Man was, and had been, and would always be
What Homer, Seneca, Thucydides,
Xenophon, Cicero, and more like these
Had limned. They saw their legislative task
As somehow philosophical, would ask,
As Jefferson and Lincoln once did, the one
Sound question: What is man, what must be done
By government, man’s servant, to fulfil
The deeper longings of his higher will?
For politics was metaphysics, art,
Eloquence, knowledge of the human heart,
That is now sunk into a disrepute
Shameful and shameless, all too absolute.
This year will pose the question once again:
Where shall we go to seek superior men?
Superior in what? – a voice asks then:
The answer: In no more than being men.
The great technician’s no superior man –
Only a larger type of artesan,
Extensive of his system or machine.
We need philosophers, not men who’ve been
Exalted through their skill at shyster’s tricks
Who shell out shibboleths, who fox, who fix,
Committed to the timocratic view
That wealth is power, and neither is for you.
Add wealth and power to vulgar ignorance,
And you can tune up for our Totentanz.
The worship of the base is here to stay:
I heard a British union leader say:
‘They brought the plain men where they are today,
The great men: let them sleep, their task is done.’
Exactly. Let your son, and your son’s son,
Inherit demo-ethics, demo-art,
And learn this demo-decalogue by heart;
First, order your instructors what to teach,
Since a man’s grasp must not exceed his reach:
Spit on the higher values when you can,
Unsanctified by democratic man;
Permit free speech, though, since it can’t effect
A blasting of the walls of the elect:
To slay – what is it but to put to sleep?
Computers cost much, human souls are cheap.
Lie all you wish, for who knows what truth is?
Play games among the ruined languages,
Jettison why and concentrate on how;
Assign a prime reality to now;
Deny responsibility for then;
Consume and damn posterity – amen.
To opt out of this midden into dreams –
Communes or opiates – to many seems
The desperate one solution. I say: turn
Once more to the necessity to learn,
Not make a tabula rasa of your head,
But cram it with philosophy instead;
Leave inarticulacy to the loathed
Nude apes up there: let us at least be clothed,
Attack from knowledge and not just from rage:
Reject from reason. In another age,
Your fathers spoke thus, and did not the grey
Poet on Paumanok cry out: Obey
Little; resist much – let those four words be
A lasting slogan for the polity?
Love man the social animal, but hate,
On principle, the engine called the State;
Burn out the evil centre, and resolve
To flaunt a banner blazoned with Devolve,
Devolve. Then, last, remember Maynard Keynes:
People alone have virtue in their veins;
All governments are evil. This he knew.
Comparatively, things go well for you,
America. I know – smog makes you cough,
Too many citizens are badly off
(Meaning, by Asian standards, millionaires),
The story of West 77th Street scares
The living daylights out of us – but still
Shocked citizens attempt to work their will
(Devolve, devolve) despite the apathy.
Your dreams, like ours, revolve on bankruptcy,
Moral or fiscal, both, inflation and
Entropy. Here, in Italy’s sad land
(Gorgeous December sheens Bracciano’s lake,
Clear as a bell beyond, my tired eyes take
Soracte in, that Horace used to know,
All candidly nival, tipped with snow),
Bankruptcy sits beside us, walks the streets,
Takes coffee in the café, chats and eats,
A trusted friend, which never lets you down.
Bankruptcy blows and petrifies the town,
Shuts the museums, spares the mailman’s boots,
Blanks out the teevoo, clears the roads, recruits
Spray-gunning thugs who scrawl Death on the plinths,
Chokes up the bureaucratic labyrinths,
Hides oil and salt, makes impotent the laws,
But places truncheons in the policeman’s paws.
Inflation? Ah, we beat all records here –
A 20 (minimal) % per year.
England, my country, mother of the free,
Is crammed with paper money too. You’ll see
Financial columns crammed with reasons why:
The petromoney of the sheiks, the sly
Printing of empty paper by the State,
The blackmail of the unions, some great
Cryptoconspiracy all bloody red
That loves to strike and, striking, strikes us dead.
So England shivers, and the coal’s undug,
Darkness abets the murder and the mug,
And light and heat assume definitive
Value – i.e., more than one has to give.
‘The oil is Allah’s,’ yodels the bilal,
‘Therefore the Peoples of the Scriptures shall
Learn who the Chosen People really are.’
So freezing people on a cooling star
Envy the Indians, who rarely freeze
But die instead from other maladies.
We’re all in this – you there and we back here –
Seeing fresh millions added every year
To swell the hordes of those ordained to starve.
The rich man has a juicy joint to carve,
But no joint’s big enough to palliate
The hunger of the hundreds at the gate.
Hinc illae lacrimae. A single penny
Is indivisible among the many,
So is a dime, a quarter, dollar – hence
We justify our modest affluence.
Courage! Though life is feeble, life persists
(Persists? Increases, cry the pessimists).
The Orinoco cannibal affirms:
Better for friends to eat you than the worms.
As you believe that men have reached the moon,
Believe that anthropophagy will soon
Solve all our problems, justifying war,
Since here’s a noble cause to wage it for.
The fighting young, the flower of every land,
Will fall in battle and will then be canned.
Try this, the supermarkets will proclaim:
Munch MANCH or MONCH or MENSCH, or some such name.
Meanwhile, although the demonstrator cries:
‘Each time you laugh, another Indian dies’;
Let’s greet old two-faced Janus with dry eyes.
‘Whatever the year brings, it brings nothing new,’
Wrote Rose Macauley. True – it was always true.
Walk on the sidewalk’s edge, avoid the dark,
Watch out for pederasts in Central Park,
Read Plato and not Playboy, cease to try
To see life as a thing to quantify,
Cherish the gunman, guardian of the door,
And you’ll come through. You came through ’74.
PERSONAL VERSE, VIGNETTES, AND OTHER SHORT WORKS
A SONNET FOR THE EMERY COLLE
GIATE INSTITUTE
Temerity – to launch into a sonnet
All unforeknowing what it will contain,
Or whether it will rhyme – whether, again,
Enough rhymes are available – not bonnet.
Upon it (they’ve been used before). I con it
(Five lines complete already) with less pain
Than I anticipated. Don’t disdain
The rhyme that’s coming. Is it? Yes. Doggone it.
Whatever that may mean. Advice: don’t read
A Clockwork Orange – it’s a foul farrago
Of made-up words that bite and bash and bleed.
I’ve written better books beside this lago
Bracciano. So have other men, indeed.
Read Hamlet, Shelley, Keats, Doctor Zhivago.
‘ADVICE TO WOULD-BE WRITERS? SIMPLE. DON’T’
Advice to would-be writers? Simple. Don’t.
Any profession’s preferable to this.
Exhilarating, true, the Muse’s kiss,
But inspiration’s accolades just won’t
Pay rent, buy groceries. To grieve, to groan, t-
-o search for the mot juste, to aim, to miss
The scene or image sought, to brave the hiss
Of critics, feel in bowel, brain and bone t-
Then add to all the public’s crass neglect,
And fellow-authors’ sneering and backbiting.
This, and much more, the tyro must expect.
To launch a book, you’d think, would be exciting –
But ship and builder are too quickly wrecked.
Neglect and poverty have rocks in wait to wreck us.
Writers in general are a wretched sect.
‘I SEND THESE LINES TO YOU IN AGINCOURT’
I send these lines to you in Agincourt
(The right place for Bucannon) and regret
I cannot send a photograph. Any yet
Why should I sell myself so beastly short,
Bestowing transience – the porcine snort
And not the porcine esculence? To let
My ugliness, irrelevant, beget
My lasting image? – No, I’m not that sort.
A man is what he does, not how he seems,
And what he does is what he bids survive.
The voice that booms, the radiant eye that beams
Are nothing – not the honey but the hive.
Faces are things one shudders at in dreams:
The work is what attests the man alive.
THE LAST DAY (TO THE EDITORS, YALE NEWS)
End of the world – cosy, something thrilling
Read in a boy’s book, heard on the radio:
Wells or Welles, apocalyptico-
Cathartic, buildings crashings, voices shrilling,
And me outside the frame, clutching the shilling
Shocker, in an incandescent glow,
Knowing this the ultimate frisson: below
The cindered earth, me saved somehow, God willing.
It will not be that way: no Gabriel’s horn
Over the snarled traffic. A whimper, rather,
Long-drawn and boring. Ravaged earth, forlorn
With crops parched, seas a polluted lather.
A man says: This is the end, for days. But never
Sure. The end could linger for ever.
LATE AS I AM, BUT BLAME THE MAILS, NOT ME (TO MR SELWYN C. GAMBLE)
Late as I am, but blame the mails, not me,
In haste I send the one thing personalised
That I can find – a piece, unpriced, unprized,
Of what I call my talent. As you see,
I roll a sheet in the machine: my free
Fancy is summoned, though weak and undersized
These days, and, prosodically supervised,
Groans in the toils of sonneteering. Be
Assured, O Selwyn Gamble, as you sit
With papal cufflinks there in Mississippi,
Sinatran toupees, even exquisite
Silks from the famous bosomy or hippy,
Socratic pearls, or pisspots from Xanthippe –
This gift’s sincere: don’t wipe your ass with it.
FORGIVE THE LATENESS, PLEASE, OF THIS REPLY (TO MR ALAN FOX)
Forgive the lateness, please, of this reply:
The Italian postal services, alas,
Exist no longer. Should it come to pass
That you receive this, no one more than I
Will be astonished. Hopelessly, I try
Believing that there’ll be a great en masse
Breakthrough, flood of mail. But, patient ass,
I bear the burden still, and wonder why.
Thanks for your praise and thanks for your request.
A photograph? Elizabeth the First
Threw out her mirrors, and I think it best
To avoid the camera. Ugly, also cursed
With only being by my work oppressed,
I’ve no extraneous liquor for your thirst.
‘SOME CONSIDER LOVE IS GREAT’
Some consider love is great
Greater than human hate,
Greater than we estimate.
TO CHAS
If God (if God exists) deliberated
Long on the framing of the human frame
Surely the product would not be the same
As this we have – it’s far too complicated.
God would, presumably, have fabricated
A simple substance, unattacked by shame
(defecation, micturation: home – the horror)
or by illness decimated.
Moreover, there’s no tinge of godly justice:
You, sir, and I have kept it fairly clean,
Whereas the lout whose life is loot and lust is
Looked after like an opulent machine.
We’ll beat the bastards yet – by God, we must. Is
‘WHAT CAN I SAY? I’D BETTER TRY A SONNET’ (TO MR PETER BRULE)
What can I say? I’d better try a sonnet
(Verse, anyway, is easier than prose),
Humility its content, I suppose,
And gratitude, like icing, troweled upon it.
The writer’s craft is difficult, doggone it,
And all too often, so it seems, and he knows
No more of it. Some new-confected bonnet
Its maker-milliner at least may see
Flaunted in public, publicly admired,
But forgers of less useful goods, like me,
Know our angelic choirs are not required,
And that is why it’s heartening to be,
As now, with some sense of usefulness enfired.
‘FORGIVE MY WRITING VERSE: I GET SO BORED’ (TO MR S. G. BYAM JR)
Forgive my writing verse: I get so bored
With prosing for a living. I did write,
I think, some effort to throw light or night
On English, in the New York Times. My sword
Was not, however, raised that there be gored
Offending flanks: there wasn’t any fight.
For my commission from the dear N. Y. T-
Imes was to write on English – nothing more, d-
ealing out data on the differences
Between American and British. You,
Dear Mr Byam, bless, since bless it is,
Me with a thing I never did. It’s true
I do deplore some downward tendencies
But someone different wrote about them. Who?
‘DEAR CHRIS, THE TROUBLE IS, AS YOU MUST KNOW’ (TO MR CHRIS MAHON)
Dear Chris, the trouble is, as you must know,
The getting over there, the getting in:
Into the States, I mean. They probe past sin,
The immigration hounds of heaven, go
Probing and prising, peering high and low
For evidence of redness, pinkness. Win?
One cannot win, even, indeed, begin
To win against these engines. Even so,
As I am likely to be there next March,
In the U.S., I mean, doing a little
Lecturing (they desiccate, they parch,
Those lectures, make the bones grow thin and brittle),
I’ll try to march beneath N.D.’s proud arch
And dole out something, just a jot or tittle.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TAE ANDREW
Mony happy returrrns o’ the day!
May ye hae a’ ye’d wish yersel’
Wi’aye guid whiskey on your shel’,
Ane haggis on the board forbye
An’ griddlecakes a’ reekin’, ay!
Lang may yer lum reek!
May Scotland feocht for freedom aye
Ah’ rin the Sassenach awa’
An’ see aince mair ane glorious day
Wi’ her ain sun flame ‘oer a’.
‘SO WILL THE FLOW OF TIME AND FIRE’
So will the flow of time and fire,
The process and the pain, expire,
And history may bow
To one eternal now.
A BALLADE FOR THE BIRTHDAY OF MY DEAREST WIFE
Various things have sabotaged the making
Of this my birthday proffer. First, the fear
Of leaving a warm spot and coldly shaking
The key like teeth (not mine, alas), the sheer
Middleaged indolence that, year by year,
Grows with my fat. But still, the urgent truth
Demands expression. Celebrate, my dear,
Another anniversary of youth.
I take on, and regret the undertaking,
Too many things, and mostly out of mere
Inertia. Projects in the oven baking,
Irons in the fire crowd time. Time comes and we’re
Overcommitted. One big time draws near
Then leaps or paws – though gently, not uncouth:
Then I’m all unprepared to clap and cheer
Another anniversary of youth.
But take this, in the time of sun’s forsaking
The glum earth, in an era of flat beer
And watered gin, when anger in its waking
Is much too tired to wake and blast the drear
World that our rulers build, when eye and ear
Survey the blazed corn like exiled Ruth.