tenderness of children’s solitude, a pulp
of snowy substance resembling oxygen
oozes out of a confession, and converts
itself into strength sufficient to deny
everything that could possibly be said
concerning the relationship between man and woman.
If man is no less than the initial of
a vanished species, the hasty signature of a verte-
brate, if man is a thistle growing out of
the concentrated essence of his own contra-
diction and if he stands still before the
gaping mouths of wounds caused by falling
thoughtlessly through outer space, he is to
woman what an ultra-violet ray is to an infra-
red ray disclosing the decimal system which
forms the main structure of red sand-
stone, and woman is a tigress in the
dock, defending her right to weep for
all the children she devoured before they
even issued from her body and to
lament an opportunity of making her-
self at least the equal of those who
gaze upon her silently as she tears their
limbs to pieces before scattering them
like melted coins across the surface of the
plain which is about to be destroyed
by an eternal earthquake.
Man is a padded cell in which woman can
fling herself from floor to ceiling without the least
sound of her screams being heard by
the world outside. Man is the finger
of a hand extended into the night to
see whether the rain is falling. Woman,
a bright and tinkling rain like that
which falls on mountain fields and
gems the threads of gossamer stretched
crazily between the eidelweiss, man a spear
of grass forcing its way out of the crevice
of a top-most rock and silhouetted
against the blue of distant heights. The
veins are curdled by the mysterious
discussion which goes on throughout the
night, the nerves awake and sing, a dew
of honey falls. Man and woman united
by the tremulous voice which rings
across the space between two peaks, man
and woman in their unity a mountain
range, a geological system, and at the
same time a pad of wadding between
two of the hardest surfaces which
ever pressed towards one another
in an attempt to crush everything
which is most glittering and most
evasively triumphant in the world.
‘Out of the rainy night, a voice, a
hand, a spear. O lightnings, sear
the wigs of all those sombre heads
which pass in a silent procession
down the gorge; strike down the
branchy pines which mar the horizon’s
ghostly clarity; and charge all
the mountain streams with electric light
and let them glitter down the vale
like morning staircases.’
‘Out of the Polar city, a white road
climbs up into the burning plateau; and
man and woman must traverse that road.
When we are lost we shall look
back, and everything which was only
revealed to us in a passing flash
of light will stand out clear as
boulders from the sand.’
Lip to lip, wrenched out of
solitude by a force greater than
all their solitary resistance, forced to
see their own faces in the light
of another’s mirror – the twisted
wreckage dangling, twirling lazily in
the empty space above the roofs of the enormous
city, mangled railway-lines
a conglomerate mess
of shattered metals, – (the great
destruction has already begun), –
the body of love expressed
and radiant in the gaze of eyes
enlarged to the size of inner lakes,
with a great light breaking forth in
breathless rays in all directions, the
perfume of perfect flesh smouldering
in the dilated nostrils of the assembled
tribes, -for ever.
‘Both land and sea reach up towards
the highest breaking-point of atmospheric
pressure, where a single heart, its
beating having perpetually increased in speed
and force in proportion to the
increase in height and desperation, tears
through the imagined night like a mighty
phallus, winged and glowing red as the
warning lantern of an express train,
whose thundering pistons shake the
surrounding hills. Yet the true source
of its movement remains unshaken as the gradual
and awesome flowering of some crystal, breaking with
calm and relentless intensity out of formless
clouds of matter into the eternally
predestined figuration of the star which
is at the core of all explosions. A star
with an infinite number of rays,
each of which points out towards the
unnamed location of the unification of two bodies. And the
exploding heart breaks into an infinite number of pieces each of
which [is] about to undergo a similar
process of combustion. The heart at the
heart of the heart at the heart of the heart -is
an endless series: and each part of the
series is predestined to explode.
‘Forms, barriers, torrential rain,
the bright mind breaking
the earth’s crust cracking, we have lain
asleep too long, there is nothing to impede
the progress of the waking planet towards
the sun. The loaves of rain-soaked bread
shall harden in the heat; we shall put on our
many-coloured robes, the sea shall come to meet us
and the dark shall die.
Our eyes, all eyes are
fixed upon the unfolding blossom of the
horizon, the summit too long hidden by
the intermingled bodies of the halt and
blind. The world is moss, peat,
velvet, sand, and water fired with the
reflection of its burning vapours – the world
is stigma, orange, dew-pond, metal
ragged leaf and petal’s odour, -dust
and syrens, clover, sparks, tumescence
pregnancy and rock.’
w. 1936
THE HILLS AND IN THE LIGHT, DAILY
When love sequestered from the mad dream of this man
Breaks into branches that unfold
In all the bounty that the brightest sun can boast
Smooth lips declaim their names and clear eyes scan
The heroes – whose the exploits shall be told
To these to come, whom the whole earth loves most
Now in the Perfect Tense we tell what they shall do:
Who loosed the captives, burnt their prisons, who
Made what seemed false the single true.
They held the sword that cleft in twain;
They took his stolen gold and gave it back again;
They broke the torture rack and stopped the pain;
And in all places built the bright abode
Of wisdom and the wide pleasant road
Away from darkness, that ensuing races trod.
But times do not revolve so easily;
And love is still unsheltere
d from the dream
That comes by night to make man restless, turn
Distraught from side to side, uneasily,
Torn between quietude and the destroying scream, -
Still ignorant, unable yet to learn.
What you involve. In perfect present time,
Are sewage systems breeding plagues of crime
Sapraemic cesspools choked with stinking slime.
w. 1936
COMPLINE FOR THE OCCIDENT.
A Cantata for Choir and Solo Voice (Fragment)
First voice:
To be
Open to every influx to obey
The law that governs mercury
First voice, Recitative:
To be
The first voice, and to break
The silence, and to say:
O speak
Now, voices of the speechless, in
My voice: O let me be
More than the voice
Of a young man alone
In a suburban bedroom, writing verse,
More than the mere
Articulation of ephemeral despair:
And let my one
Be subject to your many, at the core
Of the immense confusion and distress
Which drowns us. And to cry:
Be more than my confused subjective cry,
Confused, confusing cries, let my cry be not less
Than all yours crying, let me be possessed
By your obsession, and let me confess
To a confused distress not mine alone:
To be this voice, to give voice to this cry
So that the other voices may begin,
And having spoken to give place
To each voice in its turn
Chorus of questions:
Why do we wake
Each morning into shadow and not light?
Though sunlight may still fall
Across the coverlet, we can no longer feel
A sun within us radiate response:
And where there once
Rose like a spring in us the love of life
A dry stone lies. Why does each day
To which we wake seem like a lake of ice,
Whose unsafe surface we must cross
With swift and anxious steps
To reach sleep’s brief security? Bad dreams
Recur more frequently each night though no-one knows
Their real interpretation; and sometimes
They even drift across the waking mind like clouds.
w. 1937
TWO FRAGMENTS
The twilight eats the reeds
a crooked pin
breaks the water into shapes
like those of frozen shawls
with which the dawn was decked.
All in the carious mouth is ash, sand in the teeth
But were our mouths, as red as madder meant to
Kiss and communicate?
w. 1937-38
COME DUNGEON DARK (PART III: CONCLUSION)
Though now the false cheque’s countersigned, the fog
Of dream’s delusion lifted from the air, and split will’s
Confusion, realized at last, made all too clear:
Though now the spell be broken of the drug,
The faithful dozing dog awake to find
That he’s been muzzled: though each slight mistake
Be seen to form a link in a tight chain
That now binds freedom to the stake of its defeat:
Though all past struggle to defend seems in vain;
O do not think that this must mean that Man
Is fated never to transcend his servitude,
Nor that the first and last condition of his world
Made this conclusion of defeat foregone.
w. 1939
DARK’S FIDELITY
While manhood’s fire still burn the blood,
And quietens with unspent desire my breath,
There come to share the shadows of my bed
Many a slim sweet girl and sleek-limbed youth,
Though never next day by my side
Remains even a wraith.
But when they come no more, I’ll turn
Gratefully to the dark’s great emptiness
And sink, clasped in Night’s arms, more deeply than
Ever in any girl’s or young man’s kiss;
Nor shall I wish to rise again
From that timeless embrace.
w. 1941
EPILOGUE TO AN EPISODE
I
An adolescent brooding on a bomb
Of hatred of appearances, longing to crack
The gimcrack and exasperating crust of everyday,
Frustrated by the gunpowder’s failure to explode,
I jumped on to a bus at Charing Cross
One overcast Spring dusk, clutching my latest hope
Between the covers of a just discovered book.
