The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  entire, which too they hotter understand,

  having had it,

  we struggle. Some hang heavy on the sauce,

  some invest in the past, one hides in the land.

  Henry was not his favourite.

  29 ‘THERE SAT DOWN, ONCE, A THING ON HENRY’S HEART’

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

  só heavy, if he had a hundred years

  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

  Henry could not make good.

  Starts again always in Henry’s ears

  the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

  And there is another thing he has in mind

  like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

  would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,

  with open eyes, he attends, blind.

  All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;

  thinking.

  But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

  end anyone and hacks her body up

  And hide the pieces, where they may be found.

  He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.

  Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

  Nobody is ever missing.

  63 ‘BATS HAVE NO BANKERS AND THEY DO NOT DRINK’

  fiats have no bankers and they do not drink

  and cannot be arrested and pay no tax

  and, in general, bats have it made.

  Henry for joining the human race is bats,

  known to be so, by few them who think,

  out of the cave.

  Instead of the cave! ah lovely-chilly, dark,

  ur-moist his cousins hang in hundreds or swerve

  with personal radar,

  crisisless, kid. Instead of the cave? I serve,

  inside, my blind term. Filthy four-foot lights

  reflect on the whites of our eyes.

  He then salutes for sixty years of it

  just now a one of valor and insights,

  a theatrical man,

  O scholar & Legionnaire who as quickly might

  have killed as cast you. Olè. Stormed with years

  he tranquil commands and appears.

  67 ‘I DON’t OPERATE OFTEN. WHEN I DO’

  I don’t operate often. When I do,

  persons take note.

  Nurses look amazed. They pale.

  The patient is brought back to life, or so.

  The reason I don’t do this more (I quote)

  is: I have a living to fail –

  because of my wife & son – to keep from earning.

  – Mr Bones, I sees that.

  They for these operations thanks you, what?

  not pays you. – Right.

  You have seldom been so understanding.

  Now there is further a difficulty with the light:

  I am obliged to perform in complete darkness

  operations of great delicacy

  on my self.

  – Mr Bones, you terrifies me.

  No wonder they don’t pay you. Will you die?

  – My

  friend, I succeeded. Later.

  380 FROM THE FRENCH HOSPITAL IN NEW YORK, 901

  Wordsworth, thou form almost divine, cried Henry,

  ‘the egotistical sublime’ said Keats,

  oh ho, you lovely man!

  make from the rafters some mere sign to me

  whether when after this raving heart which beats

  & which to beat began

  Long so years since stops I may (ah) expect

  a fresh version of living or if I stop

  wholly.

  Oblongs attend my convalescence, wreckt

  and now again, by many full propt up,

  not irreversible Henry.

  Punctured Henry wondered would he die

  forever, all his fine body forever lost

  and his very useful mind?

  Hopeless & violent the man will lie,

  on decades’ questing, whose crazed hopes have crossed

  to wind up here blind.

  Olympus

  In my serpentine researches

  I came on a book review in Poetry

  which began, with sublime assurance,

  a comprehensive air of majesty,

  ‘The art of poetry

  is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse

  by the animating presence in the poetry

  of a fresh idiom: language

  so twisted & posed in a form

  that it not only expresses the matter in hand

  but adds to the stock of available reality.’

  I was never altogether the same man after that.

  I found this new Law-giver all unknown

  except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly

  Hound & Horn, just defunct.

  I haunted on Sixth Avenue until

  at 15¢ apiece or 25

  I had all 28 numbers

  & had fired my followers at Philolexian & Boar’s Head

  with the merits of this prophet.

  My girls suffered during this month or so,

  so did my seminars & lectures &

  my poetry even. To be a critic, ah,

  how deeper & more scientific.

  I wrote & printed an essay on Yeats’s plays

  re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms

  & even his sentence-structure wherever I could.

  When he answered by hand from Boston my nervous invitation

  to come & be honoured at our annual Poetry Reading,

  it must have been ten minutes before I could open the envelope.

  I got him to review Tate’s book of essays

  & Mark to review The Double Agent. Olympus!

  I have travelled in some high company since

  but never so dizzily.

  I have had some rare girls since but never one so philosophical

  as that same Spring (my last Spring there) Jean Bennett.

  Henry’s Fate

  All projects failed, in the August afternoon

  he lay & cursed himself & cursed his lot

  like Housman’s lad forsooth.

  A breeze sometimes came by. His sunburn itcht.

  His wife was out on errands. He sighed & scratcht.

  The little girls were fiddling with the telephone.

  They wanted candy, the which he gave them.

  His entire soul contorted with the phlegm.

  The sun burned down.

  Photos of him in despair flooded the town

  or city. Mourned his many friends, or so.

  The little girls were fiddling with the piano.

  He crusht a cigarette out. Crusht him out

  surprising God, at last, in a wink of time.

  His soul was forwarded.

