Webbed and monstrous on the sandy floors.
Here wind emptied the snowy caves: the brown
Hands about the tiller unbuckled.
Day lay like a mirror in the sun’s eye.
Olives sleeping, rocks hanging, sea shining
And under Arbutus the scriptural music
Of a pipe beside a boy beside a bay
Soliloquised in seven liquid quibbles.
Here the lucky in summer
Made fast like islanders
And saw upon the waters, leaning down
The haunted eyes in faces torn from books:
So painted the two dark-blue Aegean eyes
And θɛòς δíĸaιoς ‘God the Just’
Under them upon the rotting prows.
Inhabitants of reflection going:
We saw the dog-rose abloom in bowls,
Faces of wishing children in the wells
Under the Acropolis the timeless urchin
Carrying the wooden swallow,
Teller of the spring; on the hills of hair
Over Athens saw the night exhaling.
Later in islands, awaiting passage,
By waters like skin and promontories,
Were blessed by the rotation
Of peach-wind, melon-wind,
Fig-wind and wind of lemons;
Every fruit in the rotation of its breath.
And in the hills encountered
Sagacious and venerable faces
Like horn spoons: forms of address:
Christian names, politeness to strangers.
Heard the ant’s pastoral reflections:
‘Here I go in Arcadia, one two
Saffron, sage, bergamot, rue,
A root, a hair, a bead—all warm.
A human finger swarming
With little currents: a ring:
A married man.’
In a late winter of mist and pelicans
Saw the thread run out at last; the man
Kiss his wife and child good-bye
Under the olive-press, turning on a heel.
To enter April like swimmer,
And memory opened in him like a vein,
Pushed clear on the tides a pathless keel.
Standing alone on the hills
Saw all Greece, the human
Body of this sky suspending a world
Within a crystal turning,
Guarded by the green wicks of cypresses.
Far out on the blue
Like notes of music on a page
The two heads: the man and his wife.
They are always there.
It is too far to hear the singing.
1943/1943
ECHO
To Nancy
And
To Ping-Kû
for her second birthday out of Greece
Nothing is lost, sweet self,
Nothing is ever lost.
The unspoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains
The silence remains
O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!
1956/1943
THIS UNIMPORTANT MORNING
This unimportant morning
Something goes singing where
The capes turn over on their sides
And the warm Adriatic rides
Her blue and sun washing
At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.
Day rings in the higher airs
Pure with cicadas, and slowing
Like a pulse to smoke from farms,
Extinguished in the exhausted earth,
Unclenching like a fist and going.
Trees fume, cool, pour—and overflowing
Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake
Carpets from windows, brush with dew
The up-and-doing: and young lovers now
Their little resurrections make.
And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep
Stitched up—and wake, my darling, wake.
The impatient Boatman has been waiting
Under the house, his long oars folded up
Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.
1946/1944
BYRON
The trees have been rapping
At these empty casements for a year,
Have been rapping and tapping and
Repeating to us here
Omens of the defeating wind,
Omens of the defeating mind.
Headquarters of a war
House in a fever-swamp
Headquarters of a mind at odds.
Before me now lies Byron and behind,
Belonging to the Gods,
Another Byron of the feeling
Shown in this barbered hairless man,
Splashed by the candle-stems
In his expensive cloak and wig
And boots upon the dirty ceiling.
Hobbled by this shadow,
My own invention of myself, I go
In wind, rain, stars, climbing
This ladder of compromises into Greece
Which like the Notself looms before
My politics, my invention and my war.
None of it but belongs
To this farded character
Whose Grecian credits are his old excuse
By freedom holding Byron in abuse.
Strange for one who was happier
Tuned to women, to seek and sift
In the heart’s simple mesh,
To know so certainly
Under the perfume and the politics
What undertow of odours haunts the flesh:
Could once resume them all
In lines that gave me rest,
And watch the fat fly Death
Hunting the skeleton down in each,
Like hairs in plaster growing,
Promising under the living red the yellow—
I helped these pretty children by their sex
Discountenance the horrid fellow.
