The Complete Poems

  Is one part man and three parts ape,

  Avenger of misuse by man

  Of lust that by his art began,

  And master of all mimicries,

  Made tittering laughter in the trees.

  With girlish whispers, sighs and giggling

  Set the Bull prancing, the Snake wriggling;

  Where leaves were broadest and light dim,

  Fessé ambushed him.

  Up through the air I saw him swung

  To bridal bowers with red flowers hung:

  He choked for mercy like a maid

  By his own violent whim betrayed;

  Blood broke in fountains from his neck,

  I heard his hugged ribs creak and break,

  But what the tree-top rites might be

  How should I stay to see?

  In terror of the Ape God’s power

  I changed my person in that hour,

  Cast off the livery of my clan,

  Over unlawful hills I ran,

  I soiled me with forbidden earth.

  In nakedness of second birth

  I scorched away the Snake’s red eyes

  Tattoed for name about my thighs,

  And slew the Sacred Bull oppressed

  With passion on my breast.

  The girls of my new tribe are cold,

  Amazon, scarred, not soft to hold.

  They seek not men, nor are they sought,

  Whose children are not theirs, but bought

  From outlaw tribes who dwell in trees –

  Tamed apes suckle these.

  Young men of the tribe are such

  That knife or bow they dare not touch,

  But in close watching of the skies

  And reckoning counts they dim their eyes.

  Closed, each by each, in thoughtful bars

  They plot the circuits of the stars,

  And frozen music dulls their need

  Of drink and man-flesh greed.

  They hold that virtue from them slips

  When eye greets eye or lips touch lips;

  Down to the knee their broad beards fall

  And hardly are they men at all.

  Possessions they have none, nor schools

  For tribal duties, nor close rules,

  No gods, no rites, no totem beasts,

  No friendships, no love feasts.

  Now quit, as they, of gong-roused lust,

  The leap of breasts, the scattering dust,

  In hermit splendour at my glass

  I watch the skies’ procession pass,

  Tracing my figures on the floor

  Of planets’ paths and comets’ lore;

  In calm amaze I cloak my will,

  I gaze, I count, until

  Harsh from his House the Bull roars out,

  Forked lightning leaps his points about,

  Tattoos his shape upon the sky;

  Night anger fills the Serpent’s eye

  With desolating fire for one

  Who thought the Serpent’s days were done,

  And girlish titterings from the trees

  Loosen my firm knees.

  THE RED RIBBON DREAM

  As I stood by the stair-head in the upper hall

  The rooms to left and right were locked as before.

  It was senseless to hammer at an unreal door

  Painted on the plaster of a ten-foot wall.

  There was half-light here, piled darkness beyond

  Rising up sheer as the mountain of Time,

  The blank rock-face that no thought can climb,

  Girdled around with the Slough of Despond.

  I stood quite dumb, sunk fast in the mire,

  Lonely as the first man, or the last man,

  Chilled to despair since evening began,

  Dazed for the memory of a lost desire.

  But a voice said ‘Easily’, and a voice said ‘Come!’

  Easily I followed with no thought of doubt,

  Turned to the right hand, and the way stretched out;

  The ground held firmly; I was no more dumb.

  For that was the place where I longed to be,

  And past all hope there the kind lamp shone,

  The carpet was holy that my feet were on,

  And logs on the fire lay hissing for me.

  The cushions were friendship and the chairs were love,

  Shaggy with love was the great wolf skin,

  The clock ticked ‘Easily’ as I entered in,

  ‘Come,’ called the bullfinch from his cage above.

  Love went before me; it was shining now

  From the eyes of a girl by the window wall,

  Whose beauty I knew to be fate and all

  By the thin red ribbon on her calm brow.

  Then I was a hero and a bold boy

  Kissing the hand I had never yet kissed;

  I felt red ribbon like a snake twist

  In my own thick hair, so I laughed for joy.

  I stand by the stair-head in the upper hall;

  The rooms to the left and right are locked as before.

  Once I found entrance, but now never more,

  And Time leans forward with his glassy wall.

  IN PROCESSION

  Often, half-way to sleep,

  Not yet sunken deep –

  The sudden moment on me comes

  From a mountain shagged and steep,

  With terrible roll of dream drums,

  Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying,

  When with standards flying,

  Horsemen in clouds behind,

  The coloured pomps unwind

  Carnival wagons

  With their saints and their dragons

  On the scroll of my teeming mind:

  The Creation and Flood

  With our Saviour’s Blood

  And fat Silenus’ flagons,

  And every rare beast

  From the South and East,

  Both greatest and least,

  On and on,

  In endless, variant procession.

