Nor youth so respectful,

  We made no contradiction,

  Though Grandfather was mistaken–

  Or we held that conviction.

  Now fifty years have passed,

  But when likewise I complain

  To my three rude young grandsons,

  And angrily maintain

  That beer is not so hearty,

  Nor such good songs sung,

  Nor bread baked so wholesome

  As when myself was young,

  Nor youth so respectful,

  I meet with contradiction–

  Though with fact, and solid fact,

  To support my conviction.

  You may call me a liar,

  Grandchildren, without fear …

  Yet ask your nearest brewer

  If he still brews honest beer,

  Or ask your nearest baker

  If he still bakes honest bread,

  Then come back here to-morrow

  To tell me what they said;

  Or sing me whatever

  You may think is still a song,

  And I’ll make no contradiction

  But leave you in the wrong.

  SONG: A BEACH IN SPAIN

  Young wives enjoy the statutory right

  To slam the door, whether by day or night;

  Young husbands, too, are privileged to spend

  Long hours in bars, each with a chosen friend.

  But tell me can such independence prove

  More than a simple lack of love,

  More than a simple lack of love?

  O how can you regain

  Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?

  Or though the nuptial contract, that deters

  Adulteresses and adulterers,

  May sweetly mortalize the venial sin

  Of beach flirtation after too much gin,

  Can such experiments in marriage prove

  More than a simple lack of love,

  More than a simple lack of love?

  O how can you regain

  Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?

  And if your OPERATION JEALOUSY

  Should end with corpses tossing in the sea,

  Both of you having sworn in hell’s despite

  Never to panic or break off the fight,

  Can such heroic beach-head battles prove

  More than a simple lack of love,

  More than a simple lack of love?

  O how can you regain

  Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?

  BATHUNTS AT BATHURST

  (Australian fantasy provoked by a Spanish compositor’s end-of-line hyphens)

  Bat-

  hurst’s famed bath-

  unts are led uph-

  ill by

  Swart bat-

  hat-

  tendants, bold Jehos-

  hop-

  hats,

  Toph-

  eavily toffed up in tall toph-

  ats,

  Who, in the sooth-

  ung top-

  het (where bats fly),

  Clutc-

  hing bath-

  andles with poth-

  unting glee,

  Hoth-

  eadedly do lat-

  her bats with bats.

  TO A CARICATURIST, WHO GOT ME WRONG

  Every gentleman knows

  Just when to wear the wrong clo’es,

  And naturally that

  Will include the wrong hat.

  Merchants (the bright ones)

  Always wear the right ones;

  As do also those asses,

  The professional classes.

  Beggars have no choice,

  Convicts no voice,

  Cads and kings go dressed

  Always in their best;

  And as for me

  In my dubious category

  Which, yes,

  You need hardly press,

  I wear (or do not wear)

  Whatever I dare,

  Or whatever comes to hand,

  Sometimes pretty grand,

  Sometimes just so,

  Sometimes scare-crow,

  But was never seen to choose

  Either sandals or suede shoes,

  No, sir, not I–

  Nor an Old Carthusian tie.

  IN JORROCKS’S WAREHOUSE

  One hundred years ago, hard-riding Mr Jorrocks

  Came an almighty purler at a five-barred gate,

  Lapsed into science-fiction, and forgot his date.

  Afterwards, in the warehouse, superficially healed

  With a pair of bloody steaks, vinegar and brown paper,

  Jorrocks addressed Bob Dubbs, sportsman and linen-draper:

  ‘At Jorrocks’s Super-Logistical Universe Mart

  Sales traffic has been canalized, as from today;

  Watch out for the amber-light, buyers, and on your way!

  ‘Follow the desired illuminated moving band–

  I 10 for Marine Insurance, I 12 for Isotopes–

  All goods displayed from Samoyedes to Edible Soaps.

  ‘No supererogatory thank you, welcome, or goodbye.

  Our assistants are deaf mutes, robots, zombies and such;

  Your duty is to choose, point, pay and never touch.

  ‘Goods found defective cannot, of course, be replaced–

  See Conditions of Jorrocks’s Universe Mart.

  Customers are warned to realistically play their part.

  ‘Band C 305 will convey them to Complaints,

  If they find the stock we carry is not, in fact, their meat,

  And a greasy slide will deposit them, bonk! in the street’

  Bob Dubbs the linen-draper listened in wide-eyed horror.

  It made worse sense than the Reverend Silas Phipp’s

  Dominical Exegesis of the Apocalypse.

  Though I could, no doubt, invent a whip-crack ending,

  This simple moral, reader, should be enough for you:

  ‘Never charge at a five-barred gate on a broken-winded screw.’

  A FEVER

  Where the room may be, I do not know.

