‘A thread is spun
For every son,’
Said he, ‘of Pyrrha’s brood.’
But great Zeus cursed him, none the less,
With foresight to deplore
The end of that day’s childishness,
And he could eat no more:
His fame would float
Through anecdote
Into dead metaphor.
Then orators from every land,
Caught by the same disease,
With thump of fist or saw of hand
Or sinking to their knees,
Would madly boom
Of the world’s doom
And swords of Damocles.
HOMAGE TO TEXAS
It’s hardly wise to generalize
About a state or city;
But Texan girls are decent girls
And bold as they are pretty.
Who dared the outrageous unicorn
Through lonely woods a-leaping?
Who made him halt and lower his horn
And couch beside her, weeping?
Not Helen (wonder of her sex)
Nor Artemis, nor Pallas;
No, sir: a girl from Houston, Tex.,
Though some claim it was Dallas.
He told her: ‘Ma’am, your Lone Star State,
Though maybe short on schooling,
Outshines the whole bright forty-eight’ –
And so it did, no fooling.
THE DILEMMA
When Time, though granting scope enough
For any conversationalist,
Gives the sworn poet a rebuff,
Should he indeed desist?
Should he to timeless bogs retreat,
His pace slowed to an old man’s pace,
Where antique histories interlace
Around a hearth of peat?
Or, rather, take revenge on Time,
Stalking into those flood-lit stews:
Drown conversation with a crime,
Pause, yell and blow the fuse?
Sadist and masochist in me,
Each boasting himself more than half,
Press the dilemma feverishly
And raise hell if I laugh.
GENERAL BLOODSTOCK’S LAMENT FOR ENGLAND
“This image (seemingly animated) walks with them in the fields in broad Day-light; and if they are employed in delving, harrowing, Seed-sowing or any other Occupation, they are at the same time mimicked by the ghostly Visitant. Men of the Second Sight … call this reflex-man a Co-walker, every way like the Man, as his Twin-brother and Companion, haunting as his Shadow.”
Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth, 1691.
Alas, England, my own generous mother,
One gift I have from you I hate,
The second sight: I see your weird co-walker,
Silver-zoned Albion, stepping in your track,
Mimicking your sad and doubtful gait,
Your clasped hands, your head-shakings, your bent back.
The white hem of a winding sheet
Draws slowly upward from her feet;
Soon it will mount knee-high, then to the thigh.
It crackles like the parchment of the treaties,
Bonds, contracts and conveyances,
With which, beggared and faint and like to die,
You signed away your island sovereignty
To rogues who learned their primer at your knees.
‘¡WELLCOME, TO THE CAVES OF ARTÁ!’
‘They are hollowed out in the see coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Artá in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, wich prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called “The Spider”. There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown forcing visitors have explored them and wrote thier eulogy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.’
From a Tourist leaflet.
Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.
¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Alraedy in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Artá
The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefyed;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.
From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending
You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
‘The Saloon of Thousand Banners’, or ‘The Tumba of Napoleon’,
‘The Grotto of the Rosary’, ‘The Club’, ‘The Camping Tent’.
And at ‘Cavern of the Organ’ there are knocking streange formacions
Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.
¡Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills apprehending
An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is some poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.
TO A POET IN TROUBLE
Cold wife and angry mistress
And debts: all three?
Though they combine to kill you
Be grateful to the Goddess,
(Our cruel patroness),
For this felicity:
Your poems now ring true.
From Poems 1953
(1953)
TO CALLIOPE
Permit me here a simple brief aside,
Calliope,
You who have shown such patience with my pride
And obstinacy:
Am I not loyal to you? I say no less
Than is to say;
If more, only from angry-heartedness,
Not for display.
But you know, I know, and you know I know
My principal curse:
Shame at the mounting dues I have come to owe
A devil of verse,
Who caught me young, ingenuous and uncouth,
Prompting me how
To evade the patent clumsiness of truth –
Which I do now.
No: nothing reads so fresh as I first thought,
Or as you could wish –
Yet must I, when far worse is eagerly bought,
Cry stinking fish?
