New Collected Poems

by David Gascoyne

  Non loin de ces quelques camarades ou plutôt connaissances

  Qui ne sont pas tous également beaux mais tout de même

  Assez agréables à voir du point de vue du poète

  Ordinairement privé de corps

  Jeune homme splendidement nu au bord de l’eau dans ce pré tout près

  De l’ancienne ville érudite et triviale de plus en plus comblée:

  J’aurais dit que de tout ce qu’une civilisation aussi fière que la nôtre

  De ses traditions aristocratiques sinon socratiques

  Pourrait montrer aujourd’hui encore comme représentatif d’elle

  Tu étais un des exemples les plus excellentement beaux.

  Si tu n’avais pas ouvert la bouche

  Pour causer et ricaner avec tes camarades, je veux dire copains

  Qui vous égalent tous dans la grossièreté et l’étroitesse de l’esprit.

  p. 1950

  YES, YOU!

  Stealthy and utterly vain, insane

  small nagging voice,

  You go on and on, and on, repeating

  your wretched obstinate

  Unforgivable lies,

  Your impotent, impudent accusation

  Your little nastinesses and

  your filthy imaginings,

  On, and on, and on,

  Dogged enemy of all truth, and

  beauty, and courage of the mind,

  and honesty, and the will to

  change, and the power to love,

  You go on and on with your

  stealthy whispering and your

  guilty prudent repetition,

  Because you are the contemptible

  powerless victim

  Of a blind raging power by

  which you are possessed,

  And you go on and on because you

  could not even if you would, know

  how to stop,

  And perhaps in reality, you are

  not utterly guilty in the end,

  Because you are quite unconscious

  of what you are doing, of what

  you keep having to say

  Over and over and over again,

  And quite unconscious of whose

  victim it is you are.

  Be assured that the silence which

  Preceded and follows you is overwhelmingly

  vast and deep and just.

  w. 1950, p. 2007

  UNTITLED

  Yes. Thank you. Now I can start the day

  Writing this poem. You have shown me the way

  I have no longer any gift to give

  Yet I must it seems write poems, one has to live.

  For a long while I’ve been piling up a lot

  Of things I badly wanted to say but could not.

  I’ve lost my sense of form, I have no style.

  No nostalgic melody, no magic, only bile.

  w. 1950, p. 2007

  REMEMBERING THE DEAD

  In the mornings, the day-labourers must set to work once more, and daily tasks be newly undertaken or resumed; and they who work must disregard their usual disillusionment.

  ‘We shall not see a culmination of these labours; our handiwork will not last long nor our success outlive us; our successors taking over what we’ve done will as like as not disparage it; and if we build houses, they are for strangers to live in for a little while or for the next War to destroy.

  ‘Meanwhile we lose ourselves with a will in what we do today. We tacitly discourage those who would recall too many things or pay too much attention to the future. (All that we cannot see is very small and unimportant). We will put guilt upon them and they shall be silenced.’

  And in the mornings, nevertheless, in such a year as this when rain has early in the season put an end to all hope of another extravagant Summer (since a year or two ago an unexpectedly Elysian climate did for once tranform the country with such profusion and intensity of flower-hues and foliage that for the first time many millions were amazed by earth’s magnificence); on wet summer mornings, when electric light has to be turned on in the offices in the City, and listlessness and resignation walk the streets, some of the workers (no one knows how many but they may be very numerous) are disturbed by thoughts they have not thought themselves, distracted at their work as though by voices from beneath the chilly ground.

  Think, ah! think how vastly they outnumber us by now, the populations of the underworld! How immemorially have they been accumulating there, and how enormous must their number be whom there are none now living to remember. Think how they too may all be working.

  I think they think of us – Oh, how incalculably much more than ever we think of them! We scarcely think of them at all; we all prefer soon to forget; if we remember, it is only with regret. They think of us, they think of all of us; they think critically, no doubt, perhaps constructively, with more understanding than we have. Perhaps all day, all night, uninterruptedly.

  It may be that only they fully realize that there is no other way of solving the problems of life and death than by thinking about them always.

  We do not know the whole Truth; we think we know the Truth. We cannot know it, yet we must. We must seek the Truth we do not know, nor can know while we are still searchers here. Those who have neither curiosity nor doubts are the only real dead.

  w. 1950, p. 1959

  HAIKU

  My own sophistry

  Is the dark mistress whose will

  Makes me deny her.

  w. 1950, p. 1996

  Urban Leaves After War

  In Holborn leaves float

  Down to wild grass among blitzed

  Walls from brickdust trees.

  w. 1950, p. 1996

  Ambiguous Haiku 1

  My love’s existence

  Is mystery. I love him

  Through mirror that hides.

  w. 1950, p. 1995

  Cartesian Haiku 2

  I 5 must 7

  Tell 5 all in 3 (2 (1))

  Ergo: Cogito.

  w. 1950, p. 1995

  METROPOLIS BY NIGHT

  And often I have gone out towards midnight

  Through streets of dwelling-houses and apartment blocks

  Behind the rows window-squares of which

  Numberless tired executives prepared for bed

  While past street-corner lamps dogs’ pensive escorts

  Tugged them on leads along their late patrol;

  Through districts full of narrow shady gardens

  With strips of black lawn stretching from french windows,

  To sooty shrubberies, a seedy tree or two,

  Laburnum to o’erhang the pavement pilgrim

  When summer has transformed these dormitories

  By splashing blossom-sprays across their drabness

  For a few weeks each year. And have walked on

  Until I came out on an open hillside,

  A public park space from which one looks down

  Upon the mighty Nocturne of the Capital

  Whose twinkling panorama’s spread below:

  Arena sprawling dazed with concrete gloom,

  Freckled with sparks and smeared with arc-lights’ gleams

  With crawling glares and melancholy glazes,

  Slow-sinking monuments and stoic light-houses,

  Mile after mile of tenements and terraces,

  League after league of palaces and parks.

  Here hover hazes of green sick-ward light

  And there red neon blurrs flick on and off;

  In fixed directions avenues stretch sleekly

  To disappear in ultimate uncertainty

  In regions where the bottom of the sky

  Mingles with fumes that rise from the abyss …

  Fearful and wonderful, the sleepless monster,

  Most Sphinx-like cities Megalometropolis,

  Absorbing in its labyrinthine maws

  All that has ever been or could be said of it.

  The roar
ing labyrinth enisled upon Night’s floor

  Teems with such multitudinous noctambulists

  That none now fear they’ll meet the Minotaur.

  p. 1954

  NIGHT-WATCHER’S RUMINATIONS

  At night, I often sit an hour out thus.

  Attentive to a dull insistent roar –

  Or not a roar, rather a kind of cry, and yet

  No cry, for that would be a sound too clear

  And what I hear might come from underground,

  It is so thick, and hollow-sounding too,

  And yet not resonant at all, but harsh and dead,

  If dead is not too definite a word;

  And whatsoever this dull urgent rumour be,

  It holds me spellbound by the hour and more,

  While, I with a great longing to be free

  From doubt about what it can signify,

  Gaze up through a small skylight’s panes and see

  Nothing at all of any small still star

  That may be burning in the black neglected sky,

  See not even that black square the window frames,

  As though all sight lay blinded in my ears.

  And then, returning suddenly again

  To consciousness of my immediate self,

  I’ve had a moment’s glimpse into the depths

  Of solitary absence through which stray

  Our tiring restless bodies and the dead things that are found

  Strewn round them on all sides in this unanimated dream:

  Dread has distracted us away from what is here

  And what we are when faithful to the truth,

  And so we suffer hopelessly the sullen apathy

  That reigns on a deserted theatre’s stage

  Where we all night must play out our null roles.

  But listen, it begins again, I think.

  On many other nights I have heard this,

  This sound of distant rioting, the angry voices’ sound,

  Popular uproar from afar, and crowds from underground

  Simmering upwards to invade the city streets

  With hell-hoards hoarsely clamouring for blood!

  For blood! for justice! for revenge! What is their cry?

  Do you not hear some faint far echo of it?

  Another Voice:

  Yes, I hear.

  I too have known those ominous night noises. You must not

  Be too disturbed by them. Remember fear,

  And do not be afraid of it. If you can hear

  The echoes of your own anxiety, if you can bear

  To listen to that rumour, then you known at least that dread

  Of hearing what you fear has not yet deafened you.

  Crowd Voice:

  Fear, fear, you speak of fear.

  What is this fear? The fear we dare not fear,

  The fear of fear itself, of others’ fears,

  That fear which ends in passionate untruth,

  Self-justifying falsehood without end; daemonic fear

  Of individual guilt, of being caught, of being wrong,

  And fear of failure or of being found a fool, and fear

  Of anything that might contrast with me

  And thus reveal my insufficiency,

  My lack, my weakness, my inferiority,

  In showing up my difference from itself;

  Fear of uncertainty and loss, fear of all change,

  Fear of all strangeness and all strangers; and above all else

  [the fear

  Of Love, of being loved, of being asked for love,

  Of being loved and knowing one has no love to return;

  Fear of forgiveness –

  And the exhausting fear of Death and Mystery,

  The huge intolerable Mystery of Everything;

  And fear of Nothing,

  Nothing, Nothing –

  Nothing, fear of Nothing, absolutely Nothing …

  p. 1954

  NIGHT THOUGHTS

  1

  Night Thoughts. Night Music. Now out of buried labyrinths and caves of the town-dweller’s anxious dream, we move away till we emerge into the open air of a secluded country-side, where we shall find again the calm night world of Nature.

  2

  Nature, the Earth, Unconsciousness and Death. We are drawn back and down towards them in the Night.

  3

  Nocturnal Music. Meditations in dark gardens. Gradually forming thoughts pursued in gardens by such solitary strollers as may now find themselves outdoors, taking a turn or two before retiring; taking a breath or two of fresher air.

