And the shadowy ape
Which a lady, weeping,
Leads by a string
From first twilight
Until past midnight
Through the Castle yard –
‘Blow winds, blow hard!’
So the Devil snaps his chain
And renews his reign
To the little joy
Of Berry Pomeroy.
REPROACH TO JULIA
Julia: how Irishly you sacrifice
Love to pity, pity to ill-humour,
Yourself to love, still haggling at the price.
DETHRONEMENT
With pain pressing so close about your heart,
Stand (it behoves you), head uncovered,
To watch how she enacts her transformations –
Bitch, vixen, sow – the laughing, naked queen
Who has now dethroned you.
Hymns to her beauty or to her mercy
Would be ill-conceived. Your true anguish
Is all that she requires. You, turned to stone,
May not speak nor groan, shall stare dumbly,
Grinning dismay.
But as the play ends, or in its after-hush,
O then, deluded, flee! Her red-eared hounds
Scramble upon your track; past either cheek
Swan-feathered arrows whistle, or cruelly comb
Long furrows in your scalp.
Run, though you hope for nothing: to stay your foot
Would be ingratitude, a sour denial
That the life she bestowed was sweet.
Therefore be fleet, run gasping, draw the chase
Up the grand defile.
They will rend you to rags assuredly
With half a hundred love-bites –
Your hot blood an acceptable libation
Poured to Persephone, in whose domain
You shall again find peace.
CAT-GODDESSES
A perverse habit of cat-goddesses –
Even the blackest of them, black as coals
Save for a new moon blazing on each breast,
With coral tongues and beryl eyes like lamps,
Long-leggèd, pacing three by three in nines –
This obstinate habit is to yield themselves,
In verisimilar love-ecstasies,
To tatter-eared and slinking alley-toms
No less below the common run of cats
Than they above it; which they do for spite,
To provoke jealousy – not the least abashed
By such gross-headed, rabbit-coloured litters
As soon they shall be happy to desert.
THE BLUE-FLY
Five summer days, five summer nights,
The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-fly
Hung without motion on the cling peach,
Humming occasionally: ‘O my love, my fair one!’
As in the Canticles.
Magnified one thousand times, the insect
Looks farcically human; laugh if you will!
Bald head, stage-fairy wings, blear eyes,
A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles,
Long spindly thighs.
The crime was detected on the sixth day.
What then could be said or done? By anyone?
It would have been vindictive, mean and what-not
To swat that fly for being a blue-fly,
For debauch of a peach.
Is it fair, either, to bring a microscope
To bear on the case, even in search of truth?
Nature, doubtless, has some compelling cause
To glut the carriers of her epidemics –
Nor did the peach complain.
RHEA
On her shut lids the lightning flickers,
Thunder explodes above her bed,
An inch from her lax arm the rain hisses;
Discrete she lies,
Not dead but entranced, dreamlessly
With slow breathing, her lips curved
In a half-smile archaic, her breast bare,
Hair astream.
The house rocks, a flood suddenly rising
Bears away bridges: oak and ash
Are shivered to the roots – royal green timber.
She nothing cares.
(Divine Augustus, trembling at the storm,
Wrapped sealskin on his thumb; divine Gaius
Made haste to hide himself in a deep cellar,
Distraught by fear.)
Rain, thunder, lightning: pretty children.
‘Let them play,’ her mother-mind repeats;
‘They do no harm, unless from high spirits
Or by mishap.’
THE HERO
This prince’s immortality was confirmed
With envious rites paid him by such poor souls
As, dying, were condemned to flit like bats
In endless caverns of oblivion:
For he alone, amid excessive keening,
Might voyage to that island paradise,
In the red West,
Where bees come thronging to the apple flow
And thrice three damsels in a tall house
Tend the mead-vat of inspiration.
They feel no envy now, those poor souls.
Did not some bald Cilician sell them
Mansions in Heaven, and at a paltry price:
Offering crowns of gold for scabbed heads,
Robes of state for vitiliginous backs?
No blood is poured now at the hero’s tomb,
No prayers intoned,
The island paradise is unfrequented,
And neither Finn, nor Ogier, nor Arthur,
Returns to prophesy our common doom.
MARGINAL WARNING
Prejudice, as the Latin shows,
Means that you follow your own nose
Like an untutored spaniel; hence,
A nose being no good evidence
That Farmer Luke hangs from a limb
With cart-rope tightly trussing him,
Till twelve unblinking pairs of eyes
Can view the corpse and authorize
A coroner to shake his head
For: ‘Gentlemen, this man is dead’,
Your blind prognostication is
Roundly condemned as prejudice;
And should you further speculate,
Snuffing once more, upon what date
His cowman strung him to the tree:
The case being now sub judice,
Contempt of court will be the cry
To challenge and arrest you by –
What will your children think of you,
Docked of your nose and your ears too?
