Collected Poems

by Anthony Burgess

  157. ‘Nymphs and satyrs, come away.’ Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 105.

  158. ‘And in that last delirium of lust.’ Written by Enderby, as part of the Arry and Thelma cycle that he composes for a kitchen chef. Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 110.

  159. Epithalamion. Prior to writing this, Enderby invokes Shelley. For Shelley’s own Epithalamion, see P.B. Shelley, The Works of P.B. Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), p. 412. Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 138.

  160. To Tirzah. Described as a ‘gnomic telegraphic message’. In Little Wilson and Big God (p. 185), Burgess says this was printed in the University of Manchester student magazine, The Serpent. He also says ‘I never quite understood this poem’. On the same page, he provides the title of the poem. See: Damon, S. Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2013, p. 407): ‘TIRZAH was the fifth, last, and most important of the daughters of Zelphehad. As the fifth, she represents sex… Tirzah is the creator of the physical body… and thus the mother of death.’ Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 230.

  161. ‘Your presence shines about the fumes of fat.’ Written by Enderby, as part of the Arry and Thelma cycle that he composes for a kitchen chef. Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 45.

  162. ‘The Dragon’s mouth will consummate our search.’ Written while Burgess lived in Adderbury, 1950-1954. Jackson calls this poem ‘Adderbury’, but Burgess does not provide a title. The poem appears in two separate parts in The Worm and The Ring. The first stanza given here appears on p. 99. On pp.150-1, the final two stanzas appear in exactly the same format as they do in Burgess’s autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God. The first stanza is thus missed by Jackson. In The Worm and the Ring, the character-poet is described as ‘a shrunken journalist who was writing a long comic epic in heroic couplets on the town and its denizens.’ (p. 99) The Worm and the Ring (London: Heinemann, 1961), pp. 99 and 150-151.

  163. ‘Where sweat starts, nothing starts…’ This Empsonian poem is written by Fenella Crabbe, dealing with the idea that ‘[c]ivilisation is only possible in a temperate zone’. See Time for a Tiger (London: Heinemann, 1956), p. 59.

  164. ‘Land where the birds have no song, the flowers.’ This poem is written by Fenella Crabbe on a manuscript ‘much scarred with fastidious alterations’. Victor Crabbe decides: ‘It was not a very good poem – confused, the rhythms crude.’ The Enemy in the Blanket (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 103–4.

  165. ‘Cracks open the leaden corncrake sky with crass, angelic.’ Recited by Talbot ‘harshly and without nuance from a heavily corrected manuscript’. The Enemy in the Blanket, pp. 245, 365, 393.

  166. ‘The afternoon hour has struck for you to.’ Crabbe finds it ‘impossible’ that his wife’s poem should have ‘a proleptic Eliotian image of an aged eagle with tired wings demanding to be released from the dressing-mirror’. Beds in the East (London: Heinemann, 1959), pp. 127–8.

  167. ‘Rice-paper land, O lotus-footed.’ The lead character Denham tell us: ‘to my surprise, [Everett] began to quote one of his own, or Harold’s, or John’s, or Alfred’s poems.’ Who these people are is not explained. The Right to an Answer (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 206.

  168. ‘You take my heart with such unformed grace.’ Denham tells us that his friend Everett had written the verses about Imogen ‘when she was seven, though I only read them myself for the first time long after [our] first meeting.’ The Right to An Answer, p. 52.

  169. ‘Beryl is the daughterly daughter.’ Lead character J. W. Denham attributes the poem to ‘some modern poetaster’, from which he has substituted the name ‘Ethel’ for ‘Beryl.’ The Right to An Answer, p. 4.

  170. Epigraph On A Printer. Denham remarks to Everett that, even though he wrote it for Denham’s father, it could well be the poet’s own epitaph. The Right to An Answer, p. 211.

  171. The Music Of The Spheres. Versions of this poem also appear in Byrne (1995) and The Worm and the Ring (1961). This, the longest version, from Inside Mr Enderby, p. 95.

  172. ‘Not, of course, that either of us thought.’ The mention of steak and kidney pie with potatoes appears at the end of the poem. Janet Shirley, to whom it is read, ‘must have sort of nodded off while [her husband] Howard was reading this poem. It seemed to me to be a very boring poem, with no rhymes or rhythm in it either and I must have just dropped off.’ This poem acts a precursor to the attempted assisted suicide of Janet, which would have been followed by Howard’s suicide. One Hand Clapping (London: Peter Davies, 1961), pp. 102–103.

