a memorandum. Something I have
forgotten to remember,
that there are always
mysteries in life. That shoes
do not always go in pairs, any more
than we do. That one fits;
the other, not. That children can
thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion
chuck out someone’s shoe, split up
someone’s life.
But usually that shoe that I
see is a man’s, old, worn, the sole
parted from the upper.
Then why did the owner keep the other,
keep it to himself? Was he
afraid (as I so often am with
inanimate objects) to hurt its feelings?
That one shoe in the road invokes
my awe and my sad pity.
The Victoria Falls
So hushed, so hot, the broad Zambesi lies
Above the Falls, and on her weedy isles
Swing antic monkeys swarm malignant flies,
And seeming-lazy lurk long crocodiles.
But somewhere down the river does the hush
Become a sibilance that hints a sigh,
A murmur, mounting as the currents rush
Faster, and while the murmur is a cry
The cry becomes a shout, the shout a thunder
Until the whole Zambesi waters pour
Into the earth’s side, agitating under
Infinite spray mists, pounding the world’s floor.
Wrapped in this liquid turmoil who can say
Which is the mighty echo, which the spray?
Conversation Piece
It occurs to me, perversely perhaps, but unmistakably,
That it would be so nice to be seized like that
And taken away.
Why?
I’m not sure why, but it occurs to me
That it would be so nice to have a change of problems,
And such a relief to be in the right for once
In the face of the interrogators which are everywhere, anyway.
Solitary confinement sounds nice, too.
I like that word, used in the reports, ‘incommunicado’.
Why?
Well, why are you asking? I’m only just saying it occurs to me
That one might be able to take a spiritual
Retreat out of it, such as I’ve never managed
To achieve in the atmosphere of monasteries and convents.
Unworldliness is such a distraction, you see.
Of course, the idea of being seized is
A prehistoric female urge, probably, rising
Up from the Cave, which must have been exciting.
And perhaps one would hope for a charming interrogator.
Yes, I do agree, I wouldn’t like it really.
It’s only just an idea. Yes, I know you don’t follow.
Because, in fact, I’m not leading anywhere. Only talking,
That’s all. I think I’d put up a fight, actually,
If taken away off the street. And it occurs to me that maybe
I would like a fight, but not really.
Neither would they, perhaps.
Why?
I don’t know. Why are you asking questions
Like this and trying to put me in the wrong?
I’ve exhausted the idea, anyhow, with all this talking.
Elementary
Night, the wet, the onyx-faced
Over the street was shining where
I saw an object all displaced
In black water and black air.
Was it myself? If so I found
An odd capacity for vision.
Capacity, I understand
Is limited by fixed precision,
Being the measure of displacement:
The void exists as bulk defined it,
The cat subsiding down a basement
Leaves a catlessness behind it.
That vision then, shall I concede is
Proved by a void capacity?
What’s good enough for Archimedes
Ought to be good enough for me.
But knowing little of natural law
I can’t describe what happens after
You weigh a body such as I saw,
First in air and then in water.
Against the Transcendentalists
There are more visionaries
Than poets and less
Poets than missionaries,
Poets are a meagre species.
There is more of everything than poetry
Which, for personal purposes,
I wish may preserve
Identity from any other commodity
Also from Delphic insanity,
Drunkenness and discrepancy
Of which there’s already a great plenty.
And so I reserve
The right not to try to
Fulfil the wilderness or fly to
Empyreal vacuity with an eye to
Publication, for what am I to
Byzantium or Byzantium
To me? I live in Kensington
And walk about, and work in Kensington
And do not foresee departing from Kensington.
So if there’s no law in Kensington
Adaptable to verse without contravening
The letter to prove
The law, I’ll make one.
The first text is
The word. The next is
(Since morals prevent quarrels
And writers make poor fighters)
Love your neighbour, meaning
Your neighbour, let him love
His neighbour, and he his.
Who is Everyman, what is he
That he should stand in lieu of
A poem? What is Truth true of?
And what good’s a God’s-eye-view of
Anyone to anyone
But God? In the Abstraction
Many angels make sweet moan
But never write a stanza down.
Poets are few and they are better
Equipped to love and animate the letter.
