Where pure souls matrilineally foregather.
We were then shot through by merciful lunar shafts
Until hearts tingled, heads sang, and praises flowed;
And learned to scorn your factitious universe
Ruled by the death which we had flouted;
Acknowledging only that from the Dove’s egg hatched
Before aught was, but wind – unpredictable
As our second birth would be, or our second love:
A moon-warmed world of discontinuance.
A SLICE OF WEDDING CAKE
Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.
Repeat ‘impossible men’: not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.
Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.
A PLEA TO BOYS AND GIRLS
You learned Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;
You learned Pope’s Iliad by rote, not heart;
These terms should be distinguished if you quote
My verses, children – keep them poles apart –
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.
A BOUQUET FROM A FELLOW ROSEMAN
Oh, what does the roseman answer
On receiving a gift bouquet
Of raddled and blowsy roses
From the garden across the way,
From a fellow roseman?
If the roseman is a roseman is a roseman,
And nothing other at all,
He flings that bouquet of roses
Clear over his garden wall
Like a proper roseman.
But, if only a week-end roseman,
He does what he has to do:
‘What beautiful blooms,’ he answers,
‘How exceedingly kind of you!’
To the flattered roseman;
And never escapes the insistent
Arrival of new bouquets,
All equally damned and dismal,
All hankering for his praise
As a fellow roseman.
YES
The Romans had no word for YES,
So mean they were, and stiff;
With SI the Spaniards make you guess
(Their YES conceals an IF);
OUI means no more than ‘so I hear’;
JA sounds a little coarse;
Then, child, say YES, polite and clear –
Not UH-HUH, like a horse.
THE OUTSIDER
Glandular change provokes a vague content,
St Martin’s summer blossoms warm and sweet.
Frail, balding, toothless, yet benevolent
The outsider has attained the inside seat
Which once he scorned; all angry passion spent,
And twelve disciples prostrate at his feet.
Now that his once outrageous heresies
Stand firmly in the schools’ curriculum,
Should he be vexed if young fools think him wise
Whom their grandfathers prayed to be struck dumb?
And should he disavow old truth as lies,
Which on obsequious lips it has become?
From Steps
(1958)
THE ENLISTED MAN
Yelled Corporal Punishment at Private Reasons:
‘Rebels like you have no right to enlist –
Or to exist!’
Major Considerations leered approval,
Clenching his fist,
And gave his fierce moustache a fiercer twist.
So no appeal, even to General Conscience,
Kept Private Reasons’ name off the defaulter-list.
MIKE AND MANDY
Mandy: O, I’d like to be a Rug
Basking by the fireside
In a farm-house parlour.
Mike: If you were the Rug,
I’d like to be a Hard Broom
And scratch you all over.
Mandy: If you were the Hard Broom,
I’d like to be a Kitchen Maid
Mike: If you were a Kitchen Maid,
I’d like to be the Farmer
And show you who was master.
Mandy: If you were the Farmer,
I’d like to be his Wife
And strike you with a poker.
Mike: If you were his Wife,
I’d like to be the Constable
And grab you by the shoulder.
Mandy: If you were the Constable,
I’d like to be a Rug,
Lying by the fireside
In that farm-house parlour –
To slide and trip you up
And make you bang your head
On the corner of the firegrate
And kill you stone dead.
NOTHING
NOTHING is circular,
Like the empty centre
Of a smoke-ring’s shadow:
That colourless zero
Marked on a bare wall –
Nothing at all
And reflected in a mirror.
Then need you wonder
If the trained philosopher
Who seeks to define NOTHING
As absence of anything,
A world more logistically
Than, above, I
(Though my terms are cosier),
And claims he has found
That NOTHING is not round
Or hardly ever,
Will run a brain-fever
To the precise degree
Of one hundred and three
On Fahrenheit’s thermometer?
CALL IT A GOOD MARRIAGE
Call it a good marriage –
For no one ever questioned
Her warmth, his masculinity,
Their interlocking views;
Except one stray graphologist
Who frowned in speculation
At her h’s and her s’s,
His p’s and w’s.
Though few would still subscribe
To the monogamic axiom
That strife below the hip-bones
Need not estrange the heart,
Call it a good marriage:
More drew those two together,
Despite a lack of children,
Than pulled them apart.
