Had we not long ago made Earth
Our secret altar
Garlanded with our worshipping?
II
When she was young, Earth, loving thee,
Blessed us with halcyon noontide, tranquil night.
And now in eye and mouth I see
Beauty resurgent
That could not perish, being so bright.
Surely my song had fashioned first
Some alchemy for thy body’s quickening,
Before its splendour was dispersed
A few dumb ashes
Into the cool of evening.
The Fisher
When at last I am abiding
Where I would be,
Think gently of the wind-snatched rumour
That was once me.
Can you forget
How, dreaming I should find one beauty,
One silver-perfect thing to give her,
I cast the net?
How in those dark, unquiet waters
I found defeat;
And how I laid the meshes, empty,
Before her feet?
1925
COUNTRY COMETS
‘Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall.’
ANDREW MARVELL
TO HER WHOSE MIND AND BODY ARE A POETRY I HAVE NOT ACHIEVED I GIVE THESE POEMS
Prelude
Let up the curtain.
The conjuror
Spangled and certain
Of hand will appear.
He recks not your ‘bravo,’
Nor counts your pence:
He plays to a shadow
Audience.
Cheers or hisses –
Whichever you will:
Nor for this is
Rehearsed his skill;
But for remembrance
Of dreams untrue,
Lest their loved semblance
Should vanish too.
A girl’s young beauty
That was not his –
These are his only
Properties.
Though he tricks your vision
By wizard stealth,
Alas, the magician
Can’t trick himself.
And if he is slow in
Sleight of hand,
It is through knowing
He may not command –
For all his patter
And ivory wand –
The love that a greater
Wizard has banned.
Autumn of the Mood
On the heart’s hidden verge
To mark where love is buried
Mourner lilies spring
Out of the stunted spurge.
And a small wind sings dirge
Under the last leaves fluttering.
This autumn of the mood
Lives not beyond the rustle
Of its own leaves falling;
And soon, where lilies stood,
Brittle stalks in the wood
Shiver, like spectres at cock-calling.
Sun and Waterfall
Sun and waterfall conspire
To shape a thing of airy grace
Apt as Helen’s breast to baffle
And shame and haunt the very desire
To which it yields in hot embrace.
Now stands the poet with his bottle
Of cut glass by the waterfall,
To trap the rainbow glittering there;
Gloating he comes to his dark study –
O, the rainbow he would enthrall
Is a few waterdrops, its rare
Essence eludes him.
But somebody
Passing the window at high noon
Looks in the bottle, and climbs upon
Some peak, and cries across the valleys: –
‘Each petty husk of life shall soon
Mix with the dust of Ilion –
Fleas, churches, men and factory-chimneys:
But who shall keep alive the spark
That clamps together Life’s whole frame
Rotting to dissolution?’ Giddy,
He falls. The seer finds no bulwark
From his own vision. And the same
Inertia of field and city
Hails one more martyr.
Yet maybe
Some ears still heed a challenging,
A trumpet-call that drowns the little
Gossiping tongues: Some eyes can see
A flash in the air, as though the King-
Eagle swooped ominous of battle.
Then there are cannonades, alarms,
And hearts are stung to nobleness;
Smashing of eikons, bursting of fetters
That rusted on complaisant arms.
While by the waterfall no less
Intangibly a rainbow glitters.
Cyprian! Cyprian!
I
Here is green lacquer
Spread by the willows
On glossy water
Where the ballet of minnows
Moving together
In lithe sarabande
Suddenly waver
When they have seen your hand
Ruffle the water –
Stare and are hesitant,
So gracious a dancer
That ivory visitant.
II
Here, as I lay and watched the sunlight playing
A visual music in your eyes,
I thought, ‘This grand surprise
We have of beauty’s disarraying
Alone is real: without it we are less
Than ghosts, as the musician’s even
Poised hands are meaningless
But for the fire they bring from heaven!’
III
How little the love that cramps similitude
Of the beloved within this transient mirage,
Earth’s beauty! For you there is no image
In wave and tree:
No branch has motion or quietude
To match your fingers’ wizardry
That do but touch, and Reason
Is futile as a creaking skeleton.
