In your eyes. When you looked at me with love,
Were you only seeing a way to it through me?
I am a girl, unversed in the logic of heroes –
But why bring me so far, rescuing me
From my father’s rage, to leave me on this island
For the wild beasts? leave me like a forgotten
Parcel, or a piece of litter you had no time
To bury when you had used it under the myrtle?
Already a star shows. It is a day, an age
Since we came here. Oh, solitude’s the place
Where time congeals and memories run wild.
I put the ball of thread into your hands.
It is my own heartstrings I am paying out
As you go down the tunnel. I live with you
Through the whole echoing labyrinth, and die
At each blind corner. Now you have come back with
A bloody sword, a conqueror’s tired smile.
For you, the accustomed victory: for me,
Exultation, miracle, consummation.
Embracing you, the steel between us, I took
That blood upon myself, sealing our bond
Irrevocably with a smear of blood,
Forgetting that a curse lifted falls elsewhere
And weighs the heavier, forgetting whose blood it was.
Did you hear my mother’s willing, harsh outcry
Under the bull, last night? and shrink from your
Accomplice in the hot act, remembering
Whose daughter she is and whose unnatural son
She helped you butcher in the labyrinth?
I was a royal child, delicately nurtured,
Not to be told what happened once a year
Beneath the mosaic floor, while the court musicians
Played louder and my father’s face went still
As a bird listening for worms. But the maids gossiped;
And one day, when I was older, he explained –
Something about war crimes, lawful deterrents,
Just compensation for a proved atrocity.
It seemed nothing to do with flesh and blood,
The way he talked. Men have this knack for embalming
And burying outraged flesh in sleek abstractions.
Have you, too, found already a form of words
To legitimize the murdering of our love?
Ah well, I was not guiltless – never a thought for
The writhing give-and-take of those reparations
Until, with the last consignment of living meat
To be fed to the man-bull in the maze, you came.
You with the lion look among that huddle
Of shivering whelps – I watched you from the gate-tower
And trembled, not in pity, but afraid
For my own world’s foundations. When our hands
Touched at the State Reception, I knew myself
A traitor, wishing that world away, and found
My woman’s heart – sly, timorous, dangerous creature,
Docile but to the regent of her blood,
Despising the complexities men build
To cage or to hush up the brute within.
What were parents and kingdom then? or that
Poor muzzled freak in the labyrinth, my brother?
– Forgotten all. Forgetfulness, they say,
Is the gods’ timeliest blessing or heaviest curse.
A bundle of fear and shame, too much remembering,
I lie, alone, upon this haunted isle.
A victim for a victim is the law.
Is there no champion strong enough to break
That iron succession? Listen! What is this word
The bushes are whispering to the offshore breeze?
‘Forget’? No. Tell me again. ‘Forgive.’ A soft word.
I’ll try it on my tongue. Forgive. Forgive …
How strangely it lightens a bedevilled heart!
Come out of the thorn thicket, you, my brother,
My brother’s ghost! Forgive the clue, the sword!
Forgive my fear of you! Dead, piteous monster,
You did not will the hungry maze, the horns,
The slaughter of the innocents. Come, lay
Your muzzle on my forsaken breast, and let us
Comfort each other. There shall be no more blood,
No more blood. Our lonely isle expands
Into a legend where all can dream away
Their crimes and wounds, all victims learn from us
How to redeem the Will that made them so.
So on the dark shore, between death and birth,
Clasping a ghost for comfort, the girl slept.
Gently the night breeze bore across that firth
Her last, relinquishing sob: like tears unwept,
Windflowers trembled in the eye of night
Under the myrtle. Absence whirred no more
Within her dreamless head, no victim cried
Revenge, no brute fawned on its conqueror.
At dawn, far off, another promise broken,
The hero’s black sail brought his father death.
But on that island a pale girl, awoken
By more than sunlight, drew her quick, first breath
Of immortality, seeing the god bend down
And offer a hoop of stars, her bridal crown.
PART TWO
A Riddle
What is this bird
Who purloins the gold from your teeth, the pearls from your lips
To star in its nest
With any old garish domestic scraps and strips?
Who thieves for its hoard
Like a jackdaw, but builds as trig and snug as the goldcrest?
Who stabs her own breast
To nurture the nestlings? who fetches them worms in his beak
Out of sweet lawn or carrion?
