The new narcissism of the Also-Ran.
As many men, so many attitudes
Before the artifact. One writhes: one broods:
One preens the ego and one curls the lip:
One turns to stone, one to adjacent nudes.
Each man must seek his own. What do I seek?
Not the sole rights required by snob and freak,
The scholar’s or the moralist’s reward,
Not even a connoisseur’s eye for technique;
But that on me some long-dead master may
Dart the live, intimate, unblinding ray
Which means one more spring of the selfhood tapped,
One tribute more to love wrung from my clay.
And if I miss that radiance where it flies,
Something is gained in the mere exercise
Of strenuous submission, the attempt
To lose and find oneself through others’ eyes.
Singing Children: Luca Delia Robbia
(T. H.)
I see you, angels with choirboy faces,
Trilling it from the museum wall
As once, decani or cantoris,
You sang in a carved oak stall,
Nor deemed any final bar to such time-honoured carollings
E’er could befall.
I too gave tongue in my piping youth-days,
Yea, took like a bird to crotchet and clef,
Antheming out with a will the Old Hundredth,
Salem, or Bunnett in F.,
Unreckoning even as you if the Primal Sapience
Be deaf, stone-deaf.
Many a matins cheerfully droned I
To the harmonium’s clacking wheeze,
Fidgeted much through prayer and sermon
While errant bumblebees
Drummed on the ivied window, veering my thoughts to
Alfresco glees.
But voices break – aye, and more than voices;
The heart for hymn tune and haytime goes.
Dear Duomo choristers, chirping for ever
In jaunty, angelic pose,
Would I had sung my last ere joy-throbs dwindled
Or wan faith froze!
Judith and Holofernes: Donatello
(W. B. Y.)
… Next, a rich widow woman comes to mind
Who, when her folk were starving, dined and wined
Alone with Holofernes, until he
Grew rabid for her flesh. And presently,
Matching deceit with bitterer deceit,
She had struck off that tipsy captain’s head
Upon the still untousled bed,
And borne it homeward in a bag of meat.
Old Donatello thought it out in bronze –
The wrists trailing, numb as it were from bonds;
The fuddled trunk lugged upright by a loop
Of hair; the falcon-falchion poised to stoop.
Tyrant, and tyrant’s man, maybe:
Nevertheless, the sculptural face presents
A victim’s irony, the mild innocence
Of passionate men whom passion has set free.
And she, the people’s saviour, the patriot?
She towers, mouth brooding, eyes averted, not
In womanly compunction but her need
To chew and savour a vindictive deed;
Or so I construe it. One thing’s sure –
Let a man get what issue he has earned,
Where death beds or love tussles are concerned
Woman’s the single-minded connoisseur.
A political woman is an atrocious thing.
Come what may, she will have her fling
In flesh and blood. Her heady draughts cajole
A man only to cheat him, body or soul.
Judith took great Holofernes in.
For all the silver lamps that went before,
He made but a remnant on a knacker’s floor:
She lives, the brazen kind of heroine.
Annunciation: Leonardo
(R. F.)
There was never a morning quite so tremendous again.
The birth, you think? I’m not for setting great store
By birth. Births aren’t beginnings. And anyway
She only wanted to sleep off the pain
Which had made her a beast among beasts on the cow-house floor.
Shepherds and magnates tiptoeing through the hay
(You get all kinds at an inn, she drowsily thought),
Even the babe – they were part of a snowdrift trance,
Almost unreal. He was to prove a good son
In his way, though his way was beyond her. Whatever he sought
When he left home and led his friends such a dance,
He did not forget her as other boys might have done.
Her morning of mornings was when one flew to bring
Some news that changed her cottage into a queen’s
Palace; the table she worked at shone like gold,
And in the orchard it is suddenly spring,
All bird and blossom and fresh-painted green.
What was it the grand visitor foretold
Which made earth heaven for a village Mary?
He was saying something about a Saviour Prince,
But she only heard him say, ‘You will bear a child’,
And that was why the spring came. Angels carry
Such tidings often enough, but never since
To one who in such blissful ignorance smiled.
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda: Piero di Cosimo
(W. H. A.)
It is all there. The victim broods,
Her friends take up the attitudes
Right for disaster;
The winsome rescuer draws his sword,
While from the svelte, impassive fjord
Breaches terrific, dense and bored
The usual monster.
When gilt-edged hopes are selling short,
Virtue’s devalued, and the swart
Avenger rises,
We know there’ll always be those two
Strolling away without a clue,
Discussing earnestly the view
Or fat-stock prices.
