The Complete Poems

  He ponders where the Primal Den can be,

  He holds the web to have no finity

  And boldly adds, ‘Attercop has no base

  In any sure discoverable place,

  Lost in his own complexities of lace;

  A most capricious Beast

  Whose tricks need not concern us in the least.

  He’s mad or possibly long years deceased;

  But this web serves as flooring for us flies.

  Who disregards this web binding the skies,

  That man himself denies.

  The Web! Life! Liberty! All else is lies!’

  Lyrical Walter cannot speak

  Philosophy, nor use the same technique,

  But listen to his natural-magic charm

  Potent, as he thinks, for harm

  Against the tyrant Attercop.

  ‘Brush down the cobwebs from the cupboard-top

  With a long feather-mop.

  Go, cheerily stride at dawn

  With careless feet about the lawn

  Breaking the threads of gossamer;

  This, then, shall prove a token

  Of Liberty, my sapient sir,

  Attercop, whose proud name with hate be spoken,

  His net too shall be broken.’

  ANTINOMIES

  Lying in long grass one hot afternoon,

  Between two eighteenth-century garden statues,

  ‘Furor Poeticus’ and ‘Phryne Judged’,

  I observed my muse in likeness of a grasshopper

  Trilling ’Sing, Sing, child!’ So I answered her,

  ‘What can I sing, Muse?’ And she told me plainly,

  ‘Always the first thing floating in your mind.

  A formless, lumpish, nothing-in-particular.

  You take, toss, catch it, turn it inside out,

  Do new things with it; wean it, breech it, school it,

  Bring it to man’s estate; in your old age

  It should support you out of filial duty.’

  My mind was empty as the summer sky,

  And sleepy with the hum of bees and midges,

  Until a sudden clashing clamour began,

  The church bells ringing up for evensong.

  They checked my natural-magic reveries,

  Tuning the mind to more parochial thought,

  To Mrs. Ames, the widow, and Miss Bold,

  Setting their caps, if gossip may be trusted,

  At Cutt, the rector, very bitter rivals.

  Red-gowned and surpliced, sawing with his hands,

  This Cutt pours rhetoric from my mental pulpit.

  The text about the flesh warring with spirit,

  Spirit with flesh. Cutt takes the spirit’s part,

  Poor, baffled soul; though why he speaks through me

  I dare not tempt my curious muse to enquire.

  ‘Sing, Sing!’ the grasshopper warning comes again.

  ‘I’ll sing, but here’s fair Phryne’s nakedness

  Demands inclusion; let the Sculptor’s Mistress

  Plead with a sympathetic voice for flesh.

  Now, listen, Muse, what will you make of this?’

  His gorgon eyes make stone

  Of sweetest flesh and bone;

  Resigning true-love’s part

  He lets a pedant art

  Academize his heart.

  For him my body is

  A thing of surfaces

  For chisels to uncover;

  Mathematician-lover

  He lets love-splendour pass

  In thoughts of line and mass,

  And craftsman-like observes

  The straightenings and the curves

  Of my young excellence

  Making its fond expense.

  Go, fool! be done with this!

  Let steel and marble kiss,

  Transcribing the disgrace

  Of our untrue embrace,

  Let the brisk flakes that fly

  Beneath your careful eye

  Disclose for all to see

  Love’s virtuosity,

  Your mind in terms of me,

  On either part the same,

  Scorned beauty, deadness, shame.

  ‘That’s well enough,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?

  A biased history, purporting no more;

  Craftily written, rather too precise;

  Strung on the thread of an experience

  Too sympathetic to the heroine’s case.’

  ‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse! wait, let the theme develop!

  We’ll speak a sympathetic word for Spirit.

  Here, then! the sculptor’s talking.’

  She came as my true friend,

  This art our common end.

  Who could have guessed at first,

  Seeing her so demure,

  Wistful and seeming pure,

  I’d fixed my love secure

  In a strumpet of the worst,

  A fly-by-night accurst,

  A most malignant slut,

  Whose mouth I could not shut

  Nor long evade her call?

  Flesh was her all-in-all;

  I fell, and in this fall

  Here, woman, you shall view

  This marble ruined too,

  My mind in terms of you,

  On either part the same,

  Scorned beauty, passion, shame.

  ‘That’s very well,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?

  Here’s plaintiff and defendant, Roe with Doe,

  Cunningly balanced; rather too precise.

  A clear antinomy, purporting no more.

  Where does it lead us? Mutual ruination,

  Deadlock, but have you nothing to suggest,

  No swift solution of these tangled knots

  By Alexander’s way, or Solomon’s?’

  ‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse, when were you ever content?

  I gave you wronged Othello, Shakespeare-like,

  And you said “Well enough,” or “None too bad,”

  But asked for wronged Iago; that I gave you,

  Plainer than Shakespeare, proving very clearly

  Misunderstanding never makes a villain.

  There was a definite wrong Iago suffered

  From this same Moor. I gave that wrong in full.

