Blankly outside, or more unfairly still,
Cracking the crust and doing what you will
With spoon and fingers, claim at last to find
The proof of dumplingdom – study defined
Without regard for the unstudied whole –
In your digestion and your finger-bowl.
Either be dumplings and be wise of us
Or be content, as men, not to discuss
What is not us so soon as you begin
To let our steam out and your noses in.
SORROW
There is a you, a you yourself, denies
All predicates that admit contraries.
Therefore I spare you love because of hate,
Or life because of death. Joy cannot state
Such joy I have in you, because of grief.
No, let me name you sorrow: sorrow, in brief,
Is a full thought with no contrasting sense
But sorrow. Grief will cloud an innocence
Or wholeness, which in turn love’s rebel hates
Blacken, which death-of-life annihilates,
But sorrow quickens to transparency.
Be not even beauty to me through your beauty,
But singly through your sorrow: that will ease me.
THE NAPE OF THE NECK
To speak of the hollow nape where the close chaplet
Of thought is bound, the loose-ends lying neat
In two strands downward, where the shoulders open
Casual and strong below, waiting their burden,
And the long spine begins its downward journey:
The hair curtains this postern silkily,
This secret stairway by which thought will come
More personally, with a closer welcome,
Than through the latticed eyes or portalled ears;
Where kisses and all unconsidered whispers
Go smoother in than by the very lip,
And more endeared because the head’s asleep
Or grieving, the face covered with the hands.
‘But equally,’ you say, ‘to these neck-ribbands –’
To be near napeless, headsunk, simian
Forgoes the privilege of man and woman.
The tighter bound the chaplet, the more easy
The door moves on its hinges; the more free
The stair, then the more sure the tenancy –’
‘But equally,’ you say, ‘to these neck-ribbands
May come one night the hypocrite assassin
With show of love or wisdom thrusting in
And, prompted in the watchword of the day,
Run up and stab and walk unseen away.’
But there’s no need to use such melodrama,
For each betrayer only can betray
Once and the last effect of violation
Need be no ruin, no grief or contrition
(Despite tradition)
But a clear view: ‘I was betrayed indeed,
Yet to a strictness and a present need.’
And it should come to this, to wear with pride
The knife scars that it would be shame to hide,
And once more without shuddering or hardness
Loll down the head to any chosen kiss.
A VISIT TO STRATFORD
And was he innocent as you protest
Of these hot wheels, this tide, this trade, this sawdust?
No, there was weakness in him that foreknew,
Even claimed it with a brazen non sans droict,
And here’s his pedigree which pardon me
I do not mean to read, found in his closet.
His rival playwrights nudged and laughed at this,
For patronage busy among the heralds
In gratitude for secret service rendered
Had cut all tangled genealogic knots
And sealed the lie – linking the generations
We also laugh at him, in spite of love.
To go no further than the tanner’s son.
The tannery failed, beginning the long turmoil:
Turmoil brought settled grief, grief, fear of death:
This fear postponed itself in architecture:
Architecture spelt itself sweet death;
After death the abstraction of the body
(Protected by the merest formal curse)
Freeing the massy tomb for commendation,
For commentaries, for mere scholiasm:
And scholiasm bred strange heresies
Which thinned and spread in chatter through the schools:
Chatter brought pilgrims flocking, therefore trade:
Trade, this false history, this word-worn patter:
So, timber from the mulberry that he planted
Miraculously multiplied, enough
To plank and roof a great memorial hall
For summer festivals: his eight least plays,
The Shrew and Merry Wives starring the bill:
Matinees, Saturdays and Wednesdays: stalls
And sideshows valeted by the Concordance.
Oh, he foreknew the frequence of the sequence –
Sixpence a ticket, sixpence, sixpence,
School-children with their teachers, twopence.
The hackney rides, quotation to quotation,
To be or not to be. The bubble reputation.
A grievous fault (for one so rich of wit)
And grievously has Caesar answered it.
PURE DEATH
We looked, we loved, and therewith instantly
Death became terrible to you and me.
By love we disenthralled our natural terror
From every comfortable philosopher
Or tall, grey doctor of divinity:
Death stood at last in his true rank and order.
It happened soon, so wild of heart were we,
Exchange of gifts grew to a malady:
Their worth rose always higher on each side
Till there seemed nothing but ungivable pride
That yet remained ungiven, and this degree
Called a conclusion not to be denied.
Then we at last bethought ourselves, made shift
And simultaneously this final gift
Gave: each with shaking hands unlocks
The sinister, long, brass-bound coffin-box,
Unwraps pure death, with such bewilderment
As greeted our love’s first acknowledgement.
THE COOL WEB
Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.
But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose’s cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.
There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children’s day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.
II
* * *
From Poems (1914–27)
(1927)
NINE ADDITIONAL POEMS: 1927
THE PROGRESS
There is a travelling fury in his feet
(Scorn for the waters of his native spring)
Which proves at last the downfall of this king:
Shame will not let him sound the long retreat.
Tormented by his progress he displays
An open flank to the swarmed enemy
&n
bsp; Who, charging through and through, set his pride free
For death’s impossible and footless ways.
HELL
Husks, rags and bones, waste-paper, excrement,
Denied a soul whether for good or evil
And casually consigned to unfulfilment,
Are pronged into his bag by the great-devil.
Or words repeated, over and over and over,
Until their sense sickens and all but dies,
These the same fellow like a ghoulish lover
Will lay his hands upon and hypnotize.
From husks and rags and waste and excrement
He forms the pavement-feet and the lift-faces;
He steers the sick words into parliament
To rule a dust-bin world with deep-sleep phrases.
When healthy words or people chance to dine
Together in this rarely actual scene,
There is a love-taste in the bread and wine,
Nor is it asked: ‘Do you mean what you mean?’
But to their table-converse boldly comes
The same great-devil with his brush and tray,
To conjure plump loaves from the scattered crumbs,
And feed his false five thousands day by day.
THE FURIOUS VOYAGE
So, overmasterful, to sea!
But hope no distant view of sail,
No growling ice, nor weed, nor whale,
Nor breakers perilous on the lee.
Though you enlarge your angry mind
Three leagues and more about the ship
And stamp till every puncheon skip,
The wake runs evenly behind.
And it has width enough for you,
This vessel, dead from truck to keel,
With its unmanageable wheel,
A blank chart and a surly crew,
In ballast only due to fetch
The turning point of wretchedness
On an uncoasted, featureless
And barren ocean of blue stretch.
O JORROCKS, I HAVE PROMISED
Sprung of no worthier parentage than sun
In February, and fireside and the snow
Streaked on the north side of each wall and hedge,
And breakfast late, in bed, and a tall puppy
Restless for sticks to fetch and tussle over,
And Jorrocks bawling from the library shelf,
And the accumulation of newspapers
And the day-after-judgement-day to face –
This poem (only well bred on one side,
Father a grum, mother a lady’s maid)
Asked for a style, a place in literature.
So, since the morning had been wholly spoilt
By sun, by snow, breakfast in bed, the puppy,
By literature, a headache and their headaches;
Throwing away the rest of my bad day
I gave it style, let it be literature
Only too well, and let it talk itself
And me to boredom, let it draw lunch out
From one o’clock to three with nuts and smoking
While it went talking on, with imagery,
Why it was what it was, and had no breeding
But waste things and the ambition to be real;
And flattered me with puppy gratitude.
I let it miss the one train back to town
And stay to tea and supper and a bed
And even bed-in-breakfast the next morning.
More thanks.
The penalty of authorship;
Forced hospitality, an impotence
Expecting an impossible return
Not only from the plainly stupid chance
But from impossible caddishness, no less.
I answered leading questions about Poe
And let it photograph me in the snow
And gave it a signed copy of itself
And ‘the nursery money-box is on the shelf,
How kind of you to give them each a penny.’
O Jorrocks I have promised
To serve thee to the end,
To entertain young Indians,
The pupils of my friend,
To entertain Etonians
And for their sake combine
The wit of T.S. Eliot,
The grace of Gertrude Stein.
Be thou forever near me
To hasten or control,
Thou Literary Supplement,
Thou Guardian of my soul.
