You will guess more easily what we have to follow.
Death and sex are symbols of division in chaos.
Life lies on the Whole, along a circumference pure.
Duality is distress, like the image of pins in mirrors.
The first law of optics is the eye: and the first law
Of Life is Time, the endless tepid all-consuming ray.
Consider the magic of your wife or your daughter’s
Love, so partial a gift, defenceless against iron.
Why is this? Because the receiver is partial not whole.
Imperfect of reception, you are a ventriloquist’s idiot,
Acting and speaking by inherited voices and vices.
Now what is dumber than the voice of the dummy?
What more deadly than the voice of Esau in Jacob?
I will provide a text for your refreshment here:
Let it come like a foreign grace between the food
And the tongue, between the lip and the next glass.
It is: nothing can save you, because salvation
Is in what is lost, not saved: what is spent unmeasured.
Think, even as you sit here blessing you are cursed.
As you turn in your minds to escape you are damned.
The detention is ended, Ladies
And gentlemen: or what is worse perhaps,
Men and women: or what is worst of all
Children: for we speak to children under the title of Man.
Farewell.
1980/1940
THE PRAYER-WHEEL1
(1939)
Only to affirm in time
That sequence dwells in consequence,
The River’s quietly flowing muscle
Turning in the hollow cup
Will teach the human compromise.
Sword and pen win nothing here
Underneath the human floor:
Loved and loving move between
The counterpoint of universes,
Neither less and neither more.
The sage upon his snowy wheel
Secure among the flight of circles
By the calculus of prayer
Underneath the human floor
Founds a commune in the heart.
Time in love’s diurnal motion,
Suffering untold migrations,
Islanded and garlanded,
Deep as the ministry of fishes
Lives by a perpetual patience.
Teach us the already known,
Turning in the invisible saucer
By a perfect recreation
Air and water mix and part.
Reaffirm the lover’s process,
Faith and love in flesh alloyed,
Spring the cisterns of the heart:
Build the house of entertainment
On the cold circumference
Candle-pointed in the Void.
Cross the threshold of the circle
Turning in its mesmerism
On the fulcrum of the Breath:
Learn the lovely mannerism
Of a perfect art-in-death.
Think: two amateurs in Eden,
Spaces in the voiceless garden,
Ancestors whose haunted faces
Met upon the apple’s bruises,
Broke the lovely spell of pardon.
Flower, with your pure assertion,
Mythical and sea-born olive,
Share the indivisible air,
Teach the human compromise:
From a zero, plus or minus,
Born into the great Appearance,
Building cities deep in gardens,
Deeply still the law divines us
In its timeless incoherence.
What is known is never written.
By the equal distribution
He and She and It are genders,
Sparks of carbon on the circle
Meeting in the porch of sex.
Faces mix and numbers mingle
Many aspects of the One
Teach the human compromise.
Speech will never stain the blue,
Nor the lover’s occult kisses
Hold the curves of Paradise.
The voices have their dying fall.
The fingers resting on the heart,
The dumb petitions in the churchyard
Under the European sword
Spell out our tribal suicide.
Grass is green but goes to smoke:
You, my friend, and you, and you,
Breathe on the divining crystal,
Cut down History, the oak:
Prepare us for the sword and pistol.
1948/1940
1 Originally published as ‘Poem in Space and Time’.
GREEN MAN
Four small nouns I put to pasture,
Lambs of cloud on a green paper.
My love leans like a beadle at her book,
Her smile washes the seven cities.
I am the spring’s greenest publicity,
And my poem is all wrist and elbow.
O I am not daedal and need wings,
My oracle kisses a black wand.
One great verb I dip in ink
For the tortoise who carries the earth:
A grammar of fate like the map of China,
Or as wrinkles sit in the palm of a girl.
I enter my poem like a son’s house.
The ancient thought is: nothing will change.
But the nouns are back in the bottle,
I ache and she is warm, was warm, is warm.
1960/1940
IN CRISIS
For Nancy
(1939)
My love on Wednesday letting fall her body
From upright walking won by weariness,
As on a bed of flesh by ounces counted out,
Softer than snuff or snow came where my body was.
