The Complete Poems

  Not mere foreknowledge, to confess

  What powers protected and supported him

  In his mute call for singleheartedness.

  It was she indeed who planted the first kiss,

  Pleading with him for true togetherness –

  Therefore her faults might well be charged against him.

  She dared to act as he had never dared.

  Nor could he change: his heart remaining full,

  Commanded by her, yet unconquerable,

  Blinding her with its truth.

  So, worse than blind,

  He suffered more than she in body and mind.

  A DREAM OF FRANCES SPEEDWELL

  I fell in love at my first evening party.

  You were tall and fair, just seventeen perhaps,

  Talking to my two sisters. I kept silent

  And never since have loved a tall fair girl,

  Until last night in the small windy hours

  When, floating up an unfamiliar staircase

  And into someone’s bedroom, there I found her

  Posted beside the window in half-light

  Wearing that same white dress with lacy sleeves.

  She beckoned. I came closer. We embraced

  Inseparably until the dream faded.

  Her eyes shone clear and blue….

  Who was it, though, impersonated you?

  THE ENCOUNTER

  Von Masoch met the Count de Sade

  In Hell as he strode by.

  ‘Pray thrash me soundly, Count!’ he begged.

  His lordship made reply:

  ‘What? Strike a lacquey who enjoys

  Great blows that bruise and scar?’

  ‘I love you, Count,’ von Masoch sighed,

  ‘So cruel to me you are.’

  AGE GAP

  My grandfather, who blessed me as a child

  Shortly before the Diamond Jubilee,

  Was born close to the date of Badajoz

  And I have grandchildren well past your age –

  One married, with a child, expecting more.

  How prudently you chose to be a girl

  And I to be a boy! Contrary options

  Would have denied us this idyllic friendship –

  Boys never fall in love with great-grandmothers.

  NIGHTMARE OF SENILITY

  Then must I punish you with trustfulness

  Since you can trust yourself no more and dread

  Fresh promptings to deceive me? Or instead

  Must I reward you by deceiving you,

  By heaping coals of fire on my own head?

  Are truth and friendship dead?

  And why must I, turning in nightmare on you,

  Bawl out my lies as though to make them true?

  O if this Now were once, when pitifully

  You dressed my wounds, kissed and made much of me,

  Though warned how things must be!

  Very well, then: my head across the block,

  A smile on your pursed lips, and the axe poised

  For a merciful descent. Ministering to you

  Even in my torment, praising your firm wrists,

  Your resolute stance….How else can I protect you

  From the curse my death must carry, except only

  By begging you not to prolong my pain

  Beyond these trivial years?

  I am young again.

  I watch you shrinking to a wrinkled hag.

  Your kisses grow repulsive, your feet shuffle

  And drag. Now I forget your name and forget mine…

  No matter, they were always equally ‘darling’.

  Nor were my poems lies; you made them so

  To mystify our friends and our friends’ friends.

  We were the loveliest pair: all-powerful too,

  Until you came to loathe me for the hush

  That our archaic legend forced on you.

  ABSENT CRUSADER

  An ancient rule prescribed for true knights

  Was: ‘Never share your couch with a true lady

  Whom you would not care in honour to acknowledge

  As closest to your heart, on whose pure body

  You most would glory to beget children

  And acknowledge them your own.’

  The converse to which rule, for fine ladies,

  No knight could preach with firm authority;

  Nor could he venture to condemn any

  Who broke the rule even while still sharing

  Oaths of love-magic with her absent knight,

  Telling herself: ‘This is not love, but medicine

  For my starved animal body; and my right.

  Such peccadilloes all crusades afford –

  As when I yield to my own wedded Lord.’

  DREAM RECALLED ON WAKING

  The monstrous and three-headed cur

  Rose hugely when she stroked his fur,

  Using his metapontine tail

  To lift her high across the pale.

  Ranging those ridges far and near

  Brought blushes to her cheek, I fear,

  Yet who but she, the last and first

  Could dare what lions never durst?

  Proud Queen, continue as you are,

  More steadfast than the Polar Star,

  Yet still pretend a child to be

  Gathering sea-wrack by the sea.

  COLOPHON

  Dutifully I close this book ….

  Its final pages, with the proud look

  Of timelessness that your love lends it,

  Call only for a simple Colophon

  (Rose, key or shepherd’s crook)

  To announce it as your own

  Whose coming made it and whose kiss ends it.

  From Timeless Meeting

  (1973)

  THE PROMISED BALLAD

  This augurs well; both in their soft beds

  Asleep, unwakably far removed,

  Nevertheless as near as makes no odds –

  Proud fingers twitching, all but touching.

