White, white in the light of dream,
Still dip their heads.
Clear night!
He has no need of candles who can see
A longer, more celestial day than ours.
c. 1938
EPILOGUE
This severed artery
The sand-obliterated face
Amazed eyes high above catastrophe
Distributed – Is this the man’s remains
Who walked the lap of lands, and sang?
Explosions of every dimension
Directions run away
Towards the sun
The bitter sunset, or
Who knows, where all things rise and fall,
Revolve, and meet themselves again?
This is the man of matted hair
And music, whom a wanderer
Had scented a long way off, by reason of
The salt blood in his heart,
The black sun in his blood,
The gestures of his skeleton, simplicity
Of white bones worn away
Like rock by milk of love.
Dissolve and meet themselves again
All things; the sandy artery
The severed head
Limbs strewn across the rocks
Like broken boats:
So shall their widespread body rise
And march, and marching sing.
c. 1938
POEMS 1937–42
(1943)
MISERERE
‘Le désespoir a des ailes
L’amour a pour aile nacré
Le désespoir
Les sociétés peuvent changer.’
PIERRE JEAN JOUVE
TENEBRAE
‘It is finished.’ The last nail
Has consummated the inhuman pattern, and the veil
Is torn. God’s wounds are numbered.
All is now withdrawn: void yawns
The rock-hewn tomb. There is no more
Regeneration in the stricken sun,
The hope of faith no more,
No height no depth no sign
And no more history.
Thus may it be: and worse.
And may we know Thy perfect darkness.
And may we into Hell descend with Thee.
p. 1939
PIETÀ
Stark in the pasture on the skull-shaped hill,
In swollen aura of disaster shrunken and
Unsheltered by the ruin of the sky,
Intensely concentrated in themselves the banded
Saints abandoned kneel.
And under the unburdened tree
Great in their midst, the rigid folds
Of a blue cloak upholding as a text
Her grief-scrawled face for the ensuing world to read,
The Mother, whose dead Son’s dear head
Weighs like a precious blood-encrusted stone
On her unfathomable breast:
Holds Him God has forsaken, Word made flesh
Made ransom, to the slow smoulder of her heart
Till the catharsis of the race shall be complete.
p. 1939
DE PROFUNDIS
Out of these depths:
Where footsteps wander in the marsh of death and an
Intense infernal glare is on our faces facing down:
Out of these depths, what shamefaced cry
Half choked in the dry throat, as though a stone
Were our confounded tongue, can ever rise:
Because the mind has been struck blind
And may no more conceive
Thy Throne …
Because the depths
Are clear with only death’s
Marsh-light, because the rock of grief
Is clearly too extreme for us to breach:
Deepen our depths,
And aid our unbelief.
p. 1939
KYRIE
Is man’s destructive lust insatiable? There is
Grief in the blow that shatters the innocent face.
Pain blots out clearer sense. And pleasure suffers
The trial thrust of death in even the bride’s embrace.
The black catastrophe that can lay waste our worlds
May be unconsciously desired. Fear masks our face;
Are tumbling even in the mouth of our grimace.
How can our hope ring true? Fatality of guilt
And complicated anguish confounds time and place;
While from the tottering ancestral house an angry voice
Resounds in prophecy. Grant us extraordinary grace,
O spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep,
And bring to light the dream out of our sleep.
p. 1938
LACHRYMAE
Slow are the years of light:
and more immense
Than the imagination. And the years return
Until the Unity is filled. And heavy are
The lengths of Time with the slow weight of tears.
Since Thou didst weep, on a remote hill-side
Beneath the olive-trees, fires of unnumbered stars
Have burnt the years away, until we see them now:
Since Thou didst weep, as many tears
Have flowed like hourglass sand.
Thy tears were all.
And when our secret face
Is blind because of the mysterious
Surging of tears wrung by our most profound
Presentiment of evil in man’s fate, our cruellest wounds
Become Thy stigmata. They are Thy tears which fall.
p. 1939
EX NIHILO
Here am I now cast down
Beneath the black glare of a netherworld’s
Dead suns, dust in my mouth, among
Dun tiers no tears refresh: am cast
Down by a lofty hand,
Hand that I love! Lord Light,
How dark is Thy arm’s will and ironlike
Thy ruler’s finger that has sent me here!
Far from Thy face I nothing understand,
But kiss the Hand that has consigned
Me to these latter years where I must learn
The revelation of despair, and find
Among the debris of all certainties
The hardest stone on which to found
Altar and shelter for Eternity.
p. 1939
SANCTUS
Incomprehensible –
O Master – fate and mystery
And message and long promised
Revelation! Murmur of the leaves
Of life’s prolific tree in the dark haze
Of Midsummer: and inspiration of the blood
In the ecstatic secret bed: and bare
Inscription on a prison wall, ‘For thou shalt persevere
In thine identity …’: a momentary glimpsed
Escape into the golden dance of dust
Beyond the window. These are all.
Uncomprehending. But to understand
Is to endure, withstand the withering blight
Of winter night’s long desperation, war,
Confusion, till at the dense core
Of this existence all the spirit’s force
Becomes acceptance of blind eyes
To see no more. Then they may see at last;
And all they see their vision sanctifies.
p. 1942
ECCE HOMO
Whose is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun?
Whose are these hollow red-filmed eyes
And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side?
Behold the Man: He is Man’s Son.
Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
To make their mortal enemy a friend,
To hide the
bitter truth all His wounds tell,
Lest the great scandal be no more disguised:
He is in agony till the world’s end,
And we must never sleep during that time!
He is suspended on the cross-tree now
And we are onlookers at the crime,
Callous contemporaries of the slow
Torture of God. Here is the hill
Made ghastly by His spattered blood
Whereon He hangs and suffers still:
See, the centurions wear riding-boots,
Black shirts and badges and peaked caps,
Greet one another with raised-arm salutes;
They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips;
Yet these His brothers know not what they do.
And on his either side hang dead
A labourer and a factory hand,
Or one is maybe a lynched Jew
And one a Negro or a Red,
Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman,
Spaniard or German democrat.
Behind His lolling head the sky
Glares like a fiery cataract
Red with the murders of two thousand years
Committed in His name and by
Crusaders, Christian warriors
Defending faith and property.
Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands,
Exuding darkness as indelible
As guilty stains, fanned by funereal
And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands
And clefted landslides our about-to-be
Bombed and abandoned cities stand.
He who wept for Jerusalem
Now sees His prophecy extend
Across the greatest cities of the world,
A guilty panic reason cannot stem
Rising to raze them all as He foretold;
And He must watch this drama to the end.
Though often named, He is unknown
To the dark kingdoms at His feet
Where everything disparages His words,
And each man bears the common guilt alone
And goes blindfolded to his fate,
And fear and greed are sovereign lords.
The turning point of history
Must come. Yet the complacent and the proud
And who exploit and kill, may be denied –
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry –
The resurrection and the life
Wrought by your spirit’s blood.
Involved in their own sophistry
The black priest and the upright man
Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
While the rejected and condemned become
Agents of the divine.
Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey through the night
May not have been in vain.
p. 1940
METAPHYSICAL POEMS
‘Without cease and forever there is celebrated the Mystery of the Open Tomb, the Resurrection of Osiris-Ra, the Increated Light.’
The Book of the Dead
‘Therefore it is said: And the deeper secret within the secret: the land that is nowhere, that is the true home.’
The Secret of the Golden Flower
CONCERT OF ANGELS
To Kay Boyle
I
Wind! Out of the night of desolate
negation that we suffer in the waste
of time and impotence of thought,
rise in the mind and out of stupor stir
the hidden hearing with deep
echoes from the spirit host of
angels! Their intensely rapt,
almost inhuman faces luminous
with utmost concentration, the incisive bows
held in their long keen hands – enchanted swords
to slay the earth-binding ear and so release
the lost celestial sense – carving broad curves
across the nerve-taut strings, and like invisible
irradiations of sheer light, like resonance
of huge cathedral bell-notes hovering
over the earth in rings of fiery mist,
their clear cathartic music welling out
into infinity’s unfathomed well.
II
While from the sonorous black well
emerge and palely fade and form again
white disembodied hands like drifting flames,
buds, tender leaves and tendrils shaped like hands,
and vision-clouded faces cloudily
impending on the air, with hidden eyes
and hungry mouths like mouths distraught with prayer.
