The Complete Poems

  He grieved all day, a comic grief

  But by next morning sadly verified:

  His face was not his own!

  A man as like his neighbours, you would say,

  As halfpenny like halfpence, yet

  Marked from among them by the luck

  This halfpenny of halfpence brought him,

  Disfigured by its loss.

  Made by luck, by lack of luck unmade –

  A bankrupt sameness was his doom:

  To have had luck and now to have none,

  To have no face but what he borrowed

  From neighbours’ charity.

  Begging at the kerb-side, he won it back,

  The very coin – fit for a fob

  If such he had, but all was rags now.

  ‘To be my ill-luck token,’ he rejoiced,

  ‘My ill luck now my own!’

  Pride of differentiated face:

  ‘And what are rags and broken shoes

  When I can boast myself to strangers,

  Leaping face-forward from their high roofs,

  My ill luck in my hand?’

  THE FALLEN SIGNPOST

  The signpost of four arms is down,

  But one names your departure-town:

  With this for guide you may replant

  Your post and choose which road you want –

  Logic that only seems obscure

  To those deliberately not sure

  Whether a journey should begin

  With cross-roads or with origin.

  The square post, and the socket square –

  Now which way round to set it there?

  Thus from the problem coaxing out

  Four further elements of doubt,

  They make the simple cross-roads be

  A crux of pure dubiety

  Demanding how much more concern

  Than to have taken the wrong turn!

  THE CHINA PLATE

  From a crowded barrow in a street-market

  The plate was ransomed for a few coppers,

  Was brought gleefully home, given a place

  On a commanding shelf.

  ‘Quite a museum-piece,’ an expert cries

  (Eyeing it through the ready pocket-lens) –

  As though a glass case would be less sepulchral

  Than the barrow-hearse!

  For weeks this plate retells the history

  Whenever an eye runs in that direction:

  ‘Near perdition I was, in a street-market

  With rags and old shoes.’

  ‘A few coppers’ – here once again

  The purchaser’s proud hand lifts down

  The bargain, displays the pot-bank sign

  Scrawled raggedly underneath.

  Enough, permit the treasure to forget

  The emotion of that providential purchase,

  Becoming a good citizen of the house

  Like its fellow-crockery.

  Let it dispense sandwiches at a party

  And not be noticed in the drunken buzz,

  Or little cakes at afternoon tea

  When cakes are in demand.

  Let it regain a lost habit of life,

  Foreseeing death in honourable breakage

  Somewhere between the kitchen and the shelf –

  To be sincerely mourned.

  IDLE HANDS

  To-day, all day, for once he did nothing –

  A proud report from one whose hands,

  Of Satan warned when young, engross him

  Always with over-busyness. Nothing –

  Pleasure unposted in the journal.

  This is for eyes that ask no illustration,

  Not for those poor adepts at less than nothing

  Who would enquire: Was it town-idleness,

  Or did he drink the sun by the calm sea

  Until the sunset washed upon his daze,

  Then home to supper, and the bedside lamp?

  He did nothing; tells you plainly so.

  Where he did nothing is no part of this:

  Whether by the wild sea or the calm sea

  Or where the pavement-coloured dog befouls

  The pavement-kerb. It is enough that

  He did nothing, neither less nor more,

  Leaving the day, for a remembrance,

  A clear bubble in Time’s chalky glass.

  THE LAUREATE

  Like a lizard in the sun, though not scuttling

  When men approach, this wretch, this thing of rage,

  Scowls and sits rhyming in his horny age.

  His time and truth he has not bridged to ours,

  But shrivelled by long heliotropic idling

  He croaks at us his out-of-date humours.

  Once long ago here was a poet; who died.

  See how remorse twitching his mouth proclaims

  It was no natural death, but suicide.

  Arrogant, lean, unvenerable, he

  Still turns for comfort to the western flames

  That glitter a cold span above the sea.

  A JEALOUS MAN

  To be homeless is a pride

  To the jealous man prowling

  Hungry down the night lanes,

  Who has no steel at his side,

  No drink hot in his mouth,

  But a mind dream-enlarged,

  Who witnesses warfare,

  Man with woman, hugely

  Raging from hedge to hedge:

  The raw knotted oak-club

  Clenched in the raw fist,

  The ivy-noose well flung,

  The thronged din of battle,

  Gaspings of the throat-snared,

  Snores of the battered dying,

  Tall corpses, braced together,

  Fallen in clammy furrows,

  Male and female,

  Or, among haulms of nettle

  Humped, in noisome heaps,

  Male and female.

  He glowers in the choked roadway

  Between twin churchyards,

  Like a turnip ghost.

  (Here, the rain-worn headstone,

  There, the Celtic cross

  In rank white marble.)