I have been a secretary (I sing)
A secretary to love …
In this bad opera landscape
Trees, fevers and quarrels
Spread like sores: while the gilded
Abstractions like our pride and honour
On this brute age close like doors
Which pushing does not budge.
Outside them, I speak for the great average.
My disobedience became
A disguise for a style in a new dress.
Item: a lock of hair.
Item: a miniature, myself aged three,
The innocent and the deformed
Pinned up in ribbons for posterity.
And now here comes
The famous disposition to weep,
To renounce. Picture to yourself
A lord who encircled his life
With women’s arms; or another
Who rode through the wide world howling
And searching for his mother.
Picture to yourself a third: a cynic.
This weeping published rock—
The biscuits and the glass of soda-water:
Under Sunium’s white cliffs
Where I laboured with my knife
To cut a ‘Byron’ there—
I was thinking softly of my daughter.
A cock to Aesculapius no less …
You will suggest we found only
In idleness and indignation here,
Plucked by the offshore dancers, brigs
Like girls, and ports of call
In our commerce with liberty, the Whore,
Through these unbarbered priests
And garlic-eating captains:
Fame like the only porch in a wall
To squeeze our shelter from
By profit and by circumstance
Assist this rocky nation’s funeral.
The humane and the lawful in whom
Art and manners mix, who sent us here,
This sort of figures from a drawing-room
Should be paused themselves once
Under these legendary islands.
A landscape hurled into the air
And fallen on itself: we should see
Where the frail spines of rivers
Soft on the backbone intersect and scribble
These unbarbered gangs of freedom dribble
Like music down a page and come
Into the valleys with their small
Ordnance which barks and jumps.
I, Byron: the soft head of my heart bumps
Inside me as on a vellum drum.
Other enemies intervene here,
Not less where the valet serves
Not less in places where I walk alone
With Conscience, the defective: my defences
Against a past which lies behind,
Writing and rewriting to the bone
Those famous letters in my mind.
Time grows short. Now the trees
Are rapping at the empty casements.
Fevers are closing in on us at last—
So long desired an end of service
To the flesh and its competitions of endurance.
There is so little time. Fletcher
Tidies the bed at dusk and brings me coffee.
You, the speaking and the feeling who come after:
I sent you something once—it must be
Somewhere in Juan—it has not reached you yet.
O watch for this remote
But very self of Byron and of me,
Blown empty on the white cliffs of the mind,
A dispossessed His Lordship writing you
A message in a bottle dropped at sea.
1946/1944
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
‘Nous arrivons tout nouveaux aux divers âges de la vie’
‘A penny for your thoughts. I wasn’t joking.’
Most of it I learned from serving-girls,
Looking into eyes mindless as birds, taking
The pure for subject or the unaware.
When empty mouths so soon betray their fear
Kisses can be probes. Mine always were.
Yes, everywhere I sorted the betraying
Motive, point by point designed
This first detective-story of the heart,
Judge, jury, victim, all were in my aspect,
Pinned on the clear notation of the mind—
I primed them like an actor in a part.
I was my own motive—I see you smile:
The one part of me I never used or wrote,
Every comma paused there, hungry
To confess me, to reveal the famished note.
Yet in reason I mastered appetite,
And taught myself at last the tragic sense;
Then through appetite and its many ambushes
I uncovered the politics of feeling, dense
Groves for the flocks of sin to feed in.
Yet in the end the portrait always seemed
Somehow faked, or somehow still in need
Of gender, form and present tense.
I could not get beyond this wall.
No. The bait of feeling was left untasted:
Deep inside like ruins lay the desires
To give, to trust, to be my subjects’ equal,
All wasted, wasted.
Though love is not the word I want
Yet it will have to do. There is no other.
So the great Lack grew and grew.
Of the Real Darkness not one grain I lifted.
Yet the whole story is here like the part
Of some great man’s body,
Veins, organs, nerves,
Unhappily illustrating neither death nor art.