  173. ‘In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun.’ Ascribed to F. X. Enderby, who composes the poem in a lavatory. Inside Mr. Enderby, pp. 54–8. See also Byrne (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 139.

  174. ‘‘Perhaps I am not wanted then,’ he said. Enderby finds this in a number of anthologies, including ‘Poetry Now, A Tiny Garner of Modern Verse, Best Poets of Today, They Sing for You, Soldier’s Solace… Voices Within, and other volumes...’ Inside Mr. Enderby, p. 78.

  175. ‘Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.’ The first stanza also appears in The End of the World News (p. 118) when Courtland Willett sings the song to mark an early transit of Venus. The only difference in the 1982 version is that Willett’s verse has an exclamation mark at the end. See The Eve of St Venus (London: Hesperus, 2006), pp. 76–8.

  176. ‘The moon awaits your sleeping: fear to be kissed’. This is the first of Lavinia Grantham’s poems that Richard Ennis reads ‘in a small tea shop.’ A Vision of Battlements (London: Sidgwick & Jackson 1965), p. 152.

  177. ‘The stoat’s cry tears long slivers of the night.’ Lavinia is singularly impressed when Ennis mentions the personal meaning of the poem: ‘Don’t you think you ought to eat your mixed grill?’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 155.

  178. ‘And his hooves hammer me back into the ground.’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 180.

  179. ‘Pigs snort from the yard.’ Lavinia plays down this poem: ‘That’s nothing to be proud of … that bit of nonsense. I wrote it as a joke.’ A Vision of Battlements, p. 182.

  180. ‘Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark.’ Enderby Outside (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 122–3.

  181. ‘Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 190–1.

  182. ‘Archangels blasting from inner space.’ This is one of two cut-up style poems that are read by radical/psychedelic poets in this scene. Enderby Outside.

  183. ‘Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing-gown day.’ ‘Five Revolutionary Sonnets’, Transatlantic Review, no. 21 (1966), pp. 30–32. Also in Enderby Outside, p. 8.

  184. ‘Useless to hope to hold off.’ Enderby, interrupted at the end of the poem, doesn’t have the opportunity to complete the penultimate line which, in the Jackson, version appears as follows: ‘The final kiss and final/Tight pressure of hands.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 30-31.

  185. Curtal Sonnet. The Curtal Sonnet is most closely associated with Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, ’Peace’, written in 1879 is an eleven-line sonnet: ’A Curtal Sonnet in “standard” Alexandrines’. See Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W.H. Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), pp. 42, 232. Enderby Outside, p. 45.

  186. ‘Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 80–1.

  187. ‘I sought scent, and found it in your hair.’ Enderby Outside, p. 102.

  188. ‘The urgent temper of the laws.’ In response to this, ‘Out of a trance somebody farted.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 141-2

  189. From The Circular Pavane. Enderby Outside, pp.181–2.

  190. ‘At the end of the dark hall he found his love.’ Enderby Outside, p. 209.

  191. ‘Independence Day.’ This is labelled c. 1993. ‘And, like a fetal marmaset [sic]’ is a restored, previously struck-through line from the MS. The last five lines follow the version used by Paul Phillips in A Clockwork Counterpoint. A shorter version appears with a variant line (‘My brain was freer/And scrawled a cancella
tion then’) in Little Wilson and Big God, p. 194. See Phillips, A Clockwork Counterpoint, p. 407.

  192. ‘They fear and hate.’ Enderby Outside, pp. 219–21.

  193. ‘So will the flux of time and fire.’ Described as lines towards a Horatian ode for the king of Denmark. Enderby Outside, p. 227.

  194. September, 1938. Enderby Outside, pp. 239–240.

  195. Summer, 1940. Enderby Outside, p. 240.

  196. Spring In Camp, 1941. Enderby Outside, p. 240.

  197. The Excursion. Enderby Outside, p. 241.

  198. Eden. Enderby Outside, p. 242.

  199. ‘And as the Manhattan dawn came up.’ This poem is read out by another of Enderby’s composition students, a Nordic man called Sig Hamsun. This verse is described by Enderby as ‘rather sloppy and fungoid’, like ‘its execrator’. The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), p. 60. ‘Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields.’ Specimen lines from a play called The Love of Hostus for Primula by a Gervase Whitelady. Both the play and the playwright are fictions, created by Enderby. The Clockwork Testament, p. 49.

