My hawks were lightning darted from my fist.
Time was my chronicler, my deeds age-new,
And death no peril, nor decay of powers.
Glory sat firmly in my body’s thrones.
Only, at midnight, rose another crown
That drained the wholesome colour from my realm,
That stilled the wind and froze the headlong stream.
I said: A challenge not to be endured,
A shadow clouding the sweet drunken hour
When with my queens in love I company.
I left the palace sleeping, I rode out,
I flew my hawk at that thin, mocking crown,
I emptied my full quiver at the sky.
Where went my hawk? He came not home again.
What ailed my horse? He cast me like a sack.
The crown moved ghostly off against the dawn.
And from that hour, though the sun burned as fierce,
Though the wind brought me frequency of spice,
Glory was gone, and numb was all my flesh.
Whose weakling is the vanquished of the Moon?
His own heart’s weakling: thievishly he longs
To diadem his head with stolen light.
The Moon’s the crown of no high-walled domain
Conquerable by angry reach of pride:
Her icy lands welcome no soldiery.
Thus I was shamed, I wandered in the fields,
I let my nails grow long and my hair long,
Neglecting all the business of my day.
No lovely queen nor wisest minister
Could medicine me out of my wretchedness:
The palace fell in ruins, the land smoked.
In my lost realm, if grass or flower yet grew,
It sprouted from the shade of broken walls.
I threw the walls flat, crushing flower and grass.
At length in my distemper’s latest hour
I rose up shuddering, reckless to live
An idiot pawn of that inhuman power.
Over the mountain peak I watched her glide
And stood dumbfoundered by her reasoned look.
With answering reason my sick heart renewed.
So peace fell sudden, and in proof of peace
There sat my flown hawk, hooded on my fist,
And with my knees I gripped my truant horse.
Toward that most clear, unscorching light I spurred.
Whiter and closer shone the increasing disc,
Until it filled the sky, scattering my gaze.
When I might see once more, the day had come
And I was riding through gold harvest-fields,
Toward a rebuilded city, and my home.
Here then in majesty I rule again,
And grassflesh pays me tribute as of old;
In wind and sun and stream my joys I take,
Bounded by white horizons beyond touch.
TO THE SOVEREIGN MUSE
Debating here one night we reckoned that
Between us we knew all the poets
Who bore that sacred name: none bore it clear,
Not one. Some we commended
For being all they might be in a day
To which poetry was a shrouded emblem,
And some we frowned upon for lawyers’ clerks
Drafting conveyances on moral sheepskin,
Or for pantomimists making parody
Of a magnificence they feared to acclaim.
This was to praise you, Sovereign muse,
And to your love our pride devote,
Who pluck the speech-thread from a jargon-tangled
Fleece of a thousand tongues, wills, voices,
To be a single speech, twisted fine;
Snapping it short like Fate then –
‘Thus much, no more –’
Thereafter, in acknowledgement of you
We might no longer feign and stutter
As poets of the passionate chance,
Nor claim the indulgence of the hour.
Our tongues must prompter be than those
That wagged with modish lamentation –
Or lost men, otherwise, and renegades
To our confession, maudlin-sane must die
Suicides on the stair of yesterday.
THE AGES OF OATH
To find a garden-tulip growing
Among wild primroses of a wild field,
Or a cuckoo’s egg in a blackbird’s nest,
Or a giant mushroom, a whole basketful –
The memorable feats of childhood!
Once, by the earthworks, scratching in the soil,
My stick turned up a Roman amber bead….
The lost, the freakish, the unspelt
Drew me: for simple sights I had no eye.
And did I swear allegiance then
To wildness, not (as I thought) to truth –
Become a virtuoso, and this also,
Later, of simple sights, when tiring
Of unicorn and upas?
Did I forget how to greet plainly
The especial sight, how to know deeply
The pleasure shared by upright hearts?
And is this to begin afresh, with oaths
On the true book, in the true name,
Now stammering out my praise of you,
Like a boy owning his first love?
LIKE SNOW
She, then, like snow in a dark night,
Fell secretly. And the world waked
With dazzling of the drowsy eye,
So that some muttered ‘Too much light’,
And drew the curtains close.
Like snow, warmer than fingers feared,
And to soil friendly;
Holding the histories of the night
In yet unmelted tracks.
