The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  bet on his animated

  valentines – his pink and black-striped, sashed or dotted silks.

  Tom Fool is ‘a handy horse’, with a chiseled foot. You’ve the beat of a

  dancer to a measure or harmonious rush

  of a porpoise at the prow where the racers all win easily –

  like centaurs’ legs in tune, as when kettledrums compete;

  nose rigid and suede nostrils spread, a light left hand on the rein, till

  well – this is a rhapsody.

  Of course, speaking of champions, there was Fats Waller

  with the feather touch, giraffe eyes, and that hand alighting in

  Ain’t Misbehavin’! Ozzie Smith and Eubie Blake

  ennoble the atmosphere; you recall the Lippizan school;

  the time Ted Atkinson charged by on Tiger Skin –

  no pursuers in sight – cat-loping along. And you may have seen a monkey

  on a greyhound. ‘But Tom Fool …

  When I Buy Pictures

  or what is closer to the truth,

  when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,

  I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

  the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

  than the intensity of the mood;

  or quite the opposite – the old thing, the mediaeval decorated hat-box,

  in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hour-glass,

  and deer and birds and seated people;

  it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal biography perhaps,

  in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

  an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;

  the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist.

  Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one’s enjoyment.

  It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored –

  that which is great because something else is small.

  It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

  it must be ‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things’;

  it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

  T. S. Eliot 1888–1965

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse

  a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

  questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.

  Ma per ciò che giammai di questo fondo

  non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

  senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

  The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  Streets that follow like a tedious argument

  Of insidious intent

  To lead you to an overwhelming question …

  Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

  Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

  The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

  Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

  Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

  Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

  Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

  And seeing that it was a soft October night,

  Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time

  For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

  Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

  There will be time, there will be time

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate;

  Time for you and time for me,

  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time

  To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

  Time to turn back and descend the stair,

  With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –

  (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

  My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

  My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –

  (They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)

  Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all –

  Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

  I know the voices dying with a dying fall

  Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all –

  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

  Then how should I begin

  To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all –

  Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

  (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

  Is it perfume from a dress

  That makes me so digress?

  Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

  And should I then presume?

  And how should I begin?

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

  And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

  Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

  Smoothed by long fingers,

  Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

  Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

  Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

  Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

  I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

  And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

  Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

  Would it have been worth while,

  To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

  To have squeezed the universe into a ball

  To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

  To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ –

  If one, settling a pill
ow by her head,

  Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.

  That is not it, at all.’

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  Would it have been worth while,

  After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

  After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –

  And this, and so much more? –

  It is impossible to say just what I mean!

  But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

  Would it have been worth while

  If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

  And turning toward the window, should say:

  ‘That is not it at all,

  That is not what I meant, at all.’

  No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

  Am an attendant lord, one that will do

  To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

  Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

  Deferential, glad to be of use,

  Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

  Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

  At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

  Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old … I grow old …

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

  I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

  I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the waves blown black

  When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  Preludes

  I

  The winter evening settles down

  With smell of steaks in passageways.

  Six o’clock.

  The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

  And now a gusty shower wraps

  The grimy scraps

  Of withered leaves about your feet

  And newspapers from vacant lots;

  The showers beat

  On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

  And at the corner of the street

  A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

  And then the lighting of the lamps.

  II

  The morning comes to consciousness

  Of faint stale smells of beer

  From the sawdust-trampled street

  With all its muddy feet that press

  To early coffee-stands.

  With the other masquerades

  That time resumes,

  One thinks of all the hands

  That are raising dingy shades

  In a thousand furnished rooms.

  III

  You tossed a blanket from the bed,

  You lay upon your back, and waited;

  You dozed, and watched the night revealing

  The thousand sordid images

  Of which your soul was constituted;

  They flickered against the ceiling.

  And when all the world came back

  And the light crept up between the shutters,

  And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

  You had such a vision of the street

  As the street hardly understands;

  Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

  You curled the papers from your hair,

  Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

  In the palms of both soiled hands.

  IV

  His soul stretched tight across the skies

  That fade behind a city block,

  Or trampled by insistent feet

  At four and five and six o’clock;

  And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

  And evening newspapers, and eyes

  Assured of certain certainties,

  The conscience of a blackened street

  Impatient to assume the world.

  I am moved by fancies that are curled

  Around these images, and cling:

  The notion of some infinitely gentle

  Infinitely suffering thing.

  Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

  The worlds revolve like ancient women

  Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

  Whispers of Immortality

  Webster was much possessed by death

  And saw the skull beneath the skin;

  And breastless creatures under ground

  Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

  Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

  Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

  He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

  Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

  Donne, I suppose, was such another

  Who found no substitute for sense,

  To seize and clutch and penetrate;

  Expert beyond experience,

  He knew the anguish of the marrow

  The ague of the skeleton;

  No contact possible to flesh

  Allayed the fever of the bone.

  Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

  Is underlined for emphasis;

  Uncorseted, her friendly bust

  Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

  The couched Brazilian jaguar

  Compels the scampering marmoset

  With subtle effluence of cat;

  Grishkin has a maisonnette;

  The sleek Brazilian jaguar

  Does not in its arboreal gloom

  Distil so rank a feline smell

  As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

  And even the Abstract Entities

  Circumambulate her charm;

  But our lot crawls between dry ribs

  To keep our metaphysics warm.

  John Crowe Ransom 1888–1974

  Here Lies a Lady

  Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.

  Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,

  The delight of her husband, her aunt, an infant of three,

  And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

  For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,

  And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads –

  What was she making? Why, nothing; she sat in a maze

  Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds –

  Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline

  Till she lay discouraged and cold, like a stalk white and blown,

  And would not open her eyes, to kisses, to wine;

  The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

  Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,

  But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning,

  In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul

  After six little spaces of chill, and six of burning.

  Captain Carpenter

  Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime

  Put on his pistols and went riding out

  But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time

  Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

  It was a pretty lady and all her train

  That played with him so sweetly but before

  An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main

  And twined him of his nose for evermore.

  Captain Carpenter mounted up one day

  And rode straightway into a stranger rogue

  That looked unchristian but be that as may

  The Captain did not wait upon prologue.

  But drew upon him out of his great heart

  The other swung against him with a club
/>   And cracked his two legs at the shinny part

  And let him roll and stick like any tub.

  Captain Carpenter rode many a time

  From male and female took he sundry harms

  He met the wife of Satan crying ‘I’m

  The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms.’

  Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind

  I wish he had delivered half his blows

  But where she should have made off like a hind

  The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.

  And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears

  To a black devil that used him in this wise

  O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years

  Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.

  Captain Carpenter got up on his roan

  And sallied from the gate in hell’s despite

  I heard him asking in the grimmest tone

  If any enemy yet there was to fight?

  ‘To any adversary it is fame

  If he risk to be wounded by my tongue

  Or burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame

  Such are the perils he is cast among.

  ‘But if he can he has a pretty choice

  From an anatomy with little to lose

  Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice

  Or whether it be my round red heart he choose.’

  It was the neatest knave that ever was seen

  Stepping in perfume from his lady’s bower

  Who at this word put in his merry mien

  And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

  I would not knock old fellows in the dust

  But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back

  His weapons were the old heart in his bust

  And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

  The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind

  He wished to get his trophy and depart

  With gentle apology and touch refined

  He pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.

  God’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now

  I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman

  Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow

  Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

  But God’s deep curses follow after those

  That shore him of his goodly nose and ears

  His legs and strong arms at the two elbows

  And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

  The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart

  That got the Captain finally on his back

  And took the red red vitals of his heart

  And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

  Antique Harvesters