Which is to say we may safely
At any time go back, to consult
Our newspapers, lawyers or doctors,
Without being reported missing
From ourselves. Such is the credit
Of the extreme word ‘Domicil’.)
And Anthony Eden is, we know,
A clever young man who, without
Other resources than tact and
A virile English education
And a flattering way of
Being at ease among the great
(So that the great exert themselves
To be greater, so that Anthony
May be still more at ease among them),
Has established the superior
Virtue of that which is charming.
In other times this would have caused
A complete paralysis of
Activity, not to mention wars,
All joining in the exaltation
Of the personal attractiveness
Of Anthony Eden…. Perhaps,
If he had been a woman ….
But the world has grown suspicious of
Solutions, everyone is anxious
For simple ways out of
Complicated situations
And simple ways back again:
Lest the trick of history-making
Be lost and life become the burden
Of those alive rather than, always,
The intact inheritance of
The unborn generation.
We know, you see, what is going on.
It is not as if we were living
On a desert island. When it is
A question of distance in time
Rather than in geography
It is easy to keep well-informed.
And there are no distances now
But in time, and time is a matter
Of print, we read neither by maps
Nor by dates; the works of T.S. Eliot
Are in no greater hurry to be read
Than the works of Homer–
It is this waiting-power, this
Going to sleep of the author
In the work, to be wakened after
An indefinite time, which makes
Literature the darling of
Leisure. ‘Domicil’ combines
The facts, intention, and leisure,
Homer is the God of leisure,
And T.S. Eliot its Christ.
One does not hesitate to mention
Homer heartily, he delights
In dozing off and hearing his name
Thunder, like a small boy letting
Sleep roll up the voice of breakfast.
But one is inclined to call softly on
T.S. Eliot, one is inclined, that is,
Not to wake him, to give him sleep
Of much soft calling; one feels
He would make breakfast a further
Occasion for martyrdom.
He is, you see, the Christ not risen
Of literature, leisure or domicil,
Whose glory is not to get up
Ever– thus the small boy becomes
The poet. We realize, you see,
The necessity of being
Back in time, at least for a year,
During which, of course, much may grow
Permanently unfit for interest;
Nevertheless, we mean not to lose
Interest. It is important
To cease looking, when one does,
Not merely because one is tired,
But because memory has succeeded
Observation by the ultimate
Yielding of contemporary
Life to the economic
Crisis: the expense of maintaining
A news-producing universe
For our benefit is gigantic,
Beyond the imagination
Of financiers, whose good-will depends
On the reasonable fantasticness
Of the investment. We do not,
Truly, require this lavish
Apparatus for impressing
On our minds what in any case
Our minds flash topically upon
The ever-paling screen of time:
It is a nice question whether
The whole dispatch of journalism
Is not, as far as we are concerned,
A work of supererogation.
Our regards to various people
Who may happen to read this verse,
(We dare not make it much better
For fear it may read much worse),
To the rich man in his castle
And the poor man at the Spike,
And the patriot Lady Houston
Whom personally we like,
And the new blue gentleman-bobby
With his microscopes and such,
A radio-set in his helmet,
And fluent in Czech and Dutch,
And fearless Admiral Philips–
When the traffic light went red
He clapped his glass to his sightless eye
And ‘I can’t see it,’ he said,
And Number One Trunk-murderer
And likewise Number Two,
And the fellow who left his legs behind
In the train at Waterloo,
And the sixteen-year-old girl student
Who wrote, with never a blot:
‘The land of my birth is the best on Earth’–
Which wasn’t saying a lot,
And the hostesses of Mayfair
Who do nothing out of season,
And the miners of the Rhondda
Who are rebels within reason,
And men who fly to business,
And women who fly to the Cape,
(But not that Viscount Castlerosse:
We disapprove of his shape),
And the ex-ex-Rector of Stiffkey
Who crouched in a barrel cozily,
And the ex-wild-life of Whipsnade
And ex-Sir Oswald Mosley,
And almost-our-favourite author
Who moderates loves and crimes
For Shorter Notices: Fiction
In the supplement of the Times,
And W.H. Day-Spender,
Who tries, and tries, and tries,
And the poet without initials –
The Man with the Staring Eyes,
And the riveters of the Clyde
And the coracle-men of Dee,
And the nightingale in the shady vale
Who sings for the B.B.C.–
Now kindest regards to these
And our love to all the rest,
And our homage to Mr. Baldwin
(A Tory retort’s the best),
And a warning frown to each little bird
In somebody else’s nest.