  I stand at the top rungs

  Of a ladder reared in the air,

  And I rail in strange tongues,

  So the crowds murmur and stare;

  Then volleys again the blare

  Of horns, and summer flowers

  Fly scattering in showers,

  And the sun leaps in the sky,

  While the drums thumping by

  Proclaim me….

  Oh, then, when I wake,

  Could I courage take

  To renew my speech,

  Could I stretch and reach

  The flowers and the ripe fruit

  Laid out at the ladder’s foot,

  Could I rip a silken shred

  From the banner tossed ahead,

  Could I call a double-flam

  From the drums, could the goat

  Horned with gold, could the ram

  With a flank like a barn-door,

  The dwarf, the blackamoor,

  Could Jonah and the Whale

  And the Holy Grail,

  The Ape with his platter

  Going clitter-clatter,

  The Nymphs and the Satyr,

  And every marvellous matter

  Come before me here,

  Standing near and clear –

  Could I make it so that you

  Might wonder at them too!

  – Glories of land and sea,

  Of Heaven glittering free,

  Castles hugely built in Spain,

  Glories of Cockaigne,

  Of that spicy kingdom, Cand,

  Of the Delectable Land,

  Of the Land of Crooked Stiles,

  Of the Fortunate Isles,

  Of the more than three-score miles

  That to Babylon lead

  (A pretty city indeed

  Built on a four-square plan),

  Of the Land of the Gold Man

  Whose eager horses whinny

  In
their cribs of gold,

  Of the Land of Whipperginny,

  Of the land where none grows old….

  But cowardly I tell,

  Rather, of the Town of Hell –

  A huddle of dirty woes

  And houses in fading rows

  Straggled through space:

  Hell has no market-place,

  Nor point where four ways meet,

  Nor principal street,

  Nor barracks, nor Town Hall,

  Nor shops at all,

  Nor rest for weary feet,

  Nor theatre, square, or park,

  Nor lights after dark,

  Nor churches, nor inns,

  Nor convenience for sins –

  Neither ends nor begins,

  Rambling, limitless, hated well,

  This Town of Hell

  Where between sleep and sleep I dwell.

  HENRY AND MARY

  Henry was a young king,

  Mary was his queen;

  He gave her a snowdrop

  On a stalk of green.

  Then all for his kindness

  And all for his care

  She gave him a new-laid egg

  In the garden there.

  ‘Love, can you sing?’

  ‘I cannot sing.’

  ‘Or tell a tale?’

  ‘Not one I know.’

  ‘Then let us play at queen and king

  As down the garden walks we go.’

  AN ENGLISH WOOD

  This valley wood is pledged

  To the set shape of things,

  And reasonably hedged:

  Here are no harpies fledged,

  No rocs may clap their wings,

  Nor gryphons wave their stings.

  Here, poised in quietude,

  Calm elementals brood

  On the set shape of things:

  They fend away alarms

  From this green wood.

  Here nothing is that harms –

  No bulls with lungs of brass,

  No toothed or spiny grass,

  No tree whose clutching arms

  Drink blood when travellers pass,

  No mount of glass;

  No bardic tongues unfold

  Satires or charms.

  Only, the lawns are soft,

  The tree-stems, grave and old;

  Slow branches sway aloft,

  The evening air comes cold,

  The sunset scatters gold.

  Small grasses toss and bend,

  Small pathways idly tend

  Towards no fearful end.

  WHAT DID I DREAM?

  What did I dream? I do not know –

  The fragments fly like chaff.

  Yet, strange, my mind was tickled so

  I cannot help but laugh.

  Pull the curtains close again,

  Tuck me grandly in;

  Must a world of humour wane

  Because birds begin

  Complaining in a fretful tone,

  Rousing me from sleep –

  The finest entertainment known,

  And given rag-cheap?

  INTERLUDE: ON PRESERVING A POETICAL FORMULA

  I

  ‘There’s less and less cohesion

  In each collection

  Of my published poetries?’

  You are taking me to task?

  And ‘What were my last Royalties?

  Reckoned in pounds, were they, or shillings,

  Or even perhaps in pence?’

  No, do not ask!

  I’m lost, in buyings and sellings.

  But please permit only once more for luck

  Irreconcilabilities in my book….

  For these are all the same stuff really,

  The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,

  Of busy Imagination’s new-coined money;

  And if you watch the blind

  Phototropisms of my fluttering mind,

  Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise

  With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully

  Its bale-fire eyes,

  Or whether childishly

  I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace

  To play with toys until those horrors leave me –

  Yet note, whichever way I find release,

  By fight or flight,

  By being harsh or tame,

  The SPIRIT’S the same, the Pen-and-Ink’s the same.