1946/1944
PEARLS
Now mark, the Lady one fine day
To refresh her pearls she comes
And buries them in the sand here,
Letting the sea feed on them,
To lick back by salt
The lustre of them and the prize.
Ten summers, lazy as fishes follow.
Ten winters, nude as thimbles
Bear on their gradual curves
The drinkers of the darkness.
The pearls drink and recover
But their lovely Neck
Becomes one day the target for an Axe,
Bows swan-like down
Its unrepenting lovely stump.
Something is incomplete here,
Something in the story is unfinished,
A tale with no beginning,
The fragment of a voice that interrupts,
Like this unbroken coast,
Like this half-drawn landscape,
Like this broken torso of a poem.
1946/1945
HELOISE AND ABELARD
Heloise and Abelard
Nature’s great hermaphrodites,
Arists in the human way,
Turned their sad endearing eyes,
Passionate and tiger-bright,
Closed the animal.
Yet in deprivation found
By a guess
Love unseal its loveliness.
Body’s rude containers
With their humours up like wicks,
Passionate and tiger-bright,
Made them foreigners
To themselves while still awake.
Yet with this he lights the stake
Feeds like faggots tied
Innocence and pride,
Bits of what had died.
Tombs may lie by two and two
On the Jordan’s bends;
Death’s unshrinking little noun
Marks them for his own,
The passionate and tiger-bright
Couples in their shadows lie
Till the action ends.
Death by lovelessness for these
Was unsealed in mysteries
By the enduring Friend.
Lucky who can sort out
The barren and the sown,
Whose punishments are given joy,
Who their own bodies own.
Who can discriminate,
Under reason’s cruel rod
Between the friend in them
And enemy of God.
1946/1945
CONON IN ALEXANDRIA
Ash-heap of four cultures,
Bounded by Mareotis, a salt lake,
On which the winter rain rings and whitens,
In the waters, stiffens like eyes.
I have been four years bound here:
A time for sentences by the tripod:
Prophecies by those who were born dead,
Or who lost their character but kept their taste.
A solitary presumed quite happy,
Writing those interminable whining letters,
On the long beaches dimpled by the rain,
Tasting the island wind
Blown against wet lips and shutters out of Rhodes.
I say ‘presumed’, but would not have it otherwise.
* * *
Steps go down to the port
Beyond the Pharos. O my friends,
Surely these nightly visitations
Of islands in one’s sleep must soon be over?
I have watched beside the others,
But always the more attentive, the more exacting:
The familiar papers on a table by the bed,
The plate of olives and the glass of wine.
You would think that thoughts so long rehearsed
Like the dry friction of ropes in the mind
Would cease to lead me where in Greece
The almond-candles and the statues burn.
The moon’s cold seething fires over this white city,
Through four Februaries have not
forgotten.
* * *
Tonight the stars press idly on the nerves
As in a cobweb, heavy with dispersal:
Points of dew in a universe too large
Too formal to be more than terrible.
‘There are sides of the self
One can seldom show. They live on and on
In an emergency of anguish always,
Waiting for parents in another.’
Would you say that later, reading
Such simple propositions, the historian
Might be found to say: ‘The critic
In him made a humour of this passion.
The equations of a mind too conscious of ideas,
Fictions, not kisses, crossed the water between them’?
* * *
And later, Spring, which compels these separations
Will but define you further as she dies
In flowers downless and pure as Portia’s cheek,
Interrupting perhaps the conversations of friends
On terraces where the fountains plane at time,
To leave this small acid precipitate to memory,
Of something small, screwed-up, and thrown aside.
‘Partings like these are lucky. At least they wound.’
And later by the hearthstone of a philosophy
You might have added: ‘The desert, yes, for exiles.
But its immensity only confines one further.
Its end seems always in oneself.’
A gown stained at the arm-pits by a woman’s body.
A letter unfinished because the ink gave out.
* * *
The lovers you describe as ‘separating each other
Further with every kiss’: and your portrait
Of a man ‘engaged in bitterly waiting
For the day when art should become unnecessary’,