SOMETHING TO SAY
(Dialogue between Thomas Carlyle and Lewis Carroll)
T.C. ‘Would you care to explain
Why they fight for your books
With already too many
Tight-packed on their shelves
(Many hundreds of thousands
Or hundreds of millions)
As though you had written
Those few for themselves?’
L. C. ‘In reply to your query:
I wrote for one reason
And only one reason
(That being my way):
Not for fame, not for glory,
Nor yet for distraction,
But oddly enough
I had something to say.’
T.C. ‘So you wrote for one reason?
Be damned to that reason!
It may sound pretty fine
But relinquish it, pray!
There are preachers in pulpits
And urchins in playgrounds
And fools in asylums
And beggars in corners
And drunkards in gutters
And bandits in prisons
With all the right reasons
For something to say.’
OCCASIONALIA
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: CLASSIFIED
We reckon Cooke our best chemist alive
And therefore the least certain to survive
Even by crediting his way-out findings
To our Department boss, Sir Bonehead Clive.
Those Goblins, guessing which of us is what
(And, but for Cooke, we’re far from a bright lot),
Must either pinch his know-how or else wipe him.
He boasts himself quite safe. By God, he’s not!
In fact, we all conclude that Cooke’s one hope
Is neither loud heroics nor soft soap:
Cooke must defect, we warn him, to the Goblins,
Though even they may grudge him enough rope.
THE IMMINENT SEVENTIES
Man’s life is threescore years and ten,*
Which God will surely bless;
Still, we are warned what follows then –
Labour and heaviness –
And understand old David’s grouch
Though he (or so we’re told)
Bespoke a virgin for his couch
To shield him from the cold….§
Are not all centuries, like men,
Born hopeful too and gay,
And good for seventy years, but then
Hope slowly seeps away?
True, a new geriatric art
Prolongs our last adventures
When eyes grow dim, when teeth depart:
For glasses come, and dentures –
Helps which these last three decades need
If true to Freedom’s cause:
Glasses (detecting crimes of greed)
Teeth (implementing laws).
CAROL OF PATIENCE
Shepherds armed with staff and sling,
Ranged along a steep hillside,
Watch for their anointed King
By all prophets prophesied –
Sing patience, patience,
Only still have patience!
Hour by hour they scrutinize
Comet, planet, planet, star,
Till the oldest shepherd sighs:
‘I am frail and he is far.’
Sing patience etc.
‘Born, they say, a happy child;
Grown, a man of grief to be,
From all careless joys exiled,
Rooted in eternity.’
Sing patience etc.
Then another shepherd said:
‘Yonder lights are Bethlehem;
There young David raised his head
Destined for the diadem.’
Sing patience etc.
Cried the youngest shepherd: ‘There
Our Redeemer comes tonight,
Comes with starlight on his hair,
With his brow exceeding bright.’
Sing patience etc.
‘Sacrifice no lamb nor kid,
Let such foolish fashions pass;
In a manger find him hid,
Breathed upon by ox and ass.’
Sing patience etc.
Dance for him and laugh and sing,
Watch him mercifully smile,
Dance although tomorrow bring
Every plague that plagued the Nile!
Sing patience, patience,
Only still have patience!
H
H may be N for those who speak
Russian, although long E in Greek;
And cockneys, like the French, agree
That H is neither N nor E
Nor Hate’s harsh aspirate, but meek
And mute as in Humanity.
INVITATION TO BRISTOL
‘Come as my doctor,
Come as my lawyer,
Or come as my agent
(First practise your lies)
For Bristol is a small town
Full of silly gossip
And a girl gets abashed by
Ten thousand staring eyes.’
‘Yes, I’ll come as your lawyer
Or as your god-father,
Or even as Father Christmas? –
Not half a bad disguise –
With a jingle of sleigh bells,
A sack full of crackers
And a big bunch of mistletoe
For you to recognize.’
THE PRIMROSE BED
The eunuch and the unicorn
Walked by the primrose bed;
The month was May, the time was morn,
Their hearts were dull as lead.
‘Ah, unicorn,’ the eunuch cried,
‘How tragic is our Spring,
With stir of love on every side,
And loud the sweet birds sing.’
Then, arm and foreleg intertwined,
Both mourned their cruel fate –
The one was single of his kind,
The other could not mate.