  II

  EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST

  He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:

  This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid,

  So in the end he could not change the tragic habits

  This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

  A HISTORY OF PEACE

  (Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant)

  Here rest in peace the bones of Henry Reece,

  Dead through his bitter championship of Peace

  Against all eagle-nosed and cynic lords

  Who keep the Pax Romana with their swords.

  Henry was only son of Thomas Reece,

  Banker and sometime Justice of the Peace,

  And of Jane Reece whom Thomas kept in dread

  By Pax Romana of his board and bed.

  THE ROCK BELOW

  Comes a muttering from the earth

  Where speedwell grows and daisies grow,

  ‘Pluck these weeds up, root and all,

  Search what hides below.’

  Root and all I pluck them out;

  There, close under, I have found

  Stumps of thorn with ancient crooks

  Grappled in the ground.

  I wrench the thorn-stocks from their hold

  To set a rose-bush in that place;

  Love has pleasure in my roses

  For a summer space.

  Yet the bush cries out in grief:

  ‘Our lowest rootlets turn on rock,

  We live in terror of the drought

  Withering crown and stock.’

  I grow angry with my creature,

  Tear it out and see it die;

  Far beneath I strike the stone,

  Jarring hatefully.

  Impotently must I mourn

  Roses never to flower again?

  Are heart and back too slightly built

  For a heaving strain?

  Heave shall break my proud back never,

  Strain shall never burst my heart:

  Steely fingers hook in the crack,

  Up the rock shall start.

  Now from the deep and frightful pit

  Shoots forth the spiring phoenix-tree

  Long despaired in this bleak land,

  Holds the air with boughs, with bland

  Fragrance welcome to the bee,

  With fruits of immortality.

  AN IDYLL OF OLD AGE

  Two gods once visited a hermit couple,

  Philemon and his Baucis, old books tell;

  They sampled elder-wine and called it nectar,

  Though nectar is the tastier drink by far.

  They made ambrosia of pot-herb and lentil,

  They ate pease-porridge even, with a will.

  Why, and so forth….

  But that night in the spare bedroom

  Where they lay shivering in the musty gloom,

  Hermes and Zeus overheard conversation

  Behind the intervening wall drag on

  In thoughtful snatches through the night. They idly

  Listened, and first they heard Philemon sigh: –

  Phi.: ‘Since two souls meet and merge at time of marriage,

  Conforming to one stature and one age,

  An honest token each with each exchanging

  Of Only Love unbroken as a ring –

  What signified my boyhood’s ideal friendship

  That stared its ecstasy at eye and lip,

  But dared not touch because love seemed too holy

  For flesh with flesh in real embrace to l
ie?’

  Bau.: Then Baucis sighed in answer to Philemon,

  ‘Many’s the young man that my eye rests on

  (Our younger guest to-night provides the instance)

  Whose body brings my heart hotter romance

  Than your dear face could ever spark within me;

  Often I wish my heart from yours set free.’

  Phi.: ‘In this wild medley round us of Bought Love,

  Free Love and Forced Love and pretentious No-Love,

  Let us walk upright, yet with care consider

  Whether, in living thus, we do not err.

  Why might we not approve adulterous licence

  Increasing pleasurable experience?

  What could the soul lose through the body’s rapture

  With a body not its mate, where thought is pure?’

  Bau.: ‘Are children bonds of love? But even children

  Grow up too soon as women and as men,

  And in the growing find their own love private,

  Meet parent-love with new suspicious hate.

  Our favourites run the surest to the Devil

  In spite of early cares and all good will.’

  Phi.: ‘Sweetheart, you know that you have my permission

  To go your own way and to take love on

  Wherever love may signal.’

  She replying

  Bau.: Said, ‘I allow you, dearest, the same thing.’

  Zeus was struck dumb at this unholy compact,

  But Hermes knew the shadow from the fact

  And took an oath that for whole chests of money

  Neither would faithless to the other be,

  Would not and could not, being twined together

  In such close love that he for want of her

  Removed one night-time from his side would perish,

  And she was magnet-drawn by his least wish.

  Eternal Gods deny the sense of humour

  That well might prejudice their infallible power,

  So Hermes and King Zeus not once considered,

  In treating of this idyll overheard,

  That love rehearses after life’s defeat

  Remembered conflicts of an earlier heat.

  Baucis, kind soul, was palsied, withered and bent,

  Philemon, too, was ten years impotent.

  THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN TELLS OF A FAMOUS MEETING

  Unknown to each other in a hostile camp,

  Spies of two empire nations unallied,

  These heroes met, princes of East and West,

  Over a ragged pack of cards, by chance.

  Never believe what credulous annalists

  Record you in good faith of that encounter.

  I was there myself, East’s man, and witnessed all.

  In the main camp of the Middle Kingdom’s army

  At a soldier’s mess, shortly before Retreat,