Chose to be governed by those lesser powers,
More than inferior to excellence –
The worms astir in God’s corrupt flesh.
God died, not excellence his name:
Excellence lived, but only was not God.
As for those lesser powers who played at God,
Bloated with Adam’s deferential sighs
In mourning for expired divinity,
They reigned as royal monsters upon earth.
Adam grew lean, and wore perpetual black;
He made no reaching after excellence.
Eve gave him sorry comfort for his grief
With birth of sons, and mourning still he died.
Adam was buried in one grave with God
And the worms ranged and ravaged in between.
Into their white maws fell abundance
Of all things rotten. They were greedy-nosed
To smell the taint out and go scavenging,
Yet over excellence held no domain.
Excellence lives; they are already dead –
The ages of a putrefying corpse.
A WITHERING HERB
Ambition in the herb denied his root.
In dreams of the dark he whispered:
‘O to be all flower, and to star the sky –
True brother to the moon, that stemless flower
Who long has cherished me!’
Disdained the happy sun of morning,
Held it gross rival to the sovereign moon –
Thus for ambition cast his cloak of leaves
Yet could not snap the stem, to float upward
And from his roots be free:
So withered staunchly.
THE SHOT
The curious heart plays with its fears:
To hurl a shot through the ship’s planks,
Being assured that the green angry flood
Is charmed and dares not dance into the hold –
Nor first to sweep a lingering glance around
For land or shoal or cask adrift.
‘So miracles are done; but madmen drown.’
O weary luxury of hypothesis –
For human nature, honest human nature
(Which the fear-pampered heart denies)
Knows its own miracle: not to go mad.
Will pitch the shot in fancy, hint the fact,
Will bore perhaps a meagre auger hole
But stanch the spurting with a tarred rag,
And will not drown, nor even ride the cask.
DREAM OF A CLIMBER
Watch how this climber raises his own ladder
From earth to heaven, and not in a night
Nor from the secret, stony pillow.
(World patents pending; tested in the shops.)
Here’s quality timber, nosings of pure brass,
The perfect phallo-spiritual tilt,
A fuzzy puff of cloud on top –
Excellent lure for angels and archangels!
Come, climber, with your scientific hat
And beady gambler’s eye, ascend!
He pauses, poses for his camera-man:
‘Well-known Climber About to Ascend.’
But in the published print, we may be sure,
He will appear, not on the lowest rung
But nearly out of view, almost in the cloud,
Leaning aside for an angel to pass,
His muscular broad hands a-glint in the sun,
And crampons on his feet.
LOLLOCKS
By sloth on sorrow fathered,
These dusty-featured Lollocks
Have their nativity in all disordered
Backs of cupboard drawers.
They play hide and seek
Among collars and novels
And empty medicine bottles,
And letters from abroad
That never will be answered.
Every sultry night
They plague little children,
Gurgling from the cistern,
Humming from the air,
Skewing up the bed-clothes,
Twitching the blind.
When the imbecile agèd
Are over-long in dying
And the nurse drowses,
Lollocks come skipping
Up the tattered stairs
And are nasty together
In the bed’s shadow.
The signs of their presence
Are boils on the neck,
Dreams of vexation suddenly recalled
In the middle of the morning,
Languor after food.
Men cannot see them,
Men cannot hear them,
Do not believe in them –
But suffer the more
Women can see them –
O those naughty wives
Who sit by the fireside
Munching bread and honey,
Watching them in mischief
From corners of their eyes,
Slily allowing them to lick
Honey-sticky fingers.
Sovereign against Lollocks
Are hard broom and soft broom,
To well comb the hair,
To well brush the shoe,
And to pay every debt
As it falls due.
DESPITE AND STILL
Have you not read
The words in my head,
And I made part
Of your own heart?
We have been such as draw
The losing straw –
You of your gentleness,
I of my rashness,
Both of despair –
Yet still might share
This happy will:
To love despite and still.
Never let us deny
The thing’s necessity,
But, O, refuse
To choose
Where chance may seem to give
Loves in alternative.
THE SUICIDE IN THE COPSE
The suicide, far from content,
Stared down at his own shattered skull:
Was this what he meant?
