With wounds and cramps for three long years
Limped back, and sat for school.
ANCESTORS
My New Year’s drink is mulled to-night
And hot sweet vapours roofward twine.
The shades cry Gloria! with delight
As down they troop to taste old wine.
They crowd about the crackling fire,
Impatient as the rites begin;
Mulled porto is their souls’ desire –
Porto well aged with nutmeg in.
‘Ha,’ cries the first, ‘my Alma wine
Of one-and-seventy years ago!’
The second cheers ‘God bless the vine!’
The third and fourth like cockerels crow:
They crow and clap their arms for wings,
They have small pride or breeding left –
Two grey-beards, a tall youth who sings,
A soldier with his cheek-bone cleft.
O Gloria! for each ghostly shape,
That whiffled like a candle smoke,
Now fixed and ruddy with the grape
And mirrored in the polished oak.
I watch their brightening boastful eyes,
I hear the toast their glasses clink:
‘May this young man in drink grown wise
Die, as we also died, in drink!’
Their reedy voices I abhor,
I am alive at least, and young.
I dash their swill upon the floor:
Let them lap grovelling, tongue to tongue.
THE CORNER KNOT
I was a child and overwhelmed: Mozart
Had snatched me up fainting and wild at heart
To a green land of wonder, where estranged
I dipped my feet in shallow brooks, I ranged
Rough mountains, and fields yellow with small vetch:
Of which, though long I tried, I could not fetch
One single flower away, nor from the ground
Pocket one pebble of the scores I found
Twinkling enchanted there. So for relief
‘I’ll corner-knot,’ said I, ‘this handkerchief,
Faithful familiar that, look, here I shake
In these cool airs for proof that I’m awake.’
I tied the knot, the aspens all around
Heaved, and the river-banks were filled with sound;
Which failing presently, the insistent loud
Clapping of hands returned me to the crowd.
I felt and, fumbling, took away with me
The knotted witness of my ecstasy,
Though flowers and streams were vanished past recall,
The aspens, the bright pebbled reach and all.
But now, grown older, I suspect Mozart
Himself had been snatched up by curious art
To my green land: estranged and wild at heart
He too had crossed the brooks, essayed to pick
That yellow vetch with which the plains are thick;
And being put to it (as I had been)
To smuggle back some witness of the scene,
Had knotted up his cambric handkerchief
With common music, rippling, flat and brief;
And home again, had sighed above the score
‘Ay, a remembrancer, but nothing more.’
VIRGIL THE SORCERER
Virgil, as the old Germans have related,
Meaning a master-poet of wide fame –
And yet their Virgil stands dissociated
From the suave hexametrist of that name,
Maro, whose golden and lick-spittle tongue
Served Caesar’s most un-Roman tyrannies,
Whose easy-flowing Georgics are yet sung
As declamations in the academies –
Not Mantuan Virgil but another greater
Who at Toledo first enlarged his spells,
Virgil, sorcerer, prestidigitator,
Armed with all power that flatters or compels.
He, says the allegory, once was thrown
By envious dukes into a dungeon keep
Where, vermin-scarred and wasting to the bone,
Men crouched in year-old filth and could not sleep.
He beckoned then his bond-mates to his side,
Commanding charcoal; from a rusty grate
Charcoal they fetched him. Once again he cried
‘Where are the lordly souls, unbowed by fate,
‘Eager to launch with me on midnight air
A ship of hope, through the cold clouds to skim?’
They gazed at Virgil in a quick despair
Thinking him mad; yet gently humoured him,
And watched his hand where on the prison wall
He scratched a galley, buoyant and well-found.
‘Bring sticks for oars!’ They brought them at his call.
‘Up then and row!’ They stepped from solid ground,
Climbed into fantasy and with a cheer
Heaved anchor, bent their oars, pulled without stop.
And beached them, presently, on a mountain-top.
Here, without disillusion, all were free:
Wrenching their fetters off, they went their ways.
A feat, they swore, that though it could not be,
Was, in effect, accomplished beyond praise.
‘Did Virgil do what legend has related?
Is poetry in truth the queen of arts?
Can we hope better than a glib, bald-pated
Self-laurelled Maro of agreeable parts?’
Ah, fellow-captives, must you still condone
The stench of evil? On a mound of mud
You loll red-eyed and wan, whittling a bone,
Vermined, the low gaol-fever in your blood.
RECENT POEMS: 1925–26
PYGMALION TO GALATEA
As you are woman, so be lovely:
Fine hair afloat and eyes irradiate,
Long crafty fingers, fearless carriage,
And body lissom, neither short nor tall.
So be lovely!
As you are lovely, so be merciful:
Yet must your mercy abstain from pity:
Prize your self-honour, leaving me with mine.
