An Episode
So then he walled her up alive
(It seemed that her betrayal must deserve
What his own agony felt like – the slow choking
Of breath and pore in a close grave)
And waited. There was no cry from her, no knocking.
– Waited for pain to end, with her
Who had been his love and any comer’s whore.
Soft-spoken dreams revealed how he was wanting
The victim to turn comforter –
A chastened ghost, an unreproachful haunting.
Presently the blank wall grew eyes
That hunted him from every covert ease
And thickset pain. He felt as if heart were searching
For heart. He saw in those whitewashed eyes
A look neither forgiving nor beseeching.
His bloody fingers tore at the wall,
Demolishing what could never salve nor seal
Its crime, but found in the nook where he had placed her
No twisted limbs, no trace at all.
His heart lay there – a mess of stone and plaster.
A Loss
‘You are nice’ – and she touched his arm with a fleeting
Impulsive gesture: the arm that had held her close
And naked a year ago. She was not cheating,
But it falsified their balance of profit and loss.
Her gesture saluted a magnanimity shown
When he asked if she was happy with her new
Lover. That cool touch scalded him to the bone:
The ingenuous words made all words ring untrue.
Their love had never been one of creditor-debtor;
But he felt that her hand, reaching to him across
The year he had spent in failing to forget her
And all they’d shared, simply wrote off a loss.
A Meeting
Meeting the first time for many years,
What do they expect to see
Of the beings they made once, for better and worse,
Of each other – he and she?
A shrine to lost love? a hovel for guilt?
A vacant historic pile?
Something in ruins? something rebuilt
In a grand or a makeshift style?
Whatever is here to be freshly scanned,
Their view will be overcast:
Though they’ll encounter, smile, shake hands,
They can only meet in the past –
Meet at the point where they parted, in
The house of what once they were,
Haunted by ghosts of what they might have been
Today, had they lived on there.
The life they had fashioned long ago
Seemed close as a honeycomb;
And if anything couples these strangers now
Who were each other’s home,
It is grief that the pureness and plenitude of
Their love’s long-flowering day
Could, like baser, flimsier stuff,
Corrupt or melt away.
Nothing left of the cells they stored
With joy, trust, charity
For years? … Nature, it seems, can afford
Such wastefulness: not we.
An Upland Field1
By a windrowed field she made me stop.
‘I love it – finding you one of these,’
She said; and I watched her tenderly stoop
Towards a sprig of shy heartsease
Among the ruined crop.
‘Oh but look, it is everywhere!’
Stubble and flint and sodden tresses
Of hay were a prospect of despair:
But a myriad infant heartsease faces
Pensively eyed us there.
Long enough had I found that flower
Little more common than what it is named for –
A chance-come solace amid earth’s sour
Failures, a minute joy that bloomed for
Its brief, precocious hour.
No marvel that she, who gives me peace
Wherein my shortening days redouble
Their yield, could magically produce
From all that harshness of flint and stubble
Whole acres of heartsease.
1 Dorset – near Plush.
The Disabused
(a Dramatic Monologue)
Eleven o’clock. My house creaks and settles,
Feeling the dry-rot in its old bones. Well,
It will see me out; and after that, who cares?
More than a house is perishing – civilization,
For all I know; and Helen’s marriage, she tells me,
Breaking up – a mishap she seems to confuse
With the end of the world, poor girl. ‘You are so calm,
‘You amaze me, father,’ she said: ‘I feel I cannot
‘Keep my head above water any longer.’
Now she has taken her tragedy to bed.
But what storms first! – this indelicate need of woman
To have emotion – hers, his, anyone’s – exposed
Like bleeding lumps of meat on a butcher’s counter
And poke at it with insensitive, finicky fingers!
‘Helen,’ I might have said, ‘if I am calm
‘It is because I have spent most of a lifetime
‘Learning to live with myself, which is the hardest
‘Marriage of all.’ But to say this would only
Have underlined her notion that I had somehow
Failed her. The way she spoke about my calmness
Was to reproach me, of course, for having failed –
Not in recognizing what she suffers,
But in refusing to be infected by it:
For that’s what women want – that we vibrate
To their disturbance, visibly respond –
Tears, smiles, exasperation, pity, rage,
Any response will satisfy them, for so
Their weakness sees its power. She’ll never grasp
How a man grows strong by silently outstaring
His brute infirmity. ‘Helen,’ I all but told her,
‘Tomorrow is the fortieth anniversary
‘Of the day I let my brother drown.’