ASSUMPTION DAY
What was wrong with the day, doubtless,
Was less the unseasonable gusty weather
Than the bells ringing on a Monday morning
For a church-feast that nobody could welcome–
Not even the bell-ringers.
The pond had shrunk: its yellow lilies
Poked rubbery necks out of the water.
I paused and sat down crossly on a tussock,
My back turned on the idle water-beetles
That would not skim, but floated.
A wasp, a humble-bee, a blue-fly
Uncoöperatively at work together
Were sucking honey from the crowded blossom
Of a pale flower whose name someone once told me–
Someone to be mistrusted.
But, not far off, our little cow-herd
Made mud-cakes, with one eye on the cattle,
And marked each separate cake with his initials.
I was half-tempted by the child’s example
To rescue my spoilt morning.
THE MOON ENDS IN NIGHTMARE
I had once boasted my acquain
tance
With the Moon’s phases: I had seen her, even,
Endure and emerge from full eclipse.
Yet as she stood in the West, that summer night,
The fireflies dipping insanely about me,
So that that the foggy air quivered and winked
And the sure eye was cheated,
In horror I cried aloud: for the same Moon
Whom I had held a living power, though changeless,
Split open in my sight, a bright egg shell,
And a double-headed Nothing grinned
All-wisely from the gap.
At this I found my earth no more substantial
Than the lower air, or the upper,
And ran to plunge in the cool flowing creek,
My eyes and ears pressed under water.
And did I drown, leaving my corpse in mud?
Yet still the thing was so.
I crept to where my window beckoned warm
Between the white oak and the tulip tree
And rapped– but was denied, as who returns
After a one-hour-seeming century
To a house not his own.
1952–1959
THE HOUSING PROJECT
Across the strand of no seaside
Will two waves similarly glide;
And always, from whatever strand,
The long horizon’s drawn freehand.
Yet nature here must yield to art:
Look, these ten houses, kept apart
By the same exact interval,
Magnificently identical,
Whose ten same housewives, having now
Kissed ten same husbands on the brow
And sent them arm in arm away
To clock in, work, and draw their pay
At the same factory, which makes
Countless identical plum cakes,
Heave a light sigh in unison
And back to their same parlours run
With synchronized abandon, there
To put soap operas on the air.
ADVICE TO COLONEL VALENTINE
Romantic love, though honourably human,
Is comic in a girl or an old man,
Pathetic in a boy or an old woman.
‘But counts as decent for how long?’ Our nation
Allows a woman thirty years, tacks on
Ten more for men resolved on procreation.
Your decent years, alas, have lapsed? The comic
Come crowding, yet love gnaws you to the quick
As once when you were fifteen and pathetic?
What? Dye your hair, you ask? Dress natty,
Swing an aggressive cane, whistle and sigh?
No: that would be true comicality.
Honour your grey hairs, keep them out of fashion–
Even if a foolish girl, not yet full grown,
Confronts you with a scarcely decent passion.
HIPPOPOTAMUS’S ADDRESS TO THE FREUDIANS
(He quotes Plutarch’s OF ISIS AND OSIRIS 32, pleading for the revision of the misnomer ‘Oedipus Complex’, which should be ‘Hippopotamus Complex’. His own acts, unlike those of the Theban King Oedipus, were not committed in error, he asserts, but prompted by a genuine infantile libido.)
Deep in Nile mire,
Jam etiam:
‘I slew my sire,
I forced my dam.
Plutarch’s Of Isis
Dwells on my vices,
Shameless I am:
Free from repression
Or urge to confession,
Freud’s little lamb,
I slew my sire,
In frantic desire
I forced my dam–
I and not Oedipus,’
Roars Hippopotamus,
‘You have confounded us
Jam etiam!’
TWIN TO TWIN
Come, ancient rival, royal weird,
Who each new May must grip my beard
Till circling time shall cease to be:
Ground your red lance and mourn with me,
Though it were briefly –
Mourn that our wild-flower-breasted Fate,
Who locked us in this pact of hate,
Cuckolds us both as here we stand
And with unmagic mars the strand
Of her own island.
Yet, once again, your heart being true,
Our interrupted strife renew:
Reach for my beard with heaving breast
To roar: ‘You lie! She loved me best’,
And fight your fiercest.
