Collected Poems
Page 5
And we who have seen the kitchen blown away,
Or Harper’s children washed from sight, prepare
As usual in these parts for foul, not fair.
AT A DEATHBED IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND
I bid you cast out pity.
No more of that: let be
Impotent grief and mourning.
How shall a man break free
From this deathwatch of earth,
This world estranged from mirth?
Show me gay faces only.
I call for pride and wit—
Men who remember laughter,
Brave jesters to befit
An age that would destroy
Its last outpost of joy.
No longer condolence
And wailing on the tongue.
An old man bids you laugh;
This text I leave the young:
Your rage and loud despair
But shake a crumbling stair.
Laughter is what men learn
At seventy years or more,
Weary of being stern
Or violent as before.
Laughter to us is left
To light that darkening rift
Where little time is with us,
Let us enact again
Not Oedipus but The Clouds.
Summon the players in.
Be proud on a sorry earth:
Bring on the men of mirth.
AFTERWARD
Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand
At last believing and resigned,
And none of us who touch your hand
Know how to give you back in kind
The words you flung when hopes were proud:
Being born to happiness
Above the asking of the crowd,
You would not take a finger less.
We who know limits now give room
To one who grows to fit her doom.
THE UNCLE SPEAKS IN THE DRAWING ROOM
I have seen the mob of late
Standing sullen in the square,
Gazing with a sullen stare
At window, balcony, and gate.
Some have talked in bitter tones,
Some have held and fingered stones.
These are follies that subside.
Let us consider, none the less,
Certain frailties of glass
Which, it cannot be denied,
Lead in times like these to fear
For crystal vase and chandelier.
Not that missiles will be cast;
None as yet dare lift an arm.
But the scene recalls a storm
When our grandsire stood aghast
To see his antique ruby bowl
Shivered in a thunder-roll.
Let us only bear in mind
How these treasures handed down
From a calmer age passed on
Are in the keeping of our kind.
We stand between the dead glass-blowers
And murmurings of missile-throwers.
BOUNDARY
What has happened here will do
To bite the living world in two,
Half for me and half for you.
Here at last I fix a line
Severing the world’s design
Too small to hold both yours and mine.
There’s enormity in a hair
Enough to lead men not to share
Narrow confines of a sphere
But put an ocean or a fence
Between two opposite intents.
A hair would span the difference.
FIVE O’CLOCK, BEACON HILL
Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry
In the receptive twilight of the vines
And potted exile shrubs with sensitive spines
Greening the glass of the conservatory.
Curtis, in sand-grey coat and tie of madder,
Meets elder values with polite negation.
I, between yew and lily, in resignation
Watch lime-green shade across his left cheek spatter.
Gazing beyond my elbow, he allows
Significance of sorts to Baudelaire.
His phrases float across the lucent air
Like exotic leaves detached from waxy boughs.
I drink old sherry and look at Curtis’ nose—
Intelligent Puritan feature, grave, discreet,
Unquestionably a nose that one might meet
In portraits of antique generalissimos.
The study seems sufficient recompense
For Curtis’ dissertations upon Gide.
What rebel breathes beneath his mask, indeed?
Avant-garde in tradition’s lineaments!
FROM A CHAPTER ON LITERATURE
After the sunlight and the fiery vision
Leading us to a place of running water,
We came into a place by water altered.
Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept
And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist
Crawled like a snail across the land, and left
A snail’s moist trace; and everything there thriving
Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth
And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.
There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,
Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,
It had forgotten fire and aspiration,
Becoming sodden with appetite alone.
There in the green-grey thickness of the air
Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,
Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect
Hung heavily from the boughs to testify
Against all simple sensualities,
Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,
Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol
By unrelenting watery permeations.
So from promethean hopes we came this far,
This far from lands of sun and racing blood.
Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,
Behind us too the vulture and the rock—
The tragic labor and the heroic doom—
For without passion the rock also crumbles
And the wet twilight scares the bird away.
AN UNSAID WORD
She who has power to call her man
From that estranged intensity
Where his mind forages alone,
Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
And when his thoughts to her return
Stands where he left her, still his own,
Knows this the hardest thing to learn.
MATHILDE IN NORMANDY
From the archaic ships the green and red
Invaders woven in their colored hosts
Descend to conquer. Here is the threaded headland,
The warp and woof of a tideless beach, the flight,
Recounted by slow shuttles, of swift arrows,
And the outlandish attitudes of death
In the stitched soldiery. That this should prove
More than the personal episode, more than all
The little lives sketched on the teeming loom
Was then withheld from you; self-conscious history
That writes deliberate footnotes to its action
Was not of your young epoch. For a pastime
The patient handiwork of long-sleeved ladies
Was esteemed proper when their lords abandoned
The fields and apple trees of Normandy
For harsher hunting on the opposite coast.
Yours was a time when women sat at home
To the pleasing minor airs of lute and hautbois,
While the bright sun on the expensive threads
Glowed in the long windless afternoons.
