They disinfect more personally,
To be less philosophical.
Each is a very smart Paris hat
And may be divorced quite freely,
Freely, freely in the Royal Artillery,
To be each less philosophical.
Poems 1929
(1929)
SICK LOVE
O Love, be fed with apples while you may,
And feel the sun and go in royal array,
A smiling innocent on the heavenly causeway,
Though in what listening horror for the cry
That soars in outer blackness dismally,
The dumb blind beast, the paranoiac fury:
Be warm, enjoy the season, lift your head,
Exquisite in the pulse of tainted blood,
That shivering glory not to be despised.
Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark – a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
IN NO DIRECTION
To go in no direction
Surely as carelessly,
Walking on the hills alone,
I never found easy.
Either I sent leaf or stick
Twirling in the air,
Whose fall might be prophetic,
Pointing ‘there’,
Or in superstition
Edged somewhat away
From a sure direction,
Yet could not stray,
Or undertook the climb
That I had avoided
Directionless some other time,
Or had not avoided,
Or called as companion
An eyeless ghost
And held his no direction
Till my feet were lost.
IN BROKEN IMAGES
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
THIEF
To the galleys, thief, and sweat your soul out
With strong tugging under the curled whips,
That there your thievishness may find full play.
Whereas, before, you stole rings, flowers and watches,
Oaths, jests and proverbs,
Yet paid for bed and board like an honest man,
This shall be entire thiefdom: you shall steal
Sleep from chain-galling, diet from sour crusts,
Comradeship from the damned, the ten-year-chained –
And, more than this, the excuse for life itself
From a craft steered toward battles not your own.
WARNING TO CHILDREN
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel –
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still unopened on his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives – he then unties the string.
DISMISSAL
If you want life, there’s no life here.
Whatever trust you held for me
Or I for you in some such year,
Is ended as you see.
I forced this quarrel; it was not
So much disgust with all you did
As sudden doubt of whom and what
My easy friendship hid;
I carefully offended.
It would be best if you too broke
Acquaintance, with a monstrous look,
Rather than stay to temporize
Or steal away with brimming eyes
Like old friends in a book.
So if a man of you can be
Regretful of the time that’s gone
He must now imperturbably
Accept this antic kick from one
Who used to be his father’s son
Discreet in blind devotion.
GUESSING BLACK OR WHITE
Guessing black or white,
Guessing white, guessing black.
Guessing black or white.
Guessing white, guessing black.
His mother was a terrier bitch,
His father a Dalmatian,
Guessing black or white:
Not black because white
Because black because white;
Not white because black
Because white because black,
Guessing black or white.
His mother was from Renfrew,
His father was a Zulu,
Guessing black or white:
Not black because black
Because white because white;
Not white because white
Because black because black,
Guessing black or white.
His mother was a domino,
His father was a dice-box,
Guessing black or white:
Not white because white
Because white because white;
Not black because black
Because black because black,
Guessing black or white.
HECTOR
The persons in the thought, like shapes, waver.
Not to forget them, forge a history
Of squarenesses and narrownesses, saying
‘Thus ticket Hector with his fishing-rod
To the dungeon of the ticket Princess came,
Gave her a ticket.’ Or what you will.
The shapes are neither this nor that,
Not Hectors and princesses, rods and dungeons,
Nor indeed shapes but, as I say, persons
Who look ‘remember me and know me’,
And so are lost under the many tickets.
But what the devil to do with ticket Hector
Who is no more person than he was a squareness
Or squareness was a shape? He stands, mock-Hector,
Fishing with his forged rod through the false grille
From the false moat outside t
he forged dungeon,
(The ticket princess standing by) –
The dull what’s left of ticketing a ticket.
Let them close-ticket at their princely leisure
To please what girls and boys may read the myth.
The persons in the thought are long dead.
AGAINST KIND
Become invisible by elimination
Of kind in her, she none the less persisted
Among kind with no need to find excuses
For choosing this and not some alien region.
Invisibility was her last kindness:
She might have kept appearance, had she wished;
Yet to be seen living against all kind,
That would be monstrous; she permitted blindness.
She asked and she permitted nothing further,
She went her private and eventless way
As uncompanioning as uncompanioned;
And for a while they did not think to mourn her.
But soon it vexed them that her name still stood
Plain on their registers, and over-simple,
Not witnessed to by laundry, light or fuel,
Or even, they wondered most, by drink and food.
They tried rebuttal; it was not for long:
Pride and curiosity raised a whisper
That swelled into a legend and the legend
Confirmed itself in terror and grew strong.
It was not that they would prefer her presence
To her room (now hating her), but that her room
Could not be filled by any creature of kind,
It gaped; they shook with sudden impotence.
Sleeplessness and shouting and new rumours
Tempted them nightly; dulness wore their days;
They waited for a sign, but none was given;
She owed them nothing, they held nothing of hers.
They raged at her that being invisible
She would not use that gift, humouring them
As Lilith, or as an idiot poltergeist,
Or as a Gyges turning the ring’s bezel.
She gave no sign; at last they tumbled prostrate
Fawning on her, confessing her their sins;
They burned her the occasion’s frankincense,
Crying ‘Save, save!’, but she was yet discrete.
And she must stay discrete, and they stay blind
Forever, or for one time less than ever –
If they, despaired and turning against kind,
Become invisible too, and read her mind.
MIDWAY
Between insufferable monstrosities
And exiguities insufferable,
Midway is man’s own station. We no longer
Need either hang our heads or lift them high
But for the fortunes of finance or love.
We have no truck either with the forebeings
Of Betelgeux or with the atom’s git.
Our world steadies: untrembling we renew
Old fears of earthquakes, adders, floods, mad dogs
And all such wholesomes. Nothing that we do
Concerns the infinities of either scale.
Clocks tick with our consent to our time-tables,
Trains run between our buffers. Time and Space
Amuse us merely with their rough-house turn,
Their hard head-on collision in the tunnel.
A dying superstition smiles and hums
‘Abide with me’ – God’s evening prayer, not ours.
So history still is written and is read:
The eternities of divine commonplace.
CABBAGE PATCH
Green cabbage-wit, only by trying,
Flew as bird-wit;
But flocking for the season’s flying,
Restless perching and prying,
Could not content it.
As lightning-wit therefore it struck
And split the rocks indeed,
Fusing their veins, but in the instant’s luck
Was spilt by its own speed.
Back therefore to green cabbage-wit
In the old plot with glass and grit.
Tenth-in-the-line for kings and cabbages
Has honourable privileges
For which no rocks are split.
THE CASTLE
Walls, mounds, enclosing corrugations
Of darkness, moonlight on dry grass.
Walking this courtyard, sleepless, in fever;
Planning to use – but by definition
There’s no way out, no way out –
Rope-ladders, baulks of timber, pulleys,
A rocket whizzing over the walls and moat –
Machines easy to improvise.
No escape,
No such thing; to dream of new dimensions,
Cheating checkmate by painting the king’s robe
So that he slides like a queen;
Or to cry, ‘Nightmare, nightmare!’
Like a corpse in the cholera-pit
Under a load of corpses;
Or to run the head against these blind walls,
Enter the dungeon, torment the eyes
With apparitions chained two and two,
And go frantic with fear –
To die and wake up sweating by moonlight
In the same courtyard, sleepless as before.
WELSH INCIDENT
‘But that was nothing to what things came out
From the sea-caves of Criccieth yonder.’
‘What were they? Mermaids? dragons? ghosts?’
‘Nothing at all of any things like that.’
‘What were they, then?’
‘All sorts of queer things,
Things never seen or heard or written about,
Very strange, un-Welsh, utterly peculiar
Things. Oh, solid enough they seemed to touch,
Had anyone dared it. Marvellous creation,
All various shapes and sizes, and no sizes,
All new, each perfectly unlike his neighbour,
Though all came moving slowly out together.’
‘Describe just one of them.’
‘I am unable.’
‘What were their colours?’
‘Mostly nameless colours,
Colours you’d like to see; but one was puce
Or perhaps more like crimson, but not purplish.
Some had no colour.’
‘Tell me, had they legs?’
‘Not a leg nor foot among them that I saw.’
‘But did these things come out in any order?
What o’clock was it? What was the day of the week?
Who else was present? How was the weather?’
‘I was coming to that. It was half-past three
On Easter Tuesday last. The sun was shining.
The Harlech Silver Band played Marchog Jesu
On thirty-seven shimmering instruments,
Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund.
The populations of Pwllheli, Criccieth,
Portmadoc, Borth, Tremadoc, Penrhyndeudraeth,
Were all assembled. Criccieth’s mayor addressed them
First in good Welsh and then in fluent English,
Twisting his fingers in his chain of office,
Welcoming the things. They came out on the sand,
Not keeping time to the band, moving seaward
Silently at a snail’s pace. But at last
The most odd, indescribable thing of all,
Which hardly one man there could see for wonder,
Did something recognizably a something.’
‘Well, what?’
‘It made a noise.’
‘A frightening noise?’
‘No, no.’
‘A musical noise? A noise of scuffling?’
‘No, but a very loud, respectable noise –
Like groaning to oneself on Sunday morning
In Chapel, close before the second
psalm.’
‘What did the mayor do?’
‘I was coming to that.’
BACK DOOR
For bringing it so far, thank you,
Though they seem very light ones, thank you;
Who gave you my address and rank?
It may prove so-so in the end;
That would depend on what else stays so.
Easy to blend all together
But the devil to know whether or not
And how to keep it fresh in taste:
They hang on the air like rot
And are blown to waste in the end.
Still this, I own, seems steady, thanks,
Four or five of them already,
Just what the store-rooms need.
For bringing it so far, thanks.
I recognized your pranks at once, indeed
Almost before I heard the gate slam.
Of course, it’s all a gamble really:
First it’s the finding, then the picking,
Then the minding, then the dressing,
Guessing them over the awkward stage,
(I was in the trade myself, you see,
When I was on the stage;
I had several made for me
When I was in the trade,
When I was on the stage),
Then it’s those naked-light instructions
That the muctions plaster up,
Destruction take them,
In the room where the stuffs folded
On which the whole lay’s laid.
Always the same, these crews, these crows –
Lousy! Not interested? No? The shame!
Then how much must I owe you?
Many thanks, again, many francs,
Many pranks, many thanks, again.
Good day!
FRONT DOOR SOLILOQUY
‘Yet from the antique heights or deeps of what
Or which was grandeur fallen, sprung or what
Or which, beyond doubt I am grandeur’s grandson
True to the eagle nose, the pillared neck,
(Missed by the intervening generation)
Whom large hands, long face, and long feet sort out
From which and what, to wear my heels down even,
To be connected with all reigning houses,
Show sixteen quarterings or sixty-four
Or even more, with clear skin and eyes clear
To drive the nails in and not wound the wood,
With lungs and heart sound and with bowels easy:
An angry man, heaving the sacks of grain
From cart to loft and what and what and which
Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) Page 31