That have outlived their uses in my mind –
Your outward staring that is inward blind
And the mad strummings of your melancholy,
Let them cease now.
DEVILISHLY PROVOKED
Devilishly provoked
By my officious pen –
Where I demand one word
It scrawls me nine or ten;
But each surviving word
Resentfully I make
Sweat for those nine or ten
I blotted for its sake.
And even more provoked
By my officious heart
Whose emblems of desire
From every corner start:
So little joy I find
In their superfluous play
I curse the spell that drives
My only love away.
THE LEGS
There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.
And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.
And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.
What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping,
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.
Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.
My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,
Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.
Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.
My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?
Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.
OGRES AND PYGMIES
Those famous men of old, the Ogres –
They had long beards and stinking arm-pits,
They were wide-mouthed, long-yarded and great-bellied
Yet not of taller stature, Sirs, than you.
They lived on Ogre-Strand, which was no place
But the churl’s terror of their vast extent,
Where every foot was three-and-thirty inches
And every penny bought a whole hog.
Now of their company none survive, not one,
The times being, thank God, unfavourable
To all but nightmare shadows of their fame;
Their images stand howling on the hill
(The winds enforced against those wide mouths),
Whose granite haunches country-folk salute
With May Day kisses, and whose knobbed knees.
So many feats they did to admiration:
With their enormous throats they sang louder
Than ten cathedral choirs, with their grand yards
Stormed the most rare and obstinate maidenheads,
With their strong-gutted and capacious bellies
Digested stones and glass like ostriches.
They dug great pits and heaped huge mounds,
Deflected rivers, wrestled with the bear
And hammered judgements for posterity –
For the sweet-cupid-lipped and tassel-yarded
Delicate-stomached dwellers
In Pygmy Alley, where with brooding on them
A foot is shrunk to seven inches
And twelve-pence will not buy a spare rib.
And who would judge between Ogres and Pygmies –
The thundering text, the snivelling commentary –
Reading between such covers he will marvel
How his own members bloat and shrink again.
TO WHOM ELSE?
To whom else other than,
To whom else not of man
Yet in human state,
Standing neither in stead
Of self nor idle godhead,
Should I, man in man bounded,
Myself dedicate?
To whom else momently,
To whom else endlessly,
But to you, I?
To you who only,
To you who mercilessly,
To you who lovingly,
Plucked out the lie?
To whom else less acquaint,
To whom else without taint
Of death, death-true?
With great astonishment
Thankfully I consent
To my estrangement
From me in you.
AS IT WERE POEMS
I
In the legend of Reynard the Fox, Isegrim the Wolf, Grymbart the Brock, Tybert the Cat, Cuwart the Hare, Bellyn the Ram, Baldwin the Ass, Rukenawe the She-Ape and the rest of that company, where was I?
I was in the person of Bruin the Bear. And through the spite of Reynard and my own greed and credulity I left behind my ears and the claws of my fore-feet wedged in the trunk of a honey-tree.
In the legend of Troy where was I?
I was in the person of Ajax the son of Telamon. And Odysseus cheated me of the prize of dead Achilles’ arms. For he suborned Trojan captives to testify that it was he who of us all had done their city the most harm. Angered by this, I drove Troy’s whole forces single-handed from the field. But he covertly disposed slaughtered sheep in the place of the dead men that I had strewn behind me and so fastened on me the name of madman.
In the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, where was I?
I would prefer to be written down for the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin’s enemy. But the natural truth is that I played the part of jolly Friar Tuck. I took and gave great buffets. I was the gross fool of the greenwood.
In the legend of Jesus and his companions, where was I?
I was not Jesus himself, I was not John the Baptist, nor Pontius Pilate, nor Judas Iscariot, nor even Peter. I was Lazarus sickening again in old age long after the Crucifixion, and knowing that this time I could not cheat death.
In the legend of Tobit, where was I?
I was not old Tobit himself, nor his kinsman Raguel, nor Sarah, Raguel’s daughter, nor the angel Raphael, nor the devil Asmodaeus. I was Tobias, in sight of the towers of Ecbatana, with the gall, heart and liver of the fish in a pouch by my side.
