When the gate into the rose garden
Opening at last permitted him to enter
Where wise man becomes child, child plays at king.
A presence, playful yet austere,
Courteously stooping, slips into my mind
Like a most elegant allusion clinching
An argument. Eyes attentive, lined
Forehead – ‘Thus and thus runs,’ he makes it clear,
‘The poet’s rule. No slackening, no infringing
‘Must compromise it.’… Now, supplying
Our loss with words of comfort, his kind ghost
Says all that need be said about committedness:
Here in East Coker they have crossed
My heart again – For us there is only the trying
To learn to use words. The rest is not our business.
1970
POSTHUMOUS POEMS
This collection was first published by
John Rundle of The Whittington Press, 1979.
TO
PETER COCHRANE
The Park, Guy’s Hospital: Early Morning1
Sleep’s doctoring hands withdrawn,
The patient wakes early:
His light-switch can still thrust away
Insinuating dawn.
He sees through his window-square
Fuzzed branches, buildings, grass,
Archway and path chiefly because
He knows that they are there.
But what at first he has seen
As candles searching a darkened
Crypt becomes a hurry of white-capped
Girls to their routine
Of healing. For every nurse –
Though never so devoted –
Death, birth, all the body’s dramas
Must be a matter of course.
Only the patient, weak
As a leaf, imagines their voices
A dawn chorus and his own
Experience unique.
1 First published in the Guy’s Hospital House Magazine in 1970. Drafted in an exercise book bought from the hospital trolley-shop.
The Expulsion: Masaccio1
They stumble in naked grief, as refugees
From a flood or pogrom, dispossessed of all
But a spray of leaf like barbed wire round the loins.
For sight, she has mere sockets gouged and charred
By nightmare, and her mouth is a bottomless pit
Of desolation. Her lord, accomplice, dupe,
Ashamed of his failure, as if he cannot face it
Covers his eyes.
We know they left behind
A place where fruits and animals were kind
And time no enemy. But did they know their loss
As more than a child’s when its habitual toys
Are confiscated for some innocent fault,
Or take the accusing cosmic voice that called
To be the same as their dear old garden god’s?
The sword that pickets paradise also goads
Towards self-knowledge. More they shall come to wish
Than brutal comfort of committed flesh.
Masaccio paints us both
A childish tragedy – hunched back, bawling mouth,
And the hour when the animal knew that it must die
And with that stroke put on humanity.
1 Masaccio’s Frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, seen for the first time on a convalescent holiday 1970. The poem was published in a Festschrift for W. H. Auden’s 65th birthday in 1972 in a limited edition of 500.
My Méséglise Way
Always, along that path hawthorn and lilac
Hedged a demesne
A bare arm’s-length away, yet inaccessible
And coaxing in vain
Like the horizon. It was enough to part
The blossoms – eye could embrace
The glades, parterres, crystal-paned gazebos
Of a superior race.
Fountains play. A small girl walks where fidgety
Branches sieve
The sunlight: her shyness and delicate hauteur show me
Original Eve.
One day there was a hole in the hedge. I crawl
Through it. The prospect blurs,
Then clears again, as unperturbed I accept an
Epiphany in reverse –
A common and garden lawn, a hedge of privet
Not scented bloom:
The privileged scene, the sense of grandeur flown like
A drug-born dream.
Young ones in the dowdy garden happily
Tumble and chase. Cast
Is my skin of shrinking solitude when a girl
Cries ‘So you’ve joined us at last!’
Snowfall on a College Garden
While we slept, these formal gardens
Worked into their disguise. The Warden’s
Judas and tulip trees awake
In ermine. Here and there a flake
Of white falls from the painted scene,
Or a dark scowl of evergreen
Glares through the shroud, or a leaf dumps
Its load and the soft burden slumps
Earthward like a fainting girl.
No movement else. The blizzard’s whirl
Froze to this cataleptic trance
Where nature sleeps and sleep commands
A transformation. See this bush
Furred and fluffed out like a thrush
Against the cold: snow which could snap
A robust veteran branch, piled up
On the razor edge of a weak spray,
Plumping it out in mimicry
Of white buddleia. Like the Elect
Ghosts of summer resurrect
In snowy robes. Only the twangling
Noise of unseen sparrows wrangling
Tells me that my window-view
Holds the garden I once knew.
Three Little Pictures
Municipal Park
In beds of municipal parks the flowers
Stand to attention, dressed by the right,
Each bed a uniform colour –
Even the seeds were drilled.
