The valleys of melting snow
And the cruel mountain heights
By day lie exposed to the blows of the sun
Are oppressed under darkness by night
And have never repose
Or monotonous colourless skies
Weigh down the appalling /dreadful streets
Where human misery seems too great to bear –
Thugs trained to beat the poor to death
Neurotics groping in distress; –
Or fear-distended eyes through windows see
The glare of gasworks bursting on the outskirts of the town.
Lying tired and silent in a darkened room
One hears the trains rush by across the viaduct
Raucously hastening to attain the heart of Europe
And one lies wondering:
Where can all the trains be going?
Why is it all the trains are crashing
In my head?
III
[Dream, desire, death, all told,
The present’s pain,
Centreless, all-pervading,
Drowns in its daft white glare
The dissolving world retracts
Its image from our eyes]
The world dissolves, retracts
Its image from the eye’s
Dissolving glare. The present’s pain
(Dream, desire, death all told)
Centreless, (ever-present) pervading all,
Drowns in its daft white glare
The mind as music drowns
Us, listening on the … verge
Of virgin silence, that last
Comfort of the battered, and it seems
Its sense is stronger than the eye’s;
No words, no passionate description
Can move us more than these:
‘Les sons d’une musique enervante et calme.
Semblable au cri lontain de l’humaine douleur,’
Too complicated to explain,
Too like a wound (cruelly true) to bear for long
Before the wind rises again at last.
Blowing the hair back from our heads,
And snatching away the music in our ears
To lose it in the vast sky’s sombre waste
[The stanza below is written on a separate page under the heading IV]
[A man’s life now, like the wind
That passes, the winds above us,
No longer fixed nor separate in itself
But with all the others merging,
As where a lonely column melts
Into the distance and the breast of doves
Are seen a moment as they cross the brow,]
Elegiac Stanzas IV
As the wind strikes light from the sides
Of waves and silver from their crests
Though of no Southern Ocean but the couch
Of gloom and icebergs, as the wind
[That passes in its passing wrests
(A transitory smile) from (the) rock
Grinds one more grain of sand
From rock]
That passes in its passing wrests
A transitory smile from utter rock
And stirs the sleep of sand,
As where a single column melts
Into the distance and the wings (breasts) of doves
Whirl for a moment past the gazer’s eyes,
As smoke climbs up behind a hill
To tell of towns or tents beyond,
And as these vaguer images
Merge one by one into a waking dream,
A man’s life passes, is not fixed or one,
But is not substanceless as (things)
In all the loud apocalypse of time,
One man or millions, (each is set)
from which no-one escapes
The place and date. Man’s present state
How fearful, and how real.
V
A sombre script in half-light read
Text of an ancient or some sage
Transfigured by a sudden inward ray
That floods the meditative page
Instructs the bewildered heart:
Death is not only death nor yet
Shall life prevail if death should die
Whose is the memory we mourn?
But countless memories, innumerable stones,
Each spark that the dark defeated
And at last shall kindle in a blinding
Blaze, make mourning seem
A child’s misapprehending weakness, when
Flame leaps from the very urn.
An ancient text – but we do not look back
But forward out of meditation rear
A dustless and determined clear
Inscription like a fervent pointing hand:
We lived this time and saw
Ruin and death at work on every side –
We also saw your light who burn/shine ahead
(But never doubted)
Elegiac Stanzas in Memory of Alban Berg
Second draft
I
When a rich rose falls in flakes from a thorn-spiked stem
Its petals stain the dark eroded soil;
So tears fall heavily to stain the heart’s stone floor.
A grief near madness sets its sudden springs
To leap without a cause from out our sleep,
Our jarring nervous dreams,
Until we shake with sorrow that we cannot name.
The rain with turbid drops adorns the leaves
Of rose-bushes that grow among the rocks
And stifle with their scent the chilly air.
It is the hour when disembodied heads,
The faces of the lost, glide pensively
Across the twilight of this distant place, –
Cimmeria, the refuge of the shades.
On high
Striations of white light amaze the sky;
While round the staring lead-eyed pool below
A dull wind stirs the agony of reeds,
Concentric ripples strike the water’s rim
Like echoes of a desperate final cry;
And arrow-headed birds fly fast away.
II
The roads that writhe across the plains
The harrowed upland fields
The valleys of melting snow
And the cruel mountain heights
By day lie exposed to the blows of the sun
Are oppressed under darkness by night
And have never repose
Our monotonous colourless skies
Weigh down the appalling streets
Where human misery seems too great to bear:
Thugs trained to beat the poor to death
Neurotics gasping in distress
Or fear-distended eyes through windows see
The glare of gasworks bursting on the outskirts of the town.