THE CLIMATE OF THOUGHT
The climate of thought has seldom been described.
It is no terror of Caucasian frost,
Nor yet that brooding Hindu heat
For which a loin-rag and a dish of rice
Suffice until the pestilent monsoon.
But, without winter, blood would run too thin;
Or, without summer, fires would burn too long.
In thought the seasons run concurrently.
Thought has a sea to gaze, not voyage, on;
And hills, to rough the edge of the bland sky,
Not to be climbed in search of blander prospect;
Few birds, sufficient for such caterpillars
As are not fated to turn butterflies;
Few butterflies, sufficient for such flowers
As are the luxury of a full orchard;
Wind, sometimes, in the evening chimneys; rain
On the early morning roof, on sleepy sight;
Snow streaked upon the hilltop, feeding
The fond brook at the valley-head
That greens the valley and that parts the lips;
The sun, simple, like a country neighbour;
The moon, grand, not fanciful with clouds.
END OF PLAY
We have reached the end of pastime, for always,
Ourselves and everyone, though few confess it
Or see the sky other than, as of old,
A foolish smiling Mary-mantle blue;
Though life may still seem to dawdle golden
In some June landscape among giant flowers,
The grass to shine as cruelly green as ever,
Faith to descend in a chariot from the sky –
May seem only: a mirror and an echo
Mediate henceforth with vision and sound.
The cry of faith, no longer mettlesome,
Sounds as a blind man’s pitiful plea of ‘blind’.
We have at last ceased idling, which to regret
Were as shallow as to ask our milk-teeth back;
As many forthwith do, and on their knees
Call lugubriously upon chaste Christ.
We te
ll no lies now, at last cannot be
The rogues we were – so evilly linked in sense
With what we scrutinized that lion or tiger
Could leap from every copse, strike and devour us.
No more shall love in hypocritic pomp
Conduct its innocents through a dance of shame,
From timid touching of gloved fingers
To frantic laceration of naked breasts.
Yet love survives, the word carved on a sill
Under antique dread of the headsman’s axe;
It is the echoing mind, as in the mirror
We stare on our dazed trunks at the block kneeling.
THE FALLEN TOWER OF SILOAM
Should the building totter, run for an archway!
We were there already – already the collapse
Powdered the air with chalk, and shrieking
Of old men crushed under the fallen beams
Dwindled to comic yelps. How unterrible
When the event outran the alarm
And suddenly we were free –
Free to forget how grim it stood,
That tower, and what wide fissures ran
Up the west wall, how rotten the under-pinning
At the south-eastern angle. Satire
Had curled a gentle wind around it,
As if to buttress the worn masonry;
Yet we, waiting, had abstained from satire.
It behoved us, indeed, as poets
To be silent in Siloam, to foretell
No visible calamity. Though kings
Were crowned and gold coin minted still and horses
Still munched at nose-bags in the public streets,
All such sad emblems were to be condoned:
An old wives’ tale, not ours.
THE GREAT-GRANDMOTHER
That aged woman with the bass voice
And yellowing white hair: believe her.
Though to your grandfather, her son, she lied
And to your father disingenuously
Told half the tale as the whole,
Yet she was honest with herself,
Knew disclosure was not yet due,
Knows it is due now.
She will conceal nothing of consequence
From you, her great-grandchildren
(So distant the relationship,
So near her term),
Will tell you frankly, she has waited
Only for your sincere indifference
To exorcize that filial regard
Which has estranged her, seventy years,
From the folk of her house.
Confessions of old distaste
For music, sighs and roses –
Their false-innocence assaulting her,
Breaching her hard heart;
Of the pleasures of a full purse,
Of clean brass and clean linen,
Of being alone at last;
Disgust with the ailing poor
To whom she was bountiful;
How the prattle of young children
Vexed more than if they whined;
How she preferred cats.
She will say, yes, she acted well,
Took such pride in the art
That none of them suspected, even,
Her wrathful irony
In doing what they asked
Better than they could ask it….
But, ah, how grudgingly her will returned
After the severance of each navel-cord,
And fled how far again,
When again she was kind!
She has outlasted all man-uses,
As was her first resolve:
Happy and idle like a port
After the sea’s recession,
She does not misconceive the nature
Of shipmen or of ships.
Hear her, therefore, as the latest voice;
The intervening generations (drifting
On tides of fancy still), ignore.
