Mothering earth, our food, our fabulous well –
A mote in space, a flicker of time’s indifferent wheel.
Holy the marigold play of evening sun
On wall and tree, the dawn’s light-fingered run,
Night’s muted strings, the shimmering chords of summer noon.
Holy the salmon leaping up a fall,
Leopard’s glide, birds and bees their seasonal
Employ, the shy demeanour of antelope and snail.
Praise wild, tame, common, rare – chrysanthemums
That magnify a back-yard in the slums.
Gentian and passion flower, primrose of deep combes.
Praise the white orchards of the cloudful west,
Wheat prairies with abundance in their breast,
The seas, the mineral mountains, the jungle and the waste.
Holy the flowering of our genial dust
In art, law, science, raising from earth’s crust
A testament of vision made good and truth diffused.
Holy the climber’s grit, the athlete’s grace,
Whippets unleashed and pigeons’ homing race,
A stadium’s roar, a theatre’s hush – they also praise.
Oh praise man’s mind that, questioning why things are
And whence, haloes the moon with a new star,
Peers into nature’s heart and cons the order there.
Oh praise what makes us creatures breed and build
Over death’s void, and know ourselves fulfilled
In that age-hallowed trinity – man, woman, child.
Holy the heights where flesh and spirit wed.
Holy this earth, our source, our joy, our bread.
Holy to praise man’s harvest and treasure his brave seed.
BENEDICTUS
Blessed are they who come
At need, in mercy’s name
To walk beside the lame,
Articulate for the dumb.
Blessed who range ahead
Of man’s laborious trek,
Survey marsh, desert, peak,
Signal a way to tread.
Blessed whose faith defies
The mighty, welds the weak;
Whose dreaming hopes awake
And ring like prophecies.
Blessed who shall release
At this eleventh hour
Us thralls of evil power
And lift us into peace.
AGNUS DEI
O child of man,
Wombed in dark waters you retell
Millenniums, image the terrestrial span
From an unwitting cell
To the new soul within her intricate shell,
O child of man.
O child of man
Whose infant eyes and groping mind
Meet chaos and create the world again,
You for yourself must find
The toils we know, the truths we have divined –
Yes, child of man.
O child of man,
You come to justify and bless
The animal throes wherein your life began,
And gently draw from us
The milk of love, the most of tenderness,
Dear child of man.
So, child of man,
Remind us what we have blindly willed –
A slaughter of all innocents! You can
Yet make this madness yield
And lift the load of our stock-piling guilt,
O child of man.
LUX AETERNA
Commune with the dead, the myriad commonwealth
Of our forefathers: an earthbound family,
But listen! remote in mind’s catacombs they whispering
Enlighten us.
Impalpable these: but look! they point and power us
To destinies unknown and stellar distances;
Transmitting the genius of generations, they
Enlighten us.
Life-line of heroes, god-favoured or unlucky;
Common clay turned and fired by circumstance
Into rare acts of exalting beauty –
Enlighten us!
Adventurer, heart dilated with horizons;
Rebel, whose impious hand shaped a future piety;
Outcast, whose wilderness rebuked your cruel kind;
Enlighten us!
You that envisioned order and revealed it
In nature’s anomalies, to men’s anarchic
Selfishness – lawgiver, scientist, artist,
Enlighten us!
Shepherd, husbandman, artisan, clerk – all whose
Workaday routines kept our world in good trim:
You ghostly ranks of the unregarded,
Enlighten us!
The dead are engraved in us. We till death are
Keepers of their peace, and of their expansive
Estate the sole trustees. Lest we betray them,
Enlighten us!
Little as dust-motes in the light of eternity,
A moment they danced, but a dance momentous.
Break we that chain now? change being to nothing?
Angels, essences of truth, enlighten us!
RESPONSORIUM
Free us from fear, we cry. Our sleep is fretted,
Anxious we wake, in our terrestrial room.
What wastes the flesh, what ticks below the floor would
Abort all futures, desecrate the tomb.
