Delirious mewing, thin as air,
A wraith-like rumour, nowhere and everywhere.
Over the hill three buzzards are wheeling
On the glass sky their skaters’ curves.
Each in its solemn figures-of-nought preserves
Some thread invisible, reeling, unreeling,
Then glides to a stop and with wings outlined
Motionless broods there balancing on the wind.
Often enough ere now I have eyed them –
Those three celestial bodies appear
Cutting their abstract figures year after year –
But never have fathomed what instinct rides them
Round heaven’s dome like a frozen pond,
Nor why they are always three, and what is the bond
Between them: although you might well surmise
They are earth-souls doomed in their gyres to unwind
Some tragic love-tangle wherein they had mortally pined,
When you hear those phantom, famishing cries.
But birds are birds. No human key
Of fond frustration unites the haunting three.
Wild natures, kin to all cageless things –
Thistledown, grass and cloud – yet mewing
So ghostly, no prey nor animal need pursuing
In those pure rings and hoverings,
I watch the angelic pastime until
I seem to know what is beyond the hill.
A Hard Frost
A frost came in the night and stole my world
And left this changeling for it – a precocious
Image of spring, too brilliant to be true:
White lilac on the windowpane, each grass-blade
Furred like a catkin, maydrift loading the hedge.
The elms behind the house are elms no longer
But blossomers in crystal, stems of the mist
That hangs yet in the valley below, amorphous
As the blind tissue whence creation formed.
The sun looks out, and the fields blaze with diamonds.
Mockery spring, to lend this bridal gear
For a few hours to a raw country maid,
Then leave her all disconsolate with old fairings
Of aconite and snowdrop! No, not here
Amid this flounce and filigree of death
Is the real transformation scene in progress,
But deep below where frost
Worrying the stiff clods unclenches their
Grip on the seed and lets our future breathe.
The Christmas Tree
Put out the lights now!
Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled
In oriole plumes of flame,
Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled
With stars and moons – the same
That yesterday hid in the spinney and had no fame
Till we put out the lights now.
Hard are the nights now:
The fields at moonrise turn to agate,
Shadows are cold as jet;
In dyke and furrow, in copse and faggot
The frost’s tooth is set;
And stars are the sparks whirled out by the north wind’s fret
On the flinty nights now.
So feast your eyes now
On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen,
And the world cannot change or chill what its mysteries mean
To your hearts and eyes now.
The vision dies now
Candle by candle: the tree that embraced it
Returns to its own kind,
To be earthed again and weather as best it
May the frost and the wind.
Children, it too had its hour – you will not mind
If it lives or dies now.
The Chrysanthemum Show
Here’s Abbey Way: here are the rooms
Where they held the chrysanthemum show –
Leaves like talons of greenfire, blooms
Of a barbarous frenzy, red, flame, bronze –
And a schoolboy walked in the furnace once,
Thirty years ago.
You might have thought, had you seen him that day
Mooching from stall to stall,
It was wasted on him – the prize array
Of flowers with their resinous, caustic tang,
Their colours that royally boomed and rang
Like gongs in the pitchpine hall.
Any tongue could scorch him; even hope tease
As if it dissembled a leer:
Like smouldering fuse, anxieties
Blindwormed his breast. How should one feel,
Consuming in youth’s slow ordeal,
What flashes from flower to flower?
Yet something did touch him then, at the quick,
Like a premature memory prising
Through flesh. Those blooms with the bonfire reek
And the flaming of ruby, copper, gold –
There boyhood’s sun foretold, retold
A full gamut of setting and rising.
Something touched him. Always the scene
Was to haunt his memory –
Not haunt – come alive there, as if what had been
But a flowery idea took flesh in the womb
Of his solitude, rayed out a rare, real bloom.
I know, for I was he.
And today, when I see chrysanthemums,
I half envy that boy
For whom they spoke as muffled drums
Darkly messaging, ‘All decays;
But youth’s brief agony can blaze
Into a posthumous joy.’
Two Songs
Written to Irish Airs
‘LOVE WAS ONCE LIGHT AS AIR’ (Air: Dermott)
Love was once light as air
Brushed over all my thoughts and themes;
Love once seemed kind as air
When the dewfall gleams.
Now he’s another thing –
Naked light, oh hard to bear,
Too much discovering
With his noonday beams.