  4

  Walking there without a predetermined object; in the starlight; at a slow pace, uncertainly. Standing still from time to time as though to listen, yet not attending to any clearly determined sound.

  5

  The Night Music drifts away into remote serenity, leaving the hearer standing still to listen to the stillness of the garden, waiting to hear what may be born out of the stillness.

  6

  He stands still and seems to listen to some unknown distant thing; something that may be reaching him from … from where? What echo from beyond what last horizon?

  7

  There is nothing to be heard. The garden is quite still. There is only silence in the darkness.

  8

  Yet there is seldom experienced anywhere on the inhabited earth, for more than a moment or two at a time, such a thing as silence. For Silence is something we imagine only, an idea that we have of what a complete absence of sound would be like. Real Silence is the message spoken to us that we fear most of all to hear. What is usually called silence is most often no more really than a confused medley of diminutive sounds to which it would be too tiring to pay conscious attention.

  9

  Everywhere about us, day and night, goes on the eddying stream of murmur: little drifting sighs and rumblings, whispers, coughing, whistles, moans. Goes on rising from the earth, the home of life, birthplace of restlessness, where all the rhythms meet, and cross, and intertwine uninterruptedly.

  10

  Night music of mysterious hazard. Dream-fugues; variations on fortuitous themes; intricate tracery unwinding like designs drawn in a trance across the taut sky of the universal Ear.

  11

  Decrepid gust-blown tinkling of a crumbling pagoda’s bells.

  12

  Intensely complex tightscrewed-up tattoo of tiny drums.

  14

  Velvet-padded hammering of the life-blood’s changing pulse.

  15

  The pulse of changing life is the deep underlying constant. And the Unchanging also is a pulse, flowing through all that lives; a single pulse.

  16

  The changes and the pauses and occasional recurrence of abrupt irregularity make sound-patterns we overhear but never really hear. Our hearing intercepts no more than one bar at a time. These patterns are upon a scale not measurable in hours. Attention wanders; thinking intervenes.

  17

  The boundaries of the senses are not often clearly realised. The Infra and the Ultra are fields easily forgotten. Out of hearing stays unthought-of; out of sight is out of mind. And yet, how haunted we all are.

  18

  The night-walker, on a terrace in the garden, unaccompanied, hardly aware of it, half hopes to overhear – that haunting. Something that hovers, hovers maybe only just beyond the rim. A thing no-one has thought of yet, that he has never heard.

  19

  The weir, the misty, distant falling waters of the weir among the meadows make a whispering that swells and faints but never quite subsides.

  20

  The City blazing with electricity just over the horizon flings its glare-reflection like a continual exclamation of astonishment into the sky, emitting intermittently a high-pitched filtered rumour of its roar.

  21

  The whisper drifts, the faint roar flutters in the upper air. Both rise and fall. And presently a sudden fine and quite unearthly w
histling sound comes sliding down from emptiness, lasting no longer than it takes a shot star’s dust to drift and disappear.

  22

  And then a brisk salt wind blows from the other side of the black sleeping downs, and for a while the sea in its perpetual passion of frustration at the shore is to be heard vociferating.

  23

  A salt breeze seems at least to bring some echo of that sound.

  24

  The sound of the sea’s ebb and everlasting obstinate resurgence, from afar.

  25

  On a terrace in the garden, the solitary stroller has at last come to a standstill. He leans over a parapet and gazes out ahead into the starlit tranquil dark. He thinks of nothing. He lifts his head and gazes and is blind. His heart beating strikes midnight. He breathes in the night’s ancientness and freshness, slowly absorbing strength and courage for a coming time when he will have to be reborn.

  26

  He thinks: ‘I stand here staring into darkness and see nothing. Yet it is not nothing that stretches away there before me for ever in whatever direction I turn my eyes. It is the Universe. It is I myself that am nothing. Through my eyes, Nothing gazes at Reality, that utterly unqualifiable Something. And slowly the question rises out of nothing’s depths, Can I be real if I remain unseen? If I speak out of my own inmost reality, shall I not be heard? Why should it be more extraordinary that I who am nothing may be none the less perceived, or that my speaking may be heard, than that nothingness should wonder, gaze and listen?’

  27

  He speaks: ‘I stand here speaking of my nothingness; and yet I am a man. It is my heart that speaks, abasing itself in dread before that colossal inscrutability; overwhelmed by the total evidence that what is there must be. I cannot ever understand how I am able to address what faces me; and yet I know I must somehow respond. From out of that profound star-strewn abyss of night-blue vacancy comes the command: “Lift up your heart” … I raise my spellbound head and face to face with what I cannot name I worship and adore. I lift my heart up and it speaks my prayer.’

  28

  He asks: ‘O Being, be! O be what faces me, to whom my heart may speak.

  ‘Almightiness, O be the Face bent over me, O be aware and hear.

  ‘Acknowledge me, accept me, and may my response responded to help me to know how we are thus akin.