And never will comprehend?’
I sit in a wood and stare
Up at untroubled branches
Locked together and staunch as
Though girders of the air:
And think, the first wind rising
Will crack that intricate crown
And let the daylight down.
But there is naught surprising
Can explode the single mind: –
Let figs from thistles fall
Or stars from their pedestal,
This architecture will stand.
2
Come, soul, let us not fight
Like cynical Chinee
Beneath umbrella, nor wish to trade
Upon neutrality.
For the mind must cope with
All elements or none –
Bask in dust along with weevils,
Or criticise the sun.
Look, where cloud squadrons are
Stampeded by the wind,
A boy’s kite sits as calm as Minos
If the string be sound:
But if there are no hands
To keep the cable tense
And no eyes to mark a flaw in it,
What use the difference
Between a gust that twitters
Along the wainscot at dawn
And a burly wind playing the zany
In fields of barleycorn?
The time has gone when we
Could sprawl at ease between
Light and darkness, and deduce
Omnipotence from our Mean.
For us the Gregorian
Example of those eyes
That risked hell’s blight and heaven’s blinding
But dared not compromise.
3
That afternoon we lay on Lillington Common
The land wallowed around us in the sunlight;
But finding all things my strenuous sense included
Ciphers new-copied by the indefinite sunlight,
I fell once more under the shadow of my Sphinx.
The aimlessness of buttercup and beetle
So pestered me, I would have cried surrender
To the fossil certitudes of Tom, Dick, and Harry,
Had I known how or believed that such a surrender
Could fashion aught but a dead Sphinx from the live Sphinx.
Later we lit a fire, and the hedge of darkness –
Garnished with not a nightingale nor a glow-worm –
Sprang up like the beanstalk by which our Jack aspired
once.
Then, though each star seemed little as a glow-worm
Perched on Leviathan’s flank, and equally terrible
My tenure of this plateau that sloped on all sides
Into annihilation – yet was I lord of
Something: for, seeing the fall of a burnt-out faggot
Make all the night sag down, I became lord of
Light’s interplay – stoker of an old parable.
4
Come up, Methuselah,
You doddering superman!
Give me an instant realized
And I’ll outdo your span.
In that one moment of evening
When roses are most red
I can fold back the firmament,
I can put time to bed.
Abraham, stint your tally
Of concubines and cattle!
Give place to me – capitalist
In more intrinsic metal.
I have a lover of flesh
And a lover that is a sprite:
To-day I lie down with finite,
To-morrow with infinite.
That one is a constant
And suffers no eclipse,
Though I feel sun and moon burning
Together on her lips.
This one is a constant,
But she’s not kind at all;
She raddles her gown with my despairs
And paints her lip with gall.
My lover of flesh is wild,
And willing to kiss again;
She is the potency of earth
When woods exhale the rain.
My lover of air, like Artemis
Spectrally embraced,
Shuns the daylight that twists her smile
To mineral distaste.
Twin poles energic, they
Stand fast and generate
This spark that crackles in the void
As between fate and fate.
5
My love is a tower.
Standing up in her
I parley with planets
And the casual wind.
Arcturus may grind
Against our wall: – he whets
A tropic appetite,
And decorates our night.
‘What happier place
For Johnny Head-in-Air,
Who never would hear
Time mumbling at the base?’
I will not hear, for she’s
My real Antipodes,
And our ingrowing loves
Shall meet below earth’s spine
And there shall intertwine,
Though Babel falls above.
Time, we allow, destroys
All aërial toys:
But to assail love’s heart
He has no strategy,
Unless he suck up the sea
And pull the earth apart.
6
Dismayed by the monstrous credibility
Of all antinomies, I climbed the fells
To Easedale Tarn. Could I be child again
And grip those skirts of cloud the matriarch sky
Draggled on mere and hillside?… (‘So the dog
Returns to his vomit,’ you protest. Well only
The dog can tell what virtue lies in his vomit.)
Sleep on, you fells and profound dales: there’s no
Material wind or rain can insulate
The mind against its own forked speculation,
When once that storm sets in: and then the flash
That bleakly enlightens a few sour acres leaves but
A more Egyptian darkness whence it came.3
Mountains are the musicians; they despise
Their audience: but the wind is a popular preacher
And takes more from his audience than he gives them.