Not ‘saw’
Or ‘watched’ – you notice, Tom – but ‘let’. I never
Permit myself the soft and venial option …
It’s the first morning of a summer holiday
After the War. You are just demobbed, and I,
Three years younger, finished with school. We run
Along the cliff path – harebell, scabious, rampion,
Sunlight and dew on the grass – and we are running
Back into the boyhood of our world.
You, always the leader, stand at the waves’ edge
Undressed, before I have scrambled down the steep path
Among those yellow poppies to the beach.
Then, like a new slide thrown on the screen, with a click
The picture is different – I on the shingle, you
Thirty yards out suddenly thrashing the calm sea
To foam, as if you had been harpooned. This happens
So quickly, and yet your dying seems to go on
For ever. You struggle silently, your eyes
Howling for help. And I, a feeble swimmer,
Must let you drown or flounder out and let you
Drag me under.
But there was no choice, really:
Fear, like an automatic governor,
Shut off the power in my limbs, held me down
So hard that a flint dug my bare sole open
(I have the stigma now). The cove contained
My tiny shouts. My eyes searched everywhere –
Foreshore and cliff and heaven – at first for help,
But soon to make sure there was no witness of
Your dying and my living, or perhaps
Most of all to
avoid your whitening stare.
No one in sight; and at last the sea’s face too
Was empty. Now I could look. Along the horizon,
Slow as a minute hand, there faintly moved
A little ship, a model of indifference.
So it went.
You have omitted one thing.
No, Tom, I was coming to that. I lay down
In the shallows to saturate my clothes.
(‘What presence of mind,’ you say? A coward soon
Learns circumspection.) So, when I got home
Crying, limping, dripping with brine, father
In his crammed anguish still found room to praise me,
Console and praise me for having done my best.
There’s this to be said for growing old – one loses
The itch for wholeness, the need to justify
One’s maimed condition. I have lived all these years
A leper beneath the skin, scrupulous always
To keep away from where I could spread contagion.
No one has guessed my secret. I had to learn
Good and early the know-how of consuming
My own waste products: I at least have never
Contaminated soil or river. Why,
Why then, though I have played the man in facing
My worst, and cauterized the ugly wound,
Does that original morning by the sea
Still irk me like a lovers’ tryst unkept –
Not with remorse or tragedy curses – no,
With the nostalgic sweetness of some vision
All but made flesh, then vanishing, which drains
Colour and pith from the whole aftertime?
I lost a brother
Only a brother?
Tom,
Do you mean self-respect? We have had this out
A hundred times. You know I have regained it,
Stiffening my heart against its primal fault.
‘There was the fault,’ you say? What? Do you blame
The wound for the scar-tissue, or a bombed site
For growing willowherb? It is nature’s way.
You who gulped the sea and are dead, why do you
Keep swimming back with these cast-off things in your mouth
Like an imbecile dog?
The vision. The sweet vision.
Recapture. A last chance.
This is beyond me!
Last chance of what? Is it your elder-brotherly
Pleasure to keep me wallowing in that sour
Humiliation? You can teach me nothing
About the anatomy of fear – I’ve made it
A life-long study, through self-vivisection:
And if I did use local anaesthetics
To deaden the area, better a witness than
A victim to the science of self-knowledge.
Relentlessly I have tracked each twist and shuffle,
Face-saving mask, false candour, truth-trimmed fraud,
All stratagems of bluster and evasion –
Traced them back along the quivering nerves
To that soft monster throned in my being’s chasm,
Till I was armed in and against the infirmity.
Self-knowledge. I tell you, Tom, we do not solve
Human problems with tears and kisses: each,
Like one of my engineering jobs, demands
Calculation of stresses and resistance.
If the material’s faulty
Poor father,
Must you fail me then?
Helen! You too?
How can you put such nonsense into my head?
I said I would do all that I can to help you,
See the lawyers, have you and the children here –
Practical things. ‘Consider this your home now,’
I said. A storm of animal sobbing then,
As though I had struck her. Good Lord, does she expect me
To interview Robert and make him return to her?
If only her mother was alive! – such scenes
Afflict me with a rigor of repulsion.
Curious, that: how near we come to loathing
Those whose demands, however unreasonable,
We fail to meet – yes, impotence humiliates,
Not in bed only.
Father, do you love me?
Love you? Of course I do. You are my daughter.
She used to remind me, as a child, of Tom –
The same blue, mocking, meditative gaze …
Azure eye of the sea, wakeful, dangerous.
Between the sea’s eye and the yellow poppies
A vision to recapture?… I perceive
One drowning, one not drowning, that is all.
No, Tom, let us stick to facts: the relevant fact is
That it was you, not I, who died that day.