Lying tired and silent in a darkened room
One hears the trains rush by across the viaduct
Raucously hastening to attain the heart of Europe;
And one lies wondering:
Where can all the trains be going?
Why is it all the trains are crashing
In my head?
w. 1936, p. 2007
CHORUS
Is this the final coast
Between the dark land and tomorrow’s sea
Home friends and lover lost
Is this the cost
Wandering aimlessly
Unlock the monster’s jaws at last
Now he has come
Into a foreign hall
Which is not home at all
Now he is here
The cross-word puzzle fan
Looks up but does not hear
Or answer our lost man.
In the unfriendly street
Wings of the pavement beat
About the bright bowed head
No
questions answered no
Encouragement, and so
Best beat a swift retreat
Before the signals change from green to red
And now the answer’s plain
Stand and stare down again
Where water flows
Biting the town in half –
Unlock death’s easy jaws
Fall like a stone
And disregard the frown
But men conspire
The desperate to cheat
Street after street
Our wanderer
Seeks for a lock to try
He wants to die
But does not dare
Here will he hear
Another’s angry voice
Teaching the crowd to fear
God and the State –
Hurl then the heavy mace
Although it may fly too far
And fall too late
Away again away
The phrase repeat
Day after day
Follows these weary streets
Searching forgotten joy
No stone commemorates
Who did not dare to die
Till the town’s furthest bound
Cements its bond
With lonely ruined fields
Desolate acres spanned
By a forbidding wall
Whose shadow shields
No-one at all
But this old clumsy clown
Last remnant of the past
See how his beard falls down
See on the ground
His unknown captive squirm –
Fear an old fool at last
And the silk worm
Now a familiar face
Appears when all hope seemed lost
Joy with a summer grace
Come like a welcome ghost
To save what mattered most
Lovers embrace
Making the past a jest
If out of sight be out of mind
Then leave this place
If love be blind
Happy then not to see the clown’s grimace
Together advance once more
Along the wall set out to find
The certain door
Though landscapes lie beyond
Tragic as those once passed
Now they go hand in hand
The terrors still ahead
Seem but their journey’s last
Warning lest too great a speed
w. 1936, p. 1998
MOON OVER LONDON
Last night a woman’s veil
Above the city drifting like a bat
Or some lost wing of smoke
By hateful influences was rent in twain
Predicting ruin for the denizens below
Out of its house of cerulean shell
The twin-breasted eclipse
Released its venom on the world
And poured its quick-tongued vapours
on our sleep
While dire hounds howled on Hampstead Hill.
Then sighed the half-extinguished torch:
‘Aversion of the violence foretold
Is in the courage of the weak
To brace the breaking rock
And cut adrift the tethered keel of Time.’
w. 1937, p. 1996
AN UNFINISHED, UNPUBLISHED POST-AUDEN PRE-WAR PROEM
For J.S.
The nervous bats are twitching through the dusk.
The lamp’s honey-coloured light
Upon the page, the early rose
Stuck in the one-time inkwell on the desk,
At the garden-window the wireless playing Mozart’s
Soothing but earnest voice:
Harbour the meditation: upon you and the endless world
About which you reflect;
In which we live; which swings
The mere wind into the daze and ache of void;
The object of every greed, which hourly sets
Writhing a thousand pens.
In all this peace (a man walks a dog down the road,
The wireless softly sings,
Night concentrates its blue),
I think of you, and long with fascinated dread
For all the noise and punishment of Facts:
All that we could or could not know.
But think: have we filled in our map, have we drawn
An extensive plan?
Are we really aware
Of all the precise implications of having been born?
You and I, are we really so knowing that we can avoid
The ubiquitous fear?
This is what we must cast out, we are agreed.
But we are alone
And all our courage – (null)
If they still go on fearing whom we arrogantly called
‘The small’, pretending that we were privileged
To be – (ill)
Consider the chicken and the egg and which was first.
Outer or inner?
The world of loves
And hates, of the intimate one and two; and just as vast
And complicated, implicating us, the world
Of human lives.
w. 1937, p. 1996
THREE VERBAL OBJECTS
In Memory of Humphrey Jennings
I
The poet is dead; and it is in the people that we must seek to find what remains of the mysterious radiation of his soul: – birthpangs of a series of images stretching away into infinity; crystallization of the movements of impulsion and repulsion; from the hermit’s cave to the broken shell of the great roc, a trail of bones and other fragments.