What is this anomalous creature at once unique
As the phoenix chaste,
Faithful as bullfinch, immoral and many as sparrows?
A starling for fun,
For sorrow a nightingale; the golden oriole
Seen through umbrageous
Thickets; the lark which a clear sky swallows up whole:
This manifold one
Flies higher than rocketing hope, sings best in a cage.
Seasonable Thoughts for Intellectuals
(at Portland Bill, 1949)
Cold chisels of wind, ice-age-edged,
Hammered hard at the marble block of
This mutilated island. Wind like a wedge
Splitting the cross-grained, bitter sea.
What a pity no artist or master mason
Aims the blows blind Nature lays on!
Flint flakes of a wintry sea
Shaling off the horizon
In endless, anonymous, regimental order.
Fish or fowl should laugh to see
Such penitential hordes of water.
Not so merrily laugh we.
A shag, wave-hopping in emblematic flight
Across that molten iron, seems
Less a bird than the shadow of some bird above,
So invulnerably it skims.
But there’s no sun, and Neptune’s unreflective,
And anyway, who wants a fowl’s directive?…
O sea, with your wolverine running,
Your slavering over the land’s end,
Great waves gulping in granite pot-holes,
Smacking your lips at the rocks you’d devour,
Belching and belly-rumbling in caves,
Sucking your teeth on the shingle! –
How sad to think that, before
You’ve more than nibbled a trillionth of the meal,
A piece of jelly which came from your maw
Many aeons ago, and contracted a soul,
May atomize earth and himself and you –
Yes, blow the whole bloody issue back into the blue.<
br />
The Committee
So the committee met again, and again
Nailed themselves to the never-much-altered agenda,
Making their points as to the manner born,
Hammering them home with the skill of long practice.
These men and women are certainly representative
Of every interest concerned. For example, A. wears
Integrity like a sheriff’s badge, while B.
Can grind an axe on either side of a question:
C. happens to have the facts, D. a vocation
For interpreting facts to the greater glory of Dogma:
E. is pompously charming, diffidently earnest,
F. is the acid-drop, the self-patented catalyst.
Our chairman’s a prince of procedure, in temporizing
Power a Proteus, and adept in seeming to follow
Where actually he leads – as indeed he must be,
Or the rest would have torn him to pieces a long time ago.
Yet all, in a curious way, are public-spirited,
Groping with their ad hoc decisions to find
The missing, presumed omnipotent, directive.
Idly the sun tracing upon their papers
Doodles of plane-leaf shadows and rubbing them out:
The buzz of flies, the gen of the breeze, the river
Endlessly stropping its tides against the embankment:
Seasons revolving with colours like stage armies,
Years going west along the one-way street –
All these they ignore, whose session or obsession
Must do with means, not ends. But who called this meeting
Of irreconcilables? Will they work out some positive
Policy, something more than a modus vivendi?
Or be adjourned, sine die, their task half done?
So the committee, as usual, reached a compromise –
If reach is the word, denoting, as it ought to,
A destination (though why should destiny not
Favour a compromise, which is only the marriage
For better or worse between two or more incompatibles,
Like any marriage of minds?) and left the table,
There being no further business for today.
And the silent secretary wrote up the minutes,
Putting the leaves in order. For what? the eye
Of higher authority? or the seal of the dust?
Or again, to be dispersed irreparably
When the hinge turns and a brusque new life blows in?
And I regret another afternoon wasted,
And wearily think there is something to be said
For the methods of the dictatorships – I who shall waste
Even the last drops of twilight in self-pity
That I should have to be chairman, secretary,
And all the committee, all the one-man committee.
The Wrong Road
There was no precise point at which to say
‘I am on the wrong road’. So well he knew
Where he wanted to go, he had walked in a dream
Never dreaming he could lose his way.
Besides, for such travellers it’s all but true
That up to a point any road will do
As well as another – so why not walk
Straight on? The trouble is, after this point
There’s no turning back, not even a fork;
And you never can see that point until
After you have passed it. And when you know
For certain you are lost, there’s nothing to do
But go on walking your road, although
You walk in a nightmare now, not a dream.
But are there no danger-signs? Couldn’t he see
Something strange about the landscape to show
That he was near where he should not be?
Rather the opposite – perhaps the view
Gave him a too familiar look
And made him feel at home where he had no right
Of way. But when you have gone so far,
A landscape says less than it used to do
And nothing seems very strange. He might
Have noticed how, mile after mile, this road
Made easier walking – noticed a lack
Of grit and gradient; there was a clue.
