I puzzle old things learned at school,
Half riddles, answerless, yet intense,
A date, an algebraic rule,
A bar of music with no sense.
We win the fifteenth mile by strength
‘Halt!’ the men fall, and where they fall,
Sleep. ‘On!’ the road uncoils its length;
Hamlets and towns we pass them all.
False dawn declares night nearly gone:
We win the twentieth mile by theft.
We’re charmed together, hounded on,
By the strong beat of left, right, left.
Pale skies and hunger: drizzled rain:
The men with stout hearts help the weak,
Add a new rifle to their pain
Of shoulder, stride on, never speak.
We win the twenty-third by pride:
My neighbour’s face is chalky white.
Red dawn: a mocking voice inside
‘New every morning’, ‘Fight the good fight’.
Now at the top of a rounded hill
We see brick buildings and church spires.
Nearer they loom and nearer, till
We know the billet of our desires.
Here the march ends, somehow we know.
The step quickens, the rifles rise
To attention: up the hill we go
Shamming new vigour for French eyes.
So now most cheerily we step down
The street, scarcely withholding tears
Of weariness: so stir the town
With all the triumph of Fusiliers.
Breakfast to cook, billets to find,
Scrub up and wash (down comes the rain),
And the dark thought in every mind
‘To-night they’ll march us on again.’
POETIC INJUSTICE†
A Scottish fighting man whose wife
Turned false and tempted his best friend,
Finding no future need for life
Resolved he’d win a famous end.
Bayonet and bomb this wild man took,
And Death in every shell-hole sought,
Yet there Death only made him hook
To dangle bait that others caught.
A hundred German wives soon owed
Their widows’ weeds to this one man
Who also guided down Death’s road
Scores of the Scots of his own clan.
Seventeen wounds he got in all
And jingling medals four or five.
Often in trenches at night-fall
He was the one man left alive.
But fickle wife and paramour
Were strangely visited from above,
Were lightning-struck at their own door
About the third week of their love.
‘Well, well’ you say, ‘man wife and friend
Ended as quits’ but I say not:
While that false pair met a clean end
Without remorse, how fares the Scot?
THE SURVIVOR COMES HOME†
Despair and doubt in the blood:
Autumn, a smell rotten-sweet:
What stirs in the drenching wood?
What drags at my heart, my feet?
What stirs in the wood?
Nothing stirs, nothing cries.
Run weasel, cry bird for me,
Comfort my ears, soothe my eyes!
Horror on ground, over tree!
Nothing calls, nothing flies.
Once in a blasted wood,
A shrieking fevered waste,
We jeered at Death where he stood:
I jeered, I too had a taste
Of Death in the wood.
Am I alive and the rest
Dead, all dead? sweet friends
With the sun they have journeyed west;
For me now night never ends,
A night without rest.
Death, your revenge is ripe.
Spare me! but can Death spare?
Must I leap, howl to your pipe
Because I denied you there?
Your vengeance is ripe.
Death, ay, terror of Death:
If I laughed at you, scorned you, now
You flash in my eyes, choke my breath…
‘Safe home.’ Safe? Twig and bough
Drip, drip, drip with Death!
THE PUDDING
‘Eat your pudding Alexander.’
‘’Tis too sour to eat.’
‘Take it quickly, Alexander.’
‘Now ’tis far too sweet.’
And now ’tis thin and slippy-sloppy
And now ’tis tough as leather,
Now too hot and now too cold,
And now ’tis all together.
MOTHER’S SONG IN WINTER
The cat is by the fire,
The dog is on the mat:
The dog has his desire,
So also has the cat.
The cat is white
The dog is black,
The year’s delight
Will soon come back.
The kettle sings, the loud bell rings
And fast my baby clings.
TO JEAN AND JOHN
What shall we offer you, Jean and John?
The softest pillows to sleep upon,
The happiest house in the whole of Wales,
Poodle puppies with wingle tails,
Caldicott pictures, coloured toys
The best ever made for girls or boys
Plenty to drink, plenty to eat
A big green garden with flowers complete
A kind Scotch nurse, a Father and Mother
Doesn’t this tempt you?
All right, don’t bother.
1920s–1930s
FROM AN UPPER WINDOW
Dark knoll, where distant furrows end
In rocks beyond the river-bend,
I make my visionary stand
In your secure well-wooded land
Where idle paths of idle fancy tend.
