Past all unbelief, we know them held
By peace and light and irrefragable love –
Twin paragons, our final selves, resistant
To the dull pull of earth dappled with shade:
Myself the forester, never known to abandon
His vigilant coursing of the greenwood’s floor,
And you, dryad of dryads, never before
Yielding her whole heart to the enemy, man.
NOTHING NOW ASTONISHES
A month of vigilance draws to its close
With silence of snow and the Northern Lights
In longed-for wordlessness.
This rainbow spanning our two worlds
Becomes more than a bridge between them:
They fade into geography.
Variegated with the seven colours
We twist them into skeins for hide and seek
In a lovers’ labyrinth.
Can I be astonished at male trembling
Of sea-horizons as you lean towards them?
Nothing now astonishes.
You change, from a running drop of pure gold
On a silver salver, to the white doe
In nut-groves harbouring.
Let me be changed now to an eight-petalled
Scarlet anemone that will never strain
For the circling butterfly.
Rest, my loud heart. Your too exultant flight
Had raised the wing-beat to a roar
Drowning seraphic whispers.
I’D DIE FOR YOU
I’d die for you, or you for me,
So furious is our jealousy –
And if you doubt this to be true
Kill me outright, lest I kill you.
From Collected Poems 1965
(1965)
GRACE NOTES
It was not the words, nor the melody,
Not the beat, nor the pace;
It was that slow suspension of our breathing
As we watched your face,
And the grace-notes, unrecordable on the clef,
Sung only by a spirit in grace.
GOOD NIGHT TO THE OLD GODS
Good night, old gods, all this long year so faint
You propped your heavy eyelids up with shells!
Though once we honoured you who ruled this land
One hundred generations and ten more,
Our mood has changed: you dribble at the mouth,
Your dark-blue fern-tattoos are faded green,
Your thunderous anger wanes to petulance,
And love to groanings of indifference.
What most you crave is rest in a rock-cave,
Seasonally aroused by raucous gulls
Or swallows, nodding off once more to sleep.
We lay you in a row with cool palm wine
Close at your elbows, should you suffer thirst,
And breadfruit piled on rushes by your feet;
But will not furnish you a standing guard –
We have fish to net and spear, taro to hoe,
Pigs to fatten, coco-trees to climb;
Nor are our poets so bedulled in spirit
They would mount a platform, praising in worn verse
Those fusillades of lightning hurled by you
At giants in a first day-break of time:
Whom you disarmed and stretched in a rock-cave
Not unlike this – you have forgotten where.
THE SWEET-SHOP ROUND THE CORNER
The child dreaming along a crowded street
Lost hold of his mother, who had turned to greet
Some neighbour, and mistakenly matched his tread
With a strange woman’s. ‘Buy me sweets,’ he said,
Waving his hand, which he found warmly pressed;
So dragged her on, boisterous and self-possessed:
‘The sweet-shop’s round the corner!’ Both went in,
And not for a long while did the child begin
To feel a dread that something had gone wrong:
Were Mother’s legs so lean, or her shoes so long,
Or her skirt so patched, or her hair tousled and grey?
Why did she twitter in such a ghostly way?
‘O Mother, are you dead?’
What else could a child say?
DOUBLE BASS
He coils so close about his double-bass,
Serpentine and entranced,
That they form a single creature:
Which man-instrument writhes and complains,
Mouth of disaster, skeleton limbs a-twitch,
Cavernous belly booming,
Insistent fingers torturing us to love,
Its deep-gulped fumes of marihuana
Blinding our eyes with scarlet streamers ….
Again I turn, for your laugh-nod to lend me
Measured reassurance of sanity.
DESCENT INTO HELL
Christ harrowed Hell in pity for all damned souls
Who had perverted innocence and honour –
It was a Sabbath, the day given to rest –
But none rose with him, and his journey grieved
The hearts even of such as loved him best.
THE PARDON
Should not the white lie and the unkept promise,
Though distant from black lie and broken vow,
Demand a kiss of pardon afterwards
From the sworn lover? So I kiss you now,
Counting on my own pardon: who but I
Provoked both unkept promise and white lie?
POINT OF NO RETURN
When the alcoholic passed the crucial point
Of no return, he sold his soul to priests
Who, mercifully, would not deny him drink
But remitted a thousand years of purgatory
On this condition: that he must now engage
A woman’s pity, beseeching her to cure him,
Wearing her down with betterment and relapse,
Till he had won a second soul for glory,
At the point of no return.