I hear your voice make of each trivial thought
Aria so lovely that all philosophies seem
An ocean of greybeard waves
Chattering the same old, outworn theme.
Save in your body Poetry is naught
But a painted bawd who lives
On another’s graces at any crossroad bought.
And so will I throw off this flaunting
Motley of wisdom: it only would obscure
In my heart’s clouded air
That bright and birdlike haunting
When you and Love are moving there.
Naked Woman with Kotyle
She moved to the slow
Dance of supplication;
Her body’s flow
Was a moon in motion.
Like the moon that swims
In a cold river
And eddies at its whims
She seemed to her lover.
She danced alone,
Whiter than a column
Of the Parthenon,
Virginal and solemn.
So he prayed to the stars,
Took enamel and graver,
And toiling on this vase
Timeless grace gave her.
He looked with heartbreak
On the vase, so petty
So frail a thing to take
All her live beauty.
Now are they gone –
Trancèd and entrancer.
Dust dancing in the sun
Is that forgotten dancer.
Haven in Ithaca
When my heart’s Odyssey
Finds the despaired-of Ithaca on your lips,
And in that moment dies the misery
Of storm and calm and the sick shi
p’s
Seafaring over an endless sea;
This haven of delight
Will happier be because it holds a swell
Sea-borne, an after thrill of the long fight –
The mountainous swoop from heaven to hell,
The blind masts reeling against the night.
Magicians in Dorset
No one, I thought, shall invade
This faery fastness that holds us; the battlement
Of fern with a rare enchantment
Impregnable we have made.
No one, ’tis sure, can invade …
And then; ‘Have ye seen a stray calf anywhere?’
In the quiet Dorsetshire
Accents; and a horse neighed.
Like a puckish Abraham
The rider seemed, or a bearded Oberon:
So wizardly his face shone
That our spells grew empty and sham.
For his was the simpleness
Born of earth-magic, finer than fantasy;
The unconscious dignity
Of hills and wind-laden grass.
Certainly we were the least
Of magicians; or else, when they turned away through the green
Battlement, we would have seen
The man and his elfin beast –
Wings asprout from their shoulders –
Climb up to the sun, sedately fantastical
As spray from the waves that fall
Upon distant Atlantic boulders.
From the Waters of Loch Linnhe
I
Rest now in your places, you calm hills,
Priestesses of quiet!
Rest now! You have kept the secret
of your repose that fills
My heart only with sharp unrestfulness.
No storm thrusting across the sky
Black menacing antlers, nothing distemperate
Has power to violate
You, cloistered up in your own serenity
From every storm and stress.
Lament, you winds! Skirl, skirl
Over the hills and the deep-rooted loch
Love’s desperate coronach!
Their heart stirs not. Unheeding as this proud girl,
Unheeding they must be ever.
O she is cold, she is lovely and ruinous
As a spear flung into the sunset
Never to find a target:
She was born to spend her impetuous
Spring-time upon no lover.
II
The hills reply
Do not cry out. When truth’s whole firmament quakes
It will be time to scream and scold:
Love that is cast in the heroic mould
Covers his countenance, but makes
No vain lamenting.
Will you be never satisfied to feel
Her beauty beating through your eyes?
Are they dim with search for brighter ardencies,
To those the present times reveal
Still unconsenting?
Do not cry out. Think rather how the days
Because she lived them at your side
Swung in an epic rhythm; each beautified,
A flower, a summer, each, to praise
Her April brow.
With her you watched the gorgeous stars along
Cool skies ride out the night, until
Her face grew rapt and fervent as the trill
Of a blackbird startled into song
By one green bough.
And since of hurrying wind, anchorless wave,
Of mist and curlew-call and star
She seemed thus essence and interpreter,
Why do you envy us our grave
Cerement of quiet?
Cling then to these, folding away despair;
In them there’s better than heart’s ease,
Lovelier than tranquillity, for these
Stamped you at the core of her, to share
The young blood’s riot.
