When in my first and loneliest love I saw
The sun swim down in tears to meet the sea,
When woods and clouds and mountains massed their awe
To whelm the house of torment that was me,
When spirits below the cromlech heard me pass,
Belling their hate with such malignant cries
That horror and anguish rustled through the grass
And the very flowers glared up with oafish eyes,
Then round I turned where rose the death-white Fay
And knew her well that exercised her wand,
That spurred my heart with rowellings day by day
To the very reach of madness, and beyond,
Thee, Moon, whom now I flout, by thought made bold,
Naked, my Joseph’s garment in thy hold.
FOUR CHILDREN
As I lay quietly in the grass,
Half dreaming, half awake,
I saw four children barefoot pass
Across the tufted brake:
The sky was glass, the pools were glass,
And not a leaf did shake.
The autumn berries clustered thick,
Seldom I met with more;
I thought these children come to pick,
As many picked before;
Each had a long and crooked stick,
And crowns of ash they wore.
But not one berry did they take;
Gliding, I watched them go
Hand in hand across the brake
With sallies to and fro.
So half asleep and half awake
I guessed what now I know.
They were not children, live and rough,
Nor phantoms of the dead,
But spirits woven of airy stuff
By wandering fancy led,
Creatures of silence, fair enough
No sooner seen than sped.
THE BARGAIN
The stable door was open wide:
I heard voices, looked inside.
Six candle-yellow birds were set
In a cage of silver net,
Shaking wing, preening feather,
Whistling loudly all together.
Two most ancient withered fairies
Bartered rings against canaries,
Haggled with a courteous cunning -
Hinting, boasting, teasing, punning
In a half-remembered tongue.
‘Too low an offer!’ ‘Times are bad.’
‘Too low!’ ‘By far the best you have had.’
‘Raise it!’ Then what a song was sung:
‘Dicky is a pretty lad!
Dicky is a pretty lad!’
But diamonds twinkled with light flung
By twelve impatient golden wings,
The younger merchant took the rings,
Closed his bargain with a sigh,
And sadly wished his flock ‘Goodbye.’
Goodbye, goodbye, in fairy speech
With a sugar-peck for each
Unsuspecting bright canary.
‘Fare you well.’
A sudden airy
Gust of midnight slammed the door.
Out went the lights: I heard no more.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS A WORD
The difficulty was, it was
Simple, as simple as it seemed;
Needing no scrutinizing glass,
No intense light to be streamed
Upon it. It said what it said
Singly, without backthought or whim,
With all the strictness of the dead,
Past reason and past synonym.
But they, too dull to understand,
Laboriously improvised
A mystic allegory, and
A meaning at last recognized:
A revelation and a cause,
Crowding the cluttered stage again
With saints’ and sinners’ lies and laws
For a new everlasting reign.
THE BAIT
My wish, even my ambition
(For such ambition spells no diminution
Of virtue, strict in self-possession),
Is not, to deaden the mind
To be resigned
To take the insistent bait
To be hauled out, hooked and hulking;
Is not, to refuse the bait,
To be angry, to go hungry,
To lodge in the mud, to be sulking:
It is, I would surge toward these troubles
Trailing a row of easy bubbles;
Would gulp the bait, the hook, rod, reel,
Fisherman and creel,
Converting even the landing-net’s tough mesh,
The spaced and regular knots, to wholesome flesh;
And would subside again, resume my occupation,
With ‘yes and no’ for what showed blank negation:
So, would remain just fish.
That, or something of that, is my wish.
AN INDEPENDENT
The warring styles both claim him as their man
But undisturbed, resisting either pull
He paints each picture on its own right plan
As unexpected as inevitable.
They while admitting that this treatment is
Its own justification, take offence
At his unmodish daily practices:
Granting him genius, they deny him sense.
He grinds his paints in his own studio,
Has four legitimate children (odd!) and thinks
Of little else; he dresses like a crow,
Keeps with his wife and neither smokes nor drinks.
When painting is discussed, he takes no part,
Pretends he’s dull; and who can call his bluff?
The styles protest, while honouring his art,
He will not take Art seriously enough.
[THE UNTIDY MAN]
There was a man, a very untidy man,
Whose fingers could nowhere be found to put in his tomb.
He had rolled his head far underneath the bed:
He had left his legs and arms lying all over the room.
1934–1939
MIDSUMMER DUET*
First Voice
O think what joy that now
Have burst the pent grenades of summer
And out sprung all the angry hordes
To be but stuttering storm of bees
On lisping swoon of flowers –
That such winged agitation
From midge to nightingale astir
These lesser plagues of sting and song
But looses on the world, our world.
O think what peace that now
Our roads from house to sea go strewn
With fast fatigue – time’s burning footsounds,
Devilish in our winter ears,
Cooled to a timeless standstill
As ourselves from house to sea we move
Unmoving, on dumb shores to pledge
New disbelief in ills to come
More monstrous than the old extremes.
Second Voice
And what regret that now
The dog-star has accomplished wholly
That promise April hinted with
Faint blossom on her hungry branches,
And pallid hedgerow shoots?
Exuberance so luscious
Of fruit and sappy briar
Disgusts: midsummer’s passion chokes
‘No more!’ – a trencher heaped too high.
And O what dearth that now
We have sufficient dwelling here
Immune to hopes gigantical
That once found lodgement in our heart.
What if less shrewd we were
And the Dog’s mad tooth evaded not –
But quick, the sweet froth on our lips,
Reached at fulfilments whose remove
Gave muscle to our faith at least?
First Voice
Let prophecy
now cease
In that from mothering omens came
Neither the early dragon nor the late
To startle sleeping errantries
Or blaze unthinkable futures.
The births have not been strange enough;
Half-pestilential miseries
At ripeness failed of horrid splendour.
Our doomsday is a rabbit-age
Lost in the sleeve of expectation.
Let winter be less sharp
In that the heats of purpose
Have winter foreflight in their wings,
Shaking a frostiness of thought
Over those aestive fancies
Which now so inwardly belie
(Their fury tepid to our minds)
The outward boast of season –
We need not press the cold this year
Since warmth has grown so honest.
Second Voice
Let talk of wonders cease
Now that outlandish realms can hold
No prodigies so marvellous as once
The ten-years-lost adventurer
Would stretch our usual gaze with.
The golden apple’s rind offends
Our parks, and dew-lapped mountaineers
Unbull themselves by common physic.
There comes no news can take us from
Loyalty to this latter sameness.
Let the bold calendar
Too garrulous in counting
Fortunes of solar accident
Weary, and festive pipes be soft.
Madness rings not so far now
Around the trysting-oak of time;
Midsummer’s gentler by the touch
Of other tragic pleasures.
We need not write so large this year
The dances or the dirges.
First Voice
But what, my friend, of love –
If limbs revive to overtake
The backward miles that memory
Tracks in corporeal chaos?
Shall you against the lull of censoring mind
Not let the bones of nature run
On fleshlorn errands, journey-proud –
If ghosts go rattling after kisses,
Shall your firmed mouth not quiver with
Desires it once spoke beauty by?
And what of beauty, friend –
If eyes constrict to clear our world
Of doubt-flung sights and ether’s phantom spaces
Cobwebbed where miserly conceit
Hoarded confusion like infinity?
If vision has horizon now,
Shall you not vex the tyrant eyes
To pity, pleading blindness?
Second Voice
But what, my friend, of death,
That has the dark sense and the bright,
Illumes the sombre hour of thought,
Fetches the flurry of bat-souls?
Shall you not at this shriven perfect watch
Survey my death-selves with a frown
And scold that I am not more calm?
Shall you not on our linking wisdoms
Loathe the swart shapes I living wear
In being dead, yet not a corpse?
And what of jest and play –
If caution against waggishness
(Lest I look backward) makes my mood too canting?
Shall you not mock my pious ways,
Finding in gloom no certain grace or troth,
And raise from moony regions of your smile
Light spirits, nimbler on the toe,
Which nothing are -I no one?
First Voice
Suppose the cock were not to crow
At whitening of night
To warn that once again
The spectrum of incongruence
Will reasonably unfold
From day’s indulgent prism?
Second Voice
Suppose the owl were not to hoot
At deepening of sleep
To warn that once again
The gospel of oblivion
Will pompously be droned
From pulpit-tops of dream?
First Voice
And shall the world our world have end
In miracles of general palsy,
Abject apocalyptic trances
Wherein creature and element
Surrender being in a God-gasp?
Both Voices
Or shall the world our world renew
At worn midsummer’s temporal ailing,
Marshal the season which senescence
Proclaimed winter but we now know
For the first nip of mind’s hereafter?
MAJORCAN LETTER, 1935*
This year we are all back again in time –
For a year: excellent: in our zeal
We had abandoned, like new converts,
Certain practices which serve good sense
Under all cosmic flags. The later mind,
For instance, has a need of News as constant
As the earlier; strangers inhabit
Every liveable condition, and we cannot
Regulate our own affairs without at least
Such distancing (if not entire annulment)
Of theirs as with the reading of our papers
We had learnt to exert on foreign conduct.
A talent not to let lapse: the years
Increased the alien volume, few matters
Remained domestic. The need of privacy
Is as strong as ever, nor to be satisfied
Without a public universe to wall
The central reservations. Excellent then,
Those habits of concern with wars, politics,
Impromptu heroes, successes, tragedies,
All weather-mystic to the personal heart,
Substance of outer flush and evanescence;
Scientific rediscoveries of truths
Long known by natural names and numbers;
Theories of God, Finance, Verse and Diet
Called ‘modern’ because indeed many but now
First reflect on these primitive subjects,
As if wisdom had ceased to descend
And life were the amazed infant again.
It is well to look out from our discreet windows
With a still curious eye. It is well
To look upon the stale wonders and tumults
Remember how we are surrounded ever
As yesterday and once by the remote
Great populations of infinity;
And to keep advised how small-immediate
The space of final conference remains.
Communism is a mighty plan
For turning bread into a doctrine.
And each shall have as much doctrine
As bread: what could be simpler?
Religion was never so accurate.
But haven’t they forgotten the wine?
Perhaps, after all, as they say,
Drinking is a lost art.
One still sees interesting recipes
For soups, but on the whole
The world is a drier place.
Ships do not merely no longer splash:
The very ocean has become
An abstraction whereon hotels
Convey the traveller to hotels
In the true spirit of competition,
Whose devices are more humane
Than Nature’s, which after all
Is too literal-minded
For the comfortable accommodation
Of man’s ubiquitous imagination.
In fact, water is an extinct element
Save for the quaint trickle in the taps
Wherewith they lay the ghosts
Of former hygienes, puny
To the present genii
Of vapours, creams and lotions.
Drinking is a lost art,
Baptism a lost rite,
Water a lost element.
Seaside balsam soothes away
The wetness sustained
In the exorcizing of wetness,
With the assistance of the sun.
And, the waves having by argument
Of logical progress from wet to dry
Undergone vigorous evaporation,
The world-at-large takes to the air-at-large,
In more generous fulfilment
Of the historic farewell
Governing the scattering of peoples
And senses: with a goodbye
More absolute than the mariner’s
Salt tear and world-ho.
We are perfectly informed, you see,
In the character and manner
Of life as it is now lived
Around us and around us
And now and now and now
Along the ever-widening
Periphery of this modest
Memorial to coherence
Wherein ourselves have domicile.
(The three elements involved
In questions of this kind,
Our lawyer tells us,
Are Nationality, Residence
And Domicile. By Nationality
Is meant the political relationship
Existing between ourselves
And the sovereign states to which we owe –
But we, and our respective states,
Consider these formalities
Sacred to unpleasant incidents
Abroad, where our Consuls maintain us
In the liberty of feeling at home
Wherever the birth-days guaranteed
Mortal by our respective states
Find us in our post-national age.
Residence merely implies
The place we happen to dwell in
At a particular moment:
A word for the body absent
On the body’s errands–
‘A purely physical fact’
Our lawyer explicitly avows.
Each sleeps in many beds
During a lifetime of acquiring
Command over the limbs,
Till we are able, without regret,
To exact that permanence
Which our lawyer calls ‘Domicil’–
He spells it without ‘e’, please note,
Terribly, insisting the spirit
Of the law before the letter.
‘Domicil is a combination
Of facts and intention.’
We intend to remain thus
Resident in definite us
‘For an indefinite time’–
Time, after the legal years
Have been passed, the numbers crossed out,
And no new counting can be done,
Becomes ‘an indefinite time’,