O passer-by, can you not feel my glances
Beating against the pane,
Fluttering like a moth shut off from the glades of musk
And the moonlit dances?
O passer-by, can you not see it plain?
She comes not to meet us, muttered the neighbours
Peering in from the stony street:
But look at her parlour, all lighted and spider-spruce!
How saucily wink the brasses!
So garnished a room never tokens a pure recluse.
Let us hope she’ll bring, said the gossiping neighbours,
No scandal upon our street.
Ah, what do you know of the crippled heart, my neighbours,
That shrinks from the light and the press?
My winking brass, all the fine repetitive web
Of my house-proud labours –
Even I dare not know them for signals of distress.
A happy release, murmured the living
As they carried at last out into the world
Her body, light as a bird’s that has died of hunger
Beneath some warped hedgerow:
Though it was her own doing if all humanity shunned her,
Yet a happy release to be done with living
An outcast from the world.
O living hearts, you are wrong once more. Unassuaged
Even now are my pangs, my fears.
I starved amid plenty. Death seemed no deliverance
To flesh that was caged,
O living hearts, in a ghost these fifty years.
The Misfit
At the training depot that first morning
When the west-country draft came forth on parade –
Mechanics, labourers, men of trade
Herded with shouts like boneheaded cattle –
One stood out from the maul
Who least of them all
Looked metal for killing or meat for the butchery blade.
He wore a long black cutaway coat
Which should have been walking by blackthorn-fleeced
Hedges to church; and good as a feast
Was the spare, wild face much weather had flavoured.
A shepherd or ploughman
I thought, or a cowman –
One with a velvet hand for all manner of beast.
I cannot forget how he stood, bemused,
With the meek eye of a driven thing:
But a solitude old as a cromlech ring
Was around him; a freeborn air of the downland,
A peace of deep combes
No world-anger consumes
Marked him off from the herd to be branded for soldiering.
I saw him not after. Is he now buried
Far from pastures buttercup-strewed,
Or tending his beasts again with the same rude
Rightness of instinct which then had brought him
So quaintly dressed
In his Sunday best
For the first step along the Calvary road?
In the Shelter
In a shelter one night, when death was taking the air
Outside, I saw her, seated apart – a child
Nursing her doll, to one man’s vision enisled
With radiance which might have shamed even death to its lair.
Then I thought of our Christmas roses at home – the dark
Lanterns comforting us a winter through
With the same dusky flush, the same bold spark
Of confidence, O sheltering child, as you.
Genius could never paint the maternal pose
More deftly than accident had roughed it there,
Setting amidst our terrors, against the glare
Of unshaded bulb and whitewashed brick, that rose.
Instinct was hers, and an earthquake hour revealed it
In flesh – the meek-laid lashes, the glint in the eye
Defying wrath and reason, the arms that shielded
A plaster doll from an erupting sky.
No argument for living could long sustain
These ills: it needs a faithful eye, to have seen all
Love in the droop of a lash and tell it eternal
By one pure bead of its dew-dissolving chain.
Dear sheltering child, if again misgivings grieve me
That love is only a respite, an opal bloom
Upon our snow-set fields, come back to revive me
Cradling your spark through blizzard, drift and tomb.
Two Translations
THE FOOTSTEPS
(from Paul Valéry)
Born of my voiceless time, your steps
Slowly, ecstatically advance:
Toward my expectation’s bed
They moved in a hushed, ice-clear trance.
Pure being, shadow-shape divine –
Your step deliberate, how sweet!
God! – every gift I have imagined
Comes to me on those naked feet.
If so it be your offered mouth
Is shaped already to appease
That which occupies my thought
With the live substance of a kiss,
Oh hasten not this loving act,
Rapture where self and not-self meet:
My life has been the awaiting you,
Your footfall was my own heart’s beat.
THE GRAVEYARD BY THE SEA1
(from Paul Valéry)
This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame –
That sea for ever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time’s air is sparkling, dream is certainty –
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.
Sure treasure, simple shrine to intelligence,
Palpable calm, visible reticence,
Proud-lidded water, Eye wherein there wells
Under a film of fire such depth of sleep –
O silence!… Mansion in my soul, you slope
Of gold, roof of a myriad golden tiles.
