The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  These things have served their purpose: let them be.

  So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

  By others, as I pray you to forgive

  Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten

  And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

  For last year’s words belong to last year’s language

  And next year’s words await another voice.

  But, as the passage now presents no hindrance

  To the spirit unappeased and peregrine

  Between two worlds become much like each other,

  So I find words I never thought to speak

  In streets I never thought I should revisit

  When I left my body on a distant shore.

  Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

  To purify the dialect of the tribe

  And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,

  Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

  To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.

  First, the cold friction of expiring sense

  Without enchantment, offering no promise

  But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

  As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

  Second, the conscious impotence of rage

  At human folly, and the laceration

  Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

  And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

  Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

  Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

  Of things ill done and done to others’ harm

  Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

  Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

  From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit

  Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire

  Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

  The day was breaking. In the disfigured street

  He left me, with a kind of valediction,

  And faded on the blowing of the horn.

  ALUN LEWIS Raiders’ Dawn

  Softly the civilized

  Centuries fall,

  Paper on paper,

  Peter on Paul.

  And lovers waking

  From the night –

  Eternity’s masters,

  Slaves of Time –

  Recognize only

  The drifting white

  Fall of small faces

  In pits of lime.

  Blue necklace left

  On a charred chair

  Tells that Beauty

  Was startled there.

  NORMAN CAMERON Green, Green is El Aghir

  Sprawled on the crates and sacks in the rear of the truck,

  I was gummy-mouthed from the sun and the dust of the track.

  And the two Arab soldiers I’d taken on as hitch-hikers

  At a torrid petrol-dump, had been there on their hunkers

  Since early morning. I said, in a kind of French

  ‘On m’a dit, qu’il y a une belle source d’eau fraîche.

  Plus loin, à El Aghir’…

  It was eighty more kilometres

  Until round a corner we heard a splashing of waters,

  And there, in a green, dark street, was a fountain with two faces

  Discharging both ways, from full-throated faucets

  Into basins, thence into troughs and thence into brooks.

  Our negro corporal driver slammed his brakes,

  And we yelped and leapt from the truck and went at the double

  To fill our bidons and bottles and drink and dabble.

  Then, swollen with water, we went to an inn for wine.

  The Arabs came, too, though their faith might have stood between.

  ‘After all,’ they said, ‘it’s a boisson,’ without contrition.

  Green, green is El Aghir. It has a railway-station,

  And the wealth of its soil has borne many another fruit,

  A mairie, a school and an elegant Salle de Fêtes.

  Such blessings, as I remarked, in effect, to the waiter,

  Are added unto them that have plenty of water.

  STEVIE SMITH Bog-Face

  Dear little Bog-Face,

  Why are you so cold?

  And why do you lie with your eyes shut? –

  You are not very old.

  I am a Child of this World,

  And a Child of Grace,

  And Mother, I shall be glad when it is over,

  I am Bog-Face.

  STEVIE SMITH Dirge

  From a friend’s friend I taste friendship,

  From a friend’s friend love,

  My spirit in confusion,

  Long years I strove,

  But now I know that never

  Nearer I shall move,

  Than a friend’s friend to friendship,

  To love than a friend’s love.

  Into the dark night

  Resignedly I go,

  I am not so afraid of the dark night

  As the friends I do not know,

  I do not fear the night above,

  As I fear the friends below.

  PATRICK KAVANAGH from The Great Hunger

  from I

  Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

  Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scare-crows move

  Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men.

  If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

  Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

  Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs

  And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.

  Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?

  Or why do we stand here shivering?

  Which of these men

  Loved the light and the queen

  Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself

  Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en?

  We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain

  Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay

  Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles

  Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.

  III

  Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day

  He worked for years. It was he that lit the fire

  And boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.

  His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire

  Came down the stairs bare-foot at the kettle-call

  And talked to her son sharply: ‘Did you let

  The hens out, you?’ She had a venomous drawl

  And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.

  Two black cats peeped between the banisters

  And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan.

  Outside the window showed tin canisters.

  The snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring noise

  And Patrick on a headland stood alone.

  The pull is on the traces, it is March

  And a cold old black wind is blowing from Dundalk.

  The twisting sod rolls over on her back –

  The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.

  No worry on Maguire’s mind this day

  Except that he forgot to bring his matches.

