A tragic fall: if deaths have happened
In him, through him, he never preached at the funeral.
It’s friendship we return to in the end:
Past selves are kept alive in it, a living
Communion flows from their dead languages. A home
Enlarged by absences, mellowed by custom,
Undemanding, simply taking and giving,
Is he, our sixty-year-old friend.
My Mother’s Sister1
I see her against the pearl sky of Dublin
Before the turn of the century, a young woman
With all those brothers and sisters, green eyes, hair
She could sit on; for high life, a meandering sermon
(Church of Ireland) each Sunday, window-shopping
In Dawson Street, picnics at Killiney and Howth …
To know so little about the growing of one
Who was angel and maid-of-all-work to my growth!
– Who, her sister dying, took on the four-year
Child, and the chance that now she would never make
A child of her own; who, mothering me, flowered in
The clover-soft authority of the meek.
Who, exiled, gossiping home chat from abroad
In roundhand letters to a drift of relations –
Squires’, Goldsmiths, Overends, Williams’ – sang the songs
Of Zion in a strange land. Hers the patience
Of one who made no claims, but simply loved
Because that was her nature, and loving so
Asked no more than to be repaid in kind.
If she was not a saint, I do not know
What saints are … Buying penny toys at Christmas
(The most a small purse could afford) to send her
Nephews and nieces, she’d never have thought the shop
Could shine for me one day in Bethlehem splendour.
Exiled again after ten years, my father
Remarrying, she faced the bitter test
Of charity – to abdicate in love’s name
From love’s contentful duties. A distressed
Gentle woman housekeeping for strangers;
Later, companion to a droll recluse
Clergyman brother in rough-pastured Wexford,
She lived for all she was worth – to be of use.
She bottled plums, she visited parishioners.
A plain habit of innocence, a faith
Mildly forbearing, made her one of those
Who, we were promised, shall inherit the earth.
… Now, sunk in one small room of a Rathmines
Old people’s home, helpless, beyond speech
Or movement, yearly deeper she declines
To imbecility – my last link with childhood.
The battery’s almost done: yet if I press
The button hard – some private joke in boyhood
I teased her with – there comes upon her face
A glowing of the old, enchanted smile.
So, still alive, she rots. A heart of granite
Would melt at this unmeaning sequel. Lord,
How can this be justified, how can it
Be justified?
1 Agnes Squires, known as ‘Knos’.
Madrigal for Lowell House1
The crimson berry tree navelled upon this court
Twinkles a coded message, a wind-sun tingling chord,
Curious round her foot saunters one blue jay:
Fallen leaves swarm and scurry – a game of running away
Slides from play to panic.
Young men pull the berries
To pelt one another, or go their way to seminars
On art and the organic.
The crimson berry tree
Has serious moments too – or we make-believe it so,
Dubbing inspired comments on
Her dumb but pretty show.
‘Jaywalker, stuttering leaves have little need to stay
When I bleed berries over the snow. But oh, the gay
Young men, the grave young men who feel the wind and sun
Today are gone tomorrow, never come back again.’
1 CDL lived in Lowell House, Harvard, when he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair 1964–65.
This Loafer
In a sun-crazed orchard
Busy with blossomings
This loafer, unaware of
What toil or weather brings,
Lumpish sleeps – a chrysalis
Waiting, no doubt, for wings.
And when he does get active,
It’s not for business – no
Bee-lines to thyme or heather,
No earnest to-and-fro
Of thrushes: pure caprice tells him
Where and how to go.
All he can ever do
Is to be entrancing,
So that a child may think,
Upon a chalk-blue chancing,
‘Today was special. I met
A piece of the sky dancing.’
Grey Squirrel: Greenwich Park
You with the panache tail
The dowdy old ash-bin fur –
What are you for, zigzagging so sprucely
And so obtusely
Over the autumn leaves, stopping so dead
The eye shoots ahead of you? What main chance
Are you after, my prancing dear?
You cover the autumn grass with a row
Of lolloping shorthand signs and no
Hesitation or apparent destination;
Then pose upright, paws on chest
Like a politician clasping his top-hat on
A solemn occasion, or a hospital matron
Attending some lord of the wards.
They say you are vermin, but I cannot determine
What no good you’re up to. Possibly the odium
Attaches to you for ganging so thoroughly
Your own mad, felicitous gait, not doing
A hand’s turn for State, Church, Union, or Borough.
Squirrel, go climb a tree.
You are too like me.
