Collected Poems 1931-74

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Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 14

by Lawrence Durrell

Bearing in rivers upside down

  The myrtle and the olive, in ruins

  The faces of the innocents in wells.

  Salt and garlic, water and dry bread,

  Greek bread from the comb they knew

  Like an element in sculpture:

  By these red aerial cherries,

  Or flawed grapes painted green

  But pouted into breasts: as well

  By those great quarries of the blood—

  The beating crimson hearts of the grenades:

  All far beyond the cupidity of verses

  Or the lechery of images to tell.

  Here worlds were confirmed in him.

  Differences that matched like cloth

  Between the darkness and the inner light,

  Moved on the undivided breath of blue.

  Formed moving, trees asserted here

  Nothing but simple comparisons to

  The artist’s endearing eye.

  Sleep. Napkins folded after grace.

  Veins of stealing water

  By the unplumbed ruins, never finding peace.

  A watershed, a valley of tombs,

  Never finding peace.

  ‘Look’ she might say ‘Press here

  With your fingers at the temples.

  Are they not the blunt uncut horns

  Of the small naked Ionian fauns?’

  Much later, moving in a dark,

  Snow-lit landscape softly

  In her small frock walked his daughter

  And a simile came into his mind

  Of lovers, like swimmers lost at sea,

  Exhausted in each other’s arms,

  Urgent for land, but treading water.

  IX

  Red Polish mouth,

  Lips that as for the flute unform,

  Gone round on nouns or vowels,

  To utter the accepting, calm

  ‘Yes’, or make terrible verbs

  Like ‘I adore, adore’.

  Persuader, so long hunted

  By your wild pack of selves,

  Past peace of mind or even sleep,

  So longed for and so sought,

  May the divider always keep

  Like unshed tears in lashes

  Love, the undeclarèd thought.

  X

  Athens. Katsimbalis, Wallace and Anna Southam.

  Seferiades Stephanides

  Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us,

  Autumn with her wild packs

  Comes down to the robbing of the flowers.

  On this unstained sky, printless

  Snow moves crisp as dreamers’ fingers,

  And the rate of passion or tenderness

  In this island house is absolute.

  Within a time of reading

  Here is all my growth

  Through the bodies of other selves,

  In books, by promise or perversity

  My mutinous crew of furies—their pleading

  Threw up at last the naked sprite

  Whose flesh and noise I am,

  Who is my jailor and my inward night.

  ‘Anya, my angel, my darling. This is an act of folly I’m committing, a feebleness, a crime, I know it, but …’

  Dostoevsky’s Letters to his wife

  In Europe, bound by Europe,

  I saw them moving, the possessed

  Fëdor and Anna, the last

  Two vain explorers of our guilt,

  Turn by turn holding the taws,

  Made addicts of each other lacking love,

  Friendless embittered and alone.

  The lesser pities held them back

  Like mice in secrecies,

  Yet through introspection and disease,

  Held on to the unflinching bone,

  The sad worn ring of Anna,

  Loyal to filth and weakness,

  Hammered out on this slender bond,

  Fëdor’s raw cartoons and episodes.

  By marriage with this ring,

  Companioned each their darkness.

  In cracked voices we can hear

  These hideous mommets now

  Like westering angels over Europe sing.

  XI

  So knowledge has an end,

  And virtue at the last an end,

  In the dark field of sensibility

  The unchanging and unbending;

  As in aquariums gloomy

  On the negative’s dark screen

  Grow the shapes of other selves,

  So groaned for by the heart,

  So seldom grasped if seen.

  Love bears you. Time stirs you.

  Music at midnight makes a ground,

  Or words on silence so perplex

  In hidden meanings there like bogies

  Waiting the expected sound.

  Art has limits and life limits

  Within the nerves that support them.

  So better with the happy

  Discover than with the wise

  Who teach the sad valour

  Of endurance through the seasons,

  In change the unchanging

  Death by compromise.

  XII

  Now darkness comes to Europe

  Dedicated by a soft unearthly jazz.

  The greater hearts contract their joys

  By silence to the very gem,

  While the impertinent reformers,

  Barbarians with secretaries move,

  Whom old Cavafy pictured,

  Whom no war can remove.

  Alexandria ‘The mythical Yellow Emperor, first exponent of the Tao’.

