Harp falls silent –
For lack of strings,
Not for lack of love.
PITY
Sickness may seem a falling out of love,
With pleas for pity– love’s lean deputy.
If so, refuse me pity, wait, love on:
Never outlaw me while I yet live.
The day may come when you too, falling sick,
Implore my pity. Let me, too, refuse it
Offering you, instead, my pitiless love.
SILENT VISIT
I was walking my garden
Judiciously, calmly,
Curved mattock in hand
Heavy basket on shoulder,
When all of a sudden
You kissed me most kindly
From forehead to chin,
Though arriving unseen
As a pledge of love-magic
And wordlessly even.
Had you come, long-announced,
Wearing velvets and silk
After travels of grandeur
From Greece to the Yemen,
Socotra and Aden
With no rapture of silence
Nor rapture of absence –
No poem to greet you,
No burst of green glory
From trees in my garden….
But you came, a grown woman,
No longer the child
Whom I loved well enough
When your age was just seven –
Who would enter alone
The close thickets of Eden
And there would run wild.
CORONET OF MOONLIGHT
Such was the circumstance of our first love:
Sea, silence, a full moon.
Nevertheless, even the same silence
Amended by a distant nightingale
From the same past, and gently heaving surf,
Brings me no sure revival of our dream –
For to be surely with you is to sleep,
Having well earned my coronet of moonlight
By no mere counting of processional sheep.
SONG: TO BECOME EACH OTHER
To love you truly
I must become you,
And so to love you
I must leave behind
All that was not you:
All jewelled phantoms,
All fabrications
Of a jealous mind.
For man and woman
To become each other
Is far less hard
Than would seem to be:
An eternal serpent
With eyes of emerald
Stands curled around
This blossoming tree.
Though I seem old
As a castle turret
And you as young
As the grass beneath
It is no great task
To become each other
Where nothing honest
Goes in fear of death.
HEAVEN
Laugh still, write always lovingly, for still
You neither will nor can deny your heart,
Which always was a poet’s,
Even while our ways are cruelly swept apart.
But though the rose I gave you in your childhood
Has never crumbled yellowing into dust
Neither as yet have needles pricked your conscience,
Which also is a poet’s,
To attempt the miracles which one day you must.
Meanwhile reject their Heaven, but guard our own
Here on this needle-point, immediately
Accessible, not sprawled like theirs across
Limitless outer space. If to those angels
We seem a million light-years yet unborn,
And cannot more concern them than they us,
Let our own Heaven, with neither choir nor throne
Nor janitor, rest inexpugnable
And private for our gentler love alone.
GROWING PAINS
My earliest love, that stabbed and lacerated,
Must I accept it as it seemed then –
Although still closely documented, dated
And even irreversibly annotated
By your own honest pen?
Love never lies, even when it most enlarges
Dimensions, griefs, or charges,
But, come what must, remains
Irrevocably true to its worst growing pains.
FRIDAY NIGHT
On the brink of sleep, stretched in a wide bed,
Rain pattering at the windows
And proud waves booming against granite rocks:
Such was our night of glory.
Thursday had brought us dreams only of evil,
As the muezzin warned us:
‘Forget all nightmare once the dawn breaks,
Prepare for holy Friday!’
Friday brings dreams only of inward love
So overpassing passion
That no lips reach to kiss, nor hands to clasp,
Nor does foot press on foot
We wait until the lamp has flickered out
Leaving us in full darkness,
Each still observant of the other’s lively
Sighs of pure content.
Truth is prolonged until the grey dawn:
Her face floating above me,
Her black hair falling cloudlike to her breasts,
Her lovely eyes half-open.
THE PACT
The identity of opposites had linked us
In our impossible pact of only love
Which, being a man, I honoured to excess
But you, being woman, quietly disregarded –
Though loving me no less –
And, when I would have left you, envied me
My unassuageable positivity.
POOR OTHERS
Hope, not Love, (wangles her single string
Monotonously and in broken rhythms.
Can Hope deserve praise?
I fell in love with you, as you with me.
Hope envies us for being otherwise
Than honest Hope should be.
No charm avails against the evil eye
Of envy but to spit into our bosoms
And so dissemble
That we are we and not such luckless others
As hope and tremble,
Shifting the blame to fathers or to mothers
For being themselves, not others:
Alas, poor others!