How regimental, we think, how bright and dull!
By such a bed he stands, recalling
A wild lost darling.
Boat from Ireland
Children chase round and round and round.
For them the past is past, the deck
Another windy playground.
Man, though you tear up your used vacances,
Fling the white scraps to the wind,
Seagulls follow above your wake –
A mobile shifting, sliding, dancing.
Roger
So Roger is gone. We had not met
Lately. But the news like a flashbulb whipped
Out of the darkness the voice, the features,
The touch of Lear. I notice that
Picking off our acquaintance one by one,
One by one Time prises our fingers loose
From the edge that overhangs oblivion.
Reflections 1
Horse at a pool’s edge drinking its own reflection.
Aircraft sledging its shadow across the desert miles.
Young girl begging a mirror to tell her fortune.
Lost man’s cooee echoed from aquiline mountain walls.
Here are duelling-grounds of reality and illusion –
Endless shimmer of foils and counterfoils.
Reflections 2
Says the dream to the sleeper, ‘Achieve me’.
Says the wife to the mirror, ‘Deceive me’.
Says the heart to the mind, ‘Believe me’.
Said the shadow to the sun, ‘Don’t leave me’.
Poets, uncage the Word!
Poets, uncage the word!
It flies beyond all logic, all horizons,
Beyond the rage of men, the reach of time
Car
olling over tombs and seasons.
Freedom’s a migrant bird,
Now here, now there is heard its homing call:
You makers, tune our souls till it become
Challenge and need and right for all.
Poets gave men the nerve
To ride the rapids of the treacherous ages,
Revealing virgin landfalls yet to come
After the blind and battering stages.
Freedom’s our chosen course
Through killing rocks, wild eddies. Poet seer
Summon a rainbow from the cataract’s wrath,
Image the faith by which we steer.
A Christmas Way
How to retrace the bygone track
Over two thousand years
And a desert of shifting landmarks, back
To its divine or mythical source –
It seems we have lost the knack.
Grassed-over is now the pilgrim way
Which men of old could plod
To find a first-born in the hay
And recognise him as the Son of God
Any Christmas Day.
Into more tinselled novelties
The fabulous star has dwindled,
Powerless against man’s weaponries
And devilish pride were the arms which dandled
That small prince of peace.
One way’s still open. Return to the child
You were on Christmas Eve –
His expectation of marvels piled
Against tomorrow, his pure belief
In a responsive world.
Plus Ultra1
FOR WALTER ALLEN
Let us not call it progress: movement certainly
And under direction, though what directions we move in
Is anyone’s guess. … It is as if a man
Leapt from one ship to another, and instantly looks round
And the ship he leapt from has dropped below the horizon
Or sunk. But not without trace.
The world we were young in has
Disintegrated; yet scraps of it bob in our wake like flotsam.
Not the great wars, discoveries, revolutions –
They have done their worst, or best, and are accomplished,
As the young I has become an historic figure already
Subject to history’s over- and under-simplifications.
No, it’s the marginal crises, the magical trivia
Which, against all reason, haunt me.
Finding white heather on a Mayo hillside,
A boy lamenting his toy boat lost on its first voyage,
A girl’s first glance – no hint of the bliss and bane that would follow –
In such small relics my dead world lives on.
Time, that has proved we can survive, puts back
The sirens on their rock, the Cyclops in his cave:
We see their point now we no longer fear them.
Those desperate straits are never the world’s end:
There is always more beyond, marvels beyond to draw us,
Movement certainly: perhaps we may call it progress.
1 First appeared in On the Novel edited by B. S. Benedikz – a present for Walter Allen’s 60th birthday.
Recurring Dream
… the house being the first problem. Dilapidated,
Or is it only half built? He cannot rightly
See or remember. No question it looks unsightly –
All lath and plaster, pipes, treacherous floors
And baffle walls.
Before him an assault course
That felt familiar. He infiltrated
The house, wriggling through pipes, circumventing
Holes in the floor, scaling walls; but always
The course gained height. Such was his expertise
He could have done it on his head or blindfold
(Perhaps he did). At least he never failed
To make, or to forget, the happy ending.
For, as he reached it, that bare top storey
Is the highest floor of a luxury hotel
And problem number two. No lift, no stair-well
Visible, and he knows he must get down
To ground level.
