Like children’s ears attentive here,
Blown like glass from the floors of snow.
Truly, we the endowed who pass here
With the assurance of visitors in rugs
Can raise from the menhir no ghost
By the cold sound of English idioms.
Our true parenthood rests with the eagle,
We recognize him turning over his vaults.
Bones have no mouths to smile with
From the beds of companionable rivers dry.
The modern girls pose on a tomb smiling;
Night watches us on the western horn;
The hyssop and the vinegar have lost their meaning,
And this is what breaks the heart.
1943/1942
‘Je est un Autre’
RIMBAUD
He is the man who makes notes,
The observer in the tall black hat,
Face hidden in the brim:
In three European cities
He has watched me watching him.
The street-corner in Buda and after
By the post-office a glimpse
Of the disappearing tails of his coat,
Gave the same illumination, spied upon,
The tightness in the throat.
Once too meeting by the Seine
The waters a moving floor of stars,
He had vanished when I reached the door,
But there on the pavement burning
Lay one of his familiar black cigars.
The meeting on the dark stairway
Where the tide ran clean as a loom:
The betrayal of her, her kisses
He has witnessed them all: often
I hear him laughing in the other room.
He watches me now, working late,
Bringing a poem to life, his eyes
Reflect the malady of De Nerval:
O useless in this old house to question
The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise.
1943/1942
CONON IN EXILE
Author’s Note
Conon is an imaginary Greek philosopher who visited me twice in my dreams, and with whom I occasionally identify myself; he is one of my masks, Melissa is another; I want my total poetic work to add up as a kind of tapestry of people, some real, some imaginary. Conon is real.
I
Three women have slept with my books,
Penelope among admirers of the ballads,
Let down her hair over my exercises
But was hardly aware of me; an author
Of tunes which made men like performing dogs;
She did not die but left me for a singer in a wig.
II
Later Ariadne read of The Universe,
Made a journey under the islands from her own
Green home, husband, house with olive trees.
She lay with my words and let me breathe
Upon her face; later fell like a gull from the
Great ledge in Scio. Relations touched her body
Warm and rosy from the oil like a scented loaf,
Not human any more—but not divine as they had hoped.
III
You who pass the islands will perhaps remember
The lovely Ion, harmless, patient and in love.
Our quarrels disturbed the swallows in the eaves,
The wild bees could not work in the vine;
Shaken and ill, one of true love’s experiments,
It was she who lay in the stone bath dry-eyed,
Having the impression that her body had become
A huge tear about to drop from the eye of the world.
We never learned that marriage is a kind of architecture,
The nursery virtues were missing, all of them,
So nobody could tell us why we suffered.
IV
It would be untrue to say that The Art of Marriage
And the others: Of Peace in the Self and Of Love
Brought me no women; I remember bodies, arms, faces,
But I have forgotten their names.
V
Finally I am here. Conon in exile on Andros
Like a spider in a bottle writing the immortal
Of Love and Death, through the bodies of those
Who slept with my words but did not know me.
An old man with a skinful of wine
Living from pillow to poke under a vine.
At night the sea roars under the cliffs.
The past harms no one who lies close to the Gods.
Even in these notes upon myself I see
I have put down women’s names like some
Philosophical proposition. At last I understand
They were only forms for my own ideas,
With names and mouths and different voices.
In them I lay with myself, my style of life,
Knowing only coitus with the shadows,
By our blue Aegean which forever
Washes and pardons and brings us home.
1943/1942
ON FIRST LOOKING INTO LOEB’S HORACE
I found your Horace with the writing in it;
Out of time and context came upon
This lover of vines and slave to quietness,
Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing
Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines.
All the small-holder’s ambitions, the yield
Of wine-bearing grape, pruning and drainage
Laid out by laws, almost like the austere
Shell of his verses—a pattern of Latin thrift;
Waiting so patiently in a library for
Autumn and the drying of the apples;
The betraying hour-glass and its deathward drift.
Surely the hard blue winterset
Must have conveyed a message to him—
The premonitions that the garden heard
Shrunk in its shirt of hair beneath the stars,
How rude and feeble a tenant was the self,
An Empire, the body with its members dying—
And unwhistling now the vanished Roman bird?
The fruit-trees dropping apples; he counted them;
The soft bounding fruit on leafy terraces,
And turned to the consoling winter rooms
Where, facing south, began the great prayer,
With his reed laid upon the margins
Of the dead, his stainless authors,
Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.
Here, where your clear hand marked up
‘The hated cypress’ I added ‘Because it grew
On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns’,
Depicting a solitary at an upper window
Revising metaphors for the winter sea: ‘O
Dark head of storm-tossed curls’; or silently
Watching the North Star which like a fever burns
Away the envy and neglect of the common,
Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation
The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only
As a metaphor for the self and its perfection—
A burning heart quite constant in its station.
Easy to be patient in the summer,
The light running like fishes among the leaves,
Easy in August with its cones of blue
Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter
With its bareness pared his words to points
Like stars, leaving them pure but very few.
He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding
The pose of sufficiency, the landed man,
Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree
Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we
Use, yet based in him, his mason’s tongue;
Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary,
With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation,
Disguising a sense of fa
ilure in a hatred for the young,
Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery
Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome;
Who studiously developed his sense of death
Till it was all around him, walking at the circus,
At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop—
The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic
Imperatives: Seek, suffer, endure. The Roman
In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.
So perfect a disguise for one who had
Exhausted death in art—yet who could guess
You would discern the liar by a line,
The suffering hidden under gentleness
And add upon the flyleaf in your tall
Clear hand: ‘Fat, human and unloved,
And held from loving by a sort of wall,
Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
Indifference and success had crowned them all.’