THE ENCOUNTER
Soon after dawn in hottest June (it may
For all I know, have been Midsummer’s Day)
An hour at which boulevardiers are few,
From either end of the grand avenue
Flanked with basilicas and palaces
And shaded by long rows of ancient trees,
A man drew near, his lips in rage compressed,
Marching alone, magnificently dressed –
This, rose on green; that, mulberry on gold –
Two tall unyielding men of the same mould
Who wore identical helmets, cloaks and shoes
And long straight swords they had well learned to use,
Both being luckless fellows, paired by fate
In bonds of irremediable hate.
Closer they steered: although the walk was wide,
A scant inch served as margin to their pride.
The encounter surely could but end in blows;
Yet neither thought to tweak his enemy’s nose,
Or jostle him, or groan, or incur guilt
By a provocative grasp at the sword hilt,
Each setting such reliance on mischance
He sauntered by without a sidelong glance.
I’M THROUGH WITH YOU FOR EVER
The oddest,
surely, of odd tales
Recorded by the French
Concerns a sneak thief of Marseilles
Tried by a callous Bench.
His youth, his innocency, his tears –
No, nothing could abate
Their sentence of ‘One hundred years
In galleys of the State.’
Nevertheless, old wives affirm
And annalists agree,
He sweated out the whole damned term,
Bowed stiffly, and went free.
Then come, my angry love, review
Your sentence of today.
‘For ever’ was unjust of you,
The end too far away.
Give me four hundred years, or five –
Can rage be so intense? –
And I will sweat them out alive
To prove my impenitence.
WITH HER LIPS ONLY
This honest wife, challenged at dusk
At the garden gate, under a moon perhaps,
In scent of honeysuckle, dared to deny
Love to an urgent lover: with her lips only,
Not with her heart. It was no assignation;
Taken aback, what could she say else?
‘For the children’s sake’, she argued with her conscience.
Yet a mortal lie must follow before dawn:
Challenged as usual in her own bed,
She protests love to an urgent husband,
Not with her heart but with her lips only;
‘For the children’s sake’, she argues with her conscience,
‘For the children’ – turning suddenly cold towards them.
THE BLOTTED COPY-BOOK
He broke school bounds, he dared defy
The Master’s atrabilious eye,
Diced, swigged raw brandy, used foul oaths,
Wore shamelessly Corinthian clothes,
And taught St Dominic’s to mock
At gown and hood and whipping-block.
The boy’s a nabob now, retired
With wealth enough to be admired
Even by the School Governors
(Benignly sycophantic bores)
Who call on him to give away
Prize-medals on Foundation Day.
Will he at last, or will he not,
His yellowing copy-book unblot:
Accede, and seriously confess
A former want of seriousness,
Or into a wild fury burst
With: ‘Let me see you in Hell first!’?
THE SACRED MISSION
The ungainsayable, huge, cooing message
Hurtles suddenly down the dawn streets:
Twenty loudspeakers, twenty lovesick voices
Each zealous to enlarge his own range
And dominate the echoing border-zones.
Now the distressed whimper of little children,
The groans of sick men cheated in their hope
Of snatching a light sleep from the jaws of pain,
The curses, even, of the unregenerate –
All are submerged in the rising sea of noise
Which floods each room and laps round every pillow,
Roaring the mercy of Christ’s limitless love.
FROM THE EMBASSY
I, an ambassador of Otherwhere
To the unfederated states of Here and There
Enjoy (as the phrase is)
Extra-territorial privileges.
With heres and theres I seldom come to blows
Or need, as once, to sandbag all my windows.
And though the Otherwhereish currency
Cannot be quoted yet officially,
I meet less hindrance now with the exchange
Nor is my garb, even, considered strange;
And shy enquiries for literature
Come in by every post, and the side door.
SIROCCO AT DEYÁ
How most unnatural-seeming, yet how proper;
The sea like a cat with fur rubbed the wrong way,
As the sirocco with its furnace flavor
Dashes at full tilt around the village
[‘From every-which-a-way, hot as a two-buck pistol’]
Stripping green olives from the blown-back boughs,
Scorching the roses, blinding the eyes with sand;
While slanderous tongues in the small cafés
And in the tightly-shuttered limestone houses
Clack defamation, incite and invite
Knives to consummate their near-murders….
