1857–1934
1
A boy among the reeds on Severn shore
Sound-bathing: a ghost humming his ’cello tune
Upon the Malvern hills: and in between,
Mostly enigma. Who shall read this score?
The stiff, shy, blinking man in a norfolk suit:
The martinet: the gentle-minded squire:
The piano-tuner’s son from Worcestershire:
The Edwardian grandee: how did they consort
In such luxuriant themes? Not privilege
Nor talent’s cute, obsequious ear attuned
His soul to the striding rhythms, the unimpugned
Melancholy of a vulgar, vivid age.
Genius alone can move by singular ways
Yet home to the heart of all, the common chord;
Beat to its own time, timelessly make heard
A long-breathed statement or a hesitant phrase.
For me, beyond the marches of his pride,
Through the dark airs and rose-imperial themes,
A far West-country summer glares and glooms,
A boy calls from the reeds on Severn side.
2
Orchards are in it – the vale of Evesham blooming:
Rainshine of orchards blowing out of the past.
The sadness of remembering orchards that never bore,
Never for us bore fruit: year after year they fruited,
But all, all was premature –
We were not ripe to gather the full beauty.
And now when I hear ‘orchards’ I think of loss, recall
White tears of blossom streaming away downwind,
And wish the flower could have stayed to be one with the fruit it formed.
Oh, coolness at the core of early summers,
Woodwind haunting those green expectant alleys,
Our blossom falling, falling.
Hills are in it – the Malverns, Bredon, Cotswold.
A meadowsweetness of high summer days:
Clovering bees, time-honeyed bells, the lark’s top C.
Hills where each sound, like larksong, passes into light,
And light is music all but seen.
Dawn’s silvery tone and evening’s crimson adagio;
Noonday on the full strings of sunshine simmering, dreaming,
No past, no future, the pulse of time unnoticed:
Cloud-shadows sweeping in arpeggios up the hillsides;
Grey, muted light which, brooding on stone, tree, clover
And cornfield, makes their colours sing most clear –
All moods and themes of light.
And a river – call it the Severn – a flowing-awayness.
Bray of moonlight on water; brassy flamelets
Of marigold, buttercup, flag-iris in water-meadows;
Kingfishers, mayflies, mills, regattas: the ever-rolling
Controlled percussion of thunderous weirs.
Rivers are passionate gods: they flood, they drown,
Roar themselves hoarse, ripple to gaiety, lull the land
With slow movements of tender meditation.
And in it too, in his music, I hear the famous river –
Always and never the same, carrying far
Beyond our view, reach after noble reach –
That bears its sons away.
Ideal Home
1
Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places –
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past –
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring ‘Live with me.’
House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.
Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me. Then you shall live again.
2
… Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love –
I’ll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents – rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property. Possess me.
Be born again.
3
If only there could be lives enough, you’re wishing?…
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.
Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self. Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.
Switch love, move house – you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.
Fisherman and/or Fish
There was a time when I,
The river’s least adept,
Eagerly leapt, leapt
To the barbed, flirtatious fly.
Thrills all along the line,
A tail thrashing – the sport
Enthralled: but which was caught,
Which reeled the other in?
Anglers aver they angle
For love of the fish they play
(Arched spine and glazing eye,
A gasping on the shingle).
I’ve risen from safe pools
And gulped hook line and sinker
(Oh, the soft merciless fingers
Fumbling at my gills!)
Let last time be the last time
For me with net or gaff.
I’ve had more than enough
Of this too thrilling pastime.
The river’s veteran, I
Shall flick my rod, my fin,
Where nothing can drag me in
Nor land me high and dry.
The Antique Heroes
Faultlessly those antique heroes
Went through their tests and paces,
Meeting the most extraordinary phenomena
With quite impassive faces.
Dragons, chimeras, sirens, ogres
Were all in the day’s work;
From acorn to dryad, from home to the Hesperides
No further than next week.
There was always someone who would give them something
Still more impossible to do,
And a divinity on call to help them
See the assignment through.
