Selected Poems of Stephen Spender

by Stephen Spender

  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,