I therefore resign
The seven-league line
In footwear of super-cosmic design
To the global hops
Of wizards and wops;
Hoping that if Byzantium
Should appear in Kensington
The city will fit the size
Of the perimeter of my eyes
And of the span of my hand:
Hands and eyes that understand
This law of which the third
Text is the thing defined,
The flesh made word.
Shipton-under-Wychwood
Under Wychwood the growth and undergrowth
contend and do not mind how things exceptional
meander into landscape. They are drenched under
and under the repetitive green at last.
Fetched into chastity are fond extravagant
and noticeable doings and undertakings
whereover all the rhythms of Cotswold ride.
Ride, and have struck an ever-receding camp
over and over again, redundant time and tenses
disposing of themselves. What horses overtake them?
and what will become of the rare and royal hunters?
Prebend plunges over Plantagenet; it is all
over, then, with the legions of Rome before
finality, split-hooved, has taken over
Shipton under the forest, concealed in summer.
Conversations
Two or three on the winter pavement talking,
One or two in the stubble field,
Idle, concerning miracles.
Voices are butter, but the eyes overtly
Detest another’s dubious lips;
Eyes are blades where fancy breeds.
In boredom
breeds, meanwhile remains to each
Enemy his friend, to every lying
Tongue an angel apiece.
The conversation therefore is in heaven,
Here on the streets of understanding
Here in the fields of bread.
When men are magic and air their advocates
Bide by the human grain and yet,
Though these offences needs must come,
Agree, sincere as light.
Blessed is the child of indiscretion talking,
And the orphan of indignation,
And before their Father’s face, their conversations
Continually dancing.
Blessed are sons enticed to sea, and the mother
Constrained by wonder and by sign,
Their angels cover the face of the water,
And the water singeth a quiet tune.
Two or three must argue these contentions;
One or two in a winter season
Herein long since have plucked a sentiment or scandal.
But our conversation is in heaven.
The Card Party
Pacified, smooth as milk, by cakes and tea,
Four ladies took their chairs accordingly;
Each, picking up her cards in slow suspense,
Preened up her creamy neck to Providence.
Somewhat apart from this important four,
Two sisters, knitting, settled near the door,
Cautioned each other, bending eye to eye,
Then watched the game together in rivalry.
Each player felt reluctantly compelled
To know what mystery the other held;
As one white neck rose taller with desire
The other three stretched likewise snakier.
And all the afternoon, discomfited,
Those four swans turned disdainful head from head;
Erect, they cast their cards throughout the night.
Each throat thinned upwards like a stalagmite.
By dawn they bent and buried their flexible
Extending isthmuses beneath the table,
Upraising with apologetic pride
Those graceful members at the other side.
And what about the two beside the door?
They veered from cross to curious, hour by hour.
The knitting tangled, bound both necks askew,
And from this loggerhead a spiral grew
From which the sister-heads peered forth to pry—
What cards? All six coiled there, finally.
Set in a formal knot and inextricable,
Two died beside the door, four at the table.
How brave these darlings, and how marvellous
That all their lovely necks should mingle thus.
Thus twined it was in death they coincided
Who always in their lives had been divided.
Chrysalis
We found it on a bunch of grapes and put it
In cotton-wool, in a matchbox partly open,
In a room in London in winter-time, and in
A safe place, and then forgot it.
Early in the cold spring we said, ‘See this!
Where on earth has the butterfly come from?’
It looked so unnatural whisking about the curtain:
Then we remembered the chrysalis.
There was the broken shell with what was once
The head askew; and what was once the worm
Was away out of the window, out of the warm,
Out of the scene of the small violence.
Not strange, that the pretty creature formalised
The virtue of its dark unconscious wait
For pincers of light to come and pick it out.
But it was a bad business, our being surprised.
Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard
Lady who lies beneath this stone,
Pupil of Time pragmatical,
Though in a lifetime’s cultivation
You did not blossom, summer shall.
The fierce activity of grass
Assaults a century’s constraint.
Vigour survives the vigorous,
Meek as you were, or proud as paint.
And bares its fist for insurrection
Clenched in the bud; lady who lies
Those leaves will spend in disaffection
Your fond estate and purposes.
