Such large round eyes of the owl among the trees.
All seems immortal but for the dangling mouse,
an old hurt string among the harmony
of the masterful and jewelled orchestra
which shows no waste soundlessly playing on.
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
You Are at the Bottom of My Mind
from the Gaelic
Without my knowing it you are at the bottom of my mind
like a visitor to the bottom of the sea
with his helmet and his two large eyes,
and I do not rightly know your appearance or your manner
after five years of showers
of time pouring between me and you:
nameless mountains of water pouring
between me hauling you on board
and your appearance and manner in my weak hands.
You went astray
among the mysterious plants of the sea-bed
in the green half-light without love,
and you will never rise to the surface
though my hands are hauling ceaselessly,
and I do not know your way at all,
you in the half-light of your sleep
haunting the bed of the sea without ceasing
and I hauling and hauling on the surface.
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH
Some Poetry
Poetry is a loose term and only
A fool would offer a definition.
Those not concerned with the form
At all usually refer to some
Beautiful manifestation or the other.
Chopin, dying in hellish foggy London,
Wrote to say he was leaving for
Paris to finish the ultimate act,
Begging Grzymala to make his room ready
And not to forget a bunch of violets
So that he would have a little poetry
Around him when he returned.
I like to think the violets were
Easily obtainable and that the poetry
Was there, on the table, breathing
Wordless volumes for one too tired
To turn pages while moving swiftly
Towards an inevitable incomprehensible form.
FREDA DOWNIE
Hampstead: the Horse Chestnut Trees
At the top of a low hill
two stand together, green
bobbings contained within
the general sway. They
must be about my age.
My brother and I
rode between them and
down the hill and the impetus
took us on without pedalling
to be finally braked by
a bit of sullen marsh
(no longer there) where the mud
was coloured by the red-brown
oozings of iron. It
was autumn
or was it?
Nothing to keep it there, the
smell of leaf in May
sweet and powerful as rutting
confuses me now, it’s all
getting lost, I started
forgetting it even as I wrote.
Forms remain, not the life
of detail or hue
then the forms are lost and
only a few dates stay with you.
But the trees have no sentiments
their hearts are wood
and preserve nothing
their
boles get great, they are
embraced by the wind they
rushingly embrace,
they spread outward
and upward
without regret
hardening tender green
to insensate lumber.
THOM GUNN
Father in the Railway Buffet
What are you doing here, ghost, among these urns,
These film-wrapped sandwiches and help-yourself biscuits,
Upright and grand, with your stick, hat and gloves,
Your breath of eau-de-cologne?
What have you to say to these head-scarfed tea-ladies,
For whom your expensive vowels are exotic as Japan?
Stay, ghost, in your proper haunts, the clubland smoke-rooms,
Where you know the waiters by name.
You have no place among these damp and nameless.
Why do you walk here? I came to say goodbye.
You were ashamed of me for being different.
It didn’t matter.
You who never even learned to queue?
U. A. FANTHORPE
Football at Slack
Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.
The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men
Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind –
The rubbery men bounced after it.
The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.
Winds from fiery holes in heaven
Piled the hills darkening around them
To awe them. The glare light
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.
Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy
While the humped world sank foundering
And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under depth of Atlantic depression –
But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air
And the goalie flew horizontal
And once again a golden holocaust
Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.
TED HUGHES
Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. I dared once to look up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:
The wind flung a magpie away and a black–
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
TED HUGHES
Epiphany
London. The grimy lilac softness
Of an April evening. Me
Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge
On my way to the tube station.
A new father – slightly light-headed
With the lack of sleep and the novelty.
Next, this young fellow coming towards me.
I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn’t believe it)
What I’d been ignoring.
Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers u
sed to wear their whippets –
But its actual face. Eyes reaching out
Trying to catch my eyes – so familiar!
The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression –
The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,
Between the jacket lapels.
‘It’s a fox-cub!’
I heard my own surprise as I stopped.
He stopped. ‘Where did you get it? What
Are you going to do with it?’
A fox-cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!
‘You can have him for a pound.’ ‘But
Where did you find it? What will you do with it?’
‘Oh, somebody’ll buy him. Cheap enough
At a pound.’ And a grin.
What I was thinking
Was – what would you think? How would we fit it
Into our crate of space? With the baby?
What would you make of its old smell
And its mannerless energy?
And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
The long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?
