The Complete Poems

  A date, an algebraic rule,

  A bar of music with no sense.

  We win the fifteenth mile by strength

  ‘Halt!’ the men fall, and where they fall,

  Sleep. ‘On!’ the road uncoils its length;

  Hamlets and towns we pass them all.

  False dawn declares night nearly gone:

  We win the twentieth mile by theft.

  We’re charmed together, hounded on,

  By the strong beat of left, right, left.

  Pale skies and hunger: drizzled rain:

  The men with stout hearts help the weak,

  Add a new rifle to their pain

  Of shoulder, stride on, never speak.

  We win the twenty-third by pride:

  My neighbour’s face is chalky white.

  Red dawn: a mocking voice inside

  ‘New every morning’, ‘Fight the good fight’.

  Now at the top of a rounded hill

  We see brick buildings and church spires.

  Nearer they loom and nearer, till

  We know the billet of our desires.

  Here the march ends, somehow we know.

  The step quickens, the rifles rise

  To attention: up the hill we go

  Shamming new vigour for French eyes.

  So now most cheerily we step down

  The street, scarcely withholding tears

  Of weariness: so stir the town

  With all the triumph of Fusiliers.

  Breakfast to cook, billets to find,

  Scrub up and wash (down comes the rain),

  And the dark thought in every mind

  ‘To-night they’ll march us on again.’

  POETIC INJUSTICE†

  A Scottish fighting man whose wife

  Turned false and tempted his best friend,

  Finding no future need for life

  Resolved he’d win a famous end.

  Bayonet and bomb this wild man took,

  And Death in every shell-hole sought,

  Yet there Death only made him hook

  To dangle bait that others caught.

  A hundred German wives soon owed

  Their widows’ weeds to this one man

  Who also guided down Death’s road

  Scores of the Scots of his own clan.

  Seventeen wounds he got in all

  And jingling medals four or five.

  Often in trenches at night-fall

  He was the one man left alive.

  But fickle wife and paramour

  Were strangely visited from above,

  Were lightning-struck at their own door

  About the third week of their love.

  ‘Well, well’ you say, ‘man wife and friend

  Ended as quits’ but I say not:

  While that false pair met a clean end

  Without remorse, how fares the Scot?

  THE SURVIVOR COMES HOME†

  Despair and doubt in the blood:

  Autumn, a smell rotten-sweet:

  What stirs in the drenching wood?

  What drags at my heart, my feet?

  What stirs in the wood?

  Nothing stirs, nothing cries.

  Run weasel, cry bird for me,

  Comfort my ears, soothe my eyes!

  Horror on ground, over tree!

  Nothing calls, nothing flies.

  Once in a blasted wood,

  A shrieking fevered waste,

  We jeered at Death where he stood:

  I jeered, I too had a taste

  Of Death in the wood.

  Am I alive and the rest

  Dead, all dead? sweet friends

  With the sun they have journeyed west;

  For me now night never ends,

  A night without rest.

  Death, your revenge is ripe.

  Spare me! but can Death spare?

  Must I leap, howl to your pipe

  Because I denied you there?

  Your vengeance is ripe.

  Death, ay, terror of Death:

  If I laughed at you, scorned you, now

  You flash in my eyes, choke my breath…

  ‘Safe home.’ Safe? Twig and bough

  Drip, drip, drip with Death!

  THE PUDDING

  ‘Eat your pudding Alexander.’

  ‘’Tis too sour to eat.’

  ‘Take it quickly, Alexander.’

  ‘Now ’tis far too sweet.’

  And now ’tis thin and slippy-sloppy

  And now ’tis tough as leather,

  Now too hot and now too cold,

  And now ’tis all together.

  MOTHER’S SONG IN WINTER

  The cat is by the fire,

  The dog is on the mat:

  The dog has his desire,

  So also has the cat.

  The cat is white

  The dog is black,

  The year’s delight

  Will soon come back.

  The kettle sings, the loud bell rings

  And fast my baby clings.

  TO JEAN AND JOHN

  What shall we offer you, Jean and John?

  The softest pillows to sleep upon,

  The happiest house in the whole of Wales,

  Poodle puppies with wingle tails,

  Caldicott pictures, coloured toys

  The best ever made for girls or boys

  Plenty to drink, plenty to eat

  A big green garden with flowers complete

  A kind Scotch nurse, a Father and Mother

  Doesn’t this tempt you?

  All right, don’t bother.

  1920s–1930s

  FROM AN UPPER WINDOW

  Dark knoll, where distant furrows end

  In rocks beyond the river-bend,

  I make my visionary stand

  In your secure well-wooded land

  Where idle paths of idle fancy tend.

