Upon ten thousand platforms to proclaim the system mad
And urge the liquidation of a senile ruling-class.
Years like a prison-wall, frustrating though unsound
On which the brush of History, with quick, neurotic strokes,
Its latest and most awe-inspiring fresco soon outlined:
Spenglerian lowering of the Western skies, red lakes
Of civil bloodshed, free flags flagrantly torn down
By order of macabre puppet orators, the blind
Leading blindfolded followers into the Devil’s den …
III
And so, Goodbye, grim ’Thirties. These your closing days
Have shown a new light, motionless and far
And clear as ice, to our sore riddled eyes;
And we see certain truths now, which the fear
Aroused by earlier circumstances could but compromise,
Concerning all men’s lives. Beyond despair
May we take wise leave of you, knowing disasters’ cause.
Having left all false hopes behind, may we move on
At a vertiginous unmeasured speed, beyond, beyond,
Across this unknown Present’s bleak and rocky plain;
Through sudden tunnels; in our ears the wind
Echoing unintelligible guns. Mirrored within
Each lonely consciousness, War’s world seems without end.
Dumbly we stare up at strange skies with each day’s dawn.
Could you but hear our final farewell call, how strained
And hollow it would sound! We are already far
Away, forever leaving further leagues behind
Of this most perilous and incoherent land
We’re in. The unseen enemy are near.
Above the cowering capital Death’s wings impend.
Rapidly under ink-black seas today’s doomed disappear.
We are alone with one another, but our eyes
Meet seldom in the dark. What a relentless roar
Stuffs every ear, as though with wool! The winds that rise
Out of our dereliction’s vortex, hour by hour,
To bring us word of the incessant wordless guns,
Tirades of the insane, thick hum of planes, the rage of fire,
Eruptions, waves: all end in utmost silence in our brains.
‘The silence after the viaticum.’ So silent is the ray
Of naked radiance that lights our actual scene,
Leading the gaze into those nameless and unknown
Extremes of our existence where fear’s armour falls away
And lamentation and defeat and pain
Are all transfigured by acceptance; where men see
The tragic splendour of their final destiny.
w. New Year 1940, p. 1941
SPRING MCMXL
London Bridge is falling down, Rome’s burnt, and Babylon
The Great is now but dust; and still Spring must
Swing back through Time’s continual arc to earth.
Though every land become as a black field
Dunged with the dead, drenched by the dying’s blood,
Still must a punctual goddess waken and ascend
The rocky stairs, up into earth’s chilled air,
And pass upon her mission through those carrion ranks,
Picking her way among a maze of broken brick
To quicken with her footsteps the short sooty grass between;
While now once more their futile matchwood empires flare and blaze
And through the smoke men gaze with bloodshot eyes
At the translucent apparition, clad in trembling nascent green,
Of one they can still recognize, though scarcely understand.
p. 1942
A WARTIME DAWN
Dulled by the slow glare of the yellow bulb;
As far from sleep still as at any hour
Since distant midnight; with a hollow skull
In which white vapours seem to reel
Among limp muddles of old thought; till eyes
Collapse into themselves like clams in mud …
Hand paws the wall to reach the chilly switch;
Then nerve-shot darkness gradually shakes
Throughout the room. Lie still … Limbs twitch;
Relapse to immobility’s faint ache. And time
A while relaxes; space turns wholly black.
But deep in the velvet crater of the ear
A chip of sound abruptly irritates.
A second, a third chirp; and then another far
Emphatic trill and chirrup shrills in answer; notes
From all directions round pluck at the strings
Of hearing with frail finely-sharpened claws.
And in an instant, every wakened bird
Across surrounding miles of air
Outside, is sowing like a scintillating sand
Its throat’s incessantly replenished store
Of tuneless singsong, timeless, aimless, blind.
Draw now with prickling hand the curtains back;
Unpin the blackout-cloth; let in
Grim crack-of-dawn’s first glimmer through the glass.
All’s yet half sunk in Yesterday’s stale death,
Obscurely still beneath a moist-tinged blank
Sky like the inside of a deaf mute’s mouth …
Against a cinder coloured wall, the white
Pear-blossom hovers like a stare; rain-wet
The further housetops weakly shine; and there,
Beyond, hangs flaccidly, a lone barrage-balloon.
An incommunicable desolation weighs
Like depths of stagnant water on this break of day. –
Long meditation without thought. – Until a breeze
From some pure Nowhere straying, stirs
A pang of poignant odour from the earth, an unheard sigh
Pregnant with sap’s sweet tang and raw soil’s fine
Aroma, smell of stone, and acrid breath
Of gravel puddles. While the brooding green
Of nearby gardens’ grass and trees, and quiet flat
Blue leaves, the distant lilac mirages, are made
Clear by increasing daylight, and intensified.