A TOAST TO DEATH
This is, indeed, neither the time nor the place
For victory celebrations. Victory over what?
Over Death, his grinning image and manifesto
Of which, as children, we have been forewarned
And offered a corpse’s frigid hand to kiss.
Contrariwise, let me raise this unsteady glass
In a toast to Death, the sole deviser of life,
Our antenatal witness when each determined
Sex, colour, humour, religion, limit of years,
Parents, place, date of birth –
A full conspectus, with ourselves recognized
As viable capsules lodged in the fifth dimension,
Never to perish, time being irrelevant,
And the reason for which, and sole excuse, is love –
Tripled togetherness of you with me.
THE YOUNG SIBYL
The swing has its bold rhythm,
Yet a breeze in the trees
Varies the music for her
As down the apples drop
In a row on her lap.
Though still only a child
She must become our Sibyl,
A holder of the apple
Prophesying wild
Histories for her people.
Five apples in a row,
Each with ruddy cheeks,
So too her own cheeks glow
As the long swing creaks,
Pulsing to and fro
RE
CORDS
Accept these records of pure love
With no end or beginning, written for
Yourself alone, not the abashed world,
Timeless therefore –
Whose exaltations clearly tell
Of a past pilgrimage through hell,
Which in the name of love I spare you.
Hell is my loneliness, not ours,
Else we should harrow it together.
Love, have you walked worse hells even than I,
Through echoing silence where no midge or fly
Buzzes – hells boundless, without change of weather?
THE FLOWERING ALOE
The century-plant has flowered, its golden blossom
Showering honey from seven times our height:
Now the stock withers fast and wonder ends.
Yet from its roots eventually will soar
Another stock to enchant your great-grandchildren
But vex my jealous, uninvited ghost,
These being no blood of mine.
CIRCUS RING
How may a lover draw two bows at once
Or ride two steeds at once,
Firm in the saddle?
Yet these are master-feats you ask of me
Who loves you crazily
When in the circus ring you rock astraddle
Your well-matched bay and grey –
Firing sharp kisses at me.
AGELESS REASON
We laugh, we frown, our fingers twitch
Nor can we yet prognosticate
How we shall learn our fate –
The occasion when, the country which –
Determined only that this season
Of royal tremulous possession
Shall find its deathless reason.
AS WHEN THE MYSTIC
To be lost for good to the gay self-esteem
That carried him through difficult years of childhood,
To be well stripped of all tattered ambitions
By his own judgement, now scorning himself
As past redemption –
this is anticipation
Of true felicity, as when the mystic
Starved, frightened, purged, assaulted and ignobled
Drinks Eleusinian ambrosia
From a gold cup and walks in Paradise.
UNPOSTED LETTER
(1963)
Do you still love, once having shared love’s secret
With a man born to it?
Then sleep no more in graceless beds, untrue
To love, where jealousy of the secret
May scorch away your childlike sheen of virtue –
Did he not confer crown, orb and sceptre
On a single-hearted, single-fated you?
BIRTH OF A GODDESS
It was John the Baptist, son to Zechariah,
Who assumed the cloak of God’s honest Archangel
And mouthpiece born on Monday, Gabriel,
And coming where his cousin Mary span
Her purple thread or stitched a golden tassel
For the curtain of the Temple Sanctuary,
Hailed her as imminent mother, not as bride –
Leaving the honest virgin mystified.
Nor would it be a man-child she must bear:
Foreseen by John as a Messiah sentenced
To ransom all mankind from endless shame –
But a Virgin Goddess cast in her own image
And bearing the same name.
BEATRICE AND DANTE
He, a grave poet, fell in love with her.
She, a mere child, fell deep in love with love
And, being a child, illumined his whole heart.
From her clear conspect rose a whispering
With no hard words in innocency held back –
Until the day that she became woman,
Frowning to find her love imposed upon:
A new world beaten out in her own image –
For his own deathless glory.
THE DILEMMA
Tom Noddy’s body speaks, not so his mind;
Or his mind speaks, not so Tom Noddy’s body.
Undualistic truth is hard to find
For the distressed Tom Noddy.
