of nations, and the twilight of the West.
A new Isaiah walks the City streets
with burning coals of fire on his head
who cries his warnings to the careless crowds
who heed him not but arm themselves for wars,
who whet their swords for one another’s blood,
who go a-whoring with their own inventions
deaf to the cries of one who sees their fate:
‘As Rome fell, ye shall fall,
as falling ye are now.’
A new Isaiah walks the City streets
with burning coals of fire on his head:
‘The world-metropolis is built on dust,
with fruitless labour, by the sweat of lust.
To dust it shall return nor shall it rise again
till the world writhes in the tremendous pain
of a new birth in a far-distant dawn,
nor can you hope to see that new world born.
‘You cannot turn to God for there is no God left:
Your god is the Machine, of soul bereft.
Through all the discords of a striving host
the Machine drones on, a steel ghost.
‘Out of the foul refuse that the mob ignores
old vices rise that no one now deplores.
New Sodoms and Gomorrahs flourish in the dusk
which suck their foul fruit dry and fling away the husk.
‘You cannot check the wheel of Fate.
The years are late,– the years are late.
The West declines, Metropolis is falling …’
through the loud shade the prophet-voice calling.
The sun has gone. The City’s lights
shine out with fevered brilliance.
When at the last these brilliant lights shall fail
how dark and terrible the Winter night!
E’en now, above the giant roofs
rises a pale and waning moon –
Tis but a few can read the signs.
OTHER EARLY POEMS
(1932–1935)
BY THE SEA
TRADITIONAL FORM
The sea rolls to and from the land,
Leaving white patterns on the sand.
To watch the waves I wander here
Along the water’s edge – I hear
The whole world crying out in sleep,
With voice of winds and waves that weep.
BY THE SEA
MODERNIST POEM
(1)
the whiskey windwhite
waves spit in my
face they are so grey so stony cold the
waves
are grey stone walls the
sea is an old washerwoman’s wh
O (ooo)spitsand flings grey stones atm
e (eee)
(2)
Bluer and blue meeting
bluer the sea rushes and
retreats folding (o) and
ex pan ding l ike a
concertina.
(3)
Lettuces are grow
ing in the blue c
averns
little f
ish sw
ish in
and out of them
(4)
LOOK!
it is the shark
with the little no
selike al
umpo
fsugar he jumps)
out of the water) (sh-) … spl … ash … ashing
us with spray likes
ilver tea-leaves
(5)
awave touches
aus Trali A
and anothe
r touches C
hinajingl
ing likech
ains the waves join am
er
(booo … o … oom) ic
a
to Europe where the flags fly
but no wave touches Switzerland
where the mountains like taller
waves only whiter reach for the
sky
(6)
the sea is an old washerwoman
forever folding and unfolding
her blue with cold enormous
arms
forever rolling and unrolling
her white froth with enormous
eyes.
p. 1933
SEASIDE SOUVENIR
The pattern the jelly-fish left behind,
a pocketful of sand,
a dead, pressed leaf,
the woven rhythms of three days:
these are their traces, faded, indistinct.
The cliff’s wide boulders, the immense
rocking of ocean through the bay,
the lighthouse beam stabbing the rainy night:
these are the memories of three days and more,
not separate, but one – and quite distinct.
p. 1933
ON THE TERRACE
A heavy day: so old the sky
That covers up the treegrown leagues below;
So cold the figures up and down
The terrace where the gusty fountains blow.
Here comes a colonel, at his side
His wife, with drooping shoulders, dressed in black.
They neither of them speak a word.
The colonel walks with hands behind his back.
The woman wears a fading rose
Upon her breast. She and the colonel stare,
Dumb, at the footworn pavingstones
As they walk on. A sigh disturbs the air.
Stirred by no dull regrets for youth,
Or love now dead that once in Spring was new,
Too tired to speak of memories,
They pause and turn to contemplate the view.
Then they pass on. A fountain leans
To drench the stones on which they stood with spray;
And from an ironrailinged tree
A bird looks after them – then flaps away.
p. 1933
SLATE
Behind the higher hill
sky slides away to fringe of crumbling cloud;
out of the gorse-grown slope
the quarry bites its tessellated tiers.
The rain-eroded slate packs loose and flat
in broken sheets and frigid swathes of stone,
like withered petals of a great grey flower.
The quarry is deserted now; within
a scooped-out niche of rubble, dust and silt
a single slate-roofed hut to ruin falls.
