To feed the sick saint who once vanquished him
With spear so stark and grim;
Would set a pillow of grass beneath his head,
Would fetch him fever-wort from the pool’s brim –
And crept into his grave when he was dead.
TAP ROOM
Believe me not a dolt: I would invent
No proverbs; but considering them
I need to state them:
Beauty impracticable,
Strength undemonstrable;
Lives without end await them.
Yet know me able and quick
To force an ending. How?
Finding a dolt to have begun them.
Finding him where?
On Halfpenny Island where they milk the cats.
Where may that lie?
Near Farthing Island where they milk mice.
How shall he have begun them?
O how indeed, but
Cracking the nut against the hammer.
What nut? Why, sir, the nut …
Believe me not a dolt: I have invented
No proverbs …
THE TERRACED VALLEY
In a deep thought of you and concentration
I came by hazard to a new region:
The unnecessary sun was not there,
The necessary earth lay without care –
For more than sunshine warmed the skin
Of the round world that was turned outside-in.
Calm sea beyond the terraced valley
Without horizon easily was spread,
As it were overhead,
Washing the mountain-spurs behind me:
The unnecessary sky was not there,
Therefore no heights, no deeps, no birds of the air.
Neat outside-inside, neat below-above,
Hermaphrodizing love.
Neat this-way-that-way and without mistake:
On the right hand could slide the left glove.
Neat over-under: the young snake
Through an unyielding shell his path could break.
Singing of kettles, like a singing brook,
Made out-of-doors a fireside nook.
But you, my love, where had you then your station?
Seeing that on this counter-earth together
We go not distant from each other;
I knew you near me in that strange region,
So searched for you, in hope to see you stand
On some near olive-terrace, in the heat,
The left-hand glove drawn on your right hand,
The empty snake’s egg perfect at your feet –
But found you nowhere in the wide land,
And cried disconsolately, until you spoke
Immediate at my elbow, and your voice broke
This trick of time, changing the world about
To once more inside-in and outside-out.
OAK, POPLAR, PINE
The temple priests though using but one sign
For TREE, distinguish poplar, oak and pine:
Oak, short and spreading – poplar, tall and thin –
Pine, tall, bunched at the top and well inked in.
Therefore in priestly thought all various trees
Must be enrolled, in kind, as one of these.
The fir, the cedar and the deodar
Are pines, so too the desert palm-trees are;
Aspens and birches are of poplar folk
But chestnut, damson, elm and fig are oak.
All might be simple, did the priests allow
That apple-blossom dresses the oak bough,
That dates are pines-cones; but they will not so,
Well taught how pine and oak and poplar grow:
In every temple-court, for all to see
Flourishes one example of each tree
In tricunx. Your high-priest would laugh to think
Of oak boughs blossoming in pagan pink,
Or numerous cones, hung from a single spine,
Sticky yet sweeter than the fruit of vine,
(For vine’s no tree; vine is a creeping thing,
Cousin to snake, that with its juice can sting).
Confront your priest with evident apple-blossom;
Will faith and doubt, conflicting, heave his bosom?
Force dates between his lips, will he forget
That there’s no date-palm in the alphabet?
Turn apostate? Even in secret? No,
He’ll see the blossom as mere mistletoe.
The dates will be as grapes, good for his needs:
He’ll swallow down their stones like little seeds.
And here’s no lie, no hypocritic sham:
Believe him earnest-minded as I am.
His script has less, and mine more, characters
Than stand in use with lexicographers.
They end with palm, I see and use the sign
For tree that is to palm as palm to pine,
As apple-bough to oak-bough in the spring:
It is no secrecy but a long looking.
ACT V, SCENE 5
You call the old nurse and the little page
To act survivors on your tragic stage –
You love the intrusive extra character.
‘But where’s the tragedy,’ you say, ‘if none
Remains to moralize on what’s been done?
There’s no catharsis in complete disaster.
Tears purge the soul – the nurse’s broken line:
“O mistress, pretty one, dead!” the page’s whine:
“Thou too? Alas, fond master!”’
No purge for my disgusted soul, no tears
Will wash away my bile of tragic years,
No sighs vicariously abate my rancour –
If nurse and page survive, I’d have them own
Small sorrow to be left up-stage alone,
And on the bloodiest field of massacre
Either rant out the anti-climax thus:
‘’A’s dead, the bitch!’ ‘So’s Oscar! Joy for us!’