THE STRAW
Peace, the wild valley streaked with torrents,
A hoopoe perched on his warm rock. Then why
This tremor of the straw between my fingers?
What should I fear? Have I not testimony
In her own hand, signed with her own name
That my love fell as lightning on her heart?
These questions, bird, are not rhetorical.
Watch how the straw twitches and leaps
As though the earth quaked at a distance.
Requited love; but better unrequited
If this chance instrument gives warning
Of cataclysmic anguish far away.
Were she at ease, warmed by the thought of me,
Would not my hand stay steady as this rock?
Have I undone her by my vehemence?
THE FOREBODING
Looking by chance in at the open window
I saw my own self seated
in his chair
With gaze abstracted, furrowed forehead,
Unkempt hair.
I thought that I had suddenly come to die,
That to a cold corpse this was my farewell,
Until the pen moved slowly upon paper
And tears fell.
He had written a name, yours, in printed letters:
One word on which bemusedly to pore –
No protest, no desire, your naked name,
Nothing more.
Would it be tomorrow, would it be next year?
But the vision was not false, this much I knew;
And I turned angrily from the open window
Aghast at you.
Why never a warning, either by speech or look,
That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?
Already it was too late: the bait swallowed,
The hook fast.
CRY FAUGH!
Caria and Philistia considered
Only pre-marital adventures wise;
The bourgeois French argue contrariwise.
Socrates and Plato burked the issue
(Namely, how man-and-woman love should be)
With homosexual ideology.
Apocalyptic Israelites, foretelling
The Imminent End, called only for a chaste
Sodality: all dead below the waist.
Curious, various, amoral, moral –
Tell me, what elegant square or lumpish hamlet
Lives free from nymphological disquiet?
‘Yet males and females of the lower species
Contrive to eliminate the sexual problem,’
Scientists ponder: ‘Why not learn from them?’
Cry faugh! on science, ethics, metaphysics,
On antonyms of sacred and profane –
Come walk with me, love, in a golden rain
Past toppling colonnades of glory,
The moon alive on each uptilted face:
Proud remnants of a visionary race.
HERCULES AT NEMEA
Muse, you have bitten through my fool’s-finger.
Fierce as a lioness you seized it
In your white teeth most amorously;
And I stared back, dauntless and fiery-eyed,
Challenging you to maim me for my pride.
See me a fulvous hero of nine fingers –
Sufficient grasp for bow and arrow.
My beard bristles in exultation:
Let all Nemea look and understand
Why you have set your mark on this right hand.
DIALOGUE ON THE HEADLAND
She: You’ll not forget these rocks and what I told you?
He: How could I? Never: whatever happens.
She: What do you think might happen?
Might you fall out of love? – did you mean that?
He: Never, never! ‘Whatever’ was a sop
For jealous listeners in the shadows.
She: You haven’t answered me. I asked:
‘What do you think might happen?’
He: Whatever happens: though the skies should fall
Raining their larks and vultures in our laps –
She: ‘Though the seas turn to slime’ – say that –
‘Though water-snakes be hatched with six heads.’
He: Though the seas turn to slime, or tower
In an arching wave above us, three miles high –
She: ‘Though she should break with you’ – dare you say that?
‘Though she deny her words on oath.’
He: I had that in my mind to say, or nearly;
It hurt so much I choked it back.
She: How many other days can’t you forget?
How many other loves and landscapes?
He: You are jealous?
She: Damnably.
He: The past is past.
She: And this?
He: Whatever happens, this goes on.
She: Without a future? Sweetheart, tell me now:
What do you want of me? I must know that.
He: Nothing that isn’t freely mine already.
She: Say what is freely yours and you shall have it.
He: Nothing that, loving you, I could dare take.
She: O, for an answer with no ‘nothing’ in it!
He: Then give me everything that’s left.
She: Left after what?
He: After whatever happens:
Skies have already fallen, seas are slime,
Watersnakes poke and peer six-headedly –
She: And I lie snugly in the Devil’s arms.
