Mixed with the copper crowd, was gone.
He grieved all day, a comic grief
But by next morning sadly verified:
His face was not his own!
A man as like his neighbours, you would say,
As halfpenny like halfpence, yet
Marked from among them by the luck
This halfpenny of halfpence brought him,
Disfigured by its loss.
Made by luck, by lack of luck unmade –
A bankrupt sameness was his doom:
To have had luck and now to have none,
To have no face but what he borrowed
From neighbours’ charity.
Begging at the kerb-side, he won it back,
The very coin – fit for a fob
If such he had, but all was rags now.
‘To be my ill-luck token,’ he rejoiced,
‘My ill luck now my own!’
Pride of differentiated face:
‘And what are rags and broken shoes
When I can boast myself to strangers,
Leaping face-forward from their high roofs,
My ill luck in my hand?’
THE FALLEN SIGNPOST
The signpost of four arms is down,
But one names your departure-town:
With this for guide you may replant
Your post and choose which road you want –
Logic that only seems obscure
To those deliberately not sure
Whether a journey should begin
With cross-roads or with origin.
The square post, and the socket square –
Now which way round to set it there?
Thus from the problem coaxing out
Four further elements of doubt,
They make the simple cross-roads be
A crux of pure dubiety
Demanding how much more concern
Than to have taken the wrong turn!
THE CHINA PLATE
From a crowded barrow in a street-market
The plate was ransomed for a few coppers,
Was brought gleefully home, given a place
On a commanding shelf.
‘Quite a museum-piece,’ an expert cries
(Eyeing it through the ready pocket-lens) –
As though a glass case would be less sepulchral
Than the barrow-hearse!
For weeks this plate retells the history
Whenever an eye runs in that direction:
‘Near perdition I was, in a street-market
With rags and old shoes.’
‘A few coppers’ – here once again
The purchaser’s proud hand lifts down
The bargain, displays the pot-bank sign
Scrawled raggedly underneath.
Enough, permit the treasure to forget
The emotion of that providential purchase,
Becoming a good citizen of the house
Like its fellow-crockery.
Let it dispense sandwiches at a party
And not be noticed in the drunken buzz,
Or little cakes at afternoon tea
When cakes are in demand.
Let it regain a lost habit of life,
Foreseeing death in honourable breakage
Somewhere between the kitchen and the shelf –
To be sincerely mourned.
IDLE HANDS
To-day, all day, for once he did nothing –
A proud report from one whose hands,
Of Satan warned when young, engross him
Always with over-busyness. Nothing –
Pleasure unposted in the journal.
This is for eyes that ask no illustration,
Not for those poor adepts at less than nothing
Who would enquire: Was it town-idleness,
Or did he drink the sun by the calm sea
Until the sunset washed upon his daze,
Then home to supper, and the bedside lamp?
He did nothing; tells you plainly so.
Where he did nothing is no part of this:
Whether by the wild sea or the calm sea
Or where the pavement-coloured dog befouls
The pavement-kerb. It is enough that
He did nothing, neither less nor more,
Leaving the day, for a remembrance,
A clear bubble in Time’s chalky glass.
THE LAUREATE
Like a lizard in the sun, though not scuttling
When men approach, this wretch, this thing of rage,
Scowls and sits rhyming in his horny age.
His time and truth he has not bridged to ours,
But shrivelled by long heliotropic idling
He croaks at us his out-of-date humours.
Once long ago here was a poet; who died.
See how remorse twitching his mouth proclaims
It was no natural death, but suicide.
Arrogant, lean, unvenerable, he
That glitter a cold span above the sea.
A JEALOUS MAN
To be homeless is a pride
To the jealous man prowling
Hungry down the night lanes,
Who has no steel at his side,
No drink hot in his mouth,
But a mind dream-enlarged,
Who witnesses warfare,
Man with woman, hugely
Raging from hedge to hedge:
The raw knotted oak-club
Clenched in the raw fist,
The ivy-noose well flung,
The thronged din of battle,
Gaspings of the throat-snared,
Snores of the battered dying,
Tall corpses, braced together,
Fallen in clammy furrows,
Male and female,
Or, among haulms of nettle
Humped, in noisome heaps,
Male and female.
He glowers in the choked roadway
Between twin churchyards,
Like a turnip ghost.
(Here, the rain-worn headstone,
There, the Celtic cross
In rank white marble.)
