Saying ‘Renounce’, the other
Answering ‘Be’; the division
Of the darkness into faces
Crying ‘Too late’ ‘Too late’.
At night the immediate
Rubbing of the ocean on stones,
The headlands dim in her smoke
And always the awareness
Of self like a point, the quiver
As of a foetal heart asleep in him.
Continuous memory, continual evocations.
An old man in a colony of stones,
Frowning, exilic, upon a thorn,
Learning nothing of time:
Sometimes in a windy night asleep
His lips brushed the forbidden apples.
Everything reproached him, the cypress
Revising her reflection in pools,
The olive’s stubborn silver in wind,
The nude and statuary hills all
Saying ‘Turn back. Turn back.
Peace lies another way, old man’.
It seemed to him here at last
His age, his time, his sex even
Were struck and past; life
In a flood carrying all idols
Into the darkness, struck
Like floating tubs, and were gone.
The pathfinder rested now,
The sick man found silence
Like the curved ear of a shell;
A roar of silence even
Diminishing the foolish cool
Haunting note of the dove.
By day he broke his fruit
Humbly from the tree: his water
From wells as deep as Truth:
Living on snails and waterberries,
Marvelling for the first time
At the luminous island, the light.
His body he left in pools
Now dazed by fortune, like an old
White cloth discarded where
Only the fish were visitors.
Their soft perverted kisses
Melted the water on his side.
The rich shadow of the vine’s tent
Like a cold cloth on his skull;
Spring water blown through sand,
Bubbled on mineral floors,
Ripened in smooth cisterns
Dripped from a hairy lintel on his tongue.
Truth’s metaphor is the needle,
The magnetic north of purpose
Striving against the true north
Of self: Fangbrand found it out,
The final dualism in very self,
An old man holding an asphodel.
Everywhere night lay spilled,
Like coolness from spoons,
And his to drink, the human
Surface of the sky, the planes
And concaves of the eye reflecting
A travelling mirror, the earth.
He regarded himself in water,
The torrid brow’s beetle,
The grammarian’s cranium-bone.
He regarded himself in water
Saying ‘X marks the spot,
Self, you are still alive!’
From now the famous ten-year
Silence fell on him; disciples
Invented the legend; now
They search the white island
For a book perhaps, a small
Paper of revelation left behind.
Comb out the populous waters,
Study the mud: what kept,
Held, fed, fattened him?
The hefts of stone are the only
Blossoms here: nothing grows,
But the ocean expunges.
Time’s chemicals mock the hunter
For crumbs of doctrine; Fangbrand
Died with his art like a vase.
The grave in the rock,
Sweetened by saffron, bubbles water
Like a smile, an animal truth.
Death interrupted nothing.
Like guarded towns against alarms,
Our sentries in the nerves
Never sleep; but his one night
Slept on their arms, Hesperus shining,
And the unknowns entered.
So the riders of the darkness pass
On their circuit: the luminous island
Of the self trembles and waits,
Waits for us all, my friends,
Where the sea’s big brush recolours
The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.
1943/1941
AT EPIDAURUS
The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
Washed all winter by the surviving stars
Are here hardly recalled: or only as
Stone choirs for the sea-bird,
Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.
This civilized valley was dedicated to
The cult of the circle, the contemplation
And correction of famous maladies
Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also
By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.
The only disorder is in what we bring here:
Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,
The penetration of clocks striking in London.
The composure of dolls and fanatics,
Financed migrations to the oldest sources:
A theatre where redemption was enacted,
Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.
The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,
And the swallow’s cot in the ruin seems how
Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!
Here we can carry our own small deaths
With the resignation of place and identity;
A temple set severely like a dice
In the vale’s Vergilian shade; once apparently
Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:
A formula for marble when the clouds
Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke
Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.
Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,
The dying leaves and the reports of love.
The land’s lie, held safe from the sea,
Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,
Provides a context understandably natural
For men who could divulge the forms of gods.
