The Penguin Book of English Verse

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The Penguin Book of English Verse Page 127

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,

 

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