NO MORE GHOSTS
The patriarchal bed with four posts
Which was a harbourage of ghosts
Is hauled out from the attic glooms
And cut to wholesome furniture for wholesome rooms;
Where they (the ghosts) confused, abused, thinned,
Forgetful how they sighed and sinned,
Cannot disturb our ordered ease
Except as summer dust tickles the nose to sneeze.
We are restored to simple days, are free
From cramps of dark necessity,
And one another recognize
By an immediate love that signals at our eyes.
No new ghosts can appear. Their poor cause
Was that time freezes, and time thaws;
But here only such loves can last
As do not ride upon the weathers of the past.
LEAVING THE REST UNSAID
Finis, apparent on an earlier page,
With fallen obelisk for colophon,
Must this be here repeated?
Death has been ruefully announced
And to die once is death enough,
Be sure, for any life-time.
Must the book end, as you would end it,
With testamentary appendices
And graveyard indices?
But no, I will not lay me down
To let your tearful music mar
The decent mystery of my progress.
So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,
Rising in air as on a gander’s wing
At a careless comma,
From No More Ghosts
(1940)
THE GLUTTON
Beyond the Atlas roams a glutton
Lusty and sleek, a shameless robber,
Sacred to Aethiopian Aphrodite;
The aborigines harry it with darts,
And its flesh is esteemed, though of a fishy tang
Tainting the eater’s mouth and lips.
Ourselves once, wandering in mid-wilderness
And by despair drawn to this diet,
Before the meal was over sat apart
Loathing each other’s carrion company.
A LOVE STORY
The full moon easterly rising, furious,
Against a winter sky ragged with red;
The hedges high in snow, and owls raving –
Solemnities not easy to withstand:
A shiver wakes the spine.
In boyhood, having encountered the scene,
I suffered horror: I fetched the moon home,
With owls and snow, to nurse in my head
Throughout the trials of a new Spring,
Famine unassuaged.
But fell in love, and made a lodgement
Of love on those chill ramparts.
Her image was my ensign: snows melted,
Hedges sprouted, the moon tenderly shone,
The owls trilled with tongues of nightingale.
These were all lies, though they matched the time,
And brought me less than luck: her image
Warped in the weather, turned beldamish.
Then back came winter on me at a bound,
The pallid sky heaved with a moon-quake.
Dangerous it had been with love-notes
To serenade Queen Famine.
In tears I recomposed the former scene,
Let the snow lie, watched the moon rise, suffered the owls,
Paid homage to them of unevent.
THE THIEVES
Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
‘I and you are both away.’
After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
&nbs
p; More completely not to know.
Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.
TO SLEEP
The mind’s eye sees as the heart mirrors:
Loving in part, I did not see you whole,
Grew flesh-enraged that I could not conjure
A whole you to attend my fever-fit
In the doubtful hour between a night and day
And be Sleep that had kept so long away.
Of you sometimes a hand, a brooch, a shoe
Wavered beside me, unarticulated –
As the vexed insomniac dream-forges;
And the words I chose for your voice to speak
Echoed my own voice with its dry creak.
Now that I love you, now that I recall
All scattered elements of will that swooped
By night as jealous dreams through windows
To circle above the beds like bats,
Or as dawn-birds flew blindly at the panes
In curiosity rattling out their brains –
Now that I love you, as not before,
Now you can be and say, as not before:
The mind clears and the heart true-mirrors you
Where at my side an early watch you keep
And all self-bruising heads loll into sleep.
From Work in Hand
(1942)
DAWN BOMBARDMENT
Guns from the sea open against us:
The smoke rocks bodily in the casemate
And a yell of doom goes up.
We count and bless each new, heavy concussion –
Captives awaiting rescue.
Visiting angel of the wild-fire hair
Who in dream reassured us nightly
Where we lay fettered,
Laugh at us, as we wake – our faces
So tense with hope the tears run down.
THE WORMS OF HISTORY
On the eighth day God died; his bearded mouth
That had been shut so long flew open.
So Adam’s too in a dismay like death –
But the world still rolled on around him,
Instinct with all those lesser powers of life
That God had groaned against but not annulled.
‘All-Excellent’, Adam had titled God,
And in his mourning now demeaned himself
As if all excellence, not God, had died;