But hope chose a November to uprear
Another anniversary of youth.
Envoi
Dearest, although the signs of age appear
In me, in greying hair, deciduous tooth,
You work your yearly miracle. Lo, here:
Another anniversary of youth.
WHISKY
Double you aitch aye ess kay ee wye spells
Irish and, without an ee, speels Scotch.
Saxon stupidity has made a botch
Out of the Celtic uisgebaugh, which tells
The truth about it. Uisge flows from wells,
But baugh means life – the seed within the crotch,
The thudding heart, tough as a cheap tin watch,
And flowing bowls, and balls, and bulls, and bells.
Whisky will do – ah, liquid sun and thunder,
Rich as the sea that beats the unnumbered pebbles.
But look at the damned tax it labours under.
One year it doubles, in the next it trebles,
Quit or sextuples. Is it any wonder
That whisky-loving men are bloody rebels?
A BALLADE FOR CHRISTMAS
Great Julius Caesar through the British race
Was despicably weaky, weedy, weeny.
And so it was and is. It’s lost all its pace,
Its morals are as brittle as grissini.
Still, in this season, greyish and ungreeny,
Something revives, survives, the thinned blood thickens.
The heart’s strings start to throb like Paganini.
I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.
A brandy glow irradiates the face,
The air grows soft, an aria from Puccini,
The stolid London streets attain the grace
Of a prolonged crescendo in Rossini.
The holly berries cluster, sharp and sheeny,
And Scrooge, whose heart is smaller than a chicken’s
Learns what to do with money, the old meanie.
I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.
Nutmeg’s a spice and so, once more, is mace,
And Christmas cake goes well with capuccini.
With luck, frost will festoon like Brussels lace,
And circuses please all, just not Fellini.
The Ulster troubles, hymned by Seamus Heaney,
Will briefly ebb, like everything that sickens
(Take etiolated Eliot’s Apeneck Sweeney).
I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.
ENVOY
Principe, Principessa, Principini –
You’ll be abroad when the green season thickens,
But in Long Island’s opulent confini
We wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.
JANUARY 1
1.
Last night, before the death of the old year,
I got the catalogue of my year’s sins,
Chronic sins really, hurled at me, mere pins
To this habituated cushion, mere
Eveish swipes at the old Adam, sheer
Archetypal wifedom that begins
And ends with ego, ego. Still my shins
Winced at the barking. It was not nice to hear.
You’ll have to change. I’ve head such words before.
Next month, with luck, I score my 68,
And do not think to knock on a new door.
Change, at that age, is easy to translate,
And so I’ll spill my egos on to the floor
And water them and watch them germinate.
2.
The four French télé channels were all smiles,
Like grand pianos waiting to be struck
At midnight. Mitterand wished us good luck
And looked as though he’d found a cure for piles.
Cartesian digitals displacing dials,
We waited for Debussy harps to pluck
Nouvelle Année, for even time is stuck
On the French culture cake, like cats on tiles.
New Year in England was a whole hour later
And, naturally, seemed more genuine.
Big Ben throbbed twelve and drowned the Russians’ data
On the same waveband. Noon: I ovened in
A steak and kidney pie. Would that act rate a
Slight remission of at least one sin?
SONNET À L’HÔTEL LE CLOS VOLTAIRE
Leman’s for lovers, still, though Thomas Stearns
Eliot wept a Waste Land out, alone.
Careers (flotations foreign on) the Rhone,
Lapping a thousand banks. Servetus burns,
Or Calvin. Under bald Alps, a city learns
Salvation may be palpable as stone.
Leman’s for lovers, still, though Thomas Stearns
Eliot wept a Waste Land out, alone.
Lapping its banks, the incremental Rhone
Out-ticks all purely temporal returns.
Swiss skills from Alpine skulls; Alps carve dead bone.
Virtue’s in tolerance, not vaults or clocks
Or Institutes. Voltaire, your surgeon’s quill
Lanced Europe’s boil. Your knife-eyes rayed their will
To tyrants there. We yet feel these made shocks
And here you went to earth, old friend, old fox.
I seemed last night to hear you breathing still,
Reposeless. Rise, take up your trumpet shrill,
Excoriate our wolves, our bleating flocks!
‘THE VERSES OF E. LUCIE-SMITH’
The verses of E. Lucie-Smith
Must not be dealt sneeringly with.
They’re not just belle-lettric
I wander on any road under my moon,
Careless of glory, indifferent to the boon
Or stuffed up with rhetoric;
They’re full not of wind but of pith.
‘YOU WERE THERE, AND NOTHING SAID’
You were there, and nothing said,
For words were dead and dust in the air.
But I was suddenly aware, in the split instant
Of the constant, in a sort of passionless frenzy –
Trees, table, the war, in a fixed relation
Of your calculation, their primum mobile,
But that you were there really was all I knew.
What the blood purposed you to be.
Among the things that I bequeath
That safety razor. Stock up with
Blades, particularly the brand
The name of a notable swordsmith.
CATULLUS 1
Who shall I give this pretty new
Dry-pumice-polished booklet to?
To you Cornelius, for you
Used to declare: By God, there is I think
Merit in these nugacities.
When you alone of Italy’s
Historians had the guts to write
The world up in three volumes, quite
A job, weighty, and erudite.
So take this book for what it’s worth.
Hecate, help its birth,
Grant it a hundred years on earth.
CATULLUS 2
Sparrow, my lady’s pet,
In play upon her lap,
Her fingertip you get
To peck or sharply snap.
When she my shiny one
Bids sharper pain grow weak.
And pain is only fun
Delivered from your beak.
Sicker in love than she
I wish you’d play with me
Pecking my pain like crumbs
Till the heart’s numbness comes.
‘HEROES ARE DEAD TO US’
Heroes are dead to us,
We worship filmstars.
Deep drinking and thinking
Give place to milkbars.
‘MY FATHER, HIS WIFE’
My father, his wife,
Too old to make decisions,
Yet plotted their revisions
/> Of their life.
Nor could this hope be
More vain for
It was left to me
To open the oven door.
She at least, the mother.
He in his apprehension
Cut the knot of tension.
She thought of other
Uses, seeking a flame
Stronger in her
The instinct came
To start the Sunday dinner.
THAT THE EARTH ROSE OUT OF A VAST BASIN OF ELECTRIC SEA
Rolled, rolled, rolled,
And all being fills in it,
Where fire flies, sparks gay with gold,
Wash the lot, the tide swills, spills in it.
Tying all, oh with what strings
It binds, binds earth and air to all
It shews and knoes, meets all, leaps and sings
Its way through the spray of it, the misty caul.
Womb of all, tomb of all, the mass
Where mighty fingers beat now, kneed and mould,
With a curling of tongues, a laugh and a mocking to pass:
It ceases note, rolling in wash and glint of gold.
SONNET IN ALEXANDRINES
Whether windowed a greycold welkin or a dawn that mounts and breaks
In a roseflush wave each day arises the working man,
Heavy maybe but never for a thwarted life’s plan
Seen shaped to the pounding day:- for the day’s round he awakes.
He shakes sleep away. Day warms. He leaves and takes
A snap of sullen cheese, hunked bread, a brew for his can,
And thrives in the air, strives, spits, swears. His breastcares span
But Saturday’s care or bet; naught deeper rankles or aches.
When the violet air blooms about him, then at last he can wipe
His hands sheerfree of swink, monarch of hours ahead;
Hearty he eats and, full, he sits to pull at his pipe,
Warm at the kitchen glow. The courts and sports-news read,
He argues, sups in the Lion vault; to a plate of tripe
Or crisp chips home returns, then climbs to a dreamless bed.
A RONDEL FOR SPRING
(from the French of Charles d’Orléans)
The earth has cast her winter skin
Of warping wind and driving rain,
And garbed greenery again
With fretted sunlight woven in.
No bird or beast but does begin
In its own speech to swell the strain:
The earth has cast her winter skin
Of warping wind and driving rain.
The floods vast, the streams thin
Spin in the source or sweep the plain,
Flaunting a sun-bespeckled train
To swell the wild and waking din.
The earth has cast her winter skin.
WHEN IT IS ALL OVER
One can only deplore
The devastated fields,
And check the fire-spread,
And do no more.
And after it is all over,
And the voices fall in the hoarse
Throats, and rubber truncheons rot under glass covers,
And dream blows are struck without force.
There shall be ‘Nazi’ lipsticks,
‘Gestapo’ cigarettes
And children shall cuddle toy
S.A. men in their beds.
WIR DANKEN UNSREM FÜHRER
We thank our Führer for redeeming us
From the ignoble sluggish slough of peace;
For striking down the sleek, insidious
Serpents that choked us; working our release
From the semitic bondage of our race.
Sun symbol held aloft, we climb still nearer
To the pure sun, the one God-granted place;
We thank our Führer.
We thank our Führer as the reasoning head,
We the blind limbs to function and obey,
Content with that. God-like he harvested
Wheat from the chaff of his own Judgment Day.
God-like our shepherd feeding us aright
Not in the flesh, what to the soul is dearer,
Our everlasting arms, sheen of our might.
We thank our Führer.
We thank our Führer that he prophesied,
Yours is the kingdom. You shall inherit the earth.
Fulfilling that, men will have starved and died
Gladly with pride in death through pride in birth.
Shadowing space our fylfot will have told
History’s spring and end to the eager hearer,
Our earth’s first blood, our titles manifold.
We thank our Führer.
GIRL
She was all
Brittle crystal;
Her hands
Silver silk over steel;
Her hair harvested
Sheaves shed by summer;
Her grace in repose the flash
Of the flesh of a river swimmer.
That was not nature’s good;
She nothing understands.
Horrible now she should
Use to her own ends.
TO AMARYLLIS AFTER THE DANCE
Semitic violins, by the wailing wall
Weep their threnody
For the buried jungle, the tangled lianas;
Or say that was before, in the first flush,
And say that now
A handful of coins, image and milled edge worn,
Is spilled abroad, and determines
Our trade of emotions. Over this background are imposed
Urges, whose precise nature it is hard
To etch out, to define.
(Shells, shaped by forgotten surges).
One never gets to know anything really, having no word
To body forth a thought, no axe
To reach flagged soil, no drills
To pierce living wells. It would tax
My energies overmuch now to garner you
Cut of worn coins, worn shells.
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
Well, my Eurydice, that was pain enough
Having only your name to call on, day and night.
Both day and night were long enough;
Now I lead you laboriously to the light.
Hell played at forfeits. On a swivel of the head
Rested your return; as one might stab a pin
Idly at a fly for its irrelevant end.
The world was plunged into original sin.
That was not in the pattern of our lives,
Whose miraculous fabric has for every strand
Accounted. Wantonly the Destroyer unweaves,
Just as He hides time’s secret in His hand.
But it is true I would have been destined then,
Climbing alone back to the light, to have met
The deserved logical end. The tree that has been
Fruitful, only stays to be fruitful yet.
Life’s undergrowth of laws that see no light,
This I believe in, as much as anything.
He would have seen you no Proserpina
Nor sent you back to wither up the spring.
‘ALL THE ORE’
All the ore
that, waiting, lay
for the later working
I melted before
its time
to make you ornaments for a day.
And all else, too
I drew out, there is no more.
For between man and man at the last
there rests at least shame.
A HISTORY
Anyway, there emerged from his mind’s cellar
The forged stamp of the image of goddess,
And it fell upon her,
Almost, as it were, per accidens.
And with it a pitiful dual approach,
Half Shelley, half Flaubert.
He broached and broke
the hymen of her lips
After three weeks’ work, and was pre-occupied
By the technique, art for art’s sake, of his kisses.
It was an attempt, having carved her pedestal,
To raise himself, almost by a metaphysical
Conceit, and to conduct love
On the level of Ideas, out of the clogs of time,
Seeing ethereal virtues in the bones
Of a paradigm.
O granted it was to become a grammar of love,
Yet who might construct the language, the vibrant speech
Sprung out of earth, from what had shed
All but archetypes, supposing the language dead?
Anyway, they reached complete intimacy,
And it was all on this level, carved out cleanly in time.
A fulfilling of all parts of the act, except
That it was playing from score, that a pattern was imposed,
That there was no growth out to become the pattern.
And he at least was amazed at the futility,
Thought the whole thing overrated; out of mind
Were the sweat and the labour to compass an ecstasy.
But with her an unpurposed external heat
Had achieved the loosening of the icefloes. A late spring
Became a wonder in her. Her body began
To flower in its own right.
He saw that its opening to man
Was what he had done, that that was the accomplished fact
That had to be greater to her than their personal history,
The released woman more than the melted she.
Stricken, he escapes to the war.
In absence her image reverts to that of the goddess crystallised
About his longings; not before
Might she impartially have watched his spasm worked out
In her the instrument. But to-day
He is outside his handiwork, the unpremeditated lord
Of creation, and that one connecting cord
Shrivelled away.
THE LOWDOWN ON ART
OR ÆSTHETICS FOR THE SCIENCE STUDENT
Art and Science have this in common: they both = man + nature.
They both imposed an ordered scheme on nature.
Science, in its applied state, for a useful end.
Pure science and pure art for a useless end.
Collected Poems Page 33