Free us from fear. The shapes that loom around us
Darkening judgment, freezing all that’s dear
Into a pose of departure – these are shadows
Born of man’s will and bodied by his fear.
May the white magic of the child’s wayfaring,
Wonderful earth – our present from the dead,
And the long vistas of mankind slow maturing
Lighten the heart and clear the feverish head!
O living light, break through our shroud! Release
Man’s mind, and let the living sleep in peace!
1962
1 After publication of The Gate Donald Swann set the Requiem to music.
THE ROOM
and other poems
TO ELIZABETH BOWEN
FABLES AND CONFESSIONS
The Room
FOR GEORGE SEFERIS1
To this room – it was somewhere at the palace’s
Heart, but no one, not even visiting royalty
Or reigning mistress, ever had been inside it –
To this room he’d retire.
Graciously giving himself to, guarding himself from
Courtier, suppliant, stiff ambassador,
Supple assassin, into this unviewed room
He, with the air of one urgently called from
High affairs to some yet loftier duty,
Dismissing them all, withdrew.
And we imagined it suitably fitted out
For communing with a God, for meditation
On the Just City; or, at the least, a bower of
Superior orgies … He
Alone could know the room as windowless
Though airy, bare yet filled with the junk you find
In any child-loved attic; and how he went there
Simply to taste himself, to be reassured
That under the royal action and abstraction
He lived in, he was real.
1 Seferis (George Seferiades) was Greek Ambassador in London at this time. The conflict between the particularly public career of diplomat with the private one of poet intrigued CDL.
On Not Saying Everything
This tree outside my window here.
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature’s plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
Fr
om the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.
Unwritten poems loom as if
They’d cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth’s expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.
As for you, my love, it’s harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and woman
Defy the limits of what’s human.
Your glancing eye, your animal tongue,
Your hands that flew to mine and clung
Like birds on bough, with innocence
Masking those young experiments
Of flesh, persuaded me that nature
Formed us each other’s god and creature.
Play out then, as it should be played,
The sweet illusion that has made
An eldorado of your hair
And our love an everywhere.
But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need – to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring
From the not saying everything.
The Way In
The right way in would be hard to find –
Not for want of a door, but because there were so many,
Each commanding a different kind
Of approach, and then committing him to
An unretraceable step. If he faced
The flunkey’s sneer and the snarling wolfhounds,
He would soon discover that getting past
Them was the least of his troubles. He lacked
The hero’s invincible charm: to go
Without card of introduction or book
Of etiquette was bad; but worse, he had no
Ground-plan given him for what would be
Less of a mansion, he feared, than a maze.
Still, through state apartments and ancestor-lined
Passages, beyond a door of green baize,
He knew there must be that innermost room
Where She, alone, waited. Waited for whom?
No doubt she was at home. He had seen her mooning
Around the garden – pearl feet, gold crown
Proved her a princess – early every morning
In the ghostfall dew by the dreaming cedars.
No sentry, mastiff or chains could he spy,
But he felt her a captive … Now, crawling through
The grass of the lawn, which had grown head-high
Since he came, he listened at a gloomed french window
Faint sounds he heard: they might have been
Cries for help or his own voice calling
From sleep. Ventured a glance: obscene
Slug trails and spider webs pasted the glass.
Frantic to peel away the cataract spell
He circled the domicile, trying each door:
Bells, knockers, handles – he tried them all.
But all in a repudiating hush was locked;
Till a window opened, a wide mouth mocked.
So he went home, romantic even in disgrace,
And told his father the whole sad story.
Who said: ‘To be sure, I remember the place,
And the afternoon I felt like going there.
I walked through the door – there is only one,
By the way – and yes, I remember a crown
Of tawny hair. I tumbled it down.
She sighed for relief. I took her, bare
And crowing as a babe, on the kitchen floor.’
The Passion for Diving
The man up there with red trunks, middle-aged paunch,
Rapt in a boy like singleness of mind
Or in some trance of altitude immersed –
What do we make of him? The way he’ll launch
From bank, deck, high board, harbour wall, to find
Himself arriving, more or less head-first,
In pool, sea, river, then scramble out and prise
The void again, again? Not for display:
He cuts no athlete’s figure through the air.
