The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Of about one year and a half.

  DAVID GASCOYNE Snow in Europe

  Out of their slumber Europeans spun

  Dense dreams: appeasement, miracle, glimpsed flash

  Of a new golden era; but could not restrain

  The vertical white weight that fell last night

  And made their continent a blank.

  Hush, says the sameness of the snow,

  The Ural and the Jura now rejoin

  The furthest Arctic’s desolation. All is one;

  Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:

  Contours and boundaries no longer show.

  The warring flags hang colourless a while;

  Now midnight’s icy zero feigns a truce

  Between the signs and seasons, and fades out

  All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,

  How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!

  DAVID GASCOYNE A Wartime Dawn

  Dulled by the slow glare of the yellow bulb;

  As far from sleep still as at any hour

  Since distant midnight; with a hollow skull

  In which white vapours seem to reel

  Among limp muddles of old thought; till eyes

  Collapse into themselves like clams in mud…

  Hand paws the wall to reach the chilly switch;

  Then nerve-shot darkness gradually shakes

  Throughout the room. Lie still… Limbs twitch;

  Relapse to immobility’s faint ache. And time

  A while relaxes; space turns wholly black.

  But deep in the velvet crater of the ear

  A chip of sound abruptly irritates.

  A second, a third chirp; and then another far

  Emphatic trill and chirrup shrills in answer; notes

  From all directions round pluck at the strings

  Of hearing with frail finely-sharpened claws.

  And in an instant, every wakened bird

  Across surrounding miles of air

  Outside, is sowing like a scintillating sand

  Its throat’s incessantly replenished store

  Of tuneless singsong, timeless, aimless, blind.

  Draw now with prickling hand the curtains back;

  Unpin the blackout-cloth; let in

  Grim crack-of-dawn’s first glimmer through the glass.

  All’s yet half sunk in Yesterday’s stale death,

  Obscurely still beneath a moist-tinged blank

  Sky like the inside of a deaf mute’s mouth…

  Nearest within the window’s sight, ash-pale

  Against a cinder coloured wall, the white

  Pear-blossom hovers like a stare; rain-wet

  The further housetops weakly shine; and there,

  Beyond, hangs flaccidly a lone barrage-balloon.

  An incommunicable desolation weighs

  Like depths of stagnant water on this break of day. –

  Long meditation without thought. – Until a breeze

  From some pure Nowhere straying, stirs

  A pang of poignant odour from the earth, an unheard sigh

  Pregnant with sap’s sweet tang and raw soil’s fine

  Aroma, smell of stone, and acrid breath

  Of gravel puddles. While the brooding green

  Of nearby gardens’ grass and trees, and quiet flat

  Blue leaves, the distant lilac mirages, are made

  Clear by increasing daylight, and intensified.

  Now head sinks into pillows in retreat

  Before this morning’s hovering advance;

  (Behind loose lids, in sleep’s warm porch, half hears

  White hollow clink of bottles, – dragging crunch

  Of milk-cart wheels, – and presently a snatch

  Of windy whistling as the newsboy’s bike winds near,

  Distributing to neighbour’s peaceful steps

  Reports of last-night’s battles); at last sleeps.

  While early guns on Norway’s bitter coast

  Where faceless troops are landing, renew fire:

  And one more day of War starts everywhere.

  KEITH DOUGLAS Desert Flowers

  Living in a wide landscape are the flowers –

  Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying –

  the shell and the hawk every hour

  are slaying men and jerboas, slaying

  the mind: but the body can fill

  the hungry flowers and the dogs who cry words

  at nights, the most hostile things of all.

  But that is not new. Each time the night discards

  draperies on the eyes and leaves the mind awake

  I look each side of the door of sleep

  for the little coin it will take

  to buy the secret I shall not keep.

  I see men as trees suffering

  or confound the detail and the horizon.

  Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing

  of what the others never set eyes on.

  H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) from The Walls Do Not Fall 1944

  I

  An incident here and there,

  and rails gone (for guns)

  from your (and my) old town square:

  mist and mist-grey, no colour,

  still the Luxor bee, chick and hare

  pursue unalterable purpose

  in green, rose-red, lapis;

  they continue to prophesy

  from the stone papyrus:

  there, as here, ruin opens

  the tomb, the temple; enter,

  there as here, there are no doors:

  the shrine lies open to the sky,

  the rain falls, here, there

  sand drifts; eternity endures:

  ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof

  leaves the sealed room

  open to the air,

  so, through our desolation,

  thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us

  through gloom:

  unaware, Spirit announces the Presence;

  shivering overtakes us,

  as of old, Samuel:

  trembling at a known street-corner,

  we know not nor are known;

  the Pythian pronounces – we pass on

  to another cellar, to another sliced wall

  where poor utensils show

  like rare objects in a museum;