Love if you will; or stay stone-frozen.
So be merciful!
As you are merciful, so be constant:
I ask not you should mask your comeliness,
Yet keep our love aloof and strange,
Keep it from gluttonous eyes, from stairway gossip.
So be constant!
As you are constant, so be various:
Love comes to sloth without variety.
Within the limits of our fair-paved garden
Let fancy like a Proteus range and change.
So be various!
As you are various, so be woman:
Graceful in going as well armed in doing.
Be witty, kind, enduring, unsubjected:
Without you I keep heavy house.
So be woman!
As you are woman, so be lovely:
As you are lovely, so be various,
Merciful as constant, constant as various.
So be mine, as I yours for ever.
IN COMMITTEE
As the committee musters,
‘Silence for Noisy, let Noisy orate.’
Noisy himself blusters,
Shouldering up, mounting the dais,
And baritonely opens the debate
With cream-bun fallacies
With semi-nudes of platitudes
And testamentary feuds
Rushed at a slap-stick rate
To a jangling end.
Immediately he
Begins again, pleads confidentially:
‘Be grateful to your Noisy,
The old firm, your old friend –’
Whose bagpipe lungs express
Emphatic tunelessness.
How could we draft
a fair report
Till all old Noisy’s variants have been aired,
His complimentary discords paired,
Bellowing and squealing sort by sort
In Noah’s Ark fashion;
Noisy’s actual invalidation?
Applause. Up jumps Hasty. ‘Excellent Hasty,
Three cheers for Hasty,’ sings out Hearty,
And is at once ejected
As he expected.
Hasty speaks. Hasty is diabetic,
Like a creature in spasms, pathetic, out of joint,
Stammers, cannot clear the point,
Only as he sinks back, from his seat
Spits out, ‘Noisy you dog, you slug, you cheat.’
Enter the Chairman, late,
Gathers the threads of the debate,
Raps for order,
‘Ragman, will you speak next, sir?’
Ragman pulls out his latest clippings,
Potsherds, tags of talk, flint chippings,
Quotations happy and miserable,
Various careless ologies, half a skull,
Commonplace books, blue books, cook books
And artificial flies with tangled hooks.
‘All genuine,’ lamely says Ragman,
‘Draw your own deductions, gentlemen,
I offer nothing.’
Critic crosses the floor, snuffling,
Draws casually from Ragman’s bag
Two judgements, a fossil, a rag, a thread,
Compares them outspread.
‘Here Noisy cheated, as Hasty said,
Though not as Hasty meant.
Use your discernment.
These objects prove both speakers lied:
One side first, then the other side.
We can only say this much: –
So and So clearly is not such and such.
And the point is…’ Critic wrinkles his nose.
‘Use your discernment.’
Re-enter Hearty, enthusiastically repentant,
Cries of ‘Order, Order!’ Uproar.
Chairman raps, is impotent.
Synthesis smoking in a corner
Groans, pulls himself together,
Holds his hand up, takes the floor,
‘Gentlemen, only a half-hour more
And nothing done. What’s to be blamed?
No, no. Let us agree
First, that the motion’s wrongly framed,
Two senses are confused, indeed three,
Next, the procedure’s upside-down.
Pray, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Secretary…
Let us hear Pro and Con
On the reconstituted motion.’
Pro and Con speak. Noisy makes no objection,
Busy recalling his oration
For instant publication.
Hasty makes no objection,
Busy clicking the blind-cords up and down,
Nor Ragman (Ragman consults a Hebrew Lexicon),
Nor Critic (Critic drums with a pencil on the table),
Nor Hearty (Hearty is affable
In bubbling praise of Ragman’s knowledge).
Synthesis sums up, nerves on edge.
Critic amends a small detail.
Synthesis accepts it, not too proud.
Chairman reads the draft-report aloud,
‘Resolved that this day fortnight without fail…’
All vote, all approve
With show of brotherly love,
And the clock strikes, just in time.
Hearty proposes in pun-strewn rhyme
A vote of thanks to all the officers.
Cheers drown Hasty’s angry bark.
Noisy begins: ‘Gentlemen and Philosophers…’
Critic hums: ‘Not too ill a morning’s work.’
Ragman’s on all fours after scraps and crumbs.
Chairman turns out the gas: ‘Come, Ragman!’
Ragman comes;
Synthesis left sitting in the dark:
‘I shall resign to-morrow, why stay
Flattered as indispensable
By this odd rabble,
Not indispensable: and going grey?’
A LETTER TO A FRIEND
Gammon to Spinach,
Kentucky to Greenwich,
‘Neither have I met you,
Nor can I forget you
While the world’s round.’