  The charts that threaten all things free

  With bondage of geography

  That loop you with a road way round

  Or pin you to some parish bound

  Cannot withdraw your loveliness from me.

  Nor though I went with hound and stick

  With compass and arithmetic

  To gain myself a closer view

  Could I in space come up with you

  Your glades with moving shades and colours quick.

  You are remote in space and time

  As inenarrable in rhyme,

  Yet by this very rareness doubt

  That you are you is blotted out –

  Hill of green hopes with slopes no foot may climb.

  DRINK AND FEVER

  In fever the mind leaps three paces forward;

  In drink the mind draws back the same three paces.

  It turns about and sees the face twitching;

  Stares ahead and sees the back stiffening.

  It hears the voice auguring monstrously;

  Hears the voice arguing meticulously.

  Man is located then as man sleep-walking

  Midmost between delirious and drunken.

  So drink and fever touch and are combined

  In the clear space where should be man’s mind.

  VESTRY

  My parents were debtors,

  And flung out of doors,

  My brothers were eunuchs,

  My sisters were whores;

  If I tell the whole story,

  You’ll laugh till you cry,

  That I am what I am

  None knows better than I.

  My breath smelt of garlic,

  My body was lean,

  My lovelocks were lousy,

  My garments not clean;

  When I strolled in the desert

  Or dozed by the sea,

  There was no one gainsaid me

  In all Galilee.

  I was all things to all men

  But death to the rich;

  I coaxed the dung-fire

 
; And made cakes in the ditch;

  My proverbs came pat,

  And my features were flame,

  And I paid the tax-penny

  When quarter-day came.

  I drove my disciples

  With daily advice

  About rubies and talents

  And pearls of great price,

  About laying up treasure

  And profit and loss.

  It was what my mind ran on

  From manger to cross.

  When my hearers went hungry

  I bade them sit down,

  And I fed them with fables

  Of white bread and brown,

  Of old wine and new wine,

  Of herrings and salt;

  And what happened after

  Was never my fault.

  THE END

  Who can pretend

  To spy to the very end

  The ultimate confusion

  Of belief and reason,

  Perfection of all progress?

  But I say, nevertheless:

  That when instead of chairs

  The altars of the martyrs

  Are taken by philosophers

  As vessels of reality;

  When Cardinals devoutly

  Canonize in curia

  Some discarded formula

  Of mad arithmetician

  Or mad geometrician

  Now seated in a swivel-chair

  Widowed of its philosopher,

  In that General Post

  Down will come Pepper’s Ghost

  And proclaim Utopia,

  The final synthesis,

  With a cornucopia

  And halitosis.

  The dogs will bark,

  The cats will cry,

  And the Angel of Death go drumming by.

  THE SAND GLASS

  The sand-glass stands in frame both ways the same, Single broad based; but so enclosed the glass Alters in action, most revengeful, trickling

  Minute by minute, minute-minus-moment,

  By broken minute, nervous time,

  Narrowing time,

  Nearly time,

  No time,

  Time!

  Upend,

  Equilibrize

  Eyes near maddened,

  Sand-roped nonsensically:

  Now sense, sight, sand, no nonsense.

  Turn, suicide, from the wasp-waist, while time runs A new five minutes: then view once more with calm The base root-firm, each base, solid in time.

  THIS WHAT-I-MEAN

  A close deduction about close deduction.

  Or, starting at an earlier point than that

  With any pavement-rainbow after rain,

  First, the experience of an easy pleasure,

  Then the close observation ‘filmed with oil’,

  Then qualification of that easy pleasure,

  Then close deduction about doubtful pleasure,

  Then close deduction about close deduction.

  How to outgo this vistaed close deduction,

  To find if anything is behind or not?

  If not, no matter; no matter either way.

  We are not collecting worms for the Museum.

  And we are not taking Cat’s Cradle, say,

  Beyond the ninth, or is it the nineteenth, stage,

  The last stage that the oldest experts know.

  (That would be physical and scientific,

  A progress further into the same close vista)

  And we are not leaping the unknown gap;

  Any poor fugitive does that with razor

  Or lysol as the spring-board, and he knows

  One brink of the gap at least before he jumps.

  This what-I-mean is searching out the gap

  Under all closeness and improving on it

  And the new gaps above and every which way,

  Gradually loosening everything up

  So nothing sticks to anything but itself –

  A world of rice cooked Indian fashion

  To be eaten with whatever sauce we please.

  THE FINGERHOLD

  He himself

  Narrowed the rock shelf

  To only two shoes’ width,

  And later by

  A willing poverty

  To half that width and breadth.