  Adressat unbekannt. The little girls with a shout

  welcomed the dazzling package. In official rime

  the official verdict was: dead.

  Robert Lowell 1917–77

  The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

  (FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA)

  Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that month upon the earth.

  I

  A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket, –

  The sea was still breaking violently and night

  Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

  When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light

  Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,

  He grappled at the net

  With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:

  The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,

  Its open, staring eyes

  Were lustreless dead-lights

  Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk

  Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close

 
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,

  Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose

  On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name

  Is blocked in yellow chalk.

  Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea

  Where dreadnoughts shall confess

  Its hell-bent deity,

  When you are powerless

  To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced

  By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste

  In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute

  To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet

  Recoil and then repeat

  The hoarse salute.

  II

  Whenever winds are moving and their breath

  Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,

  The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death

  In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear

  The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall

  Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall

  Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash

  The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,

  As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears

  The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash

  The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids

  For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids

  Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones,

  Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush

  At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush

  Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones

  Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast

  Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.

  III

  All you recovered from Poseidon died

  With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine

  Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,

  Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,

  Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod

  Guns, cradled on the tide,

  Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock

  Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand

  Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock

  Our warships in the hand

  Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues

  Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost

  In the mad scramble of their lives. They died

  When time was open-eyed,

  Wooden and childish; only bones abide

  There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed

  Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news

  Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost

  Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick

  I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry:

  ‘If God himself had not been on our side,

  If God himself had not been on our side,

  When the Atlantic rose against us, why,

  Then it had swallowed us up quick.’

  IV

  This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale

  Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell

  And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools

  To send the Pequod packing off to hell:

  This is the end of them, three-quarters fools,

  Snatching at straws to sail

  Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale,

  Spouting out blood and water as it rolls,

  Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals:

  Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail

  For water, for the deep where the high tide

  Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs.

  Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out,

  Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs,

  The beach increasing, its enormous snout

  Sucking the ocean’s side.

  This is the end of running on the waves;

  We are poured out like water. Who will dance

  The mast-lashed master of Leviathans

  Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves?

  v

  When the whale’s viscera go and the roll

  Of its corruption overruns this world

  Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Wood’s Hole

  And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword

  Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?

  In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat

  The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,

  The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,

  The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears

  The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,

  And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags

  And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,

  Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,

  Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers

  Where the morning stars sing out together

  And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers

  The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide,

  Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.

  VI

  OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM

  There once the penitents took off their shoes

  And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;

  And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file

  Slowly along the munching English lane,

  Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose

  Track of your dragging pain.

  The stream flows down under the druid tree,

  Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad

  The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad

  And whistled Sion by that stream. But see:

  Our Lady, too small for her canopy,

  Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness

  At all or charm in that expressionless

  Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,

  This face, for centuries a memory,

  Non est species, neque decor,

  Expressionless, expresses God: it goes

  Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,

  Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem

  Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

  VII

  The empty winds are creaking and the oak

  Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,

  The boughs are trembling and a gaff

  Bobs on the untimely stroke

  Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell

  In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;

  Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,

  Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:

  Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh,

  Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,

  Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil

  You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

  Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

  When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

  And breathed into his face the breath of life,

  And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

  The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

  Sailing Home from Rapallo

  (FEBRUARY 1954)

  Your nurse could only speak Italian,

  but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,

  and tears ran down my cheeks …

  When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,

  the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Geneva

  was breaking into fiery flower.

  The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds

  blasting like jack hammers across

  the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,

  recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.

  Mother travelled first-class in the hold,

  her Risorgimento black and gold casket

  was like Napoleon�
�s at the Invalides …

  While the passengers were tanning

  on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,

  our family cemetery in Dunbarton

  lay under the White Mountains

  in the sub-zero weather.

  The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone –

  so many of its deaths had been midwinter.

  Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,

  its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.

  A fence of iron spear-hafts

  black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.

  The only ‘unhistoric’ soul to come here

  was Father, now buried beneath his recent

  unweathered, pink-veined slice of marble.

  Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:

  Occasionem cognosce,

  seemed too businesslike and pushing here,

  where the burning cold illuminated

  the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:

  twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.

  Frost had given their names a diamond edge …

  In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,

  Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.

  The corpse

  was wrapped like panetone in Italian tinfoil.

  Waking in the Blue

  The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

  rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

  propped on The Meaning of Meaning.

  He catwalks down our corridor.

  Azure day

  makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

  Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

  Absence! My heart grows tense

  as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

  (This is the house for the ‘mentally ill’.)

  What use is my sense of humor?

  I grin at ‘Stanley’, now sunk in his sixties,

  once a Harvard all-American fullback,

  (if such were possible!)

  still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,

  as he soaks, a ramrod

  with the muscle of a seal

  in his long tub,

  vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.

  A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,

  worn all day, all night,

  he thinks only of his figure,

  of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale –

  more cut off from words than a seal.

  This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;

  the hooded night lights bring out ‘Bobbie’,

  Porcellian ’29,