A SHIFT OF SCENE
To lie far off, in bed with a foul cough,
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky; here to watch, all the day long,
For a dove, or a black cat, or a puff of smoke
To cause a shift of scene – how could it do so? –
Or to take a pen and write – what else is there
To write but: ‘I am not dead, not quite, as yet
Though I lie far off, in bed with a foul cough
And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth
Of clear sky’? Tell me, love, are you sick too
And plagued like me with a great hole in the mind
Where all those towers we built, and not on sand,
Have been sucked in and lost; so that it seems
No dove, and no black cat, nor puff of smoke
Can cause a shift of scene and fetch us back
To where we lie as one, in the same bed?
From Seventeen Poems Missing From ‘Love Respelt’
(1966)
COCK IN PULLET’S FEATHERS
Though ready enough with beak and spurs,
You go disguised, a cock in pullet’s feathers,
Among those crowing, preening chanticleers.
But, dear self, learn to love your own body
In its full naked glory,
Despite all blemishes of moles and scars –
As she, for whom it shines, wholly loves hers.
DEAD HAND
Grieve for the loveless, spiritless, faceless men
Without alternative but to protract
Reason’s mortmain on what their hearts deny –
Themselves – and owed small courtesy beyond
The uncovered head, as when a hearse goes by.
ARREARS OF MOONLIGHT
My heart lies wrapped in red under your pillow,
My body wanders b
anished among the stars;
On one terrestrial pretext or another
You still withhold the extravagant arrears
Of moonlight that you owe us,
Though the owl whoops from a far olive branch
His brief, monotonous, night-long reminder.
WHAT DID YOU SAY?
She listened to his voice urgently pleading,
So captivated by his eloquence
She saw each word in its own grace and beauty
Drift like a flower down that clear-flowing brook,
And draw a wake of multicoloured bubbles.
But when he paused, intent on her reply,
She could stammer only: ‘Love, what did you say?’ –
As loath as ever to hold him in her arms
Naked, under the trees, until high day.
LURE OF MURDER
A round moon suffocates the neighbouring stars
With greener light than sun through vine-leaves.
Awed by her ecstasy of solitude
I crouch among rocks, scanning the gulf, agape,
Whetting a knife on my horny sole.
Alas for the lure of murder, dear my love!
Could its employment purge two moon-vexed hearts
Of jealousy more formidable than death,
Then each would stab, stab, stab at secret parts
Of the other’s beloved body where unknown
Zones of desire imperil full possession.
But never can mortal dagger serve to geld
This glory of ours, this loving beyond reason –
Death holds no remedy or alternative:
We are singled out to endure his lasting grudge
On the tall battlements of nightfall.
THE GORGE
Yonder beyond all hopes of access
Begins your queendom; here is my frontier.
Between us howl phantoms of the long dead,
But the bridge that I cross, concealed from view
Even in sunlight, and the gorge bottomless,
Swings and echoes under my strong tread
Because I have need of you.
ECSTASY OF CHAOS
When the immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable colour
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than ecstasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.
STOLEN JEWEL
You weep whole-heartedly – your shining tears
Roll down for sorrow, not like mine for joy.
Dear love, should we not scorn to treat each other
With palliatives and with placebos?
Under a blinding moon you took from me
This jewel of wonder, but unaware
That it was yielded only on condition
Of whole possession; that it still denies you
Strength or desire for its restitution.
What do you fear? My hand around your throat?
What do I fear? Your dagger through my heart?
Must we not rage alone together
In lofts of singular high starriness?
THE EAGRE
Suddenly the Eagre mounts upstream
And a tall youth on dolphin back
Outdares my blue eyes and your black.
THE SNAPPED THREAD
Desire, first, by a natural miracle
United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty;
Transcended bodies, transcended hearts.
Two souls, now unalterably one
In whole love always and for ever,
Soar out of twilight, through upper air,
Let fall their sensuous burden.
Is it kind, though, is it honest even,
To consort with none but spirits –
Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours
In enforced night-long separation,
Each to its random bodily inclination,
The thread of miracle snapped?