So in the aboriginal waterways of the mind,
No word being spoken by a familiar girl,
One may have a clear apprehension of ghostly matters,
Audible, as perhaps in the sea-shell’s helix
The Gulf Stream can rub soft music from a pebble
Like quiet rehearsal of the words ‘Kneel down’:
And cool on the inner corridors of the ear
Can blow on memory and conscience like a sin.
The inner man is surely a native of God
And his wife a brilliant novice of nature.
The woman walks in the dark like a lantern swung,
A white spark blown between points of pain.
We do not speak, embracing with the blood,
The tolling heart marking its measures in darkness
Like the scratch of a match or the fire-stone
Struck to a spark in the dark by a colder one.
So, lying close, the enchanted boy may hear
Soon from Tokio the crass drum sounding,
From the hero’s hearth the merry crotchet of war.
Flame shall swallow the lady.
Tall men shall come to cool the royal bush,
Over the grey waters the bugler’s octaves
Publish aloud a new resurrection of terror.
Many will give suck at the bomb’s cold nipple.
Empty your hearts: or fill from a purer source.
That what is in men can weep, having eyes:
That what is in Truth can speak from the responsible dust
And O the rose grow in the middle of the great world.
1943/1940
AT CORINTH
For V.
(1940)
At Corinth one has forgiven
The recording travellers in the same past
Who first entered this land of doors,
Hunting a precise emotion by clues,
Haunting a river, or a place in a book.
Here the continuous evocations are washed
Harder than tears and brighter,
But less
penetrating than the touch of flesh,
(Our fingers pressed upon eyelids of stone),
Yet more patient, surely, watching
To dissolve the statues and retire
Night after night with a dissolving moon.
The valley mist ennobles
Lovers disarmed by negligence or weather,
And before night the calm
Discovers them, breathing upon the nerves,
The scent of the exhausted lamps.
Here stars come soft to pasture,
And all doors lead to sleep.
What lies beneath the turf forbids
A footstep on the augustan stair,
The intrusion of a style less pure,
Seen through the camera’s lens,
Or the quotations of visitors.
My skill is in words only:
To tell you, writing this letter home,
That we, whose blood was sweetened once
By Byron or his elders in the magic,
Entered the circle safely, found
No messenger for us except the smiles.
Owls sip the wind here. Well,
This place also was somebody’s home,
Whipped by the gulf to thorns,
A house for proverbs by a broken well.
Winter was never native here: nor is.
Men, women, and the nightingales
Are forms of Spring.
1943/1940
NEMEA
(1940)
A song in the valley of Nemea:
Sing quiet, quite quiet here.
Song for the brides of Argos
Combing the swarms of golden hair:
Quite quiet, quiet there.
Under the rolling comb of grass,
The sword outrusts the golden helm.
Agamemnon under tumulus serene
Outsmiles the jury of skeletons:
Cool under cumulus the lion queen:
Only the drum can celebrate,
Only the adjective outlive them.
A song in the valley of Nemea:
Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.
Tone of the frog in the empty well,
Drone of the bald bee on the cold skull,
Quiet, Quiet, Quiet.
1943/1940
IN ARCADIA
(1940)
By divination came the Dorians,
Under a punishment composed an arch.
They invented this valley, they taught
The rock to flow with odourless water.
Fire and a brute art came among them.
Rain fell, tasting of the sky.
Trees grew, composing a grammar.
The river, the river you see was brought down
By force of prayer upon this fertile floor.
Now small skills: the fingers laid upon
The nostrils of flutes, the speech of women
Whose tutors were the birds; who singing
Now civilized their children with the kiss.
Lastly, the tripod sentenced them.
Ash closed on the surviving sons.
The brown bee memorized here, rehearsed
Migration from an inherited habit.
All travellers recorded an empty zone.
Between rocks ‘O death’, the survivors.
O world of bushes eaten like a moon,
Kissed by the awkward patience of the ant.
Within a concave blue and void of space.
Something died out by this river: but it seems
Less than a nightingale ago.
