Collected Poems 1931-74 (12 page)

Sure a lovely day and all weather

Leading westward to Ireland and our childhood.

On the quarters of heaven, held by stars,

The Hunter and Arcturus getting ready—

The elect of heaven all burning on the wheel.

This lovely morning must the pilot leaning

In the eye of heaven feel the island

Turning beneath him, burning soft and blue—

And all this mortal globe like a great lamp

With spines of rivers, families of cities

Seeming to the solitary boy so

Local and queer yet so much part of him.

The enemies of silence have come nearer.

Turn, turn to the morning on wild elbows:

Look down through the five senses like stars

To where our lives lie small and equal like two grains

Before Chance—the hawk's eye or the pilot's

Round and shining on the open sky,

Reflecting back the innocent world in it.

1946/
1945

Put it more simply: say the city

Swam up here swan-like to the shallows,

Or whiteness from an overflowing jar

Settled into this grassy violet space,

Theorem for three hills,

Went soft with brickdust, clay and whitewash,

On a plastered porch one morning wrote

Human names, think of it, men became the roads.

The academy was given over

To the investigation of shade an idle boy

Invented, tearing out the heart

Of a new loaf, put up these slender columns.

Later the Parthenon's small catafalque

Simple and congruent as a wish grew up,

Snow-blind, the marbles built upon a pause

Made smoke seem less surprising, being white.

Now syntax settled round the orderless,

Joining action and reflection in the arch,

Then adding desire and will: four walls:

Four walls, a house. ‘How simple' people said.

Man entered it and woman was the roof.

A vexing history, Geros, that becomes

More and more simple as it ends, not less;

And nothing has redeemed it: art

Moved back from pleasure-giver to a humour

As with us … I see you smile …

Footloose on the inclining earth

The long ships moved through cities

Made of loaf-sugar, tamed by gardens,

Lying hanging by the hair within the waters

And quickened by self-knowledge

Men of linen sat on marble chairs

In self-indulgence murmuring ‘I am, I am'.

Chapters of clay and whitewash. Others here

Find only a jar of red clay, a Pan

The superstitious whipped and overturned.

Yet nothing of ourselves can equal it

Though grown from causes we still share,

The natural lovely order, as where water

Touches earth, a tree grows up,

A needle touching wax, a human voice.

But for us the brush, the cone, the candle,

The spinning-wheel and clay are only

Amendments to an original joy.

Lost even the flawless finishing strokes,

White bones among the almonds prophesying

A death itself that seemed a coming-of-age.

Lastly the capes and islands hold us,

Tame as a handclasp,

Causes locked within effects, the land—

This vexed clitoris of the continental body,

Pumice and clay and whitewash

Only the darkness ever compromises

Or an eagle softly mowing on the blue …

And yet, Geros, who knows? Within the space

Of our own seed might some day rise,

Shriek truth, punish the blue with statues.

1948/
1945
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6
 

MAN

The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.

We are getting the refugee habit,

WOMEN

Moving from island to island,

Where the boundaries are clouds,

Where the frontiers of the land are water.

OLD MAN

We are getting the refugee habit,

WOMAN

We are only anonymous feet moving,

Without friends any more, without books

Or companionship any more. We are getting—

MAN

The refugee habit. There's no end

To the forest and no end to the moors:

Between the just and the unjust

There is little distinction.

Bodies like houses, without windows and doors:

WOMAN

The children have become so brown,

Their skins have become dark with sunlight,

MAN

They have learned to eat standing.

OLD MAN

When we come upon men crucified,

Or women hanging downward from the trees,

They no longer understand.

WOMAN

How merciful is memory with its fantasies.

They are getting the refugee habit …

OLD MAN

How weary are the roads of the blood.

Walking forwards towards death in my mind

I am walking backwards again into my youth;

A mother, a father, and a house.

One street, a certain town, a particular place:

And the feeling of belonging somewhere,

Of being appropriate to certain fields and trees.

WOMAN

Now our address is the world. Walls

Constrain us. O do you remember

The peninsula where we so nearly died,

And the way the trees looked owned,

Human and domestic like a group of horses?

They said it was Greece.

MAN

Through Prussia into Russia,

Through Holland to Poland,

Through Rumania into Albania.

WOMAN

Following the rotation of the seasons.

OLD MAN

We are getting the refugee habit:

The past and the future are not enough,

Are two walls only between which to die:

Who can live in a house with two walls?

MAN

The present is an eternal journey;

In one country winter, in another spring.