The little fox peered past me at other folks,
At this one and at that one, then at me.
Good luck was all it needed.
Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life’s happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox –
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
TED HUGHES
Elegy for the Welsh Dead, in the Falkland Islands, 1982
Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth oedd ffraeth eu llu;
Glasfedd eu hancwyn, a gwenwyn fu.
– Y Gododdin (6th century)
Men went to Catraeth, keen was their company.
They were fed on fresh mead, and it proved poison.
Men went to Catraeth. The luxury liner
For three weeks feasted them.
They remembered easy ovations,
Our boys, splendid in courage.
For three weeks the albatross roads,
Passwords of dolphin and petrel,
Practised their obedience
Where the killer whales gathered,
Where the monotonous seas yelped.
Though they went to church with their standards
Raw death has them garnished.
Men went to Catraeth. The Malvinas
Of their destiny greeted them strangely.
Instead of affection there was coldness,
Splintering iron and the icy sea,
Mud and the wind’s malevolent satire.
They stood nonplussed in the bomb’s indictment.
Malcolm Wigley of Connah’s Quay. Did his helm
Ride high in the war-line?
Did he drink enough mead for that journey?
The desolated shores of Tegeingl,
Did they pig this steel that destroyed him?
The Dee runs silent beside empty foundries.
The way of the wind and the rain is adamant.
Clifford Elley of Pontypridd. Doubtless he feasted.
He went to Catraeth with a bold heart.
He was used to valleys. The shadow held him.
The staff and the fasces of tribunes betrayed him.
With the oil of our virtue we have anointed
His head, in the presence of foes.
A lad in Tredegar or Maerdy. Was he shy before girls?
He exposes himself now to the hags, the glance
Of the loose-fleshed whores, the deaths
That congregate like gulls on garbage.
His sword flashed in the wastes of nightmare.
Russell Carlisle of Rhuthun. Men of the North
Mourn Rheged’s son in the castellated Vale.
His nodding charger neighed for the battle.
Uplifted hooves pawed at the lightning.
Now he lies down. Under the air he is dead.
Men went to Catraeth. Of the forty-three
Certainly Tony Jones of Carmarthen was brave.
What did it matter, steel in the heart?
Shrapnel is faithful now. His shroud is frost.
With the dawn men went. Those forty-three,
Gentlemen all, from the streets and byways of Wales,
Dragons of Aberdare, Denbigh and Neath –
Figment of empire, whore’s honour, held them.
Forty-three at Catraeth died for our dregs.
ANTHONY CONRAN
from Mercian Hymns
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money-changer: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist; the friend of Charlemagne.
‘I liked that’, said Offa, ‘sing it again.’
XIV
Dismissing reports and men, he put pressure on the wax, blistered it to a crest. He threatened malefactors with ash from his noon cigar.
When the sky cleared above Malvern, he lingered in his orchard; by the quiet hammer-pond. Trout-fry simmered there, translucent, as though forming the water’s underskin. He had a care for natural minutiae. What his gaze touched was his tenderness. Woodlice sat pellet-like in the cracked bark and a snail sugared its new stone.
At dinner, he relished the mockery of drinking his family’s health. He did this whenever it suited him, which was not often.
XXI
Cohorts of charabancs fanfared Offa’s province and his concern, negotiating the by-ways from Teme to Trent. Their windshields dripped butterflies. Stranded on hilltops they signalled with plumes of steam. Twilight menaced the land. The young women wept and surrendered.
Still, everyone was cheerful, heedless in such days: at summer weekends dipping into valleys beyond Mercia’s dyke. Tea was enjoyed, by lakesides where all might fancy carillons of real Camelot vibrating through the silent water.
Gradually, during the years, deciduous velvet peeled from evergreen albums and during the years more treasures were mislaid: the harp-shaped brooches, the nuggets of fool’s gold.
XXII
We ran across the meadow scabbed with cow-dung, past the crab-apple trees and camouflaged nissen hut. It was curfew-time for our war-band.
At home the curtains were drawn. The wireless boomed its commands. I loved the battle-anthems and the gregarious news.
Then, in the earthy shelter, warmed by a blue-glassed stormlantern, I huddled with stories of dragon-tailed airships and warriors who took wing immortal as phantoms.
XXVII
‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funerea
l gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls.
He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs.
After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting.
GEOFFREY HILL
Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
The Map and the Clock Page 37