1943/1940
A NOCTUARY IN ATHENS
I
I have tasted my quantum of misfortune,
Have prayed before the left-handed woman;
Now as the rain of heaven downfalling tastes of space,
So the swimmer in the ocean of self, alone,
Utters his journey like a manual welcome,
Sculptures his element in search of grace.
II
I have sipped from the flask of resurrection,
Have eaten the oaten cake of redemption,
And love, sweet love, who weeps by the water-clock
Can bring if she will the sexton and the box,
For I wear my age as wood wears voluble leaves,
The temporal hunger and the carnal locks.
III
I have buried my wife under a dolmen,
Where others sleep as naked as the clouds,
Where others lie and weigh their dreams by ounces,
Where tamarisk, lentisk lean to utter sweets,
And angels in their shining moods retire:
Where from the wells the voice of truth pronounces.
IV
I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.
In the desert, the cities of ash and feathers,
In front of others I have spoken the vowel,
Knelt to the curly wool, the uncut horns;
Have carried my tribulation in a basket of wattle,
Solitary in my penitence as the owl.
V
I have set my wife’s lip under the bandage,
O pound the roses, bind the eye of the soul,
Recite the charm of the deep and heal soon,
For the mountains accuse, and the sky’s walls.
Let the book of sickness be put in the embers.
I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.
1943/1940
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
(1937)
This boy is the good shepherd.
He paces the impartial horizons,
Forty days in the land of tombs,
Waterless wilderness, seeking waterholes:
Knows the sound of the golden eagle, knows
The algebraic flute blue under Jupiter:
Supine in myrtle, lamb between his knees,
Has been a musical lion upon the midnight.
This was the good shepherd, Daphnis,
Time’s ante-room by the Aegean tooth,
Curled like an umber snake above the spray,
Mumbling arbutus among the chalk-snags,
The Grecian molars where the green sea spins,
Suffered a pastoral decay.
This girl was the milk and the honey.
Under the eaves the dark figs ripen,
The leaves’ nine medicines, a climbing wine.
Under the tongue the bee-sting,
Under the breast the adder at the lung,
Like feathered child at wing.
Life’s honey is distilled simplicity:
The icy crystal pendant from the rock,
The turtle’s scorching ambush for the egg,
The cypress and the cicada,
And wine-dark, blue, and curious, then,
The metaphoric sea.
This was Chloe, the milk and honey,
Carved in the clear geography of Time,
The skeleton clean chiselled out in chalk,
For our Nigerian brown to study on.
From the disease of life, took the pure way,
Declined into the cliffs, the European waters,
Suffered a pastoral decay.
1943/1941
FANGBRAND
A BIOGRAPHY
For Stephan Syriotis
(Mykonos, 1940)
Fangbrand was here once,
A missionary man,
Borne down by the Oxus,
Pursued by the lilies,
Inhabited by the old voice of sorrows,
In a black hat and sanitary boots.
The island recognised him,
Giving no welcome, lying
Trembling among her craters:
The blue circlets of stone,
On a sea blotted with fictions.
He came to the wharf with long oars.
The Ocean’s peculiar spelling
Haunts here, cuddled by syllables
In caves perpendicular, a blue recitation
Of water wa
shing the dead,
On the pediments of the statues,
Came the strange man, the solitary man,
Fangbrand the unsuspecting,
Missionary one in thick soles,
Measuring penance by the pipkin,
Step-brother to the gannet,
Travelling the blue bowl of the world,
His virtues in him rough as towels.
His brows that bent like forests
Over the crystal-gazing eyes;
His brows that bent like forests,
A silver hair played on his neck.
He saw this rock and the seal asleep,
With the same mineral stare.
This place he made pastance
For the platonic ass; in this
Cottage by the water supported
The duellers, the twins,
Of argument and confusion,
Alone in a melancholy hat.
Those who come to this pass,
Ask themselves always how
A rock can become a parish,
Pulpits whitened by the sea-birds,
Mean more than just house, rock,
A tree, a table and a chair.
His window was Orion;
At night standing upon the deep,
His eyes smaller than commas
Watched without regret the ships
Passing, one light in a void,
One pure point on the wave’s floor.
Measured in the heart’s small flask
The spirit’s disturbance: the one voice
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 7