Temple of time, within a brief sigh bounded,
To this rare height inured I climb, surrounded
By the horizons of a sea-girt eye.
And, like my supreme offering to the gods,
That peaceful coruscation only breeds
A loftier indifference on the sky.
Even as a fruit’s absorbed in the enjoying,
Even as within the mouth its body dying
Changes into delight through dissolution,
So to my melted soul the heavens declare
All bounds transfigured into a boundless air,
And I breathe now my future’s emanation.
Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!
After such arrogance, after so much strange
Idleness – strange, yet full of potency –
I am all open to these shining spaces;
Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes,
Ghosting along – a ghost subduing me.
My soul laid bare to your midsummer fire,
O just, impartial light whom I admire,
Whose arms are merciless, you have I stayed
And give back, pure, to your original place.
Look at yourself … But to give light implies
No less a sombre moiety of shade.
Oh, for myself alone, mine, deep within
At the heart’s quick, the poem’s fount, between
The void and its pure issue, I beseech
The intimations of my secret power.
O bitter, dark an
d echoing reservoir
Speaking of depths always beyond my reach.
But know you – feigning prisoner of the boughs,
Gulf which eats up their slender prison-bars,
Secret which dazzles though mine eyes are closed –
What body drags me to its lingering end,
What mind draws it to this bone-peopled ground?
A star broods there on all that I have lost.
Closed, hallowed, full of insubstantial fire,
Morsel of earth to heaven’s light given o’er –
This plot, ruled by its flambeaux, pleases me –
A place all gold, stone and dark wood, where shudders
So much marble above so many shadows:
And on my tombs, asleep, the faithful sea.
Keep off the idolaters, bright watch-dog, while –
A solitary with the shepherd’s smile –
I pasture long my sheep, my mysteries,
My snow-white flock of undisturbéd graves!
Drive far away from here the careful doves,
The vain daydreams, the angels’ questioning eyes!
Now present here, the future takes its time.
The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
To some ineffably rarefied solution …
Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.
The dead lie easy, hidden in earth where they
Are warmed and have their mysteries burnt away.
Motionless noon, noon aloft in the blue
Broods on itself – a self-sufficient theme.
O rounded dome and perfect diadem,
I am what’s changing secretly in you.
I am the only medium for your fears.
My penitence, my doubts, my baulked desires –
These are the flaw within your diamond pride …
But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble,
Under the roots of trees a shadow people
Has slowly now come over to your side.
To an impervious nothingness they’re thinned,
For the red clay has swallowed the white kind;
Into the flowers that gift of life has passed.
Where are the dead? – their homely turns of speech,
The personal grace, the soul informing each?
Grubs thread their way where tears were once composed.
The bird-sharp cries of girls whom love is teasing,
The eyes, the teeth, the eyelids moistly closing,
The pretty breast that gambles with the flame,
The crimson blood shining when lips are yielded,
The last gift, and the fingers that would shield it –
All go to earth, go back into the game.
And you, great soul, is there yet hope in you
To find some dream without the lying hue
That gold or wave offers to fleshy eyes?
Will you be singing still when you’re thin air?
All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
Am I. Divine impatience also dies.
Lean immortality, all crêpe and gold,
Laurelled consoler frightening to behold,
Death is a womb, a mother’s breast, you feign –
The fine illusion, oh the pious trick!
Who does not know them, and is not made sick –
That empty skull, that everlasting grin?
Ancestors deep down there, O derelict heads
Whom such a weight of spaded earth o’erspreads,
Who are the earth, in whom our steps are lost,
The real flesh-eater, worm unanswerable
Is not for you that sleep under the table:
Life is his meat, and I am still his host.
‘Love’, shall we call him? ‘Hatred of self’, maybe?
His secret tooth is so intimate with me
That any name would suit him well enough,
Enough that he can see, will, daydream, touch –
My flesh delights him, even upon my couch
I live but as a morsel of his life.
Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno,
Have you then pierced me with your feathered arrow
That hums and flies, yet does not fly! The sounding
Shaft gives me life, the arrow kills. Oh, sun! –
Oh, what a tortoise-shadow to outrun
My soul, Achilles’ giant stride left standing!
No, no! Arise! The future years unfold.
Shatter, O body, meditation’s mould!
And, O my breast, drink in the wind’s reviving!
