See to the outer gate, our protection.
I rest between the born and the unborn.
The father, the mother, the baby unicorn
Intercede for me, attended the christening.
Exempt me.
I have friends in the underworld.
1943/1938
1 Originally published as ‘Egyptian Pastiche’.
CAROL ON CORFU
(1937)
I, per se I, I sing on.
Let flesh falter, or let bone break
Break, yet the salt of a poem holds on,
Even in empty weather
When beak and feather have done.
I am such fiddle-glib strokes,
As play on the nerves, glance the bare bone
With the madman’s verve I quicken,
Leaven and liven body’s prime carbon,
I, per se I, alone.
This is my medicine: trees speak and doves
Talk, woods walk: in the pith of the planet
Is undertone, overtone, status of music: God
Opens each fent, scent, memory, aftermath
In the sky and the sod.
O per se O, I sing on.
Never tongue falters or love lessens,
Lessens. The salt of the poem lives on
Like this carol of empty weather
Now feather and beak have gone.
1943/1938
LINES TO MUSIC
Ride out at midnight,
You will meet your sun.
Into what arsenal now seem fallen
The germs of the plum and the peppercorn?
The born and the unborn will report
What poison licks the wheat,
Or in the melon’s gold retort
Repeat what melody fattens the leopard
From his mother’s dusky teat.
Ride out at midnight
And number the sparrows.
Who put great wings to the Ark?
Who gave the unicorn spurs?
Only the women with thighs like mackerel,
Nourish the germ of the man of sorrows,
Are true to their monsters.
Be you to yours.
1960/1938
THEMES HERALDIC
I
If I say what I honestly mean
It’s only because
I honestly mean what I say.
Shall I renounce you for a new theme
Who are a warm green stone, green girl,
Warm in a white bone bed?
It is no victory to write you,
But to become you. Gnosis
By osmosis. Knowing in becoming.
Desire is quite heraldic yet—
A lion or griffin on a playing-card,
Or Fiat Voluntas, and a page of uncials.
What do we care, though? I imagine always
Someone much later to read us here.
Open this garish album of the flesh
Kept to horrify children,
Silence the late traveller,
Pore on us. Point. Stop eating. There!
An Ice Age you and me!
1980/1938
II
You have been surely as a great moon.
There have been utterly drawn up
Frantic and magnetic liners, voyagers,
Ships in a doldrum, destroyers
Prowling a trade-route, gulls.
Even the amputated earth herself
Pours suicidal tidal water,
Ebbs upwards, up along homeward elastic
On the long tug wombward. Tides
Shine between your ribs, my moon’s
White suicidal tides.
Everything is drawn in. Often
The known world will melt magnetic.
The glacier thaw and soften.
Then Man, Monkey, Microscope
Litter the long water lunatic.
No. The pale face offers no comment
On an uprooted cosmos. Only now
I can sniff gongs in the blood,
Drums in the water. Masks.
Rivers of seed flowing.
Moon of my blood
So suicidal a watch must be
As for the tidal world, for me,
Absolute ebb and flood.
1980/1938
III1
Delicate desire,
She moves in belly’s soft pocket,
At the wrist, like worm turning,
Apprehending morning, meaning
In all things. Rivers.
As tongue to mouth
Or eye to socket.
The swan, the candid unicorn
Fear nothing, caged in myth:
Have all green history’s page
To frolic on.
Delicate desire,
As knife-thrust upward from beneath,
Grant two deep
Having, holding, folding,
Fading and inclining,
Dance into sleep
As tongue to tongue,
As knife to sheath.
1980/1937
IV
Unblade the brighter passions one by one.
See, like swords shaken, angels’ heels,
The bright things crowd upon us unawares.
Terrific toys the limbs like children cherish,
You in the night, I in the night—O falling.
Straws join on a collapsing flood and we
Pouring, forever pouring as we perish.
The night. Orion’s black proscenium
Invites: and, mortal here, we perish
Whose face I shall not see nor thaw whose sperm.
Only I tell a mouth as cold as coin
Breast finger chilly as the loin I cherish.
Now what pale allegory hangs between the stars?
What mouth sips out the candles of the body?
See, here is war and yet I bring no weapon,
My theme is simply visionary paper.
