Lest every eye should look and see
The answer to its life as he,
When the flesh prizes are all lost
In that white second of the ghost
Who grasps his world of loneliness
Sliding into empty space:
I gather all my life and pour
Out its love and comfort here.
To populate his loneliness,
And to bring his ghost release,
My love and pity shall not cease
For a lifetime at least.
A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
At five a man fell to the ground
And the watch flew off his wrist
Like a moon struck from the earth
Marking a blank time that stares
On the tides of change beneath.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
That opened wide the distances
Of his final loneliness.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
And the bones are fixed at five
Under the moon’s timelessness;
But another who lives on
Wears within his heart for ever
The space split open by the bullet.
All under the olive trees.
War Photograph
Where the sun strikes the rock and
The rock plants its shadowed foot
And the breeze distracts the grass and fern frond,
There, in the frond, the instant lurks
With its metal fang planned for my heart
When the finger tugs and the clock strikes.
I am that numeral which the sun regards,
The flat and severed second on which time looks,
My corpse a photograph taken by fate;
Where inch and instant cross, I shall remain
As faithful to the vanished moment’s violence
As love fixed to one day in vain.
Only the world changes, and time its tense,
Against the creeping inches of whose moon
I launch my wooden continual present.
The grass will grow its summer beard and beams
Of light melt down the waxen slumber
Where soldiers lie dead in an iron dream;
My corpse be covered with the snows’ December
And roots push through skin’s silent drum
When the years and fields forget, but the whitened bones remember.
Fall of a City
All the posters on the walls
All the leaflets in the streets
Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain,
Their words blotted out with tears,
Skins peeling from their bodies
In the victorious hurricane.
All the names of heroes in the hall
Where the feet thundered and the bronze throats roared,
Fox and Lorca claimed as history on the walls,
Are now angrily deleted
Or to dust surrender their dust,
From golden praise excluded.
All the badges and salutes
Torn from lapels and from hands
Are thrown away with human sacks they wore,
Or in the deepest bed of mind
They are washed over with a smile
Which launches the victors when they win.
All the lessons learned, unlearnt;
The young, who learned to read, now blind
Their eyes with an archaic film;
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey’s bray;
These only remember to forget.
But somewhere some word presses
On the high door of a skull, and in some corner
Of an irrefrangible eye
Some old man’s memory jumps to a child
– Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.
At Castellon
Backed to the brown walls of the square
The lightless lorry headlamps stare
With glinting reflectors through the night
At our gliding star of light.
Houses are tombs, tarpaulins cover
Mysterious trucks of the lorries over.
The town vacantly seems to wait
The explosion of a fate.
Our cigarettes and talking stir
Beneath the walls a small false ember.
A sentry stops us at his hut
Stamping with his rifle-butt.
Beside him stands a working man
With cheeks where suns have run.
‘Take this comrade to the next village.’
The lines ploughed with ravage
Lift to a smile, the eyes gleam
And then relapse into their dream.
Head bent, he shuffles forward
And in without a word.
The car moves on to suns and time
Of safety for us and him.
But behind us on the road
The winged black roaring fates unload
Cargoes of iron and of fire
To delete with blood and ire
The will of those who dared to move
From the furrow, their life’s groove.
The Bombed Happiness
Children, who extend their smile of crystal,
And their leaping gold embrace,
And wear their happiness as a frank jewel,
Are forced in the mould of the groaning bull
And engraved with lines on the face.
Their harlequin-striped flesh,
Their blood twisted in rivers of song,
Their flashing, trustful emptiness,
Are trampled by an outer heart that pressed
From the sky right through the coral breast
And kissed the heart and burst.
This timed, exploding heart that breaks
The loved and little hearts, is also one
Splintered through the lungs and wombs
And fragments of squares in the sun,
And crushing the floating, sleeping babe
Into a deeper sleep.
Its victoried drumming enters
Above the limbs of bombed laughter
The body of an expanding State
And throbs there and makes it great,
But nothing nothing can recall
Gaiety buried under these dead years,
Sweet jester and young playing fool
Whose toy was human happiness.
Darkness and Light
To break out of the chaos of my darkness
Into a lucid day is all my will.
My words like eyes in night, stare to reach
A centre for their light: and my acts thrown
To distant places by impatient violence
Yet lock together to mould a path of stone
Out of my darkness into a lucid day.
Yet, equally, to avoid that lucid day
And to preserve my darkness, is all my will.
My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse
And shut upon obscurity; my acts
Cast to their opposites by impatient violence
Break up the sequent path; they fly
On a circumference to avoid the centre.
To break out of my darkness towards the centre
Illumines my own weakness, when I fail;
The iron arc of the avoiding journey
Curves back upon my weakness at the end;
Whether the faint light spark against my face
Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight,
Centre and circumference are both my weakness.
O strange identity of my will
and weakness!
Terrible wave white with the seething word!
Terrible flight through the revolving darkness!
Dreaded light that hunts my profile!
Dreaded night covering me in fears!
My will behind my weakness silhouettes
My territories of fear, with a great sun.
