The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,

  Pillar of creation engouled in me?

  What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,

  Every energumen an Endymion yet?

  All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,

  But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?

  What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?

  Deep conviction or preference can seldom

  Find direct terms in which to express itself.

  Today on this shingle shelf

  I understand this pensive reluctance so well,

  This not discommendable obstinacy,

  These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,

  These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be

  Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred

  Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago

  But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion,

  Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.

  The inward gates of a bird are always open.

  It does not know how to shut them.

  That is the secret of its song,

  But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.

  I look at these stones and know little about them,

  But I know their gates are open too,

  Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be,

  That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer

  Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,

  Though through them no man can see,

  No man nor anything more recently born than themselves

  And that is everything else on the Earth.

  I too lying here have dismissed all else.

  Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,

  From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight

  Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.

  I would scorn to cry to any easier audience

  Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response.

  I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is;

  I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does;

  Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me

  As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones.

  I must begin with these stones as the world began.

  WILLIAM EMPSON This Last Pain

  This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:

  ‘They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned.’

  Such, but on earth, let me foretell,

  Is all, of heaven or of hell.

  Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul,

  May know her happiness by eye to hole:

  He’s safe; the key is lost; he knows

  Door will not open, nor hole close.

  ‘What is conceivable can happen too,’

  Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you;

  But wisely; if we worked it long

  We should forget where it was wrong.

  Those thorns are crowns which, woven into knots,

  Crackle under and soon boil fool’s pots;

  And no man’s watching, wise and long,

  Would ever stare them into song.

  Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;

  A splendid cleanser for the frying-pan:

  And those who leap from pan to fire

  Should this brave opposite admire.

  All those large dreams by which men long live well

  Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;

  This then is real, I have implied,

  A painted, small, transparent slide.

  These the inventive can hand-paint at leisure,

  Or most emporia would stock our measure;

  And feasting in their dappled shade

  We should forget how they were made.

  Feign then what’s by a decent tact believed

  And act that state is only so conceived,

  And build an edifice of form

  For house where phantoms may keep warm.

  Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,

  (Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)

  What could not possibly be there,

  And learn a style from a despair.

  WILLIAM EMPSON Homage to the British Museum

  There is a Supreme God in the ethnological section;

  A hollow toad shape, faced with a blank shield.

  He needs his belly to include the Pantheon,

  Which is inserted through a hole behind.

  At the navel, at the points formally stressed, at the organs of sense,

  Lice glue themselves, dolls, local deities,

  His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world.

  Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations

  And dissolve into our judgement all their codes.

  Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation

  (People are continually asking one the way out),

  Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

  Being everything, let us admit that is to be something,

  Or give ourselves the benefit of the doubt;

  Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God,

  And grant his reign over the entire building.

  LOUIS MACNEICE Snow

  The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

  Spawning snow and pink roses against it

  Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

  World is suddener than we fancy it.

  World is crazier and more of it than we think,

  Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

  A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

  The drunkenness of things being various.

  And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

  Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –

  On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –

  There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

  WILLIAM SOUTAR The Tryst

  O luely, luely cam she in

  And luely she lay doun:

  I kent her by her caller lips

  And her breists sae sma’ and roun’.

  5

  A’ thru the nicht we spak nae word

  Nor sinder’d bane frae bane:

  A’ thru the nicht I heard her hert

  Gang soundin’ wi’ my ain.

  It was about the waukrife hour

  10 Whan cocks begin to craw

  That she smool’d saftly thru the mirk

  Afore the day wud daw.

  Sae luely, luely, cam she in

  Sae luely was she gaen

  15

  And wi’ her a’ my simmer days

  Like they had never been.

  1936 W. H. AUDEN

  Out on the lawn I lie in bed,

  Vega conspicuous overhead

  In the windless nights of June;

  Forests of green have done complete

  The day’s activity; my feet

  Point to the rising moon.

  Lucky, this point in time and space

  Is chosen as my working place;

  Where the sexy airs of summer,

  The bathing hours and the bare arms,

  The leisured drives through a land of farms,

  Are good to the newcomer.

  Equal with colleagues in a ring

  I sit on each calm evening,

  Enchanted as the flowers

  The opening light draws out of hiding

  From leaves with all its dove-like pleading

  Its logic and its powers.

  That later we, though parted then

  May still recall these evenings when

  Fear gave his watch no look;

  The lion griefs loped from the shade

  An
d on our knees their muzzles laid,

  And Death put down his book.

  Moreover, eyes in which I learn

  That I am glad to look, return

  My glances every day;

  And when the birds and rising sun

  Waken me, I shall speak with one

  Who has not gone away.

  Now North and South and East and West

  Those I love lie down to rest;

  The moon looks on them all:

  The healers and the brilliant talkers,

  The eccentrics and the silent walkers,

  The dumpy and the tall.

  She climbs the European sky;

  Churches and power stations lie

  Alike among earth’s fixtures:

  Into the galleries she peers,

  And blankly as an orphan stares

  Upon the marvellous pictures.

  To gravity attentive, she

  Can notice nothing here; though we

  Whom hunger cannot move,

  From gardens where we feel secure

  Look up, and with a sigh endure

  The tyrannies of love:

  And, gentle, do not care to know,

  Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,

  What violence is done;

  Nor ask what doubtful act allows

  Our freedom in this English house,

  Our picnics in the sun.

  The creepered wall stands up to hide

  The gathering multitudes outside

  Whose glances hunger worsens;

  Concealing from their wretchedness

  Our metaphysical distress,

  Our kindness to ten persons.

  And now no path on which we move

  But shows already traces of

  Intentions not our own,

  Thoroughly able to achieve

  What our excitement could conceive,

  But our hands left alone.

  For what by nature and by training

  We loved, has little strength remaining:

  Though we would gladly give

  The Oxford colleges, Big Ben,

  And all the birds in Wicken Fen,

  It has no wish to live.

  Soon through the dykes of our content

  The crumpling flood will force a rent,

  And, taller than a tree,

  Hold sudden death before our eyes

  Whose river-dreams long hid the size

  And vigours of the sea.

  But when the waters make retreat

  And through the black mud first the wheat

  In shy green stalks appears;

  When stranded monsters gasping lie,

  And sounds of riveting terrify

  Their whorled unsubtle ears:

  May this for which we dread to lose

  Our privacy, need no excuse

  But to that strength belong;

  As through a child’s rash happy cries

  The drowned voices of his parents rise

  In unlamenting song.

  After discharges of alarm,

  All unpredicted may it calm

  The pulse of nervous nations;

  Forgive the murderer in his glass,

  Tough in its patience to surpass

  The tigress her swift motions.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Now the leaves are falling fast,

  Nurse’s flowers will not last;

  Nurses to the graves are gone,

  And the prams go rolling on.

  Whispering neighbours, left and right,

  Pluck us from the real delight;

  And the active hands must freeze

  Lonely on the separate knees.

  Dead in hundreds at the back

  Follow wooden in our track,

  Arms raised stiffly to reprove

  In false attitudes of love.

  Starving through the leafless wood

  Trolls run scolding for their food;

  And the nightingale is dumb,

  And the angel will not come.

  Cold, impossible, ahead

  Lifts the mountain’s lovely head

  Whose white waterfall could bless

  Travellers in their last distress.

  ELIZABETH DARYUSH Still-Life

  Through the open French window the warm sun

  lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid

  round a bowl of crimson roses, for one –

  a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed

  near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot

  rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,

  butter in ice, high silver coffee pot,

  and, heaped on a salver, the morning’s post.

  She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,

  from her early walk in her garden-wood

  feeling that life’s a table set to bless

  her delicate desires with all that’s good,

  that even the unopened future lies

  like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.

  LAURA RIDING The Wind Suffers

  The wind suffers of blowing,

  The sea suffers of water,

  And fire suffers of burning,

  And I of a living name.

  As stone suffers of stoniness,

  As light of its shiningness,

  As birds of their wingedness,

  So I of my whoness.

  And what the cure of all this?

  What the not and not suffering?

  What the better and later of this?

  What the more me of me?

  How for the pain-world to be

  More world and no pain?

  How for the old rain to fall

  More wet and more dry?

  How for the wilful blood to run

  More salt-red and sweet-white?

  And how for me in my actualness

  To more shriek and more smile?

  By no other miracles,

  By the same knowing poison,

  By an improved anguish,

  By my further dying.

  PATRICK KAVANAGH Inniskeen Road: July Evening