OLD MAN

I am sick of the general deaths:

We have seen them impersonally dying:

Everything I had hoped for, fireside and hearth,

And death by compromise some summer evening.

MAN

You are getting the refugee habit:

You are carrying the past in you

Like a precious vessel, remembering

Its essence, ownership and ordinary loving.

WOMAN

We are too young to remember.

OLD MAN

Nothing disturbed such life as I remember

But telephone or telegram,

Such death-bringers to the man among the roses

In the garden of his house, smoking a pipe.

WOMAN

We are the dispossessed, sharing

With gulls and flowers our lives of accident:

No time for love, no room for love:

If only the children—

MAN

Were less wild and unkept, belonged

To the human family, not speechless,

OLD MAN

And shy as the squirrels in the trees:

WOMAN

If only the children

OLD MAN

Recognized their father, smiled once more.

OLD MAN
+
WOMAN

They have got the refugee habit,

Walking about in the rain hunting for food,

Looking at their faces in the bottom of wells:

OLD MAN

They are living the popular life.

All Europe is moving out of winter

Into spring with all boundaries being

Broken down, dissolving, vanishing.

Migrations are beginning, a new habit

From where the icebergs rise in the sky

To valleys where corn is spread like butter …

WOMAN

So many men and women: each one a soul.

MAN

So many souls crossing the world,

OLD MAN

So many bridges to the end of the world.

Frontiers mean nothing any more …

WOMAN

Peoples and possessions,

Lands, rights,

Titles, holdings,

Trusts, Bonds …

OLD MAN

Mean nothing any more, nothing.

A whistle, a box, a shawl, a cup,

A broken sword wrapped in newspaper.

WOMAN

All we have left us, out of context,

OLD MAN

A jar, a mousetrap, a broken umbrella,

A coin, a pipe, a pressed flower

WOMAN

To make an alphabet for our children.

OLD MAN

A chain, a whip, a lock,

A drum and a dancing bear …

WOMAN

We have got the refugee habit.

Beyond tears at last, into some sort of safety

From fear of wanting, fear of hoping,

Fear of everything but dying.

We can die now.

OLD MAN

Frontiers mean nothing any more. Dear Greece!

MAN

Yes. We can die now.

1946/
1946

DESPATCH ADGENERAL PUBLICS EXTHE WEST

PERPETUAL MOTION QUITE UNFINDING REST

ADVANCES ETRETREATS UPON ILLUSION

PREPARES NEW METAPHYSICS PERCONFUSION
 

PARA PERDISPOSITION ADNEW EVIL

ETREFUSAL ADCONCEDE OUR ACTS ADDEVIL

NEITHER PROFIT SHOWS NOR LOSS

SEDSOME MORE PROPHETS NAILED ADCROSS

ATTACK IN FORCE SURMEANS NONENDS

BY MULTIPLYING CONFUSION TENDS

ADCLOUD THE ISSUES WHICH ARE PLAIN

COLON DISTINGUISH PROFIT EXGAIN

ETBY SMALL CONCEPTS LONG NEGLECTED

FIND VIRTUE SUBACTION CLEAR REFLECTED

ETWEIGHING THE QUANTUM OF THE SIN

BEGIN TO BE REPEAT BEGIN.

1946/
1946

These ships, these islands, these simple trees

Are our rewards in substance, being poor.

This earth a dictionary is

To the root and growth of seeing,

And to the servant heart a door.

Some on the green surface of the land

With all their canvas up in leaf and flower,

And some empty of influence

But from the water-winds,

Free as love's green attractions are.

Smoke bitter and blue from farms.

And points of feeble light in houses

Come after them in the scale

Of the material and the beautiful;

Are not less complex but less delicate

And less important than these living

Instruments of space,

Whose quiet communication is

With older trees in ships on the grey waves:

An order and a music

Like a writing on the skies

Too private for the reason or the pen;

Too simple even for the heart's surprise.

This rough field of sudden war—

This sand going down to the sea, going down,

Was made without the approval of love,

By a general death in the desire for living.

Time got the range of impulse here:

On old houses with no thought of armies,

Burnt guns, maps and firing:

All the apparatus of man's behaviour

Put by in memories for books on history:

A growth like these bitter

Green bulbs in the hollow sand here.

But ideas and language do not go.

The rate of the simple things—

Men walking here, thinking of houses,

Gardens, or green mountains or beliefs:

Units of the dead in these living armies,

Making comparison of this bitter heat,

And the living sea, giving up its bodies,

Level and dirty in the mist,

Heavy with sponges and the common error.

1946/
1946