Here the mathematician entered his own problem,
A house built round his identity,
Round the fond yet mysterious seasons
Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.
Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,
And the hum of the chorus enchanted.
We, like the winter, are only visitors,
To prosper here the breathing grass,
Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing
Nothing, enduring the sun like girls
In a town window. The earth’s flowers
Blow here original with every spring,
Shines in the rising of a man’s age
Into cold texts and precedents for time.
Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order
Of old captains who sleep in the hill.
Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,
Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,
Unlocking this world which is not our world.
The somnambulists walk again in the north
With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.
Useless a morality for slaves: useless
The shouting at echoes to silence them.
Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,
Four ragged travellers in Homer.
All causes end within the great Because.
1943/1941
LETTER TO SEFERIS THE GREEK
‘Ego dormio sed cor meum vigilat’
(1941)
No milestones marked the invaders,
But ragged harps like mountains
here:
A text for Proserpine in tears: worlds
With no doors for heroes and no walls with ears:
Yet snow, the anniversary of death.
How did they get here? How enact
This clear severe repentance on a rock,
Where only death converts and the hills
Into a pastoral silence by a lake,
By the blue Fact of the sky forever?
‘Enter the dark crystal if you dare
And gaze on Greece.’ They came
Smiling, like long reflections of themselves
Upon a sky of fancy. The red shoes
Waited among the thickets and the springs,
In fields of unexploded asphodels,
Neither patient nor impatient, merely
Waited, the born hunter on his ground,
The magnificent and funny Greek.
We will never record it: the black
Choirs of water flowing on moss,
The black sun’s kisses opening,
Upon their blindness, like two eyes
Enormous, open in bed against one’s own.
Something sang in the firmament.
The past, my friend compelled you,
The charge of habit and love.
The olive in the blood awoke,
The stones of Athens in their pride
Will remember, regret and often bless.
Kisses in letters from home:
Crosses in the snow: now surely
Lover and loved exist again
By a strange communion of darkness.
Those who went in all innocence,
Whom the wheel disfigured: whom
Charity will not revisit or repair,
The innocent who fell like apples.
Consider how love betrays us:
In the conversation of the prophets
Who daily repaired the world
By profit and loss, with no text
On the unknown quantity
By whose possession all problems
Are only ink and air made words:
I mean friends everywhere who smile
And reach out their hands.
Anger inherits where love
Betrays: iron only can clean:
And praises only crucify the loved
In their matchless errand, death.
Remember the earth will roll
Down her old grooves and spring
Utter swallows again, utter swallows.
Others will inherit the sea-shell,
Murmuring to the foolish its omens,
Uncurving on the drum of the ear,
The vowels of an ocean beyond us,
The history, the inventions of the sea:
Upon all parallels of the salt wave,
To lovers lying like sculptures
In islands of smoke and marble,
Will enter the reflections of poets
By the green wave, the chemical water.
I have no fear for the land
Of the dark heads with aimed noses,
The hair of night and the voices
Which mimic a traditional laughter:
Nor for a new language where
A mole upon a dark throat
Of a girl is called ‘an olive’:
All these things are simply Greece.
Her blue boundaries are
Upon a curving sky of time,
In a dark menstruum of water:
The names of islands like doors
Open upon it: the rotting walls
Of the European myth are here
For us, the industrious singers,
In the service of this blue, this enormous blue.
Soon it will be spring. Out of
This huge magazine of flowers, the earth,
We will enchant the house with roses,
The girls with flowers in their teeth,
The olives full of charm: and all of it
Given: can one say that
Any response is enough for those
Who have a woman, an island and a tree?
I only know that this time
More than ever, we must bless
And pity the darling dead: the women
Winding up their hair into sea-shells,
The faces of meek men like dials,
The great overture of the dead playing,
Calling all lovers everywhere in all stations
Who lie on the circumference of ungiven kisses.