How can I wear the clouds, who feel each mountain
Yearn from its flinty marrow to abdicate
Sublimity and globe-trot with the wind?
By Easedale Tarn, where I sought a comforter,
I found a gospel sterner than repentance.
Prophetic earth, you need no lumber of logic
Who point your arguments alike with a primrose
And a sick sheep coughing among the stones:
And I have only words; yet must they both
Outsoar the mountain and lap up the wind.
7
Few things can more inflame
This far too combative heart
Than the intellectual Quixotes of the age
Prattling of abstract art.
No one would deny it –
But for a blind man’s passion
Cassandra had been no more than a draggle-skirt,
Helen a ten-year fashion.
Yet had there not been one hostess
Ever whose arms waylaid
Like the tough bramble a princeling’s journey, or
At the least no peasant maid
Redressing with rude heat
Nature’s primeval wrong,
Epic had slumbered on beneath his blindness
And Helen lacked her song.
(So the antique balloon
Wobbles with no defence
Against the void but a grapnel that hops and ploughs
Through the landscape of sense.)
Phrase-making, dress-making –
Distinction’s hard to find;
For thought
must play the mannequin, strut in phrase,
Or gape with the ruck: and mind,
Like body, from covering gets
Most adequate display.
Yet time trundles this one to the rag-and-bone man,
While that other may
Reverberate all along
Man’s craggy circumstance –
Naked enough to keep its dignity
Though it eye God askance.
Part II
‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself;
I am large, I contain multitudes.’
W. WHITMAN.
8
It is becoming now to declare my allegiance,
To dig some reservoir for my springtime’s pain,
Bewilderment and pride, before their insurgence
Is all sopped up in this dry regimen.
Laughable dwarfs, you may twirl and tweak my heart, –
Have I not fought with Anakim at the crossways?
Once I was Cicero, though pedant fate4
Now bids me learn the grammar of my days.
These, then, have my allegiance; they whose shining
Convicted my false dawn of flagrant night,
Yet ushered up the sun, as poets leaning
Upon a straw surmise the infinite.
You, first, who ground my lust to love upon
Your gritty humorous virginity,
Then yielding to its temper suddenly
Proved what a Danube can be struck from stone:
With you I ran the gauntlet for my prime,
Then living in the moment lived for all time.
Next the hawk-faced man, who could praise an apple
In terms of peach and win the argument. Quick
Was he to trip the shambling rhetoric
Of laws and lions: yet abstract turned the tables
And his mind, almost, with a whiff of air
Clothed first in a woman and after in a nightmare.
She next, sorrow’s familiar, who turned
Her darkness to our light; that ‘brazen leech’
Alleviating the vain cosmic itch
With fact coated in formulæ lest it burned
Our tongue. She shall have portion in my praise,
And live in me, not memory, for always.
Last the tow-haired poet, never done
With cutting and planing some new gnomic prop
To jack his all too stable universe up: –
Conduct’s Old Dobbin, thought’s chameleon.
Single mind copes with split intelligence,
Breeding a piebald strain of truth and nonsense.
These have I loved and chosen, once being sure
Some spacious vision waved upon their eyes
That troubles not the common register;
And love them still, knowing it otherwise.
Knowing they held no mastership in wisdom
Or wit save by certificate of my love,
I have found out a better way to praise them –
Nestor shall die and let Patroclus live.
So I declare it. These are they who built
My house and never a stone of it laid agley.
So cheat I memory that works in gilt
And stucco to restore a fallen day.
9
I thought to have had some fame
As the village idiot
Condemned at birth to sit
Oracle of blind alleys:
Shanghaied aboard the galleys
I got reprieve and shame.
Tugging at his oar
This idiot who, for lack
Of the striped Zodiac,
Swore that every planet
Was truck, soon found some merit
In his own abject star.
Then there came disgust
Of the former loon who could
Elbow a bridge and brood
From Chaos to last Trump
Over the imbecile pomp
Of waters dribbling past.
