‘O be the One, that I may be no more alone in knowing that I am. Let my lost loneliness be illusory. Allow to me a part in Being, that I may thus be part of One and All.’
29
He reflects: ‘I am a man of a benighted century, famished for light and praying out of darkness in the dark. I do not really any longer know what praying means. To pray by rote, repeating time-deconsecrated words, seems vanity to me. I cannot bear to hear myself repeating words of prayer that might be mumbled and not meant. Men of this time seem not to know that there is meaning, nor to know what Being is. All of us talk and talk of all and everything, and shut ourselves up in ourselves, and with the curtain of our words shut out the fact that we are blind and dumb. We are afraid of silence, and afraid to look each other in the eye. Talking, we do not speak to one another; and one who speaks of many others seldom fails to disparage them all indiscriminately. Many speeches are made to urge men on to secure peace through understanding; but I will speak no more of speaking:
Man has become above all the most indefatigable mimic of all the ways of being man that have ever been thought striking. Men imitate, and I am imitating them. I say ‘Man’ and ‘men,’ and thus invest abstractions with my own deficiencies, and think I somehow thus may be absolved of the whole failure to be truly man. I am a man. I cry out of my darkness. I could not cry if I were in complete despair.’
30
In the gardens of the Night, breathed on by newly freshened air, wrapped in the sheltering arms of shadows cast by slowly growing things, the consolation of profound serenity is to be found. Here, in forgetting by degrees the crude immediacies of day, talk’s trivialities, the well-worn props and tokens of habitual routine, it is possible to recall to mind and to draw near again to something vastly fundamental, self-effacingly withdrawn, that has been lying there and is there all the time. It is an ever-new discovery to find it still awaiting our return, unsmiling, taciturn, yet limitlessly tolerant and all-comprehending, ready to take us back into obscurity, to share with us its poverty, to close and soothe our eyes.
31
Nature, the Earth, Unconsciousness and Death. We are drawn down and back towards them in the Night. But there is Vigil where the walker in the gardens stands and wonders in the dark.
32
Now the man who spoke aloud out of his dark into the darkness: to no-one, to someone? the mystery is not mine to solve that each must face alone – the man who said: ‘I could not cry if I were in despair,’ turns presently towards the lighted windows he had left behind him earlier, and slowly makes his way back through the sleeping garden’s scented plants and dangling leaves to where await him wife and home and books and bed.
33
He begins to realise, as he goes, something has changed in him. The open air, the space about him had first stirred his heart, he lifted up his heart and it had opened, and the wind that blows when it will and comes from nowhere that we know and passes on as unaccountably, had inspired it with its own more vital, lighter, unrestricted and revivifying breath. Silence had delivered its essential message to him, and he had responded. Now he feels that he no longer has the need to reassure himself with words.
34
He goes back to the house, he returns to his wife and children. The children upstairs have long been asleep in the night-nursery. His wife is sitting where he left her, under the reading-lamp. She closes her book as he enters; looks up at her husband and smiles slowly at him, sleepily. He kisses her.
35
They are together. The primary division of the human family at night is that which sets those who are alone apart from those who are together. And yet, all are alone, as the man realised in the garden earlier; and all those who are isolated in their solitude are really alone only because they fail actually to realise the presence of other beings like themselves in the world.
36
Greetings to the solitary. Friends, fellow beings, you are not total strangers to us. We are closer to one another than we ever realise. Let us remember one another at night, even though we do not know each other’s names.
p. 1956
SENTIMENTAL COLLOQUY
Daphne: The evening in the towns when Summer’s over
Has always this infectious sadness, Conrad;
And when we walk together after rain
As darkness gathers in the public gardens,
There is such hopelessness about the leaves
That now lie strewn in heaps along each side
Of the wet asphalt paths, that as we turn
Back to the gardens’ closing gates, we two,
Though in our early twenties still, seem elderly,
Both of us, Conrad, quietly quite resigned
And humbled into silence by the Fall …
Conrad: My dear, even your Mother is not elderly!
A woman is a girl or an old maid.
Yet I too do feel muted by this twilight;
For as it ever is the tendency
Of dusk to fall, and of past Summer’s leaves,
At this time not of day but of the year,
To drop from trees, so surely must we fall
Silent if we take lovers’ strolls in Autumn
Hoping we’ll not fall out before the Spring.
Daphne: I hate you, Conrad, if that’s what you’re hoping!
I don’t believe you think I’m a ‘young girl’.
There is already in the air that hint of death
That when we breathe it makes us winter-wise.
