New Collected Poems
Page 30
on a painting by Graham Sutherland
To Elizabeth Jennings
Memento rectangled to lead the gaze
From outer levels to a hub of white,
An elsewhere that recedes from coiling planes
Sequestered rural scene reputed Welsh,
Season’s regalia reduced to tones
Of veld and verdure, leaves to sprays of blotch
A static vortex wherein ochre glows
Softly in strata linked by streaks and zones
Of compact shade and layers of virid light
The felt-floored lane leads to a blank where hues
And perceptions vanish as fast as time
Into the non-lieu beyond mortal reach
Where red is not an opposite of rot
Or devastation the reverse of peace
And all those things that were the case resume.
w. 1985, p. 1986
A FURTHER FRONTIER
Viewed from Corfu
To Lawrence Durrell
Seen across leagues of amethystine calm,
Two facing foreheads, one afforested,
The other sparsely greened as with Greek-hay,
An isthmus vista in between them hazed
By distant fluorescent shimmering
Of drowsy blended colours in which soot
Suffuses violet, peach and ivory.
Far to the East, a tranquil smoulder veils
Some remote city old as Trebizond,
Sated with myth and stunned by history,
Where linger shades of despots, peasants, saints,
Lost in oblivion’s drifting dust. The end
Of afternoon approaches, the tenth month
Is almost here, further to obumbrate
A land once white with dawn, the nearby shore
Of North Helladic rock, whose dwellers owe
Fealty alike to thoughts of men long dead.
Night hovers like the question haunting all
As to whether eschatos has not come:
Unseen above hangs Saturn’s fractured scythe.
w. 1985
A SARUM SESTINA
To Satish Kumar
Schooldays were centred round the tallest spire
In England, whose chime-pealing ruled our lives,
Spent in the confines of a leafy Close:
Chimes that controlled the hours we spent in singing,
Entered the classrooms to restrict our lessons
And punctuated the half-times of games.
The gravel courtyard where we played rough games
During the early break or after singing
In the Cathedral circled by the Close
And dominated by its soaring spire
Saw many minor dramas of our lives.
Such playgrounds predetermine later lessons.
Daily dividing services, meals, lessons,
Musical time resounded through the Close,
Metered existence like the rules of games.
What single cord connects most schoolboys’ lives?
Not many consist first of stints of singing.
Our choral rearing paralleled a spire.
Reaching fourteen within sight of that spire
Unconsciously defined our growing lives,
As music’s discipline informed our lessons.
We grew aware of how all round the Close
Households were run on lines that like our singing
Were regulated as communal games.
We sensed the serious need for fun and games,
What funny folk can populate a Close.
We relished festive meals as we did singing.
Beauty of buildings balanced boring lessons.
We looked relieved at times up at the spire
Balanced serene above parochial lives.
Grubby and trivial though our schoolboy lives
Were as all are, we found in singing
That liberation and delight result from lessons.
Under the ageless aegis of the spire
Seasonal feasts were ever-renewed games.
Box-hedges, limes and lawns line Sarum Close.
Choristers in that Close lead lucky lives.
They are taught by a spire and learn through singing
That hard lessons can be enjoyed like games.
w. 1984, p. 1986
NOVEMBER IN DEVON
Leaving Plymouth last seen after first smashed by bombs,
Driving North all the morning after rain
Towards Hartland’s hospitable hearth
Through landscapes clad in disruptive pattern
Material edged by hedge or walls of dry-stone:
Under a cover of commingling cloud and clear,
Drifts of drab haze transpierced by wet blue slate,
Between lofty moor and deep glen
Past lanes twisting off into the arcane
We spin towards midday’s strengthening sun.
After Launceston eleven o’clock approaches
At a thousand revs per minute four times
Beneath us: the car radio
Picks up brass playing Nimrod in Whitehall,
Rearousing a reticent love for this land.
While memory brings back like a sepia still
Holding my mother’s hand in a Bournemouth
Doorway during the first of all
Remembrance Days’ two minutes of silence,
Today I anticipate the advent of death.
A parade of folk sporting mass-produced poppies
In the next village briefly delays us
At a border-point round which spread
Areas of age-old non-violence.
In ivy-dark gardens hang white rags of late rose.
An abrupt paranoia wonders just how sure
One can be now that no secret convoy
Was out during last night on roads
Linking Hinckley Point and Bull Head, that near-
by tin-mines or tumuli hide no lethal hoards.
At half my age this might have worried me more.
The South country kept my childhood secure.
Now I know that to Whinny-moor
Before long I shall come, as one more year
Declines towards departure in deceptive calm.
w. 1986
THREE REMANENCES
SCOTLAND 1919
In Kinghorn on Forth
held up to the sill
I saw dim shapes cross
the Firth’s distant mouth –
the Kaiser’s whole fleet
on its way to be sunk
in remote Scapa Flow
Nineteen years had to pass
before one could guess
what revenant would rise
from reprisal’s sea depths
SPUTNIK OVER AIX
Every day for a week
like a steel astral tine
from the apricot West
slicing evening’s swart skin
slowly but quick
on its way towards Cannes
slid fugacious sputnik
PROVENCE MARITIME
Half way between
L’Estaque and Aigues-Mortes
he she and I
after sardines and wine
lay spread on a bed of
couch grass and grey sand
like a twelve-limb-rayed star
beneath a taut awning
of cyan velour
sprayed with Milky Way sperm
Waking soon before dawn
I had to decide
between grasping her wrist
or caressing his nape
By the time light arrived
I still hadn’t stirred
to wake them from sleep
w. 1992, p. 1994
IVY
The ivy invading my window-sill
Needs perennial cutting-back.
An ivy-leaf fluttering in the wind
reminds me of i
nhuman nature’s
obstinate beauty.
A patch of pale blue behind it
portrays a persistent faint yearning
while the cloud crossing it
grey as boredom
is yet tinged with a flush
of residual hope.
w. Isle of Wight, 24 August 1994, p. 1995
APPENDIX A
UNPUBLISHED POEMS, DRAFTS AND FAIR COPIES
David Gascoyne in the 1940s
SONNET
A SONNET FOR A.K.M.
For countless miles around us stretches air
That knows strong Southern sunshine, Northern rains,
That moves on mountains, trembles over plains
Of burning sand, yet cannot let us share
Its pulsing knowledge, cannot sudden bear
On its wings away through lovely lanes
Of ice-blue sky and swirling, pearly chains
Of cloud to that unknown, desired place, where
Midst snow, the navel of the world, the core
Of light and dark lies naked and revealed,
The secret of the kabbalistic lore,
The meaning of the cosmos, unconcealed.
There man would be consumed with piercing awe
And madly from that Truth would search for shield.
w. 1932
HINTERLAND
(1)
Damp silence and dark in the valley; above the town
brown sackcloth hillsides slope barely away
to cold peaks and snow-crags where not yet the day
has turned on its light. Cold waters flow down
from a cleft in the hills: They are quiet in the night,
moving slow through the vale past the somnolent mill
whose wheels turn no longer, whose crankshafts are still;
past the wide, empty quayside where in the halflight
a few misty figures steal secretly by;
past the darktowering powerhouse where dynamos sleep,
to the ultimate plain, where unshepherded sheep
wander grazing and bleating beneath the dim sky,
flowing out to the sea through a motionless port
whose windows are shadowy, dockyards seem dead.
Fog moves up the valley; the heights overhead
can hardly be seen; but the time is now short
till the dawn.
All the valley is waiting.
The sea
beats impatiently on like a preluding drum
to the dazzling symphony of light that’s to come.
All the valley is waiting and longs to be free
from this stifling curtain, the prison of dark.
From her nest of wet weeds in the midst of the plain
to rise upwards singing and joyful again
to welcome the first ray of dawn waits the lark.
(2)
And now, in this listening hush before light
when the valley seems waiting, and waiting is dumb
with expectancy; in this last hour of the night
strange portents appear of renaissance to come.
From behind the dead peaks of the last mountain range
a white comet bursts from its matrix of sky
trailing glorious streamers of swift-foaming flame
and down the cold roads of the air rushes by.
From a pass in the foothills a stranger came down.
Through the valley he wanders, a messenger-ghost.
He passes through the midst of the town
to the fog-hidden plain where vague sheep wander lost.
Now piercing the veils of the fog from the sea
a stately great ship up the estuary slides.
At the sound of her engines, the song of her crew,
on all sides around her the silence divides.
In the town a clock strikes and the lights one by one
begin faintly to glimmer in windows and streets.
Like sparks among stubble they spread house to house
and slowly before them the darkness retreats.
And lo! on the mountains the snows are aflame
with a gospel of hope for this sad hinterland
The mists glow with glory, the fog sails away,
and the lark rises singing, for dawn is at hand!
w. 1932
THE VERY IMAGE
The dark sun is drowned
Floats loose as a straw
Down the torrents of light
That no man’s hand can check
On any stone
In the blank space between two dawns
The dawn behind is that of too dense dark
Before it lies the dawn of too scant day.
w. 1936
ASYLUM
‘Red roses, red …,’ the impotent cripple murmurs,
‘I am so tired, so tired. Give back
Our blood, our rose-red blood!’ Our nerves
Are famished, too; our aching eyes
Can hardly focus [on] the street’s hard brick houses
Where the newspapers are read.
The genuine anger which this crime arouses,
This dastardly attack, that treaty broken,
Does not sustain the passing on of time
From one week to the next. Next week
No doubt, a worse event will call
For further and more fervent indignation.
All the exasperation, all the shouting,
The hysteria steadily mounting day by day,
Make it more difficult to hold on, hold out
Until the swelling burst: with bursting shells,
With squadrons darkening the sky – whole towns wiped out, -
The prelude to the final overthrow.
w. 1936
THE PERPETUAL EXPLOSION
When the wall was hidden by a cloud,
we knew the treasure must be hidden on
the other side. A garden of leprosy.
The sun was made of skin.
When we sang into the hollow sun, our
skins began to stretch. We looked like
flies. There is a wheelbarrow in Heaven.
Rouse your stick the stones will rise,
the flowers will appear to be
sewing their nerves to the veins of the stones,
your stick will stretch to a length of
one hundred and forty-two feet, the sound
of its growing will fill the ears of the flowers,
a growth of hair will fill the mouths of calves.
A citadel of wax destroyed by a
beam of light. Tie your tongue to your
toes. Destruction is not immanent.
Ants’ eggs eat birds, birds eat palms,
palms eat carpets, the carpets are spread
across the path of the [meandering ?] corpse
which ate the coal buried at the foot of
the cross. The cataract of brains burns out
the speed of thought which equals the speed
of trains, increased by the power
of torrential deluges of rain. Great eyes of
ruined phosphor gaze into the sound of
cities, rising from the labours of the plain,
and hollow is the midnight of the wind. The
dust of houses falling in the rain is spread
across the outstretched body of remembered torment.
‘Do not beg me to cease, my end is
my own end, I see no further than the
distance which begins to be near.’
‘I cannot bear the beating of the rain
inside your brain, nor the movements of
destruction, nor the thawing of blackness of
the Poles. I am on fire.’
And the gradual and unbearable
[thrust ?] of the womb becomes a hideous
throbbing hidden by the sulphur throat of
the sky, in which the flight of buildings
has d
arkened the deepening cleft which
separates the boiling flood of thought
from the metallic wrinkles of the roaring sand.
‘Have you carved your name upon the flank
of the immense stone basilisk who guards the fiery
gates? The key which I held in my
hand was bubbling liquid dark as ink
which fell and stained the mass beneath my feet.’
‘I do not know which way the wind has
gone, and carried with it all that I forget.’
And the home of dusk turns on to its
side in the echo of chaotic
magnetism, determined to search the
further brink of silence, when the thickness
of the bolts is as a calming hand hard
on the forehead of the red-hot metal plates.
And the thick skins of plants preserved in
alcohol begin to breathe through their
foreshortened sex, the sound of their
putrefaction is as breaking ice, their
heads are broken and their limbs are vapour.
At each moment the sweat of snakeskin
pours from an eyelet in the partition
of a skull, in whose bleak shadow
strikes an acid clock. Long after its
last glimmer has faded into the
lake surrounding it the fog of
numbers and conundrums continues to
bind the shrivelled gods of iodine
together in the soft ears of the shells
which are swaying slowly to and fro in
the semi-darkness of the morgue. A
rapid claw slits open the velvet
throat of a bullock’s horn which is
biting like a waltzer’s skate into
the frozen surface of the tropic slime.
From top to bottom falls a cyst.
‘My fingers illumine the path which
leads from emptiness to suffocation.
There is no longer any reason why
they should continue to convert rain into
the weakness which robs our sleep of
dynamite. There are no more blades
between the sheets.’
‘Paralysis has not yet invaded the
[two illegible words], but an
approach has already blackened the
edges of the forms which represent our
desire to poison one another as soon as day breaks.’
But suddenly a dense falsity
envelopes the conventional replies which
give rise to so much confusion that the
heat they engender almost melts the