Well, do you deny it? Do you deny it? Speak to me!
You cannot. You are dead, I am alive.
Let sleeping visions lie. How could he think
I should breach the dyke I have been all these years
Building and reinforcing? Ah, I see it –
Trying to lure me out of my depth – the same
As Helen an hour ago – ‘Come, father, jump
Into the boiling sea of my emotions
And let us choke together.’
If you love me,
Father, stretch out a hand.
If stretching out
My hand could rescue, I would do it: but
Father, if you can love, stretch out your hand.
Well, gestures are the easiest way to humour
A woman. So why not reach out my hand,
As it might be over the breakfast table tomorrow,
Reach out this hand to Helen, so. Reach out –
Christ, I cannot! Won’t move, it won’t move!
What’s this? A seizure, a stroke? Move, damn you!
Dying? No! No! I cannot die yet.
Dreaming. A bad dream. Overwork. Of course.
Jackson’s arm caught in the hydraulic press.
Man with a withered arm, in the Bible: atrophy –
No, that’s gradual. Cramp. Tom died of it.
But there’s no agony, not a twinge – God!
Let me feel something! I have gone dead, quite dead:
All power cut off … If I could analyse
My feelings, I should – cogito, ergo sum –
But there’s no feeling, only an Arctic night
Of numb, eternal fear, death’s null forever.
Dead, then? How long? How long? Eleven-fifteen,
The clock says. My nightcap still on the table;
And there’s my hand, reaching out to take it.
Reaching! Alive!…
My God, I needed that.
What a grotesque hallucination! Really,
I could have sworn my arm was paralysed
For a few moments. If I were superstitious,
I’d say it was a sign from heaven – yes, Tom,
It rather proves my point – a sign that I
Was right not to embroil myself in Helen’s
Hysterical maelstrom. What she needs from me
Is rational guidance, realism, detachment,
Not facile gestures of pure self-indulgence.
You and your ‘vision’, Tom! No, I’m not buying it.
One delusion is quite enough … I’d better
Ring MacIntyre in the morning, and arrange
For him to give me a thorough overhaul.
Not Proven
(a Dramatic Monologue)
FOR GEORGE RYLANDS
NOTE: Madeleine Hamilton Smith was tried for murder, at Edinburgh, in 1857. She died in the United States of America, aged 92, in 1928.
So. I am dying. Let the douce young medico
Syrup his verdict, I am not deceived.
You pity me, boy? a shrunk old woman dying
Alone in an alien country? Sir, you have
chosen
The wrong woman to pity. There was a girl
Seventy-two years ago – high-coloured, handsome,
The belle of the Glasgow ballrooms – gave herself
Body and soul to a wheedling mannikin,
And went down into hell through him. Pity
Her, if pity you must – though she asked none
Except from her dwarf-souled lover – not this crumpled
Dead-letter of flesh, yellow as the press-cuttings
I keep in my workbox there. You wonder why
I treasure such things? I was a heroine,
A nine-days’ marvel to an admiring world.
No, sir, my wits are not astray. Those cuttings –
They’re my citations for valour. Close, come closer.
The panel’s voice grows weak. You are very young.
Tell me, what does it mean to you – the name of
Madeleine Smith?…
Now he is gone at last,
The nice wee doctor, leaving a prescription
And an unuttered question in the room –
A question I have seen for seventy years
In every eye that knew me, and imagined
In every eye that would not rest on mine.
They got no sign from me – those speiring eyes:
Long ago I learnt to outface even
My own, soliciting me from the cold mirror,
As I outfaced them all in court for nine days –
Beetle-eyes of journalists crawling busily
Over me; jurymen’s moth-eyes fluttering at mine
And falling, scorched; bat-eyes darting around me.
And after the trial, a drift of letters offering
Marriage, or fornication. Chivalrous
Young fools, wishful to comfort a wronged innocent;
Used-up philanderers dreaming of new sensations
In bed with a murderess; they too were drawn
To the mystery behind this brow, the sphinx.
My secret! Ah, the years have mossed it over,
The lettering on the stone’s illegible now.
HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MADELEINE,
DAUGHTER OF JAMES SMITH, WIDOW OF
GEORGE WARDLE, IN HOPE OF EVERLASTING
OBLIVION. SHE WAS TRIED FOR THE MURDER
OF HER LOVER, PIERRE EMILE L’ANGELIER, BY
THE ADMINISTRATION OF ARSENIC. THE
VERDICT OF THE COURT: NOT PROVEN.
THE REST WAS SILENCE.
Beneath that slab I have lain
Seventy years – the remains of a gallant girl
Complete Poems Page 41