Death’s a contagion: spring’s a bright
Green fit; the blight will overcome
The plague that overcame the blight
That laid this lady low and dumb,
And laid a parish on its back
So soon amazed, so long enticed
Into an earthy almanack,
And musters now the spring attack;
Which render passive, latent Christ.
Evelyn Cavallo
This person never came to pass,
Being the momentary name I gave
To a slight stir in a fictitious grave
Wherein I found no form and face, alas,
Of Evelyn Cavallo, Evelyn of grass.
Therefore, therefore, Evelyn,
Why do you assert your so non-evident history
While all your feminine motives make a mystery
Which, to resolve, arise your masculine?
Why will you not lie down
At the back of the neither here not there
Where lightly I left you, Evelyn of guile?
But no, you recur in the orgulous noonday style,
Or else in your trite, your debonair
Postprandial despair.
The Rout
A battle between thousands of bees and wasps in the ancient church at Stockerton, near Market Harborough (Leics.) has ended in a victory for the wasps.
Since the battle started three weeks ago the church has been closed and no services have been held.
For years, the bees had been storing their honey under the roof. But the honey started to trickle down the walls. The smell attracted the wasps.
Thousands of bees have been killed and the wasps are now eating the honey.
It is hoped to reopen the church on Sunday.
(NEWS CHRONICLE, 7 September 1951)
From Oliver Cromwell’s despatch to Speaker Lenthall dated 14 June 1645, from Market Harborough:
‘This day we marched towards him. He drew out to meet us. Both armies engaged. We, after three hours fight very doubtful at last routed his army; killed and took about 5,000; very many officers, but of what quality we yet know not. We took also about 200 carriages, all he had, and all his guns, being twelve in number; whereof two were demi-culverins and (I think) the rest sakers . . . Sir, this is none other but the hand of God, and to him alone belongs the glory, wherein none are to share with him.’
I
‘has ended in a victory for the wasps’
What’s wasps?—
A species of bees, or bees
A sort of wasps? Look
Them up in the Pocket Book of
British Insects: The Honey Bee,
Not a native of Britain.
After escape from captivity,
Wild colonies in hollow trees
Or similar sites not uncommon,
But these are from domesticated stock.
Wasps: A common wasp colony in
August or September may contain
Many thousands but all of these
Except the queens
Die in the autumn.
II
‘the honey started to trickle down the walls’,
And that is sickening enough.
For years they stored the stuff under the roof
And summer had o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.
‘And that is sickening enough’, to use the phrase
Lawrence used about bees’ ways;
(‘bees . . . cluster on their own queen.
And that is sickening enough.’)
What Lawrence meant I mean
,
Which is that humanity’s
Different, or ought to be, from bees.
We who are of imported
Origin, wild or domesticated,
Are not so similar
To bees as wasps are,
But in smelling honey we
Are like enough to wasp and bee
To be what we ought not to be.
III
‘The smell attracted the wasps.’
Thousands of upstarts out of paper cells
Form up, assault the established
Wax-works of the wealthy sweet with smells
From long-ago ancestral summers ravished.
Wasps that recently have been
Clustering on your own queen,
Witness the outcome:
The murder of innumerable bees,
‘A victory for the wasps’ ‘but these
Die in the autumn.’
IV
To the Queen Wasp: a despatch from Buzzer Bummer
Dated nineteen-fifty-one, the end of summer,
From Stockerton church near Market Harborough:
This day we marched towards her.
She drew out to meet us. We,
Since three weeks’ fight at last routed her army.
Took all stores. Killed many thousand.
Madam, this is none other but the hand
Of God. ‘The wasps are now eating the honey.’
‘It is hoped to reopen the church on Sunday.’
Four People in a Neglected Garden
Not yet. That is the high concession,
Taking the best of it.
Dying, not dead, the neglected garden
Is passionate yet.
But we are a process no protracted
Parley with trowel and gravel will prolong.
Nature nurtured us too, and then neglected
To gauge how long the grass grew long.
We four are gardens and are guardians
Of gardens. No wonder we let the increase
Of grass grow under our feet and made our own
Seditious separate peace.
Because there is a truce before the tall tree bending
Falls in the end and withers,
Ourselves the occasion of afternoon’s portending—
Lie, syringa; follow, rambler; stems, tumble together.
Like Africa
He is like Africa in whose
White flame the brilliant acres lie,