  This jealous man is smitten,

  His fear-jerked forehead

  Sweats a fine musk;

  A score of bats bewitched

  By the ruttish odour

  Swoop singing at his head;

  Nuns bricked up alive

  Within the neighbouring wall

  Wail in cat-like longing.

  Crow, cocks, crow loud,

  Reprieve the doomed devil –

  Has he not died enough?

  Now, out of careless sleep,

  She wakes and greets him coldly,

  The woman at home,

  She, with a private wonder

  At shoes bemired and bloody –

  His war was not hers.

  THE CLOAK

  Into exile with only a few shirts,

  Some gold coin and the necessary papers.

  But winds are contrary: the Channel packet

  Time after time returns the sea-sick peer

  To Sandwich, Deal or Rye. He does not land,

  But keeps his cabin; so at last we find him

  In humble lodgings maybe at Dieppe,

  His shirts unpacked, his night-cap on a peg,

  Passing the day at cards and swordsmanship

  Or merry passages with chambermaids,

  By night at his old work. And all is well –

  The country wine wholesome although so sharp,

  And French his second tongue; a faithful valet

  Brushes his hat and brings him newspapers.

  This nobleman is at home anywhere,

  His castle being, the valet says, his title.

  The cares of an estate would incommode

  Such tasks as now his Lordship has in hand.

  His Lordship, says the valet, contemplates

  A profitable absence of some years.


  Has he no friend at Court to intercede?

  He wants none: exile’s but another name

  For an old habit of non-residence

  In all but the recesses of his cloak.

  It was this angered a great personage.

  THE HALLS OF BEDLAM

  Forewarned of madness:

  In three days’ time at dusk

  The fit masters him.

  How to endure those days?

  (Forewarned is foremad)

  ‘ – Normally, normally.’

  He will gossip with children,

  Argue with elders,

  Check the cash account.

  ‘I shall go mad that day –’

  The gossip, the argument,

  The neat marginal entry.

  His case is not uncommon,

  The doctors pronounce;

  But prescribe no cure.

  To be mad is not easy,

  Will earn him no more

  Than a niche in the news.

  Then to-morrow, children,

  To-morrow or the next day

  He resigns from the firm.

  His boyhood’s ambition

  Was to become an artist –

  Like any City man’s.

  To the walls and halls of Bedlam

  The artist is welcome –

  Bold brush and full palette.

  Through the cell’s grating

  He will watch his children

  To and from school.

  ‘Suffer the little children

  To come unto me

  With their Florentine hair!’

  A very special story

  For their very special friends –

  They burst in the telling:

  Of an evil thing, armed,

  Tap-tapping on the door,

  Tap-tapping on the floor,

  ‘On the third day at dusk.’

  Father in his shirt-sleeves

  Flourishing a hatchet –

  Run, children, run!

  No one could stop him,

  No one understood;

  And in the evening papers….

  (Imminent genius,

  Troubles at the office,

  Normally, normally,

  As if already mad.)

  OR TO PERISH BEFORE DAY

  The pupils of the eye expand

  And from near-nothings build up sight;

  The pupil of the heart, the ghost,

  Swelling parades the dewy land:

  With cowardice and with self-esteem

  Makes terror in the track that through

  The fragrant spotted pasture runs;

  And a bird wails across the dream.

  Now, if no heavenly window shines

  Nor angel-voices cheer the way,

  The ghost will overbear the man

  And mark his head with fever-signs.

  The flowers of dusk that he has pulled

  To wonder at when morning’s here

  Are snail-shells upon straws of grass –

  So easily the eye is gulled.

  The sounding words that his mouth fill

  Upon to-morrow’s lip shall droop;

  The legs that slide with skating ease

  Be stiff to the awakened will.

  Or, should he perish before day,

  He leaves his lofty ghost behind

  Perpetuating uncontrolled

  This hour of glory and dismay.

  A COUNTRY MANSION

  This ancient house so notable

  For its gables and great staircase,

  Its mulberry-trees and alleys of clipped yew,

  Humbles the show of every near demesne.

  At the beginning it acknowledged owners –

  Father, son, grandson –

  But then, surviving the last heirs of the line,

  Became a place for life-tenancy only.

  At the beginning, no hint of fate,

  No rats and no hauntings;

  In the garden, then, the fruit-trees grew

  Slender and similar in long rows.

  A bedroom with a low ceiling

  Caused little fret at first;

  But gradual generations of discomfort

  Have bred an anger there to stifle sleep.

  And the venerable dining-room,

  Where port in Limerick glasses

  Glows twice as red reflected

  In the memory-mirror of the waxed table –

  For a time with paint and flowered paper

  A mistress tamed its walls,

  But pious antiquarian hands, groping,

  Rediscovered the grey panels beneath.