  Pompeii has nothing to teach us,

  we know crack of volcanic fissure,

  slow flow of terrible lava,

  pressure on heart, lungs, the brain

  about to burst its brittle case

  (what the skull can endure!):

  over us, Apocryphal fire,

  under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor,

  slope of a pavement

  where men roll, drunk

  with a new bewilderment,

  sorcery, bedevilment:

  the bone-frame was made for

  no such shock knit within terror,

  yet the skeleton stood up to it:

  the flesh? it was melted away,

  the heart burnt out, dead ember,

  tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,

  yet the frame held:

  we passed the flame: we wonder

  what saved us? what for?

  SORLEY MACLEAN Hallaig

  ‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’

  The window is nailed and boarded

  through which I saw the West

  and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,

  a birch tree, and she has always been

  between Inver and Milk Hollow,

  here and there about Baile-chuirn:

  she is a birch, a hazel,

  a straight, slender young rowan.

  In Screapadal of my people

  where Norman and Big Hector were,

  their daughters and their sons are a wood

  going up beside the stream.

  Proud tonight the p
ine cocks

  crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra,

  straight their backs in the moonlight –

  they are not the wood I love.

  I will wait for the birch wood

  until it comes up by the cairn,

  until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice

  will be under its shade.

  If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig,

  to the Sabbath of the dead,

  where the people are frequenting,

  every single generation gone.

  They are still in Hallaig,

  MacLeans and MacLeods,

  all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim

  the dead have been seen alive.

  The men lying on the green

  at the end of every house that was,

  the girls a wood of birches,

  straight their backs, bent their heads.

  Between the Leac and Fearns

  the road is under mild moss

  and the girls in silent bands

  go to Clachan as in the beginning,

  and return from Clachan

  from Suisnish and the land of the living;

  each one young and light-stepping,

  without the heartbreak of the tale.

  From the Burn of Fearns to the raised beach

  that is clear in the mystery of the hills,

  there is only the congregation of the girls

  keeping up the endless walk,

  coming back to Hallaig in the evening,

  in the dumb living twilight,

  filling the steep slopes,

  their laughter a mist in my ears,

  and their beauty a film on my heart

  before the dimness comes on the kyles,

  and when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana

  a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love;

  and will strike the deer that goes dizzily,

  sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes:

  his eye will freeze in the wood,

  his blood will not be traced while I live.

  (1970)

  LAURENCE BINYON Winter Sunrise

  It is early morning within this room: without,

  Dark and damp: without and within, stillness

  Waiting for day: not a sound but a listening air.

  Yellow jasmine, delicate on stiff branches

  Stands in a Tuscan pot to delight the eye

  In spare December’s patient nakedness.

  Suddenly, softly, as if at a breath breathed

  On the pale wall, a magical apparition,

  The shadow of the jasmine, branch and blossom!

  It was not there, it is there, in a perfect image;

  And all is changed. It is like a memory lost

  Returning without a reason into the mind;

  And it seems to me that the beauty of the shadow

  Is more beautiful than the flower; a strange beauty,

  Pencilled and silently deepening to distinctness.

  As a memory stealing out of the mind’s slumber,

  A memory floating up from a dark water,

  Can be more beautiful than the thing remembered.

  LAURENCE BINYON The Burning of the Leaves

  Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.

  They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke

  Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.

  Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!

  A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites

  On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

  The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;

  All the spices of June are a bitter reek,

  All the extravagant riches spent and mean.

  All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;

  Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild

  Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

  Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,

  Time for the burning of days ended and done,

  Idle solace of things that have gone before:

  Rootless hopes and fruitless desire are there;

  Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.

  The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

  They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise

  From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,

  And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;

  The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.

  Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.

  Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

  KEITH DOUGLAS Vergissmeinnicht

  Three weeks gone and the combatants gone

  returning over the nightmare ground

  we found the place again, and found

  the soldier sprawling in the sun.

  The frowning barrel of his gun

  overshadowing. As we came on

  that day, he hit my tank with one

  like the entry of a demon.

  Look. Here in the gunpit spoil

  the dishonoured picture of his girl

  who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht

  in a copybook gothic script.

  We see him almost with content,

  abased, and seeming to have paid

  and mocked at by his own equipment

  that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

  But she would weep to see today

  how on his skin the swart flies move;

  the dust upon the paper eye

  and the burst stomach like a cave.

  For here the lover and killer are mingled

  who had one body and one heart.

  And death who had the soldier singled

  has done the lover mortal hurt.

  ROBERT GRAVES To Juan at the Winter Solstice 1945

  There is one story and one story only

  That will prove worth your telling,