Now head sinks into pillows in retreat
Before this morning’s hovering advance;
(Behind loose lids, in sleep’s warm porch, half hears
White hollow clink of bottles, – dragging crunch
Of milk-cart wheels, – and presently a snatch
Of windy whistling as the newsboy’s bike winds near,
Distributing to neighbour’s peaceful steps
Reports of last-night’s battles); at last sleeps.
While early guns on Norway’s bitter coast
Where faceless troops are landing, renew fire:
And one more day of War starts everywhere.
w. April 1940, p. 1941
WALKING AT WHITSUN
‘La fontaine n’a pas tari
Pas plus que l’or de la paille ne s’est terni
Regardons l’abeille
Et ne songeons pas à l’avenir …’
APOLLINAIRE
… Then let the cloth across my back grow warm
Beneath such comforting strong rays! new leaf
Flow everywhere, translucently profuse,
And flagrant weed be tall, the banks of lanes
Sprawl dazed with swarming lion-petalled suns
As with largesse of pollen-coloured wealth
The meadows; and across these vibrant lands
Of Summer-afternoon through which I stroll
Let rapidly gold glazes slide and chase
Away such shades as chill the hillside trees
And make remindful mind turn cold …
The eyes
Of thought stare elsewhere, as though skewer-fixed
To an imagined sky’s im
mense collapse;
Nor can, borne undistracted through this scene
Of festive plant and basking pastorale,
The mind find any calm or light within
The bone walls of the skull; for at its ear
Resound recurrent thunderings of dark
Smoke-towered waves rearing sheer tons to strike
Down through Today’s last dyke. Day-long
That far thick roar of fear thuds, on-and-on,
Beneath the floor of sense, and makes
All carefree quodlibet of leaves and larks
And fragile tympani of insects sound
Like Chinese music, mindlessly remote,
Drawing across both sight and thought like gauze
Its unreality’s taut haze.
But light!
O cleanse with widespread flood of rays the brain’s
Oppressively still sickroom, wherein brood
Hot festering obsessions, and absolve
My introspection’s mirror of such stains
As blot its true reflection of the world!
Let streams of sweetest air dissolve the blight
And poison of the News, which every hour
Contaminates the ether.
I will pass
On far beyond the village, out of sight
Of human habitation for a while
Grass has an everlasting pristine smell.
On high, sublime in his bronze ark, the sun
Goes cruising across seas of silken sky.
In fields atop the hillside, chestnut trees
Display the splendour of their branches piled
With blazing candle burdens. – Such a May
As this might never come again …
I tread
The white dust of a weed-bright lane; alone
Upon Time-Present’s tranquil outmost rim,
Seeing the sunlight through a lens of dread,
While anguish makes the English landscape seem
Inhuman as the jungle, and unreal
Its peace. And meditating as I pace
The afternoon away, upon the smile
(Like that worn by the dead) which Nature wears
In ignorance of our unnatural tears,
From time to time I think: How such a sun
Must glitter on their helmets! How bright-red
Against this sky’s clear screen must ruins burn …
How sharply their invading steel must shine!
w. Marshfield, May 1940, p. 1941
OXFORD: A SPRING DAY
For Bill
The air shines with a mild magnificence …
Leaves, voices, glitterings … And there is also water
Winding in easy ways among much green expanse,
Or lying flat, in small floods, on the grass;
Water which in its widespread crystal holds the whole soft song
Of this swift tremulous instant of rebirth and peace.
Tremulous – yet beneath, how deep its root!
Timelessness of an afternoon! Air’s gems, the walls’ bland grey,
Slim spires, hope-coloured fields: these belong to no date.
w. 1941
THE GRAVEL-PIT FIELD
Beside the stolid opaque flow
Of rain-gorged Thames; beneath a thin
Layer of early evening light
Which seems to drift, a ragged veil,
Upon the chilly March air’s tide:
Upwards in shallow shapeless tiers
A stretch of scurfy pock-marked waste
Sprawls laggardly its acres till
They touch a raw brick-villa’d rim.
Amidst this nondescript terrain
Haphazardly the gravel-pits’
Rough-hewn rust-coloured hollows yawn,
Their steep declivities away
From the field-surface dropping down
Towards the depths below where rain-
Water in turbid pools stagnates
Like scraps of sky decaying in
The sockets of a dead man’s stare.