CONSIDINE
‘Why’, they demand, ‘with so much yet unknown
Anticipate the final colophon
Where the book fails among appendices
And indices?
‘To count the tale almost as good as done
Would be intimidation by the Sun,
That tap-house bully with his mounting score
Chalked on the door.
‘Look at Sam Shepherd, ruinously white,
With marrow in his bones to leap all night!’
Yet Considine sits dead from the neck down,
With not a tooth lost and a beard still brown,
Curse of the town.
THE JUGGLER
(for Henry Ringling North)
Posturing one-legged on a slack wire,
He is no illusionist (nor I a liar)
When his free foot tosses in sequence up,
To be caught confidently by the joggled head,
Saucer, cup,
saucer, cup,
saucer, cup,
saucer, cup,
Each to fall fair and square on its mounting bed.
Wonder enough? Or not?
Not:
for a teapot
Floats up to crown them; item, following soon,
Supererogatory lump-sugar, and spoon.
Thus the possible is transcended
By a prankster’s pride in true juggling,
Twice daily for weeks at Ringling’s ring,
Until the seasonal circuit’s ended–
An act one degree only less absurd
Word
upon word
upon word
upon word,
Each wanton as an eel, daft as a bird.
THE YOUNG WITCH
The moon is full,
Forget all faith and me, Go your own road,
If your own road it be;
Below the girdle women are not wise.
Hecatë hounds you on,
You dare not stay,
Nor will she lead you home
Before high day–
Here is the truth, why taunt me with more lies?
BIRTH OF A GREAT MAN
Eighth child of an eighth child, your wilful advent
Means, as they say, more water in the stew.
Tell us: why did you choose this year and month
And house to be born into?
Were you not scared by Malthusian arguments
Proving it folly at least, almost a sin,
Even to poke your nose around the door –
Much more, come strutting in?
Yet take this battered coral in proof of welcome.
We offer (and this is surely what you expect)
Few toys, few treats, your own stool by the fire,
Salutary neglect.
Watch the pot boil, invent a new steam-engine;
Daub every wall with inspirational paint;
Cut a reed pipe, blow difficult music through it;
Or become an infant saint.
We shall be too short-handed for interference
While you keep calm and tidy and never brag–
But evade the sesquipedalian school-inspector
With his muzzle and his bag.
TO MAGDALENA MULET, MARGITA MORA & LUCIA GRAVES
Fairies of the leaves and rain,
One from England, t
wo from Spain,
You who flutter, as a rule,
At Aina Jansons’ Ballet School,
O what joy to see you go
Dancing at the Lírico:
Pirouetting, swaying, leaping,
Twirling, whirling, softly creeping,
To a most exciting din
Of French horn and violin!
These three bouquets which I send you
Show how highly I commend you,
And not only praise the bright
Brisk performance of tonight
(Like the audience), but far more
The practising that went before.
You have triumphed at the cost
Of week-ends in the country lost,
Aching toes from brand-new points,
Aching muscles, aching joints,
Pictures missed and parties too,
And suppers getting cold for you
With homework propped beside the plate,
Which meant you had to sit up late.
From dawn to midnight fairies run
To please both Aina and the Nun.
THE PUMPKIN
You may not believe it, for hardly could I–
I was cutting a pumpkin to put in a pie,
And on it was written most careful and plain:
‘You may hack me in slices, but I’ll grow again.’
I hacked it and sliced it and made no mistake
As, with dough rounded over, I set it to bake:
But down in the garden when I chanced to walk,
Why, there was my pumpkin entire on the stalk!
MAX BEERBOHM AT RAPALLO
The happiest of exiles he, who shakes
No dust from either shoe, who gently takes
His leave, discards his opera hat, but stows
Oxford and London in twin portmanteaux,
To be unpacked with care and loving eyes
Under the clear blue of Ligurian skies,
And becomes guardian of such excellence
As cannot fade nor lose its virtue!
Hence,
After their long experience of decay
And damage, which had sent all wits astray,
The rueful English to Rapallo went;
Where Max, unaltered by self-banishment
Welcomed them to his vine, then (over tea)
Taught them what once they were, and still might be.
THE GRANDFATHER’S COMPLAINT
A Broadsheet Ballad
When I was ten years old
And Grandfather would complain
To me and my two brothers–
Would angrily maintain:
That beer was not so hearty,
Nor such good songs sung,
Nor bread baked so wholesome
As when himself was young,