Come after them in the scale
Of the material and the beautiful;
Are not less complex but less delicate
And less important than these living
Instruments of space,
Whose quiet communication is
With older trees in ships on the grey waves:
An order and a music
Like a writing on the skies
Too private for the reason or the pen;
Too simple even for the heart’s surprise.
II
NEAR EL ALAMEIN
This rough field of sudden war—
This sand going down to the sea, going down,
Was made without the approval of love,
By a general death in the desire for living.
Time got the range of impulse here:
On old houses with no thought of armies,
Burnt guns, maps and firing:
All the apparatus of man’s behaviour
Put by in memories for books on history:
A growth like these bitter
Green bulbs in the hollow sand here.
But ideas and language do not go.
The rate of the simple things—
Men walking here, thinking of houses,
Gardens, or green mountains or beliefs:
Units of the dead in these living armies,
Making comparison of this bitter heat,
And the living sea, giving up its bodies,
Level and dirty in the mist,
Heavy with sponges and the common error.
1946/1946
LEVANT
Gum, oats and syrup
The Arabians bore.
Evoking nothing from the sea but more
And more employ to christen them
With whips of salt and glittering spray,
Their wooden homes rocked on the chastening salt.
Lamps on altars, breath of children;
So coming and going with their talk of bales,
Lading and enterprises marked out
And fell on this rusty harbour
Where tills grew fat with cash
And the quills of Jews invented credit,
And in margins folded up
Bales, gum-arabic, and syrup;
Syrian barley in biffed coracles
Hugging the burking gulf or blown
As cargoes from the viny breath
Of mariners, the English or the Dutch.
In manners taught them nothing much
Beyond the endurance in the vile.
Left in history words like
Portuguese or Greek
Whose bastards can still speak and smile.
After this, lamps
Confused the foreigners;
Boys, women and drugs
Built this ant-hill for grammarians
Who fed upon the fathers fat with cash,
Turned oats and syrup here
To ribbons and wands and rash
Patents for sex and feathers,
Sweets for festivals and deaths.
Nothing changes. The indifferent
Or the merely good died off, but fixed
Here once the human type ‘Levant’.
Something fine of tooth and with the soft
Hanging lashes to the eye,
Given once by Spain and kept
In a mad friendship here and sadness
By the promiscuous sea upon this spit of sand.
Something money or promises can buy.
1946/1946
GREEK CHURCH: ALEXANDRIA
The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
Indeed all half asleep; their coming was
No eloquent proposition of natures
Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.
But a propitiation by dreams of belief
A relief from the chafing ropes of thought.
Piled high in Byzance like a treasure-ship
The church heels over, sinking in sound
And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys
And blazing crockery of the orthodox God
Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,
A sorcery to the black-coated rational,
To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.
Now however all hums and softly spins
Like a great top, the many-headed black
Majority merged in a single sea-shell.
Idle thoughts press in, amazing one—
How the theologians with beards of fire
Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,
Or with dividers spun for us a fine
Conniving cobweb—traps for the soul.
Three sailors stand like brooms.
The altar has opened like a honeycomb;
An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.
Surely we might ourselves exhale
Our faults like rainbows on this incense?
If souls did fire the old Greek barber
Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,
Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward
Child at this sill of pomp,
Moved by a hunger money could not sate,
Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.
1946/1946
NOTEBOOK1
For Eve
Mothers and sculptors work
By small rehearsed caresses in the block
Each to redeeming ends,
By shame or kisses print
Good citizens, good lovers and good friends.
Your impatient hero so admired
In all his epic scenery
Was such a vessel once, unfired,
A chaos on the wheel and rocked
In a muse on the womb’s dark Galilee.
And the lovers, those two characters,
Who have their exits and their entrances,
A certain native style may give
As predetermined in the bone,
Speak through the crude gags of the grave.
Their luck and hazard rests, my dear,
So lightly on us in our dreams
As voices rich with tears,
Whom no poetic justice gave
A friendship mad as ours.