A petrified chaos
the quarry is; the slate makes still-born waves,
or crumbling clouds like those
behind the hill, monotonously grey.
p. 1933
SUSAN: A CARVING BY ERIC GILL
The fingers of the air caress your face;
you are so smooth and yet your stone is firm,
inevitable, like volcanic rock
that bursting molten through to air
at once sets firm and is unalt’rable.
The rock has formed spontaneously your face;
and natural as the waves that run through corn
your curved and flowing hair; your petalled lips;
and empty eyes that show no soul although a soul is there.
From: TEN PROSES
2
In New York and other cities, cities of the Future, there are overhead railways along the sides of buildings. The windows of the trains glint in the sunlight or the frenetic glare of enormous electric signs as they pass, dizzily, leaning swiftly outwards as they swerve sharp corners.
Far, far above, writhing away from the cutlery-canteen-crescendo of the interminable traffic passing in the canyons below, a few jets of smoke or steam spurt upwards into the indigo sky, the once-enormous sky now dwarfed by the overwhelming presence of the Present.
3
Shafts of pale light are directed across vari-surfaced planes set at conflicting angles. We
become aware of a mysterious and inhuman figure gradually moulding itself into actuality against this faceted background: Titan’s forehead, bull’s eyes, ultra Romano-Semitic nose, bald, lipless mouth, chin vanished or never existent. When fully materialised, this neo-Gothic gargoyle speaks:
“I carry in my breast the secret of renunciation.”
And we have to acknowledge that this strange mask possesses at least one thousandth part of the world’s total beauty.
8
They were hardly to be expected here, but it is not necessary to explain the long strings of telephone wire looped unexpectedly among the branches of the lane. – Red blotches. – “Now Edinburgh is a place I’d like to go to,” said a voice; and then there was another voice beneath the dark windows, talking about dogs. But now the jabneedles in perilled sockets, candles of pain twisted back in the sockets of eyes.
The fair-ground melodiously awoke beneath the Entry of the Gladiators March. A little steam trickled from the funnel in the middle, against the trees. You couldn’t see it from the top of the hill, where I sat thinking: Supposing I wanted to sign my name across the fields? Wasn’t it like looking into a cup to see that harrow? A horse harrowing an earthcup’s bottom. Undoubtedly a horse.
And now the old beams die, or are chalk marks on white chalk. After dark a sudden and terrific hootwhistle-hoot. People rush past the window which is not yet but soon will be lit.
10
THE WORLD OF DE CHIRICO
We cannot tell the hour, for these elongated shadows across the square are not those of sundials; beneath the arches of the colonnades they are mystery. Against the infinity of the horizon a train moves towards Nowhere, releasing phantom plumes of smoke.
Beyond the immobile equestrian statue which has stood at the edge of the square for so long that one has forgotten whom it commemorates, the sea lies waiting for the hour when it shall rise to overwhelm this dead and empty city. Roman soldiers wander and terrific horses gallop over the sands.
We enter the colonnade and find our way into a white-washed room. Here there are plaster casts of heads of a type of beauty now extinct, there are gloves, T-squares, cornices, laths, picture-frames, handles of violins, biscuits and strangely-marked wands.
Coming towards us from the doorway with slow, agonising movements is a menacing and abnormally tall figure, swathed, its head featureless as an egg, with bricks, scaffoldings, models of buildings and little arches tumbling from its dreadful breast. Its arm creaks as it raises its rubber hand to point at us, meaninglessly ….
p. 1933
AUTOMATIC ALBUM LEAVES
1
The room is not very large, plaster has begun to flake from the ceiling, the windows are draped with whorled lace, under the windows there are little orange trees growing in patent-leather shoes instead of pots. On the plain walls there are hundreds of crosses hanging, made of rotting, worm-eaten wood, and to each one is nailed a small flat figure cut from rose-coloured tin. On the table there are bundles of hair, paper-knives, photographs of angels kissing, bottles of chlorine, miniature facsimiles of the Discobolus in cork, and specimens of the handwriting of children. A tattered shadow floats upwards towards the ventilator and bursts there like a silent bomb; portfolios open on all the shelves and coloured plates showing embryonic development flutter down in slow-motion to the cement floor, faintly phosphorescent and smelling of sweat.
p. 1933
IN PERPETUUM MOBILE
Too tightly tangled are mixed notions;
Wide ocean’s wrack-worn tracks trace whorling wheels,
The vampire sun sucks up the sea’s salt scum
And twists it into cloud that rolls or reels
In woven webs across the crystal sky;
The sun’s barbaric cockerel comb of fire
Royally rages, reaching myriad miles,
Revolving regent rays that outwardly expire;
The system which has sun for centre spins
Round other systems that are cogs for more
Which act on others to the orbit’s end, –
Continual correlation, endless war.
