Day peters out. Darkness wells up
From wheelrut, culvert, vacant drain;
But still a rooster glints with life,
High on a church’s weather-vane;
The sun flings Mycenaean gold
Against a neighbor’s window-pane.
COMING HOME
From the journals of John Clare
July 18, 1841
They take away our belts so that we must hold
Our trousers up. The truly mad don’t bother
And thus are oddly hobbled. Also our laces
So that our shoes do flop about our feet.
But I’m permitted exercise abroad
And feeling rather down and melancholy
Went for a forest walk. There I met gypsies
And sought their help to make good my escape
From the mad house. I confessed I had no money
But promised I should furnish them fifty pounds.
We fixed on Saturday. But when I returned
They had disappeared in their Egyptian way.
The sun set up its starlight in the trees
Which the breeze made to twinkle. They left behind
An old wide awake hat on which I battened
As it might advantage me some later time.
July 20
Calmly, as though I purposed to converse
With the birds, as I am sometimes known to do,
I walked down the lane gently and was soon
In Enfield Town and then on the great York Road
Where it was all plain sailing, where no enemy
Displayed himself and I was without fear.
I made good progress, and by the dark of night
Skirted a marsh or pond and found a hovel
Floored with thick bales of clover and laid me down
As on the harvest of a summer field,
Companion to imaginary bees.
But I was troubled by uneasy dreams.
I thought my first wife lay in my left arm
And then somebody took her from my side
Which made me wake to hear someone say, “Mary,”
But nobody was by. I was alone.
* * *
I’ve made some progress, but being without food,
It is slower now, and I must void my shoes
Of pebbles fairly often, and rest myself.
I lay in a ditch to be out of the wind’s way,
Fell into sleep for half an hour or so
And waked to find the left side of me soaked
With a foul scum and a soft mantling green.
* * *
I travel much at night, and I remember
Walking some miles under a brilliant sky
Almost dove-grey from closely hidden moonlight
Cast on the moisture of the atmosphere
Against which the tall trees on either side
Were unimaginably black and flat
And the puddles of the road flagstones of silver.
* * *
On the third day, stupid with weariness
And hunger, I assuaged my appetite
With eating grass, which seemed to taste like bread,
And seemed to do me good; and once, indeed,
It satisfied a king of Babylon.
I remember passing through the town of Buckden
And must have passed others as in a trance
For I recall none till I came to Stilton
Where my poor feet gave out. I found a tussock
Where I might rest myself, and as I lay down
I heard the voice of a young woman say,
“Poor creature,” and another, older voice,
“He shams,” but when I rose the latter said,
“O no he don’t,” as I limped quickly off.
I never saw those women, never looked back.
July 23
I was overtaken by a man and woman
Traveling by cart, and found them to be neighbors
From Helpstone where I used to live. They saw
My ragged state and gave me alms of fivepence
By which at the public house beside the bridge
I got some bread and cheese and two half-pints
And so was much refreshed, though scarcely able
To walk, my feet being now exceeding crippled
And I required to halt more frequently,
But greatly cheered at being in home’s way.
I recognized the road to Peterborough
And all my hopes were up when there came towards me
A cart with a man, a woman and a boy.
When they were close, the woman leaped to the ground,
Seized both my hands and urged me towards the cart
But I refused and thought her either drunk
Or mad, but when I was told that she was Patty,
My second wife, I suffered myself to climb
Aboard and soon arrived at Northborough.
But Mary was not there. Neither could I discover
Anything of her more than the old story
That she was six years dead, intelligence
Of a doubtful newspaper some twelve years old;
But I would not be taken in by blarney
Having seen her very self with my two eyes
About twelve months ago, alive and young
And fresh and well and beautiful as ever.
PRAISE FOR KOLONOS
Come, let us praise this haven of strong horses,
unmatched, brilliant Kolonos, white with sunlight,
where the shy one, the nightingale, at evening
flutes in the darkness,
the ivy dark, so woven of fruit and vine-leaves
no winter storms nor light of day can enter
this sanctuary of the dancing revels
of Dionysos.
Here, under heaven’s dew, blooms the narcissus,
crown of life’s mother and her buried daughter,
of Earth and the Dark below; here, too, the sunburst
flares of the crocus.
The river’s ample springs, cool and unfailing,
rove and caress this green, fair-breasted landscape.
Here have the Muses visited with dances,
and Aphrodite
has reined her chariot here. And here is something
unheard of in the fabulous land of Asia,
unknown to Doric earth—a thing immortal;
gift of a goddess,
beyond the control of hands, tough, self-renewing,
an enduring wealth, passing through generations,
here only: the invincible grey-leafed olive.
Agèd survivor
of all vicissitudes, it knows protection
of the All-Seeing Eye of Zeus, whose sunlight
always regards it, and of Grey-Eyed Athena.
I have another
tribute of praise for this city, our mother:
the greatest gift of a god, a strength of horses,
strength of young horses, a power of the ocean,
strength and a power.
O Lord Poseidon, you have doubly blessed us
with healing skills, on these roads first bestowing
the bit that gentles horses, the controlling
curb and the bridle,
and the carved, feathering oar that skims and dances
like the white nymphs of water, conferring mastery
of ocean roads, among the spume and wind-blown
prancing of stallions.
From SOPHOCLES’ Oedipus at Kolonos
SESTINA D’INVERNO
Here in this bleak city of Rochester,
Where there are twenty-seven words for “snow,”
Not all of them polite, the wayward mind
Basks in some Yucatan of its own making,
Some coppery, sleek lagoon, or cinnamon island
Alive with lemon tints and burnished natives,
And O that we were th
ere. But here the natives
Of this grey, sunless city of Rochester
Have sown whole mines of salt about their land
(Bare ruined Carthage that it is) while snow
Comes down as if The Flood were in the making.
Yet on that ocean Marvell called the mind
An ark sets forth which is itself the mind,
Bound for some pungent green, some shore whose natives
Blend coriander, cayenne, mint in making
Roasts that would gladden the Earl of Rochester
With sinfulness, and melt a polar snow.
It might be well to remember that an island
Was a blessed haven once, more than an island,
The grand, utopian dream of a noble mind.
In that kind climate the mere thought of snow
Was but a wedding cake; the youthful natives,
Unable to conceive of Rochester,
Made love, and were acrobatic in the making.
Dream as we may, there is far more to making
Do than some wistful reverie of an island,
Especially now when hope lies with the Rochester
Gas and Electric Co., which doesn’t mind
Such profitable weather, while the natives
Sink, like Pompeians, under a world of snow.
The one thing indisputable here is snow,
The single verity of heaven’s making,
Deeply indifferent to the dreams of the natives
And the torn hoarding-posters of some island.
Under our igloo skies the frozen mind
Holds to one truth: it is grey, and called Rochester.
No island fantasy survives Rochester,
Where to the natives destiny is snow
That is neither to our mind nor of our making.
ROME
Just as foretold, it all was there.
Bone china columns gently fluted
Among the cypress groves, and the reputed
Clarity of the air,
There was the sun-bleached skeleton
Of History with all its sins
Withered away, the slaves and citizens
Mercifully undone.
With here and there an armature
Of iron or a wall of brick,
It lay in unhistoric peace, a trick
Of that contrived, secure,
Arrested pterodactyl flight
Inside the museum’s tank of glass;
And somehow quite unlike our Latin class
Sepias of the site,
Discoursed upon by Mr. Fish
In the familiar, rumpled suit,
Who tried to teach us the Ablative Absolute
And got part of his wish,
But a small part, and never traveled
On anything but the B. M. T.
Until the day of his death, when he would be,
At length, utterly graveled.
SWAN DIVE
Over a crisp regatta of lights, or a school
Of bobbling spoons, ovals of polished black
Kiss, link, and part, wriggle and ride in place
On the lilt and rippling slide of the waterback,
And glints go skittering in a down-wind race
On smooth librations of the swimming pool,
While overhead on the tensile jut and spring
Of the highest board, a saffroned diver toes
The sisal edge, rehearsing throughout his limbs
The flight of himself, from the arching glee to the close
Of wet, complete acceptance, when the world dims
To nothing at all in the ear’s uproar and ring.
He backs away, and then, with a loping run
And leap of released ambition, lifts to a splendid
Realm of his own, a destined place in the air,
Where, in a wash of light, he floats suspended
Above the turquoise waters, the ravelled snare
Of snaking gold, the fractured, drunken sun,
And the squints of the foreshortened girls and boys
Below in a world of envies and desires,
Eying him rise on fonts of air to sheer
And shapely grace. His dream of himself requires
A flexed attention, emptiness, a clear
Uncumbered space and sleek Daedalian poise,
From which he bows his head with abrupt assent
And sails to a perfect sacrifice below—
To a scatter of flagstone shadows, a garbled flight
Of quavering anthelions, a slow
Tumult of haloes in green, cathedral light.
Behind him trails a bright dishevelment
Of rising carbuncles of air; he sees
Light spill across the undulant mercury film
Beyond which lies his breath. And now with a flutter
Of fountaining arms and into a final calm
He surfaces, clutching at the tiled gutter,
Where he rides limp and smilingly at ease.
But hoisting himself out, his weight returns
To normal, like sudden aging or weariness.
Tonight, full-length on a rumpled bed, alone,
He will redream it all: bathed in success
And sweat, he will achieve the chiselled stone
Of catatonia, for which his body yearns.
“AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE”
A small, unsmiling child,
Held upon her shoulder,
Stares from a photograph
Slightly out of kilter.
It slipped from a loaded folder
Where the income tax was filed.
The light seems cut in half
By a glum, October filter.
Of course, the child is right.
The unleafed branches knot
Into hopeless riddles behind him
And the air is clearly cold.
Given the stinted light
To which fate and film consigned him,
Who’d smile at his own lot
Even at one year old?
And yet his mother smiles.
Is it grown-up make-believe,
As when anyone takes your picture
Or some nobler, Roman virtue?
Vanity? Folly? The wiles
That some have up their sleeve?
A proud and flinty stricture
Against showing that things can hurt you,
Or a dark, Medean smile?
I’d be the last to know.
A speechless child of one
Could better construe the omens,
Unriddle our gifts for guile.
There’s no sign from my son.
But it needs no Greeks or Romans
To foresee the ice and snow.
PERIPETEIA
Of course, the familiar rustling of programs,
My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture
Of mink. A little craning about to see
If anyone I know is in the audience,
And, as the house fills up,
A mild relief that no one there knows me.
A certain amount of getting up and down
From my aisle seat to let the others in.
Then my eyes wander briefly over the cast,
Management, stand-ins, make-up men, designers,
Perfume and liquor ads, and rise prayerlike
To the false heaven of rosetted lights,
The stucco lyres and emblems of high art
That promise, with crude Broadway honesty,
Something less than perfection:
Two bulbs are missing and Apollo’s bored.
And then the cool, drawn-out anticipation,
Not of the play itself, but the false dusk
And equally false night when the houselights
Obey some planetary rheostat
And bring a stillness on. It is that stillness
I wait for.
Before it comes,
Whether we like i
t or not, we are a crowd,
Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance,
Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood.
But in that instant, which the mind protracts,
From dim to dark before the curtain rises,
Each of us is miraculously alone
In calm, invulnerable isolation,
Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but,
As at the beginning and end, a single soul,
With all the sweet and sour of loneliness.
I, as a connoisseur of loneliness,
Savor it richly, and set it down
In an endless umber landscape, a stubble field
Under a lilac, electric, storm-flushed sky,
Where, in companionship with worthless stones,
Mica-flecked, or at best some rusty quartz,
I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend.
A useful discipline, perhaps. One that might lead
To solitary, self-denying work
That issues in something harmless, like a poem,
Governed by laws that stand for other laws,
Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines,
At the soul’s knowledge and habiliment.
In any case, in a self-granted freedom,
The mind, lone regent of itself, prolongs
The dark and silence; mirrors itself, delights
In consciousness of consciousness, alone,
Sufficient, nimble, touched with a small grace.
Then, as it must at last, the curtain rises,
The play begins. Something by Shakespeare.
Framed in the arched proscenium, it seems
A dream, neither better nor worse
Than whatever I shall dream after I rise
With hat and coat, go home to bed, and dream.
If anything, more limited, more strict—
No one will fly or turn into a moose.
But acceptable, like a dream, because remote,
And there is, after all, a pretty girl.
Perhaps tonight she’ll figure in the cast
I summon to my slumber and control
In vast arenas, limitless space, and time
Collected Earlier Poems Page 10