  Classical Chinese Philosophy

  Through the ambuscades of sex,

  The follies of the will, the tears,

  Turning, a personal world I go

  To where the yellow emperor once

  Sat out the summer and the snow,

  And searching in himself struck oil,

  Published the first great Tao

  Which all confession can only gloze

  And in the Consciousness can only spoil.

  Apparent opposition of the two

  Where unlocked numbers show their fabric,

  He laid his finger to the map,

  And where the signs confuse,

  Defined the Many and the None

  As base reflections of the One.

  ‘Duality, the great European art-subject, which is resolved by the Taoist formulas’.

  Anaïs Nin

  What bifid Hamlet in the maze

  Wept to find; the döppelgänger

  Goethe saw one morning go

  Over the hill ahead; the man

  So gnawed by promises who shared

  The magnificent responses of Rimbaud.

  All that we have sought in us,

  The artist by his greater cowardice

  In sudden brush-strokes gave us clues—

  Hamlet and Faust as front-page news.

  The yellow emperor first confirmed

  By one Unknown the human calculus,

  Where feeling and idea,

  Must fall within this space,

  This personal landscape built

  Within the Chinese circle’s calm embrace.

  ‘The Continuous I behind discontinuous Me’s’.

  E. Graham Howe

  Dark Spirit, sum of all

  That has remained unloved,

  Gone crying through the world:

  Source of all manufacture and repair,

  Quicken the giving-spring

  In ferns and birds and ordinary people

  That all deeds done may share,

  By this our temporal sun,

  The part of living that is loving,

  Your dancing, a beautiful behaviour.

  Darkness, who contain

  The source of all this corporal music,

  On the great table of the Breath

  Our opposites in pity bear,

  Our measure of perfection or of pain,

 
Both trespassers in you, that then

  Our Here and Now become your Everywhere.

  XIII

  The old yellow Emperor

  With defective sight and matted hair

  His palace fell to ruins

  But his heart was in repair.

  Veins like imperfect plumbing

  On his flesh described a leaf.

  His palms were mapped with cunning

  Like geodesies of grief.

  His soul became a vapour

  And his limbs became a stake

  But his ancient heart still visits us

  In Lawrence or in Blake.

  XIV

  All cities plains and people

  Reach upwards to the affirming sun,

  All that’s vertical and shining,

  Lives well lived,

  Deeds perfectly done,

  Reach upwards to the royal pure

  Affirming sun.

  Accident or error conquered

  By the gods of luck or grace,

  Form and face,

  Tribe or caste or habit,

  All are aspects of the one

  Affirming race.

  Ego, my dear, and id

  Lie so profoundly hid

  In space-time void, though feeling,

  While contemporary, slow,

  We conventional lovers cheek to cheek

  Inhaling and exhaling go.

  The rose that Nostradamus

  In his divining saw

  Break open as the world;

  The city that Augustine

  Founded in moral law,

  By our anguish were compelled

  To urge, to beckon and implore.

  Dear Spirit, should I reach,

  By touch or speech corrupt,

  The inner suffering word,

  By weakness or idea,

  Though you might suffer

  Feel and know,

  Pretend you do not hear.

  XV

  Bombers bursting like pods go down

  And the seed of Man stars

  This landscape, ancient but no longer known.

  Only the critic perseveres

  Within his ant-like formalism

  By deduction and destruction steers;

  Only the trite reformer holds his own.

  See looking down motionless

  How clear Athens or Bremen seem

  A mass of rotten vegetables

  Firm on the diagram of earth can lie;

  And here you may reflect how genus epileptoid

  Knows his stuff; and where rivers

  Have thrown their switches and enlarged

  Our mercy or our knowledge of each other

  Wonder who walks beside them now and why,

  And what they talk about.

  There is nothing to hope for, my Brother.

  We have tried hoping for a future in the past.

  Nothing came out of that past

  But the reflected distortion and some

  Enduring, and understanding, and some brave.

  Into their cool embrace the awkward and the sinful

  Must be put for they alone

  Know who and what to save.

  XVI

  Small temptations now—to slumber and to sleep,

  Where the lime-green, odourless

  And pathless island waters

  Crossing and uncrossing, partnerless

  By hills alone and quite incurious

  Their pastures of reflection keep.

  For Prospero remains the evergreen

  Cell by the margin of the sea and land,

  Who many cities, plains, and people saw

  Yet by his open door

  In sunlight fell asleep

  One summer with the Apple in his hand.

  1946/1946

  RODINI

  Windless plane-trees above Rodini

  To the pencil or the eye are tempters

  Where of late trees have become ears in leaf

  Curved for the cicada’s first monotony.

