Knowing his sweet new style was spare, refined,
Tough, difficult, precise in every part,
And therefore apt to be fudged in its gist
By scribes half qualified and some half pissed.
Such minds are rare, and often in disguise
They come into the world. My only role
In your brave saga is that I was wise
Enough to see the brilliant scholar’s soul
Shine through her beauty in the lecture hall
Even before we met. I guessed it all.
How could that be? Well, here is how it can:
You took notes at the same speed that I ate,
With an eye for truth unknown to mortal man,
Especially this man. It was my fate
To fish the surface but my luck to see
You hungered for a deeper clarity.
I saw you flower in Florence. That was where
The bigwigs spotted you and marked your card.
The sage Contini knew you were a rare
Natural philologist worth his regard,
And while you learned, you taught me. From the way
You read me Dante I foretold today.
Today, so far from our first years, I bless
My judgment, which in any other case
Is something we both know I don’t possess,
But one thing I did know. I knew my place.
I knew yours was the true gift that would bring
Our house the honours that mean everything:
The honour of our daughters raised to treat
All people with your scrupulous respect,
The honour of your laughter and the sweet
Self-abnegation of an intellect
That never vaunts itself though well it might,
And this above all, lovely in my sight –
Pursued through busy days in precious hours,
Pored over word by word and line by line
Year after year with concentrated powers
Of selfless duty to the grand design
Of someone long dead who was well aware
That dreams of peace on earth must court despair –
The honour of the necessary task
Done well, not just for show, and done for keeps.
Could I have helped you more? Don’t even ask.
I can hear Dante, grunting as he sleeps:
“You are the weakling and you always were.
If you would sing for glory, sing of her.”
Whitman and the Moth
Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age
Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,
Crowding his final notebooks page by page
With names of trees, birds, bugs and things like that.
The war could never break him, though he’d seen
Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.
But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:
Evangelising greed was in control.
Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged
By tracing how creation reigned supreme.
A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:
America, still unfolding from its dream.
Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,
Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.
A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,
Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.
But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,
The meeting point where great art comes to pass –
Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,
The moth, which had not written Leaves of Grass,
Composed a picture of the interchange
Between the mind and all that it transcends
Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange
In how he put his hand out to make friends
With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.
Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,
He blessed new life, though it had only just
Arrived in time to see the end of him.
The Later Yeats
Where he sought symbols, we, for him, must seek
A metaphor, lest mere praise should fall short
Of how the poems of his last years set
Our standards for the speech that brings the real
To integrated order dearly bought,
Catching the way complexity would speak
If it had one voice. This, he makes us feel,
Is where all deeper meanings are well met,
Contained in a majestic vessel made
We never, watching it our whole lives long,
Doubt its solidity. All else may fade,
But this stands out as if it had been sent
To prove it can have no equivalent.
Even his first things were wind-driven boats.
A coracle would have its speed enhanced
By some queen elf who stood with gauze shift spread,
Materialising from the twilight mist.
Slim dhows, as his romantic urge advanced,
Sliced through the East. A little navy floats
In his early pages. Sleek sloops joined the list
When more substantial things asked to be said.
His wild-swan racing schooners heeled and ran
Cargo from Athens, Bethlehem and Rome,
Or the body of an Irish airman home
Across the gale. The full soul of a man
Was on display: sound craft of trim outline
Criss-crossed the billows. All of his design,
These would have been enough to make him great:
The caravels that reached Byzantium
Alone proved him unmatched. Then, at the heart
Of this flotilla, as if light were haze,
Something appeared to strike the viewer dumb:
A huge three-decker fighting ship of state.
Acres of air caught in her tiered arrays
Of raw silk, she made clear, in every part,
All of her million parts were cleanly wrought
To fit together with no need of nails.
From gun-decks upward to top-gallant sails
She was one artefact, a cloud drawn taut
By force, so far beyond its builder’s mind
It felt for him, and saw where he was blind.
