The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  Winter kept us warm, covering

  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

  A little life with dried tubers.

  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

  And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

  And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

  Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

  And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

  My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

  And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

  Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock,

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  Frisch weht der Wind

  Der Heimat zu

  Mein Irisch Kind,

  Wo weilest du?

  ‘You gave me Hyacinths first a year ago;

  ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

  – Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

  Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

  Oed’ und leer das Meer.

  Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

  Had a bad cold, nevertheless

  Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

  With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

  Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

  (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

  Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

  The lady of situations.

  Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

  And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

  Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

  Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

  The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

  I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

  Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

  Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

  One must be so careful these days.

  Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

  ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

  ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

  ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

  ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

  ‘O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

  ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

  ‘You! hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, – mon frère!’

  IV Death by Water

  Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

  Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

  And the profit and loss.

  A current under sea

  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

  He passed the stages of his age and youth

  Entering the whirlpool.

  Gentile or Jew

  O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  IVOR GURNEY Possessions

  Sand has the ants, clay ferny weeds for play

  But what shall please the wind now the trees are away

  War took on Witcombe steep?

  It breathes there, and wonders at old night roarings;

  October time at all lights, and the new clearings

  For memory are like to weep.

  It was right for the beeches to stand over Witcombe reaches,

  Until the wind roared and softened and died to sleep.

  (1934)

  IVOR GURNEY The High Hills

  The high hills have a bitterness

  Now they are not known

  And memory is poor enough consolation

  For the soul hopeless gone.

  Up in the air there beech tangles wildly in the wind –

  That I can imagine

  But the speed, the swiftness, walking into clarity,

  Like last year’s bryony are gone.

  (1954)

  D. H. LAWRENCE Medlars and Sorb-Apples 1923

  I love you, rotten,

  Delicious rottenness.

  I love to suck you out from your skins

  So brown and soft and coming suave,

  So morbid, as the Italians say.

  What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour

  Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:

  Stream within stream.

  Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine

  Or vulgar Marsala.

  Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity

  Soon in the pussyfoot West.

  What is it?

  What is it, in the grape turning raisin,

  In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,

  Wineskins of brown morbidity,

  Autumnal excrementa;

  What is it that reminds us of white gods?

  Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,

  Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant

  As if with sweat,

  And drenched with mystery.

  Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

  I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,

  Orphic, delicate

  Dionysos of the Underworld.

  A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm of rupture,

  Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.

  And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,

  A new gasp of further isolation,

  A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

  Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,

  The fibres of the heart parting one after the other

  And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied

  Like a flame blown whiter and whiter

  In a deeper and deeper darkness

  Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

  So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples

  The distilled essence of hell.

  The exquisite odour of leave-taking.

  Jamque vale!

  Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

  Each soul departing with its own isolation,

  Strangest of all strange companions,

  And best.

  Medlars, sorb-apples,

  More than sweet

  Flux of autumn

  Sucked out of you
r empty bladders

  And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala

  So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its savour to yours,

  Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell

  And the ego sum of Dionysos

  The sono io of perfect drunkenness

  Intoxication of final loneliness.

  D. H. LAWRENCE The Mosquito

  When did you start your tricks,

  Monsieur?

  What do you stand on such high legs for?

  Why this length of shredded shank,

  You exaltation?

  Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards

  And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,

  Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

  I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory

  In sluggish Venice.

  You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

  How can you put so much devilry

  Into that tranlucent phantom shred

  Of a frail corpus?

  Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs,

  How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,

  A nothingness.

  Yet what an aura surrounds you;

  Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

  That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:

  Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power

  To deaden my attention in your direction.

  But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

  Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air

  In circles and evasions, enveloping me,

  Ghoul on wings

  Winged Victory.

  Settle, and stand on long thin shanks

  Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,

  You speck.

  I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air

  Having read my thoughts against you.

  Come then, let us play at unawares,

  And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.

  Man or mosquito.

  You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist.

  Now then!

  It is your trump,

  It is your hateful little trump,

  You pointed fiend,

  Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:

  It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

  Why do you do it?

  Surely it is bad policy.

  They say you can’t help it.

  If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.

  But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan,

  A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

  Blood, red blood

  Super-magical

  Forbidden liquor.

  I behold you stand

  For a second enspasmed in oblivion.

  Obscenely ecstasied

  Sucking live blood,

  My blood.

  Such silence, such suspended transport,

  Such gorging,

  Such obscenity of trespass.

  You stagger

  As well as you may.

  Only your accursed hairy frailty,

  Your own imponderable weightlessness

  Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.

  Away with a pæan of derision,

  You winged blood-drop.

  Can I not overtake you?

  Are you one too many for me,

  Winged Victory?

  Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

  Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes

  Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!

  Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

  D. H. LAWRENCE The Blue Jay

  The blue jay with a crest on his head

  Comes round the cabin in the snow.

  He runs in the snow like a bit of blue metal,

  Turning his back on everything.

  From the pine-tree that towers and hisses like a pillar of shaggy cloud

  Immense above the cabin

  Comes a strident laugh as we approach, this little black dog and I.

  So halts the little black bitch on four spread paws in the snow

  And looks up inquiringly into the pillar of cloud,

  With a tinge of misgiving.

  Ca-a-a! comes the scrape of ridicule out of the tree.

  What voice of the Lord is that, from the tree of smoke?

  Oh, Bibbles, little black bitch in the snow,

  With a pinch of snow in the groove of your silly snub nose,

  What do you look at me for?

  What do you look at me for, with such misgiving?

  It’s the blue jay laughing at us.

  It’s the blue jay jeering at us, Bibs.

  Every day since the snow is here

  The blue jay paces round the cabin, very busy, picking up bits,

  Turning his back on us all,

  And bobbing his thick dark crest about the snow, as if darkly saying:

  I ignore those folk who look out.

  You acid-blue metallic bird,

  You thick bird with a strong crest,

  Who are you?

  Whose boss are you, with all your bully way?

  You copper-sulphate blue bird!

  HILAIRE BELLOC On a General Election

  The accursèd power which stands on Privilege

  (And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)

  Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign:

  (Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

  HILAIRE BELLOC Ballade of Hell and of Mrs Roebeck

  I’m going out to dine at Gray’s

  With Bertie Morden, Charles and Kit,

  And Manderly who never pays,

  And Jane who wins in spite of it,

  And Algernon who won’t admit

  The truth about his curious hair

  And teeth that very nearly fit: –