The Map and the Clock

by Carol Ann Duffy

  Sing of human unsuccess

  In a rapture of distress;

  In the deserts of the heart

  Let the healing fountain start,

  In the prison of his days

  Teach the free man how to praise.

  W. H. AUDEN

  Carrickfergus

  I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

  To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

  Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

  Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

  The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

  The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

  The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

  But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

  The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,

  The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;

  Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor

  Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

  The Norman walled this town against the country

  To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave

  And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting

  The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.

  I was the rector’s son, born to the anglican order,

  Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;

  The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept

  With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

  The war came and a huge camp of soldiers

  Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long

  Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice

  And the sentry’s challenge echoing all day long;

  A Yorkshire terrier ran in and out by the gate-lodge

  Barred to civilians, yapping as if taking affront:

  Marching at ease and singing ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’

  The troops went out by the lodge and off to the Front.

  The steamer was camouflaged that took me to England –

  Sweat and khaki in the Carlisle train;

  I thought that the war would last for ever and sugar

  Be always rationed and that never again

  Would the weekly papers not have photos of sandbags

  And my governess not make bandages from moss

  And people not have maps above the fireplace

  With flags on pins moving across and across –

  Across the hawthorn hedge the noise of bugles,

  Flares across the night,

  Somewhere on the lough was a prison ship for Germans,

  A cage across their sight.

  I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents

  Contracted into a puppet world of sons

  Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt-mines

  And the soldiers with their guns.

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  Soap Suds

  This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

  House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

  To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

  To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

  And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

  Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

  A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

  A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

  To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine

  And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

  Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

  Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

  Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

  And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

  But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

  Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  Snow

  The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

  Spawning snow and pink roses against it

  Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

  World is suddener than we fancy it.

  World is crazier and more of it than we think,

  Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

  A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

  The drunkenness of things being various.

  And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

  Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –

  On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –

  There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  Ghosts in New Houses

  There’s something dreadful about ghosts in new houses:

  Ghosts in old houses are bad enough:

  But ghosts in new houses are terrible.

  The very newness of these new desolate houses

  Would be terrible enough without the ghosts.

  But the ghosts are new too.

  Blue girls in blue blouses

  And people at their Sunday roasts

  In broad daylight, within these new houses

  On streets where men are sweeping broken glass.

  MALCOLM LOWRY

  What the Gardener Said to Mrs Traill

  – And now they turn poor poetry outdoors.

  But in the olden time it was not so,

  For it was once the language of man’s woe,

  And, through the tongues of prophets, of God’s laws,

  And, through the tongues of angels, of that cause

  For which great souls have burned, and dwarf oaks grow.

  I, who am friend to love-lies-bleeding, know

  A healing in that name, and for these shores.

  But now they use hard words for simple things,

  For the wild flowers, and the flowers of the lake.

  Gayfeather, blazing star, are words that move

  Few today, yet have more than a seed’s wings.

  If ever sinful man like me can speak

  With God who humbly calls such names with love.

  MALCOLM LOWRY

  He Liked the Dead

  As the poor end of each dead day drew near

  he tried to count the things which he held dear.

  No Rupert Brooke and no great lover, he

  remembered little of simplicity:

  his soul had never been empty of fear

  and he would sell it thrice now for a tarot of beer.

  He seemed to have known no love, to have valued dread

  above all human feelings. He liked the dead.

  The grass was not green not even grass to him;

  nor was sun, sun; rose, rose; smoke, smoke; limb, limb.

  MALCOLM LOWRY

  Lessons of the War

  To Alan Michell

  Vixi duellis nuper idoneus

  Et militavi non sine gloria

  I. NAMING OF PARTS

  To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,

  We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,

  We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,

  To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica

  Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,

  And to-day we have naming of parts.

  This is the lower sling swivel. And this

  Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

  When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

  Which in your case you have not got. The branches

  Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,

  Which in our case we have not got. />
  This is the safety-catch, which is always released

  With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me

  See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy

  If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms

  Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see

  Any of them using their finger.

  And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this

  Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it

  Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this

  Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards

  The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

  They call it easing the Spring.

  They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

  If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

  And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

  Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom

  Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

  For to-day we have naming of parts.

  II. JUDGING DISTANCES

  Not only how far away, but the way that you say it

  Is very important. Perhaps you may never get

  The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know

  How to report on a landscape: the central sector,

  The right of arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,

  And at least you know

  That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army

  Happens to be concerned – the reason being,

  Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know

  There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,

  And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly

  That things only seem to be things.