  ‘Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae,’

  From every second hill a neighbour watches

  With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.

  Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap

  These men know God the Father in a tree:

  The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,

  And Christ will be the green leaves that will come

  At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.

  Primroses and the unearthly start of ferns

  Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch, />
  A dead sparrow and an old waistcoat. Maguire learns

  As the horses turn slowly round the which is which

  Of love and fear and things half born to mind.

  He stands between the plough-handles and he sees

  At the end of a long furrow his name signed

  Among the poets, prostitute’s. With all miseries

  He is one. Here with the unfortunate

  Who for half moments of paradise

  Pay out good days and wait and wait

  For sunlight-woven cloaks. O to be wise

  As Respectability that knows the price of all things

  And marks God’s truth in pounds and pence and farthings.

  from XI

  The cards are shuffled and the deck

  Laid flat for cutting – Tom Malone

  Cut for trump. I think we’ll make

  This game, the last, a tanner one.

  Hearts. Right. I see you’re breaking

  Your two-year-old. Play quick, Maguire,

  The clock there says it’s half-past ten –

  Kate, throw another sod on that fire.

  One of the card-players laughs and spits

  Into the flame across a shoulder.

  Outside, a noise like a rat

  Among the hen-roosts. The cock crows over

  The frosted townland of the night.

  Eleven o’clock and still the game

  Goes on and the players seem to be

  Drunk in an Orient opium den.

  Midnight, one o’clock, two.

  Somebody’s leg has fallen asleep.

  What about home? Maguire are you

  Using your double-tree this week?

  Why? do you want it? Play the ace.

  There’s it, and that’s the last card for me.

  A wonderful night, we had. Duffy’s place

  Is very convenient. Is that a ghost or a tree?

  And so they go home with dragging feet

  And their voices rumble like laden carts.

  And they are happy as the dead or sleeping…

  I should have led that ace of hearts.

  from XII

  The fields were bleached white,

  The wooden tubs full of water

  Were white in the winds

  That blew through Brannagan’s Gap on their way from Siberia;

  The cows on the grassless heights

  Followed the hay that had wings –

  The February fodder that hung itself on the black branches

  Of the hilltop hedge.

  A man stood beside a potato-pit

  And clapped his arms

  And pranced on the crisp roots

  And shouted to warm himself.

  Then he buck-leaped about the potatoes

  And scooped them into a basket.

  He looked like a bucking suck-calf

  Whose spine was being tickled.

  Sometimes he stared across the bogs

  And sometimes he straightened his back and vaguely whistled

  A tune that weakened his spirit

  And saddened his terrier dog’s.

  (… )

  A mother dead! The tired sentiment:

  ‘Mother mother’ was a shallow pool

  Where sorrow hardly could wash its feet…

  Mary Anne came away from the deathbed and boiled the calves their gruel.

  O what was I doing when the procession passed?

  Where was I looking?

  Young women and men

  And I might have joined them.

  Who bent the coin of my destiny

  That it stuck in the slot?

  I remember a night we walked

  Through the moon of Donaghmoyne,

  Four of us seeking adventure –

  It was midsummer forty years ago.

  Now I know

  The moment that gave the turn to my life.

  O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever.

  HENRY REED Judging Distances 1943

  Not only how far away, but the way that you say it

  Is very important. Perhaps you may never get

  The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know

  How to report on a landscape: the central sector,

  The right of arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,

  And at least you know

  That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army

  Happens to be concerned – the reason being,

  Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know

  There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,

  And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly

  That things only seem to be things.

  A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,

  Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.

  You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:

  At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen

  Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,

  Don’t call the bleeders sheep.

  I am sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,

  The one at the end, asleep, endeavours to tell us

  What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,

  After first having come to attention. There to the west,

  On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow

  Vestments of purple and gold.

  The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,

  And under the swaying elms a man and a woman

  Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say

  That there is a row of houses to the left of arc,

  And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans

  Appear to be loving.

  Well that, for an answer, is what we might rightly call

  Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,

  Is that two things have been omitted, and those are important.

  The human beings, now: in what direction are they,

  And how far away, would you say? And do not forget

  There may be dead ground in between.

  There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got

  The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture

  A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers

  (Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished)

  At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance