New Collected Poems
Page 16
Recounted hour when the reflection ceased
To flow like unseen life-blood in between
The night’s tenebral mirror and the lunar light,
Exchanging meaning. Anguish like a crack
Ran with its ruin from the fulfilled Past
Toward’s the Future’s emptiness; and black,
Invading all the prism, became absolute.
Black was the No-time at the heart
Of Time (the frameless mirror’s back),
But still the Anguish shook
As though with memory and with anticipation: till
Its terror’s trembling broke
By an unhoped-for miracle Negation’s spell:
Death died and Birth was born with one great cry
And out of some uncharted spaceless sky
Into the new-born night three white stars fell.
And were suspended there a while for all
To see and understand (though none may tell
The inmost meaning of this Mystery).
The first star has a name which stands
For many names of all things that begin
And all first thoughts of undivided minds;
The second star
Is nameless and shines bleakly like the pain
Of an existence conscious only of its end,
And inarticulate, alone
And blind. Immeasurably far
Each from the other first and second spin;
Yet to us at this moment they appear
So close to one another that their rays
In one blurred conflagration intertwine:
So that the third seems born
Of their embracing: till the outer pair
Are separate seen again
Fixed in their true extremes; and in between
These two gleams’ hemispheres, unseen
But shining everywhere
The third star balanced shall henceforward burn
Through all dark still to come, serene,
Ubiquitous, immaculately clear;
A magnet in the middle of the maze, to draw us on
Towards that Bethlehem beyond despair
Where from the womb of Nothing shall be born
A Son.
w. 1939, p. 1942
EPODE
Then
The great Face turned away in silence, veiled and slow,
Resigned and imperturbable: the brow
A grave dome drastic in its upthrust, and the eyes’
Unquenched blue fires of grief sealed and concealed
Beneath lids of irrevocable flint. It turned
Away; and as the shaft below began to slant
Towards its headlong fall into unknown
Futurity, the sacred Mouth enshrined
Like a sarcophagus within its midst revealed
During that moment’s timeless flash
The wordless Meaning of the Whole
(Which may be spoken by no man)
Through the unearthly brilliance of its smile …
While the old world’s last bonfires turned to ash.
w. 1939, p. 1941
PERSONAL POEMS
SONNET: FROM MORN TO MOURNING
Morning. Full Chorus of the birds. A Sun
Of nascent ardour in the sapphire dome.
Now Memnon’s massive kings with mouths of stone
Chant their aubade. Now down the valleys come
Innocent minstrels in whose unstained eyes
Vision unfolds vibrating like a flower:
Yggdrasil spreads above them; Jordan flows
About their feet; they hear the magic lyre
Of Orpheus echo from the Underworld …
All Earth’s calm landscape shimmers; rainbows dance
Above the mountain meadows wherein Love’s
Flocks graze … But what chill shadow, not of cloud,
Is this that darkens noonday’s crystal? Whence
Comes that far wail of mourning through the groves?
p. 1943
THE FABULOUS GLASS
For Blanche Reverchon-
Jouve
In my deep Mirror’s blindest heart
A Cone I planted there to sprout.
Sprang up a Tree tall as a cloud
And each branch bore a loud-voiced load
Of Birds as bright as their own song;
But when a distant death-knell rang
My Tree fell down, and where it lay
A Centipede disgustingly
Swarmed its quick length across the ground!
Thick shadows fell inside my mind;
Until an Alcove rose to view
In which, obscure at first, there now
Appeared a Virgin and her Child;
But it was horrid to behold
How she consumed that Infant’s Face
With her voracious Mouth. Her Dress
Was Black, and blotted all out. Then
A phosphorescent Triple Chain
Of Pearls against the darkness hung
Like a Temptation; but ere long
They vanished, leaving in their place
A Peacock, which lit up the glass
By opening his Fan of Eyes:
And thus closed down my Self-regarding Gaze.