  200. ‘So the world ticks, aye, like to a ticking clock.’ Soliloquoy by a minor character named Retchpork. Enderby produces this work of fiction, under pressure to sustain the lie he has told about the existence of an Elizabethan poet named Gervase Whitelady. He tells his students that this comes from a play called ‘Give you good den good my masters’. See The Clockwork Testament, p. 51.

  201. ‘You went that way as you always said you would.’ Enderby encounters these lines in a volume of his own work that is brought to him by a psychopathic woman. Although he cannot remember writing them, he decides that he possessed genius at the time. The Clockwork Testament, p. 112.

  202. ‘The work ends when the work ends.’ This is an improvised verse recited by a time traveller child called Edmund in order to mark the death of Enderby. His teacher decides that the verse is inappropriate, and accordingly rebukes him. The Clockwork Testament, p. 122.

  203. In Memoriam Wystan Hugh Auden KMT. Mark Twain Journal, vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1975). Copy at IABF.

  204. A Christmas Recipe. Hand stitched and bound booklet. Limited edition of 100 copies. Labelled ‘Seasons Greetings from Anthony & Liana Burgess. Buon Natale 1977.’ A Christmas Recipe (Verona: Plain Wrapper Press, 1977).

  205. Limerick: The Angler Of Kinsale. Burgess provides this limerick as an example of Irish place name limericks, which he says Patrick Stevenson was engaging in. Patric(k) Stevenson (1909-1983) was a poet and prolific painter, who lived in County Down, Ireland. ‘Something lyrical, something terrible.’ Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1978, p. 576.

  206. ‘I had not thought to hear.’ The verse is recited by Toomey after remembering how he met the character Valentine Wrigley: ‘He had read an article I had contributed to the English Review on the poetry of Edward Thomas and had written me a letter saying that he had thought himself to be the only admirer of Thomas’s work.’ The poem is enclosed in this letter. Earthly Powers, p. 61.

  207. ‘Thus kneeling at the altar rail.’ Dawson Wignall is the fictional poet laureate who Toomey meets via the British Council in Malta. Toomey owns a ‘revised Oxford Book of English Verse, bloody Val Wrigley as editor... I did not care for what I found – insular, ingrown, formally traditional, products of a stunted mind. Wignall’s themes derived from Anglican church services, the Christmas parties of his childhood, his public school pubescence, suburban shopping streets; they occasionally exhibited perverse valleities of fetischistic order’ (Earthly Powers, p. 23).

  208. ‘Do ye the savage old law deny.’ Of this, the lead character Toomey notes, after performing it to his friend Val: ‘It needs tidying up a little, of course.’ He smiled, not at me, but in pleasure at his performance’ (Earthly Powers, p. 62).

  209. ‘The kind of laugh that Wodehouse imparts is.’ The fictional poet Wrigley writes this in response to P.G. Wodehouse being ‘captured by the Germans in his French villa and persuaded to talk very freely and indiscreetly, though also humorously, on Berlin radio’. See Earthly Powers, p. 438.

  210. ‘A glance or gander of this gandy dancer.’ Toomey notes that this verse is ‘A long way from the thrush in the heart of Ealing.’ The verse is one of Wrigley’s published works: ‘From a big side pocket, he pulled a thin book. Valentine Wrigley. Faber and, highly reputable. The title: A Feast of Cinders.’ The style of this verse is reminiscent primarily of Hopkins (‘wavewhite preen’, ‘gandy dancer’) but there may be elements of Whitman, too. See Earthly Powers, p. 214.

  211. ‘The young things who frequent movie palaces.’ Carl Jung, who hears this limerick in the novel, is ‘prudishly embarrassed’ by it. End of the World News: An Entertainment (London: Hutchinson, 1982).

  212. The Wiggle Poof. This is purportedly juvenilia, but bears the same neat-rhymed style of the children’s verse Burgess write in the late 1970s, especially in Long Trip to Teatime. Published in Little Wilson and Big God, p. 101.

  213. ‘A prism is a useful thing.’ Claimed as another piece of juvenilia in Little Wilson and Big God, p. 101.

  214. ‘I wrote on the beach, with a stick of salty wood.’ The colliding ‘s’ sounds are comparable with the linguistic experimentation of G. M. Hopkins. Little Wilson and Big God, p. 101.