Nor from infatuation with what lies
Supine beneath: it seldom can delay
Him longer than the few strokes he must spare
To reach a foot-hold and climb out again.
There may be pride in it (for Lucifer,
Might not that long dive feel like an aspiring?);
And pleasure – heaving haunches of the main,
That green, comethering inshore eye, the stir
Of watersilk muscle, over which he’s poring.
But most it is the sense of challenge, a boy’s
Need and fear of solitary engagement
With powers beyond his power, that springs the leap.
The man recalls a young self in that poise
And pause between an airy unattachment
And the blind, brief committal to the deep.
Derelict
FOR A. D. PETERS1
The soil, flinty at best, grew sour. Its yield
Receding left the old farm high and dry
On a ledge of the hills. Disused, the rutted field-
Track fades, like the sound of footsteps, into a sigh
For any feet to approach this padlocked door.
The walls are stained and cracked, the roof’s all rafter.
We have come where silence opens to devour
Owl-cry, wind-cry, all human memories … After
So many working life-times a farm settles
For leisure, and in the tenth of a life-time goes
To seed … A harrow rusts among harsh nettles.
She who in love or protest grew that rose
Beneath her window, left nothing else behind
But a mangle in the wash-house. The rose now
Looks mostly thorn and sucker; the window’s blind
With cobwebs. Dilapidated! – even the low
Front wall is ragged: neighbours have filched its stone
To build their pigsties, maybe; but what neighbours? –
Never did a farm stand more alone.
Was it the loneliness, then, and not their labour’s
Poor yield that drove them out? A farmer’s used
To the silence of things growing, weather breeding.
More solitude, more acres. He’d be amused
To hear it’s human company he was needing.
With a wife to bake, wash, mend, to nag or share
The after-supper silence, children to swing
From those rheumatic apple trees; and where
The docks run wild, his chained-up mongrel barking
If anyone climbed a mile off on the hill.
He’d not abandon cheerfully a place
In which he’d sunk his capital of skill
And sweat. But if earth dies on you, it’s no disgrace
To pull up roots … Now, all that was the farm’s –
The same demands of seasons, the plain grit
And homely triumph – deepens and informs
The silence you can hear. Reverence it.
; 1 A. D. Peters was CDL’s literary agent and close friend for forty-six years of his writing life.
Saint Anthony’s Shirt
‘We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony’s shirt.’
KEATS: Letter to Reynolds
This moving house of mine – how could I care
If, wasting and renewing cell by cell,
It’s the ninth house I now have tenanted?
I cannot see what keeps it in repair
Nor charge the workmen who, its changes tell,
Build and demolish it over my head.
Ninth house and first, the same yet not the same –
Are there, beneath new brickwork, altering style,
Viewless foundations steady through the years?
Hardly could I distinguish what I am
But for the talkative sight-seers who file
Through me, the window-view that clouds or clears.
The acting, speaking, lusting, suffering I
Must be a function of this house, or else
Its master principle. Is I a sole
Tenant created, recreated by
What he inhabits, or a force which tells
The incoherent fabric it is whole?
If master, where’s the master-thread runs through
This patchwork, piecemeal self? If occupant
Merely, the puppet of a quarrelsome clique,
How comes the sense of selfhood as a clue
Embodying yet transcending gene and gland?
The I, though multiple, is still unique.
I walk these many rooms, wishing to trace
My frayed identity. In each, a ghost
Looks up and claims me for his long-lost brother –
Each unfamiliar, though he wears my face.
A draught of memory whispers I was most
Purely myself when I became another:
Tending a sick child, groping my way into
A woman’s heart, lost in a poem, a cause,
I touched the marrow of my being, unbared
Through self-oblivion. Nothing remains so true
As the outgoingness. This moving house
Is home, and my home, only when it’s shared.
Days before a Journey
Days before a journey
The mind, prefiguring absence,
Begins to leave. Its far
Complete Poems Page 44