Had not his purpose been
To liberate himself from duns and dolts
By a change of scene?
From somewhere came a roll of laughter:
He had looked so on his wedding-day,
And the day after.
There was nowhere at all to go,
And no diversion now but to peruse
What literature the winds might blow
Into the copse where his body lay:
A year-old sheet of sporting news,
A crumpled schoolboy essay.
FRIGHTENED MEN
We were not ever of their feline race,
Never had hidden claws so sharp as theirs
In any half-remembered incarnation;
Have only the least knowledge of their minds
Through a grace on their part in thinking aloud;
And we remain mouse-quiet when they begin
Suddenly in their unpredictable way
To weave an allegory of their lives,
Making each point by walking round it –
Then off again, as interest is warmed.
What have they said? Or unsaid? What?
We understood the general drift only.
They are punctilious as implacable,
Most neighbourly to those who love them least.
A shout will scare them. When they spring, they seize.
The worst is when they hide from us and change
To something altogether other:
We meet them at the door, as who returns
After a one-hour-seeming century
To a house not his own.
A STRANGER AT THE PARTY
For annoyance, not shame,
Under their covert stares
She would not give her name
Nor demand theirs.
&nb
sp; Soon everyone at the party,
Who knew everyone,
Eyed her with plain envy
For knowing none –
Such neighbourly mistrust
Breathed across the floor,
Such familiar disgust
With what they were and wore –
Until, as she was leaving,
Her time out-stayed,
They tried to say they loved her;
But pride forbade.
THE OATH
The doubt and the passion
Falling away from them,
In that instant both
Take timely courage
From the sky’s clearness
To confirm an oath.
Her loves are his loves,
His trust is her trust;
Else all were grief
And they, lost ciphers
On a yellowing page,
Death overleaf.
Rumour of old battle
Growls across the air;
Then let it growl
With no more terror
Than the creaking stair
Or the calling owl.
She knows, as he knows,
Of a faithful-always
And an always-dear
By early emblems
Prognosticated,
Fulfilled here.
LANGUAGE OF THE SEASONS
Living among orchards, we are ruled
By the four seasons necessarily:
This from unseasonable frosts we learn
Or from usurping suns and haggard flowers –
Legitimist our disapproval.
Weather we knew, not seasons, in the city
Where, seasonless, orange and orchid shone,
Knew it by heavy overcoat or light,
Framed love in later terminologies
Than here, where we report how weight of snow,
Or weight of fruit, tears branches from the tree.
MID-WINTER WAKING
Stirring suddenly from long hibernation,
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And presently dared open both my eyes.
O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,
Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;
And you, sudden warm airs that blow
Before the expected season of new blossom,
While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go –
Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,
I found her hand in mine laid closely
Who shall watch out the Spring with me.
We stared in silence all around us
But found no winter anywhere to see.
THE ROCK AT THE CORNER
The quarrymen left ragged
A rock at the corner;
But over it move now
The comforting fingers
Of ivy and briar.
Nor will it need assurance
Of nature’s compassion
When presently it weathers
To a noble landmark
Of such countenance
That travellers in winter
Will see it as a creature
On guard at the corner
Where deep snows ingratiate
The comforts of death.
From Poems 1938–1945
(1945)
THE BEACH
Louder than gulls the little children scream
Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam;
But others fearlessly rush in, breast high,
Laughing the salty water from their mouths –
Heroes of the nursery.
The horny boatman, who has seen whales
And flying fishes, who has sailed as far
As Demerara and the Ivory Coast,
Will warn them, when they crowd to hear his tales,
That every ocean smells alike of tar.
THE VILLAGERS AND DEATH
The Rector’s pallid neighbour at The Firs,
Death, did not flurry the parishioners.
Yet from a weight of superstitious fears
Each tried to lengthen his own term of years.
He was congratulated who combined
Toughness of flesh and weakness of the mind
In consequential rosiness of face.
This dull and not ill-mannered populace
Pulled off their caps to Death, as they slouched by,
But rumoured him both atheist and spy.
All vowed to outlast him (though none ever did)
And hear the earth drum on his coffin-lid.