A freshness, exhalation of the sea,
Restores my soul … Salt-breathing potency!
Let’s run at the waves and be hurled back to living!
Yes, mighty sea with such wild frenzies gifted
(The panther skin and the rent chlamys), sifted
All over with sun-images that glisten,
Creature supreme, drunk on your own blue flesh,
Who in a tumult like the deepest hush
Bite at your sequin-glittering tail – yes, listen!
The wind is rising!… We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
1948
1 The graveyard is at Sète (Hérault)
AN ITALIAN VISIT1
1 This poem was written in 1948–49 except for Part Five. It was eventually published in 1953. Rosamond Lehmann, with whom CDL had had a long liaison until 1949, laid an embargo on its publication, which she lifted in 1953.
… an Italian visit is a voyage of discovery, not only of scenes and cities, but also of the latent faculties of the traveller’s heart and mind.
JASPER MORE: The Land of Italy
TO HENRY REED
PART ONE
Dialogue at the Airport
TOM So here we are, we three, bound on a new experience.
DICK Three persons in one man, bound for the Eternal City.
HARRY We’re not as young as we were, but Italy’s some years older.
TOM Listen, I don’t much fancy antiques myself; we’ve had some.
Ruins fetch nothing today. The Forum, the Farringdon Market,
The Colosseum, Hiroshima – death’s death, however you look at it,
However composed the remains. Time enough for such bric-à-brac when
My silver cord is loosed, my arches are fallen. Oh no, if
It’s ruins you’re after, we’ll soon be parting company.
DICK Wait!
There are ruins and ruins. Some mature their memories, feed them
On seeding love-spores blown from age to age; or it may be
Their ghosts fly back like a silver skein of doves when the crash
Of the fall that tumbled them out has died away. It is these ghosts
I’m going to look for.
HARRY You think so. But I don’t think you will find them.
The only ghosts I believe in are the dangerous self-detachments
We leave behind in places captured or captivating:
Garrisons, call them, or hostages – wiped out soon enough, most of them,
Yet here and there is a hardier self lives on to haunt us
With the old riddle, what is the phantom, what the real.
Temple, aqueduct, belvedere, projects fulfilled or abandoned –
Multiform are the ruins, but the ghosts are always the same ghost.
TOM We’d better leave you behind, then, to the desk, the queue and the rush-hour,
Men and women straphanging like clusters of bats, the bodies
That jostle and never touch, the eyes without spe
culation
But for tomorrow’s headline or deadline; leave you behind
With all the white-faced addicts of a patent, cellophaned future.
London’s the place for ghosts, if ghosts are invalid monads.
And for God’s sake, Harry, don’t tell us a crowd is always the same crowd.
DICK What are we leaving behind, though? The identity cards that inform us
Not who we are or might be, but how we are interchangeable;
The season tickets that rattle us back and forth in a groove from
Centre to circumference, from dust to dust; the ration books
Entitling each to his cut of the communal mess and heartburn.
The fog, the slush, the slogans.
HARRY Italy will provide
The same slogans, no doubt, but at least in another language.
TOM No doubt in another language escapism may sound more attractive.
DICK Well, it’s a holiday, isn’t it? Even Harry can take a holiday.
HARRY I have omitted to pack my Kierkegaard, Marx and Groddeck.
My angst I can only hope they will confiscate at the Customs.
TOM I am too old to suppose new facts give new sensations.
Still, like shadows, our senses revive on a shot of sunshine.
One would go far to feel their primitive dance again
DICK Far from the heart’s last ditch, the stand on private relationships
HARRY Far from the mind’s closed shop and the intellectual weeklies.
TOM So here we are, we three, off for a fortnight’s holiday,
Our fingers already reaching out to the treat before us
DICK Like a child’s on Christmas Eve who, visioning the dear morrow
Spangled with expectation, would whip time faster and faster,
And at last whips himself into a humming sleep.
HARRY Travel ought to be sleep – I mean, we should move oblivious
To the interspace between here and there. We’ve only a limited
Stock of attention, and this we had better not spend on wayside
Sirens who’d make us break our journey or regret not breaking it.
TOM If he means what I think he means, I am not to look out of the window.
DICK There’s something in what he says, though the motive’s unsound, as usual.
Could the zone between here and there be instead a kind of hiatus
Complete Poems Page 30