  What did you tell me then? “A mere antinomy,

  Cunningly balanced, rather too precise,

  Strung on the thread of an experience

  Not sympathetic to Iago’s case.”

  I tell you, Muse, you’ll have to stay content

  This great while yet with such antinomies.

  Until all history’s written in that style

  (Absolutism made ridiculous),

  There’s no room for constructing newer forms.

  Be content, Muse, you’re driving me too hard.’

  Yet, still, among the clashing noise of bells

  And buzzing brazen echoes when they ceased,

  My grass-hid muse whirred her dissatisfaction,

  ‘Critical Box and Cox, Roe against Doe,

  Unsolved antinomies, have you nothing else?

  Sing, child, a fuller song. Sing, Sing,’ she trilled.

  ‘A fuller song? Sweet Muse, how can that be,

  While I must yet continue implicate

  With life half-strangled by its own free-will?

  Always, when I am called to approve the rights

  Of one or other side in any brawl,

  To hold both claims at fault can make no sense.

  How can the plaintiff hear me, still recalling

  The old wrong done, the insult unavenged,

  Drowning my saws with shrill reiteration?

  It’s then I brief myself as advocate

  For the defence, I advance counter-claims

  Raising my voice as loud as his or louder.

  “Deny it, plaintiff, nevertheless it’s true.”

  He’ll bite on that, distasteful though it be,

  And the quarre
l marches one step nearer peace.

  No one loves conflict on its own account,

  But for the hoped-for triumphs it entails.

  Then since I hold that, though no conflict ends

  Except in ruin of opposing views,

  Yet till antinomies plainly stand opposed

  Truth cannot rise to knock the swords aside,

  What’s to be done? The immediate action’s plain,

  To throw my weight the other side of the scales.

  Trimming? Contrariness? Equivocation?

  Nothing of that. Muse, here’s a novel turn

  To Aesop’s fable of the Man and Satyr: –

  Blow hot to warm your hands, cold for your porridge.

  Then though the simple Satyr stands aghast

  Warning his brethren to beware your mouth,

  Not even a Satyr could deny this much

  That hands need warming, porridge demands cooling,

  Rather than frost-bite or the scalded tongue.’

  NORTHWARD FROM OXFORD

  (An Architectural Progress)

  First from, Beaumont Street:

  Do you know Beaumont Street in Oxford, city of ghosts and damps?

  The eighteenth century curves up, broadly, from Worcester College,

  And apart from the ‘Cave of Forty Thieves’* lit by Ruskin’s Lamps

  The street has an air of knowledge, strength and confidence in knowledge,

  Not the knowledge and strength, admitted, that delights me best,

  But politeness, grand proportions, decorum and the rest:

  Pass on, then, from Beaumont Street; gloomy but impressed.

  Next to Banbury Road,

  Leaving St. Giles’s, passing the old bounds of the city.

  It begins with the young Victoria, and ends with Edward’s age,

  And the middle compromises, solid state with pretty-pretty,

  Oh, the Struggle-for-Existence-God’s-in-His-Heaven-Art-for-Art’s-sake stage,

  Red brick and gables, Gothic spires, freestone and knick-knackery,

  Steep, narrow stairs, dark kitchens, the greenhouse, the rockery,

  Beards, bustles, black silk dresses, and the glazed art crockery!

  So to Summertown,

  By ’bus, to a row of post-war villas, neurotically built,

  Standing each at different curious angles to the road,

  Each with the most extravagantly individualistic shrug and tilt

  Of roof, wall, porch and gutter, as though each abode,

  Rosslyn, Sans Souci, Mons defied the serjeant-major, would not dress,

  Dumbly blaspheming Banbury Road’s ordered pretentiousness,

  The semi-detached pairs writhing in a loveless caress.

  So on from Oxford:

  Come home with me these three miles beyond Summertown –

  If the Cherwell does not flood the fields between –

  Our house is older than Beaumont Street, at first sight rather tumble-down

  But solid enough; and the windows open, and floors are easy to clean:

  A house self-certain, not divided, with a good feng shwee. §

  Beaumont Street, Banbury Road and Summertown cannot come to see,

  Whom I can no more understand than they can me.

  WITCHES

  These churchyard witches in pursuit

  Of magics most abominate

  Urge out their sieves from the cliff’s foot

  The midnight seas to navigate,

  Or high in air through roaring glooms

  With brooms their covens levitate.

  I have watched their Sabbath pack –

  North Berwickward in flight they came –

  Nutcracker face and knobbled back,

  Or young breasts bare and eyes like flame,

  Twelve to the coven, with one more;

  Him they adore in Hell’s own name.

  Wedgewise by thirteens they flew,

  Each devil sounding his Jews’ trump,

  The witches chanting psalms thereto

  Mouthing and clapping hand on rump,

  That we who watched from Tweed’s far brink

  Felt the heart sink like a lead lump.

  Such feats on oath we testify

  To whom like powers have long been known,

  But we for love the cold heavens fly

  Which other whiles for lust are flown,

  We walk the swellings of the sea

  Dryshod and free, for love alone.