THE STRANGLING IN MERRION SQUARE
None ever loved as Molly loved me then,
With her whole soul, and yet
How might the patientest of Irishmen
Forgive, far less forget
Her long unpaid and now unpayable debt?
There’s scarce a liveried footman in the Square
But can detail you how and when and where.
THE AWAKENING
Just why should it invariably happen
That when the Christian wakes at last in Heaven
He finds two harassed surgeons watching by
In white angelic smocks and gloves, and why
Looking so cross and (as three junior nurses
Trundle the trolley off with stifled curses)
Why joking that the X-ray photograph
Must have been someone else’s – what a laugh! –?
Now they may smoke…. A message from downstairs
Says: ‘Matron says, God’s due soon after Prayers.’
From The Green-Sailed Vessel
(1971)
THE HOOPOE TELLS US HOW
Recklessly you offered me your all,
Recklessly I accepted,
Laying my large world at your childish feet
Beyond all bounds of honourable recall:
Wild, wilful, incomplete.
Absence reintegrates our pact of pacts –
The hoopoe tells us how:
With bold love-magic, Moon in Leo,
Sun in Pisces, blossom upon bough.
PART I
THE WAND
These tears flooding my eyes, are they of pain
Or of relief: to have done with other loves,
To abstain from childish folly?
It has fallen on us to become exemplars
Of a love so far removed from gallantry
That we now meet seldom in a room apa
rt
Or kiss goodnight, or even dine together
Unless in casual company.
For while we walk the same green paradise
And confidently ply the same green wand
That still restores the wilting hopes of others
Far more distressed than we,
How can we dread the broad and bottomless mere
Of utter infamy sunk below us
Where the eggs of hatred hatch?
FIVE
Five beringed fingers of Creation,
Five candles blazing at a shrine,
Five points of her continuous pentagram,
Five letters in her name – as five in mine.
I love, therefore I am.
QUINQUE
Quinque tibi luces vibrant in nomine: quinque
Isidis in Stella cornua sacra deae.
Nonne etiam digitos anuli quinque Isidis ornant?
Ornant te totidem, Julia .… Sum, quod amo.
ARROW ON THE VANE
Suddenly, at last, the bitter wind veers round
From North-East to South-West. It is at your orders;
And the arrow on our vane swings and stays true
To your direction. Nothing parts us now.
What can I say? Nothing I have not said,
However the wind blew. I more than love,
As when you drew me bodily from the dead.
GORGON MASK
When the great ship ran madly towards the rocks
An unseen current slewed her into safety,
A dying man ashore took heart and lived,
And the moon soared overhead, ringed with three rainbows,
To announce the birth of a miraculous child.
Yet you preserved your silence, secretly
Nodding at me across the crowded hall.
The ship carried no cargo destined for us,
Nor were her crew or master known to us,
Nor was that sick man under our surveillance,
Nor would the child ever be born to you,
Or by me fathered on another woman –
Nevertheless our magic power ordained
These three concurrent prodigies.
Stranger things bear upon us. We are poets
Age-old in love: a full reach of desire
Would burn us both to an invisible ash….
Then hide from me, if hide from me you must,
In bleak refuge among nonentities,
But wear your Gorgon mask of divine warning
That, as we first began, so must we stay.
TO BE POETS
We are two lovers of no careless breed,
Nor is our love a curiosity
(Like honey-suckle shoots from an oak tree
Or a child with two left hands) but a proud need
For royal thought and irreproachable deed;
What others write about us makes poor sense,
Theirs being a no-man’s land of negligence.
To be poets confers Death on us:
Death, paradisal fiery conspectus
For those who bear themselves always as poets,
Who cannot fall beneath the ignoble curse
(Whether by love of self, whether by scorn
Of truth) never to die, never to have been born.
WITH A GIFT OF RINGS
It was no costume jewellery I sent:
True stones cool to the tongue, their settings ancient,
Their magic evident.
Conceal your pride, accept them negligently
But, naked on your couch, wear them for me.
CASSE-NOISETTE
As a scurrying snow-flake
Or a wild-rose petal
Carried by the breeze,
Dance your nightly ballet
On the set stage.
And although each scurrying
Snow-flake or rose-petal
Resembles any other –
Her established smile,
Her well-schooled carriage –
Dance to Rule, ballet-child;
Yet never laugh to Rule,
Never love to Rule!
Keep your genius hidden
By a slow rage.