Ah yes, if only he had listened to his feet!
But, as I told you, he walked in a dream.
You can argue it thus or thus: either the road
Changed gradually under his feet and became
A wrong road, or else it was he who changed
And put the road wrong. We’d hesitate to blame
The traveller for a highway’s going askew:
Yet possibly he and it became one
At a certain stage, like means and ends.
For this lost traveller, all depends
On how real the road is to him – not as a mode
Of advancement or exercise – rather, as grain
To timber, intrinsic-real.
He can but pursue
His course and believe that, granting the road
Was right at the start, it will see him through
Their errors and turn into the right road again.
The Pest
That was his youthful enemy, fouling the azure
With absolute mirk risen from god knows where –
A zero mood, action’s and thought’s erasure,
Impassable as rock, vapid as air.
When angels came, this imbecile thing infesting
His home retired to its sanctum below stairs;
But emerged, sooner or later, clammily testing
His hold on grace, his bond with the absent stars:
Till the horror became a need, the blacked-out sky
A promise that his angels would reappear,
A proof of light. Then the curse played its sly
Last trick – it thinned away, it was never there.
If it has gone for good, will he mope and die
Like a pauper with the lice washed out of his hair?
Almost Human
The man you know, assured and kind,
Wearing fame like an old tweed suit –
You would not think he has an incurable
Sickness upon his mind.
Finely that tongue, for the listening people,
Articulates love, enlivens clay;
While under his valued skin there crawls
An outlaw and a cripple.
Unenviable the renown he bears
When all’s awry within? But a soul
Divinely sick may be immunized
From the scourge of common cares.
A woman weeps, a friend’s betrayed,
Civilization plays with fire –
His grief or guilt is easily purged
In a rush of words to the head.
The newly dead, and their waxwork faces
With the look of things that could never have lived,
He’ll use to prime his cold, strange heart
And prompt the immortal phrases.
Before you condemn this eminent freak
As an outrage upon mankind,
Reflect: something there is in him
That must for ever seek
To share the condition it glorifies,
To shed the skin that keeps it apart,
To bury its grace in a human bed –
And it walks on knives, on knives.
George Meredith, 1861
Whether it was or not his wish,
His real wish, he could never know:
But, after it happened, it seemed as if
A total stranger had struck the blow –
Some liberator out of the blue
Or hooded fanatic within himself.
The victim’s cry for mercy came
Like a cry from his own heart, instantly gashed
By the knowledge of all he had
aimed to undo.
So one they were, that severing blow
Could not but mortally hurt him too:
The deed came home to him in a flash
(Yet still too late), and at last he knew
The terrible meaning of ‘one flesh’.
Historians now might take the view
That this was one more – though a crucial one –
Incident of his war within.
He’d been the battlefield long enough
As well as a combatant, when he withdrew
Scorching the earth behind him thus,
To whatever was left of integrity.
If they merely say that he saved his own skin,
They miss the point. Though he could not be
Occupied, utterly possessed again,
He has bought invulnerability
Too dear: such broad areas blackened, deadened –
How few of those sensitive threads remain
Which kept him in touch with hell, with heaven!
Betrayal is always a self-betrayal
Where love is concerned. The beautiful place,
Mortgaged by our ancestral sin,
Grows more untenable and more unreal
Each time, however needfully, we sell
Some share of it, buying with certain loss
Uncertain reprieve for our dwindling demesne …
So he, whose choice or necessity willed
The blackened earth, the liberating blow,
Is pent in the fruitless policies of brain.
While through his ghostly orchards tread
A murdered love and an unfulfilled
Agony, he walks elsewhere; and oh!
His silenced heart cannot tell him he is dead.
The Mirror
To make a clean sweep was the easiest part,
Though difficult enough. Anger of grief
Strengthened her hand and kept the silly heart
From dallying over his relics for relief.
To burn the letters, send back the keepsakes, wipe
His fingerprints off what little remained her own –
The girl stood over herself with a swift whip
And lashed until the outrageous task was done.
She had detached her flesh from his flesh, torn
It loose like a sea-anemone from a rock.
Now in that bare room where, lest he return,
All else was changed (she could not change the lock)
She took one careful invalid step, gauging
How much the ice of solitude would bear,
Complete Poems Page 37