FORTUNATE CHILD
For fear strangers might intrude upon us
You and I played at being strangers,
But lent our act such verisimilitude
That when at last, by hazard, we met alone
In a secret glen where the badger earths
We had drawn away from love: did not prepare
For melting of eyes into hearts of flowers,
For a sun-aureoled enhancement of hair,
For over-riding of death on an eagle’s back –
Yet so it was: sky shuddered apart before us
Until, from a cleft of more than light, we both
Overheard the laugh of a fortunate child
Swung from those eagle talons in a gold cloth.
LOVING TRUE, FLYING BLIND
How often have I said before
That no soft ‘if’, no ‘either-or’,
Can keep my obdurate male mind
From loving true and flying blind? –
Which, though deranged beyond all cure
Of temporal reason, knows for sure
That timeless magic first began
When woman bared her soul to man.
Be bird, be blossom, comet, star,
Be paradisal gates ajar,
But still, as woman, bear you must
With who alone endures your trust.
THE NEAR ECLIPSE
Out shines again the glorious round sun –
After his near-eclipse when pools of light
Thrown on the turf between leaf shadows
Grew crescent-shaped like moons – dizzying us
With paraboles of colour: regal amends
To our own sun mauled barbarously
By the same wide-mouthed dragon.
DANCING FLAME
Pass now in metaphor beyond birds,
Their seasonal nesting and migration,
Their airy gambols, their repetitive song;
Beyond the puma and the ocelot
That spring in air and follow us with their eyes;
Beyond all creatures but our own selves,
Eternal genii of dancing flame
Armed with the irreproachable secret
Of love, which is: never to turn back.
BIRTH OF ANGELS
Never was so profound a shadow thrown
On earth as by your sun: a black roundel
Harbouring an unheard-of generation
Fledged by the sun ablaze above your own –
Wild beyond words, yet each of them an angel.
ON GIVING
Those who dare give nothing
Are left with less than nothing;
Dear heart, you give me everything,
Which leaves you more than everything –
Though those who dare give nothing
Might judge it left you nothing.
Giving you everything,
I too, who once had nothing,
Am left with more than everything
As gifts for those with nothing
Who need, if not our everything,
At least a loving something.
From Colophon to ‘Love Respelt’
(1967)
THE P’ENG THAT WAS A K’UN
(Adapted from the Chinese of Lao Tse)
In Northern seas there roams a fish called K’un,
Of how many thousand leagues in length I know not,
Which changes to a bird called P’eng – its wing-span
Of how many thousand leagues in width I know not.
Every half-year this P’eng, that was a K’un,
Fans out its glorious feathers to the whirlwind
And soars to the most Southerly pool of Heaven.
The Finch and Sparrow, thus informed, debated:
‘We by our utmost efforts may fly only
To yonder elm. How can the P’eng outdo us?’
Th
ough, indeed, neither started as a fish.
LIKE OWLS
The blind are their own brothers; we
Form an obscure fraternity
Who, though not destitute of sight
Know ourselves doomed from birth to see,
Like owls, most clearly in half light.
IN PERSPECTIVE
What, keep love in perspective? – that old lie
Forced on the Imagination by the Eye
Which, mechanistically controlled, will tell
How rarely table-sides run parallel;
How distance shortens us; how wheels are found
Oval in shape far oftener than round;
How every ceiling-corner’s out of joint;
How the broad highway tapers to a point –
Can all this fool us lovers? Not for long:
Even the blind will sense that something’s wrong.
THE UTTER RIM
But if that Cerberus, my mind, should be
Flung to earth by the very opiate
That frees my senses for undared adventure,
Waving them wide-eyed past me to explore
Limitless hells of disintegrity,
Endless, undifferentiatable fate
Scrolled out beyond the utter rim of nowhere,
Scrolled out……
who on return fail to surrender
Their memory trophies, random wisps of horror
Trailed from my shins or tangled in my hair?
BOWER-BIRD
The Bower-bird improvised a cool retreat
For the hen he honoured, doing his poor best
With parrot-plumage, orchids, bones and corals,
To engage her fancy.
But this was no nest …
So, though the Penguin dropped at his hen’s feet
An oval stone to signal: ‘be my bride’,
And though the Jackdaw’s nest was glorified
With diamond rings and brooches massed inside,
It was the Bower-bird who contented me
By not equating love with matrimony.
Complete Poems 3 (Robert Graves Programme) Page 54