  Children love the old house tearfully,

  And the parterres, how fertile!

  Married couples under the testers hugging

  Enjoy carnality’s bliss as nowhere else.

  A smell of mould from loft to cellar,

  Yet sap still brisk in the oak

  Of the great beams: if ever they use a saw

  It will stain, as cutting a branch from a green tree.

  …Old Parr had lived one hundred years and five

  (So to King Charles he bragged)

  When he did open penance, in a sheet,

  For fornication with posterity.

  Old Parr died; not so the mansion

  Whose inhabitants, bewitched,

  Pour their fresh blood through its historic veins

  And, if a tile blow from the roof, tremble.

  The last-born of this race of sacristans

  Broke the long spell, departed;

  They lay his knife and fork at every meal

  And every evening warm his bed;

  Yet cannot draw him back from the far roads

  For trifling by the lily-pool

  Or wine at the hushed table where they meet,

  The guests of genealogy.

  It was his childhood’s pleasure-ground

  And still may claim his corpse,

  Yet foster-cradle or foster-grave

  He will not count as home.

  This rebel does not hate the house,

  Nor its dusty joys impugn:

  No place less reverend could provoke

  So proud an absence from it.

  He has that new malaise of time:

  Gratitude choking with vexation

  That he should opulently inherit

  The goods and titles of the extinct.

  THE EREMITES

  We may well wonder at those bearded hermits

  Who like the scorpion and the basilisk

  Couched in the desert sands, to undo

  Their scurfy flesh with tortures.

  They drank from pools fouled by the ass and camel,

  Chewed uncooked millet pounded between stones,

  Wore but a shame-rag, dusk or dawn,

  And rolled in thorny places.

  In the wilderness there are no women;

  Yet hermits harbour in their shrunken loins

  A penitential paradise,

  A leaping-house of glory.

  Solomons of a thousand lusty love-chants,

  These goatish men, burned Aethiopian black,

  Kept vigil till the angelic whores

  Should lift the latch of pleasure.

  And what Atellan orgies of the soul

  Were celebrated then among the rocks

  They testify themselves in books

  That rouse Atellan laughter.

  Haled back at last to wear the ring and mitre,

  They clipped their beards and, for their stomachs’ sake,

  Drank now and then a little wine,

  And tasted cakes and honey.

  Observe then how they disciplined the daughters

  Of noble widows, who must fast and thirst,

  Abjure down-pillows, rouge and curls,

  Deform their delicate bodies:

  Whose dreams were curiously beset by visions

  Of stinking hermits in a wilderness

  Pressing un
natural lusts on them

  Until they wakened screaming.

  Such was the virtue of our pious fathers:

  To refine pleasure in the hungry dream.

  Pity for them, but pity too for us –

  Our beds by their leave lain in.

  ADVOCATES

  Fugitive firs and larches for a moment

  Caught, past midnight, by our headlight beam

  On that mad journey through unlasting lands

  I cannot put a name to, years ago,

  (And my companions drowsy-drunk) – those trees

  Resume again their sharp appearance, perfect

  Of spur and tassel, claiming memory,

  Claiming affection: ‘Will we be included

  In the catalogue? Yes, yes?’ they plead.

  Green things, you are already there enrolled.

  And should a new resentment gnaw in me

  Against my dear companions of that journey

  (Strangers already then, in thought and deed)

  You shall be advocates, charged to deny

  That all the good I lived with them is lost.

  SELF-PRAISE

  No, self-praise does not recommend.

  What shall I do with mine

  When so few Englishmen pretend

  Not to be dogs or swine,

  That to assume the peacock’s part,

  To scream and spread the tail,

  Is held a doom-defying art

  And witnesses turn pale?

  But praise from fellow-creatures is

  (All Englishmen agree)

  The sweetest of experiences

  And confers modesty,

  And justifies the silent boast

  Of a bemedalled line:

  The most dog-true of dogs, the most

  Egregious swine of swine.

  O, let me suffer in self-praise,

  Unfit to occupy

  The kennel, for my headstrong ways,

  Too squeamish for the sty.

  THE CHALLENGE

  In ancient days a glory swelled my thighs,

  And sat like fear between my shoulder-blades,

  And made the young hair bristle on my poll.

  Sun was my crown, green grassflesh my estate,

  The wind a courtier, fanning at my cheek,

  And plunged I in the stream, its waters hissed.

  Queens I had to try my glory on,

  And glory-princes my queens bore to me.

  Royally I swept off all caitiff crowns.

  Were the queens whores? the princes parricides?

  Or were the tumbled crowns again worn high?

  No, I was king then, if kings ever were.

  O cousin princes, glory is hard put by,

  And green grassflesh is lovely to a king.

  My hawks were lightning darted from my fist.