This jealous man is smitten,
His fear-jerked forehead
Sweats a fine musk;
A score of bats bewitched
By the ruttish odour
Swoop singing at his head;
Nuns bricked up alive
Within the neighbouring wall
Wail in cat-like longing.
Crow, cocks, crow loud,
Reprieve the doomed devil –
Has he not died enough?
Now, out of careless sleep,
She wakes and greets him coldly,
The woman at home,
She, with a private wonder
At shoes bemired and bloody –
His war was not hers.
THE CLOAK
Into exile with only a few shirts,
Some gold coin and the necessary papers.
But winds are contrary: the Channel packet
Time after time returns the sea-sick peer
To Sandwich, Deal or Rye. He does not land,
But keeps his cabin; so at last we find him
In humble lodgings maybe at Dieppe,
His shirts unpacked, his night-cap on a peg,
Passing the day at cards and swordsmanship
Or merry passages with chambermaids,
By night at his old work. And all is well –
The country wine wholesome although so sharp,
And French his second tongue; a faithful valet
Brushes his hat and brings him newspapers.
This nobleman is at home anywhere,
His castle being, the valet says, his title.
The cares of an estate would incommode
Such tasks as now his Lordship has in hand.
His Lordship, says the valet, contemplates
A profitable absence of some years.
Has he no friend at Court to intercede?
He wants none: exile’s but another name
For an old habit of non-residence
In all but the recesses of his cloak.
It was this angered a great personage.
THE HALLS OF BEDLAM
Forewarned of madness:
In three days’ time at dusk
The fit masters him.
How to endure those days?
(Forewarned is foremad)
‘ – Normally, normally.’
He will gossip with children,
Argue with elders,
Check the cash account.
‘I shall go mad that day –’
The gossip, the argument,
The neat marginal entry.
His case is not uncommon,
The doctors pronounce;
But prescribe no cure.
To be mad is not easy,
Will earn him no more
Than a niche in the news.
Then to-morrow, children,
To-morrow or the next day
He resigns from the firm.
His boyhood’s ambition
Was to become an artist –
Like any City man’s.
To the walls and halls of Bedlam
The artist is welcome –
Bold brush and full palette.
Through the cell’s grating
He will watch his children
To and from school.
‘Suffer the little children
To come unto me
With their Florentine hair!’
A very special story
For their very special friends –
They burst in the telling:
Of an evil thing, armed,
Tap-tapping on the door,
Tap-tapping on the floor,
‘On the third day at dusk.’
Father in his shirt-sleeves
Flourishing a hatchet –
Run, children, run!
No one could stop him,
No one understood;
And in the evening papers….
(Imminent genius,
Troubles at the office,
Normally, normally,
As if already mad.)
OR TO PERISH BEFORE DAY
The pupils of the eye expand
And from near-nothings build up sight;
The pupil of the heart, the ghost,
Swelling parades the dewy land:
With cowardice and with self-esteem
Makes terror in the track that through
The fragrant spotted pasture runs;
And a bird wails across the dream.
Now, if no heavenly window shines
Nor angel-voices cheer the way,
The ghost will overbear the man
And mark his head with fever-signs.
The flowers of dusk that he has pulled
To wonder at when morning’s here
Are snail-shells upon straws of grass –
So easily the eye is gulled.
The sounding words that his mouth fill
Upon to-morrow’s lip shall droop;
The legs that slide with skating ease
Be stiff to the awakened will.
Or, should he perish before day,
He leaves his lofty ghost behind
Perpetuating uncontrolled
This hour of glory and dismay.
A COUNTRY MANSION
This ancient house so notable
For its gables and great staircase,
Its mulberry-trees and alleys of clipped yew,
Humbles the show of every near demesne.
At the beginning it acknowledged owners –
Father, son, grandson –
But then, surviving the last heirs of the line,
Became a place for life-tenancy only.
At the beginning, no hint of fate,
No rats and no hauntings;
In the garden, then, the fruit-trees grew
Slender and similar in long rows.
A bedroom with a low ceiling
Caused little fret at first;
But gradual generations of discomfort
Have bred an anger there to stifle sleep.
And the venerable dining-room,
Where port in Limerick glasses
Glows twice as red reflected
In the memory-mirror of the waxed table –
For a time with paint and flowered paper
A mistress tamed its walls,
But pious antiquarian hands, groping,
Rediscovered the grey panels beneath.