  He shrank it then

  By angry discipline

  To a mere fingerhold,

  Which was the occasion

  Of his last confusion:

  He was not so bold

  As to let go

  At last and throw

  Himself on air that would uphold.

  He wept

  Self-pityingly and kept

  That finger crooked and strained

  Until almost

  His life was lost

  And death not gained.

  THEN WHAT?

  If I rise now and put my straw hat on

  Against the strong sun lying in wait outside

  Scorching the flowers and over the flat stone

  Making the air dance – what? The prospect’s wide:

  The sea swimming to nowhere, the near hills

  Incredible of ascent and horned with crags,

  The blank sky darted through with the sun’s quills,

  The pleasant poplar grove where the eye drags.

  Then what? The path curves to the gate, from which

  A dusty road curves to my neighbour’s gate:

  Then turn, slowly, as granting leave to fate

  Stroll past it, pausing at the boundary ditch

  To exploit this chance in grossness of event,

  Then what? Then gladly home with nothing spent.

  HISTORICAL PARTICULARS

  And if at last the anecdotal world

  Records my name among ten million more

  In the long-drawn-out story of itself

  (O tediousness) and far from the last page? –

  ‘English poet and miscellaneous writer,

  Eccentric of the Later Christian era,

  Sometime a subject of King George the Fifth,

  (While the ninth, eighth and seventh Popes of Rome

  Before the last were reigning). It was the time

  Of the World War – he served throughout – the time

  Of airships and top-hats and communism,

  Passports and gangsters, breach of promise cases,

  When coal was burned in grates and gold coin minted,

  When radio was a novelty and horses

  Still ran with vans about the city streets…’

  And if with such quaint temporal statistics

  They date me in their books and bury me,

  Could I protest an honest alibi

  Who dreamed ill dreams one night and woke, staring,

  In those too populous and wealthy streets

  And wandered there, as it were dreaming still,

  Out at heels and my heart heavy in me,

  And drank with strangers in the bright saloons

  And gossiped there of politics and futures?

  My alibi’s the future: there I went

  And in the idle records found my record,

  And left my spectre fast between the pages

  As a memorial and a mockery

  Where they shall find it when they come to be.

  And as I am, I am, the visit over.

  What name, what truth? Unbiographical.

  The fixity of one who has no spectre.

  I learn slowly, but I may not wander.

  ADDRESS TO SELF

  Our loves are cloaked, our times are variable,

  We keep our rooms and meet only at table.

  But come, dear self, agree that you and I

  Shall henceforth court each other’s company

  And bed in peace together now and fall

  In loving discourse, as were natural,

  With open heart and mind, both alike bent

  On a just verdict, not on argument,

  And hi
de no private longings, each from each,

  And wear one livery and employ one speech.

  I worked against you with my intellect,

  You against me with folly and neglect,

  Making a pact with flesh, the alien one:

  Which brought me into strange confusion

  For as mere flesh I spurned you, slow to see

  This was to acknowledge flesh as part of me.

  PROSPERITY OF POETS

  Several instances in time occur

  When, numbers reckoned, there appears a quorum

  Sufficient to explain the way of the world

  To the world, in plural singularity.

  The agenda, often, has been mass conversion

  From sin, often mass resort to reason,

  Rarely poems, and then what an array

  Of unrelated beauties marshalled!

  Mutual indulgence, each to each,

  Among these poets being the arbiter

  Of what shall stand. The world, noting

  A harmless literary renascence,

  Snatches up certain poems (as a sample)

  Where the indulgence has been strained

  To exclude poetry and include world,

  And flutes them under academic escort

  To that Glass Palace where the Great consort.

  1940s-1950s

  DIOTIMA DEAD

  Diotima’s dead – how could she die?

  Or what says Socrates, now she is dead?

  Diotima’s wisdom he might credit

  While still she looked at him with eyes of love:

  He could his life commit to Diotima,

  Clear vessel of the Word’s divinity,

  Until she cloaked herself in deathward pride

  And ruin courted by equivocation –

  Did he not swear then, she had always lied?

  Scholars, the truth was larger than herself.

  The truth it was she had told Socrates

  (Though peevish in her immortality

  And starving for what meats the God forbade)

  Until her vision clouded, her voice altered,

  And two lives must have ended, had he stayed.

  THE HEARTH

  The cat purrs out because it must,

  So does the cricket call;

  The crackling fire in which they trust

  Cares not for them at all.

  Though cat-and-cricket-like we cry

  Around a fatal fire,

  And give ‘because we must’ for ‘why’,

  As children of desire,

  Care is our reading of that glow