  A barn is not called a bam, to put it more plainly,

  Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.

  You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:

  At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen

  Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,

  Don’t call the bleeders sheep.

  I am sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,

  The one at the end, asleep, endeavours to tell us

  What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,

  After first having come to attention. There to the west,

  On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow

  Vestments of purple and gold.

  The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,

  And under the swaying elms a man and a woman

  Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say

  That there is a row of houses to the left of arc,

  And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans

  Appear to be loving.

  Well that, for an answer, is what we might rightly call

  Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,

  Is that two things have been omitted, and those are important.

  The human beings, now: in what direction are they,

  And how far away, would you say? And do not forget

  There may be dead ground in between.

  There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got

  The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture

  A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,

  (Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)

  At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance

  Of about one year and a half.

  HENRY REED

  In Hospital: Poona (I)

  Last night I did not fight for sleep

  But lay awake from midnight while the world

  Turned its slow features to the moving deep

  Of darkness, till I knew that you were furled,

  Beloved, in the same dark watch as I

  And sixty degrees of longitude beside

  Vanished as though a swan in ecstasy

  Had spanned the distance from your sleeping side.

  And like to swan or moon the whole of Wales

  Glided within the parish of my care:

  I saw the green tide leap on Cardigan,

  Your red yacht riding like a legend there.

  And the great mountains Dafydd and Llewelyn,

  Plynlimmon, Cader Idris and Eryri

  Threshing the darkness back from head and fin,

  And also the small nameless mining valley

  Whose slopes are scratched with streets and sprawling graves

  Dark in the lap of firwoods and great boulders

  Where you lay waiting, listening to the waves

  My hot hands touched your white despondent shoulders

  And then ten thousand miles of daylight grew

  Between us, and I heard the wild daws crake

  In India’s starving throat; whereat I knew

  That Time upon the heart can break

  But love survives the venom of the snake.

  ALUN LEWIS

  All Day it has Rained …

  All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors

  Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,

  Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground

  And from the first grey wakening we have found

  No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain

  And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap

  And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.

  All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,

  Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream

  Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly

  Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly

  Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.

  And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,

  Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,

  Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox

  And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; –

  And we talked of girls, and dropping bombs on Rome,

  And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities

  Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;

  – Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently

  As of ourselves or those whom we

  For years have loved, and will again

  Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain

  Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.

  And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart

  Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday

  Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard’s merry play,

  Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me

  By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree

  To the Shoulder O’ Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long

  On death and beauty – till a bullet stopped his song.

  ALUN LEWIS

  The Mountain over Aberdare

  From this high quarried ledge I see

  The place for which the Quakers once

  Collected clothes, my father’s home,

  Our stubborn bankrupt village sprawled

  In jaded dusk beneath its nameless hills;

  The drab streets strung across the cwm,

  Derelict workings, tips of slag

  The gospellers and gamblers use

  And children scrutting for the coal

  That winter dole cannot purvey;

  Allotments where the collier digs

  While engines hack the coal within his brain;

  Grey Hebron in a rigid cramp,

  White cheap-jack cinema, the church

  Stretched like a sow beside the stream;

  And mourners
in their Sunday best

  Holding a tiny funeral, singing hymns

  That drift insidious as the rain

  Which rises from the steaming fields

  And swathes about the skyline crags

  Till all the upland gorse is drenched

  And all the creaking mountain gates

  Drip brittle tears of crystal peace;

  And in a curtained parlour women hug

  Huge grief, and anger against God.

  But now the dusk, more charitable than Quakers,

  Veils the cracked cottages with drifting may

  And rubs the hard day off the slate.

  The colliers squatting on the ashtip

  Listen to one who holds them still with tales,

  While that white frock that floats down the dark alley

  Looks just like Christ; and in the lane

  The clink of coins among the gamblers

  Suggests the thirty pieces of silver.

  I watch the clouded years

  Rune the rough foreheads of these moody hills,

  This wet evening, in a lost age.

  ALUN LEWIS

  A Wartime Dawn

  Dulled by the slow glare of the yellow bulb,

  As far from sleep still as at any hour

  Since distant midnight; with a hollow skull

  In which white vapours seem to reel

  Among limp muddles of old thought; till eyes

  Collapse into themselves like clams in mud …

  Hand paws the wall to reach the chilly switch;