Conrad: I do not think we to ourselves appear
A pair of fledglings. Let the middle-aged
Be sentimentally aware of their maturity
But let us not seem to invite their envy.
We shall be like them sooner than we think.
Daphne: There go a couple really bent with care:
Oh, look! how they both love each other, though,
In spite of –
Conrad: Why, you only speak your wish,
Daphne, you’ve not looked close enough!
A pair of ancient fish, my love, out of the deep:
Mute and expressionless they loom and pass
On their dim way across the ocean floor
Of roaring London.
Daphne: Conrad, how long ago
Did we sink drowned in it? Little you care
For two such poor old phantoms. Sink or swim,
We have no choice, since gravity descends
And we although our love’s still young
And though true love’s immortal, are as old
And sink as fast as hearts of stone, if we pretend
We care for no one but ourselves,
Failing to recognize that that’s who they are.
Conrad: You will become a Sybil, sweetheart, soon.
p. 1954
ELEGIAC IMPROVISATION ON THE DEATH OF PAUL ELUARD
A tender mouth a sceptical shy mouth
A firm fastidious slender mouth
A Gallic mouth an asymmetrical mouth
He opened his mouth he spoke without hesitation
He sat down and wrote as he spoke without changing a word
Warmly and urgently
Simply, convincingly
Gently and movingly
Softly, sincerely
Clearly, caressingly
Bitterly, painfully
Pensively, stumblingly
Brokenly, heartbreakingly
Uninterruptedly
In clandestinity
In anguish, in arms and in anger,
In passion, in Paris, in person
In partisanship, as the poet
Of France’s Resistance, the spokesman
Of unconquerable free fraternity.
And now his printed words all add up to a sum total
And it can be stated he wrote just so many poems
And the commentators like undertakers ta
ke over
The task of annotating his complete collected works.
Yet the discursivity of the void
Diverts and regales the whole void then re-enters the void
While every printed page is a swinging door
Through which one can pass in either of two directions
On one’s way towards oblivion
And from the blackness looming through the doorway
The burning bush of hyperconsciousness
Can fill the vacuum abhorred by human nature
And magic images flower from the poet’s speech
He said, ‘There is nothing that I regret,
I still advance,’ and he advances
He passes us Hyperion passes on
Prismatic presence
A light broken up into colours whose rays pass from him
To friends in solitude, leaves of as many branches
As a single and solid solitary trunk has roots
Just as so many sensitive lines cross each separate leaf
On each of the far-reaching branches of sympathy’s tree
Now the light of the prism has flashed like a bird down the dark-blue grove
At the end of which mountains of shadow pile up beyond sight
Oh radiant prism
A wing has been torn and its feathers drift scattered by flight.
Yet still from the dark through the door shines the poet’s mouth speaking.
In rain as in fine weather
The climate of his speaking
Is silence, calm and sunshine,
Sublime cloudburst and downpour,
The changing wind that breaks out blows away
All words – wind that is mystery
Wind of the secret spirit
That breaks up words’ blind weather
With radiant breath of Logos
When silence is a falsehood
And all things no more named
Like stones flung into emptiness
Fall down through bad eternity
All things fall out and drop down, fall away
If no sincere mouth speaks
To recreate the world
Alone in the world it may be
The only candid mouth
Truth’s sole remaining witness
Disinterested, distinct, undespairing mouth
‘Inspiring mouth still more than a mouth inspired’
Speaking still in all weathers
Speaking to all those present
As he speaks to us here at present
Speaks to the man at the bar and the girl on the staircase
The flowerseller, the newspaper woman, the student
The foreign lady wearing a shawl in the faubourg garden
The boy with a bucket cleaning the office windows
The friendly fellow in charge of the petrol station
The sensitive cynical officer thwarting description
Like the well-informed middle-class man who prefers to remain undescribed
And the unhappy middle-aged woman who still hopes and cannot be labelled
The youth who’s rejected all words that could ever be spoken
To conceal and corrupt where they ought to reveal what they name.
The truth that lives eternally is told in time
The laughing beasts the landscape of delight
The sensuality of noon the tranquil midnight
The vital fountains the heroic statues
The barque of youth departing for Cythera
The ruined temples and the blood of sunset
The banks of amaranth the bower of ivy
The storms of spring and autumn’s calm are Now
Absence is only of all that is not Now
And all that is true is and is here Now
The flowers the fruit the green fields and the snow’s field
The serpent dance of the silver ripples of dawn
The shimmering breasts the tender hands are present
The open window looks out on the realm of Now
Whose vistas glisten with leaves and immaculate clouds
And Now all beings are seen to become more wonderful
More radiant more intense and are now more naked
And more awake and in love and in need of love
Life dreamed is now life lived, unlived life realized
The lucid moment, the lifetime’s understanding
Become reconciled and at last surpassed by Now
Words spoken by one man awake in a sleeping crowd
Remain with their unique vibration’s still breathing enigma
When the crowd has dispersed and the poet who spoke has gone home.