  215. ‘Calm lies our harbour, while the maiden day.’ Burgess says he sent this sonnet ‘to the Sunday Times, which sent it back’. No copy of this correspondence is listed in either the IABF or HRC archives. Little Wilson and Big God, p. 150.

  216. ‘Father of fire who, with bold simony.’ ‘There was my father [in the poem] proffering a flaring Swan Vesta. He had become both myth and comedy.’ Little Wilson and Big God, p.195.

  217. ‘J.B.W.’ Little Wilson and Big God, p. 210.

  218. ‘The sea, green and deep.’ Burgess describes this verse as a mnemonic rhyme for the phoneme /I:/. A Mouthful of Air, p. 330.

  219. ‘Winter wins.’ This, according to Burgess, is a mnemonic rhyme for the phoneme /I/. A Mouthful of Air, p. 330.

  220. ‘Out of the station puffs the train.’ This also appears in Burgess, Language Made Plain (London: Fontana, 1975), p. 147. Following this verse, Burgess notes: ‘Meanwhile, read. The Bantam dual language books and the Penguin anthologies of foreign verse are cheap and useful. They have literal translations next to the text. Whatever the view of poetry held by the average Englishman, most other peoples are fond of it. Read a French poem in a French café and people will applaud. Read a Russian poem to Russians, and they will kiss you and buy you drinks. Learn short poems by heart. That is a sure way into the heart of the language and the hearts of the people’ (p. 147). See also A Mouthful of Air, p. 129.

  221. ‘Crippled, the antarctic fire with chiselled skill.’ This poem appears in the typescript of an unpublished play, ‘The End of Things: Three Dialogues for Old Men’ (1991). After the poem has been recited, one of the three characters in the dialogue, Aubrey, comments: ‘That sonnet is about something, and that something is the impossibility of making sense of the world. Its meaning is the necessary cancelling out of meaning. It is art, hence it is beauty.’

  222. ‘Imagination is your true Apollo.’ IABF, AB/ARCH/A/POE/5.

  223. ‘Our Norman betters.’ IABF, AB/ARCH/A/POE/8.

  224. Nostalgia In Head Plunging. IABF, AB/ARCH/A/POE/4.

  225. ‘Dreaming when dawn’s left hand.’ IABF, AB/ARCH/A/POE/4.

  226. ‘An Elegy for X’ in Stephen Spender (ed). Hockney’s Alphabet. (London: Faber, 1991).

  227. Princess’s Lullaby/Queen’s Lullaby. Previously unpublished. From ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’ (IABF, AB/ARCH/A/MOS).

  228. Chant. Previously unpublished. From ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  229. Soldier’s Song. Previously unpublished complete version. Variant published in Revolutionary Sonnets without final line. From ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  230. Prayer. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music fo
r Moses the Lawgiver.

  231. Lullaby. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  232. Pastorale. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  233. Water Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver.

  234. Desert Song For Moses. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  235. Travelling Song. Previously unpublished. From ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  236. Miriam’s Song of Triumph. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  237. Miriam’s Song of Triumph. Previously unpublished. From ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  238. Marriage Round. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  239. Moses’s Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  240. Travel Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  241. Bull Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  242. Golden Calf Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  243. Bard’s Song. Previously unpublished, from ‘Music for Moses the Lawgiver’.

  244. Jubilee Anthem. For Malayan Boys’ Voices. Previously unpublished, from handwritten MS, c.1955. Written to be sung by boys of Malay College Kuala Kangsar, whose golden jubilee was celebrated in 1955 (IABF, AB/ARCH/A/POE/15). For more detail, see Sholto Byrnes, ‘Unveiled: Work by Anthony Burgess Suppressed for Years’, Independent, 5 December 2010.

  245. The Three Dimensions. This poem appears on pp. 51–3 of the prose draft of Byrne (published 1995). The full verse does not appear in the final version, although it is alluded to.

  246. Words Getting In The Way. Previously unpublished. Transcribed from undated MS. It is not clear as to whether the poem was intended for a novel, play, or translation. The section beginning ‘No matter how powerful or subtle or fine’ is from another draft (IABF, AB/ARCH/A/CYR/20).

  247. ‘Slavery slavery.’ Previously unpublished. From red notebook of the brand ‘Block Notes Mediolanum ICCI Produzione 5’.