Darling no message but the eventual
Limbs junction, sockets of pleasure turning.
No pomp but the visitor at the window, Orion.
O I carry no sword but the inevitable
Statuary dagger, the reaping sword alive,
Against my belly, under the belt of stars.
1980/1938
V
A girl has four partners in heraldry,
Elbow, wrist, ankle, knee.
Four bone gates the body uses
In its delicate abuses.
Ink become wine! Wine be blood!
O spirit, the leopard, eat body’s food!
Girl, girl, girl, you have become
A valley of dead saints’ bones,
A volley of hollow words, words, words.
Lie still. Watch the great heavy,
The flashing coloured boxer, Night,
Gong back the paleface, Day.
Opal and extravagant as a cat.
Lastly the moon will wake in him, too,
The stiff victorious grin o’ the skull.
1980/1938
VI
Call back the stars. They are too many, Lord.
Death takes us man by man. Old wars
Covet us with the trumpet, cover us. April
Gives in deceit her stammering flowers.
Desire like a doom, the boom boom of the surf
Tells us. The slow-motion dive of the pole star
To the rim of the morning, the meaning of things,
Builds your tent where we are.
How shall it be? Caught in the sun’s red loom,
Be woven to rock, to water, a new manufacture.
By the moon drawn, a green dolphin,
Up into death sans fracture?
Answer. At wedding, at tea-time, in snow?
Or in the dog-days, surprised at an oar,
In a drawn breath
Shall see save me too near the fatal,
Your absolute and ghostly impact, Lord,
The white yacht—death?
1980/1938
VII2 (1937)
At last the serious days of summer
When from the red forge dancing,
The blacksmith sunshine hammers
New beaks for the flesh.
From the black mint
Steel for new flint.
State me no theme for misery. The season
Like a woman lies open, is folding,
Secret, growth upon growth. The black fig,
Desire, is torn again from the belly of Reason.
Our summer is gravid at last, is big.
All you, who know desire in these seas,
Have souls or equipment for loneliness, loneliness,
Lean now like fruitage. The Hesperides
Open. This is the limbo, the doldrum.
Seal down the eye of your cyclops,
Silence time’s drum.
1943/1938
VIII3
The paladin of the body is rock,
Dark rock, the anonymous
Stark stone, the prime ingot.
This crystal of darkness is flesh.
Call on Him and the rock
Becomes flesh and the flesh
God. Rock is His pseudonym.
This black rock does not feel
The kiss of the rivet, man’s iron
So the body’s armature seems
Bone: but is really stone.
God in the marrow
Borrows the belly’s zone,
Shatters the mind’s great lock,
And there visible is the Sphinx,
Whatever one thinks. God
Prime in the black rock.
1980/1938
IX4
The father is in death.
Let him now enter into the sun’s attic,
Enter the floating chambers of the sea.
Who will bear witness how foreign,
How musical with the silence
And alphabets we three be?
The father is in death.
The shadow lobs at the western wall.
The wheel has a broken spoke.
O conjure, my brothers, the pelican
That its monstrous egg is not laid here
Lest dogs snap the poisoned yolk.
The father is strangled in his vine.
We will go sideways out of the house
Leaving only by the oven to nestle
A small rabbit on her perch-grass:
She is too soft a thing, too abhorred
A morsel for the twelve angers,
The pestle and mortar of the Lord.
1980/1938
1 First published as ‘A Lyric for Nikh’.
2 Also published as ‘Summer in Corfu’.
3 Also published as ‘The Sermon of One’.
4 Also published as ‘Poem to Gerald’ and ‘The Three Sons’.
LOGOS
Thy kingdom come. They say the prophet
In private house lies with his myth:
Sees strange particularities in flesh
That poison his beatitude.
Onlie begetter, shining one
We travel a same rare latitude
To fringe the Arctic Circle of the Word:
Carry no compass, flag to plant, but bone.
The ageless humour of the skeleton.
His myth is grace: no less our absolute,
Locust and honey, scrip and wallet. Woman
Can be a wilderness enough for body
To wander in: is a true human
Genesis and exodus. A serious fate.
She the last crucifixion on the Word.
We press on her as Roman on his sword.