  It is beamed and parquetted,

  With yew-logs charring on a broad hearth,

  Curtains of taffeta, chairs of cherry,

  And a rough wolfskin to lie at ease upon

  Naked before the fire in half-darkness;

  The shadowy bed behind.

  Who she may be I do not know,

  Nor do I know her nation.

  She is truthful, she is tender,

  In everything a woman, but for the claws:

  Her skin moon-blanched, her arms lissom,

  Her tawny tresses hanging free,

  Her frown eloquent.

  What we do together, that I know;

  But when, eludes me;

  Whether long ago, one night, or never …

  Meaning? Meaning in some recess of Time,

  Untemporal yet sure …

  Why should it irk me? Now I must sleep–

  She says so with her frown.

  AUGEIAS AND I

  Now like the cattle byre of Augeias

  My work-room, Hercules, calls for the flood

  Of Alpheus and Peneius, green as glass,

  To hurtle down in catastrophic mood

  And free me from accumulated piles

  Of books, trays, journals, bulging letter-files.

  In memory often, I remount the stairs

  To that top room where once a sugar-case

  Served me for chair – the house was poor in chairs –

  A broken wash-stand lent me writing space,

  And one wax-candle cast a meagre light;

  Where all I wrote was what I itched to write.

  Augeias, though, if he had dunged the trees,

  Cornland, and pot-herb garden studiously,

  Would not have needed help from Hercules;

  We stand accused of careless husbandry


  When nothing less than floods or cleansing fire

  Can purge my work-room and his cattle byre.

  IS IT PEACE?

  ‘What peace,’ came Jehu’s answering yell,

  ‘While Jezebel is Jezebel?’–

  But when the hungry pariahs cease

  To gnaw her bones, will that bring peace?

  Why (harlot though she were, or worse)

  Could he not leave her to God’s curse?

  Rather than pamper their unclean

  Bellies with blood of a live queen?

  Two wars, world wars. I lost in one

  My cousins; in the next, a son–

  That scarcely finished with, I heard

  Dismal prognoses of a third.

  Yet – since no signed memorial,

  Nor bannered march, nor crowded hall

  Our Jehus can, it seems, restrain

  From bawling ‘Jezebel!’ again –

  Unrealistically (or not?)

  I cultivate my garden plot

  Where peppers, corn and sea kale sprout

  Careless of strontium fallout.

  FINGERS IN THE NESTING BOX

  My heart would be faithless

  If ever I forgot

  My farm-house adventure

  One day by the fowl run

  When Phoebe (of the fringe

  And the fairy-story face)

  Incited me to forage

  Under speckled feathers

  For the first time.

  Fabulous I thought it,

  Fabulous and fateful

  (Before familiarity

  With the fond pastime

  My feelings blunted),

  To clasp in frightened fingers

  A firm, warm, round…

  ‘Phoebe, dear Phoebe,

  What have I found?’

  BARABBAS’S SUMMER LIST

  Barabbas, once a publisher

  But currently Prime Minister,

  Writes – not of course in his own fist –

  ‘May we include you in our List’

  (Across the Times in glory spread

  With Baths and Garters at its head)?

  ‘Your graceful lyric work,’ says he,

  ‘Fully deserves a C.B.E.’

  I ask my agents, Messrs. Watt,

  Whether I should accept or not.

  Few agents are so tough as these

  At battling with Barabbases:

  The mongoose in his cobra-war

  Provides a perfect metaphor.

  ‘Barabbas ought to raise his price

  By five per cent,’ is Watt’s advice.

  STABLE DOOR

  Watch how my lank team-fellow strains

  Home up the last incline!

  His joints creak, but his heart remains

  As obdurate as mine.

  Our crib may well contain no feed,

  The skies may be our roof,

  Yet should two foundered horses need

  To clack an angry hoof

  In their death-dream of oats and hay,

  A dry, well-littered floor,

  And Sam the ostler, whistling gay,

  Drunk by the stable door?

  FLIGHT REPORT

  To be in so few hours translated from

  Picking blood-oranges, mandarins, mimosa,

  Roses and violets in my Spanish garden,

  Where almonds also bloom like old men’s polls

  And olive twigs bow under wrinkled berries –

  To be in so few hours translated here

  Three miles above the frantic, chill Atlantic,

  Is something monstrous.

  Tell me, how should I act?

  Bored (as do my seasoned fellow-birds),

  Recalling equally sensational flights

  I have taken in my mind’s own empyrean?

  Or should I register rustic amaze?

  The captain in his cockpit tilts the craft

  To enchant us with what Coleridge never saw:

  An iceberg, towering up from grey pack ice,

  Through which the sun, whose dawn we long delayed,

  Shines green as emerald – or greener, even.

  Fasten your belts! And down we drop at Gander,

  In a snowstorm, among firs of Newfoundland,

  Then battle against head-winds five hours more

  To New York, is it?