The shabby coat of coarse grass spread
Unevenly across the ruts
And humps of lumpy soil; the bits
Of stick and threads of straw; loose clumps
Of weeds with withered stalks and black
Tatters of leaf and scorched pods: all
These intertwined minutiae
Of Nature’s humblest growths persist
In their endurance here like rock.
As with untold intensity
On the far edge of Being, where
Life’s last faint forms begin to lose
Name and identity and fade
Away into the Void, endures
The final thin triumphant flame
Of all that’s most despoiled and bare:
So these least stones, in the extreme
Of their abasement might appear
Like rare stones such as could have formed
A necklet worn by the dead queen
Of a great Pharaoh, in her tomb …
So each abandoned snail-shell strewn
Among these blotched dock-leaves might seem
In the pure ray shed by the loss
Of all man-measured value, like
Some priceless pearl-enamelled toy
Cushioned on green silk under glass.
And who in solitude like this
Can say the unclean mongrel’s bones
Which stick out, splintered, through the loose
Side of a gravel-pit, are not
The precious relics of some saint,
Perhaps miraculous? Or that
The lettering on this Woodbine-
Packet’s remains ought not to read:
Mene mene tekel upharsin?
Now a breeze gently breathes across
The wilderness’s cryptic face;
The meagre grasses scarcely stir;
But when some stranger gust sweeps past,
Seeming as though an unseen swarm
Of sea-birds had disturbed the air
With their strong wings’ wide stroke, a gleam
Of freshness hovers everywhere
About the field: and tall weeds shake,
Leaves wave their tiny flags to show
That the wind blown about the brow
Of this poor plot is nothing less
Than the great constant draught the speed
Of Earth’s gyrations makes in Space …
As I stand musing, overhead
The zenith’s stark light thrusts a ray
Down through the dusk’s rolling vapours, casts
A last lucidity of day
Across the scene: and in a flash
Of insight I behold the field’s
Apotheosis: No-man’s-land
Between this world and the beyond,
Remote from men and yet more real
Than any human dwelling-place:
A tabernacle where one stands
As though within the empty space
Round which revolves the Sage’s Wheel.
w. Spring 1941, p. 1941
REQUIEM
‘Permets que nous te goûtions d’abord le jour de la mort
Qui est un grand jour de calme d’épousés,
Le monde heureux, les fils réconciliés.’
PIERRE JEAN JOUVE
I
[Voice: Recitative]
O hidden Face! O gaze fixed on us from afar
And that we cannot meet: Grant us, who wait
In the great park of crumbling monuments that is
The world, that we may meet at last those eyes
In which black fires burn back to white,
With perfect clearness, and not blurred by fever’s heat
Nor in the sudden spasm of disintegrating fear
That rends the breast of beasts and blinds
The blind and undefined: And O instruct
Us how to ripen unto Thee.
[Choir: Sotto Voce]
Hearts are unripe
And spirits light as straw that in Thy light
Shall kindle like the straw, and flare away
To nothing in an instant breath of smoke.
[Voice]
Thy light is like a darkness and Thy
Joy is found through grief. And they who search
For Thee shall find Thee not. And hidden in Thy mouth
The blinding benediction of the final phrase
Which shall not fall upon a listening ear.
[Choir]
For they who listen at the secret door
Hear only their own heart beat out its fault.
II
[Voice]
In the great park,
A wanderer at sundown by the weeping falls
Of pallid spume and high prismatic spray
Once saw across the water in the last illusive light
A figure with a gleaming chalice come …
[Choir]
But it was not Thy Angel!
[Voice]
And another heard
A warning echo in a mountain cave,
Reverberant with distance and the undertone of guilt …
[Choir]
But it was not Thy voice!
[Voice]
For silent and invisible
Are all Thy works; and hidden in the depths midway between
Desire and fear. And they who long for Thee and are afraid
Of Life, and they who fear the clear stroke of Thy knife
Obsessed with the pale shadows of themselves, shall lose full sight
And understanding of that final mystery.
III
[Choir]
Tenebral treasure and immortal flower
And flower of immortal Death!
O silent white extent
Of skyless sky, the wingless flight
And the long flawless cry
Of aspiration endlessly!
[Voice]
The seed is buried in us like a memory; the seed
Is hidden from us like the omnipresent Eye; it grows
Within us through Time’s flux, both night and day.
[Choir]
Darkness that burns like light, black light
And essence of all radiance!
O depth beyond confusion sunk,
The timeless Nadir at the heart
Of Time, where all creative and
Destructive forces meet!
[Voice]
The seed is nurtured by involuntary tears; by blood
Shed from Love’s inmost wounds; its roots are fed
By the concealed corruption of unknown desires.
[Choir]
We cannot hear or see, nor say
The name: There is no light
Or shade, nor place nor time,