Then fall to rifling pocket, belt and purse
With corky jokes and pantomime of sin;
Or let the feud rage on, page against nurse –
His jewelled dirk, her thund’rous rolling-pin.
SONG: LIFT-BOY
Let me tell you the story of how I began:
I began as the boot-boy and ended as the boot-man,
With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,
With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,
With nothing in my pockets.
Let me tell you the story of how I went on:
I began as the lift-boy and ended as the lift-man,
With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,
With nothing in my pockets but a jack-knife and a button,
With nothing in my pockets.
I found it very easy to whistle and play
With nothing in my head or my pockets all day,
With nothing in my pockets.
But along came Old Eagle, like Moses or David;
He stopped at the fourth floor and preached me Damnation:
‘Not a soul shall be savèd, not one shall be savèd.
The whole First Creation shall forfeit salvation:
From knife-boy to lift-boy, from ragged to regal,
Not one shall be saved, not you, not Old Eagle,
No soul on earth escapeth, even if all repent –’
So I cut the cords of the lift and down we went,
With nothing in our pockets.
From Poems 1926–1930
(1931)
BROTHER
It’s odd enough to be alive with others,
But odder still to have sisters and brothers:
To make one of a characteristic litter –
The sisters puzzled and vexed, the brothers vexed and bitter
That this one wears, though flattened by abuse,
The family no
se for individual use.
BAY OF NAPLES
The blind man reading Dante upside-down
And not in Braille frowned an admiring frown;
He sniffed, he underscored the passage read,
‘One nose is better than both eyes,’ he said.
‘Here’s a strong trace of orange-peel and sweat
And palate-scrapings on the rock, still wet,
And travellers’ names carved on the sappy tree –
Old Ugolino’s grief! Sublime!’ said he.
FLYING CROOKED
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has – who knows so well as I? –
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
REASSURANCE TO THE SATYR
The hairs of my beard are red and black mingled,
With white now frequent in the red and black.
My finger-nails, see here, are ill-assorted;
My hands are not a pair, nor are my brows;
My nose is crooked as my smile.
‘How?’ says the Satyr. ‘Dare I trust a monster
Who cannot match his left hand with his right,
Who wears three several colours in his beard?’
Satyr, the question is well asked.
Nevertheless I am as trustworthy
As any shepherd in this wide valley.
I touch the doubtful with the left hand first,
Then with the right, under right brow and left
Peer at it doubtfully.
I am red-bearded wild, white-bearded mild,
Black-bearded merry.
And what the other shepherds know but singly
And easily at the first sight or touch
(Who follow a straight nose and who smile even)
I know with labour and most amply:
I know each possible lie and bias
That crookedness can cozen out of straightness.
Satyr, you need not shrink.
SYNTHETIC SUCH
‘The sum of all the parts of Such –
Of each laboratory scene –
Is Such.’ While Science means this much
And means no more, why, let it mean!
But were the science-men to find
Some animating principle
Which gave synthetic Such a mind
Vital, though metaphysical –
To Such, such an event, I think
Would cause unscientific pain:
Science, appalled by thought, would shrink
To its component parts again.
DRAGONS
These ancient dragons not committed yet
To any certain manner,
To any final matter,
Ranging creation recklessly,
Empowered to overset
Natural form and fate,
Freaking the sober species,
Smoothing rough accident to be
Level in a long series
And, each new century,
Forging for God a newer signet –
To these wild monsters boasting
Over and over
Their unchecked tyranny,
The only not a monster
In a small voice calling
Answered despitefully:
‘Dragons, you count for nothing:
You are no more than weather,
The year’s unsteadfastness
To which, now summer-basking,
To which, now in distress
Midwinter-shivering,
The mind pays no honour.’
THE NEXT TIME
And that inevitable accident
On the familiar journey – roughly reckoned
By miles and shillings – in a cramped compartment
Between a first hereafter and a second?
And when we passengers are given two hours,
The wheels failing once more at Somewhere-Nowhere,
To climb out, stretch our legs and pick wild flowers –
Suppose that this time I elect to stay there?
To Whom Else?