Children love the old house tearfully,
And the parterres, how fertile!
Married couples under the testers hugging
Enjoy carnality’s bliss as nowhere else.
A smell of mould from loft to cellar,
Yet sap still brisk in the oak
Of the great beams: if ever they use a saw
It will stain, as cutting a branch from a green tree.
…Old Parr had lived one hundred years and five
(So to King Charles he bragged)
When he did open penance, in a sheet,
For fornication with posterity.
Old Parr died; not so the mansion
Whose inhabitants, bewitched,
Pour their fresh blood through its historic veins
And, if a tile blow from the roof, tremble.
The last-born of this race of sacristans
Broke the long spell, departed;
They lay his knife and fork at every meal
And every evening warm his bed;
Yet cannot draw him back from the far roads
For trifling by the lily-pool
Or wine at the hushed table where they meet,
The guests of genealogy.
It was his childhood’s pleasure-ground
And still may claim his corpse,
Yet foster-cradle or foster-grave
He will not count as home.
This rebel does not hate the house,
Nor its dusty joys impugn:
No place less reverend could provoke
So proud an absence from it.
He has that new malaise of time:
Gratitude choking with vexation
That he should opulently inherit
The goods and titles of the extinct.
THE EREMITES
We may well wonder at those bearded hermits
Who like the scorpion and the basilisk
Couched in the desert sands, to undo
Their scurfy flesh with tortures.
They drank from pools fouled by the ass and camel,
Chewed uncooked millet pounded between stones,
Wore but a shame-rag, dusk or dawn,
And rolled in thorny places.
In the wilderness there are no women;
Yet hermits harbour in their shrunken loins
A penitential paradise,
A leaping-house of glory.
Solomons of a thousand lusty love-chants,
These goatish men, burned Aethiopian black,
Kept vigil till the angelic whores
Should lift the latch of pleasure.
And what Atellan orgies of the soul
Were celebrated then among the rocks
They testify themselves in books
That rouse Atellan laughter.
Haled back at last to wear the ring and mitre,
They clipped their beards and, for their stomachs’ sake,
Drank now and then a little wine,
And tasted cakes and honey.
Observe then how they disciplined the daughters
Of noble widows, who must fast and thirst,
Abjure down-pillows, rouge and curls,
Deform their delicate bodies:
Whose dreams were curiously beset by visions
Of stink
ing hermits in a wilderness
Pressing unnatural lusts on them
Until they wakened screaming.
Such was the virtue of our pious fathers:
To refine pleasure in the hungry dream.
Pity for them, but pity too for us –
Our beds by their leave lain in.
ADVOCATES
Fugitive firs and larches for a moment
Caught, past midnight, by our headlight beam
On that mad journey through unlasting lands
I cannot put a name to, years ago,
(And my companions drowsy-drunk) – those trees
Resume again their sharp appearance, perfect
Of spur and tassel, claiming memory,
Claiming affection: ‘Will we be included
In the catalogue? Yes, yes?’ they plead.
Green things, you are already there enrolled.
And should a new resentment gnaw in me
Against my dear companions of that journey
(Strangers already then, in thought and deed)
You shall be advocates, charged to deny
That all the good I lived with them is lost.
SELF-PRAISE
No, self-praise does not recommend.
What shall I do with mine
When so few Englishmen pretend
Not to be dogs or swine,
That to assume the peacock’s part,
To scream and spread the tail,
Is held a doom-defying art
And witnesses turn pale?
But praise from fellow-creatures is
(All Englishmen agree)
The sweetest of experiences
And confers modesty,
And justifies the silent boast
Of a bemedalled line:
The most dog-true of dogs, the most
Egregious swine of swine.
O, let me suffer in self-praise,
Unfit to occupy
The kennel, for my headstrong ways,
Too squeamish for the sty.
THE CHALLENGE
In ancient days a glory swelled my thighs,
And sat like fear between my shoulder-blades,
And made the young hair bristle on my poll.
Sun was my crown, green grassflesh my estate,
The wind a courtier, fanning at my cheek,
And plunged I in the stream, its waters hissed.
Queens I had to try my glory on,
And glory-princes my queens bore to me.
Royally I swept off all caitiff crowns.
Were the queens whores? the princes parricides?
Or were the tumbled crowns again worn high?
No, I was king then, if kings ever were.
O cousin princes, glory is hard put by,
And green grassflesh is lovely to a king.