1946/1943
ON ITHACA STANDING
(1937)
Tread softly, for here you stand
On miracle ground, boy.
A breath would cloud this water of glass,
Honey, bush, berry and swallow.
This rock, then, is more pastoral, than
Arcadia is, Illyria was.
Here the cold spring lilts on sand.
The temperature of the toad
Swallowing under a stone whispers: ‘Diamonds,
Boy, diamonds, and juice of minerals!’
Be a saint here, dig for foxes, and water,
Mere water springs in the bones of the hands.
Turn from the hearth of the hero. Think:
Other men have their emblems, I this:
The heart’s dark anvil and the crucifix
Are one, have hammered and shall hammer
A nail of flesh, me to an island cross,
Where the kestrel’s arrow falls only,
The green sea licks.
1943/1943
EXILE IN ATHENS
(1940)
To be a king of islands,
Share a boundary with eagles,
Be a subject of sails.
Here, on these white rocks,
In cold palaces all winter,
Under the salt blanket,
Forget not yet the tried intent,
Pale hands before the face: face
Before the sea’s blue negative,
Washing against the night,
Pushing against the doors,
Earth’s dark metaphors.
Here alone in a stone city
I sing the rock, the sea-squill,
Over Greece the one punctual star.
To be king of the clock—
I know, I know—to share
Boundaries with the bird,
With the ant her lodge:
But they betray, betray.
To be the owner of stones,
To be a king of islands,
Share a bed with a star,
Be a subject of sails.
1943/1943
A BALLAD OF THE GOOD LORD NELSON
The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,
Little of the scripture did he understand
Till a woman led him to the promised land
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Adam and Evil and a bushel of figs
Meant nothing to Nelson who was keeping pigs,
Till a woman showed him the various rigs
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
His heart was softer than a new laid egg,
Too poor for loving and ashamed to beg,
Till Nelson was taken by the Dancing Leg
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Now he up and did up his little tin trunk
And he took to the ocean on his English junk,
Turning like the hour-glass in his lonely bunk
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
The Frenchman saw him a-coming there
With the one-piece eye and the valentine hair,
With the safety-pin sleeve and occupied air
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Now you all remember the message he sent
As an answer to Hamilton’s discontent—
There were questions asked about it in Parliament
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Now the blacker the berry, the thicker comes the juice.
Think of Good Lord Nelson and avoid self-abuse,
For the empty sleeve was no mere excuse
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
‘England Expects’ was the motto he gave
When he thought of little Emma out on Biscay’s wave,
And remembered working on her like a galley-slave
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
The first Great Lord in our English land
To honour the Freudian command,
For a cast in the bush is worth two in the hand
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Now the Frenchman shot him there as he stood
In the rage of battle in a silk-lined hood
And he heard the whistle of his own hot blood
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air
Nelson stylites in Trafalgar Square
Reminds the British what once they were
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
If they’d treat their women in the Nelson way
There’d be fewer frigid husbands every day
And many more heroes on the Bay of Biscay
Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
1943/1943
COPTIC POEM1
A Coptic deputation, going to Ethiopia,
Disappeared up one morning like the ghost in Aubrey
‘With a Sweet Odour and a Melodious Twang’.
Who saw them go with their Melodious Odour?
I, said the arrow, the aboriginal arrow,
I saw them go, Coptic and Mellifluous,
Fuzzy-wig, kink-haired, with cocoa-butter shining,
With stoles on poles, sackbuts and silver salvers
Walking the desert ways howling and shining:
A Coptic congregation, red blue and yellow,
With Saints on parchment and stove-pipe hats,
All disappeared up like the ghost in Aubrey
Leaving only a smell of cooking and singing,
Rancid goat-butter and the piss of cats.
1946/1943
1 Originally published as ‘Mythology’.
MYTHOLOGY
All my favourite characters have been
Out of all pattern and proportion:
Some living in villas by railways,
Some like Katsimbalis heard but seldom seen,
And others in banks whose sunless hands
Moved like great rats on ledgers.
Tibble, Gondril, Purvis, the Duke of Puke,
Shatterblossom and Dude Bowdler
Who swelled up in Jaffa and became a tree:
Hollis who had wives killed under him like horses
And that man of destiny,
Ramon de Something who gave lectures
From an elephant, founded a society
To protect the inanimate against cruelty.
He gave asylum to aged chairs in his home,
Lampposts and crockery, everything that
Seemed to him suffering he took in
Without mockery.
The poetry was in the pity. No judgement
Disturbs people like these in their frames
O men of the Marmion class, sons of the free.
1946/1943
MATAPAN
Unrevisited perhaps forever
Southward from the capes of smoke
Where past and present to the waters are one
And the peninsula’s end points out
Three fingers down the night:
To where the islands, at last, the islands …
Abstract and more lovely
Andros Delos and Santorin,
Transpontine headlands in crisp weather,
Cries amputated by the gulls,
Formless, yet made in marble
Whose calm insoluble statues wear
Stone vines for hair, forever sharing
A sea-penumbra, the darkened arc
Where mythology walks in a wave
And the islands are.
Leaving you, hills, we were unaware
Or only as sleepwalkers are aware
Of a key turned in the heart, a letter
Posted under the door of an empty house;
Now Matapan and her forebodings
Became an identity, a trial of conduct,
Rolled and unrolled by the surges
Like a chart, mapped by a star,
With thistle and trefoil blowing,
An end of everything known
A beginning of water.
Here sorrow and beauty shared
Like time and place an eternal relation,
Matapan …
Here we learned that the lover
Is contained by love, not containing,
Matapan, Matapan:
Here the lucky in summer
Tied up their boats; a mile from land
The cicada’s small machine came like a breath;
Touching bottom saw their feet become
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 9