Their groans and whispers down the village street
Soon soured his nature, which was never sweet.
THE DOOR
When she came suddenly in
It seemed the door could never close again,
Nor even did she close it – she, she –
The room lay open to a visiting sea
Which no door could restrain.
Yet when at last she smiled, tilting her head
To take her leave of me,
Where she had smiled, instead
There was a dark door closing endlessly,
The waves receded.
UNDER THE POT
Sulkily the sticks burn, and though they crackle
With scorn under the bubbling pot, or spout
Magnanimous jets of flame against the smoke,
At each heel end a dirty sap breaks out.
Confess, creatures, how sulkily ourselves
We hiss with doom, fuel of a sodden age –
Not rapt up roaring to the chimney stack
On incandescent clouds of spirit or rage.
THROUGH NIGHTMARE
Never be disenchanted of
That place you sometimes dream yourself into,
Lying at large remove beyond all dream,
Or those you find there, though but seldom
In their company seated –
The untameable, the live, the gentle.
Have you not known them? Whom? They carry
Time looped so river-wise about their house
There’s no way in by history’s road
To name or number them.
In your sleepy eyes I read the journey
Of which disjointedly you tell; which stirs
My loving admiration, that you should travel
Through nightmare to a lost and moated land,
Who are timorous by nature.
TO LUCIA AT BIRTH
Though the moon beaming matronly and bland
Greets you, among the crowd of the new-born,
With ‘welcome to the world’ yet understand
That still her pale, lascivious unicorn
And bloody lion are loose on either hand:
With din of bones and tantarará of horn
Their fanciful cortege parades the land –
Pest on the high road, wild-fire in the corn.
Outrageous company to be born into,
Lunatics of a royal age long dead.
Then reckon time by what you are or do,
Not by the epochs of the war they spread.
Hark how they roar; but never turn your head.
Nothing will change them, let them not change you.
DEATH BY DRUMS
If I cried out in anger against music,
It was not that I cried
Against the wholesome bitter arsenic
Necessary for suicide:
For suicide in the drums’ racking riot
Where horned moriscoes wailing to their bride
Scare every Lydian songster from the spot.
SHE TELLS HER LOVE WHILE HALF ASLEEP
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out g
rass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
INSTRUCTIONS TO THE ORPHIC ADEPT
[In part translated from the Timpone Grande and Campagno Orphic tablets.]
So soon as ever your mazed spirit descends
From daylight into darkness, Man, remember
What you have suffered here in Samothrace,
What you have suffered.
After your passage through Hell’s seven floods,
Whose fumes of sulphur will have parched your throat,
The Halls of Judgement shall loom up before you,
A miracle of jasper and of onyx.
To the left hand there bubbles a black spring
Overshadowed with a great white cypress.
Avoid this spring, which is Forgetfulness;
Though all the common rout rush down to drink,
Avoid this spring!
To the right hand there lies a secret pool
Alive with speckled trout and fish of gold;
A hazel overshadows it. Ophion,
Primaeval serpent straggling in the branches,
Darts out his tongue. This holy pool is fed
By dripping water; guardians stand before it.
Run to this pool, the pool of Memory,
Run to this pool!
Then will the guardians scrutinize you, saying:
‘Who are you, who? What have you to remember?
Do you not fear Ophion’s flickering tongue?
Go rather to the spring beneath the cypress,
Flee from this pool!’
Then you shall answer: ‘I am parched with thirst.
Give me to drink. I am a child of Earth,
But of Sky also, come from Samothrace.
Witness the glint of amber on my brow.
Out of the Pure I come, as you may see.
I also am of your thrice-blessèd kin,
Child of the three-fold Queen of Samothrace;
Have made full quittance for my deeds of blood,
Have been by her invested in sea-purple,
And like a kid have fallen into milk.
Give me to drink, now I am parched with thirst,
Give me to drink!’
But they will ask you yet: ‘What of your feet?’
You shall reply: ‘My feet have borne me here
Out of the weary wheel, the circling years,
To that still, spokeless wheel: – Persephone.
Give me to drink!’
Then they will welcome you with fruit and flowers,