As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being so perfectly living and dead
In your story, worse than theirs, but true.
Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.
No Orpheus, No Eurydice
Nipples of bullets, precipices,
Ropes, knives, all
Now would seem as gentle
As the far away kisses
Of her these days remove
– To the dervish of his mind
Lost to her love.
There where his thoughts alone
Dance round his walls,
They paint his pale darling
In a piteous attitude standing
Amongst blowing winds of space,
Dead, and waiting in sweet grace
For him to follow, when she calls.
For how can he believe
Her loss less than his?
‘True it is that she did leave
Me for another’s kiss;
Yet our lives did so entwine
That the blank space of my heart
Torn from hers apart,
Tore hers too from mine.’
O, but if he started
Upon that long journey
Of the newly departed
Where one and all are born poor
Into death naked,
Like a slum Bank Holiday
Of bathers on a desolate shore;
If, with nerves strung to a harp,
He searched among the spirits there,
Looking and singing for his wife
To follow him back into life
Out of this dull leaden place,
He would never find there
Her cold, starry, wondering face.
For he is no Orpheus,
She no Eurydice.
She has truly packed and gone
To live with someone
Else, in pleasures of the sun,
Far from his kingdoms of despair
Here, there, or anywhere.
The Drowned
They still vibrate with the sound
Of electric bells,
The sailors who drown
While their mouths and ships fill
With wells of silence
And horizons of distance.
Kate and Mary were the city
Where they lingered on shore
To mingle with the beauty
Of the girls: they’re still there –
Where no numbness nor dumbness
Appals dance hall and bar.
No letters reach wrecks;
Corpses have no telephone;
Gold tides cut the nerves
The desires are frozen
While the blurred sky
Rubs bitter medals on the eyes.
Jack sees her with another
And he knows how she smiles
At the light facile rival
Who so easily beguiles
Dancing and doing
What he never will now.
Cut off unfairly
By the doom of doom
Which makes heroes and serious
Skulls of men all,
Where under waves we roll
Whose one dream was to play
And forget death all day.
The Barn
Half-hidden by trees, the sheer roof of the barn
Is warped to a river of tiles
By currents of the sky’s weather
Through long damp years.
Under the leaves, a great butterfly’s wing
Seems its brilliant red, streaked with dark lines
Of lichen and rust, an underwing
Of winter leaves.
A sapling, with a jet of flaming
Foliage, cancels with its branches
The guttered lower base of the roof, reflecting
The tiles in a cup of green.
Under the crashing vault of sky,
At the side of the road flashing past
With a rumour of smoke and steel,
Hushed by whispers of leaves, and bird song,
The barn from its dark throat
Gurgitates with a gentle booming murmur.
This ghost of a noise suggests a gust
Caught in its rafters aloft long ago,
The turn of a winch, the wood of a wheel.
Tangled in the sound, as in a girl’s hair
Is the enthusiastic scent
Of vivid yellow straw, lit by a sun-beam
Laden with motes, on the boards of a floor.
To Natasha
You, whom such fragments do surround
Of childhood straying through your face
Leaving two signs of hair there as your name –
Through the loneliness
Of my long look past the darkness
At the tunnel’s end, I watch your curving neck,
The wondering colours marvel in your eyes,
My space of silence touch your dawn that lights
My life’s emerging line.
You, who are afraid of fear,
Whose past has moulded hollows in your cheeks,
Who murmur ‘mercy’, turning in your sleep,
Whose glances touch me with shy voices:
Your fingers of music
Pressing down a rebellion of mistakes
Raise here our devout tower of mutual prayer.
I am one who knows each day his past
Tear out the links from an achieving chain;
Daily through vigorous imagining
I summon my being again
Out of a chaos of nothing.
My grasp on nothing builds my everything
Lest what I am should relapse into pieces.
Darling, this kiss of great serenity
Has cast no sheet anchor of security
But balances upon the faith that lies
In the timeless loving of your eyes
Our terrible peace, where all that was
Certain and stated, falls apart
Into original meanings, and the words
That weighed like boulders on us from the past
Are displaced by an earthquake of the heart.
from Elegy for Margaret
II
(To H.S.)
Dearest and nearest brother,
No word can turn to day
The freezing night of silence
Where all your dawns delay
Watching flesh of your Margaret
Wither in sickness away.
Yet those we lose, we learn
With singleness to love:
Regret stronger than passion holds
Her the times remove:
All those past doubts of life, her death
One happiness does prove.
Better in death to know
The happiness we lose
Than die in life in meaningless
Misery of those
Who lie beside chosen
Companions they never choose.
Orpheus, maker of music,
Clasped his pale bride
Upon that terrible river
Of the ghosts who have died.
Then of his poems, the uttermost
Laurel sprang from his side.
When your red eyes follow
Her body dazed and hurt
Under the torrid mirage
Of delirious desert,
Her breasts break with white lilies,
Her eyes with Margaret.
As child, of those who played
With me, I sought you most:
Our twining hands
and leafy eyes
Under world-schemes are lost;
And the kiss that reconciled
No longer spares the cost.
I bring no consolation
Of the weeping shower
Whose final dropping jewel deletes
All grief in the sun’s power:
You must watch these things grow worse
Day after day, hour after hour.
Yet to accept the worst
Is finally to revive
When we are equal with the force
Of that with which we strive
And having almost lost, at last
Know that such was to live.
As she will live who, candle-lit,
Floats upon her final breath,
The ceiling of the frosty night
And her high room beneath,
Wearing not like destruction, but
Like a white dress, her death.
V
(i)
Already you are beginning to become
Fallen tree-trunk with sun-burnished limbs
In an infinite landscape among tribal bones
Encircled by encroaching ritualistic stones.
(ii)
Those that begin to cease to be your eyes
Are flowers parched of their honey where memories
Crowd over and fly out like avid butterflies.
The striped and glittering colours of lost days,
Swallow-tail, Red Admiral, fritillaries,
Feed on your eyes and then fly from our gaze.
(iii)
In the corner of the bed you are already partly ghost
A whispering scratching existence almost lost
To our blatant life which spreads through all the rooms
Our contrast transient as heaped consoling blooms.
(iv)
You are so quiet; your hand on the sheet seems a mouse.
Yet when we look away, the flails
Which pound and beat you down with ceaseless pulse
Shake like a steam hammer through the house.
(v)
Evening brings the opening of the windows.
Now your last sunset throws
Shadows from the roots of all the trees,
Atrean hounds it unleashes
In front of a sky in which there burns a rose.
The Furies point and strain forwards.
The pack of night is crowding towards us.
Man and Woman
Through man’s love and woman’s love
Moons and tides move
Which fuse those islands, lying face to face.
Mixing in naked passion
Those who naked new life fashion
Are themselves reborn in naked grace.
Lost
Horizontal on amber air three boughs of green
Lift slotted sleeves. Beyond them, the house glows.
Straight mouldings delineate tall windows.
Glass panes weigh the balance between
Garden mirrored and interior darkly seen.
That cracked stucco wall seems the rind
Of miles and days from here to what I savour:
My thought, biting it, penetrates the flavour
Of a shining withheld day behind
Where sweetness entered me, body and mind.
Against that wall my eating memories press
As though through my own flesh into my heart.
One room, my heart, holds a girl with lips apart
Watching a child starred in his nakedness.
Her gaze covers him like a fleecy dress.
That is the room where the world was most precious
Where jewelled silence on their eyes collects
The light which each from each reflects.
Here lamp and wooden furniture are gracious.
All other times and places seem atrocious.
My spirit shut outside them is a ghost
Gazing through clay and gales at his warm past.
From out my empty everywhere I cast
My seeing unseen eyes through the time lost
Back to that one room where life was life most.
Seascape
(in memoriam M.A.S.)
There are some days the happy ocean lies
Like an unfingered harp, below the land.