1946/1946
1 Originally published as ‘For Gipsy Cohen’.
EIGHT ASPECTS OF MELISSA
I
BY THE LAKE
If seen by many minds at once your image
As in a prism falling breaks itself,
Or looking upwards from a gleaming spoon
Defies: a smile squeezed up and vanishing
In roundels of diversion like the moon.
Yet here you are confirmed by the smallest
Wish or kiss upon the rising darkness
But rootless as a wick afloat in water,
Fatherless as shoes walking over dead leaves;
A patient whom no envy stirs but joy
And what the harsh chords of your experience leave—
This dark soft eye, so liquid now and hoarse
With pleasure: or your arms in mirrors
Combing out softly hair
As lovely as a planet’s and remote.
How many several small forevers
Whispered in the rind of the ear
Melissa, by this Mediterranean sea-edge,
Captured and told?
How many additions to the total silence?
Surely we increased you by very little,
But as with a net or gun to make your victims men?
II
CAIRO1
Cut from the joints of this immense
Darkness upon the face of Egypt lying,
We move in the possession of our acts
Alone, the dread apostles of our weakness.
For look. The mauve street is swallowed
And the bats have begun to stitch slowly.
At the stable-door the carpenter’s thre
e sons
Bend over a bucket of burning shavings,
Warming their inwardness and quite unearthly
As the candle-marking time begins.
Three little magi under vast Capella,
Beloved of all as shy as the astronomer,
She troubles heaven with her golden tears,
Tears flowing down upon us at this window,
The children rapt, the mauve street swallowed,
The harps of flame among the shadows
In Egypt now and far from Nazareth.
III
THE ADEPTS
Some, the great Adepts, found it
A lesser part of them—ashes and thorns—
Where this sea-sickness on a bed
Proved nothing calm and virginal,
But animal, unstable, heavy as lead.
Some wearied for a sex
Like a science of known relations:
A God proved through the flesh—or else a mother.
They dipped in this huge pond and found it
An ocean of shipwrecked mariners instead,
Cried out and foundered, losing one another.
But some sailed into this haven
Laughing, and completely undecided,
Expecting nothing more
Than the mad friendship of bodies,
And farewells undisguised by pride:
They wrote those poems—the diminutives of madness
While at a window someone stood and cried.
IV
THE ENCOUNTER
At this the last yet second meeting,
Almost the autumn was postponed for us—
Season when the fermenting lovers lie
Among the gathered bunches quietly.
So formal was it, so incurious:
The chime of glasses, the explorer,
The soldier and the secret agent
With a smile inviting like a target.
Six of a summer evening, you remember.
The painful rehearsal of the smile
And the words: ‘I am going into a decline,
Promised by summer but by winter disappointed.’
The face was turned as sadly as a hare’s,
Provoked by prudence and discretion to repeat:
‘Some of them die, you know, or go away.
Our denials are only gestures—can we help it?’
Turn to another aspect of the thing.
The cool muslin dress shaken with flowers—
It was not the thought that was unworthy
Knowing all you knew, it was the feeling.
Idly turning from the offered tea I saw
As swimmers see their past, in the lamplight
Burning, particular, fastidious and lost
Your figure forever in the same place,
Same town and country, sorting letters
On a green table from many foreign cities,
The long hare’s features, the remarkable sad face.
V
PETRON, THE DESERT FATHER
Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness
Of Mareotis, this was the beginning:
Dry reeds touched by the shallow beaks he heard
On the sand trash of an estuary near Libya,
This dense yellow lake, ringing now
With the insupportable accents of the Word.
Common among the commoners of promise
He illustrated to the ordinary those
Who found no meaning in the flesh’s weakness—
The elegant psychotics on their couches
In Alexandria, hardly tempted him,
With talk of business, war and lovely clothes.
The lemon-skinned, the gold, the half-aware
Were counters for equations he examined,
Grave as their statues fashioned from the life;
A pioneer in pleasure on the long
Linen-shaded colonnades he often heard
Girls’ lips puff in the nostrils of the fife.