The functions of the heroine were,
Though pleasurable, more narrow –
Receiving a god, generally Zeus,
And breeding another hero.
It gave life an added interest for all
Complaisant girls, to know
That a bull, a swan, a yokel might be
Deity incognito.
Scholars dispute if such tales were chiefly
The animist’s childwise vision,
Ancestor-snobbery, or a kind of
Archaic science-fiction.
Well, I have seen a clutch of hydras
Slithering round W.C.2,
And Odysseus striding to the airport. I think
Those tales could be strictly true.
; The Graves of Academe
The ghosts were all right till this grave-digger came
With the rheumatic style and the missioner’s frown.
Unpleasing, unpleasured, he lectures each shade:
Now they ought to be dead, but they will not lie down.
How the tall, genial spirits must laugh
When this pocket Disposer-Supreme volunteers
To drill and dismiss them, puts each in his place
And lays on the tombstone a wreath of pale sneers.
Which do we honour – a generous host,
Or maggots puffed up by the fare he provides them?
Ghosts whose bright presence has outlived the dawn,
Or this channering worm that officiously chides them?
‘Said the Old Codger’
When Willie Yeats was in his prime,
Said the old codger,
Heroic frenzy fired his verse:
He scorned a poet who did not write
As if he kept a sword upstairs.
Nowadays what do we find,
Said the old codger,
In every bardlet’s upper room?
– Ash in the grate, a chill-proof vest,
And a metronome.
The Unexploded Bomb
Two householders (semi-detached) once found,
Digging their gardens, a bomb underground –
Half in one’s land, half in t’other’s, with the fence between.
Neighbours they were, but for years had been
Hardly on speaking terms. Now X. unbends
To pass a remark across the creosoted fence:
‘Look what I’ve got!… Oh, you’ve got it too.
Then what, may I ask, are you proposing to do
About this object of yours which menaces my wife,
My kiddies, my property, my whole way of life?’
‘Your way of life,’ says Y., ‘is no credit to humanity.
I don’t wish to quarrel; but, since you began it, I
Find your wife stuck-up, your children repel me,
And let me remind you that we too have the telly.
This bomb of mine –’
‘I don’t like your tone!
And I must point out that, since I own
More bomb than you, to create any tension
Between us won’t pay you.’
‘What a strange misapprehension!’
Says the other: ‘my portion of bomb is near
Six inches longer than yours. So there!’
‘They seem,’ the bomb muttered in its clenched and narrow
Sleep, ‘to take me for a vegetable marrow.’
‘It would give me,’ said X., ‘the very greatest pleasure
To come across the fence now with my tape-measure –’
‘Oh no,’ Y. answered, ‘I’m not having you
Trampling my flowerbeds and peering through
My windows.’
‘Oho,’ snarled X., ‘if that’s
Your attitude, I warn you to keep your brats
In future from trespassing upon my land,
Or they’ll bitterly regret it.’
‘You misunderstand.
My family has no desire to step on
Your soil; and my bomb is a peace-lover’s weapon.’
Called a passing angel, ‘If you two shout
And fly into tantrums and keep dancing about,
The thing will go off. It is surely permissible
To say that your bomb, though highly fissible,
Is in another sense one and indivisible;
By which I mean – if you’ll forgive the phrase,
Gentlemen – the bloody thing works both ways.
So let me put forward a dispassionate proposal:
Both of you, ring for a bomb-disposal
Unit, and ask them to remove post-haste
The cause of your dispute.’
X. and Y. stared aghast
At the angel. ‘Remove my bomb?’ they sang
In unison both: ‘allow a gang
To invade my garden and pull up the fence
Upon which my whole way of life depends?
Only a sentimental idealist
Could moot it. I, thank God, am a realist.’
The angel fled. The bomb turned over
In its sleep and mumbled, ‘I shall soon discover,
If X. and Y. are too daft to unfuse me,
How the Devil intends to use me.’
The Christmas Rose
What is the flower that blooms each year
In flowerless days,
Making a little blaze
On the bleak earth, giving my heart some cheer?