Look up, a great grey cloud broods nonchalant
On the mountain-top nine hundred feet above us,
Motionless and turgid, blotting out the sun,
And from it sneers a supercilious Devil:
‘Mere local wind: no messenger of mine!’
From Collected Poems 1955
(1955)
PENTHESILEIA
Penthesileia, dead of profuse wounds,
Was despoiled of her arms by Prince Achilles
Who, for love of that fierce white naked corpse,
Necrophily on her committed
In the public view.
Some gasped, some groaned, some bawled their indignation,
Achilles nothing cared, distraught by grief,
But suddenly caught Thersites’ obscene snigger
And with one vengeful buffet to the jaw
Dashed out his life.
This was a fury few might understand,
Yet Penthesileia, hailed by Prince Achilles
On the Elysian plain, pauses to thank him
For avenging her insulted womanhood
With sacrifice.
POETS’ CORNER
De ambobus mundis ille
Convoravit diligens…
The Best of Both Worlds being Got
Between th’Evangel and the Pot,
He, though Exorbitantly Vice’d,
Had Re-discover’d Thirst for Christ
To Ale, God’s Love and Syphilis.
Here then in Triumph See Him Stand,
Laurels for Halo, Scroll in Hand,
Whyle Ganymeds and Cherubim
And Squabby Nymphs Rejoyce with Him:
Aye, Scroll Shall Fall and Laurels Fade
Long, Long before his Debts are Pay’d.
CORONATION ADDRESS
I remember, Ma’am, a frosty morning
When I was five years old and brought ill news,
Marching solemnly upstairs with the paper
Like an angel of doom; knocked gently.
‘Father, the Times has a black border. Look!
The Queen is dead.’
Then I grew scared
When big tears started, ran down both his cheeks
To hang glistening in the red-grey beard –
A sight I had never seen before.
My mother thought to comfort him, leaned closer,
Whispering softly: ‘It was a ripe old age…
She saw her century out.’ The tears still flowed,
He could not find his voice. My mother ventured:
‘We have a King once more, a real King.
“God Save the King” is in the Holy Bible.
Our Queen was, after all, only a woman.’
At that my father’s grief burst hoarsely out.
‘Only a woman! You say it to my face?
Queen Victoria only a woman! What?
Was the orb nothing? Was the sceptre nothing?
To cry “God Save the King” is honourable,
But to serve a Queen is lovely. Listen now:
Could I have one wish for this son of mine… ’
A wish fulfilled at last after long years.
Think well, Ma’am, of your great-great-grandmother
Who earned love, who bequeathed love to her sons,
Yet left one crown in trust for you alone.
BEAUTY
IN TROUBLE
Beauty in trouble flees to the good angel
On whom she can rely
To pay her cab-fare, run a steaming bath,
Poultice her bruised eye;
Will not at first, whether for shame or caution,
Her difficulty disclose;
Until he draws a cheque book from his plumage,
Asking how much she owes.
(Breakfast in bed: coffee and marmalade,
Toast, eggs, orange-juice,
After a long, sound sleep – the first since when? –
And no word of abuse.)
Loves him less only than her saint-like mother,
Promises to repay
His loans and most seraphic thoughtfulness
A million-fold one day.
Beauty grows plump, renews her broken courage
And, borrowing ink and pen,
Writes a news-letter to the evil angel
(Her first gay act since when?):
The fiend who beats, betrays and sponges on her,
Persuades her white is black,
Flaunts vespertilian wing and cloven hoof;
And soon will fetch her back.
Virtue, good angel, is its own reward:
Your guineas were well spent.
But would you to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment?
A LOST JEWEL
Who on your breast pillows his head now,
Jubilant to have won
The heart beneath on fire for him alone,
At dawn will hear you, plagued by nightmare,
Mumble and weep
About some blue jewel you were sworn to keep.
Wake, blink, laugh out in reassurance,
Yet your tears will say:
‘It was not mine to lose or give away.
‘For love it shone – never for the madness
Of a strange bed –
Light on my finger, fortune in my head.’
Roused by your naked grief and beauty,
For lust he will burn:
‘Turn to me, sweetheart! Why do you not turn?’
THE WINDOW SILL
Presage and caveat not only seem
To come in dream,
But do so come in dream.
When the cock crew and phantoms floated by,
This dreamer I
Out of the house went I,
Down long unsteady streets to a queer square;
And who was there,
Or whom did I know there?