by Paul Keegan
Toyland
Today the sunlight is the paint on lead soldiers
Only they are people scattering out of the cool church
And as they go across the gravel and among the spring streets
They spread formality: they know, we know, what they have been doing,
The old couples, the widowed, the staunch smilers,
The deprived and the few nubile young lily-ladies,
And we know what they will do when they have opened the doors of their houses and walked in:
Mostly they will make water, and wash their calm hands and eat.
The organ’s flourishes finish; the verger closes the doors;
The choirboys run home, and the rector goes off in his motor.
Here a policeman stalks, the sun glinting on his helmet-crest;
Then a man pushes a perambulator home; and somebody posts a letter.
If I sit here long enough, loving it all, I shall see the District Nurse pedal past,
The children going to Sunday School and the strollers strolling;
The lights darting on in different rooms as night comes in;
And I shall see washing hung out, and the postman delivering letters.
I might by exception see an ambulance or the fire brigade
Or even, if the chance came round, street musicians (singing and playing).
For the people I’ve seen, this seems the operation of life:
I need the paint of stillness and sunshine to see it that way.
The secret laugh of the world picks them up and shakes them like peas boiling;
They behave as if nothing happened; maybe they no longer notice.
I notice. I laugh with the laugh, cultivate it, make much of it,
But still I don’t know what the joke is, to tell them.
THOM GUNN In Santa Maria del Popolo
Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.
But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dusty forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?
No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
Casting the pain out under name of sin.
The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candour and secrecy inside the skin.
He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent
Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,
Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
For money, by one such picked off the streets.
I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
– For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.
THOM GUNN My Sad Captains
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.
MALCOLM LOWRY [Strange Type] 1962
I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter.
CHRISTOPHER LOGUE from Patrocleia: an Account of Book 16 of Homer’s Iliad
[Apollo Strikes Patroclus]
His hand came from the east,
And in his wrist lay all eternity;
And every atom of his mythic weight
Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.
Your eyes lurched out. Achilles’ bonnet rang
Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of Trojan horses,
And you were footless… staggering… amazed…
Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,
Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes,
The noise – like weirs heard far away –
Dabbling your astounded fingers
In the vomit on your chest.
And all the Trojans lay and stared at you;
Propped themselves up and stared at you;
Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
All of them lay and stared;
And one, a hero boy called Thackta, cast.
His javelin went through your calves,
Stitching your knees together, and you fell,
Not noticing the pain, and tried to crawl
Towards the Fleet, and – even now – feeling
For Thackta’s ankle – ah! – and got it? No…
Not a boy’s ankle that you got,
But Hector’s.
Standing above you,
His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
Putting his spear through… ach, and saying:
‘Why tears, Patroclus?
Did you hope to melt Troy down
And make our women fetch the ingots home?
I can imagine it!
You and your marvellous Achilles;
Him with an upright finger, saying:
“Don’t show your face to me again, Patroclus,
Unless it’s red with Hector’s blood.’ ”
And Patroclus,
Shaking the voice out of his body, says:
‘Big mouth.
Remember it took three of you to kill me.
A god, a boy, and, last and least, a hero.
I can hear Death pronounce my name, and yet
Somehow it sounds like Hector.
And as I close my eyes I see Achilles’ face
With Death’s voice coming out of it.’
Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand
Hector withdrew his spear and said:
‘Perhaps.’
1963CHARLES TOMLINSON The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of Stone
What should one
wish a child
and that, one’s own
emerging
from between
the stone lips
of a sheep-stile
that divides
village graves
and village green?
– Wish her
the constancy of stone.
– But stone
is hard.
– Say, rather
it resists
the slow corrosives
and the flight
of t
ime
and yet it takes
the play, the fluency
from light.
– How would you know
the gift you’d give
was the gift
she’d wish to have?
– Gift is giving,
gift is meaning:
first
I’d give
then let her
live with it
to prove
its quality the better and
thus learn
to love
what (to begin with)
she might spurn.
– You’d
moralize a gift?
– I’d have her
understand
the gift I gave her.
– And so she shall
but let her play
her innocence away
emerging
as she does
between
her doom (unknown),
her unmown green.
R. S. THOMAS On the Farm
There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.
There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.
There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.
And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life’s dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.
LOUIS MACNEICE Soap Suds
This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.
And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.
To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then
Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.
LOUIS MACNEICE The Taxis
In the first taxi he was alone tra-la,
No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence
But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance
As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride.
In the second taxi he was alone tra-la
But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according
And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure
You have left nothing behind tra-la between you.’
In the third taxi he was alone tra-la
But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra
Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd
Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes.
As for the fourth taxi, he was alone
Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked
Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take
So many people, not to speak of the dog.’
AUSTIN CLARKE Martha Blake at Fifty-One
Early, each morning, Martha Blake
Walked, angeling the road,
To Mass in the Church of the Three Patrons.
Sanctuary lamp glowed
And the clerk halo’ed the candles
On the High Altar. She knelt
Illumined. In gold-hemmed alb,
The priest intoned. Wax melted.
Waiting for daily Communion, bowed head
At rail, she hears a murmur.
Latin is near. In a sweet cloud
That cherub’d, all occurred.
The voice went by. To her pure thought,
Body was a distress
And soul, a sigh. Behind her denture,
Love lay, a helplessness.
Then, slowly walking after Mass
Down Rathgar Road, she took out
Her Yale key, put a match to gas-ring,
Half filled a saucepan, cooked
A fresh egg lightly, with tea, brown bread,
Soon, taking off her blouse
And skirt, she rested, pressing the Crown
Of Thorns until she drowsed.
In her black hat, stockings, she passed
Nylons to a nearby shop
And purchased, daily, with downcast eyes,
Fillet of steak or a chop.
She simmered it on a low jet,
Having a poor appetite,
Yet never for an hour felt better
From dilatation, tightness.
She suffered from dropped stomach, heartburn
Scalding, water-brash
And when she brought her wind up, turning
Red with the weight of mashed
Potato, mint could not relieve her.
In vain her many belches,
For all below was swelling, heaving
Wamble, gurgle, squelch.
She lay on the sofa with legs up,