(Oscar Wilde said, “All art is perfectly useless.”)
You can decorate a wall with a Da Vinci.
You can use part of a Haydn string quartet for national anthem.
That is making use of art, but that is not the essential purpose of art.
Pure science is seeking to discover and manifest Truth.
Art is seeking to discover and manifest Beauty.
These are called Values. Their discovery and
manifestation are considered to be valuable or
worth while.
No that Truth or Beauty exist.
There are only true things and beautiful things.
So no one should think that Science is on the trail of Ultimate Truth.
Or Art on the trail of Ultimate Beauty.
Both these quests are the job or Religion.
* *
What is Beauty?
One says that the colour of a flower or the note of a
bird is beautiful. This, however, cannot be
the sense in which we are to take the beauty
that art creates.
Because this beauty is natural, not created by the artist.
It is beautiful in that it is pleasing to the senses.
A church father called St. Thomas Aquinas said
that those things are beautiful the appre-hension
of which is pleasing.
So the beauty that art creates is also pleasing, but not only to the senses.
This beauty is a beauty of form, not of texture.
The business of the artist is to create new forms.
The artist’s job is not purely a decorative one.
Wallpaper has a pattern,
But the pictorial art has form.
The pictorial art takes over the raw material, the forms found in nature,
And disposes them into a new and original form which is not found in nature.
Which is pleasing and significant.
(The artist does not copy nature. That is the photographer’s job.)
In what way significant?
* *
Our minds are full of images, sounds, thoughts, and
emotions which we never use.
Which are chaotic, undigested, unarticulated.
Art digests and articulates these.
Makes them have meaning by giving them a form,
Which has such balance and unity that the effect strikes us as beautiful.
* *
A poem takes over the emotions which we feel
Vaguely but cannot express complete.
It expresses those emotions in words completely,
using everything that speech can give to attain
that completeness.
It binds words and balances them to a unity to
Attain that completeness.
Then we feel that the emotion has been mastered
by being expressed,
Objectified, separated from ourselves.
* *
And music makes something organised, new and
original out of the chaotic rhythms and sound
intervals of nature.
* *
So that the more we know about art and the more
we learn to appreciate it, the more we feel
that we have mastered nature and enriched our
own experience through making something o
nature’s into something of ours.
* *
Now you may read Shakespeare,
Listen to Mozart,
Look at Michael Angelo.
DEAD LEAVES
Lonely as the last batch of swallows that swing
Desolate on the aerial, and taut
With unthought memories, we bring
Four figures only to the melody,
And leave the dead note dead.
We are not those whose life is blown away
By the omission, not those for whom
Normality is formal now, each day
An exercise in self-control, but yet
We feel regret for the abrupt
Manner of going, cannot quite forget
The lull when conversation for a moment stopped:
We turned, with a remark half-said,
To find a room grown suddenly dark,
And you – fled.
SONNET ON EXAMINATIONS
Hard thing it is to sweat and strive and aim
And feel the very task within consume
All that is best in us, as the blown bloom
(Being like weak old men, feeble and lame,
Yet envious and powerful) clouds to gloom
And darken long, till like the crash of doom
They burst, and these laugh loud and love their game.
So it has been with us (seems for an age)
And darken on us thoughts of high-born rage,
Avenging anger lest we sink i’ the scale,
It’s Judgment’s show and shadow: sot and sage,
We build a narrow home fast in this cage
And our on one song then ‘Is it pass or fail?’
SIXTH-FORM TRIOLETS
I.
All agonies that torture us
Find fast their home in H. S. C.
The aching arm, the fevered fuss –
All agonies that torture us.
Words that won’t come and (what is wuss)
Though learn’d with labour, thought that flee,
All agonies that torture us
Find fast their home in H. S. C.
II.
The strain of waiting for results
Is really more than man can stand,
It ages children to adults,
The strain of waiting for results.
‘Mention, or space that just insults?’
Turns in the mind on every hand; –
The strain of waiting for results
Is really more than man can stand.
III.
Regrets, those spectres faint and pale
Were surely born in this exam.
They see the truth too late and wail –
Regrets, those spectres faint and pale.
They prompt us, when we fear a ‘fail’
To cry ‘what a – – I am!’
Regrets, those spectres faint and pale
Were surely born in this exam.
JACK’S STORY
Browning made haunches, Rupert Brooke made branches stir,
Both seeking rhymes for names of towns that rhyme,
Though Grantchester could not be less like Manchester,
Which city, in a rather distant time
My muse invokes. Stir, Muse! Come, stir! Why can she stir?
She’s bogged down, as a bird is bogged in lime,
At the sheer prospect of our setting forth
To engage the smoke and the vowels of the North.
‘PRUDENCE! PRUDENCE!’ THE PIGEONS CALL’
‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call.
Serpents lurk in the gilded meadow.
An eye is embossed on the island wall.
The running tap casts a static shadow.
‘Caution caution’ the rooks proclaim,
‘The dear departed, the weeping widow
Will meet in you in the core of flame.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.
‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.
Drain the sacrament of choice.
The running tap casts a static shadow.’
FISH AND HEROES
A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;
The absolute was anybody’s pitch
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name;
That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
; But then were endless growling ocean, rich
In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;
A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning: birds could not be liars.
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.
‘NYMPHS AND SATYRS, COME AWAY’
Nymphs and satyrs, come away.
Faunus, laughing from the hill,
Rips the blanket of the day
From the paunch of dirty Will.
Each projector downs its snout,
Truffling the blackened scene,
Till the Wille’s lights gush out
Vorstellungen on the screen.
Doxies blanch to silverwhite;
All their trappings of the sport,
Lax and scattered, in this light
Merge and lock to smooth and taut.
See! The rockets shoot afar!
Ah! The screen was tautest then.
Tragic the parabola
When the sticks reel down again.
‘AND IN THAT LAST DELIRIUM OF LUST’
And in that last delirium of lust
Your image glows. Love is a blinding rain,
Love crow all the cocks, love lays the dust
Of this cracked crying throat whose thirst is pain.
‘EPITHALAMION’
The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,
The alien planet’s heaven where seven moons
Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and
bloodstone.
Or else binary suns
Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,
Bound, twisted and conjoined
To an invertebrate love where selves are melted
To the primal juice of a creator’s joy,
Before matter was made,
Two spheres in a single orbit
Swollen with cream or honey
The convalescent evening launches its rockets,
Soaring above the rich man’s gala day,
In the thousand parks of the kingdom
Which radiate from this bed
Anoint the ship with wine! On ample waters,
Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled
Only away from cities, let it dance and ride
And you whose fear of maps
Set buzzing the long processes of power,
Resign your limbs at length to elements
Friendly or neutral at least,
Mirrors of the enemy
And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet
And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors
Hung with undecipherable blazons
For two at least can deny
That the past has any odour. They can witness
Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize
That all the world’s guilt can sit like air
On the bodies of these living.
TO TIRZAH
You being the gate
Where the army went through
Would you renew the triumph and have them decorate
The arch and stone again?
Surely those flowers are withered, the army
Now on a distant plain.
But some morning when you are washing up,
Or some afternoon, taking a cup
Of tea, possibly you will see
The heavens opening and a lot
Of saints singing, with bells swinging.
But then again, possibly not.
‘YOUR PRESENCE SHINES ABOUT THE FUMES OF FAT’
Your presence shines about the fumes of fat,
Glows from the oven-door.
Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat,
Your image treads the floor
Ennobling the potato-peel, the lumps
Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps.
‘Love!’ cry the eggs a-whisk, and ‘Love!’ the beef
Calls from the roasting-tin.
The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf
That hides the heart within
Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie
Are richly crammed with love, and so am I.
‘THE DRAGON’S MOUTH WILL CONSUMMATE OUR SEARCH’
The Dragon’s mouth will consummate our search
For pillars of the borough and the Church,
Whose bar-side stance bespeaks their propping function.
There stands the Vicar who, with extreme unction,
To flesh and blood will transubstantiate
The cups that Sunday abstinents donate.
This generation, wiser than the luminous,
Thus gains vicarious contact with the numinous.