So let it be your triumph
In this nightly ballet
Of snow-flakes and petals,
To present love-magic
In your single image –
With a low, final curtsey
From the set stage.
THE GARDEN
Enhanced in a tower, asleep, dreaming about him,
The twin buds of her breasts opening like flowers,
Her fingers leafed and wandering…
Past the well
Blossoms an apple-tree, and a horde of birds
Nested in the close thickets of her hair
Grumble in dreamy dissonance,
Calling him to the garden, if he dare.
THE GREEN-SAILED VESSEL
We are like doves, well-paired,
Veering across a meadow –
Children’s voices below,
Their song and echo;
Like raven, wren or crow
That cry and prophesy,
What do we not foreknow,
Whether deep or shallow?
Like the tiller and prow
Of a green-sailed vessel
Voyaging, none knows how,
Between moon and shadow;
Like the restless, endless
Blossoming of a bough,
Like tansy, violet, mallow,
Like the sun’s afterglow.
Of sharp resemblances
What further must I show
Until your black eyes narrow,
Furrowing your clear brow?
DREAMING CHILDREN
They have space enough, however cramped their quarters,
And time enough, however short their day,
In sleep to chase each other through dream orchards
Or bounce from rafters into buoyant hay.
But midnight thunder rolls, with frequent flashes,
Wild hail peppers the farm-house roof and walls,
Wild wind sweeps from the North, flattening the bushes
As with a crash of doom chain-lightning falls.
Split to its tap-roots, their own favourite oak-tree
Glows like a torch across the narrow heath.
She shudders: ‘Take me home again! It scares me!
Put your arms round me, we have seen death!’
THE PROHIBITION
You were by my side, though I could not see you,
Your beauty being sucked up by the moon
In whose broad light, streaming across the valley,
We could match colours or read the finest print,
While swart tree shadows rose from living roots
Like a stockade planted against intrusion.
But since dawn spread, birds everywhere wakeful
And the sun risen masterly from the East,
Where are you now? Not standing at my side
But gone with the moon, sucked away into daylight,
All magic vanished, save for the rare instant
When a sudden arrow-shot transfixes me.
Marry into your tribe, bear noble sons
Never to call me father – which is forbidden
To poets by the laws of moon magic,
The Goddess being forever a fierce virgin
And chastening all love with prohibition
Of what her untranslatable truth transcends.
SERPENT’S TAIL
When you are old as I now am
I shall be young as you, my lamb;
For lest love’s timely force should fail
The Serpent swallows his own tail.
UNTIL WE BOTH …
Until we both…
Strolling across Great Park
With a child and a dog, greeting the guardian lions
At the royal entrance, slowly rounding the mere
Counting our blessings peacefully enough…
Until we both, at the same horrid signal,
The twelfth stroke of a clock booming behind us,
Sink through these nonchalant, broad, close-cut lawns
To a swirling no-man’s land shrouded in smoke
That feeds our kisses with bright furnace embers,
And we beg anguished mercy of each other,
Exchanging vow for vow, our lips blistered…
Until we both…
Until we both at once…
Have you more courage, love, even than I
Under this final torment?
Shall we ever again greet our guardian lions
And the boats on the Great Mere?
THE MIRACLE
No one can understand our habit of love
Unless, trudging perhaps across the moor
Or resting on a tree-stump, deep in thought,
He has been scorched, like me, by summer lightning
And every blade of grass etherialized.
Which must have happened at some sudden turn
Of love, neither invited nor foreseen,
Nor are such miracles ever repetitious
Unless in their long deep-drawn gasp of wonder
And fierce awareness of its origin.
Do they astonish always as renewal
Of truth after impossible variance,
With tongues of flame spurting from bush and tree?
THE ROSE
When was it that we swore to love for ever?
When did this Universe come at last to be?
The two questions are one.
Fetch me a rose from your rose-arbour
To bless this night and grant me honest sleep:
Sleep, not oblivion.
TESTAMENT
Pure melody, love without alteration,
Flame without smoke, cresses from a clean brook,
The sun and moon as it were casting dice
With ample falls of rain,
Then comes the peaceful moment of appraisal,
The first and last lines of our testament,
With you ensconced high in the castle turret,
Combing your dark hair at a silver mirror,
And me below, sharpening my quill again.
This body is now yours; therefore I own it.
The Complete Poems Page 60