I shall not fear the battle
While thou art by my side,
Nor wander from the pathway
If thou shalt be my guide.
Amen.
LOST ACRES
These acres, always again lost
By every new ordnance-survey
And searched for at exhausting cost
Of time and thought, are still away.
They have their paper-substitute –
Intercalation of an inch
At the so-many-thousandth foot –
And no one parish feels the pinch.
But lost they are, despite all care,
And perhaps likely to be bound
Together in a piece somewhere,
A plot of undiscovered ground.
Invisible, they have the spite
To swerve the tautest measuring-chain
And the exact theodolite
Perched every side of them in vain.
Yet, be assured, we have no need
To plot these acres of the mind
With prehistoric fern and reed
And monsters such as heroes find.
Maybe they have their flowers, their birds,
Their trees behind the phantom fence,
But of a substance without words:
To walk there would be loss of sense.
GARDENER
Loveliest flowers, though crooked in their border,
And glorious fruit, dangling from ill-pruned boughs –
Be sure the gardener had not eye enough
To wheel a barrow between the broadest gates
Without a clumsy scraping.
Yet none could think it simple awkwardness;
And when he stammered of a garden-guardian,
Said the smooth lawns came by angelic favour,
The pinks and pears in spite of his own blunders,
They nudged at this conceit.
Well, he had something, though he called it nothing –
An ass’s wit, a hairy-belly shrewdness
That would appraise the intentions of an angel
By the very yard-stick of his own confusion,
And bring the most to pass.
TO A CHARGE OF DIDACTICISM
Didactic, I shall be didactic
When I have hit on something new
Else dons unborn will be didactic
On undidacticism too.
Didactic, they will be didactic
With ‘excellently’s’ and ‘absurd’s’:
Let me make sure that they’re didactic
On my own words on my own words.
THE PHILATELIST-ROYAL
The Philatelist-Royal
Was always too loyal
To say what he honestly
Thought of Philately.
Must it rank as a Science?
Then he had more reliance,
(As he told the Press wittily),
In Royal Philately
Than in all your geologies,
All your psychologies,
Bacteriologies,
Physics and such.
It was honester, much,
Free of mere speculations
And doubtful equations,
So therefore more true
From a pure science view
Than other school courses:
For Nature’s blind forces
Here alone, they must own,
Played no meddlesome part.
It was better than Art:
&nb
sp; It enforced education,
It strengthened the nation
In the arts of mensuration
And colour-discrimination,
In cleanliness, in hope,
In use of the microscope,
In mercantile transactions,
In a love of abstractions,
In geography and history:
It was a noble mystery.
So he told them again
That Philately’s reign,
So mild and humane,
Would surely last longer,
Would surely prove stronger
Than the glory of Greece,
Than the grandeur of Rome.
It brought goodwill and peace
Wherever it found a home.
It was more democratic,
More full, more ecstatic,
Than the Bible, the bottle,
The Complete Works of Aristotle,
And worthierer and betterer
And etceterier and etcetera.
The Philatelist-Royal
Was always too loyal
To say what he honestly
Thought of Philately.
SONG: TO BE LESS PHILOSOPHICAL
Listen, you theologians,
Give ear, you rhetoricians,
Hearken, you Aristotelians:
Of the Nature of God, my song shall be.
Our God is infinite,
Your God is infinite,
Their God is infinite,
Of infinite variety.
God, he is also finite,
God, she is also definite,
He, she; we, they; you, each and it –
Of finite omnipresence.
He is a bloody smart sergeant
And served in the Royal Artillery:
For gallantly exposing his person
He won the Victoria Cross.
She is also divorced,
From a Russian count in exile,
And paints a little and sings a little –
And won a little prize in Paris.
It has also the character of a soap
And may be employed quite freely
For disinfecting cattle trucks
And the very kine in the byre.
You are also mad, quite mad,
To imagine you are not God.
Goddam it, aren’t you a Spirit,
And your ministers a flaming fire?
We are also gradually tending
To be less philosophical,
We talk through hats more personally,
With madness more divine.
They are a very smart Goddam Cross
With the character of a soap, a little:
Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) Page 30