by Paul Keegan
And Mrs Roebeck will be there.
And then to-morrow someone says
That someone else has made a hit
In one of Mister Twister’s plays,
And off we go to yawn at it;
And when it’s petered out we quit
For number 20, Taunton Square,
And smoke, and drink, and dance a bit: –
And Mrs Roebeck will be there.
And so through each declining phase
Of emptied effort, jaded wit,
And day by day of London days
Obscurely, more obscurely, lit;
Until the uncertain shadows flit
Announcing to the shuddering air
A Darkening, and the end of it: –
And Mrs Roebeck will be there.
Envoi
Prince, on their iron thrones they sit,
Impassable to our despair,
The dreadful Guardians of the Pit: –
And Mrs Roebeck will be there.
W. B. YEATS Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
Bur feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
1925ROBERT GRAVES Love Without Hope
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.
ROBERT BRIDGES To Francis Jammes
’Tis April again in my garden, again the grey stone-wall
Is prankt with yellow alyssum and lilac aubrey-cresses;
Half-hidden the mavis caroleth in the tassely birchen tresses
And awhile on the sunny air a cuckoo tuneth his call:
Now cometh to mind a singer whom country joys enthral,
Francis Jammes, so grippeth him Nature in her caresses
She hath steep’d his throat in the honey’d air of her wildernesses
With beauty that countervails the Lutetian therewithal.
You are here in spirit, dear poet, and bring a motley group,
Your friends, afore you sat stitching your heavenly trousseau –
The courteous old road-mender, the queer Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Columbus, Confucius, all to my English garden they troop,
Under his goatskin umbrella the provident Robinson Crusoe,
And the ancestor dead long ago in Domingo or Guadaloupe.
EDMUND BLUNDEN The Midnight Skaters
The hop-poles stand in cones,
The icy pond lurks under,
The pole-tops steeple to the thrones
Of stars, sound gulfs of wonder;
But not the tallest there, ’tis said,
Could fathom to this pond’s black bed.
Then is not death at watch
Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch
Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet
Between, he has his engines set.
Then on, blood shouts, on, on,
Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan,
Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.
BASIL BUNTING from Villon
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full –
fellmonger Death gets every skin.
All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:
Three score and ten years after sight
of this pay me your pulse and breath
value received. And who dare cite,
as we forgive our debtors, Death?
Abelard and Eloise,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genée, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.
And General Grant and General Lee,
Patti and Florence Nightingale,
like Tyro and Antiope
drift among ghosts in Hell,
know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
driving across a mind
preoccupied with this: our doom
is, to be sifted by the wind,
heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.
We are less permanent than thought.
The Emperor with the Golden Hands
is still a word, a tint, a tone,
insubstantial-glorious,
when we ourselves are dead and gone
and the green grass growing over us.
EDWIN MUIR Childhood
Long time he lay upon the sunny hill,
To his father’s house below securely bound.
Far off the silent, changing sound was still,
With the black islands lying thick around.
He saw each separate height, each vaguer hue,
Where the massed islands rolled in mist away,
And though all ran together in his view
He knew that unseen straits between them lay.
Often he wondered what new shores were there.
In thought he saw the still light on the sand,
The shallow water clear in tranquil air,
And walked through it in joy from strand to strand.
Over the sound a ship so slow would pass
That in the black hill’s gloom it seemed to lie.
The evening sound was smooth like sunken glass,
And time seemed finished ere the ship passed by.
Grey tiny rocks slept round him where he lay,
Moveless as they, more still as evening came,
The grasses threw straight shadows far away,
And from the house his mother called his name.
HUGH MACDIARMID from Sangschaw
The Watergaw
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle
I saw yon antrin thing,
A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht
Ayont the on-ding;
5
An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied
Afore ye deed!
There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose
That nicht – an’ nane i’ mine;
But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht
10
Ever sin’ syne;
An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.
HUGH MACDIARMID The Eemis Stane
I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht
The warl’ like an eemis stane
Wags i’ the lift;
An’ my eerie memories fa’
5
Like a yowdendrift.
Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read
The words cut oot i’ the stane
Had the fug o’ fame
An’ history’s hazelra
w
10
No’ yirdit thaim.
1926HUGH MACDIARMID Empty Vessel
I met ayont the cairney
A lass wi’ tousie hair
Singin’ till a bairnie
That was nae langer there.
5
Wunds wi’ warlds to swing
Dinna sing sae sweet,
The licht that bends owre a’ thing
Is less ta’en up wi’t.
HUGH MACDIARMID from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
O wha’s the bride that cairries the bunch
O’ thistles blinterin’ white?
Her cuckold bridegroom little dreids
What he sall ken this nicht.
5
For closer than gudeman can come
And closer to’r than hersel’,
Wha didna need her maidenheid
Has wrocht his purpose fell.
O wha’s been here afore me, lass,
10
And hoo did he get in?
– A man that deed or I was born
This evil thing has din.
And left, as it were on a corpse,
Your maidenheid to me?
15
– Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began
‘S hed ony mair to gi’e.
But I can gi’e ye kindness, lad,
And a pair o’ willin’ hands,
And you sail ha’e my briests like stars,
20
My limbs like willow wands,
And on my lips ye’ll heed nae mair,
And in my hair forget,
The seed o’ a’ the men that in
My virgin womb ha’e met…
JAMES JOYCE from Pomes Penyeach 1927
Bahnhofstrasse
The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day,
Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.
Ah star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again
Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.
(written 1918)
THOMAS HARDY Lying Awake 1928
You, Morningtide Star, now are steady-eyed, over the east,
I know it as if I saw you;
You, Beeches, engrave on the sky your thin twigs, even the least;
Had I paper and pencil I’d draw you.
You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew,
I see it as if I were there;
You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew,
The names creeping out everywhere.
AUSTIN CLARKE The Planter’s Daughter
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
W. B. YEATS Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
W. B. YEATS from Meditations in Time of Civil War
V The Road at My Door
An affable Irregular,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man,
Comes cracking jokes of civil war
As though to die by gunshot were
The finest play under the sun.
A brown Lieutenant and his men,
Half dressed in national uniform,
Stand at my door, and I complain
Of the foul weather, hail and rain,
A pear tree broken by the storm.
I count those feathered balls of soot
The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
To silence the envy in my thought;
And turn towards my chamber, caught
In the cold snows of a dream.
VI The Stare’s Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,