Now dense as clouded urine moved the lake
Whose waters were to be his ark and fort
By the harsh creed of water-fowl and snake,
To the wave-polished stone he laid his ear
And said: ‘I dare not ask for what I hope,
And yet I may not speak of what I fear.’
VI
THE RISING SUN
Now the sun again, like a bloody convict,
Comes up on us, the wheels of everything
Hack and catch the luckless rising;
The newly married, the despairing,
The pious ant and groom,
Open like roses in the darkened bed-room.
The bonds are out and the debentures
Shape the coming day’s adventures,
The revising of money by strategy or tears—
And here we lie like riders on a cloud
Whom kisses only can inform
In breath exhaling twenty thousand years
Of curses on the sun—but not too loud.
While the days of judgement keep,
Lucky ladies sleek with sleep,
Lucky ladies sleek with sleep.
VII
VISITATIONS
Left like an unknown’s breath on mirrors,
The enchanters, the persuaders
Whom the seasons swallow up,
Only leave us ash in saucers,
Or to mice the last invaders
Open cupboard-doors or else
Lipstick-marks upon a cup.
Fingerprint the crook of time,
Ask him what he means by it,
Eyes and thoughts and lovely bodies,
David’s singing, Daphne’s wit
Like Eve’s apple undigested
Rot within us bit by bit.
Experience in a humour ends,
Wrapped in its own dark metaphor,
And divining winter breaks:
Now one by one the Hungers creep
Up from the orchards of the mind
Here to trouble and confuse
Old men’s after-dinner sleep.
VIII
A PROSPECT OF CHILDREN
All summer watch the children in the public garden,
The tribe of children wishing you were like them—
These gruesome little artists of the impulse
For whom the perfect anarchy sustains
A brilliant apprehension of the present,
In games of joy, of love or even murder
On this green springing grass will empty soon
A duller opiate, Loving, to the drains.
Cast down like asterisks among their toys,
Divided by the lines of daylight only
From adventure, crawl among the rocking-horses,
And the totems, dolls and animals and rings
To the tame suffix of a nursery sleep
Where all but few of them
The restless inventories of feeling keep.
Sleep has no walls. Sleep admits
The great Imago with its terror, yet they lie
Like something baking, candid cheek on finger,
With folded lip and eye
Each at the centre of the cobweb seeking
His boy or girl, begotten and confined
In terror like the edges of a table
Begot by passion and confirmed in error.
What can they tell the watcher at the window,
Writing letters, smoking up there alone,
Trapped in the same limitation of his growth
And yet not envying them their childhood
Since he endured his own?
1946/1946
1 Also published as ‘The Night’.
POSSIBLE WORLDS
Suppose one died
Or ended this
This love like a long consumption,
Unlighted by a common kiss,
In desperation
To cut away, cut down,
&nbs
p; This faithless hand
Like ivy clinging to your own,
Made solitariness not passion
The wild soul’s iron ration …
Stars have winked out
A thousand year
But the numb star of death
The widow’s mite and portion
Must never catch you here;
Only cut down and heal
Beneath the thorns of sense
And in this darkness dense
O feel again and find
The limb that will not bind.
Listen to them now,
The inner voices pleading:
‘Death would not be
Like separation is or changing,
But a deep luxurious bleeding:
Last of the malaises, like
The muzzle of a dog that drops
In the darkness to your lap:
Softly you could take the cue.
No one would be watching you.’
So one recalls
As if deep underground
The fortune-teller’s promises;
Your body idle now as sound,
Green as the hanging-tree,
And your sad mouth
Whose leaves are printed here
Where sky and landscape meet
Like virgins lame of touch,
Smiles, but says nothing much.
And so the long long
Parting wears us both away
To winterfall and the return;
Softly every night
The great horned branch of heaven rises
With its blossoms white;
And time bleeds in us like a wound
While the forest of the future
Separating stands,
Reaching out its hands.
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 12