Call it a good marriage:
They never fought in public,
They acted circumspectly
And faced the world with pride;
Thus the hazards of their love-bed
Were none of our damned business –
Till as jurymen we sat upon
Two deaths by suicide.
READ ME, PLEASE!
If, as well may happen,
On an autumn day
When white clouds go scudding
And winds are gay,
Some earth-bound spirit,
A man lately dead,
(Your fellow-clerk) should take it
Into his crazed head
To adopt a more venturesome
Shape than a dead leaf
And wish you a ‘good morning’
Abrupt and brief,
He will come disguised
As a sheet of newspaper
Charging across the square
With a clumsy caper,
To flatten himself out
Across
your shins and knees
In a suppliant posture:
‘Read me, please!’
Then scanning every column
On both sides, with care,
You will find that clerk’s name
Printed somewhere –
Unless, perhaps, in warning
The sheet comes blown
And the name which you stumble on
Is, alas, your own.
THE TWIN OF SLEEP
Death is the twin of Sleep, they say:
For I shall rise renewed,
Free from the cramps of yesterday,
Clear-eyed and supple-thewed.
But though this bland analogy
Helps other folk to face
Decrepitude, senility,
Madness, disease, disgrace,
I do not like Death’s greedy looks:
Give me his twin instead –
Sleep never auctions off my books,
My boots, my shirts, my bed.
AROUND THE MOUNTAIN
Some of you may know, others perhaps can guess
How it is to walk all night through summer rain
(Thin rain that shrouds a beneficent full moon),
To circle a mountain, and then limp home again.
The experience varies with a traveller’s age
And bodily strength, and strength of the love affair
That harries him out of doors in steady drizzle,
With neither jacket nor hat, and holds him there.
Still, let us concede some common elements:
Wild-fire that, until midnight, burns his feet;
And surging rankly up, strong on the palate,
Scents of July, imprisoned by long heat.
Add: the sub-human, black tree-silhouettes
Against a featureless pale pall of sky;
Unseen, gurgling water; the bulk and menace
Of entranced houses; a wraith wandering by.
Milestones, each one witness of a new mood –
Anger, desperation, grief, regret;
Her too-familiar face that whirls and totters
In memory, never willing to stay set.
Whoever makes the desired turning-point,
Which means another fifteen miles to go,
Learns more from dawn than love, so far, has taught him:
Especially the false dawn, when cocks first crow.
Those last few miles are easy: being assured
Of the truth, why should he fabricate fresh lies?
His house looms up; the eaves drip drowsily;
The windows blaze to a resolute sunrise.
III
* * *
From Food for Centaurs
(1960)
TWICE OF THE SAME FEVER
No one can die twice of the same fever?
Tell them it is untrue:
Have we not died three deaths, and three again,
You of me, I of you?
The chill, the frantic pulse, brows burning,
Lips broken by thirst –
Until, in darkness, a ghost grieves:
‘It was I died the first.’
Worse than such death, even, is resurrection.
Do we dare laugh away
Disaster, and with a callous madrigal
Salute the new day?
ESTABLISHED LOVERS
The established lovers of an elder generation
Dead from the waist down, every man of them,
Have now expired for sure
And, after nine days’ public threnody,
Lapse to oblivion, or literature…
Clerks of Establishment must therefore search
For faces fit to people the blank spaces.
Faces enough are found, to pretend modesty
And mask their yearning for the public call:
Pluperfect candidates
Having long ceased to live as lovers do…
Clerks of Establishment, checking the dates,
Can feel no qualm in recommending Orders,
Titles and honorary love-doctorates.
Observe him well, the scarlet-robed academician
Stalled with his peers, an Order on his breast,
And (who could doubt it?) free
Of such despairs and voices as attended
His visits to the grotto below sea
Where once he served a glare-eyed Demoness
And swore her his unswerving verity.
THE QUIET GLADES OF EDEN
All such proclivities are tabulated –
By trained pathologists, in detail too –
The obscener parts of speech compulsively
Shrouded in Classic Latin.
But though my pleasure in your feet and hair
Is ungainsayable, let me protest
(Dear love) I am no trichomaniac
And no foot-fetichist.
If it should please you, for your own best reasons,
To take and flog me with a rawhide whip,
I might (who knows?) surprisedly accept
This earnest of affection.
Nothing, agreed, is alien to love
When pure desire has overflowed its baulks;
But why must private sportiveness be viewed
Through public spectacles?
Enough, I will not claim a heart unfluttered
By these case-histories of aberrancy;
Nevertheless a long cool draught of water,
Or a long swim in the bay,
Serves to restore my wholesome appetite
For you and what we do at night together:
Which is no more than Adam did with Eve
In the quiet glades of Eden.
HEROES IN THEIR PRIME
Theseus: was he an old, bald King of Athens
By folly forced into self-banishment,
Who cursed his own twelve tribes from Mount Gargettus
And sailed for Scyros, glowering discontent?
No, but that tall youth who laid low Procrustes,
Sinis and Scyron, bandits of repute,
And in a labyrinthine lair at Cnossus
The Minotaur by night did execute.
Bellerophon: was he a tattered outcast
Seldom descried on the rough Xanthian plain,
Whom Pegasus had pitched into a thorn-bush,
Thus rudely closing his presumptuous reign?
No, but that hero, smiled on by Athene,
Scourge both of Amazons and Solymi,
Who quenched Chimaera’s fiery exhalations
With arrows shot at her from a clear sky.
Jason: was Jason a chap-fallen beggar
Whom the prophetic prow of Argo slew
When back he crawled to die in shame at Corinth
Loathed by the gods, and by his shipmates too?
No, but that single-sandalled young Magnesian,
Fearless and fond, the cynosure of Greece,
Who by your kindly aid, Queen Aphrodite,
Seduced Medea and fetched home the Fleece.
And Nestor: was he Agamemnon’s Nestor,
Whose grey beard wagged beside the walls of Troy
And wagged still more, long after Troy had fallen,
Anent his exploits as a beardless boy?
Yes, that was he: revered by Prince Achilles,
Odysseus, Diomede and many more –
Not the young braggart quaking at the tree-top
In terror of a Calydonian boar.
CATKIND
Through the window,
Listening carefully,
I overheard a low
Moonlight murmur from an olive-tree –
Three cats rehearsed the virtues of catkind:
Catkind’s silky tread and devious mind,
Catkind’s quiet economy
(Cleansing itself with wash of its own body),
Catkind’s nonchalance,
Catkind’s persistence,
Catkind’s circumambulance,
Its fealty to the Queen of Cats above –
‘But when we love,’ they wailed, ‘alas, we LOVE!’
TWO CHILDREN
You were as venturesome as I was shy:
Eager and inquisitive your eye.
You set a nap on the plum, a haze on the rose,
And shooting stars across the wintry sky
Flashed by in volleys for me when you chose.
None spoke with you, I alone worshipped you,
Child of the wave, child of the morning dew,
And in my dreams went chasing here and there
A fugitive beacon – your moon-yellow hair.
HERE LIVE YOUR LIFE OUT!
Window-gazing, at one time or another
In the course of travel, you must have startled at
Some coign of true felicity. ‘Stay!’ it beckoned,
‘Here live your life out!’ If you were simple-hearted
The village rose, perhaps, from a broad stream
Lined with alders and gold-flowering flags –
Hills, hay-fields, orchards, mills – and, plain to see,
The very house behind its mulberry-tree
Stood, by a miracle, untenanted!
Alas, you could not alight, found yourself jolted
Viciously on; public conveyances
Are not amenable to casual halts,
Except in sternly drawn emergencies –
Bandits, floods, landslides, earthquakes or the like –
Nor could you muster resolution enough
To shout: ‘This is emergency, let me out!’
Rushing to grasp their brakes; so the whole scene
Withdrew forever. Once at the terminus
(As your internal mentor will have told you),
It would have been pure folly to engage
A private car, drive back, sue for possession.
Too far, too late:
Already bolder tenants were at the gate.
JOAN AND DARBY
My friends are those who find agreement with me
In large measure, but not absolutely.
Little children, parasites and God
May flatter me with absolute agreement –
For no one lives more cynical than God.
As for my love, I gifted my heart to her
Twenty years ago, without proviso,
And in return she gifted hers to me;
Yet still they beat as two, unyielding in