Terns
Sunlit over the shore
Terns – a flock of them – flew,
With swordplay supple as light
Criss-crossing the charmed blue.
They seemed one bird, not a score –
One bird of ubiquitous flight,
One blade so swift in the fence
It flickers like twenty men’s,
Letting no thought of a scar,
No fatal doubt pierce through.
Oh whirl and glide, the cut
And thrust of the dazzling terns,
Weaving from joy or need
Such quick, momentous patterns!
If we shall have opted out
Of nature, may she breed
Something more tern-like, less
Inept for togetherness
Than we, who have lost the art
Of dancing to her best tunes.
Apollonian Figure
Careful of his poetic p’s and q’s,
This self-possessed master of circumspection
Enjoyed a mariage blanc with the Muse,
Who never caught his verse in an erection.
Some praise the lapidary figure: but
With due respect to the attendant’s spiel,
That fig-leaf there, so elegantly cut –
Just what, if anything, does it conceal?
A Relativist
He raged at critic, moralist – all
That gang who with almightiest gall
Lay claim to the decisive vote
In separating sheep from goat.
So on the last day, when he’s got
His breath back again, it will not
Be goats or sheep that rouse his dudgeon
But the absurdity of judging.
Moral
‘Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.’
> A. N. WHITEHEAD
Saints and heroes, you dare say,
Like unicorns, have had their day.
Unlaurel the compulsive tough!
All pierced feet are feet of clay.
Envy – and paucity – of what
Men lived by to enlarge their lot,
Diminishing your share in them,
Downgrade you and not the great.
The saint falls down, the hero’s treed
Often, we know it. Still we need
The vision that keeps burning from
Saintly trust, heroic deed.
Accept the flawed self, but aspire
To flights beyond it: wiser far
Lifting our eyes unto the hills
Than lowering them to sift the mire.
The Voyage
Translated from Baudelaire
I
Children, in love with maps and gravings, know
A universe the size of all they lack.
How big the world is by their lamps’ clear glow!
But ah, how small to memory looking back!
One morning we set out, our heads on fire,
Our yearning hearts sulky with sour unease,
Following the waves’ rhythm, nursing our desire
For the unbounded on those earth-bound seas.
Some glad to leave an infamous birthplace: some
To escape the cradle’s nightmare; and a few –
Star-gazers drowned in a woman’s eyes – it’s from
The scent and power of Circe that they flew.
Not to be changed to beasts, they drug their minds
With space and the large light and burning sky:
The ice that bites them and the suns that bronze
Efface the scar of kisses gradually.
But the true travellers are those who go
For going’s sake: hearts light as a balloon,
They never slip their fate: why it is so
They cannot tell, but the word is ‘Fare on!’
With longings shaped like hazy clouds, they dream –
As a recruit of gunfire – there impend
Huge pleasures, changeful and untried, whose fame
Is past the wit of man to comprehend.
II
God, that we should behave like top and ball
Bouncing and twirling! Even in our sleep
The Unknown we seek gives us no rest at all,
Like suns tormented by an Angel’s whip.
Strange game, whose goal is always on the move
And being nowhere, may be any place;
And Man, whose hope no setbacks will disprove,
Keeps running madly just to catch repose.
The soul is a three-master, Ithaca-bound.
‘Keep your eyes skinned!’ a sea voice will implore;
From the maintop a keen, mad voice resound
‘Love … glory … luck!’ Oh hell, we’ve run ashore!
Each little isle hailed by the look-out man
Is the Promised Land, golden beyond belief:
Such revels he imagines, but he’ll scan
By the cold light of dawn only a reef.
Fairytale lands – that they should craze him so!
Clap him in irons? Pitch him overboard? –
This bold Columbus, drunken matelot,
Whose mirage makes our sea more hard to abide.
So the old tramp goes pounding through the shit
And, nose in air, dreams up a paradise;
The meanest shanties where a candle’s lit
Are Pleasure-Domes to his enchanted eyes.
III
Amazing voyagers, what splendid tales
Your sea-deep eyes have printed on them. Rare
The jewel caskets of your chronicles:
Show us those gems, fashioned from stars and air.
We’d voyage, but we have no sail or screw.
Liven our spirits, that are canvas-taut.
Breathe your horizon memories, view on view,
Over the boredom of our prisoned thought.
Tell us, what have you seen?
IV
We’ve seen some stars,
Some waves; and we have met with sand-banks too:
For all the uncharted hazards and the jars
We suffered, we were often bored, like you.