  What most engages him are his own eyes

  Beautified by dreaming how one day

  He will cast this long love-story as a ballad

  For her to sing likewise –

  How endless lovers will accept its marvels

  As true, which they must be indeed:

  Freed of dark witches and tall singing devils.

  THE IMPOSSIBLE DAY

  A day which never could be yesterday

  Nor ever can become tomorrow,

  Which framed eternity in a great lawn

  Beside the appletrees, there in your garden –

  We never shall dismiss it.

  Threats of poverty, or of long absence,

  Foreknowledge often thousand strokes

  Threatened against our love by a blank world –

  How suddenly they vanished and were gone;

  We had fallen in love for ever.

  Our proof of which, impossibility,

  Was a test of such true magic

  As no one but ourselves could answer for.

  Both of us might be dead, but we were not,

  Our light being still most needed.

  And if some unannounced oppression breaks

  To chase the governing stars from a clear sky,

  Thunder rolling at once from west and east

  What should we lovers fear from such a scene

  Being incontestably a single heart?

  Then say no more about eternity

  That might compel us into fantasy:

  One day remains our sure centre of being,

  Substance of curious impossibility

  At which we stand amazed.

  THE POET’S CURSE

  Restore my truth, love, or have done for good –

  Ours being a simple compact of the heart

  Guiding each obstinate body

  And slow mind regularly –

  Each always with a proud faith in the othe
r’s

  Proud faith in love, though often wrenched apart

  By the irresistible Nightmare that half-smothers –

  But bound for ever by the poet’s curse

  Intolerably guarding ill from worse.

  SEVEN YEARS

  Where is the truth to indulge my heart,

  These long years promised –

  Truth set apart,

  Not wholly vanished.

  I still have eyes for watching,

  Hands for holding fast,

  Legs for far-striding,

  Mouth for truth-telling –

  Can the time yet have passed,

  For loving and for listening?

  LOVE AS LOVELESSNESS

  What she refused him – in the name of love

  And the hidden tears he shed –

  She granted only to such soulless blades

  As might accept her casual invitation

  To a loveless bed.

  Each year of the long seven gnawed at her heart,

  Yet never would she lay

  Tokens of his pure love under her pillow

  Nor let him meet, by chance, her new bedfellow;

  Thus suffering more than he.

  Seven years had ended, the fierce truth was known.

  Which of these two had suffered most?

  Neither enquired and neither cared to boast:

  ‘Not you, but I. It was myself alone.’

  In loneliness true love burns to excess.

  THE SCARED CHILD

  It is seven years now that we first loved –

  Since you were still a scared and difficult child

  Confessing less than love prompted,

  Yet one night coaxed me into bed

  With a gentle kiss

  And there blew out the candle.

  Had you then given what your tongue promised,

  Making no fresh excuses

  And never again punished your true self

  With the acceptance of my heart only,

  Not of my body, nor offered your caresses

  To brisk and casual strangers –

  How would you stand now? Not in love’s full glory

  That jewels your fingers immemorially

  And brines your eyes with bright prophetic tears.

  AS ALL MUST END

  All ends as all must end,

  And yet cannot end

  The way that all pretend,

  Nor will it have been I

  Who forged the obtrusive lie

  But found sufficient wit

  To contradict it.

  Never was there a man

  Not since this world began

  Who could outlie a woman:

  Nor can it have been you

  Who tore our pact in two

  And shaking your wild head

  Laid a curse on my bed.

  I hid in the deep wood,

  Weeping where I stood,

  Berries my sole food,

  But could have no least doubt

  That you would search me out,

  Forcing from me a kiss

  In its dark recesses.

  TOUCH MY SHUT LIPS

  Touch my shut lips with your soft forefinger,

  Not for silence, but speech –

  Though we guard secret words of close exchange,

  Whispering each with each,

  Yet when these cloudy autumn nights grow longer

  There falls a silence stronger yet, we know,

  Than speech: a silence from which tears flow.

  THE MOON’S LAST QUARTER

  So daylight dies.

  The moon’s in full decline,

  Nor can those misted early stars outshine her.

  But what of love, counted on to discount

  Recurrent terror of the moon’s last quarter?

  Child, take my hand, kiss it finger by finger!

  Can true love fade? I do not fear death

  But only pity, with forgetfulness

  Of love’s timeless vocabulary

  And an end to poetry

  With death’s mad aircraft rocketing from the sky.