c. 1943
CAMERA OBSCURA
When Summer sifts its first dusts through the mesh
Of twig and tendril that the Spring has spun, again
Splashing with verjuice stains the lanes and avenues down which
The annual lovers stroll towards their bliss;
And when along banks and beaches warming waves
Throw up wet limbs like ingots for the wind to wipe
Dry, the sun’s fervid kissing to ignite; when high-
Charged and bruise-coloured clouds, like tight
Emotion-swollen bosoms rising, brew
Intoxicating storm-broth for the night:
Desire’s beams, breaking through a furtive aperture
Into the camera obscura of my dream,
Flash on that secret and uncensored screen
Flagrant fast-changing frescoes filled
With rearing torso-monoliths, strong tender lines
Of thew and tendon carved in bas-relief, gunmetal shine
Like mist from neck to thighs: unflawed anatomies
Of nakedness too dizzying to envisage long:
Marlowe’s Leander, Michaelangelic gods, that young
High-diving Mercury I once cut from a sports-page …
Their dark or sparkling heads just out of reach
Of my outstretched and empty questing palm, have faces
Hidden or turned away, unclear or with glass eyes
Impersonal and cryptic as a fortune-teller’s orb;
And so that other quarry that Desire
Projects alternately inside my sight’s closed lids:
The fragile natural heroines with submissive fard-sweet lips
But icebound opal eyes that my male fires must melt
Into admiring mirrors: female cherubim, are all
Like disembodied birds or beauteous busts on plinths of air.
How can the Janus gaze, pinned living to twin poles,
Like a rare moth with one white wing one black,
Fly ever to the act’s clear candle-flame?
Rely on memory to back these makeshift shades
With Love’s hard-won diplomas of accomplishment? Regret
For lost accomplices of other Summer nights, whose hands
Articulated more than all their voices (restless winds
Around what clandestine hotels: O moonlit hells!), blows back
With long-held burning breath through eyeholes bored
By image-laden rays, into my isolation-cell …
Touch cannot undivide the pinioned heart
Foaming with helpless fury that could not be shared
Or lessened by acceptance; nor can speech mean more
&
nbsp; Than tired preliminaries to farewell: which leaves when said
A slow deep-rooted sting. Then let these briefly bared
Bright simulacra starving need brings forth
Out of the void between two wounds unwind
Designs of pure lubricity, and people the short peace
Of celibacy with myths’ lucid smiling flesh;
And wraithlike vanish, leaving no scar behind.
w. 1940, p. 1941
APOLOGIA
‘Poète et non honnête homme.’
PASCAL
1
It’s not the Age,
Disease, or accident, but sheer
Perversity (or so one must suppose),
That pins me to the singularly bare
Boards of this trestle-stage
That I have mounted to adopt the pose
Of a demented wrestler, with gorge full
Of phlegm, eyes bleared with salt, and knees
Knocking like ninepins: a most furious fool!
2
Fixed by the nib
Of an inept pen to a bleak page
Before the glassy gaze of a ghost mob,
I stand once more to face the silent rage
Of my unseen Opponent, and begin
The same old struggle for the doubtful prize:
Each stanza is a round, and every line
A blow aimed at the too elusive chin
Of that Oblivion which cannot fail to win.
3
Before I fall
Down silent finally, I want to make
One last attempt at utterance, and tell
How my absurd desire was to compose
A single poem with my mental eyes
Wide open, and without even one lapse
From that most scrupulous Truth which I pursue
When not pursuing Poetry. – Perhaps
Only the poem I can never write is true.
c. 1943
THE WRITER’S HAND
What is your want, perpetual invalid
Whose fist is always beating on my breast’s
Bone wall, incurable dictator of my house
And breaker of its peace? What is your will,
Obscure uneasy sprite: where must I run,
What must I seize, to win
A brief respite from your repining cries?
Is it a star, the passionate short spark
Produced by friction with another’s flesh?
You ache more darkly after. Is it power:
To snap restriction’s leash, to leap
Like bloodhounds on the enemy? There is no grip
Can crush the fate you fight. Or is it to escape
Into the dream-perspectives maps and speed create?
You never listen, disillusion’s dumb
To your unheeding ear. But see my hand,
The only army to enforce your claim
Upon life’s hostile land: five pale, effete,
Aesthetic-looking fingers, whose chief feat
Is to trace lines like these across a page:
What small relief can they bring to your siege!
p. 1940
THE SACRED HEARTH
To George Barker
You must have been still sleeping, your wife there
Asleep beside you. All the old oak breathed: while slow,
How slow the intimate Spring night swelled through those depths
Of soundlessness and dew-chill shadow on towards the day.
Yet I, alone awake close by, was summoned suddenly
By distant voice more indistinct though more distinctly clear,
While all inaudible, than any dream’s, calling on me to rise
And stumble barefoot down the stairs to seek the air
Outdoors, so sweet and somnolent, not cold, and at that hour
Suspending in its glass undrifting milk-strata of mist,
Stilled by the placid beaming of the adolescent moon.