To either hand the crisis throws
Its human quirks and gestures. Those
Are not essential.
Look rather at the oafish Dread,
The Cloud-man come to strike it dead,
Armed with a sword and gorgon’s head –
Magic’s credentials.
White on the rocks, Andromeda.
Mother had presumed too far.
The deep lost patience.
The nightmare ground its teeth. The saviour
Went in. A winning hit. All over.
Parents and friends stood round to offer
Congratulations.
But when the vast delusions break
Upon you from the central lake,
You’ll be less lucky.
I’d not advise you to believe
There’s a slick op. to end your grief
Or any nick-of-time reprieve.
For you, unlikely.
Boy with Dolphin: Verrocchio
(D.T.)
At the crack of spring on the tail of the cold,
When foam whipped over the apple tree aisles
And the grape skin sea swelled and the weltering capes were bold,
I went to school with a glee of dolphins
Bowling their hoops round the brine tongued isles
And singing their scales were tipped by a sun always revolving.
Oh truant I was and trident and first
Lord of fishes, bearleading all tritons
In the swim of my blood before the foam brewed bubble burst.
And as I was nursling to mermaids, my sun
Cooed through their nestling grottoes a cadence
Of thrummed and choral reefs for the whale sounded gulfs to hum.
Those were the gambolling days I
led
Leviathan a dance in my sea urchin glee
Till the lurching waves shoaled out with a school of wishes. My head
Was shells and ringing, my shoulders broke
Into a spray of wings. But the sea
Ran dry between two bars of foam, and the fine folk
In the temple of fins were flailed away
And the weed fell flat and the mermilk curdled,
And buoyant no more to bliss are the miles where alone I play
My running games that the waves once aisled,
With a doll of a lithe dead dolphin saddled,
And cold as the back of spring is my tale of the applefroth isles.
PART SIX
Elegy Before Death: At Settignano
(TO R. N. L.)
… for be it never so derke
Me thinketh I see hir ever mo.
CHAUCER
Come to the orangery. Sit down awhile.
The sun is setting: the veranda frames
An illuminated leaf of Italy.
Gold and green and blue, stroke upon stroke,
Seem to tell what nature and man could make of it
If only their marriage were made in heaven. But see,
Even as we hold the picture,
The colours are fading already, the lines collapsing
Fainting into the dream they will soon be.
Again? Again we are baffled who have sought
So long in a melting Now the formula
Of Always. There is no fast dye. Always! –
That is the word the sirens sing
On bone island. Oh stop your ears, and stop
All this vain peering through the haze,
The fortunate haze wherein we change and ripen,
And never mind for what. Let us even embrace
The shadows wheeling away our windfall days.
Again again again, the frogs are screeling
Down by the lilypond. Listen! I’ll echo them –
Gain gain gain … Could we compel
One grain of one vanishing moment to deliver
Its golden ghost, loss would be gain
And Love step naked from illusion’s shell.
Did we but dare to see it,
All things to us, you and I to each other,
Stand in this naked potency of farewell.
The villa was built for permanence. Man laid down
Like wine his heart, planted young trees, young pictures,
Young thoughts to ripen for an heir.
Look how these avenues take the long view
Of things ephemeral! With what aplomb
The statues greet us at the grassy stair!
Time on the sundial was a snail’s migration
Over a world of warmth, and each day passing
Left on the fertile heart another layer.
The continuity they took for granted
We wistfully glamourize. So life’s devalued:
Worth not a rhyme
These statues, groves, books, bibelots, masterpieces,
If we have used them only to grout a shaken
Confidence or stop up the gaps of time.
We must ride the flood, or go under
With all our works, to emerge, when it recedes,
Derelicts sluggish from the dishonouring slime.
Our sun is setting. Terrestrial planes shift
And slide towards dissolution, the terraced gardens
Quaver like waves, and in the garden urn
Geraniums go ashen. Now are we tempted, each
To yearn that his struggling counterpoint, carried away
Drowned by the flood’s finale, shall return
To silence. Why do we trouble
A master theme with cadenzas
That ring out, fade out over its fathomless unconcern?
Love, more than our holidays are numbered.
Not one day but a whole life is drained off
Through this pinprick of doubt into the dark.
Rhadamanthine moment! Shall we be judged
Self-traitors? Now is a chance to make our flux
Stand and deliver its holy spark, –
Now, when the tears rise and the levees crumble,
To tap the potency of farewell.
What ark is there but love? Let us embark.