Say what you will, anxiety there too
Played havoc with the skein, and the knots came
When fingers’ occupation
and mind’s attention
Grew too divergent, at the keen remembrance
Of wooden ships putting out from a long beach,
And the grey ocean dimming to a void,
And the sick strained farewells, too sharp for speech.
AT A BACH CONCERT
Coming by evening through the wintry city
We said that art is out of love with life.
Here we approach a love that is not pity.
This antique discipline, tenderly severe,
Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,
Asking of us a grace in what we bear.
Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—
The vital union of necessity
With all that we desire, all that we suffer.
A too-compassionate art is half an art.
Only such proud restraining purity
Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.
THE RAIN OF BLOOD
In the dark year an angry rain came down
Blood-red upon the hot stones of the town.
Beneath the pelting of that liquid drought
No garden stood, no shattered stalk could sprout,
As from a sunless sky all day it rained
And men came in from streets of terror stained
With that unnatural ichor. Under night
Impatient lovers did not quench the light,
But listening heard above each other’s breath
That sound the dying heard in rooms of death.
Each loudly asked abroad, and none dared tell
What omen in that burning torrent fell.
And all night long we lay, while overhead
The drops rained down as if the heavens bled;
And every dawn we woke to hear the sound,
And all men knew that they could stanch the wound,
But each looked out and cursed the stricken town,
The guilty roofs on which the rain came down.
STEPPING BACKWARD
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.
You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They’re luckiest who know they’re not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler’s frenzy; you and I
Still look from separate windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square.
And when we come into each other’s rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered and self-conscious,
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers—
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers—
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried geranium,
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.
It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragic-comic stumblers like ourselves.
The knowledge breeds reserve. We walk on tiptoe,
Demanding more than we know how to render.
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down;
The human act will make us real again,
And then perhaps we come to know each other.
Let us return to imperfection’s school.
No longer wandering after Plato’s ghost,
Seeking the garden where all fruit is flawless,
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather.
The sourest apple makes its wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang.
Maybe we shouldn’t turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff,
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation—
If not our own, then someone’s anyway.
So I come back to saying this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my own,
This stepping backward for another glance.
Perhaps you’ll say we need no ceremony,
Because we know each other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension.
Your stature’s one I want to memorize—
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman.
I’d ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you both yourself and human.
ITINERARY
The guidebooks play deception; oceans are
A property of mind. All maps are fiction,
All travelers come to separate frontiers.
The coast, they said, is barren; birds go over
Unlighting, in search of richer inland gardens.
No green weed thrusts its tendril from the rock face.
Visit it if you must; then turn again
To the warm pleasing air of colored towns
Where rivers wind to lace the summer valleys.
The coast is naked, sharp with cliffs, unkind,
They said; scrub-bitten. Inland there are groves
And fêtes of light and music.
But I have seen
Such denizens of enchantment print these sands
As seldom prowl the margins of old charts:
Stallions of verd antique and wild brown children
And tails of mermaids glittering through the sea!
A REVIVALIST IN BOSTON
But you shall walk the golden street,
And you unhouse and house the Lord.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Going home by lamplight across Boston Common,
We heard him tell how God had entered in him,
And now he had the Word, and nothing other
Would do but he must cry it to his brother.
We stood and listened there—to nothing new.
Yet something loosed his tongue and drove him shouting.
Compulsion’s not play-acted in a face,
And he was telling us the way to grace.
Somehow we saw the youth that he had been,
Not one to notice; an ordinary boy—
Hardly the one the Lord would make His tool—
Shuffling his feet in Baptist Sunday school.
And then transfiguration came his way;
He knew t
he secret all the rest were seeking.
He made the tale of Christendom his own,
And hoarsely called his brethren to the throne.
The same old way; and yet we knew he saw
The angelic hosts whose names he stumbled over.
He made us hear the ranks of shining feet
Treading to glory’s throne up Tremont Street.
THE RETURN OF THE EVENING GROSBEAKS
The birds about the house pretend to be
Penates of our domesticity.
And when the cardinal wants to play at prophet
We never tell his eminence to come off it.
The crows, too, in the dawn prognosticate
Like ministers at a funeral of state.
The pigeons in their surplices of white
Assemble for some careful Anglican rite.
Only these guests who rarely come our way
Dictate no oracles for us while they stay.
No matter what we try to make them mean
Their coming lends no answer to our scene.
We scatter seed and call them by their name,
Remembering what has changed since last they came.
THE SPRINGBOARD
Like divers, we ourselves must make the jump
That sets the taut board bounding underfoot
Clean as an axe blade driven in a stump;
But afterward what makes the body shoot
Into its pure and irresistible curve
Is of a force beyond all bodily powers.
So action takes velocity with a verve
Swifter, more sure than any will of ours.
A CHANGE OF WORLD
Fashions are changing in the sphere.
Oceans are asking wave by wave
What new shapes will be worn next year;
And the mountains, stooped and grave,
Are wondering silently range by range
What if they prove too old for the change.