Spinach in reply,
‘Fool! but more fool I.
Neither do I know you
Nor shall I forgo you.
Here’s occasion found
For a graver meeting
For a blunter greeting
Spinach with Gammon,
Jacksnipe with Salmon
In the deserts of Ammon
Thus to live nearly,
Thus to love dearly
On unexplored ground.’
IN SINGLE SYLLABLES
Since I was with you last, at one with you,
Twelve hours have passed. Can I now swear it true
That love rose up in wrath to make us blind,
And stripped from us all powers of heart and mind,
So we were mad and had no pulse or thought
But love, love, love, in the one bale-fire caught?
You pass, you smile: yet is that smile I see
Of love, and of your all-night gift to me?
Now I too smile, for doubt, and own the doubt,
And wait in fear for night to root it out,
And doubt the more; but take heart to be true,
Each time of change, to a fresh hope of you,
That love may prove his worth once more and be
Fierce as the tides of Spring in you and me,
And bear with us till dawn shall break, though soon
With dreams of doubt to vex me at high noon.
THE TIME OF DAY
Here some sit restless asking the time of day,
Waiting the miracle. ‘What miracle’s that?’ I ask.
‘The triumph of one confident hour,’ they say,
‘Over its team-mates in the century’s task.’
‘An event, be sure,’ I say, ‘that shall never be,
Nor was nor could be, unless as mere denial
Of some huge timely eventuality
That promised more than it later brought to trial.
‘For the hour must always cry for a certain date
As a glass to gaze in, a charter of true succession,
Consent each time to bow to the legal fate
Of quaintness, which is the end of self-possession.’
Even while I spoke, they shivered white as sheets
Muttering ‘The Comforter is about to speak.
He will exalt the mighty to their usual seats
And kick the cringing buttocks of the humble and meek.
‘For while the miracle waits of which we have spoken
The Comforter’s here to confirm the ancestral story,
How the teeth of all the ungodly shall be broken
And the flag of Virtue flaunt its tattered glory.’
Then the Comforter eyed the niche where I was sitting.
‘Well pleaded, fanciful spirit,’ he laughed, and named
My early sweetnesses. Coward! I found it fitting
To blush my deprecations, but I was truly shamed.
BLONDE OR DARK?
Who calls for women, drink and snuff
In the one breath, has said enough
To give the scientist his answer
To ‘How came pox and gout and cancer?’
Undifferentiated ‘women
And drink and snuff in time of famine
Become materialized, remain
Real when plenty comes again,
And pox, gout, cancer are the price
Of this continued artifice,
A self-abusive make-believe
That wears its heart not on its sleeve
Merely, but flips it in the palm
Of any busi
ness-like madame
Whose ‘Blonde or dark, sir?’ says enough
Whether of women, drink, or snuff.
BOOTS AND BED
Here in this wavering body, now brisk, now dead,
Rules the long struggle between boots and bed,
Empiric boots distrusting all that seems,
And quietistic bed, my ship of dreams.
Each laid a wager in my infancy
Himself would have me when I came to die,
And still the stakes are raised as I appear
More stalwart or more sickly, year by year;
Until I lie afield, and keep my toes
Naked and nimble as a monkey goes.
Yet something always baulking this evasion,
Glass under foot or frost or irritation
Of gnats and midges in the summer hay,
Once more begins my accustomed day-to-day
With pride of boots, and closes in delight
Of ghoulish bed gloating ‘Perhaps to-night’:
So nothing’s left but to dull-weary them
And out-Methusalem Methusalem.
THE TAINT
Being born of a dishonest mother
Who knew one thing and thought the other,
A father too whose golden touch
Was ‘Think small, please all, compass much’,
He was hard put to it to unwind
The early swaddlings of his mind.
‘Agree, it is better to confess
The occasion of my rottenness
Than in a desperation try
To cloak, dismiss or justify
The inward taint: of which I knew
Not much until I came to you
And saw it then, furred on the bone,
With as much horror as your own.
‘You were born clean; and for the sake
Of your strict eyes I undertake
(If such disunion be allowed
To speak a sentence, to go proud
Among the miseries of to-day)
No more to let mere doing weigh
As counterbalance in my mind
To being rotten-boned and blind,
Nor leave the honesty and love
Of both only for you to prove.’
DUMPLINGS’ ADDRESS TO GOURMETS
King George who asked how was the dumpling packed
With apple, seeing the crust was yet intact,
Was no more royal fool than you who show
Our lives in terms of raw fruit and raw dough
Or make our dumplingdom mere aggregate
Of heat, fruit, sugar, dough and china plate,
Who criticize our beneath-crust condition
Before the crust is cracked, from a position