Here ruined farmers, in new hacking-coats,
Pour Scotch and ram fat bacon down their throats;
And children, obdurately red and flaxen,
Proclaim the crass inbreeding of the Saxon.
Observe the maidens who, with brawny arms,
Gush the seductive fragrance of the farms.
They feel the body should be mainly meat,
That ankles have no function and that feet,
Disdaining shape and glorying in size,
Should shout a curious kinship to the thighs.
But lest with so much weight the streets should rock,
The desiccated matrons of good stock
(Though not for soup) tune their patrician tweeds,
Then hog the pavements with their barking spouses
Before they seek their deathwatch-rotting houses,
Where flies die in the port and rabbit, stewed,
Provides for dog and man a basic food.
The manor gates are down, the past is dead.
American police patrol instead,
Save there, where feudalism’s greasy scraps
Still touch the villagers who touch their caps
To soap king’s lady or to upstart lord
Who licked the party’s boots or swelled its hoard,
Trimming like mad or clinging like a louse
To be translated to the Upper House,
Whence now he comes to dogmatise and hector,
Sway the church sycophants and hound the rector.
‘WHERE SWEAT STARTS, NOTHING STARTS. TRUE, LIFE RUNS’
Where sweat starts, nothing starts. True, life runs
On in a way, in rings of dust like Saturn’s,
And creating is creating arid patterns
Whose signature prove, always, the arid sun’s.
‘LAND WHERE THE BIRDS HAVE NO SONG, THE FLOWERS’
Land where the birds have no song, the flowers
No scent, and time no movement; here
The rhythms of northern earth are frozen, the hours
Set like ice-cubes; the running of the year
I stopped and comma’d only by the moon’s feasts,
And the sun is Allah, never an avatar;
In sight of that constant eye life crumbles, wastes
To the contented champing patterns of the beasts
Which live in day’s denomination. Far
The life of years and works that yet a day’s
Flight can restore…
‘CRACKS OPEN THE LEADEN CORNCRAKE SKY WITH CRASS, ANGELIC’
…Cracks open the leaden corncrake sky with crass, angelic
Wails as round
as cornfruit, sharp as crowfoot, clawfoot,
Rash, brash, loutish gouts of lime or vinegar strokes
Till the crinkled fish start from their lace of bone
But loss, too, is at least a thing which, in the dark,
We can hold, feeling a sharpness, knowing that a knife
Is a double-edged weapon, for carving as well as killin
g.
The knife in the abattoir is also the knife on the table,
The corpse becomes meat, the dead stone heart the raw
Stuff of the sculptor’s art.
In moments of crisis hunger comes, welling
Up through the groaning tubes, and feeding-time
Is the time of waking of perhaps the time before
Night settles on the land, endless night.
Light, whether of dawn or evening, turns
The river to glow-gold syrup, the trees
To a fairyland of fruit.
‘THE AFTERNOON HOUR HAS STRUCK FOR YOU TO’
The afternoon hour has struck for you to
Enter, become your body, pay
The forced grin of affection due to
What is now you. That is to say:
You are this pate and mouth of missing teeth.
You are these sagging bulbs and bags beneath,
And the leering social face in that far mirror
Recognized with sock (but no, no error) –
That is you, too.
Youth was a knife and lakes and air,
Metal and glass; you could bestow
Your body as a gift of swords to spare.
It was different then. It was not you –
Be patient. I will learn to be concise
Again, the hot room shrinks to austere ice.
The silver will evoke a salmon’s leap,
And bone-rungs strong enough for a single step
Will make a one-way stair.
‘RICE-PAPER LAND, O LOTUS-FOOTED’
Rice-paper land, O lotus-footed,
Whose tiny trees are tiny-rooted,
And cherry-blossom bells tingle over the lakes
And old Fujiyama shakes and quakes.
‘YOU TAKE MY HEART WITH SUCH UNFORMED GRACE’
You take my heart with such unformed grace,
One, at times, with the heartbreak earth
And its children, fur or bone – fawn, mouse,
Palpitating duckling, stumbling calf.
In touching you, silk, silver, I touch half
Of the whole dreadful mystery of birth.
I dread you faring forward into the world,
Carrying your beauty like an innocent gift