A weeping firmament, a sac of waters,
A passive chaos – time without wind or tide,
Where on brief motiveless eddy seethe
Lost faces, furniture, animals, oblivion’s litter –
Envelop me, just as the incipient poem
Is globed in nescience, and beneath
A heart purged of all but memory, grows.
No landfall yet? No rift in the film?… I send you
My dove into the future, to your death.
* * *
A dove went forth: flits back a ghost to me,
Image of her I imagine lost to me,
Up the road through Fiesole we first travelled on
Was it a week or thirty years ago?
Time vanishes now like a mirage of water,
Touched by her feet returning whence she had gone,
Touched by the tones that darkly appeal to me,
The memories that make her shade as real to me
As all the millions breathing under the upright sun.
We are back at the first time we went abroad together.
Homing to this garden with a love-sure bent
Her phantom has come. Now hand in hand we stray
Through a long-ago morning mounting from a lather
Of azaleas and dizzy with the lemon blossom’s scent.
And I seem to hear her murmur in the old romantic way,
‘So blissfully, rosily our twin hearts burn here,
‘This vernal time, whenever we return here,
‘To haunter and haunted will be but yesterday.’
I follow her wraith down the terraced gardens
Through a dawn of nightingales, a murmurous siesta,
By leaf-green frogs on lily leaves screeling again
Towards eve. Is it dark or light? Fireflies glister
Across my noon, and nightlong the cicadas
Whir like a mechanical arm scratching in the brain.
All yesterday’s children who fleetingly caressed her
Break ranks, break time, once more to join and part us:
I alone, who possessed her, feel the drag of time’s harsh chain.
‘Ah, you,’ she whispers; ‘are you still harping
‘On mortal delusion? still the too much hoping
‘Who needs only plant an acorn to dream a dryad’s kiss?
‘Still the doubtful one who, when she came to you
‘Out of the rough rind, a naked flame for you,
‘Fancied some knot or flaw in love, something amiss?’
Yes, such I am. But since I have found her
A revenant so fleshed in my memories, I wonder
Is she the real one and am I a wisp from the abyss.
Dare I follow her through the wood of obscurity –
This ilex grove where shades are lost in shade?
Not a gleam here, nothing differs, nothing sings, nothing grows,
For the trees are columns which ebonly support
A crypt of hollow silence, a subliminal thought,
A theorem proving the maggot equivalent to the rose.
Undiminished she moves here, shines, and will not fade.
Death, what had she to do with your futile purity,
The dogma of bone that on rare and common you would impose?
Her orbit clasped and enhanced in its diadem
All creatures. Once on a living night
When cypresses jetted like fountains of wine-warm air
Bubbling with fireflies, we going outside
In the palpitating dark to admire them,
One of the fireflies pinned itself to her hair;
And
its throbbings, I thought, had a tenderer light
As if some glimmering of love inspired them,
As if her luminous heart was beating there.
Ah, could I make you see this subtle ghost of mine,
Delicate as a whorled shell that whispers to the tide,
Moving with a wavering watersilk grace,
Anemone-fingered, coral-tinted, under whose crystalline
Calm such naiads, angel fish and monsters sleep or slide;
If you could see her as she flows to me apace
Through waves through walls through time’s fine mesh magically drawn,
You would say, this was surely the last daughter of the foam-born,
One whom no age to come will ever replace.
Eve’s last fainting rose cloud; mornings that restored her
With orange tree, lemon tree, lotus, bougainvillea:
The milk-white snake uncoiling and the flute’s light-fingered charm:
Breast of consolation, tongue of tried acquaintance:
A tranquil mien, but under it the nervous marauder
Slithering from covert, a catspaw from a calm:
Heaven’s city adored in the palm of a pictured saint:
My vision’s ara coeli, my lust’s familiar,
All hours, moods, shapes, desires that yield, elude, disarm –
All woman she was. Brutalizing, humanizing,
Pure flame, lewd earth was she, imperative as air
And weak as water, yes all women to me.
To the rest, one of many, though they felt how she was rare
In sympathy and tasted in her warm words a sweetness
Of life that has ripened on the sunny side of the tree.
To herself a darker story, as she called her past to witness –
A heart much bruised, how often, how stormily surmising
Some chasmal flaw divided it from whole felicity.
So I bless the villa on the hill above Fiesole,
For here and now was flawless, and the past could not encroach
On its charmed circle to menace or to taunt her.
Oh, time that clung round her in unfading drapery,
Oh, land she wore like an enamelled brooch,
It was for remembrance you thus adorned her!
Complete Poems Page 34