Though Grandfather was mistaken–
Or we held that conviction.
Now fifty years have passed,
But when likewise I complain
To my three rude young grandsons,
And angrily maintain
That beer is not so hearty,
Nor such good songs sung,
Nor bread baked so wholesome
As when myself was young,
Nor youth so respectful,
I meet with contradiction–
Though with fact, and solid fact,
To support my conviction.
You may call me a liar,
Grandchildren, without fear …
Yet ask your nearest brewer
If he still brews honest beer,
Or ask your nearest baker
If he still bakes honest bread,
Then come back here to-morrow
To tell me what they said;
Or sing me whatever
You may think is still a song,
And I’ll make no contradiction
But leave you in the wrong.
SONG: A BEACH IN SPAIN
Young wives enjoy the statutory right
To slam the door, whether by day or night;
Young husbands, too, are privileged to spend
Long hours in bars, each with a chosen friend.
But tell me can such independence prove
More than a simple lack of love,
More than a simple lack of love?
O how can you regain
Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?
Or though the nuptial contract, that deters
Adulteresses and adulterers,
May sweetly mortalize the venial sin
Of beach flirtation after too much gin,
Can such experiments in marriage prove
More than a simple lack of love,
More than a simple lack of love?
O how can you regain
Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?
And if your OPERATION JEALOUSY
Should end with corpses tossing in the sea,
Both of you having sworn in hell’s despite
Never to panic or break off the fight,
Can such heroic beach-head battles prove
More than a simple lack of love,
More than a simple lack of love?
O how can you regain
Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain?
BATHUNTS AT BATHURST
(Australian fantasy provoked by a Spanish compositor’s end-of-line hyphens)
Bat-
hurst’s famed bath-
unts are led uph-
ill by
Swart bat-
hat-
tendants, bold Jehos-
hop-
hats,
Toph-
eavily toffed up in tall toph-
ats,
Who, in the sooth-
ung top-
het (where bats fly),
Clutc-
hing bath-
andles with poth-
unting glee,
Hoth-
eadedly do lat-
her bats with bats.
TO A CARICATURIST, WHO GOT ME WRONG
Every gentleman knows
Just when to wear the wrong clo’es,
And naturally that
Will include the wrong hat.
Merchants (the bright ones)
Always wear the right ones;
As do also those asses,
The professional classes.
Beggars have no choice,
Convicts no voice,
Cads and kings go dressed
Always in their best;
And as for me
In my dubious category
Which, yes,
You need hardly press,
I wear (or do not wear)
Whatever I dare,
Or whatever comes to hand,
Sometimes pretty grand,
Sometimes just so,
Sometimes scare-crow,
But was never seen to choose
Either sandals or suede shoes,
No, sir, not I–
Nor an Old Carthusian tie.
IN JORROCKS’S WAREHOUSE
One hundred years ago, hard-riding Mr Jorrocks
Came an almighty purler at a five-barred gate,
Lapsed into science-fiction, and forgot his date.
Afterwards, in the warehouse, superficially healed
With a pair of bloody steaks, vinegar and brown paper,
Jorrocks addressed Bob Dubbs, sportsman and linen-draper:
‘At Jorrocks’s Super-Logistical Universe Mart
Sales traffic has been canalized, as from today;
Watch out for the amber-light, buyers, and on your way!
‘Follow the desired illuminated moving band–
I 10 for Marine Insurance, I 12 for Isotopes–
All goods displayed from Samoyedes to Edible Soaps.
‘No supererogatory thank you, welcome, or goodbye.
Our assistants are deaf mutes, robots, zombies and such;
Your duty is to choose, point, pay and never touch.
‘Goods found defective cannot, of course, be replaced–
See Conditions of Jorrocks’s Universe Mart.
Customers are warned to realistically play their part.
‘Band C 305 will convey them to Complaints,
If they find the stock we carry is not, in fact, their meat,
And a greasy slide will deposit them, bonk! in the street’
Bob Dubbs the linen-draper listened in wide-eyed horror.
It made worse sense than the Reverend Silas Phipp’s
Dominical Exegesis of the Apocalypse.
Though I could, no doubt, invent a whip-crack ending,
This simple moral, reader, should be enough for you:
‘Never charge at a five-barred gate on a broken-winded screw.’
A FEVER
Where the room may be, I do not know.
It is beamed and parquetted,
With yew-logs charring on a broad hearth,
Curtains of taffeta, chairs of cherry,
And a rough wolfskin to lie at ease upon
Naked before the fire in half-darkness;
The shadowy bed behind.
