The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

I have to live with it overnight

  And I can’t keep away from it.

  There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.

  There is only a little grid, no exit.

  I put my eye to the grid.

  It is dark, dark,

  With the swarmy feeling of African hands

  Minute and shrunk for export,

  Black on black, angrily clambering.

  How can I let them out?

  It is the noise that appalls me most of all,

  The unintelligible syllables.

  It is like a Roman mob,

  Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

  I lay my ear to furious Latin.

  I am not a Caesar.

  I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

  They can be sent back.

  They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

  I wonder how hungry they are.

  I wonder if they would forget me

  If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.

  There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,

  And the petticoats of the cherry.

  They might ignore me immediately

  In my moon suit and funeral veil.

  I am no source of honey

  So why should they turn on me?

  Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

  The box is only temporary.

  SYLVIA PLATH Edge

  The woman is perfected.

  Her dead

  Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

  The illusion of a Greek necessity

  Flows in the scrolls of her toga,

  Her bare

  Feet seem to be saying:

  We have come so far, it is over.

  Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

  One at each little

  Pitcher of milk, now empty.

  She has folded

  Them back into her body as petals

  Of a rose close when the garden

  Stiffens and odors bleed

  From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

  The moon has nothing to be sad about,

  Staring from her hood of bone.

  She is used to this sort of thing.

  Her blacks crackle and drag.

  BASIL BUNTING from Briggflatts 1966

  I

  Brag, sweet tenor bull,

  descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,

  each pebble its part

  for the fells’ late spring.

  Dance tiptoe, bull,

  black against may.

  Ridiculous and lovely

  chase hurdling shadows

  morning into noon.

  May on the bull’s hide

  and through the dale

  furrows fill with may,

  paving the slowworm’s way.

  A mason times his mallet

  to a lark’s twitter,

  listening while the marble rests,

  lays his rule

  at a letter’s edge,

  fingertips checking,

  till the stone spells a name

  naming none,

  a man abolished.

  Painful lark, labouring to rise!

  The solemn mallet says:

  In the grave’s slot

  he lies. We rot.

  Decay thrusts the blade,

  wheat stands in excrement

  trembling. Rawthey trembles.

  Tongue stumbles, ears err

  for fear of spring.

  Rub the stone with sand,

  wet sandstone rending

  roughness away. Fingers

  ache on the rubbing stone.

  The mason says: Rocks

  happen by chance.

  No one here bolts the door,

  love is so sore.

  Stone smooth as skin,

  cold as the dead they load

  on a low lorry by night.

  The moon sits on the fell

  but it will rain.

  Under sacks on the stone

  two children lie,

  hear the horse stale,

  the mason whistle,

  harness mutter to shaft,

  felloe to axle squeak,

  rut thud the rim,

  crushed grit.

  Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,

  head to a hard arm,

  they kiss under the rain,

  bruised by their marble bed.

  In Garsdale, dawn;

  at Hawes, tea from the can.

  Rain stops, sacks

  steam in the sun, they sit up.

  Copper-wire moustache,

  sea-reflecting eyes

  and Baltic plainsong speech

  declare: By such rocks

  men killed Bloodaxe.

  Fierce blood throbs in his tongue,

  lean words.

  Skulls cropped for steel caps

  huddle round Stainmore.

  Their becks ring on limestone,

  whisper to peat.

  The clogged cart pushes the horse downhill.

  In such soft air

  they trudge and sing,

  laying the tune frankly on the air.

  All sounds fall still,

  fellside bleat,

  hide-and-seek peewit.

  Her pulse their pace,

  palm countering palm,

  till a trench is filled,

  stone white as cheese

  jeers at the dale.

  Knotty wood, hard to rive,

  smoulders to ash;

  smell of October apples.

  The road again,

  at a trot.

  Wetter, warmed, they watch

  the mason meditate

  on name and date.

  Rain rinses the road,

  the bull streams and laments.

  Sour rye porridge from the hob

  with cream and black tea,

  meat, crust and crumb.

  Her parents in bed

  the children dry their clothes.

  He has untied the tape

  of her striped flannel drawers

  before the range. Naked

  on the pricked rag mat

  his fingers comb

  thatch of his manhood’s home.

  Gentle generous voices weave

  over bare night

  words to confirm and delight

  till bird dawn.

  Rainwater from the butt

  she fetches and flannel

  to wash him inch by inch,

  kissing the pebbles.

  Shining slowworm part of the marvel.

  The mason stirs:

  Words!

  Pens are too light.

  Take a chisel to write.

  Every birth a crime,

  every sentence life.

  Wiped of mould and mites

  would the ball run true?

  No hope of going back.

  Hounds falter and stray,

  shame deflects the pen.

  Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles

  but jogs the draftsman’s elbow.

  What can he, changed, tell

  her, changed, perhaps dead?

  Delight dwindles. Blame

  stays the same.

  Brief words are hard to find,

  shapes to carve and discard:

  Bloodaxe, king of York,

  king of Dublin, king of Orkney.

  Take no notice of tears;

  letter the stone to stand

  over love laid aside lest

  insufferable happiness impede

  flight to Stainmore,

  to trace

  lark, mallet,

  becks, flocks

  and axe knocks.

  Dung will not soil the slowworm’s

  mosaic. Breathless lark

  drops to nest in sodden trash;

  Rawthey truculent, dingy.

  Drudge at t
he mallet, the may is down,

  fog on fells. Guilty of spring

  and spring’s ending

  amputated years ache after

  the bull is beef, love a convenience.

  It is easier to die than to remember.

  Name and date

  split in soft slate

  a few months obliterate.

  R. S. THOMAS Pietà

  Always the same hills

  Crowd the horizon.

  Remote witnesses

  Of the still scene.

  And in the foreground

  The tall Cross,

  Sombre, untenanted,

  Aches for the Body

  That is back in the cradle

  Of a maid’s arms.

  R. S. THOMAS Gifts

  From my father my strong heart,

  My weak stomach.

  From my mother the fear.

  From my sad country the shame.

  To my wife all I have

  Saving only the love

  That is not mine to give.

  To my one son the hunger.

  SEAMUS HEANEY Personal Helicon

  for Michael Longley

  As a child, they could not keep me from wells

  And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.

  I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells

  Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

  One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.

  I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

  Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

  So deep you saw no reflection in it.

  A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

  Fructified like any aquarium.

  When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

  A white face hovered over the bottom.

  Others had echoes, gave back your own call

  With a clean new music in it. And one

  Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall

  Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

  Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,

  To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring

  Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme

  To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

  1967 TED HUGHES Thistles

  Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

  Thistles spike the summer air

  Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

  Every one a revengeful burst

  Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

  Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

  From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

  They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

  Every one manages a plume of blood.

  Then they grow grey, like men.

  Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

  Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

  TED HUGHES Full Moon and Little Frieda

  A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

  And you listening.

  A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.

  A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror

  To tempt a first star to a tremor.

  Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –

  A dark river of blood, many boulders,

  Balancing unspilled milk.

  ‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

  The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

  That points at him amazed.

  JOHN MONTAGUE from A Chosen Light

  II rue Daguerre

  At night, sometimes, when I cannot sleep

  I go to the atelier door

  And smell the earth of the garden.

  It exhales softly,

  Especially now, approaching springtime,

  When tendrils of green are plaited

  Across the humus, desperately frail

  In their passage against

  The dark, unredeemed parcels of earth.

  There is white light on the cobblestones

  And in the apartment house opposite –

  All four floors – silence.

  In that stillness – soft but luminously exact,

  A chosen light – I notice that

  The tips of the lately grafted cherry-tree

  Are a firm and lacquered black.

  GEORGE THEINER from the Czech of Miroslav Holub The Fly

  She sat on a willow-trunk

  watching

  part of the battle of Crécy,

  the shouts,

  the gasps,

  the groans,

  the tramping and the tumbling.

  During the fourteenth charge

  of the French cavalry

  she mated

  with a brown-eyed male fly

  from Vadincourt.

  She rubbed her legs together

  as she sat on a disembowelled horse

  meditating

  on the immortality of flies.

  With relief she alighted

  on the blue tongue

  of the Duke of Clervaux.

  When silence settled

  and only the whisper of decay

  softly circled the bodies

  and only

  a few arms and legs

  still twitched jerkily under the trees,

  she began to lay her eggs