I grow towards the acceptance of that sun
Which hews the day from night. The light
Runs from the dark, the dark from light
Towards a black or white of total emptiness.
The world, my body, binds the dark and light
Together, reconciles and separates
In lucid day the chaos of my darkness.
The Separation
When the night within whose deep
Our minds and bodies melt in love,
Instead of joining us, divides
With winds and seas that tear between
Our separated sleep –
Then to my lidless eyes that stare
Beyond my dark and climbing fears,
Your answering warm island lies
In the gilt wave of desire
Far as the day from here.
Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.
The present voices and the faces
Of strangers mirroring each other
In their foreign happiness,
Lay waste and populate my map
With meaningless names of places.
To bring me back to you, the earth
Must turn, the aeroplane
Must fly across the glittering spaces,
The clocks must run, the scenery change
From mountains into town.
Against a wheel I press my brain,
My blood roars through a night of wood
But my heart uncoils no shoot
From the centre of a silence
Of motionless violence.
And when we meet – the ribs will still
Divide the flesh-enfolding dream
And the winds and seas of time
Ruin the islands with their stream
However compassed be the will;
Unless within the turning night
Where we are ever separate,
Our eyes drink in each other’s silence,
Unmeasuring patience
Threaded upon their secret light.
Shuttered by dark at the still centre
Of the world’s circular terror,
O tender birth of life and mirror
Of lips, where love at last finds peace
Released from the will’s error.
To a Spanish Poet
(for Manuel Altolaguirre)
You stared out of the window on the emptiness
Of a world exploding:
Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain
Blasted sideways by the wind.
Every sensation except loneliness
Was drained out of your mind
By the lack of any motionless object the eye could find.
You were a child again
Who sees for the first time things happen.
Then, stupidly, the sulphur stucco pigeon
Fixed to the gable above your ceiling
Swooped in a curve before the window
Uttering, as it seemed, a coo.
When you smiled,
Everything in the room was shattered;
Only you remained whole
In frozen wonder, as though you stared
At your image in the broken mirror
Where it had always been silverly carried.
Thus I see you
With astonishment whitening in your gaze
Which still retains in the black central irises
Laughing images
Of a man lost in the hills near Malaga
Having got out of his carriage
And spent a week following a partridge;
Or of that broken-hearted general
Who failed to breed a green-eyed bull.
Beyond the violet violence of the news,
The meaningless photographs of the stricken faces,
The weeping from entrails, the vomiting from eyes,
In all the peninsular places,
My imagination reads
The penny fear that you are dead.
Perhaps it is we who are unreal and dead,
We of a world that revolves, dissolves and explodes
While we lay the steadfast corpse under the ground
Just beneath the earth’s lid,
And the flowering eyes grow upwards through the grave
As through a rectangular window
Seeing the stars become clear and more clear
In a sky like a sheet of glass,
Beyond these comedies of falling stone.
Your heart looks through the breaking body,
Like axle through the turning wheel,
With eyes of blood.
Unbroken heart,
You stare through my revolving bones
On the transparent rim of the dissolving world
Where all my side is opened
With ribs drawn back like springs to let you enter
And replace my heart that is more living and more cold.
Oh let the violent time
Cut eyes into my limbs
As the sky is pierced with stars that look upon
The map of pain,
For only when the terrible river
Of grief and indignation
Has poured through all my brain
Can I make from lamentation
A world of happiness,
And another constellation,
With your voice that still rejoices
In the centre of its night,
As, buried in this night,
The stars burn with their brilliant light.
Auf dem Wasser zu Singen
A girl today, dreaming
On her river of time
With April clouds streaming
Through the glass of her eyes,
Laid down her book,
Looked shoreward, and sighed:
‘Oh, if print put on flesh
And these words were whispers
From the lips of the poet
In the vase of my face,
Then this punt would be the river
That bore my name for ever
And my legend never fade.
‘Then I would understand
What the people of his land
Never understood: his heart
Was torn apart
By a vulture: hence
Fury his address,
And his life disorder.
‘I would cling tight to his hand –
The handle of the glass
Where my image would pass
And I saw my face for ever,’
She thought, turning from her lover
Whose need then hung above her.
And he looked up
Across a gulf of rivers
Straight into a face
High above this time and place
And the terrible eyes knew him
And his terrible eyes knew them.
The Vase of Tears
Tears pouring from this face of stone,
Angels from the heart, unhappiness
From some dream to yourself unknown –
Let me dry your eyes with these kisses.
I pour what comfort of ordinariness
I can; faint light upon your night alone.
And then we smother
with caresses
Both our starved needs to atone.
Stone face creased with human tears: yet
Something in me gentle and delicate
Sees through those eyes an ocean of green water
And one by one the bitter drops collects
Into my heart, a glass vase which reflects
The world’s grief weeping in its daughter.
The Double Shame
You must live through the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.
Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows red in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and gold
Of her who was different in each.
Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and look at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless –
Here birds crossed once and cries were uttered
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.
For the story of those who made mistakes
Of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
What the blood is now writing in your head,
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 5