Darkness’s mouth, which opens in us now
in the most secret place, is over-brimmed
with straining hymns, with stars
like fountains burning upwards with the impetus
of flying gothic buttresses whose rainbow-arc
both aspiration and sustaining force contains.
III
Here is the transcendental source
of every human cry, replenished by
the deepest chords of death, by shrill
destruction’s laughter, by the thrilling
arias of love, so lofty none can tell
or human or divine; and shock-torn sobs
of rape and copulation, exiled sighs,
corrupted beauty’s ravishing lament, the long
nostalgic call that answers skylines, transference
from mortal sound into eternal song!
Let there be praise, praise and
praise, organic orchestra and cloudy choir,
to the great incandescent power
of sublimation, vitalizing clay,
with sacred fire consuming the grey dross
of sleep and sickness, balancing
in perfect tension between dark and light
the horrid depth, the spiritual height.
w. 1937–8, p. 1946
ELSEWHERE
La vraie vie est ailleurs …
RIMBAUD
Profound is inexistence on this earth
Among our human kind:
Profound
The weight of absence on the sleeping heart
That all war’s detonations cannot rouse:
Rumour of selfless hordes with eyes
Red-rimmed and haggard, swarming through the dirt
Of ruined palaces: the roar
Of cannon-mouths, of sawtoothed mouths, the mouths
Of printing-presses, megaphonic maws
Of the possessed and the psychotic: and the pounding waves
Of automatic labour on the daily shore:
Rocked by this deep
And oil-black ocean’s tidal pulse
The stunned soul sleeps,
Profoundly absent from its body’s condemned house.
The taste of pleasure’s now like sand between the teeth;
Worn-out, the nerves are numb; and Death’s
Most sumptuous music strikes the ear like wind
Forced dumbly out of emptiness.
The sun
Strikes cold upon our nakedness, and shines
With rays of shadow through the diffuse light
Of interstellar space;
While over the last phase of night
The dead face of the moon hangs like a curse.
Deep in our empty sky hangs like a moon
The curse of inexistence; while the spirit sleeps
Profoundly absent from the earth.
But on
Negation’s further shore, the yonder side
Of sleep and absence, dazzling is the sheer
Rockface set like an ice-barred gate
Beneath that nether tableland’s pure height:
Whose sk
y is the negation of our sky,
Where all earth’s ruins are rebuilt
Of stone that sings, and cold fire burns
The scentless incense of the air:
Where time and number are once more atoned
And to its true existence the Unnamed returns.
w. by 1939, p. 1946
WORLD WITHOUT END
See how across the seas of azure milk
Transpire the changing tranquil cloudy forms
Which image us below. The other eyes
Profoundly sunken in us, brim
With such refractions and mysterious
Broken light-webs from the depths
Or inward heights.
And without cease
The spirit’s upward exhalation stirs
Susurrus and whirled currents of the central flame
Which burns relentlessly away
The lower body and the crystal skull
To carbon purity, and shines
Intense as daybreak down the rocky shafts
Into the world beyond.
p. 1938
INFERNO
One evening like the years that shut us in,
Roofed by dark-blooded and convulsive cloud,
Led onward by the scarlet and black flag
Of anger and despondency, my self:
My searcher and destroyer: wandering
Through unnamed streets of a great nameless town,
As in a syncope, sudden, absolute,
Was shown the Void that undermines the world:
For all that eye can claim is impotent –
Sky, solid brick of buildings, masks of flesh –
Against the splintering of that screen which shields
Man’s puny consciousness from hell: over the edge
Of a thin inch’s fraction lie in wait for him
Bottomless depths of roaring emptiness.
p. 1941
LOWLAND
Heavy with rain and dense stagnating green
Of old trees guarding tombs these gardens
Sink in the dark and drown. The wet fields run
Together in the middle of the plain. And there are heard
Stampeding herds of horses and a cry,
More long and lamentable as the rains increase,
From out of the beyond.
O dionysian
Desire breaking that voice, released
By fear and torment, out of our lowland rear
A lofty, savage and enduring monument!
p. 1938