Long had I sought for you,
Long, long by subtle masks delayed:
Fair shapes I thought were you
On my green heart played.
Now love at his height informs
All that was so vague to view,
Shall not those slighter forms
In his noon hour fade?
Fade they then fast as snow
When April brings the earth to light,
One shape – alas ’tis so –
Still lingers white:
One heart-wrung phantom still,
One I would not tell to go,
Shadows my noontime still
And haunts my night.
‘OH LIGHT WAS MY HEAD’ (Air: St. Patrick’s Day)
Oh light was my head as the seed of a thistle
And light as the mistletoe mooning an oak,
I spoke with the triton, I skimmed with the nautilus,
Dawn was immortal as love awoke.
But when a storm began to blow
My thistle was dashed, my tree laid low,
My folk of the wave went down to their deep, so I
Frown on a thistledown floating capriciously,
Scorn as mere fishes the folk of the sea,
Agree the renowned golden bough is a parasite,
Love but a gallous-eyed ghost for me.
Ah, fooled by the cock at the cool of the morning
And fooled by the fawning mirage of the day,
I say that I’m truly well rid of this featherwit –
Reason has tethered it down in clay.
But when the light begins to go,
When shadows are marching heel and toe,
When day is a heap of ashes, I know that I’ll
&n
bsp; Ride to love’s beam like a barque at her anchorage,
Glide on the languorous airs of the past,
For fast as the pride of our reason is waning,
Old follies returning grow wise at last.
Minor Tragedy
Hundreds went down to the ocean bed,
Hundreds fell from the sky,
The shades in the street thickened,
Blood stood in every eye.
Oh kiss me or I’ll die, she said,
Kiss me or I’ll die!
He took a shadow into the bed
Where she had drained him dry:
With words that buzzed like bullets
She pinned him to a lie.
Don’t kiss me or I’ll die, she said,
Don’t kiss me or I’ll die!
Thousands twined on the ocean bed,
Thousands burned in the sky:
Nursing a spent bullet
He let the world go by,
And I’ll kiss it till I die, he said,
Kiss it till I die!
On the Sea Wall
As I came to the sea wall that August day,
One out of all the bathers there
Beckoned my eye, a girl at play
With the surf-flowers. Was it the dark, dark hair
Falling Egyptian-wise, or the way
Her body curved to the spray? –
I know not. Only my heart was shaking
Within me, and then it stopped; as though
You were dead and your shape had returned to haunt me
On the very same spot where, five years ago,
You slipped from my arms and played in the breaking
Surges to tease and enchant me.
I could not call out. Had there been no more
Than those thickets of rusty wire to pen us
Apart, I’d have gone to that girl by the shore
Hoping she might be you. But between us
Lie tangled, severing, stronger far,
Barbed relics of love’s old war.
Ewig
Multitudes of corn
Shock-still in July heat,
Year upon foaming year
Of may and meadowsweet –
Soon, soon they fleet.
So many words to unsay,
So much hue and cry
After a wisp of flame,
So many deaths to die
Ere the heart runs dry.
All Gone
The sea drained off, my poverty’s uncovered –
Sand, sand, a rusted anchor, broken glass,
The listless sediment of sparkling days
When through a paradise of weed joy wavered.
The sea rolled up like a blind, oh pitiless light
Revealing, shrivelling all! Lacklustre weeds
My hours, my truth a salt-lick. Love recedes
From rippled flesh bared without appetite.
A stranded time, neap and annihilation
Of spirit. Gasping on the inglorious rock,
I pray the sea return, even though its calm
Be treachery, its virtue a delusion.
Put forth upon my sands, whether to mock,
Revive or drown, a liberating arm!
The Neurotic
The spring came round, and still he was not dead.
Skin of the earth deliciously powdered
With buttercups and daisies – oh, Proserpina
Refreshed by sleep, wild-cherry-garlanded
And laughing in the sallies of the willow-wren!
With lambs and lilies spring came round again.
Who would suppose, seeing him walk the meadows,
He walks a treadmill there, grinding himself
To powder, dust to greyer dust, or treads
An invisible causeway lipped by chuckling shadows?
Take his arm if you like, you’ll not come near him.
His mouth is an ill-stitched wound opening: hear him.
‘I will not lift mine eyes unto the hills
For there white lambs nuzzle and creep like maggots.