In the centre of the arc is fixed a hunter’s bow and arrow, festooned with deadly flowers. This is the node of animal magnetism and of all dreams of hate and fear. The people have secretly proclaimed their love for those who haunt them.
Over the marshes, in the summer air, there hang invisible monsoons which, if the human eye could register them, would have the form of funnels. Into their mouths pass the warm breath of sinking creatures and the emanations of defeated warriors, whose shields and armour glitter strangely in the green light of the setting sun. Some representative of a distant tribe is seated passive on the bank, occasionally beating an idle note upon his drum. There will be no more thunder for at least another month.
The people love the warrior; and even as he lies sinking in the marsh, they deck his image with a thousand lethal flowers. They cannot see his wounds.
To the warrior, war; to the lover, love. And the lower species also shall give instances of their passion: in the twilight crevices, silent bubbles, swelling and deflating like the lungs. Smoke rises out of the eyes, distorting the labyrinthine perspective. This is sleep. Its oscillations only serve to aggravate the decay of the outer ramparts. There, our projected bodies parade themselves, clad in all the amazing appearance of the illusions which, without knowing it, we can entertain about them in the night.
Violent is the falsehood with which we have clothed our desires. To eat, to kill and to make love. Magic, the clotted valve, intoxication, cold invading the pores, the syren-call of giddiness falling from North to South. The ocean does not cease to lacerate the shore; nor the blood to circulate through the channels of the brain.
II
It is well-nigh impossible to describe in words the natural beauties of this country. The hills are bathed in a glow of the most subliminal tranquillity, like that which is given out by the innocent eyes of children, milky and diffuse. The shadows cast by the further ranges eat into the plain like acid. There are only a few houses round the edge of the lakes, dwelling-places of fakirs and water-diviners, untroubled spirits who appear on their thresholds only at evening, when the sun throws an additional lustre upon the bismuth grottoes which adorn the shores. Who would not envy them, who pass their days in the ecstatic contemplation of the death of Time? To the N
orth, there stand the remains of one or two deserted villages. These were once inhabited by an outlandish race, wearing skins and communicating with one another in a speech most closely resembling that of birds, shrill yet guttural. Their wells ran dry, or became salt, and they migrated, we know not where. In their abandoned huts, which were hewn from volcanic stone, a few pots and other utensils have been discovered, bearing curious ornamentations which are supposed to illustrate the myths of the lost tribe.
Foremost among these legendary representations is the Wheel. Sometimes this fantasy is expressed as a chain of limbs of animals and of men entwined. Some vessels, again, are covered with what appear to be crudely drawn bands of flowers. Certain monoliths, also, which have recently been discovered among the petrified Western forests, where the ground is frequently shaken by seismic tremors, are ornamented, totem-like, by circular constellations of five eyes.
The phenomenon of the wheel of eyes is said to have been frequently observed in this part of the country by watchers on the hills at dawn. The last occasion on which it was reported to have been seen was when a band of scientifically-minded explorers were making their way into the extreme fastnesses of the nether mountains, not so many years ago. They were emerging from their tents, at about five o’clock in the morning, when their guides drew their attention to a curious patch of light in the sky just above their heads. A few moments later, it became quite clear that this light was being given out not, as they had at first imagined, by a cluster of stars, but by five enormous and distinctly outlined eyes, which hovered gravely, motionless and without blinking in the sky for about ten minutes, holding the spectators spell-bound with silent awe and wonder, and then faded away like cloud.
The phenomenon was accompanied by a distant grinding, ringing sound. It is supposed that this mirage, or optical illusion, is due to the peculiar reflective properties of the mica rocks with which the region is encumbered; and that it was this appearance which originally gave rise, in association with the other and more obvious symbols of perpetual recurrence, to the legend of the Wheel.
III
Vast expanses of devastated territory, jagged skyline, wooden scaffoldings 140 foot high and blazing like giant torches – young women and little old children lying murdered in disordered heaps – abandoned gun-carriages, drifts of snow lying melting in the sun here and there among the ruins …
Everything was in order. Our leader called a halt. He turned his face towards us, away from the shattered landscape, and we saw that he was smiling through his tears. When the last trace of the old world is cleared away, comrades, he cried, we shall build our city here.
And one of our number planted the standard on top of a hillock of refuse. We set to work with diligence in the fresh morning smell. Everything is in order, we repeated to ourselves, looking up now and then to observe the destruction of a last altar, or a prison wall.