He’d sensed, during his lone
Climb, others doing the course. Quite solitary
The new ordeal – no chambermaid, waiter, guest
To show him the way out. Frantic he raced
From end to end of the floor. A deep staircase
Appeared at last, pointing the right direction,
Down which he flew; but has no recollection
Where or indeed whether one egressed.
Going My Way?
1
Now, when there is less time than ever,
Every day less time,
I do have the greatest need for patience.
Not to be rushed by thawing, cracking ice
Into a hasty figure.
Not to require daffodils before spring
But accept each spring as another golden handshake.
Not to be misled by fatuous fires
Into a sanctuary clemmed and de-consecrated.
Never irked that this line has no fancy
Departure lounge for V.I.P.s.
Least of all to lose faith in the experience,
The mortal experiment
To which at birth I was committed.
2
Those three provincials, the dear sisters whom
Abrupt catastrophe and slow dry-rot,
Gutting their hearts of youth, condemn to what
Cheerless routines and seasons yet may come –
Would you not say that they were better dead
Than haunted by their sweet illusion’s ghost,
Love ground down to irritable dust,
The ideal city still unvisited?
Not so their curtain speech: ‘We must go on,
And we must work. Our sufferings will grow.
Peace and joy for coming generations.’
Was it illusion’s desperate last throw?
At least those heroines showed that nothing can
Become the mortal heart like trust and patience.
Hellene: Philhellene1
IN MEMORY OF GEORGE SEFERIS AND C. M. BOWRA
Great poet, friend of my later days, you first
I would honour. Driven from shore to shore
Like Odysseus, everywhere you had nursed
The quivering spark of freedom, your heart’s core
Loaded and lit by your country’s tragedies,
Her gods and heroes. These inhabited
Your poetry with a timeless, native ease
But they moved there among the living dead
Of recent times, so myth and history
Became one medium, deeply interfused.
I recall, in London or in Rome, you welcoming me –
Warm growl, the Greek ‘my dear’ – a spirit used
To catching voices from rock, tree, waves, ports,
And so always a shade preoccupied.
Hearing you were dead, I remembered your Argonauts,
How ‘one after another the comrades died
With downcast eyes’, having become reflections
And articles of the voyage: as you, whose quest is
One now with theirs. My lasting recollections –
Your grace before necessity, your passion for justice.
And you no less, dear tutor of my young days,
Lover of Greece and poetry, I mourn.
To me you seem then the exorbitant blaze
Of Aegean sun dispelling youth’s forlorn
Blurred images; the lucid air; the salt
Of tonic sea on your lips. And you were one
Whom new poetic languages enthralled
(After I’d stumbled through a Greek unseen,
You’d take The Tower or The Waste Land from a shelf
And read me into stra
nge live mysteries.)
You taught me most by always being yourself
Those fifty years ago. For ever Greece
Remained your second country, even though
You were self-exiled latterly, touched by the same
Indignation which made that other know
Exile was not for him. Yearly your fame
Grew as administrator, scholar, wit:
But my best memory, the young man whose brilliance
Lit up my sombre skies and kept them lit,
Drawing dead poets into the ageless dance.
I miss these men of genius and good sense,
In a mad world lords of their just enclave,
My future emptier for the one’s absence,
So much of my youth laid in the other’s grave.
Hellene and Philhellene, both gone this year,
They leave a radiance on the heart, a taste
Of salt and honey on the tongue, a dear
Still-warm encampment in the darkening waste.
1 First published in Cornhill (winter 1971–1972). Maurice Bowra had been CDL’s tutor when he read Classics at Wadham College. Oxford. We had last been reunited with our friend George Seferis – the great Greek poet and Nobel Prizewinner – in Rome in 1968, before the Colonels confiscated his passport. On principle. Maurice would not now travel to Greece. It was a sacrifice. On a fiercely hot day, Cecil, himself now mortally ill, had gone from Greenwich to Oxford to follow Maurice’s coffin to the graveside.
Remembering Carrownisky1
The train window trapped fugitive impressions
As we passed, grasped for a moment then sucked away –
Woods, hills, white farms changing shape and position,
A river which wandered, as if not sure of the way,
Into and off the pane. A landscape less
Well-groomed than, say, a Florentine painter’s one,
But its cross-rhythmed shagginess soothed me through the glass
As it ambled past out there in the setting sun.
Then, one Welsh mead turned up with a girl rider –
Light hair, red jersey – cantering her horse.
Complete Poems Page 51