Mind wanders blindly, body misbehaves;
Body sickens, mind at last repents,
Each calling on the heart, the heart that saves,
Disposes, glows, relents.
Which of these two must poor Tom’s heart obey:
The mind seduced by logical excess
To misbehaviour, or its lonely prey –
The unthinking body sunk in lovelessness?
THE WALL
A towering wall divides your house from mine.
You alone hold the key to the hidden door
That gives you secret passage, north to south,
Changing unrecognizably as you go.
The south side borders on my cherry orchard
Which, when you see, you smile upon and bless.
The north side I am never allowed to visit;
Your northern self I must not even greet,
Nor would you welcome me if I stole through.
I have a single self, which never alters
And which you love more than the whole world
Though you fetch nothing for me from the north
And can bring nothing back. To be a poet
Is to have no wall parting his domain,
Never to change. Whenever you stand by me
You are the Queen of poets, and my judge.
Yet you return to play the Mameluke
Speaking a language alien to our own.
WOMEN AND MASKS
Translated from Gábor Devecseri’s Hungarian
Women and masks: an old familiar story.
Life slowly drains away and we are left
As masks of what we were. The living past
Rightly respects all countenances offered
As visible sacrifices to the gods
And clamps them fast even upon live faces.
Let face be mask then, or let mask be face –
Mankind can take its ease, may assume godhead.
Thus God from time to time descends in power
Graciously, not to a theologian’s hell
But to our human hell enlaced with heaven.
Let us wear masks once worn in the swift circlings
And constant clamour of a holy dance
Performed always in prayer, in the ecstasy
Of love-hate murder – today’s children always
Feeling, recording, never understanding.
Yet this old woman understands, it seems,
At least the unimportance of half-knowledge,
Her face already become mask, her teeth
Wide-gapped as though to scare us, her calm face
Patterned with wrinkles in unchanging grooves
That outlive years, decades and centuries.
Hers is a mask remains exemplary
For countless generations. Who may wear it?
She only, having fashioned it herself.
So long as memory lasts us, it was hers.
Behind it she assembles her rapt goodness,
Her gentle worth already overflooding
The mask, her prison, shaming its fierce, holy
Terror: for through its gaping sockets always
Peer out a pair of young and lovely eyes.
TILTH
(‘Robert Graves, the British veteran, is no longer in the poetic swim. He still resorts to traditional metres and rhyme, and to such out-dated words as tilth; withholding his 100% approbation also from contemporary poems that favour sexual freedom.’
From a New York critical weekly)
Gone are the drab monosyllabic days
When ‘agricultural labour’ still was tilth;
And ‘100% approbation’, praise;
And ‘pornographic modernism’, filth –
Yet still
I stand by tilth and filth and praise.
THE LAST FISTFUL
He won her Classic races, at the start,
With a sound wind, strong legs and gallant heart;
Yet she reduced his fodder day by day
Till she had sneaked the last fistful away –
When, not unnaturally, the old nag died
Leaving her four worn horseshoes and his hide.
THE TRADITIONALIST
Respect his obstinacy of undefeat,
His hoarding of tradition,
Those hands hung loosely at his side
Always prepared for hardening into fists
Should any fool waylay him,
His feet prepared for the conquest of crags
Or a week’s march to the sea.
If miracles are recorded in his presence
As in your own, remember
These are no more than time’s obliquities
Gifted to men who still fall deep in love
With real women like you.
THE PREPARED STATEMENT
The Prepared Statement is a sure stand-by
For business men and Ministers. A lie
Blurted by thieves caught in the very act
Shows less regard, no doubt, for the act’s fact
But more for truth; and all good thieves know why.
ST ANTONY OF PADUA
Love, when you lost your keepsake,
The green-eyed silver serpent,
And called upon St Antony
To fetch it back again,
The fact was that such keepsakes
Must never become idols
And meddle with the magic
That chains us with its chain:
Indeed the tears it cost you
By sliding from your finger
Was Antony’s admonishment
That magic must remain
Dependent on no silver ring
Nor serpent’s emerald eyes
But equally unalterable,
Acceptable and plain…
Yet none the less St Antony
(A blessing on his honesty!)
Proved merciful to you and me
And found that ring again.
BROKEN COMPACT
It was not he who broke their compact;
But neither had he dared to warn her