PAUL ELUARD has come back to his home the world.
w. 1952, p. 1954
NIGHT THOUGHTS
Radiophonic Poem
(1956)
Aber weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie in Orcus Ohne
Goettliches unser Geschlecht …
HÖLDERLIN
But alas! our generation walks in night, dwells as in Hades, without the Divine …
1 THE NIGHTWATCHERS
[Voice A]
Let those who hear this voice become aware
The sun has set. O night-time listeners,
You sit in lighted rooms marooned by darkness,
And through dark ether comes a voice to bid you
All be reminded that the night surrounds you.
[Voice B]
Around us, as within us, battle rages.
Enveloped in obscurity, our enemy,
An emissary from the world of shadows,
Assails us from an unknown vantage-point,
Observes us unawares, usurps initiative
And uses it to inspire such distrust in us
That we must now suspect him everywhere.
[Voice C]
Let those who hear my voice become aware
That Night has fallen. We are in the dark.
I do not see you, but in my mind’s eye
You sit in lighted rooms marooned by darkness.
My message is sent out upon the waves
Of a black boundless sea to where you drift,
Each in a separate lit room, as though on rafts,
Survivors of the great lost ship, The Day.
[Voice A]
Let those who hear our voices be aware
That Night now reigns on earth. Nocturnal listeners,
The time you hear me in is one of darkness,
And round us, as within us, battle rages.
[Voice B]
A war goes on within against the shadows.
[Voice D]
Who speaks tonight of war and battle? Go to bed!
[Voice E]
The war? What war? We’ve had too many wars.
The last War’s over.
[Voice F]
Go to sleep. Put out
That light. The War is over now. It’s late.
Why don’t those people go to bed?
[Voice G]
Why must we hear
Night-voices always arguing about the state
The world’s in? Why can’t they forget about it?
[Voice E]
War?
Why must we always worry about that? Make them put out
Those lights.
[Voice F]
I’m O so sleepy … Now let’s talk no more.
[Voice B]
The plane-trees in the court outside my window
Suspend their leaves between me and the street-lamp
That burns all night beside the entrance-arch;
And when the night-wind sets their branches waving
The shadows drift in tattered velvet bunches,
Thick-tangled rags of shadow are set swaying,
That dance like the black flames of a cold bonfire,
Leap up and are cast writhing on my bed.
[Voice C]
Anxiety and dream assail the watchman
Who waits in solitude for night to pass,
And shadowy multitudes with muffled tread
March menacingly round about the vigilant.
[Voice A]’
‘Anxiety and dream,’ the watchman said,
‘A shadowy tumult that I cannot quell,
Stir round me like a wind through sleeping grass.’
[Voice B]
I cannot sleep. These nights are terrible. Yet there is now
Nothing more terrible to be afraid of: We have won
The worst; now we need fear no more, nor hide
Our disbelief in anyone.
[Voice D]
Can you believe,
O foreigner I’m thinking of, woman unknown to me,
Lying awake somewhere in Europe, can you now
Believe that you have friends lying alone,
In darkness, overseas, who can imagine how you feel
And wish, and wish – ah, what? What can be done
For anyone, what can we do alone, alas, how can
The lonely people without power, who hardly know
How best to help neighbours they know, help those
Who surely would be neighbours like themselves, if they but knew
How to break through the silence and the noise and the great night
Of all that is unknown to us, that weighs down in between
One lonely human being and another? Who can hear
My thoughts, or know how my heart grieves, or feel
That I just like themselves long to believe
That lonely human beings love each other?
[Voice E]
I believe
There’s bound to be another war one day.
[Voice F]
You can’t believe
Everything that the papers say.
[Voice C]
Russia, the U.S.A.,
Atomic Power, Foreign Powers …
[Voice F]
Go to sleep. Put out
That light! The War is over now. It’s late.
Why don’t those people go to bed?
[Voice E]
They’re all alike
Those foreigners, you can’t trust them, can you?
(Confused Grumbling Voices Fade Out)
[Narration One]
The Tyrant Negativity has usurped power and thrown
Men’s captive souls into the silent pit
Of self-confounded Subjectivity.
Immortal souls that know themselves to be
Immortal souls have wings.