Tea-clipper-tall but at the waterline
Three times the width, she had the looks to quell
Resistance instantly by show of might:
Empires would knuckle under. Ireland
Itself would kneel to see her breast the swell
With such bulk. But develop and refine
This image as we may, and as we planned –
Down to the shining brass, sheets chalky white,
Glazed lanterns, mullioned windows, oaken rails –
It will not serve the turn without a sense
Of brute strength tempered by benevolence.
The monarch reigns supreme because her sails,
From cinquecento chapel walls low down
On up through salon panels to her crown
Of screens, woodcuts and painted fans, are all
Unchallenged masterpieces. Her curved hull
Was moulded by the cave walls of Lascaux
And stamped with its motifs. But what we hear,
Not what we see, confirms the miracle
And makes the metaphor. We’re held in thrall
By music. Music lush, music austere,
All music ever heartfelt, holds the flow
Of splendour in one place. Not thought alone –
Thought least of all, because it was his fate
To grow more infantile as it grew late –
Could build this thing, nor was it cut and sewn
Or hewn solely by touch, or sealed by skill.
A feat of the self
-sacrificing will,
The peaceful man-of-war is here to prove
Any attempt to emulate her air
Of grandeur invites ridicule, unless
We, too, pour everything into the task
Of building something that will still be there
When we are gone. And that means all we love
And more, as Yeats knew when he wore a mask
To quell the self, thinking its pettiness
Could be faced down. It can’t, but it can be
Tapped and diverted to an empty space
Where something permanent can take its place,
Shaped for the voyage to eternity
Out of our tears of weakness at the way
The thing we mean means more than we can say.
Worse than absurd, then – witless, in the end –
To trace him through his visionary schemes
And systems, or pay grave attention to
Those last affairs, boosted by monkey glands,
His patient wife scorned as a dotard’s dreams
If more unreal. No scholarship can mend
The error of not seeing all demands
For human truth are vain. Few things are true
About the life except the work. Yeats found
His final glory when his jade and gold
Were joined by rag and bones to sink and fold
Into the flux of images and sound
That formed a magic ship to win the war
Against time, which is just a metaphor
For the battle to make sense of growing old,
And bless the ebb tide. It is outward bound,
Fit for the launch of what we have to give
The future, though that be a paltry thing.
Our house is flooded and our books are drowned,
The embers of our passion are stone cold,
We count the minutes we have left to live,
Yet even now it is of love we sing,
And for a paragon we have the vast
Swan-songs of Yeats that brought his depths to light.
Among school children or on All Souls’ Night,
Humble or proud, he saved the best for last
And gave it to the waves – but no. There is
No ship. Just words, and all of them are his.
Habitués
Some older people like the ship so much
They pay again and go wherever it goes –
Which means that for a large part of the year
They just steam back and forth across the Atlantic –
Until they die, while other older people
Are there for one performance after another
Of The Sound of Music. They know every word.
“How” they smile wryly as they sing along,
“Do you solve a problem like Maria?” If
They conk out before the interval, are they
Removed? Surely the mark of the habitués
Is that they’re dead already. When I noticed
That my club was full of men who had become
Stuffed armchairs and oak tables for school food
I resigned to save my skin. They liked the place
Too much. They thought the ship’s Entertainment
Officer was entertaining. They were dewy-eyed
Instead of loud with scorn when Liesl’s suitor
Expressed in terms of chaste and tender love
His youthful urge to get into her pants.
Dull death, the minimum of information –
Where entropy, to steal a phrase from S. J.
Perelman, fills every nook of Granny –
Will come when it will come, but while we’re waiting
Beware the lapse into familiar comfort,
All outlines softened. In that cloud lies proof
Your life was lost on you, though I suppose
It isn’t only easier but better
To echo an ecstatic singing nun –
Transfigured like Bernini’s St Teresa
At the mere prospect of an edelweiss –
Than to puzzle out the dialogue of, say,
Act I, Scene IV of Cymbeline, which no one
Has remotely, since the day that it was written,
Enjoyed or even partly understood.
And are there no more thrills? In the fjord
The wrinklies crowd the rail to hear their voices
Come back from walls of ice. Couples hold hands.