Exhausted rivers ending in the sand;
Windmills of the old world winding
And unwinding in musical valleys your arms.
The contemptible vessel of the body lies
Lightly in its muscles like a vine;
Covered the nerves: and like an oil expressed
From the black olive between rocks,
Memory lulls and bathes in its dear reflections.
Now the blue lantern of the night
Moves on the dark in its context of stars.
O my friend, history with all her compromises
Cannot disturb the circuit made by this,
Alone in the house, a single candle burning
Upon a table in the whole of Greece.
Your letter of the 4th was no surprise.
So Tonio had gone? He will have need of us.
The sails are going out over the old world.
Our happiness, here on a promontory,
Marked by a star, is small but perfect.
The calculations of the astronomers, the legends
The past believed in could not happen here.
Nothing remains but Joy, the infant Joy
(So quiet the mountain in its shield of snow,
So unconcerned the faces of the birds),
With the unsuspected world somewhere awake,
Born of this darkness, our imperfect sight,
The stirring seed of Nostradamus’ rose.
1943/1941
FOR A NURSERY MIRROR
Image, Image, Image answer
Whether son or whether daughter,
The persuader or the dancer:
A bird’s beak poking out of the flesh,
A bird’s beak singing between the eyes.
‘The earth is a loaf,
Image, Image, Image,
The wet part is joined to the dry,
Like the joints of Adam.’
It is dark now. Rise.
Between the Nonself and the Self
Cover the little wound
With soft red clay,
From the hit of the wind of Death,
From the chink of the pin of Day.
The heart’s cold singing part,
Image of the Dancer in water,
Close up with the soft red clay
The wound in the mystical bud:
For the dancers walking in the water
This is the body, this the blood.
1946/1942
TO PING-KÛ, ASLEEP
You sleeping child asleep, away
Between the confusing world of forms,
The lamplight and the day; you lie
And the pause flows through you like glass,
Asleep in the body of the nautilus.
Between comparison and sleep,
Lips that move in quotation;
The turning of a small blind mind
Like a plant everywhere ascending.
Now our love has become a beanstalk.
Invent a language where the terms
Are smiles; someone in the house now
Only understands warmth and cherish,
Still twig-bound, learning to fly.
This hand exploring the world makes
The diver’s deep-sea fingers on the sills
Of underwater windows; all the wrecks
Of our world where the sad blood leads back
Through memory and sense like divers working.
Sleep, my dear, we won’t disturb
; You, lying in the zones of sleep.
The four walls symbolise love put about
To hold in silence which so soon brims
Over into sadness: it’s still dark.
Sleep and rise a lady with a flower
Between your teeth and a cypress
Between your thighs: surely you won’t ever
Be puzzled by a poem or disturbed by a poem
Made like fire by the rubbing of two sticks?
1943/1942
TO ARGOS
The roads lead southward, blue
Along a circumference of snow,
Identified now by the scholars
As a home for the cyclops, a habitation
For nymphs and ancient appearances.
Only the shepherd in his cowl
Who walks upon them really knows
The natural history in a sacred place;
Takes like a text of stone
A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,
Pointing at what is mutually seen,
His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.
Our idols have been betrayed
Not by the measurement of the dead ones
Who are lying under these mountains,
As under England our own fastidious
Heroes lie awake but do not judge.
Winter rubs at the ice like a hair,
Dividing time; and a single tree
Reflects here a mythical river.
Water limps on ice, or scribbles
On doors of sand its syllables,
All alone, in an empty land, alone.
This is what breaks the heart.
We say that the blood of Virgil
Grew again in the scarlet pompion,
Ever afterwards reserving the old poet
Memorials in his air, his water: so
In this land one encounters always
Agamemnon, Agamemnon; the voice
Of water falling on hair in caves,
The stonebreaker’s hammer on walls,
A name held closer in the circles
Of bald granite than even these cyclamen,
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 8