  Hollow the comb, mellow the sweetness

  Amber the honey-spoil, drink, drink.

  In these windless unechoing valleys

  The mind slips like a chisel-hand

  Touching the surface of this clement blue

  Yet must not damage the solitary Turk

  Gathering his team and singing, in whose brain

  The same disorder and the loneliness—

  The what-we-have-in-common of us all.

  Is there enough perhaps to found a world?

  Then of what you said once, the passing

  Of something on the road beyond the tombstones

  Reflecting on dark hair with its sudden theft

  Of blue from the darkness of violets

  And below the nape of the neck a mole

  All mixed in this odourless water-clock of hours.

  So one is grateful, yes, to the ancient Greeks

  For the invention of time, lustration of penitents,

  Not so much for what they were

  But for where we lie under the windless planes.

  1948/1946

  IN THE GARDEN: VILLA CLEOBOLUS

  The mixtures of this garden

  Conduct at night the pine and oleander,

  Perhaps married to dust’s thin edge

  Or lime where the cork-tree rubs

  The quiet house, bruising the wall:

  And dense the block of thrush’s notes

  Press like a bulb and keeping time

  In this exposure to the leaves,

  And as we wait the servant comes,

  A candle shielded in the warm

  Coarse coral of her hand, she weaves

  A pathway for her in the golden leaves,

  Gathers the books and ashtrays in her arm

  Walking towards the lighted house,

  Brings with her from the uninhabited

  Frontiers of the darkness to the known

  Table and tree and chair

  Some half-remembered passage from a fugue

  Played from some neighbour’s garden

  On an old horn-gramophone,

  And you think: if given once

  Authority over the word,

  Then how to capture, praise or measure

  The full round of this simple garden,

  All its nonchalance at being,

  How to adopt and raise its pleasure?

  Press as on a palate this observed

  And simple shape, like wine?

  And from the many undeserved

  Tastes of the mouth select the crude

  Flavour of fruit in pottery

  Coloured among this lovely neighbourhood?

  Beyond, I mean, this treasure hunt

  Of selves, the pains we sort to be

  Confined within the loving chamber of a form,

  Within a poem locked and launched

  Along the hairline of the normal mind?

  Perhaps not this: but somehow, yes,

  To outflank the personal neurasthenia

  That lies beyond in each expiring kiss:

  Bring joy, as lustrous on this dish

  The painted dancers motionless in play

  Spin for eternity, describing for us all

  The natural history of the human wish.

  1948/1947

  ETERNAL CONTEMPORARIES: SIX PORTRAITS

  I

  MANOLI OF COS

  Down there below the temple

  Where the penitents scattered

  Ashes of dead birds, Manoli goes

  In his leaky boat, a rose tied to the rudder.

  This is not the rose of all the world,

  Nor the rose of Nostradamus or of Malory:

  Nor is it Eliot’s clear northern rose of the mind,

  But precisely and unequivocally

  The red rose Manoli picked himself

  From the vocabulary of roses on the hill by Cefalû.

  1948/1947

 
; II

  MARK OF PATMOS

  Mark has crossed over to Mount Olivet,

  Putting aside the banneret and the drum.

  He inhabits now that part of himself

  Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonized.

  He works that what is to pass may come

  And the birth of the common heart be realized.

  What passed with him? A flower dropped

  In the boat by a friend, the cakes

  His sister brought with the unposted letter.

  Yet all the island loafers watched, disturbed,

  The red sails melt into the sky, distended,

  And each turned angrily to his lighted house

  Feeling, not that something momentous

  Had begun, but that their common childhood

  Had foundered in the Syrian seas and ended.

  1948/1947

  III

  BASIL THE HERMIT

  Banished from the old roof-tree Patmos

  Where the dynasts gathered honey,

  Like dancing bears, with smoking rituals,

  Or skimmed the fat of towns with levy-money,

  Uncaring whether God or Paradise exist,

  Laid up themselves estates in providence

  While greed crouched in each hairy fist,

  Basil, the troubled flower of scepticism,

  Chose him a pelt, and a cairn of chilly stone,

  Became the author of a famous schism:

  A wick for oil, a knife, a broken stool

  Were all, this side of hell, he dared to own.

  For twenty years in Jesus went to school.

  Often, looking up, he saw them there

  As from some prism-stained pool:

  Dark dots like birds along the battlements,

 

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