  Do you, my cribbed empiricist,

  Judge these things false, then false they’ll be

  For all who never swooped and kissed

  Above the moon, below the sea;

  Yet set no tangles in their place

  Of Time and Space and Gravity.

  For Space and Time have only sense

  Where these are flattered and adored;

  And there sit many parliaments

  Where clock and compass have no word,

  Where gravity makes levity,

  Where reason snaps her blunted sword.

  Be wary, lest on unbelief

  The cloak of dark one day be spread,

  Time shall be grief and Space be grief

  And Love in accidie lie dead,

  And broomstick rites alone remain

  To lend your cramping pain relief.

  [The King himself examined Agnes Sampsown: she confessed that upon the night of Allhallow E’en last she was accompanied as well as with the persons aforesaid, as also with a great many other witches to the number of two hundred, and that all went together to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve and went into the same with flagons of wine making merry and drinking by the way in the same riddles or sieves to the kirk of North Berwick in Lothian, and that after they had landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel or short dance, singing with one voice. Giles Duncan went before them playing this reel or dance upon a small trump, called a Jew’s trump, until they entered into the kirk of North Berwick. These confessions made the King in a wonderful admiration, and sent for the said Giles Duncan, who upon the like trump did play the said dance before the King’s Majesty.]

  [A True Discourse of the Apprehension of Sundry Witches lately taken in Scotland; 1591.]

  ANTIGONUS: AN ECLOGUE

  James, a literary historian; John, a poet.

  John. Why, James!

  James. Well, John? What are you writing now? Letters?

  John. A poem.

  James. Are you? Then I’ll go. If I had guessed…

  John. ‘Person from Porlock,’* stay!

  If you don’t know my only rule for writing

  It’s this, to welcome all disturbances

  As bearing somehow on the work in hand,

  Supplying an unguessed material need.

  James. Convenient rule! If you resent disturbance

  As you must sometimes do, in spite of rules,

  What happens?

  John. Then resentment shapes the poem.

  And if the scheme was cheerful at the start,

  And if my mind swings back to cheerfulness

  It takes some time to check the damage done:

  My rule is economical in the end.

  But, James, what have you walked out here to tell me?

  You always spring some literary surprise –

  Keats’ early punctuation? or the name

  Of Marvell’s wet-nurse, and her views on God?

  James. Nothing particular; oh, yes, there was.

  Do you recall Antigonus and the bear?

  John. ‘Antigonus, crux of the Winter’s Tale,

  Running the drama past the accepted mark

  That separates the comic from the tragic.’

  Or, that’s the verdict that your school upholds.

  James. You’ve got the point, then listen! Yesterday

  A knowledgeable student of research,

  But never mind the name –

  John. From Aberystwyth?

  James
. That’s right – convinced me, giving chapter and verse

  That Shakespeare’s story of Antigonus

  Besides its knockabout popular appeal,

  Hides a discreet political allusion,

  Caviare for the courtiers in the stalls.

  John. Who was Antigonus, then?

  James. Philip of Spain.

  John. Philip was dead a dozen years or more.

  James. True, but now Spain was pressing Italy,

  And England sympathetically aghast

  Recalled the Armada threat. When Shakespeare’s Clown

  Relates ‘Antigonus roared and the bear roared

  The Tempest roaring even louder still.’

  And grins ‘The bear wrenched out his shoulderblade,

  And the vessel, how the sea flap-dragoned it!’

  (Or words to that effect, a comic turn)

  Philip was this Antigonus (of the Jews),

  A nickname lent him by the pamphleteers.

  Dutch, Huguenots, Italians they all used it.

  The shoulderblade was actual shoulderblade

  Relic of Philip’s favourite saint, St. Laurence,

  In faith of which the Armada had been launched:

  So, when the tempest and our English guns,

  Drake’s Bear leading the van, broke Philip’s hopes,

  A savage gust of merriment convulsed

  Protestant Europe, with this caricature

  ‘The Bear tears out Antigonus’ shoulderblade’

  Which jest, revived to hearten sixteen-ten

  Preserves the comic unities, my friend holds.§

  John. I hardly know whether you’re serious.

  To accept this correspondence of ideas

  Will damage your Shakespearean reputation.

  Once you begin it, this political tack

  Involves a most unorthodox position.

  Couldn’t you try to explain it all away?

  James. No mockery!

  John. James, I’ll take you one street further.

  I’ll tell you more about Antigonus

  Than you or Aberystwyth ever guessed.

  James (drily). The scientific method aptly used

  Can yield results of most romantic flavour.

  John. James, if I swear that Julio Romano

  Whose fame lives golden in the Winter’s Tale,

  Published a pamphlet – fifteen-ninety-three,

  It’s most important to invent a date –

  Of covert anti-Catholic imagery;

  That one torn copy of this book survives

  Though not for public reading, at Madrid;

  That in this book, Antigonus and the bear

  The tempest and the shoulderbone occur

  With a deal more about this grim encounter

  Than Shakespeare with his fine selective sense

  Included – if I tell you this, believe it.