The charts that threaten all things free
With bondage of geography
That loop you with a road way round
Or pin you to some parish bound
Cannot withdraw your loveliness from me.
Nor though I went with hound and stick
With compass and arithmetic
To gain myself a closer view
Could I in space come up with you
Your glades with moving shades and colours quick.
You are remote in space and time
As inenarrable in rhyme,
Yet by this very rareness doubt
That you are you is blotted out –
Hill of green hopes with slopes no foot may climb.
DRINK AND FEVER
In fever the mind leaps three paces forward;
In drink the mind draws back the same three paces.
It turns about and sees the face twitching;
Stares ahead and sees the back stiffening.
It hears the voice auguring monstrously;
Hears the voice arguing meticulously.
Man is located then as man sleep-walking
Midmost between delirious and drunken.
So drink and fever touch and are combined
In the clear space where should be man’s mind.
VESTRY
My parents were debtors,
And flung out of doors,
My brothers were eunuchs,
My sisters were whores;
If I tell the whole story,
You’ll laugh till you cry,
That I am what I am
None knows better than I.
My breath smelt of garlic,
My body was lean,
My lovelocks were lousy,
My garments not clean;
When I strolled in the desert
Or dozed by the sea,
There was no one gainsaid me
In all Galilee.
I was all thi
ngs to all men
But death to the rich;
I coaxed the dung-fire
And made cakes in the ditch;
My proverbs came pat,
And my features were flame,
And I paid the tax-penny
When quarter-day came.
I drove my disciples
With daily advice
About rubies and talents
And pearls of great price,
About laying up treasure
And profit and loss.
It was what my mind ran on
From manger to cross.
When my hearers went hungry
I bade them sit down,
And I fed them with fables
Of white bread and brown,
Of old wine and new wine,
Of herrings and salt;
And what happened after
Was never my fault.
THE END
Who can pretend
To spy to the very end
The ultimate confusion
Of belief and reason,
Perfection of all progress?
But I say, nevertheless:
That when instead of chairs
The altars of the martyrs
Are taken by philosophers
As vessels of reality;
When Cardinals devoutly
Canonize in curia
Some discarded formula
Of mad arithmetician
Or mad geometrician
Now seated in a swivel-chair
Widowed of its philosopher,
In that General Post
Down will come Pepper’s Ghost
And proclaim Utopia,
The final synthesis,
With a cornucopia
And halitosis.
The dogs will bark,
The cats will cry,
And the Angel of Death go drumming by.
THE SAND GLASS
The sand-glass stands in frame both ways the same, Single broad based; but so enclosed the glass Alters in action, most revengeful, trickling
Minute by minute, minute-minus-moment,
By broken minute, nervous time,
Narrowing time,
Nearly time,
No time,
Time!
Upend,
Equilibrize
Eyes near maddened,
Sand-roped nonsensically:
Now sense, sight, sand, no nonsense.
Turn, suicide, from the wasp-waist, while time runs A new five minutes: then view once more with calm The base root-firm, each base, solid in time.
THIS WHAT-I-MEAN
A close deduction about close deduction.
Or, starting at an earlier point than that
With any pavement-rainbow after rain,
First, the experience of an easy pleasure,
Then the close observation ‘filmed with oil’,
Then qualification of that easy pleasure,
Then close deduction about doubtful pleasure,
Then close deduction about close deduction.
How to outgo this vistaed close deduction,
To find if anything is behind or not?
If not, no matter; no matter either way.
We are not collecting worms for the Museum.
And we are not taking Cat’s Cradle, say,
Beyond the ninth, or is it the nineteenth, stage,
The last stage that the oldest experts know.
(That would be physical and scientific,
A progress further into the same close vista)
And we are not leaping the unknown gap;
Any poor fugitive does that with razor
Or lysol as the spring-board, and he knows
One brink of the gap at least before he jumps.
This what-I-mean is searching out the gap
Under all closeness and improving on it
And the new gaps above and every which way,
Gradually loosening everything up
So nothing sticks to anything but itself –
A world of rice cooked Indian fashion
To be eaten with whatever sauce we please.
THE FINGERHOLD
He himself
Narrowed the rock shelf
To only two shoes’ width,
And later by
A willing poverty
To half that width and breadth.