Harsh the sky and hard the ground
When the Christmas rose is found.
Look! its white star, low on earth,
Rays a vision of rebirth.
Who is the child that’s born each year –
His bedding, straw:
His grace, enough to thaw
My wintering life, and melt a world’s despair?
Harsh the sky and hard the earth
When the Christmas child comes forth.
Look! around a stable throne
Beasts and wise men are at one.
What men are we that, year on year,
We Herod-wise
In our cold wits devise
A death of innocents, a rule of fear?
Hushed your earth, full-starred your sky
For a new navitity:
Be born in us, relieve our plight,
Christmas child, you rose of light!
Requiem for the Living1
REQUIEM
Grant us untroubled rest. Our sleep is fretted,
Anxious we wake, in our terrestrial room.
What wastes the flesh, what ticks below the floor will
Abort all futures, desecrate the tomb.
Let healing grace now light upon us. All flesh
Lives with its death. But may some shaft unblind
Soon our sick eyes, lest the death we choose to live with
And then must die be the murder of mankind.
Peace in our time: else upon earth a timeless
Pause of unbeing, sterile, numb and null –
Spiritus mundi, a smudge of breath wiped off
Glass; earth revolving, an idiot skull.
O living light, break through our shroud! Release
Man’s mind, and let the living sleep in peace.
KYRIE ELEISON
Because we are hypnotized by a demon our will has conjured: because we play for safety with dangerous power, and dare not revoke: because we injure the tissue of creation –
Have pity upon us.
Whether in the pursuit of knowledge, the name of freedom, or the course of duty, I serve humanity’s programme for suicide; or whether inert I acquiesce –
Have pity upon me.
I am the young who have no time in trust, no time for belief; the old who reserve the sacrament of violence: I am what struts or chaffers on a crumbling edge of existence –
Have pity upon me.
In the hour of our death, and in the day of our judgment –
Have pity upon us.
DIES IRAE
Day of wrath, oh ruthless day
When humankind shall melt away:
Day of wrath when in a flash
History shall burn to ash.
Turning keys upon the dials
Shall unloose the furious phials;
Then the trumpeting blasts be heard –
Art, law, science, all absurd.
From a lucid heaven foresee
Monstrous that epiphany
Of man’s calculated error
Break in light and brood in terror:
Skin flayed off the skeleton,
Ghosts of men burnt into stone,
Uberant rivers boiling dry,
Cities sucked up into the sky.
All too late then for repenting
Of the powers we are mis-spending.
We could only pray that doom
Fall sheer on us and fast consume;
Pray the loud heat-stroke spare us not
For the soundless rain to rot
Our angry blood, corrupt our bone –
Remnants of life that crawl and moan;
Spare us not to see this earth
Travail with a second birth,
Monsters multiply and breed
From a joyless, tainted seed.
Look how the sun of nature dips
Toward evil’s dark apocalypse!
How near the ages’ growth is blighted,
Man in his brilliancy benighted!
Day of wrath, oh ruthless day
When humankind shall melt away:
Day of wrath when in a flash
Past and future turn to ash.
OFFERTORIUM
O God, in whom we half believe,
Or not believe,
Or pray to like importunate children
Tugging a sleeve:
Whether man’s need created you,
Or his creation seed from you,
Our creeds have overshaded you
With terror, pain and grief.
O God, in whose mysterious name
We men have lit
Age after age the torturer’s flame
And died in it:
If you have not forsaken us,
Rake out this burning rage from us,
Give us concern, awake in us
Children a holier spirit!
The kin-dividing sovereignty
Of pride and fear, the blasphemy
Which is our blear-eyed apathy –
These let us sacrifice;
Burn up the false gods that infect
Our soul with lies,
Melt down the bars that cage us off
In cells of ice.
If you exist, if heed our cares,
If these our offerings and prayers
Could save, if earth’s entreating heirs
Are to be born to live –
Spirit, in whom we half believe
And would believe,
Free us from fear, revive us in
A fire of love.
SANCTUS
Holy this earth where unamazed we dwell –
Complete Poems Page 43