There, blackly outlined in their moss-green light, they stood,
The trees of the small crabbed and weed-grown orchard,
Perfect as part of one of Calvert’s idylls. It was then,
Wondering what calm magnet had thus drawn me from my bed,
I wandered out across the briar-bound garden, spellbound. Most
Mysterious and unrecapturable moment, when I stood
There staring back at the dark white nocturnal house,
And saw gleam through the lattices a light more pure than gold
Made sanguine with crushed roses, from the firelight that all night
Stayed flickering about the sacred hearth. As long as dawn
Hung fire behind the branch-hid sky, the strong
Magic of rustic slumber held unbroken; yet a song
Sprang wordless from inertia in my heart, to see how near
A neighbour strangeness ever stands to home. George, in the wood
Of wandering among wood-hiding trees, where poets’ art
Is how to whistle in the dark, where pockets all have holes,
All roofs for refugees have rents, we ought to know
That there can be for us no place quite alien and unknown,
No situation wholly hostile, if somewhere there burn
The faithful fire of vision still awaiting our return.
w. 1939–40, p. 1948
TO A CONTEMPORARY
You screwed your heart up to incredible
Rigidity; upon your sleeve it glittered like
A jewelled watch tick-tocking. All your wits
Were tough as wire since you, cut to the quick
By premature cold disabuse,
Had set your face against your inmost face
(Which wept, but which no tears could slake).
Inconsolable one, I watched your eyes
(Which never looked in mine), and saw
How often in those mirrors like the stain
Of some white poison slowly spread,
Making all sanguine colour drain
Out of what they reflected of the world outside,
Your ceaseless sense of the ubiquitous Inane.
And when you pinned up on your mouth that smile
Of purest malice by which you betrayed
Your total lack of trust, how all too well
I recognized its likeness to my own twitch of disgust
With mankind and myself … (Had I not made
The same unseeing trek through just such cruel
Subjective labyrinths as your lost feet trod?)
Through even your ignominy one saw at last
That finally despairing pride
From which you drew your courage to endure
The worst self-torments of perversity
(The treadmill of your vice,
The automatic all-dismissing sneer,
The quite deliberate invocation of the Void).
Yours was the courage not to turn away
From knowledge or from Death (whole wiles
And ironies by now surely you know
By heart); and to make unbelief
Your only refuge. You were brave
Enough to bear the seeming truth, could you not dare
To face the last fear, which is that of Love?
c. 1943
AN ELEGY
Roger Roughton 1916–41
Friend, whose unnatural early death
In this year’s cold, chaotic Spring
Is like a clumsy wound that will not heal:
What can I say to you, now that your ears
Are stoppered-up with distant soil?
Perhaps to speak at all is false; more true
Simply to sit at times alone and dumb
And with most pure intensity of thought
And concentrated inmost feeling, reach
Towards your shadow on the years’ crumbling wall.
I’ll not say any word in praise or blame
Of what you ended with the mere turn of a ta
p;
Nor to explain, deplore nor yet exploit
The latent pathos of your living years –
Hurried, confused and unfulfilled –
That were the shiftless years of both our youths
Spent in the monstrous mountain-shadow of
Catastrophe that chilled you to the bone:
The certain imminence of which always pursued
You from your heritage of fields and sun …
I see your face in hostile sunlight, eyes
Wrinkled against its glare, behind the glass
Of a car’s windscreen, while you seek to lose
Yourself in swift devouring of white roads
Unwinding across Europe or America;
Taciturn at the wheel, wrapped in a blaze
Of restlessness that no fresh scene can quench;
In cities of brief sojourn that you pass
Through in your quest for respite, heavy drink
Alone enabling you to bear each hotel night.
Sex, Art and Politics: those poor
Expedients! You tried them each in turn,
With the wry inward smile of one resigned
To join in every complicated game
Adults affect to play. Yet girls you found
So prone to sentiment’s corruptions; and the joy
Of sensual satisfaction seemed so brief, and left
Only new need. It proved hard to remain
Convinced of the Word’s efficacity; or even quite
Certain of World-Salvation through ‘the Party Line’…
Cased in the careful armour that you wore
Of wit and nonchalance, through which
Few quizzed the concealed countenance of fear,
You waited daily for the sky to fall;
At moments wholly panic-stricken by
A sense of stifling in your brittle shell:
Seeing the world’s damnation week by week
Grow more and more inevitable; till
The conflagration broke out with a roar,
And from those flames you fled through whirling smoke,
To end at last in bankrupt exile in
That sordid city, scene of Ulysses; and there,
While War sowed all the lands with violent graves,
You finally succumbed to a black, wild
Incomprehensibility of fate that none could share …
Yet even in your obscure death I see
The secret candour of that lonely child
Who, lost in the storm-shaken castle-park,
Astride his crippled mastiff’s back was borne
Slowly away into the utmost dark.
w. 1941, p. 1941