In the legend of that Lucius whom a witch of Thessaly turned into a dumb ass and who after many cruel adventures was restored to human shape by the intervention of the goddess Isis, where was I?
I was that impassioned ass in the gold trappings.
In the legend of Isis, of Python the destroyer, and of Osiris yearly drowned, where was I?
I was the drowned Osiris.
II
A sick girl went from house to house fitting people into legends of her own making. For you and for me she made a legend of the Christ and of King West the Shepherd and of the Golden Seal of Solomon long hidden in a cave of a hill at Jerusalem. You were the Christ-Woman and I was King West and she was Queen East with whom King West takes ship to Palestine: to find the Golden Seal. You as of old nursed the souls of the dead; she and I led the living.
But you reasoned with the sick girl: in the legend of the Christ there is no room for a sequel, it is a page covered with writing on both sides. Whoever would take the story further must find a clean page.
And I scolded angrily: Jesus, the Christ-Man, was a timid plagiarist. He made no new legends but said over the old ones, fitting himself into them. He was the Child foretold by Isaiah and the othe
r prophets. Born at Bethlehem, equivocally of the seed of David, riding through Zion in prophesied glory on an ass’s colt, stiffnecked to eschew love that he might be duly rejected and despised, busying himself vexatiously with the transgressions of others – he was true to the smallest articles of the legend and was drawn at last miserably to a well-documented death.
III
And how shall I call you, between the name concealed in the legends and that open name by which reason calls you and in which you reasonably answer–your name to whosoever would not have his fellow levelheads say, ‘Look, he is mad, he is talking with a familiar spirit’?
‘Call me,’ you say, ‘by my open name, so that you do not call upon any of those false spirits of the legends, those names of travesty. For in my open name I am jealous for my hinder name, that it should not be belied in drunken mystifications: am I not the most levelheaded of all your fellows? So let my open name be my closed name, and my closed name, my open name.’
To which I answer, ‘And so the names of the travesty vanish into a single name against the meddling of men with the unchangeable import of the name: Isis, the secrecy of the import. In Egypt she was the holy name of the year of holy months: she was known to her priests as the invisible removed one, and to her people as the manifoldly incomprehensible. Every new moon crowned her with its peculiar head-dress – a rose, a star, an ear of barley, the horns of a goat: and she became the Moon itself, the single head of variety, Hecate by name. And Lilith, the owl of wisdom, because her lodges were held in stealthy darkness. At length the priests themselves forgot whom they meant in Isis. They even confounded her with the cowish Demeter, the blind force of Nature, and made her wife to Osiris.
‘Now let all the false goddesses sprung from Isis – Pallas, Diana, Juno, Ceres and the rest – return to Isis, the greatly unnamed and greatly unseen and greatly unspoken with. Had but a single man seen her in Egypt, face to face, and known her for herself, then she would have been human woman, for other men to pass by and not know.
‘So likewise Osiris was myself greatly meddling, Osiris the triple-named. He was Apollo in bright strength who dries up the floods. He was Dionysus, the growth of the vine. And he was Pluto, the dead man of the pit, the flooded Egypt to which life ever returns. Every year he rose again from the dead, but every year returned to the dead again. For she was only Isis, a closed name.’
ON PORTENTS
If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.
From Poems 1930–1933
(1933)
THE BARDS
The bards falter in shame, their running verse
Stumbles, with marrow-bones the drunken diners
Pelt them for their delay.
It is a something fearful in the song
Plagues them – an unknown grief that like a churl
Goes commonplace in cowskin
And bursts unheralded, crowing and coughing,
An unpilled holly-club twirled in his hand,
Into their many-shielded, samite-curtained,
Jewel-bright hall where twelve kings sit at chess
Over the white-bronze pieces and the gold;
And by a gross enchantment
Flails down the rafters and leads off the queens –
The wild-swan-breasted, the rose-ruddy-cheeked
Raven-haired daughters of their admiration –
To stir his black pots and to bed on straw.