He shrank it then
By angry discipline
To a mere fingerhold,
Which was the occasion
Of his last confusion:
He was not so bold
As to let go
At last and throw
Himself on air that would uphold.
He wept
Self-pityingly and kept
That finger crooked and strained
Until almost
His life was lost
And death not gained.
THEN WHAT?
If I rise now and put my straw hat on
Against the strong sun lying in wait outside
Scorching the flowers and over the flat stone
Making the air dance – what? The prospect’s wide:
The sea swimming to nowhere, the near hills
Incredible of ascent and horned with crags,
The blank sky darted through with the sun’s quills,
The pleasant poplar grove where the eye drags.
Then what? The path curves to the gate, from which
A dusty road curves to my neighbour’s gate:
Stroll past it, pausing at the boundary ditch
To exploit this chance in grossness of event,
Then what? Then gladly home with nothing spent.
HISTORICAL PARTICULARS
And if at last the anecdotal world
Records my name among ten million more
In the long-drawn-out story of itself
(O tediousness) and far from the last page? –
‘English poet and miscellaneous writer,
Eccentric of the Later Christian era,
Sometime a subject of King George the Fifth,
(While the ninth, eighth and seventh Popes of Rome
Before the last were reigning). It was the time
Of the World War – he served throughout – the time
Of airships and top-hats and communism,
Passports and gangsters, breach of promise cases,
When coal was burned in grates and gold coin minted,
When radio was a novelty and horses
Still ran with vans about the city streets…’
And if with such quaint temporal statistics
They date me in their books and bury me,
Could I protest an honest alibi
Who dreamed ill dreams one night and woke, staring,
In those too populous and wealthy streets
And wandered there, as it were dreaming still,
Out at heels and my heart heavy in me,
And drank with strangers in the bright saloons
And gossiped there of politics and futures?
My alibi’s the future: there I went
And in the idle records found my record,
And left my spectre fast between the pages
As a memorial and a mockery
Where they shall find it when they come to be.
And as I am, I am, the visit over.
What name, what truth? Unbiographical.
The fixity of one who has no spectre.
I learn slowly, but I may not wander.
ADDRESS TO SELF
Our loves are cloaked, our times are variable,
We keep our rooms and meet only at table.
But come, dear self, agree that you and I
Shall henceforth court each other’s company
And bed in peace together now and fall
In loving discourse, as were natural,
With o
pen heart and mind, both alike bent
On a just verdict, not on argument,
And hide no private longings, each from each,
And wear one livery and employ one speech.
I worked against you with my intellect,
You against me with folly and neglect,
Making a pact with flesh, the alien one:
Which brought me into strange confusion
For as mere flesh I spurned you, slow to see
This was to acknowledge flesh as part of me.
PROSPERITY OF POETS
Several instances in time occur
When, numbers reckoned, there appears a quorum
Sufficient to explain the way of the world
To the world, in plural singularity.
The agenda, often, has been mass conversion
From sin, often mass resort to reason,
Rarely poems, and then what an array
Of unrelated beauties marshalled!
Mutual indulgence, each to each,
Among these poets being the arbiter
Of what shall stand. The world, noting
A harmless literary renascence,
Snatches up certain poems (as a sample)
Where the indulgence has been strained
To exclude poetry and include world,
And flutes them under academic escort
To that Glass Palace where the Great consort.
1940s-1950s
DIOTIMA DEAD
Diotima’s dead – how could she die?
Or what says Socrates, now she is dead?
Diotima’s wisdom he might credit
While still she looked at him with eyes of love:
He could his life commit to Diotima,
Clear vessel of the Word’s divinity,
Until she cloaked herself in deathward pride
And ruin courted by equivocation –
Did he not swear then, she had always lied?
Scholars, the truth was larger than herself.
The truth it was she had told Socrates
(Though peevish in her immortality
And starving for what meats the God forbade)
Until her vision clouded, her voice altered,
And two lives must have ended, had he stayed.
THE HEARTH
The cat purrs out because it must,
So does the cricket call;
The crackling fire in which they trust
Cares not for them at all.
Though cat-and-cricket-like we cry
Around a fatal fire,
And give ‘because we must’ for ‘why’,
As children of desire,