For the first time, on a lurching top-deck seat,
Spelling out Breton’s high-flown phrases’ spell
I felt the toxic thrill
Of letting-go normal surface-hold to sink, though still awake,
Into wild mental regions far beyond the pale
Of Reason and beneath the genteel veil of
Calm, commonsense and compromise. His exhortations made
South Kensington, Earl’s Court and quiet Kew
Seem built above volcanoes’ buried mouths,
Strained violently to bursting-point in the green sunset glow
By the tense imminence of the super-real …
How finely attuned the nerves were that dark Spring
To the least hint of the miraculous! The sulphur in the air,
The tinkling of faint bells beneath the skin,
Bats buried suffocating in the hair of
Aunts at tea-time! broken window-panes
Through which the sky pushed inwards with grey rain-drenched
Groping hands! Flux of provoked delusions wherein lay
This single true conviction: the sublime
Existence I aspired to was always elsewhere,
Unprisoned by the walls of Space and Time.
II
Behind my single-handed unripe mutiny of mind
I found the solidarity of a well-trained band
Of bandits and conspirators already sworn for years
To systematic sabotage of ‘the so-called real world’,
And stealthy preparation of a series of strange coups
Planned finally to culminate in the storming of the Past’s
Reactionary Bastilles by massed international groups
United in their frenzy by the flag
Of Revolution, Poetry and Love.
L’Amour
(In me confined still to the head) was synonym
For Poésie: the poetry of bed, that famous chance
Encounter there: a Man Ray dream of fair
Surrealist women, glossy, svelte and flat.
Devotee more
Of Poetry per se than of its flesh, for hours each day
I’d stare at zero, trying to glimpse the ‘flash
Of silver on the brain’s insuperable wall’; a spark
Out of the dark of that deep crucible where ‘all
Our doubts, our poor abilities, the radical idea
Of impotence, and reputation’s shreds, mixed up
With other sensitive glass instruments’, were to be thrown
As though into a cellar: where mysterious light
‘Might one day cease to flicker …’
And for hours on end
I’d listen-in to the white voice inside my skull
(Like Death each minute murmuring a name)
Announcing non-stop nonsense news: ‘The Iron Starfish Kneels
Under the Thirteenth Chair …’: make records of its drool:
Or track the automatic paper-chase through outlawed, queer
> Half-baked expanses where like weeds break through
A few weak obscene puns, where verbal mist
Is rarely stabbed by any ray of daylight making plain
The lie of the obscure surrounding text.
And often now
I was a guest at that rococo vast chateau
Which had been built up slowly, wing by wing, upon a site
Staked out in the last century by seers:
Museum, zoo or waxworks, more involved than a mad brain,
A Tower of Babel full of winding stairs,
Corridors ravelled as intestines, secret doors
And rooms more difficult to count than those of Glamis,
Each one more unexpected than the room before, like tanks
In a deep-sea aquarium, full of alarming freaks:
Anthropomorphic, ectoplasmic forms
Far too profuse and complex to rehearse:
Unwieldy objects of no earthly use
From the fleamarket of the mind, oneiric beasts
Uncatalogued by heraldry, and sculpture carved
By Sleep’s instinctive and unsteady hand.
Among these shapes the visitor may stray
As through a maze and with amazement see
The drawing-room whose ceiling is a lake, the corridor
Of which the lofty windows view the mountains of the moon;
The gallery whose niche of honour shrines
The statue of Lautréamont, piano-tuned,
Perched on a pillar of quinine; the hall
Where railway-engines fight with brontosaurs;
And somewhere lost in the colossal central court,
That desecrated chapel on whose windy stone-paved floor
The Dreamer and his mistress lie star-crossed,
United at their axe as by a sword …
w. 1939–40
DEAD END
It has become more difficult, more
Tiresome and more painful than before
To write the poem that perverse desire
To write a poem leads to. Most
Difficult of all lines is the first;
And hard again when one has written five
Or six, to clear away the mist
And seize an image (while excitement’s still
Alive) and plant it in the shallow shifting soil
Of the first stanza: like a fist,
A flag, a lantern or a door. That done,
It then should need less effort to move on:
To choose, from many possibles, the one
Route that will take me to the end
By way of the most interesting
Scenery.
But O! what scenery can I
Now see, through all the thicknesses
Of scruple, like smoked glasses, that descend
New Collected Poems Page 31