1960/1939
THE HANGED MAN
From this glass gallows in famous entertainment,
Upside down and by the dust yellowed,
The hanged man considers a green county,
Hallowed by gallows on a high hill.
The rooks of his two blue eyes eating
A mineral diet, that smile not while
The invaders move: on the dark down there
Owls with soft scissors cherish him.
Yellower than plantains by the dust touched
These hands in their chamber-music turning,
As viol or cello, these might easily be
The sullen fingers of a fallen Charles.
So will the horseman speculate in his cloak,
The felloes of the wagon cease their screech,
While one widens the eye of the farm-girl
Telling how rope ripens on a high hill.
1943/1939
FATHER NICHOLAS HIS DEATH: CORFU
(1939)
Hush the old bones their vegetable sleep,
For the islands will never grow old.
Nor like Atlantis on a Monday tumble,
Struck like soft gongs in the amazing blue.
Dip the skull’s chinks in lichens and sleep,
Old man, beside the water-gentry.
The hero standing knee-deep in his dreams
Will find and bind the name upon his atlas,
And put beside it only an X marked spot.
Leave memory to the two tall sons and lie
Calmed in smiles by the elegiac blue.
A man’s address to God is the skeleton’s humour,
A music sipped by the flowers.
Consider please the continuous nature of Love:
How one man dying and another smiling
Conserve for the maggot only a seed of pity,
As in winter’s taciturn womb we see already
A small and woollen lamb on a hilltop hopping.
The dying and the becoming are one thing,
So wherever you go the musical always is;
Now what are your pains to the Great Danube’s pains,
Your pyramids of despair against Ithaca
Or the underground rivers of Dis?
Your innocence shall be as the clear cistern
Where the lone animal in these odourless waters
Quaffs at his own reflection a shining ink.
Here at your green pasture the old psalms
Shall kneel like humble brutes and drink.
Hush then the finger bones their mineral doze
For the islands will never be old or cold
Nor ever the less blue: for the egg of beauty
Blossoms in new migrations, the whale’s grey acres,
For men of the labyrinth of the dream of death.
So sleep.
All these warm when the flesh is cold.
And the blue will keep.
1943/1939
ADAM
I have nibbled the mystical fruit. Cover me.
Lest the prophetic fish follow and swallow me.
I dare not tread among the lilies
Though lambswool cover my footfall,
Though the adder call, the Word walk,
In the orchard voices follow, hands hallow me.
Thy will be done as it was in Eden.
We were a long time—I am afraid—
Naked among silver fish and shadows,
A long time and in silence naked. Only
The fountains falling, the hornet’s drum
Calling, sunny and drunk with dew.
I am Adam, of singular manufacture,
A little clay, water, and prophetic breath;
On the waters of chaos a lamp of red clay.
The Word owns me. I have no armament
Only my fear of the walking Thing.
The rib follows me everywhere: and everywhere
A shadow follows the rib. Eve,
I am afraid. The Host walks and talks
In the baobab shade: the unknowable Thing
Is crossing the paths: the breath, woman,
Is on us: a white light: O cover me
From the unthinkable razor of thought
Whose whisper hangs over me.
Eve, we are in
this thing to the very end,
You, your shadow, and shadowless Adam, I.
O rib and morsel of anguish, bone of contention,
After the thing has shone and gone,
After it enters the terrible wood,
We will win through, perhaps: cover us deep
Beyond clue with the leaves of the wood:
Be silent until it passes: and kiss me, kiss me.
Ah! but the apple, the apple was good!
1960/1939
PARIS JOURNAL
For David Gascoyne
(1939)
Monday escapes destruction.
Record a vernal afternoon,
Tea on the lawn with mother,
A parochial interest in love, etc.
By the deviation of a hair,
Is death so far, so far, no further.
Tuesday: visibility good: and Wednesday.
A little thunder, some light showers.
A library book about the universe.
The absence of a definite self.
O and already by Friday hazardous,
To Saturday begins the slow reverse.
A Saturday without form. By midnight
The equinox seems forever gone:
Yet the motionless voice repeating:
‘Bless the hills in paradigms of smoke,
Manhair, Maidenhair meeting.’
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 5