a mystery

  Which, to resolve, arise your masculine?

  Why will you not lie down

  At the back of the neither here not there

  Where lightly I left you, Evelyn of guile?

  But no, you recur in the orgulous noonday style,

  Or else in your trite, your debonair

  Postprandial despair.

  The Rout

  A battle between thousands of bees and wasps in the ancient church at Stockerton, near Market Harborough (Leics.) has ended in a victory for the wasps.

  Since the battle started three weeks ago the church has been closed and no services have been held.

  For years, the bees had been storing their honey under the roof. But the honey started to trickle down the walls. The smell attracted the wasps.

  Thousands of bees have been killed and the wasps are now eating the honey.

  It is hoped to reopen the church on Sunday.

  (NEWS CHRONICLE, 7 September 1951)

  From Oliver Cromwell’s despatch to Speaker Lenthall dated 14 June 1645, from Market Harborough:

  ‘This day we marched towards him. He drew out to meet us. Both armies engaged. We, after three hours fight very doubtful at last routed his army; killed and took about 5,000; very many officers, but of what quality we yet know not. We took also about 200 carriages, all he had, and all his guns, being twelve in number; whereof two were demi-culverins and (I think) the rest sakers . . . Sir, this is none other but the hand of God, and to him alone belongs the glory, wherein none are to share with him.’

  I

  ‘has ended in a victory for the wasps’

  What’s wasps?—

  A species of bees, or bees

  A sort of wasps? Look

  Them up in the Pocket Book of

  British Insects: The Honey Bee,

  Not a native of Britain.

  After escape from captivity,

  Wild colonies in hollow trees

  Or similar sites not uncommon,

  But these are from domesticated stock.

  Wasps: A common wasp colony in

  August or September may contain

  Many thousands but all of these

  Except the queens

  Die in the autumn.

  II

  ‘the honey started to trickle down the walls’,

  And that is sickening enough.

  For years they stored the stuff under the roof

  And summer had o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

  ‘And that is sickening enough’, to use the phrase

  Lawrence used about bees’ ways;

  (‘bees . . . cluster on their own queen.

  And that is sickening enough.’)

  What Lawrence meant I mean
,

  Which is that humanity’s

  Different, or ought to be, from bees.

  We who are of imported

  Origin, wild or domesticated,

  Are not so similar

  To bees as wasps are,

  But in smelling honey we

  Are like enough to wasp and bee

  To be what we ought not to be.

  III

  ‘The smell attracted the wasps.’

  Thousands of upstarts out of paper cells

  Form up, assault the established

  Wax-works of the wealthy sweet with smells

  From long-ago ancestral summers ravished.

  Wasps that recently have been

  Clustering on your own queen,

  Witness the outcome:

  The murder of innumerable bees,

  ‘A victory for the wasps’ ‘but these

  Die in the autumn.’

  IV

  To the Queen Wasp: a despatch from Buzzer Bummer

  Dated nineteen-fifty-one, the end of summer,

  From Stockerton church near Market Harborough:

  This day we marched towards her.

  She drew out to meet us. We,

  Since three weeks’ fight at last routed her army.

  Took all stores. Killed many thousand.

  Madam, this is none other but the hand

  Of God. ‘The wasps are now eating the honey.’

  ‘It is hoped to reopen the church on Sunday.’

  Four People in a Neglected Garden

  Not yet. That is the high concession,

  Taking the best of it.

  Dying, not dead, the neglected garden

  Is passionate yet.

  But we are a process no protracted

  Parley with trowel and gravel will prolong.

  Nature nurtured us too, and then neglected

  To gauge how long the grass grew long.

  We four are gardens and are guardians

  Of gardens. No wonder we let the increase

  Of grass grow under our feet and made our own

  Seditious separate peace.

  Because there is a truce before the tall tree bending

  Falls in the end and withers,

  Ourselves the occasion of afternoon’s portending—

  Lie, syringa; follow, rambler; stems, tumble together.

  Like Africa

  He is like Africa in whose

  White flame the brilliant acres lie,