  And this all began

  Monstrously at a Barcelona counter

  Where a suave clerk, his mind on smaller things,

  Sold me my round-trip-ticket, with disdain

  Checking the banknotes as I paid them out,

  And grudged me even a formal ban voyage!

  SCHOOL HYMN FOR ST TRINIAN’S

  Allegro Come, playmates, lift your girlish hands

  In prayer to sweet St Trinian.

  With eyes like fiery brands, he stands –

  Cleft hoof and bat-like pinion!

  He fosters all your little deeds

  Of maidenly unkindness;

  His foul intentions flower like weeds;

  He smites the Staff with blindness.

  With ink and stink-bomb be content,

  Likewise the classroom rocket,

  His more conventional armament.

  (An H-bomb bags the pocket.)

  CHORUS

  Maestoso Learning to be a be-utiful lay-aydee

  You can if you try;

  Learning to be a be-utiful lay-aydee

  In the sweet by - and - by.

  1960–1974

  A PIEBALD’S TAIL

  Fame is the tail of Pegasus

  (A piebald horse with wings),

  One thought of which away will twitch

  The luck his colour brings.

  It follows logically, of course,

  That poets always fail

  Who try to catch their piebald horse

  By snatching at his tail.

  THE INTRUDERS

  I ask the young daughter

  Of Jetto, a painter,

  (Disclosing three faces,

  Two bold and one fainter,

  On Jetto’s Moon Chart):

  How dare these scapegraces,

  These odd bodikins,

  Who would once hide their grins

  Among wall-paper roses

  Or carved lambrequins,

  Flaunt pantomime noses

  And Carnival chins

  In abstractionist art?

  But Jetto’s young daughter

  Has drawn me apart

  And pleads for the faces:

  ‘Don’t show them to Father!

  He’ll turn black as thunder

  To see their grimaces –

  He’ll bury them under

  Whole tubefuls of madder,

  He’ll widow my heart.’

  TEIRESIAS

  Courtship of beasts

  And courtship of birds:

  How delightful to witness

  In fullness of Spring

  When swallows fly madly

  In chase of each other,

  Prairie-dogs tumble,

  Wild ponies cavort,

  And the bower-bird proffers

  Spectacular gifts

  To the hen of his choice!

  But as for the stark act

  That consummates courtship:

  Are not dusky rock-caverns

  And desolate fastnesses,

  Tangle of jungle

  And blackness of night,

  The refuges chosen

  By all honest creatures

  That pricked by love’s arrow

  Perform the said act?

  Then despite curs or roosters,

  Bulls, ganders or houseflies,

  Or troops in sacked cities

  Forgetful of shame,

  It is surely a duty

  Entailed in our beasthood

  To turn and go dumbly

  Averting the eye,

  Should we blunder on lovers

  Well couch
ed in a forest

  Who thought themselves free?

  Courtship of beasts

  And courtship of birds:

  How delightful to witness

  In fullness of Spring!

  But be warned by Teiresias,

  Thebes’ elder prophet,

  Who saw two snakes coupling

  And crept up behind.

  He for six years or seven

  Was robbed of his manhood

  But feigned to care nothing

  And ended stark blind.

  SONG: THE SMILE OF EVE

  Her beauty shall blind you,

  Long as you live;

  She will reap and grind you,

  Bolt you in a sieve,

  Will blink her merry eyes,

  Set your brain a-fire,

  Be womanly and wise,

  Thwart your desire.

  Will trample you, skin you,

  Tear your flesh apart,

  Slice nerve and sinew,

  Nestle at your heart.

  Though her aspect alters

  Your pangs are the same;

  Ready reason falters

  At sound of her name.

  No serpent in his guile

  Nor no goatish man

  Can rob her of the smile

  That with Eve began.

  [VERSE COMPOSED OVER THE TELEPHONE]

  Bullfight critics ranked in rows

  Crowd the enormous Plaza full;

  But only one is there who knows

  And he’s the man who fights the bull.

  [FIR AND YEW]

  Fir, womb of silver pain,

  Yew, tomb of leaden grief–

  Viragoes of one vein,

  Alike in leaf-

  With arms up-flung

  Taunt us in the same tongue:

  ‘Here Jove’s own coffin-cradle swung’.

  SONG: GARDENS CLOSE AT DUSK

  City parks and gardens close

  Before day has ended,

  To discourage crime for which

  They were not intended.

  Yet when moonlight lawns resume

  The private peace they merit,

  Why are boys and girls in love

  Told they may not share it?

  [PRIVACY]

  Privacy finds herself a nook

  In bold print of an open book

  Which few have eyes to read; the rest

  (If studiously inclined) will look

  For cypher or for palimpsest.

  MATADOR GORED

  A breeze fluttered the cape and you were caught:

  One thrust under your jaw, one in the belly,

  A third clean through the groin. Nevertheless,