The Shadow-Pimp
I thought, ‘Had I this body of my Hope
Coffined, earthed up, and out of ken;
This false friend whispering at the elbow,
Pointing horizonward, stunting the scope
Of here and now; this pimp of shadow,
Dream and futility: – then might I win
A mellow, chimney-corner ease.
No more my thought would go with the high branches
Fingering at the moon. I would have release
From the not quite desperate despair that clutches
Hope’s hem like a starving child.
My clock would be a register
Of minutes each sucked dry, of hours beguiled
To glow upon me placidly
As evening light in the stillroom on pewter.
Time would not lag, thus, pregnant with a burden
Of clogged expectancy.’
So I rose up one night and strangled Hope,
Buried him twelve foot deep at the end of the garden.
I might have known one cannot cope
With such. Next day the grim persistent spark
Came bodied out anew in windier boast
And promise, whispering at my elbow;
Pointing my heart towards the fruitless dark …
I suppose I must take this too substantial ghost
For undivorceable bed fellow.
It is the True Star
I will remember this night. So long as mind
Endures to captain against the vandal Doom
Her forlorn hopes – nerve, blood and bone designed
After death’s image, let me remember this night.
There were daffodils at one corner of my room
Poised in a golden trance, and the four white-
Panelled walls made cosmos in miniature
Serene as a dewdrop or a Chinese poem,
And I its essence and demiurge. So pure
A oneness (I thought) is every man. No stir
From the street breaks on his Self, a play without proem
Or epilogue, dreamed in the theatre
He calls his life: being actor and audience,
To the last posture of decay he claps,
Hisses, yawns at himself.
But then, what sense
Have they the pioneer-minded, the rebel-hearted,
If man’s fulfilment rest on no ‘perhaps’
Outside him? They are bell-buoys adrift from their charted
Safe shallows, sagging inanely through a sea
That yerks them up to meaningless stars, clanging,
Clanging for Eldorado, dementedly.
Monad or Nomad? What difference, since either state
Binds us with a law, each soul from each estranging,
To be thus terribly masters of our fate.
And I was sickened by this philosophy
That would benight each man in a six-foot cell,
Proud Playboy of his own complacency.
So I opened the window and put out my head,
Thought’s fog, portentous pachyderm, to dispel.
(‘The monad has no windows,’ Leibnitz said.)
Firm stood the moon, and all the sky marched on
Rank after rank of cloud in ragged battalions
Before its face: as though Napoleon,
The squat dynamic man, straddling the snow
Watched while his glorious tatterdemalions
Trailed home and left his hope-blood at Moscow.
Then, lapped in that magnificence, I knew
Suddenly how all creatures from one source
Take breath and purpose, and again renew
It with their greatness. How the very star
That held Columbus to his homeric course
Waned on the waters around St. Helena.
‘This star that constant is for our possession,
Find we its gleam amid whatever skies –
In valour’s dayspri
ng, or the dry noontide passion
To probe beneath life’s semblances, or drowned
In the deep-sea midnight of a woman’s eyes:
This star, whose mere reflection will astound
Us out of false content, by its possessing
Mates every true possessor; and so fills
Each creature with Creation, itself amassing
From men the stuff of Godhead.’…
As I spoke
Quietly like a clump of daffodils
Out of the night grew dawn, and sparrows awoke.
Between Hush and Hush
Dear, do not think that I
Will praise your beauty the less,
Believing death for ever
Snows up its fair impress.
Nor slight my love because
It claims no magic re-birth,
But deems all kissing over
When lips are laid to earth.
I’ll praise your beauty as
A dewdrop fast on its prime –
A still perfection lasting
But for one blink of time.
So short its hour, your love
To mine should bravelier rush,
Bird-note to bird-note thrusting
Out between hush and hush.
A Second Narcissus
Stoop, stoop, Narcissus,
Over the shadowed pool
That is her heart; no flaw there
Lurks to befool
Thy gaze with mirrored
Grimace. Yet not as he,
The Grecian, crazed by his new-
Complete Poems Page 4