And on the river, where they smoothly sail’d,
He strove with terror and awhile prevail’d;
But new to danger on the angry sea,
He clung affrighten’d to his master’s knee:
The boat grew leaky and the wind was strong,
Rough was the passage and the time was long;
His liquor fail’d, and Peter’s wrath arose, —
No more is known — the rest we must suppose,
Or learn of Peter; — Peter says, he spied
The stripling’s danger and for harbour tried;
Meantime the fish, and then th’apprentice died.’
[59-152]
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
From the Italian of Michael Angelo
No mortal object did these eyes behold
When first they met the placid light of thine,
And my Soul felt her destiny divine,
And hope of endless peace in me grew bold:
Heav’n born, the Soul a heav’n-ward course must hold
Beyond the visible world She soars to seek,
For what delights the sense is false and weak,
Ideal Form, the universal mould.
The wise man, I affirm, can find no rest
In that which perishes: nor will he lend
His heart to aught which doth on time depend.
Tis sense, unbridled will, and not true love,
Which kills the soul: Love betters what is best,
Even here below, but more in heaven above.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
‘When we two parted ...’
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow —
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame;
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o’er me —
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: —
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met —
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee! —
With silence and tears.
OSCAR WILDE
On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters
These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poets heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.
Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?
WILFRED OWEN
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madmans flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
VI IN MEMORIAM
____________________________
The elegy, like the pastoral, is one of gay love poetry’s oldest disguises. It is easy to see why: the great epic poems of Homer and Virgil, in recording the heroic events of their nations’ wars, naturally celebrate male friendships and mourn their violent ends in battle. So we have Achilles’ grief following the death of his lover Patroclus in The Iliad; and, from The Aeneid, the deaths of Euryalus and Nisus, with Virgil’s own memorializing intervention — a formula exactly echoed in the eighteenth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which begins with hyperbolic praise of the loved one’s beauty but ends with a rather smug (and, of course, absolutely correct) assertion of the memorial poem’s ability to outlast it.
To anyone who thinks of Tennyson as a pompous and somewhat ludicrous Victorian, reading or re-reading In Memoriam is likely to come as a shock: I’ve included a mere half-dozen sections from this magnificently sustained poem, which is startlingly honest and not at all bombastic. Walt Whitman’s great elegy ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ is an almost contemporary but very different affair, which should prove no less surprising to readers who think they don’t like Whitman.
The twentieth-century elegies here include poems — by Wilfred Owen and J.R. Ackerley — from both world wars. But the overwhelming occasion for gay elegiac writing in the late twentieth century is inescapably aids: I have included several such pieces and could easily have found many more, but even -or especially — these are celebrations too. That is why it seems absolutely right to end the book with Adam Johnson’s ‘The Playground Bell’, a self-elegizing poem which quite marvellously reaffirms its dying author’s utterly undiminished relish for life.
HOMER
Translated by Alexander Pope
from The Iliad
Thus like the rage of fire the combat burns,
And now it rises, now it sinks by turns.
Meanwhile, where Hellespont’s broad waters flow,
Stood Nestors son, the messenger of woe:
There sat Achilles, shaded by his sails,
On hoisted yards extended to the gales;
Pensive he sat; for all that fate design’d
Rose in sad prospect to his boding mind.
Thus to his soul he said: Ah! what constrains
The Greeks, late victors, now to quit the plains?
Is this the day, which heaven so long ago
Ordain’d, to sink me with the weight of woe?
(So Thetis warn’d;) when by a Trojan hand
The bravest of the Myrmidonian band
Should lose the light! Fulfilled is that decree;
Fallen is the warrior, and Patroclus he!
In vain I charged him soon to quit the plain,
And warn’d to shun Hectorean force in vain!’
Thus while he thinks, Antilochus appears,
And tells the melancholy tale with tears.
‘Sad tidings, son of Peleus! thou must hear;
And wretched I, the unwilling messenger!
Dead is Patroclus! For his corse they fight;
His naked corse: his arms are Hector’s right.’
A sudden horror shot through all the chief,
And wrapp’d his senses in the cloud of grief;
Cast on the ground, with furious hands he spread
The scorching ashes o’er his graceful head;
His purple garments, and his golden hairs,
These he deforms with dust, and these he tears;
On the hard soil his groaning breast he threw,
And roll’d a
nd grovell’d, as to earth he grew.
The virgin captives, with disorder’d charms,
(Won by his own, or by Patroclus’ arms,)
Rush’d from their tents with cries; and gathering round,
Beat their white breasts, and fainted on the ground:
While Nestor’s son sustains a manlier part,
And mourns the warrior with a warrior’s heart;
Hangs on his arms, amidst his frantic woe,
And oft prevents the meditated blow.
[xviii: 1-40]
He, deeply groaning — ‘To this cureless grief,
Not even the Thunderer’s favour brings relief.
Patroclus — Ah! — say, goddess, can I boast
A pleasure now? revenge itself is lost;
Patroclus, loved of all my martial train,
Beyond mankind, beyond myself, is slain!
Lost are those arms the gods themselves bestow’d
On Peleus; Hector bears the glorious load.
Cursed be that day, when all the powers above
Thy charms submitted to a mortal love:
O hadst thou still, a sister of the main,
Pursued the pleasures of the watery reign:
And happier Peleus, less ambitious, led
A mortal beauty to his equal bed!
Ere the sad fruit of thy unhappy womb
Had caused such sorrows past, and woes to come.
For soon, alas! that wretched offspring slain,
New woes, new sorrows, shall create again.
’Tis not in fate the alternate now to give;
Patroclus dead, Achilles hates to live.
Let me revenge it on proud Hector’s heart,
Let his last spirit smoke upon my dart;
On these conditions will I breathe: till then,
I blush to walk among the race of men.’
[xviii: 99-122]
VIRGIL
Translated by John Dryden
from The Aeneid
Fierce Volscens foams with rage, and gazing round,
Descried not him who gave the deadly wound,
Nor knew to fix revenge: ‘But thou (he cries),
Shalt pay for both,’ and at the prisoner flies
With his drawn sword. Then, struck with deep despair,
That cruel sight the lover could not bear;
But from his covert rushed in open view.
And sent his voice before him as he flew:
‘Me! me! (he cried) turn all your swords alone
On me — the fact confessed, the fault my own.
He neither could nor durst, the guiltless youth —
Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth!
His only crime (if friendship can offend)
Is too much love of his unhappy friend.’
Too late he speaks: the sword, which fury guides,
Driven with full force, had pierced his tender sides.
Down fell the beauteous youth: the yawning wound
Gushed out a purple stream, and stained the ground.
His snowy neck reclines upon his breast,
Like a fair flower by the keen share oppressed —
Like a white poppy sinking on the plain,
Whose heavy head is overcharged with rain.
Despair, and rage, and vengeance justly vowed,
Drove Nisus headlong on the hostile crowd.
Volscens he seeks; and him alone he bends:
Borne back and bored by his surrounding friends,
Onward he pressed, and kept him still in sight,
Then whirled aloft his sword with all his might:
The unerring steel descended while he spoke,
Pierced his wide mouth, and through his weazon broke.
Dying, he slew; and staggering on the plain,
With swimming eyes he sought his lover slain;
Then quiet on his bleeding bosom fell,
Content, in death, to be revenged so well.
O happy friends! for, if my verse can give
Immortal life, your fame shall ever live,
Fixed as the Capitols foundation lies,
And spread where’er the Roman eagle flies!
[ix: 421-458]
MICHAEL DRAYTON
from Piers Gaveston
O break my heart, quoth he, O break and die,
Whose infant thoughts were nursed with sweet delight;
But now the inn of care and misery,
Whose pleasing hope is murdered with despight:
O end my days, for now my joys are done,
Wanting my Piers, my sweetest Gaveston.
Farewell my love, companion of my youth,
My souls delight, the subject of my mirth,
My second self if I report the truth,
The rare and only phoenix of the earth,
Farewell sweet friend, with thee my joys are gone,
Farewell my Piers, my lovely Gaveston.
What are the rest but painted imagery,
Dumb idols made to fill up idle rooms,
But gaudy antics, sports of foolery,
But fleshly coffins, goodly gilded tombs,
But puppets which with others’ words reply,
Like prattling echoes soothing every lie?
O damnèd world, I scorn thee and thy worth,
The very source of all iniquity:
An ugly dam that brings such monsters forth,
The maze of death, nurse of impiety,
A filthy sink, where loathsomeness doth dwell,
A labyrinth, a gaol, a very hell.
Deceitful siren traitor to my youth,
Bane to my bliss, false thief that stealst my joys:
Mother of lies, sworn enemy to truth,
The ship of fools fraught all with gauds and toys,
A vessel stuffed with foul hypocrisy,
The very temple of idolatry.
O earth-pale Saturn most malevolent,
Combustious planet, tyrant in thy reign,
The sword of wrath, the root of discontent,
In whose ascendant all my joys are slain:
Thou executioner of foul bloody rage,
To act the will of lame decrepit age.
My life is but a very map of woes,
My joys the fruit of an untimely birth,
My youth in labour with unkindly throws,
My pleasures are like plagues that rain on earth,
All my delights like streams that swiftly run,
Or like the dew exhaled by the sun.
[469-510]
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or natures changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
THOMAS GRAY
Sonnet on the Death of Mr Richard West
In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire:
These ears, alas! for other notes repine,
A different object do these eyes require.
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer
,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men:
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more because I weep in vain.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
from In Memoriam A.H.H.
VII
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more —
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
XXVII
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
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Gay Love Poetry Page 13