For what can water be
But so much less or more
Gravamen to the oar? –
(Reasons our reformed dunce)
It is high time to renounce
This village idiocy.
10
How they would jeer at us –
Ulysses, Herodotus,
The hard-headed Phœnicians
Or, of later nations,
Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers
And a thousand others
Who laboured only to find
Some pittance of new ground,
Merchandise or women.
Those rude and bourgeois seamen
Got glory thrown in
As it were with every ton
Of wave that swept their boat,
And would have preferred a coat
For keeping off the spray.
Since the heroes lie
Entombed with the recipe
Of epic in their heart,
And have buried – it seems – that art
Of minding one’s own business
Magnanimously, for us
There’s nothing but to recant
Ambition, and be content
Like the poor child at play
To find a holiday
In the sticks and mud
Of a familiar road.
11
If I bricked up ambition and gave no air
To the ancestral curse that gabbles there,
I could leave wonder on the latch
And with a whole heart watch
The calm declension of an English year.
I would be pædagogue – hear poplar, lime
And oak recite the seasons’ paradigm.
Each year a dynasty would fall
Within my orchard wall –
I’d be their Tacitus, and they my time.
Among those pippin princes I could ease
A heart long sick for some Hesperides:
Plainsong of thrushes in the soul
Would drown that rigmarole
Of Eldorados, Auks, and Perilous Seas.
(The God they cannot see sages define
In a slow-motion. If I discipline
My flux into a background still
And sure as a waterfall
Will not a rainbow come of that routine?)
So circumscribe the vampire and he’ll die soon –
Lunacy and anæmia take their own.
Grounded in temperate soil I’ll stay,
An orchard god, and say
My glow-worms hold a candle to the moon.
12
Enough. There is no magic
Circle nor prophylactic
Sorcery of garlic
Will keep the vampire in.
See! – that authentic
Original of sin
Slides from his cabin
Up to my sober trees
And spits disease.
Thus infected, they
Start a sylvan rivalry,
Poplar and oak surpass
Their natural green, and race
Each other to the stars.
Since my material
Has chosen to rebel,
It were most politic –5
Ere I also fall sick –
To escape this Eden.
Indeed there has been no peace
For any garden
Or for any trees
Since Priapus died,
And lust can no more ride
Over self-love and pride.
Leave Eden to the brutes:
For he who lets his sap
Run downward to the roots
Will wither at the top
And wear fool’s-cap.
I am no English lawn
To build a smooth tradition
Out of Time’s recession
And centuries of dew …
Adam must subdue
The indestructible serpen
t,
Outstaring it: content
If he can transplant
One slip from paradise
Into his own eyes.
13
Can the mole take
A census of the stars?
Our firmament will never
Give him headache.
The man who nuzzles
In a woman’s lap
Burrows toward a night
Too deep for puzzles:
While he, whose prayer
Holds up the starry system
In a God’s train, sees nothing
Difficult there.
So I, perhaps,
Am neither mole nor mantis;
I see the constellations,
But by their gaps.
14
In heaven, I suppose, lie down together
Agonised Pilate and the boa-constrictor
That swallows anything: but we must seize
One horn or the other of our antitheses.
When I consider each independent star
Wearing its world of darkness like a fur
And rubbing shoulders with infinity,
I am content experience should be
More discontinuous than the points pricked
Out by the mazy course of a derelict,
Iceberg, or Flying Dutchman, and the heart
Stationary and passive as a chart.
In such star-frenzy I could boast, betwixt
My yester and my morrow self are fixed
All the birds carolling and all the seas
Groaning from Greenwich to the Antipodes.
But an eccentric hour may come, when systems
Not stars divide the dark; and then life’s pistons
Pounding into their secret cylinder
Begin to tickle the most anchorite ear
With hints of mechanisms that include
The man. And once that rhythm arrests the blood,
Who would be satisfied his mind is no
Continent but an archipelago?
They are preposterous paladins and prance
From myth to myth, who take an Agag stance
Upon the needle points of here and now,
Where only angels ought to tread. Allow
One jointure feasible to man, one state
Squared with another – then he can integrate
A million selves and where disorder ruled
Complete Poems Page 6