The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair. . .
Charlotte Mew, 1916
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Mew
I Have Been Through the Gates
His heart, to me, was a place of palaces
and pinnacles and shining towers;
I saw it then as we see things in dreams—
I do not remember how long I slept;
I remember the trees, and the high, white walls,
and how the sun was always on the towers;
The walls are standing today, and the gates:
I have been through the gates, I have groped,
I have crept
Back, back. There is dust in the streets, and
blood; they are empty; darkness is over
them;
His heart is a place with the lights gone out,
forsaken by great winds and the heavenly
rain, unclean and unswept,
Like the heart of the holy city, old, blind,
beautiful Jerusalem,
Over which Christ wept.
Charlotte Mew, 1921
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Heaney
The Wife's Tale
When I had spread it all on linen cloth
Under the hedge, I called them over.
The hum and gulp of the thresher ran down
And the big belt slowed to a standstill, straw
Hanging undelivered in the jaws.
There was such quiet that I heard their boots
Crunching the stubble twenty yards away.
He lay down and said "Give these fellows theirs.
I'm in no hurry," plucking grass in handfuls
And tossing it in the air. "That looks well."
(He nodded at my white cloth on the grass.)
"I declare a woman could lay out a field
Though boys like us have little call for cloths."
He winked, then watched me as I poured a cup
And buttered the thick slices that he likes.
"It's threshing better than I thought, and mind
It's good clean seed. Away over there and look."
Always this inspection has to be made
Even when I don't know what to look for.
But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags
Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot,
Innumerable and cool. The bags gaped
Where the chutes ran back to the stilled drum
And forks were stuck at angles in the ground
As javelins might mark lost battlefields.
I moved between them back across the stubble.
They lay in the ring of their own crusts and dregs
Smoking and saying nothing. "There's a good
yield,
Isn't there?"—as proud as if he were the land
itself—
"Enough for crushing and for sowing both."
And that was it. I'd come and he had shown me
So I belonged no further to the work.
I gathered cups and folded up the cloth
And went. But they still kept their ease
Spread out, unbuttoned, grateful, under the trees.
Seamus Heaney, 1969
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Wickham
Meditation at Kew
Alas! for all the pretty women who
marry dull men,
Go into the suburbs and never come out again,
Who lose their pretty faces, and dim
their pretty eyes,
Because no one has skill or courage to organize.
What do these pretty women suffer
when they marry?
They bear a boy who is like Uncle Harry,
A girl who is like Aunt Eliza, and not new,
These old, dull races must breed true.
I would enclose a common in the sun,
And let the young wives out to laugh and run;
I would steal their dull clothes and go away,
And leave the pretty naked things to play.
Then I would make a contract with hard Fate
That they see all the men in the world
and choose a mate,
And I would summon all the pipers in the town
That they dance with Love at a feast,
and dance him down.
From the gay unions of choice
We'd have a race of splendid beauty
and of thrilling voice.
The World whips frank, gay love with rods,
But frankly, gaily shall we get the gods.
Anna Wickham, 1921
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Blake
How sweet I roamed
How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
William Blake, 1783
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Williams W
Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
William Carlos Williams, 1917
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Levertov
What wild dawns there were
What wild dawns there were
in our first years here
when we would run outdoors naked
to pee in the long grass behind the house
and see over the hills such steamers,
such banners of fire and blue (the blue
that is Lilith to full day's honest Eve)—
What feathers of gold under the morning star
we saw from dazed eyes before
stumbling back to bed chilled with dew
to sleep till the sun was high!
Now if we wake early
we don't go outdoors—or I don't—
and you if you do go
rarely call me to see the day break.
I watch the dawn through glass: this year
only cloudless flushes of light, paleness
slowly turning to rose,
and fading subdued.
We have not spoken of these tired
risings of the sun.
Denise Levertov, 1970
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Frost
Storm Fear
When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower-chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
"Come out! Come out!"
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdu
ed to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length—
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether 'tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.
Robert Frost, 1913
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Hardy
A Wife Waits
Will's at the dance in the Club room below.
Where the tall liquor-cups foam;
I on the pavement up here by the Bow,
Wait, wait, to steady him home.
Will and his partner are treading a tune,
Loving companions they be;
Willy, before we were married in June,
Said he loved no one but me;
Said he would let his old pleasures all go
Ever to live with his Dear.
Will's at the dance in the Club room below,
Shivering I wait for him here.
Thomas Hardy, 1902
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Kinnell
After Making Love We Hear
Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably
sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all
in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now,
we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along
the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas,
it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may
make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players—
and flops down between us and hugs us
and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being
this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startlingly
muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to
the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Galway Kinnell, 1980
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Synge
A Question
I asked if I got sick and died, would you
With my black funeral go walking too,
If you'd stand close to hear them talk or pray
While I'm let down in that steep bank of clay.
And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew
Of living idiots pressing round that new
Oak coffin—they alive, I dead beneath
That board—you'd rave and rend them
with your teeth.
John Millington Synge, 1908
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Levertov
The Ache of Marriage
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it
two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.
Denise Levertov, 1964
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Goodman
Man and Wife
It was late, we
talked it all
came out words
fell we stuffed them
in each other's ears
I talked, she listened
and agreed. Not
enough. Don't shout
she yelled, Don't—I'm
not—. Quietly: In other
words, I said—There are
no other words
she said. Think. I
(thought) can't think.
Words she could not say
I said, then she
spoke for me.
Be a woman, I said.
What is a woman,
she asked, nakedly,
taking off her clothes. That
ended it. The next night
we began again, as if
there were someone
who knew
the answer.
Mitchell Goodman, 1968
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Brodsky
Six Years Later
So long had life together been that now
the second of January fell again
on Tuesday, making her astonished brow
lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
a cloudless distance waiting up the road.
So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her
I'd shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
would beat against my palm like butterflies.
So alien had all novelty become
that sleep's entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
her lips fluttering from my shoulder, sought
to join my own, without another thought.
So long had life together been that all
that tattered brood of paper roses went,
and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
and we had money, by some accident,
and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.
So long had life together been without
books, chairs, utensils—only that ancient bed—
that the triangle, before it came about,
had been a perpendicular, the head
of some acquaintance hovering above
two points which had been coalesced by love.
So long had life together been that she
and I, with our joint shadows, had composed
a double door, a door which, even if we
were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
somehow its halves were split and we went
right through them into the future, into night.
Joseph Brodsky, 1969
translated by Richard Wilbur
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Lowell R
Man and Wife
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days'
white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . . Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air
and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
Robert Lowell, 1957
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Cunningham
To My Wife
And does the heart grow old? You know
In the indiscriminate green
Of summer or in earliest snow
A landscape is another scene,
Inchoate and anonymous,
And every rock and bush and drift
As our affections alter us
Will alter with the season's shift.
So love by love we come at last,
As through the exclusions of a rhyme,
Or the exactions of a past,
To the simplicity of time,
The antiquity of grace, where yet
We live in terror and delight
With love as quiet as regret
And love like anger in the night.
J. V. Cunningham, 1958
Next | TOC> If Ever Two Were One> Strand
Coming to This
We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring
the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised,
nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain