John Berryman
Page 30
I fancy you might stand
And your eyes, even your hair
Stay to reward that skill.
Tonight I will do: patience
Rule my long love and guide
The wild nerves when they start.
But something will have died
From me if I look once
There and restrain my heart.
Cambridge
1937
Meditation
I
The clouds before the sun when the sun rose
Perform their thoughtless promise, summer rain
Filling the morning falls about the house.
River’s resentment to its natural gain
Is reconciled; communications close
To the town, muffled, and the sentinel strain
Of solitude is taken by the ground
Together with half of light and all of sound:
Asylum thus for memory and praise.
II
Uncircumscribed in an August prison
The eye of the mind travels among its past,
Seeing an anxious now; this without plan
But perfect apprehension. Being chaste
It finds simple and strange mostly the moon
Directing loss, generation into waste
Four hundred miles hence and the fluent blood
That never knew an evil from a good
Or heard among the springing corn the sun.
III
Elegy that way. The intelligent eye
Is tourist here and passes on, pausing
Now with delight upon the symmetry
And energetic poise of a grey wing
In Channel flight against a heavy sky,
Bearing like feathers the weight and end of Spring
To scattered home, indicating but this:
The texture of grey flight, analysis
Left dazzled on the shore hungry and dry.
IV
Next remains to the mind, of all those loud
Merciless laughing boys but one who knows
Too the continual drive of craft. The crowd
In classroom and on field, time cannot choose
But give a humorous aspect; we allowed
Last night however in our distant news
No compromise, five years and sea apart.
I thought upon, with sickness at my heart,
The many foundered and a few the proud.
V
And now the eye breaks out to open light
Beyond cloud, where the source it can maintain:
That constant sensibility which by night
Exerts content upon my head, my brain
Invests with careful patience and my sight
By day teaches a singular discipline.
Hers is the obscure laurel, the steady love
Which will not qualify before the grave,
Hers integral and passionate delight.
VI
The uncontrollable eye spins in the year,
A curious harvest brings. Pieces of bread
At twilight on a Dublin quay, and fear;
The clenched lip, a wrinkle on the forehead
Of hanging Christ; the eye sees everywhere
Indestructible evidence of dread,
In apples as in smiles, horrible both.
But generosity upon her mouth
Levels all torment in an actual tear.
VII
Million kaleidoscope: gesture of hand
Whose white invisible hairs are dangerous
Men, whose wrist intends frontier assault and
Rapture; the rain silent beyond the house;
The kernel being stripped of its tough rind
Bitters in air; deserted walls for us
One afternoon a lovely shelter, soft
Grass where a floor had been, and when she laughed
The sound could make a shelter for the mind.
VIII
Items to make a history. Most I stare
Upon the sign of our precaution, now
Symbol of some defeat. For a career
Before it began ends; and she, although
She wanted nothing, wants in the young air
New breath for heritage we have let go.
Her secret loss assures that he is dead
Who could not know his dark restricted bed
And what horizons have been tested there.
Cambridge
13 August 1937
Sanctuary
An evening faultless interval when
Blood ran crescendo in the brain
And time lay as a poem clear
Falls from me now; a friend is gone
Who taught my anger opaque air,
Is all but lost in time; few things remain.
The insolent look a woman gave
Casually from a door one day
Leaves me not, on the other hand;
Strange stigmata to our grave,
Indiscriminate as the wind,
We carry, with our bones they will decay.
The sky and sea are one in the night,
No eye can make distinction where
Eye is contained, eye subject is
To eyelid, even the pawn of light:
But panthers explain parenthesis
Upon their prey and sate all hunger there.
Certainty shall not touch my tongue.
And yet I hold, I have in mind
That this our love will stay for us:
Instructed by the years, belong
Obdurate and anonymous
A sanctuary eye among the blind.
The Trial
The oxen gone, the house is fallen where
Our sons stood, and the wine is spilt, and skew
Among the broken walls the servants are
Except who comes across the scorching field
Historian. But where the wind is from
That struck the mansion, great storms having failed,
No man can say. What wilderness remains?
Prosperous generations, scythe in hand,
Mapped the continents, murdered, built latrines.
Intellectual sores raven among
The faithful organs, corrupting from within;
To scrape them but the fastidious tongue.
Perforce we sit among the ashes, not
By will. We have no friends who come to pray,
Cannot discover what disaster brought:
Ignorant who commanded grass to burn
Like Spanish altars, we can scarcely say
Let the day perish wherein we were born.
1937
Night and the City
Two men sat by a stone in what dim place
Ravelled with flares in darkness they could find,
Considering death. The older man’s face
Hollowed the hope out in the young man’s mind,
Ribbed it with constant agony and pause
Where conversation multiplied. The air,
Ironic, took their talk of time and cause
Up to indifferent walls and left it there.
Political grammarians gave this
Their scrupulous attention but they saw
Terms dwindle from the eye and emphasis
Whistle on wind: they stared upon the law
While worms in books held carnival and ate
And slept and spurred their nightmares to the post.
Speechless murderous men abroad on great
Thoroughfares found the virgin and the lost.
Night now was ever upon the world-city.
Dogs struck as from inhuman dawn, they fled
Down arrogant apartments to the sea
And soon forgot among the swollen dead
Their genuine excitement when the rush
And rack of their masters fell into dance,
Ignorant sleep but a skeleton hush,
A sterile choreography for penance.
These also they discussed by the flat stone
Where sacrifice had failed; and where were those
Who in the first hysterical days had gone,
Where Matthew and where Alan, where the pose
John Grahame set against a vicious tide,
Or if they were at all still. And slim peace
Preserved the two a time but all their pride
Shrivelled in these abstract civilities.
The barriers were down, they fell afraid
On knees could not remember any smile
For godhead, their teeth appeared and they prayed
Desperate to eventual stars while
Technicians in high windows parried the dark.
They blinked and said ‘Supreme predicament
Justifies our despair, but the dogs bark.’
Under the lights their colour came and went:
Mexican subtlety glittered in the cheek
And Roman distance sentried in their eyes,
A sun on arid plains lifted that bleak
Black bridge of nose, historical blood cries
Faster in the spinning veins, faster for some
Inscrutable haven from the willed light,
The lips for a dignity to be dumb,
The antique heart finally for the night.
Nineteen Thirty-Eight
Across the frontiers of the helpless world
The great planes swarm, the carriers of death,
Germs in the healthy body of the air,
And blast our cities where we stand in talk
By doomed and comfortable fires.
In Asia famous tombs were opened so
And celebrated ancestors walked out
Into the carnage of the Rising Sun,
That horrible light upon a daughter cast,
The new language in the torn streets.
There was a city where the people danced,
Simple and generous, traditional.
Suddenly the music stopped. Shooting
Began. Some of the living call the dead
Of the Third Reich the lucky ones.
Terror accumulated in September
Until the island Dove divided up
A southern ally for the Eagle’s feast,
And trembled as the Eagle fed, knowing
The gratitude of appetite.
What was a civil war this year but strangers
Overhead, guns at sea, and foreign guns
And foreign squadrons in the plundered town?
A Spaniard learnt that any time is time
For German or Italian doom.
Survivors, lean and daring and black men,
Lurked in the hills. The villages were gone,
The land given to rape and colonists.
They slept with hunger in the hills and got
Legends of their deliverance.
The winter sky is fatal wings. What voice
Will spare the aged and the dying year?
His blood is on all thresholds, bodies found
Swollen in swollen rivers point their fingers:
Criminal, to stand as warning.
The Curse
Cedars and the westward sun.
The darkening sky. A man alone
Watches beside the fallen wall
The evening multitudes of sin
Crowd in upon us all.
For when the light fails they begin
Nocturnal sabotage among
The outcast and the loose of tongue,
The lax in walk, the murderers:
Our twilight universal curse.
Children are faultless in the wood,
Untouched. If they are later made
Scandal and index to their time,
It is that twilight brings for bread
The faculty of crime.
Only the idiot and the dead
Stand by, while who were young before
Wage insolent and guilty war
By night within that ancient house,
Immense, black, damned, anonymous.
Ceremony and Vision
I
The weather in the drawing-room
I left at that time and came into
A region of exceptional clarity.
Sea was the way. Wind took away
The odour of their trained and railway talk
And several varieties of julep.
Sea was the way. Going, I forgot
Of large brown bodies on the bankrupt sand
The quarrels. I forgot them all
And how a summer foaming by
Will surf our footing out, where are
No records, where the winter tides begin.
II
Their papers were complete. Nevertheless
Blue progression could terrify
Cartographers upon the beach.
Depending on that magnanimity
As web and flies, the elder learnt
Water takes down away its débris.
For with what skill who can transport
Around or through the fabulous windows
Of the skull their tall machines?
He paced and could not get aboard
Whose footprints are his shame
When the salt lapse uncovers them like crime.
III
That country is not famous for its clouds
Although its clouds are famous.
They pass among the swans and pride.
Too they are white capitals,
The pilgrim architecture coming in
Tenderly on that shore.
Sea was the way without history
But depth. The sea’s surpassing surfaces
An amateur saw curl and saw return
Constellation. Among whose despair
Moves a delicate legend, as in grass
The antelope who soon will lie and die there.
from Poems [1942]
TO BHAIN CAMPBELL
1911–1940
I told a lie once in a verse. I said
I said I said I said ‘The heart will mend,
Body will break and mend, the foam replace
For even the unconsolable his taken friend.’
This is a lie. I had not been here then.
The Dangerous Year
Thus far, to March, into the dangerous year
We have come safely with our children, friends,
Parents, the unfamiliar crowd, and stare
To make out the intentions of that man
Who is our Man of Fear.
We have come safely. In a frontier brawl
A few men coughed who will not cough again,
Slaughter goes on in China, refugees call
For aid; but these things are remote, they can
Touch us scarcely at all.
We are secure behind the Northern Ocean.
Whatever folly we commit is blest
Beforehand by the god Exaggeration
Who is our genius—the advancing good
Simply to be in motion.
Strangers we do not trust, or wish would leave.
Communication has not made us one
As yet, we hope, with foreigners who live
Upon their nerves, perpetually ready
To triumph or to grieve.
Our factories and homes, the man next door,
Our dear upholstered memories, are safe,
We think. The situation is a bore,
But we have the Atlantic to safeguard us:
No plane can reach our shore.
The car is still upon the road, we say.
What road? Where will you sleep tomorrow night?
Where are the maps that you had yesterday?
By whose direction are you moving now?
The light is thin and grey.
It’s time to see the frontiers as they are,
Fiction, but a fiction meaning blood,
Meaning a one world and a violent car.
It’s time to think about the weekend, think
Whether the road is war.
Time to forget the crimson and the green
Tinsel upon the Christmas tree, the lake
Shining with summer friends where you have been.
Let all that fade, for you are come upon
The shifting of the scene.
Forget the crass hope of a world restored
To dignity and unearned dividends.
Admit, admit that now the ancient horde
Loosed from the labyrinth of your desire
Is coming as you feared.
Courage is not enough, but you must find
Courage, or nothing else can do you good.
It’s time to see how far you have been blind
And try to prop your lids apart before
The midnight of the mind.
New York
1 March 1939
River Rouge, 1932
Snow on the ground. A day in March.
Uncomprehending faces move
Toward the machines by which they live,
Locked; not in anger but in hunger march.
Who gave the order on the wall?
Women are there but not in love.
Who was the first to fall?
Their simple question and their need
Ignored, men on their shoulders lift
The loudest man on the night shift
To shout into the plant their winter need.
Who gave the order on the wall?
The barbed wire and the guns aloft.
Who was the first to fall?
Snow on the bloody ground. Men break
And run and women scream as though
They dreamt a dream human snow
And human audience, but now they wake.
Who gave the order on the wall?
Remember a day in March and snow.
Who was the first to fall?
Communist
‘O tell me of the Russians, Communist, my son!
Tell me of the Russians, my honest young man!’
‘They are moving for the people, mother; let me alone,
For I’m worn out with reading and want to lie down.’
‘But what of the Pact, the Pact, Communist, my son?
What of the Pact, the Pact, my honest young man?’
‘It was necessary, mother; let me alone,
For I’m worn out with reading and want to lie down.’
‘Why are they now in Poland, Communist, my son?
Why are they now in Poland, my honest young man?’
‘For the people of Poland, mother; let me alone,
For I’m worn out with reading and want to lie down.’
‘But what of the Baltic States, Communist, my son?