Afternoon gilds all the silent wires
Into a burning music of the eyes.
On mirroring paths between those fine-strung fires
The shore, laden with roses, horses, spires,
Wanders in water, imaged above ribbed sand.
The azure vibrancy of the air tires
And a sigh, like a woman’s, from inland
Brushes the golden wires with shadowing hand
Drawing across their chords some gull’s sharp cries
Or bell, or gasp from distant hedged-in shires:
These, deep as anchors, the silent wave buries.
Then, from the shore, two zig-zag butterflies,
Like errant dog-roses cross the hot strand
And on the ocean face in spiralling gyres
Search for foam-honey in reflected skies.
They drown. Witnesses understand
Such wings torn in such ritual sacrifice,
Remembering ships, treasures and cities.
Legendary heroes, plumed with flame like pyres
On flesh-winged ships fluttered from their island
And them the sea engulfed. Their coins and eyes
Twisted by the timeless waves’ desires,
Are, through the muscular water, scarcely scanned
While, above them, the harp assumes their sighs.
To My Daughter
Bright clasp of her whole hand around my finger,
My daughter, as we walk together now,
All my life I’ll feel a ring invisibly
Circle this bone with shining: when she is grown
Far from today as her eyes are far already.
[1953]
Missing My Daughter
This wall-paper has lines that rise
Upright like bars, and overhead,
The ceiling’s patterned with red roses.
On the wall opposite the bed
The staring looking-glass encloses
Six roses in its white of eyes.
Here at my desk, with note-book open
Missing my daughter, makes those bars
Draw their lines upward through my mind.
This blank page stares at me like glass
Where stared-at roses wish to pass
Through petalling of my pen.
An hour ago, there came an image
Of a beast that pressed its muzzle
Between bars. Next, through tick and tock
Of the reiterating clock
A second glared with the wide dazzle
Of deserts. The door, in a green mirage,
Opened. In my daughter came.
Her eyes were wide as those she has,
The round gaze of her childhood was
White as the distance in the glass
Or on a white page, a white poem.
The roses raced around her name.
[1953]
Nocturne
Their six-weeks-old daughter lies
in her cot, crying out the night. Their hearts
Are sprung like armies, waiting
To cross the gap to where her loneliness
Lies infinite between them. This child’s cry
Sends rays of a star’s pain through endless dark;
And the sole purpose of their loving
Is to disprove her demonstration
Of all love’s aidlessness. Words unspoken
Out of her mouth unsaying, prove unhappiness
Pure as innocence, virgin of tragedy,
Unknowing reason. Star on star of pain
Surround her cry to make a constellation
Where human tears of victims are the
same
As griefs of the unconscious animals.
Listening, the parents know this primal cry
Out of the gates of life, hollows such emptiness,
It proves that all men’s aims should be, all times,
To fill the gap of pain with consolation
Poured from the mountain-sided adult lives
Whose minds like peaks attain to heights of snow:
The snow should stoop to wash away such grief.
Unceasing love should lave the feet of victims.
Yet, when they lift their heads out of such truths,
Today mocks at their prayers. To think this even
Suffices to remind them of far worse
Man-made man-destroying ills which threaten
While they try to lull a child. For she
Who cries for milk, for rocking, and a shawl,
Is also subject to the rage of causes
Dividing peoples. Even at this moment
Eyes might fly between them and the moon,
And a hand touch a lever to let fall
That which would make the street of begging roofs
Pulverize and creep skywards in a tower:
Down would fall baby, cradle, and them all.
That which sent out the pilot to destroy them
Was the same will as that with which they send
An enemy to kill their enemy. Even in this love
Running in shoals on each side of her bed,
Is fear, and hate. If they shift their glances
From her who weeps, their eyes meet other eyes
Willed with death, also theirs. All would destroy
New-born, innocent streets. Necessity,
With abstract head and searing feet, men’s god
Unseeing the poor amulets of flesh,
Unhearing the minutiae of prayer.
Selected Poems of Stephen Spender Page 6