  Child, take my hand!

  TRUE EVIL

  All bodies have their yearnings for true evil,

  A pall of darkness blotting out the heart,

  Nor can remorse cancel luckless events

  That rotted our engagements with Heaven’s truth;

  These are now history. Therefore once more

  We swear perpetual love at love’s own altar

  And reassign our bodies, in good faith,

  To faith in their reanimated souls.

  But on our death beds shall our flaming passions

  Revert in memory to their infantile

  Delight of mocking the stark laws of love?

  Rather let death concede a warning record

  Of hells anticipated but foregone.

  WHEN AND WHY

  When and why we two need never ask –

  It is not, we know, our task

  Though both stand bound still to accept

  The close faith we have always kept

  With contradictions and the impossible:

  To work indeed as one for ever

  In rapt acknowledgment of love’s low fever.

  THE WINDOW PANE

  To bed, to bed: a storm is brewing.

  Three natural wonders – thunder, lightning, rain –

  Test our togetherness. The window pane,

  Regaling us with vistas of forked lightning,

  Grants our mortality fair warning;

  And every stroke reminds us once again

  How soon true love curves round to its beginning.

  PRIDE OF PROGENY

  While deep in love with one another,

  Those seven long earlier years, we two

  Would often kiss, lying entranced together

  Yet never do what simpler lovers do

  In generous pride of generous progeny;

  Counting ourselves as poets only,

  We judged it false to number more than two.

  THAT WAS THE NIGHT

  That was the night you came to say goodnight,

  Where from the roof hung gargoyles of protection

  And our eyes ached, but not intolerably,

  The scene for once being well:

  We had no now that did not spell forever

  Though traffic growled and wild cascades of rain

  Rattled against each streaming window pane.

  They had gone at last, we reassured each other,

  Even those morbid untranslatable visions

  Whose ancient terrors we were pledged to accept,

  Whose broken past lay resolutely elsewhere.

  Hell, the true worldly Hell, proved otherwise:

  Dry demons having drunk our marshes dry.

  SONG: THE QUEEN OF TIME

  Two generations bridge or part us.

  The case, we grant, is rare –

  Yet while you dare, I dare:

  Our curious love being age-long pledged to last,

  Posterity, even while it ridicules,

  Cannot disprove the past.

  Neither of us would think to hedge or lie –

  Too well we know the cost:

  Should the least canon of love’s law be crossed,

  Both would be wholly lost –

  You, queen of time, and I.

  SHOULD I CARE?

  ‘Should I care,’ she asked, ‘his heart being mine,

  If his body be another’s? –

  Should I long for children and a full clothes-line?

  Children, indeed, need mothers,

  But do they still need fathers?

  And now that money governs everything

  Should a country need a king?’

  TIMELESS MEETING

  To have attained an endless, timeless meeting

  By faith in the stroke which first engaged us,

  Driving two hearts improbably
together

  Against all faults of history

  And bodily disposition –

  What does this mean? Prescience of new birth?

  But one suffices, having paired us off

  For the powers of creation –

  Lest more remain unsaid.

  Nor need we make demands or deal awards

  Even for a thousand years:

  Who we still are we know.

  Exchange of love-looks came to us unsought

  And inexpressible:

  To which we stand resigned.

  ENVOI

  There is no now for us but always,

  Nor any I but we –

  Who have loved only and love only

  From the hilltops to the sea

  In our long turbulence of nights and days:

  A calendar from which no lover strays

  In proud perversity.

  At The Gate

  (1974)

  OURS IS NO WEDLOCK

  Ours is no wedlock, nor could ever be:

  We are more, dear heart, than free.

  Evil surrounds us – love be our eye-witness –

  Yet while a first childish togetherness

  Still links this magic, all terror of lies

  Fades from our still indomitable eyes:

  We love, and none dares gibe at our excess.

  THE DISCARDED LOVE POEM

  Should I treat it as my own

  Though loth to recall

  The occasion, the reason,

  The scorn of a woman

  Who let no tears fall?

  It seems no mere exercise

  But grief from a wound

  For lovers to recognize:

  A scar below the shoulder,

  White, of royal size.

  How did she treat the occasion?

  In disdainful mood?

  Or as death to her womanhood?

  As the Devil’s long tooth?

  As the end of all truth?

  EARLIER LOVERS

  First came fine words softening our souls for magic,

  Next came fine magic, sweetening hope with sex;

  Lastly came love, training both hearts for grief–

  Magical grief that no honour could vex.

  Was it ever granted earlier true lovers –