Splendour of sunlight on a violet sea,
Splendour of townships in the setting sun
Kindled in us a burning wish to be
Deep in a sky whose mirror lured us on.
Rich towns and landscapes lovely to the gaze
Had never the mysterious appeal
Of those that chance created out of haze
And our impassioned wanting made so real.
Enjoying gives desire more potency –
Desire that feeds on pleasure: the bark grows
Thicker and tougher on the ageing tree,
But its boughs strain to see the sun more close.
Will you be growing still, great tree, who soared
Higher than cypress?… Well, since you rejoice
To swallow anything far-fetched, we’ve worked hard
And brought these sketches for your album, boys.
There we have greeted trumpeting effigies,
Thrones of star-clustered gems dazzling to view,
Palaces wrought by fairy artifice –
Dreams that would bankrupt millionaires like you;
Dresses which stagger you like drunkenness,
Women with nails and teeth vermilion-stained,
Magicians conjuring a snake’s caress.
V
Yes, yes! Go on! And then?
VI
You baby-brained!
Lest we should miss the great, the unique thing,
Ubiquitous and unconcealed we’ve seen
On the predestined ladder’s every rung
The tedious sight of man’s inveterate sin:
Woman, bitch slave, stupid and overweening,
Vain without humour, and without disgust
Self-loving; man, slave to a slave, a stream in
A sewer, all grab and foulness, greed, power, lust:
The thug who loves his work, the sobbing martyr,
The feast that seasons and perfumes the blood;
The prince whom power corrupts into self-murder,
The mob who kiss the brutalizing rod:
Several religions, just like our own following,
Bulldoze their path to heaven; the austere,
While dissolute types on feather beds are wallowing,
Gratify their own taste with nails and hair:
Gabbling mankind, drunk on its own nature
And mad today as in all previous years,
Raving with agony bawls to its Maker
‘My lord, oh my twin-brother, it’s you I curse!’
And the least mad, tough lovers of Alienation,
Fleeing the herd whom fate has corralled in,
Takes refuge with a limitless Illusion …
Such is our globe’s unchanging bulletin
VII
Acid the knowledge travellers draw. The world,
Little and dull, today, tomorrow and
Tomorrow makes you see yourself – an appalled
Oasis in a tedium of sand.
Should we then go, or stay? If you can, stay:
Go, if you must. One races: one shams death
To cheat the watchful enemy of his prey.
Some runners Time allows no pause for breath –
The wandering Jew, the apostles, who can neither
Escape this gladiator and his net
By ship nor car nor any means: another
Can kill Time without stirring from his cot.
And when he sets his foot upon our spine
At last, we shall cry hopefully ‘Let’s be going!’
Just as in old days when we left for China,
Eyes fixed on distance
s and our hair blowing,
We shall embark upon the sea of Shade,
Light-hearted as a young enthusiast.
Now do you hear those voices, sweet and sad,
Singing, ‘This way, all you who want to taste
The fragrant lotus! Here we shall let you savour
Those miracle fruits, for which your souls were famished:
Come and transport yourselves with the strange flavour
Of a long afternoon that’s never finished’?
What’s grown unreal, we guess from its usual tone.
Dear friends stretch out their arms; and ‘Swim this way,
Take new life from my loyal heart,’ cries one
Whose knees we kissed – but that was yesterday.
VIII
Old Captain Death, it’s time to go. We’re sick
Of this place. Weigh anchor! Set the course, and steer!
Maybe the sky and sea are inky black,
But in our hearts – you know them – all is clear.
Pour us the cordial that kills and cheers.
We wish, for our whole beings burn and burn,
To sound the abyss – heaven or hell, who cares? –
And find the secret wombed in the Unknown.
1965
THE WHISPERING ROOTS
FOR SEAN AND ANNA
‘The House where I was Born’ first appeared in Pegasus and Other Poems (1957), and ‘Fishguard to Rosslare’ first appeared in The Room and Other Poems (1965). They are repeated here, so that all the Irish poems can be kept together.
PART ONE
The House Where I Was Born
An elegant, shabby, white-washed house
With a slate roof. Two rows
Of tall sash windows. Below the porch, at the foot of
The steps, my father, posed
In his pony trap and round clerical hat.
This is all the photograph shows.
No one is left alive to tell me
In which of those rooms I was born,
Or what my mother could see, looking out one April
Morning, her agony done,
Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings
From that tree to the left of the lawn.
Complete Poems Page 47