New Collected Poems
Page 32
Upon my sight as soon as I’ve unwound
An opening! All images reduced
To less than crumbs, soon leave no trace
Or shadow; and the inner scene I had
Hoped would appear is further than Thibet! I’m faced
With the familiar Void: a vacant space
Like the uncoloured, senseless sea or sky
That hangs under the eyelids of the dead.
w. 1939–40
A LA FENÊTRE
Immediately above my ceiling lay
The {slanting roof-slates that kept Winter’s rain
{sloping
From seeping down to stain the room’s white walls.
And in the Summer like a lid held in
The stewing inmates’ fumes; upon
The unmade bed beneath it, I
Would lie on lean days in a daze
Of weak dejection, and for hours,
On end, half-dozing, half-awake,
Would gaze across at the pale glass
Through which was in the distance to be seen
One fragmentary cornice of a corner of
Notre-Dame, whose chimes …
w. 1940–41
EPILOGUE: 1940-1941
How far that last departure out of France
Seems now; way back in a Time-Past remote as myth’s
Most misty hemisphere; from memory almost
Expunged entirely by the curtain-falls of rock
That since, descending on experience, have crushed
All spirit from the substance of our hope and left it
Carrion …
That far-off cold night when I
Last left the capital I had so loved:
A [starry] night in early spring, after a day
Of gusty rain and chilly stillness: tears
Raw in slow streams (as I sat in the train
Watching black landscape sliding past outside
The carriage window) out of my rapt eyes.
The heart I then had in me seldom stirred
Out of the trance that held it in its thrall.
w. 1941
DEAR THOMAS ELIOT
Dear Thomas Eliot (let’s suppress
the Stearns
Your fame no longer needs, and make
this rhyme):
There is no hell-fire where a
martyr burns.
Stern flesh rejoices to be cleansed
in lime.
w. 1949–50
THE PORCH BEFORE THESE POEMS IS THE ENTRANCE INTO NIGHT
The porch before these poems is the entrance into Night
Dear nameless God, must I say Thee
Though towards the suburbs the city becomes wan
To heal the sick and cast out devils, Lord
The whole world still remains
That there is justice in the world
There are no harsh laws
Really religious people are rarely looked upon as such
Our God was executed by the people’s will
Listen, lover of the glistening peril
I had not dared to turn inward my gaze
I praise Thee, O God
The Son of Man is in revolt.
w. 1949–50
‘THE HAND THAT IN THE DARKNESS BEFORE [COLD] DAY’
The hand that in the darkness before [cold] day
Breaks with its sad blue glimmer on the ledge
Of the wide sill, the hand that still
[with age-old tenderness]
Gentle as negligeable breath
Passes across the Christ-crossed brow
Seraphic sentence has to say
Bringing a word unspeakable of life from out of death
Dear Child, dear father, dear
[noble warrior], O Still.
w. 1949–50
‘THE SON OF MAN IS IN REVOLT’
The Son of Man is in revolt
Against the God of men
The Son of God
Has nowhere now to rest his head
But in the outcast heart in solitude:
He is shut out, forgotten and his name misused
By those who never knew Him till the sword
He came to bring had been hid deep away
(Buried Excalibur) and in its stead
A jewel-filled butcher’s knife brandished aloft
To bid the comfortable come to the rich board
Where their complacency and self-deceit
Might copiously be fed.
w. 1949–50
POEM [FRAGMENT]
When I am able to think at Night,
To make use of the night-hours given to all, for rest,
For retirement apart, for meditation, not desolate solitude –
Not for feverish flight from an inner emptiness or guilty exile from the light, -
Then the hours of darkness bring me deep new strength,
Calm confidence with which to face the trials and dangers in this world
Which await every man remaining resolutely loyal
To the power of Love that he carries in him,
The hours of Night restore me to my hidden truer self.
Even here, even now, at the darkest, most desolate hour,
The Eternal is closer and simpler than breathing, brimming over with boundless love.
w. 1950
HAIKU
Rain globules on glass
Make sorrow recognize pain’s [world’s]
Tears that blur clear sight.
w. 1950
UNTITLED
And tell me, how is Christ preached now
To megalometropolitan man, and how does Christ
Strike Democrats whose victory in War
Over the forces they called Antichrist’s
Might have ensured the reign of Christian peace
Over at least the nineteen-fifties, had
They all been as sincere as those who died
In battles of the early forties. These
Naked souls we see now in city streets,
What rags have to lend them, who will freeze
To spiritual death with careless grins
Unless the clad can lend them garments
How is Christ preached to them? From vans
Through blatant tinny speakers in such tones
As a bad sergeant might use on parade
Admonishing a teen-age idiot. They have heard
That sin’s wages are death, what they believe
Is that virtues make one tough and mean
That the kind heart is soft with mawkishness.
w. 1954
REMANENCES
4. A Summer Evening at Caesar’s Tower
[Aix-en-Provence]
Something’s burning, not
too far away. What is it?
It could be brush, but smells
of, is it resin? That would mean
pines – they’re everywhere
about in Cézanne Country.
Maybe it’s coming from over
Bibemus way. Crepitations,
burning branches. The Black Château
though out of sight from here
might well be the conflagration’s site.
Masson’s property would be threatened
too if that’s the case. Let’s hope there’s
someone there to fight the blaze.
Each summer now these [bon]fires
break out in Bouches du Rhône.
Can you hear that distant crackling?
You can’t mistake that odour, it’s
almost like incense. Now smoke’s rising.
Tonight the festival’s bound to be crowded.
Mozart (as usual). At least the [Virots]*
won’t be frightened of fire. So cool down
the air with the Roman fountains.
Vieux Garçons will be packed as usual.
Too late to go down there now.
w. August-September 1992, and 16 October 1995
*
This word in DG’s shaky handwriting is illegible. It may be a proper name.
APPENDIX B
DRAFTS, POEMS IN FACSIMILE, TYPESCRIPTS
David Gascoyne photographed by Rollie McKenna, 1951
ELEGIAC STANZAS I.M. ALBAN BERG
EX NIHILO
MOZART: SURSUM CORDA
THE PLUMMET HEART
APOLOGIA
EPILOGUE TO AN EPISODE
DEAD END
AN ELEGY, last page
FROM A DIARY, pages 1 & 2
CHAMBRE D’HÔTEL
NOCTAMBULES, page 1
EPILOGUE 1940-41
SONNET: THE BATTLE
AN AUTUMN PARK
THE GRAVEL-PIT FIELD
POEMS PUBLISHED 1941, NOTES
REQUIEM
A VAGRANT
RONDEL FOR THE FOURTH DECADE
BARCAROLLE
STELE
TERMINAL
ELEGIAC IMPROVISATION IN HONOUR OF PAUL ELUARD, page 1
APPENDIX C
NOTES TO POEMS / COLLECTIONS
David Gascoyne in a Paris bookshop, 1984
POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL
Storm and October Night
Two of ‘Four of Several Poems Written by David Gascoyne (Chorister)’ written in September and published in St. Osmund’s Magazine (December) of that year. The other poems were ‘The Tear of Shame’ and ‘The Stork’.
ROMAN BALCONY AND OTHER POEMS (1932)
DG told Michèle Duclos: ‘I was already politically aware and this expressed itself in my poetry from the outset. So the title of my first collection translates the notion of Roman decadence, the end of a civilization’. He was influenced, he said, by Walter Pater and his reading of Marius the Epicurean, and explained his chosen title for the collection. As far as ‘Balcony’ is concerned, he thought it an unconscious reminiscence of Pater. He was to add a little to this in his introductory note to ‘Mood’, reprinted in Jon Stallworthy’s anthology First Lines: ‘The title reflects a concern with “the Decline of the West”, a constant implicit theme in nearly all my poetry to date, the Roman Empire’s decline and fall representing an immature metaphor for the continually increasing social and spiritual crisis experienced by my generation and its successors’ (p. 107).
‘It’s obvious that at first I was under the influence of the Imagists,’ DG told Michel Remy in the interview extract published in Temenos 7 in 1986. In a conversation with me he acknowledged, too, ‘very definitely’ in his first collection, the influence of T.S. Eliot’s ‘early Imagist poems’ (he cited Exhaustion as an example) and The Waste Land, of Baudelaire in The Bridge and possibly that of Verlaine, ‘though my discovery of Rimbaud would relegate the importance of Verlaine.’
During our conversation in 1995 DG was struck by the fact that he had chosen to use lower-case letters at the beginning of each line of verse in more than a few poems. ‘I avoided it after a while,’ he confided, ‘because everybody else was doing it.’ Significantly, however, it was his selection of form and metre in the poems which seemed to intrigue him more and more with each re-discovery. He sat across from me reading aloud and tapping out the beats in the lines on his book or the arm of his chair. ‘I’m pleased to see that I used clipped lines.’ Then, a few moments later, ‘And I like to see the use of four syllable lines in this poem, and my experiments with different techniques.’ He added with a smile, ‘When I broke the rules, I always did so deliberately.’
‘Transformation Scene’
Published in Everyman, 19 May 1932, p. 536
‘The New Isaiah’
DG commented to me that he found it interesting then to realize with the benefit of hindsight that several poems had been rehearsing for and leading up to Night Thoughts (1956), long before its publication and first broadcast. The genesis of that ‘radiophonic poem’ can be found in The New Isaiah, and later poems listed in my note to The Post-War Night.
OTHER EARLY POEMS (1932–1935)
By the Sea Traditional form & Modernist form
Published in The Quintinian, 24, Spring of that year, on pp. 31–32.
Susan: a carving by Eric Gill
First published in Recent Poetry 1923–1933, edited by Alida Monro (Gerald Howe Ltd. & The Poetry Bookshop, December 1933), p. 54.
From Ten Proses
First published in the New English Weekly, 14 September under the title ‘Ten Proses’. The World of Chirico was included by DG in his A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), pp. 74–75.
From Automatic Album Leaves
Nine prose poems were published under the title ‘Surrealist Cameos’ in the New English Weekly, 30 November, and numbered i–ix.
Hommage à Mallarmé
First published in The New English Weekly, 27 July.
Oleograph
First published in Frontier and Midland, Vol. 14, No. 2 (January).
Night-Piece
From The Listener, 31 October, p. 748.
End of Peace
Published in Tone. Modern Poetry, No. 3, 1 March, p. 11. DG is described on the Contributors pages as follows: ‘David Gascoyne, whose home is in England, is at present working on the staff of a newspaper in Paris’. There is no evidence to support this.
They Spoke of a New City
From The Bookman in the March issue.
The Roots of Evil
From The Bookman in the August issue.
MAN’S LIFE IS THIS MEAT (1932)
A note on page 4 explains that ‘With the exception of Nos.1–6, the poems in this collection are Surrealist poems.’
DG’s translation of Eluard’s ‘Critique of Poetry’ precedes the Contents page:
Of course I hate the reign of the bourgeois
The reign of cops and priests
But I hate still more the man who does not hate it
As I do
With all his might
I spit in the face of that despicable man
Who does not of all my poems prefer this Critique of Poetry.
I asked him in 1994 about the experience of ‘automatic’ writing. ‘In my Surrealist phase,’ he said, ‘I tried to make my mind a blank and wrote down whatever came into my head. It’s like a session of psychoanalysis – the result will be typical of you – people have clusters of images in their minds and they come out this way – clusters of words and images and associations – what comes out is a unique combination of new words and images. Surrealist writing is the cultivation of spontaneity.’ DG’s 1935 review in the December issue of New Verse of Paul Eluard’s most recent poems, Facile (illustrated by Man Ray), has some relevance here. ‘In Eluard,’ he writes (p. 19), ‘there can be no question of premeditated style or imagery’ (his emphases). No other living writer has achieved such perfect spontaneity’ (my emphasis). DG also told Mel Gooding: ‘I just ceased to write that sort of poem, you know, or quasi-automatic writing, without correcting what you’d written. I became more interested in creating – saying something which had form as well as content […]’ (MGI), p. 64.
Reintegration
First published in The Year’s Poetry, compiled by Gerald Gould, John Lehmann, Denys Kilham Roberts, p. 138.
Charity Week, Yves Tanguy, The Rites of Hysteria, Unspoken
When I pointed out to DG the incidence of references to hysteria in these poems, he was surprised: ‘I tried to write poetry that reflected the atmosphere of the times, that was typical of the febrile atmosphere of the thirties; for example, the bombardment of the workers’ flats in Vienna (as in Spender’s poem), the feverish, sinister atmosphere of the film Dr. Mabuse, smuggled out of Germany. The unpublished poem you’ve shown me, Asylum, reflects this. Another film was Pabst’s of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera’ (1994).
Charity Week is dedicated to Max Ernst whom DG first met in 1933. He told me that by 1934 he had seen Ernst’s ‘Iconographie’ at the end of Une Semaine de Bonté. These collages constructed by the artist of Dr Charcot’s hysterical women at the Salpetrière Hospital in Paris in
the late nineteenth century are displayed in the last seven plates of the book and portray disjunctions of mind and body. Paul Eluard’s translation into French of Charity Week appeared in Cahiers d’Art, 10 (1935).
‘The Truth is Blind’
DG accepted that the title is a paradoxical expression, ‘found spontaneously, which equates truth and the traditional image of Justice’. The text also expresses ‘my continued preoccupation with the relationship between poetry and truth, as in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Eluard’s Poésie et Vérité or Apologia [1943], another of my poems. It is a collage poem where I think of myself as the inventor.’ (MRUI), p. 120.
Educative Process, Antennae
‘Both “Educative Process” and “Antennae” were written under the influence of Eluard’s poetry’ (MRUI), p. 120, and DG indicated, in particular, L’Amour la Poésie and A Toute Epreuve. Eluard was the first Surrealist he met on his initial visit to Paris in 1933.
Salvador Dalí
Originally entitled ‘In Defence of Humanism’ when first published in New Republic in October 1934. DG told me with a smile that it was an ironic title then, and that he had put himself in the poem as a David (unnamed) to Goliath who ‘[…] plunges his hand into the poisoned well ? / And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain […]’. ‘I was also incorporating autobiographical details into the poem.’