[Narration One]
The boundaries of the senses are not often clearly realized. The Infra and the Ultra are fields easily forgotten. Out of hearing stays unthought-of; our of sight is out of mind. And yet, how haunted we all are.
[Narration Two]
The nightwalker, on a terrace in the garden, unaccompanied, hardly aware of it, half hopes to overhear – that haunting thing. Something that hovers, maybe hovers only just beyond the rim. A thing he has not thought of yet, that no one ever heard.
[Chorus 1]
The weir, the misty distant falling waters of the weir among the meadows, make a whispering that swells and faints but never quite subsides.
[Chorus 2]
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.
[Chorus 3]
The whisper drifts, the faint roar flutters in the upper air. Both rise and fall. And presently a sudden fine and quite unearthly whistling sound comes sliding down from emptiness, lasting no longer than it takes a shot star’s dust to drift and disappear.
[Chorus 1]
And then a brisk salt wind blows from the other side of the black downs, and for a while the sea in its perpetual passion of frustration at the shore is to be heard vociferating.
[Chorus 2]
A salt breeze seems at last to bring some echo of that sound.
[Chorus 3]
Of ocean’s ebb and everlasting obstinate resurgence, from afar.
[Narration One]
On the 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.
[Voice of the Solitary]
I stand here staring into darkness and see nothing. Yet it is not nothing that stretches before me away there 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 innermost 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?
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 understand however I am able to address what faces me, and yet I know I somehow must respond. From out of that profound night-blue abyss of starry 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.
O Being, be! O be what faces me, to whom my heart may speak.
Almightiness, O be the Face that bent over me, O be aware and hear.
Acknowledge me, accept me, and may my response responded to help me slowly to realize how we are thus akin.
O be the One, that I may never be alone in knowing that I am. Let my lost loneliness be illusory. Allow to me a part in Being, that I may thus be part of One and All.
I am a man of a benighted century, famished for light and praying out of darkness in the dark. I do not really any longer know what praying means. To pray by rote, repeating time-deconsecrated words, seems vanity to me. I cannot bear to hear myself repeating words of prayer that might be mumbled and not meant. Men of this time seem not to know that there is meaning, or that Being is. All of us talk and talk of all and everything, and shut ourselves up in ourselves and with the curtain of our words shut out the fact that we are blind and dumb. We are afraid of silence, and afraid to look each other in the eye. Talking, we do not speak to one another; one who speaks of many others, seldom fails to disparage them all indiscriminately. Many speeches are made to urge us on to secure peace through understanding; but I will speak no more of speaking: Man has become above all the most indefatigable mimic of all the ways of being man that have ever been thought striking. Men imitate, and I am imitating them. I say ‘Man’ and ‘men’ and thus invest abstractions with all my own deficiencies and think I somehow thus may be absolved of the whole failure to be truly man. I am a man. I cry out of my darkness. I could not cry if I were in complete despair.
[First Voice]
In the gardens of the Night, breathed on by newly freshened air, wrapped in the sheltering arms of shadows cast by slowly growing things, the consolation of profound Serenity is to be found. Here, in forgetting by degrees the crude immediacies of day, talk’s trivialities, the well-worn props and tokens of habitual routine, it is possible to recall to mind and to draw near again to something vastly fundamental, self-effacingly withdrawn, that has been lying there and is there all the time. It is an ever-new discovery to find it still awaiting our return, unsmiling, taciturn, yet limitlessly tolerant and all comprehending, ready to take us back into obscurity, to share with us its poverty, to close and soothe our eyes.
[Second Voice]
The Earth, Nature, Unconsciousness and Death. We are drawn down and back towards them in the Night. But there is Vigil where the walker in the gardens stands and wonders in the dark.
[First Voice]
Now the man who spoke aloud just now out of his dark into the darkness: (to no one? to someone? the mystery is not mine to solve that each must face alone) the man who had said: ‘I could not cry if I were in despair’, turns presently towards the lighted windows he had left behind him earlier, and slowly makes his way back through the scented plants and dangling leaves of the dumbly sleeping garden to his wife and home, his books and bed.
[Second Voice]
And as he goes, begins to realize that something has changed in him. The open air, the space about him had first stirred his heart, he lifted up his heart and it had opened, and the wind that blows when it will and comes from nowhere that we know and passes on as unaccountably, had inspired it with its own more vital, lighter, unrestricted and revivifying breath. Silence had delivered its essential message to him, and he had responded. Now he feels that he no longer has the need to reassure himself with words.
[Third Voice]
He goes back to his house, he returns to his wife and children. The children have long been asleep upstairs. His wife is sitting where he left her, under the reading-lamp. She closes her book as he enters, looks up at her husband and smiles slowly at him, sleepily. He kisses her.
[First Voice]
They are together. The primary division of the human family at night is that which sets those who are alone apart from those who are together. And yet all are alone, as the man realized earlier in the garden; and all those who are isolated in their solitude are really alone only because they do not actually realize the presence of other beings like themselves in the world.
[Second Voice]
Greetings to the solitary. Friends, fellow beings, you are not strangers to us. We are closer to one another than we realize. Let us remember one another at night, even though we do not know each other’s names.
LATER POEMS
1956–1995
THE GRASS IN THE WASTE PLACES
To Danilo Dolci
What does the grass say?
The Buddha’s smile will never tell us quite.
No propaganda, no ‘ideas’.
Grass, grasses, fields, the field, ‘la terre’, our home.
All flesh,
‘cut down, dried up, withereth …’
Teeming, brave, swayed by the wind,
Sweet in the shine and shade.
Grass and flowers. Weeds
and tares.
Anarchy the law of nature.
A blade of grass glistens with dew
That the Franciscan sun devours.
w. 1956
HALF-AN-HOUR
To Meraud Guevara
… and grass grows round the door. The ground,
Without, is grained with root and stone
And yellow-stained where sunlight pours on sand
Through listlessly stirred chestnut-leaves.
This is the long-sought still retreat,
This is the house, the quiet land,
My spirit craves.
A burning sound,
Uninterrupted as the flow of high-noon’s light
Down on the trees from whence it emanates,
The song of the cigales, slowly dissolves
All other thought than that of absolute
Consent, even to anxious transience.
w. Aix-en-Provence 1960–61, p. 1974
ON REREADING JACOB BOEHME’S ‘AURORA’
Now no one can deny
That what the blessèd shoemaker foretold
Is come about indeed. Babel stands builded high
About us. Nothing avails to save
The old world like a brand from burning. We must die
Before our eyes can see. The dead must live
Before lament and mourning cease to be
The only song heard rise from earth’s vast grave.
All shall at last affirm
The Being Boehme faithfully recalled
To have become again real at the final term
Of chaos. Out of the triple void
Of no religion, no communion, no hope, Boehme
Foresaw the sun at midnight would be seen
To rise with rays like healing wings and shine
On the whole world man’s fears had else destroyed.
w. 1953 (retitled, modified 1969), p. 1975
THREE VERBAL SONATINAS
1 HISPANIC
To Rafael Nadal
This is for reading
One wild long winter night
Before the long and dreary
Wild winds have come to fright
Us all with their emotion-
al and spicy Winter’s tales,
Have come and gone and broken
With the force of heavy gales,
Leaving spume upon the mantel
And ice upon the floor –
Where are we now? Good gracious,
It’s only half-past four!
If you want to eat them,
These words will always do,
For that’s the way to treat them,
And wild Cassandra’s too!
There is no time to sweep up
The tears upon the floor,
So crystalline and icy,
Since ‘that was half-past four!’
For since that long-past cry went
Up into empty space
The birds have come, and by went
The thrilling parrot race!
O human, all too human,
Are those they left behind,
Baboons are we, to some of us,
And bloody pansies, mind!
But Christmas comes but once a year,
Can Spring be far behind?
I’ve lost my rhyme, and metre too,
Whatever shall I do?
The time has come to wipe us up
Again, thou Winter Wind!
O thrilling Sound, the Winter round
‘We have had Spanish Flu!’
And when the wind-up wind does sound
T’will come again for you!
The pen, the pen, the bright blue pen,
It has turned up again!
So now we’ll write till candle-light
Has drenched the world, the Main
(The Spanish One), and all
Oh, all the World’s in sight!