I will not breathe the lilies of the valley
For through their scent a chambered corpse exhales.
If a petal floats to earth, I am oppressed.
The grassblades twist, twist deep in my breast.’
The night came on, and he was still alive.
Lighted tanks of streets a-swarm with denizens
Darting to trysts, sauntering to parties.
How all the heart-fires twinkle! Yes, they thrive
In the large illusion of freedom, in love’s net
Where even the murderer can act and the judge regret.
This man who turns a phrase and twiddles a glass
Seems far from that pale muttering magician
Pent in a vicious circle of dilemmas.
But could you lift his blue, thick gaze and pass
Behind, you would walk a stage where endlessly
Phantoms rehearse unactable tragedy.
‘In free air captive, in full day benighted,
I am as one for ever out of his element
Transparently enwombed, who from a bathysphere
Observes, wistful, amazed, but more affrighted,
Gay fluent forms of life weaving around,
And dares not break the bubble and be drowned.’
His doomsdays crawled like lava, till at length
All impulse clogged, the last green lung consumed,
Each onward step required the sweat of nightmare,
Each human act a superhuman strength …
And the guillemot, clotted with oil, droops her head.
And the mouse between the elastic paws shams dead.
Death mask of a genius unborn:
Tragic prince of a rejected play:
Soul of suffering that bequeathed no myth:
A dark tower and a never-sounded horn. –
Call him what we will, words cannot ennoble
This Atlas who fell down under a bubble.
Two Travellers
One of us in the compartment stares
Out of his window the whole day long
With attentive mien, as if he knows
There is hid in the journeying scene a song
To recall or compose
From snatches of vision, hints of vanishing airs.
He’ll mark the couched hares
In grass whereover the lapwing reel and twist:
He notes how the shockheaded sunflowers climb
Like boys on the wire by the railway line;
And for him those morning rivers are love-in-a-mist,
And the chimneystacks prayers.
The other is plainly a man of affairs,
A seasoned commuter. His looks assert,
As he opens a brief-case intent on perusing
Facts and figures, he’d never divert
With profitless musing
The longest journey, or notice the dress it wears.
Little he cares
For the coloured drift of his passage: no, not a thing
Values in all that is hurrying past,
Though dimly he senses from first to last
How flaps and waves the smoke of his travelling
At the window-squares.
One is preoccupied, one just stares,
While the whale-ribbed terminus nears apace
Where passengers all must change, and under
Its arch triumphal quickly disperse.
So you may wonder,
Watching these two whom the train indifferently bears,
What each of them shares
With his fellow-traveller, and which is making the best of it,
And whether this or the other one
Will be justified when the journey’s done,
And if either may carry on some reward or regret for it
Whither he fares.
Seen From The Train
Somewhere between Crewkerne
Just as the crinkled hills unroll
To the plain. A church on a small green knoll –
A limestone church,
And above the church
Cedar boughs stretched like hands that yearn
To protect or to bless. The whole
Stood up, antique and clear
As a cameo, from the vale. I swear
It was not a dream. Twice, thrice had I found it
Chancing to look as my train wheeled round it.
But this time I passed,
Though I gazed as I passed
All the way down the valley, that knoll was not there,
Nor the church, nor the trees it mounded.
What came between to unsight me?…
But suppose, only suppose there might be
A secret look in a landscape’s eye
Following you as you hasten by,
And you have your chance –
Two or three chances
At most – to hold and interpret it rightly,
Or it is gone for aye.
There was a time when men
Would have called it a vision, said that sin
Had blinded me since to a heavenly fact.
Well, I have neither invoked nor faked
Any church in the air,
And little I care
Whether or no I shall see it again.
But blindly my heart is racked
When I think how, not twice or thrice,
But year after year in another’s eyes
I have caught the look that I missed today
Of the church, the knoll, the cedars – a ray
Of the faith, too, they stood for,
The hope they were food for,
The love they prayed for, facts beyond price –
And turned my eyes away.
Outside and In
How pretty it looks, thought a passer-by –
That cyclamen on her windowsill:
Flowers flushed like the butterfly kisses of sleep that illumine
A child’s alabaster cheek.
She who set it there must have warm hopes to bloom in,
So happy it looks, thought the passer-by,
On the newcomer’s windowsill.
Complete Poems Page 29