He: I said: ‘Whatever happens.’ Are you crying?
She: You’ll not forget me – ever, ever, ever?
LOVERS IN WESTER
The posture of the tree
Shows the prevailing wind;
And ours, long misery
When you are long unkind.
But forward, look, we lean –
Not backward as in doubt –
And still with branches green
Ride our ill weather out.
ESAU AND JUDITH
Robbed of his birthright and his blessing
Esau sought refuge in the wilderness,
An outlaw girding at the world’s deceit.
He took to wife Judith, daughter of Heth,
Tall and grey-eyed, a priestess of her grove.
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
She was that sea which God had held corrupt;
Her tides he praised and her curvetting fish,
Though with no comprehension of their ways;
As a man blind from birth fondly adores
Fantasies of imagined gold and blue –
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
For how might Esau strive against his blood?
Had Isaac and Rebekah not commanded:
‘Take thee a daughter from thy father’s house!’ –
Isaac who played the pander with Rebekah,
Even as Abraham had done with Sarah?
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
THE MARK
If, doubtful of your fate,
You seek to obliterate
And to forget
The counter-mark I set
In the warm blue-veined nook
Of your elbow crook,
How can you not repent
The experiment?
No knife nor fang went in
To lacerate the skin;
Nor may the eye
Tetter or wen descry:
The place which my lips pressed
Is coloured like the rest
And fed by the same blood
Of womanhood.
Acid, pumice-stone,
Lancings to the bone,
Would be in vain.
Here must the mark remain
As witness to such love
As nothing can remove
Or blur, or hide,
Save suicide.
WITH THE GIFT OF A RING
If one of thy two loves be wroth
And cry: ‘Thou shalt not love us both,
Take one or ’tother!’, O then choose
Him that can nothing thee refuse!
Only a rogue would tear a part,
How small soever, from thy heart;
As Adam sought to plunder Eve’s
(What time they clad themselves in leaves),
Conjuring her to make an end
Of dalliance with her cursèd friend –
Too late, now she had learned to tell
False love from true, and ill from well.
LIADAN AND CURITHIR
Even in childhood
Liadan never would
Accept love simply,
But stifled longing
And went away to sing
In strange company.
Alas, for Liadan!
To fear perfection
Was her ill custom:
Cho
osing a scruple
That might seem honourable,
For retreat therefrom.
Herself she enticed
To be nunned for Christ,
Though in marriage sought
By a master-poet
On whom her heart was set –
Curithir of Connaught;
And raised a wall
As it were of crystal
Her grief around.
He might not guess
The cause of her fickleness
Nor catch one sound.
She was walled soon after
Behind stones and mortar,
From whence too late
He heard her keening,
Sighing and complaining
Of her dire self-hate.
THE SEA HORSE
Since now in every public place
Lurk phantoms who assume your walk and face,
You cannot yet have utterly abjured me
Nor stifled the insistent roar of sea.
Do as I do: confide your unquiet love
(For one who never owed you less than love)
To this indomitable hippocamp,
Child of your element, coiled a-ramp,
Having ridden out worse tempests than you know of;
Under his horny ribs a blood-red stain
Portends renewal of our pain.
Sweetheart, make much of him and shed
Tears on his taciturn dry head.
THE DEVIL AT BERRY POMEROY
Snow and fog unseasonable,
The cold remarkable,
Children sickly;
Green fruit lay thickly
Under the crab-tree
And the wild cherry.
I heard witches call
Their imps to the Hall:
‘Hey, Ilemauzar,
Sack-and-Sugar,
Peck-in-the-Crown,
Come down, come down!’
I heard bells toll
For a monster’s soul
That was born, half dead,
With a double head;
I saw ghosts leap
From the ruined keep;
I saw blows thwack
On the raw back
Of a dying ass.
Blight was on the grass,
Poison in the cup
(Lover, drink up!),
With envy, slander,
Weasels a-wander,
Incest done
Between mother and son,
Murder of hags
For their money-bags,
Wrath, rape,