2 NEO-CLASSICAL
To Terry Clare
This is a strict
And very clean song,
Not without words but,
Not to be too long,
Without a tune,
Unless you like to
Make up your own
(’Ere the clock strikes two!)
It’s very brief,
(A Sonatina
Has to be!) and rolled-
Up like a concertina,
The basic row,
The saying goes
That life is grief
Without a song, so
Anything goes!
A Spanish song’s
No more in order
Since ‘Half-past four!’
Came in and roared a
Great rallying cry,
The other evening,
Another time, another …
(What rhymes with ‘evening?’)
This, as I said,
Is meant to be
A poem read,
No symphony!
Don’t try to sing
But only listen
A bit to that,
And then to this’n
We’ll soon be through!
I think so, don’t you?
Be through ’ere two,
Eh? Will you, won’t you?
Well, we shall see
As soon as sight comes
To light the burden,
And some light hums
May see us through, till
This opus ends, as
It opened, with a
Nice strict (has
It been that?) tune
In words, so
That we will soon
Reach the last stanza.
(What rhymes with that? Oh,
It doesn’t matter!) Then
If not too flat, Oh,
We will have done well,
And eight lines each
A stanza helped
Us to at last reach
This final one!
It’s been brisk going.
But we’ve had fun!
Such Ah-and oh-ing,
Have done at last,
And well before two!
Just not too fast!
Now we are right through!
3 SERIAL
To Humphrey Searle
This starts with ATO
And then goes on to be
A set
Of variations. Of variations
On ATO. These three
Letters comprise
The basic row,
Like ABC. Instead of Twelve
Notes, we have three basic
Letters. Compare
These three
With their associations,
As, for instance, Ash,
And Tin and Oranges. And then
Shh. Wait for the next,
The next world coming on,
This earth to change: W.R. & B.
Nice to be good
Nice to be rich
Nice to be full
And beach
As I was saying,
Before I was
Politely interrupted, take
Verbal associations, such as
This time,
Ants, Offal, Tunes.
On some such tunes as these
All variations are composed.
Next Variation: Take
Three Basic Rows, such as
We have above. Then choose
Some completely new associations
This time. Take Orange,
Antiques and Turpentine.
These form an as it were
Complete
Contrast with the previous
Variation. (At least I hope
So.) Then,
After such an ATO,
Atonal kind
Of variation, we pass on
To the next variation which
Is this time once again
On OTA,
So that we have
By this time come
Back to th
e basic
Triad: O for Oxford,
T for Times, A
For Alphabet.
But what comes next?
Let’s see.
The ABC. I see.
C is the Basic Note,
C major, that is,
For all atonalists
Who know their Latin. Let’s
Conceive that A is B, and B
Is C. Where does
That get us?
Cannibals, Beach-girls.
And Anannapolis.
This will be Greek to those
Who think that Prose
Is Simple Gospel. Now I think
That Variation’s
Done with. What comes next?
Next comes a further,
A yet further variation,
This time on OAT
(I do not mean the cereal)
Now, oats are sown,
But that’s not Serial.
And so we’re back
To Purely Verbal
Associations, this time: Octaves,
Apples and Tintype.
That should be plain,
Quite plain and simple
As quite befits
This plain and simple set
Of Variations.
So to complete
This complex set
Of simple variations, let
Your mind next dwell
On OAL, just to make one
Small unexpected and
Discordant letter creep
Into the Game. With L
Let us associate a single thing,
Say Lint, or Lemon, Light
Or Loganberry. This
With O and A makes up
A sort of supersidiary
Penultimate
And temporary variation,
LOA, loa, as in Loaves,
Though, unfortunately, we
Can’t work in Fishes
So let’s get back
And let us see,
Once more, just how
To bring this Sonatina (Verbal)
To a conclusion fit
For such a thing. Suppose
We now again evoke
The Basic Three. No?
That would be rather dull? Well
Let’s try a free
And definitely final this time
Association. Say O for Oak,
and T for Tank, and A
For Arcady. OK. Let’s go.
Well, that went quick! Now let’s
Go slow, a little. Then
Will come the turn
For ATO to grow
New Collected Poems Page 28