ULYSSES
To the much-tossed Ulysses, never done
With woman whether gowned as wife or whore,
Penelope and Circe seemed as one:
She like a whore made his lewd fancies run,
And wifely she a hero to him bore.
Their counter-changings terrified his way:
They were the clashing rocks, Symplegades,
Scylla and Charybdis too were they;
Now angry storms frosting the sea with spray
And now the lotus island’s drunken ease.
They multiplied into the Sirens’ throng,
Forewarned by fear of whom he stood bound fast
Hand and foot helpless to the vessel’s mast,
Yet would not stop his ears: daring their song
He groaned and sweated till that shore was past.
One, two and many: flesh had made him blind,
Flesh had one pleasure only in the act,
Flesh set one purpose only in the mind –
Triumph of flesh and afterwards to find
Still those same terrors wherewith flesh was racked.
His wiles were witty and his fame far known,
Every king’s daughter sought him for her own,
Yet he was nothing to be won or lost.
All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed
He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone.
DOWN, WANTON, DOWN!
Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love’s name,
Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?
Poor bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach –
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!
Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.
Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?
Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!
THE PHILOSOPHER
Three blank walls, a barred window with no view,
A ceiling within reach of the raised hands,
A floor blank as the walls.
And, ruling out distractions of the body –
Growth of the hair and nails, a prison diet,
Thoughts of escape –
Ruling out memory and fantasy,
The distant tramping of a gaoler’s boots,
Visiting mice and such,
What solace here for a laborious mind!
What a redoubtable and single task
One might attempt here:
Ceiling and floor, more accurate by far
Than the cob-spider’s.
Truth captured without increment of flies:
Spinning and knotting till the cell became
A spacious other head
In which the emancipated reason might
Learn in due time to walk at greater length
And more unanswerably.
THE SUCCUBUS
Thus will despair
In ecstasy of nightmare
Fetch you a devil-woman through the air,
To slide below the sweated sheet
And kiss your lips in answer to your prayer
And lock her hands with yours and your feet with her feet.
Yet why does she
Come never as longed-for beauty
Slender and cool, with limbs lovely to see,
(The bedside candle guttering high)
And toss her head so the thick curls fall free
Of halo’d breast, firm belly and long, slender thigh?
Why with hot face,
With paunched and uddered carcase,
Sudden and greedily does she embrace,
Gulping away your soul, she lies so close,
Fathering brats on you of her own race?
Yet is the fancy grosser than your lusts were gross?
NOBODY
Nobody, ancient mischief, nobody,
Harasses always with an absent body.
Nobody coming up the road, nobody,
Like a tall man in a dark cloak, nobody.
Nobody about the house, nobody,
Like children creeping up the stairs, nobody.
Nobody anywhere in the garden, nobody,
Like a young girl quiet with needlework, nobody.
Nobody coming, nobody, not yet here,
Incessantly welcomed by the wakeful ear.
Until this nobody shall consent to die
Under his curse must everyone lie –
The curse of his envy, of his grief and fright,
Of sudden rape and murder screamed in the night.
DANEGELD
When I ceased to be a child
I had great discontent
With a not-me unreconciled
To what I thought and meant.
Some told me this, or that, or this –
No counsel was the same:
Some preached God’s holy purposes,
Some used the Devil’s name.
I made my truce with foreignness,
As seemed the easiest plan:
The curious hauntings should express
A me complete as man.
But this enlargement only spelt
To see and yet be blind –
A pirate flesh allowed Danegeld
By an unready mind.
Had I but held my truth apart
And granted greed no say
In what I saw, deep in my heart,
Must be my body way!
TRUDGE, BODY!
Trudge, body, and climb, trudge and climb,
But not to stand again on any peak of time:
Trudge, body!
I’ll cool you, body, with a hot sun, that draws the sweat,
I’ll warm you, body, with ice-water, that stings the blood,
I’ll enrage you, body, with idleness, to do
And having done to sleep the long night through:
Trudge, body!
But in such cooling, warming, doing or sleeping,
No pause for satisfaction: henceforth you make address
Beyond heat to the heat, beyond cold to the cold,