(1931)
LARGESSE TO THE POOR
I had been God’s own time on travel
From stage to stage, guest-house to guest-house,
And at each stage furnished one room
To my own comfort, hoping God knows what,
Most happy when most sure that no condition
Might ever last in God’s own time –
Unless to be death-numb, as I would not.
Yet I was always watchful at my choices
To change the bad at least for a no worse,
And I was strict nowhere to stay long.
In turn from each new home passing
I locked the door and pocketed the key,
Leaving behind goods plainly mine
(Should I return to claim them legally)
Of which I kept particular register –
In nightly rooms and chattels of the occasion
I was, to my own grief, a millionaire.
But now at last, out of God’s firmament,
To break this endless journey –
Homeless to come where that awaits me
Which in my mind’s unwearying discontent
I begged as pilgrim’s due –
To fling my keys as largesse to the poor,
The always travel-hungry God-knows-who,
With, ‘Let them fatten on my industry
Who find perfection and eternity
In might-be-worse, a roof over the head,
And any half-loaf better than no bread,
For which to thank God on their knees nightly.’
THE FELLOE’D YEAR
The pleasure of summer was its calm success
Over winter past and winter sequent:
The pleasure of winter was a warm counting,
‘Summer comes again, when, surely.’
This pleasure and that pleasure touched
In a perpetual spring-with-autumn ache,
A creak and groan of season,
In which all moved,
In which all move yet – I the same, yet praying
That the twelve spokes of this round-felloe’d year
Be a fixed compass, not a turning wheel.
TIME
The vague sea thuds against the marble cliffs
And from their fragments age-long grinds
Pebbles like flowers.
Or the vague weather wanders in the fields,
And up spring flowers with coloured buds
Like marble pebbles.
The beauty of the flowers is Time, death-grieved;
The pebbles’ beauty too is Time,
Life-wearied.
It is easy to admire a blowing flower
Or a smooth pebble flower-like freaked
By Time and vagueness.
Time is Time’s lapse, the emulsive element coaxing
All obstinate locks and rusty hinges
To loving-kindness.
And am I proof against that lovesome pair,
Old age and childhood, twins in Time,
In sorrowful vagueness?
And will I not pretend the accustomed thanks:
Humouring age with filial flowers,
Childhood with pebbles?
ON RISING EARLY
Rising early and walking in the garden
Before the sun has properly climbed the hill –
His rays warming the roof, not yet the grass
That is white with dew still.
And not enough breeze to eddy a puff of smoke,
And out in the meadows a thick mist lying yet,
And nothing anywhere ill or noticeable
–
Thanks indeed for that.
But was there ever a day with wit enough
To be always early, to draw the smoke up straight
Even at three o’clock of an afternoon,
To spare dullness or sweat?
Indeed, many such days I remember
That were dew-white and gracious to the last,
That ruled out meal-times, yet had no more hunger
Than was felt by rising a half-hour before breakfast,
Nor more fatigue – where was it that I went
So unencumbered, with my feet trampling
Like strangers on the past?
ON DWELLING
Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening
From rustic lips fail as the town encroaches:
Soon nothing passes but the cold quick stare
Of eyes that see ghosts, yet too many for fear.
Here I too walk, silent myself, in wonder
At a town not mine though plainly coextensive
With mine, even in days coincident:
In mine I dwell, in theirs like them I haunt.
And the green country, should I turn again there?
My bumpkin neighbours loom even ghostlier:
Like trees they murmur or like blackbirds sing
Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening.
ON NECESSITY
Dung-worms are necessary. And their certain need
Is dung, more dung, much dung and on such dung to feed.
And though I chose to sit and ponder for whole days
On dung-worms, what could I find more to tell or praise
Than their necessity, their numbers and their greed
To which necessity in me its daily tribute pays?
THE FOOLISH SENSES
Feverishly the eyes roll for what thorough
Sight may hold them still,
And most hysterically strains the throat
At the love song once easy to sing out
In minstrel serfdom to the armoured ill –
Let them cease now.
The view is inward, foolish eye: your rolling
Flatters the outward scene
To spread with sunset misery. Foolish throat,
That ill was colic, love its antidote,
And beauty, forced regret of who would sing
Of loves unclean.
No more, senses, shall you so confound me,
Playing your pageants through