So quick to guess their last heat is long gone,
How sure are we the failing is not ours,
Our cold contempt a portent of the void
Which is the closed heart and begins within us?
It doesn’t always take time to go nowhere.
Castle in the Air
We never built our grand house on the edge
Of the Pacific, close to where we first
Drew breath, but high up in the cliffs, a ledge
Glassed in, with balconies where we would be
Enthralled to watch it hit the rocks and burst –
The ocean that still flows through you and me
Like blood, though many years have passed since we
Sailed separately away to keep our pledge
Of seeing what the world was like. Since then
We’ve been together and done pretty well:
You by your scholarship, I by my pen,
Both earned a living and our two careers
Paid for a house and garden we could sell
For just enough to spend our final years
Out there where the last landscape disappears
Eastward above the waves, and once again
We would be home. We’ve talked about that view
So often we can watch the seagulls fly
Below us by the thousand. There’s the clue
Perhaps, to what we might do for the best:
Merely imagine it. The place to die
Is where you find your feet and come to rest.
Here, all we built is by our lost youth blessed.
This is your gift to me, and mine to you:
Front windows on a trimly English park,
A back yard we can bask in, but not burn
As we loll in our liner chairs. The bark
Stays on the trees, no wood-pile is a lair
For funnelwebs. Small prospect of return
Once you’re accustomed to the change of air,
The calm of being here instead of there –
The slow but steady way that it grows dark.
Sleep late then, while I do my meds and dress
For the creaking mile that keeps my legs alive.
In hospital I’d lie there and obsess
About the beauty of this house, and still
I love it. But I feel the waves arrive
Like earthquakes as I walk, and not until
I’m gone for good will I forget the thrill –
Nor will the urge to start again grow less
As always in my dreams I spread my chart
In the great room of the grand house on the cliffs
And plot my course. Once more I will depart
Alone, to none beholden, full of fight
To quell the decapods and hippogryphs,
Take maidens here and there as is my right,
And voyage even to eternal night
As the hero does, made strong by his cold heart.
A Spray of Jasmine
Political developments in South East Asia, 2010
The day of her release, Suu Kyi wound flowers
Into the hair behind her head: a spray
Of jasmine. She looked lovely doing so,
Something a man my age can safely say,
For she is no child. Who knows if her powers
Extend to the real world? We have to go
On what we see, the people’s thirst for her.
Today no junta general would look good
&nbs
p; With floral attributes, or hear his name
Made music by the crowds, and if it were,
The reason would be drearily the same
As always, and too readily understood:
The crowds would be afraid. Her graceful calm
Means gentleness, as long as we recall
That Comrade Duch, who also has his poise
And clean-cut looks, for all he lacks her charm,
To most of us meant nothing much at all
When separating children from their toys
In his quiet way. Brought to the killing tree
And smashed to death, they saw a face to trust.
As cool as ever, all humility,
He now denies his guilt. Because we must –
Led by the hand of history as we are
Into the prison where the innocent
Die of their agony so very far
From all our thoughts, no matter how well meant –
We give our hearts to her for being there.
Such beauty has to be benevolent:
Look at her face, the flowers in her hair.
Madagascar Full-Tilt Boogie
The lemur that bit a piece out of my daughter
When she was a student here
By now is dead and gone,
But the island still has lemurs of every size.
A lemur not much bigger than a cicada
Swallows the cicada
As you just might park a Humvee in your hallway.
The cicada gets tons of time, on its way down,
To think “Sod this for a game of soldiers.”
Larger lemurs, aloft in the spiny forest,
After feet-first triple-jumps through the parched air,
Land on a booby-trapped branch without their pads
Being even slightly punctured.
It must be done by quick adjustments,
Unless the spines go in and out and leave
No wounds. But then where would be the point,
If that’s the phrase we want, of so many needles
Even being there? It would be as if, at Anzio,
Schu-mines had popped up only to serve coffee.
In this dried mud nothing pops up at all
Until it rains, and hey! It’s mating day.
A million brown frogs magically appear.
Then half the brown frogs suddenly turn yellow
To indicate their wholesale macho readiness