Who she may be I do not know,
Nor do I know her nation.
She is truthful, she is tender,
In everything a woman, but for the claws:
Her skin moon-blanched, her arms lissom,
Her tawny tresses hanging free,
Her frown eloquent.
What we do together, that I know;
But when, eludes me;
Whether long ago, one night, or never …
Meaning? Meaning in some recess of Time,
Untemporal yet sure …
Why should it irk me? Now I must sleep–
She says so with her frown.
AUGEIAS AND I
Now like the cattle byre of Augeias
My work-room, Hercules, calls for the flood
Of Alpheus and Peneius, green as glass,
To hurtle down in catastrophic mood
And free me from accumulated piles
Of books, trays, journals, bulging letter-files.
In memory often, I remount the stairs
To that top room where once a sugar-case
Served me for chair – the house was poor in chairs –
A broken wash-stand lent me writing space,
And one wax-candle cast a meagre light;
Where all I wrote was what I itched to write.
Augeias, though, if he had dunged the trees,
Cornland, and pot-herb garden studiously,
Would not have needed help from Hercules;
We stand accused of careless husbandry
When nothing less than floods or cleansing fire
Can purge my w
ork-room and his cattle byre.
IS IT PEACE?
‘What peace,’ came Jehu’s answering yell,
‘While Jezebel is Jezebel?’–
But when the hungry pariahs cease
To gnaw her bones, will that bring peace?
Why (harlot though she were, or worse)
Could he not leave her to God’s curse?
Rather than pamper their unclean
Bellies with blood of a live queen?
Two wars, world wars. I lost in one
My cousins; in the next, a son–
That scarcely finished with, I heard
Dismal prognoses of a third.
Yet – since no signed memorial,
Nor bannered march, nor crowded hall
Our Jehus can, it seems, restrain
From bawling ‘Jezebel!’ again –
Unrealistically (or not?)
I cultivate my garden plot
Where peppers, corn and sea kale sprout
Careless of strontium fallout.
FINGERS IN THE NESTING BOX
My heart would be faithless
If ever I forgot
My farm-house adventure
One day by the fowl run
When Phoebe (of the fringe
And the fairy-story face)
Incited me to forage
Under speckled feathers
For the first time.
Fabulous I thought it,
Fabulous and fateful
(Before familiarity
With the fond pastime
My feelings blunted),
To clasp in frightened fingers
A firm, warm, round…
‘Phoebe, dear Phoebe,
What have I found?’
BARABBAS’S SUMMER LIST
Barabbas, once a publisher
But currently Prime Minister,
Writes – not of course in his own fist –
‘May we include you in our List’
(Across the Times in glory spread
With Baths and Garters at its head)?
‘Your graceful lyric work,’ says he,
‘Fully deserves a C.B.E.’
I ask my agents, Messrs. Watt,
Whether I should accept or not.
Few agents are so tough as these
At battling with Barabbases:
The mongoose in his cobra-war
Provides a perfect metaphor.
‘Barabbas ought to raise his price
By five per cent,’ is Watt’s advice.
STABLE DOOR
Watch how my lank team-fellow strains
Home up the last incline!
His joints creak, but his heart remains
As obdurate as mine.
Our crib may well contain no feed,
The skies may be our roof,
Yet should two foundered horses need
To clack an angry hoof
In their death-dream of oats and hay,
A dry, well-littered floor,
And Sam the ostler, whistling gay,
Drunk by the stable door?
FLIGHT REPORT
To be in so few hours translated from
Picking blood-oranges, mandarins, mimosa,
Roses and violets in my Spanish garden,
Where almonds also bloom like old men’s polls
And olive twigs bow under wrinkled berries –
To be in so few hours translated here
Three miles above the frantic, chill Atlantic,
Is something monstrous.
Tell me, how should I act?
Bored (as do my seasoned fellow-birds),
Recalling equally sensational flights
I have taken in my mind’s own empyrean?
Or should I register rustic amaze?
The captain in his cockpit tilts the craft
To enchant us with what Coleridge never saw:
An iceberg, towering up from grey pack ice,
Through which the sun, whose dawn we long delayed,
Shines green as emerald – or greener, even.
Fasten your belts! And down we drop at Gander,
In a snowstorm, among firs of Newfoundland,
Then battle against head-winds five hours more
To New York, is it?
And this all began
Monstrously at a Barcelona counter
Where a suave clerk, his mind on smaller things,
Sold me my round-trip-ticket, with disdain
Checking the banknotes as I paid them out,
And grudged me even a formal ban voyage!
SCHOOL HYMN FOR ST TRINIAN’S
Allegro Come, playmates, lift your girlish hands
In prayer to sweet St Trinian.
With eyes like fiery brands, he stands –
Cleft hoof and bat-like pinion!
He fosters all your little deeds
Of maidenly unkindness;
His foul intentions flower like weeds;
He smites the Staff with blindness.
With ink and stink-bomb be content,
Likewise the classroom rocket,
His more conventional armament.
(An H-bomb bags the pocket.)
CHORUS
Maestoso Learning to be a be-utiful lay-aydee
You can if you try;
Learning to be a be-utiful lay-aydee
In the sweet by - and - by.
1960–1974
A PIEBALD’S TAIL
Fame is the tail of Pegasus
(A piebald horse with wings),
One thought of which away will twitch
The luck his colour brings.
It follows logically, of course,
That poets always fail
Who try to catch their piebald horse
By snatching at his tail.
THE INTRUDERS
I ask the young daughter
Of Jetto, a painter,
(Disclosing three faces,
Two bold and one fainter,
On Jetto’s Moon Chart):
How dare these scapegraces,
These odd bodikins,
Who would once hide their grins
Among wall-paper roses
Or carved lambrequins,
Flaunt pantomime noses
And Carnival chins
In abstractionist art?
But Jetto’s young daughter
Has drawn me apart
And pleads for the faces:
‘Don’t show them to Father!
He’ll turn black as thunder
To see their grimaces –
He’ll bury them under
Whole tubefuls of madder,
He’ll widow my heart.’
TEIRESIAS
Courtship of beasts
And courtship of birds:
How delightful to witness
In fullness of Spring
When swallows fly madly
In chase of each other,
Prairie-dogs tumble,
Wild ponies cavort,
And the bower-bird proffers
Spectacular gifts
To the hen of his choice!
But as for the stark act
That consummates courtship:
Are not dusky rock-caverns
And desolate fastnesses,
Tangle of jungle
And blackness of night,
The refuges chosen
By all honest creatures
That pricked by love’s arrow
Perform the said act?
Then despite curs or roosters,
Bulls, ganders or houseflies,
Or troops in sacked cities
Forgetful of shame,
It is surely a duty
Entailed in our beasthood
To turn and go dumbly
Averting the eye,
Should we blunder on lovers
Well couched in a forest
Who thought themselves free?
Courtsh
ip of beasts
And courtship of birds:
How delightful to witness
In fullness of Spring!
But be warned by Teiresias,
Thebes’ elder prophet,
Who saw two snakes coupling
And crept up behind.
He for six years or seven
Was robbed of his manhood
But feigned to care nothing
And ended stark blind.
SONG: THE SMILE OF EVE
Her beauty shall blind you,
Long as you live;
She will reap and grind you,
Bolt you in a sieve,
Will blink her merry eyes,
Set your brain a-fire,
Be womanly and wise,
Thwart your desire.
Will trample you, skin you,
Tear your flesh apart,
Slice nerve and sinew,
Nestle at your heart.
Though her aspect alters
Your pangs are the same;
Ready reason falters
At sound of her name.
No serpent in his guile
Nor no goatish man
Can rob her of the smile
That with Eve began.
[VERSE COMPOSED OVER THE TELEPHONE]
Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous Plaza full;
But only one is there who knows
And he’s the man who fights the bull.
[FIR AND YEW]
Fir, womb of silver pain,
Yew, tomb of leaden grief–
Viragoes of one vein,
Alike in leaf-
With arms up-flung
Taunt us in the same tongue:
‘Here Jove’s own coffin-cradle swung’.
SONG: GARDENS CLOSE AT DUSK
City parks and gardens close
Before day has ended,
To discourage crime for which
They were not intended.
Yet when moonlight lawns resume
The private peace they merit,
Why are boys and girls in love
Told they may not share it?
[PRIVACY]
Privacy finds herself a nook
In bold print of an open book
Which few have eyes to read; the rest
(If studiously inclined) will look
For cypher or for palimpsest.
MATADOR GORED
A breeze fluttered the cape and you were caught:
One thrust under your jaw, one in the belly,
A third clean through the groin. Nevertheless,
As you lie stretched on the familiar slab
The Complete Poems Page 70