Unending Motion changes as it goes,
Like glyptic flame or shifting waterfall;
One moment is, then metamorphosis
Alters what was before to not at all.
Disintegration is the uncertain seed
Of Motion, making all seen things seem
A nystagmus, leaving no proof to show
That what we saw or shall see is not dream.
p. 1933
HOMMAGE À MALLARMÉ
Returning from pure space, undazzled, to
this calm square room where, sitting quite alone,
I am within white walls; attaining through
lack of motion the quietness of stone;
(too absolute is cold, this hanging air
is null; outside the window no clouds pass;
immobile is this table and this chair;
here dreams a single rose within a glass);
returning to my room from emptiness,
my slowly-moving eyes rest on a page
where clear-cut words are printed, motionless,
and through these crystal words, sans youth, sans age,
to space I now return, expressionless,
from which my sight had made its pilgrimage.
p. 1933
OLEOGRAPH
the sun
going about like a gymnosophist
being so big and strong and full of his own importance
licks
the trees and the wind
shows
their underclothes
(straw in the sun
spindrift
moths and wood-bugs
crumbling wood in lofts
motes shimmering in the
violent ray let in by the
hole in the roof of the barn)
the sun
talking about SOLAR MYTHS
and the LEGEND OF APOLLO
the sun
claims to be descended from
EGYPT
the sun discloses with surprise
the thighbone of a
GODDESS
buried in the sand
p. 1934
NIGHT-PIECE
Sea Voice: With these my massive arms of water flung
Wide and afar about the darkened globe,
I grasp in grim despair at frigid shores
Of islands that repulse my wild embrace.
Then I would smash them. Hatred in my waves
Surges against the allied stubborn cliffs;
And I will on, will ever onwards crash,
Blind as the night reflected in my deep,
Against the stone limbs of these lands that love me not.
Bird Voice: My flapping pinions catch
Dissolving snow with which
The air quivers; is taut
The fragile bone beneath my feather;
My meagre bird-flesh hates
The sharp kiss of this winter weather
The cloud-hung heavy spate,
Across the sky, of night
Chills my frail heart with fear;
Buffeted, deafened by the hollow
Howl of the sea, how fare
Shall I, with no star left to follow?
Man Voice: Silence I cannot this sorry yearning
Which with each winter night returns,
Finding a voice in waves’ and wild birds’ calling;
Distress commences as first darkness falls.
Sea-spume and wind-blown mist above the seething
Ocean meadows, with each breath I breathe
Enter my open heart, as I stand staring,
To mimic night’s empty panic there.
p. 1934
END OF PEACE
The silhouette of a German count has been pasted to the door; three families to one room; guns ready in hippockets.
The rosegarden is decaying in spite of the patent fertilizer we bought last Spring. The tin lies rusting on the heap beside the pottingshed.
POISON: – To release and to dispose; a clearance of the unwanted and an escape.
A loop. A metal design. An air-pocket.
p. 1934
PERPETUAL WINTER NEVER KNOWN
When the light falls on winter evenings
And the river makes no sound in its passing
Behind the house, is silent but for its cold
Flowing, its reeds frozen stiffer than glass
How can one anticipate the dawn, a sudden
Blazing of sunlight thawing the harshest sky?
How can one remember summer evenings?
Must not the tired heart sink and must not fear
Bite, like an acid, wrinkles in its stone?
Behind drawn curtains, gazing at the fire,
Think how the earth spins dumb and bound
By iron chains of frost through death-still air;
And how in every street the sealed windows
Are orange cubes of firelight, how in houses
Cuckoo-clocks imitate the spring, candles are
Suns. Perpetual winter never known,
Families warm their hands and wait, nor
Ever doubt the season’s transience.
p. 1934
‘NOT HAVING KNIFE-EDGE TO MY ERMINE CAPE’
Not having knife-edge to my ermine cape,
Like smoke I float down passages of
Dust and rust and leave not cut or smouldering
Trace. Tick-tock. Didactic. Vague.
And now stop short
to scatter
A careless crumb or two of imagery.
For you a rose, madame; (so simple).
For you, sir, a factory, or a star perhaps.
But now
what desperate effort and what
Damp nail-wounded palm, what peevish squealing rage,
When as the future raises barricades
I find myself too late to be inside.
p. 1934
LANDSCAPE
Across the correct perspective to the painted sky
Scores of reflected bridges merging