Collected Poems 1931-74 (3 page)

I turned and found a new-moon at my feet:

All the long day and night made measureless:

New glamour in the traffick of the street,

And in your glance a secret holiness.

Here is a wonder that has made us wise,

Discovered all creation in a song.

We have found light and shining of the eyes,

And loyalty is with us all day long.

Most merciful, since you have turned your face,

And given this perfection to my hand,

Earth has become an autumn dancing place,

And I a traveller in enchanted land;

And all the rumour of the earth's decay

Remoter than to-morrow seems to-day.

1980/
1932

There must be some slow ending to this pain:

Surely some pitying god will give release,

Guerdon for service, leaving us again

The old magnificence and peace?

May we who serve such cruel apprenticeship

Find no more answer than an empty guess,

Knowing that every lip to questing lip

Must give for answer ‘Yes'?

Oh turn your mind from such ungodly thought,

Let your dear, trembling mouth no longer guess:

Pleasure is greatest pain so dearly bought,

And love unfaithfulness.

1980/
1932

We had endured vicissitude and change,

Laughter and lanterns, colours in the grass,

And all the foreign music of the earth:

Starlight and glamour: every subtle range

Of motion, rhythm, and power that gave us birth.

Now that the ink has dried and left its rust

On the forgotten words, the growing rhythms

Have thundered into peace; shaken to dust

Are all the restless, savage, drowsy hymns:

Vanished the echo where the music was,

Faded the lanterns: colours in the grass

Died with the laughter of the old foolish rhymes …

Quietly we stand aside and let them pass.

1980/
1932

You have so dressed your eyes with love for me

That all my mind's entangled in a flame,

Crying the old despair for all to see,

The wonder of your name.

I must believe the passion of your mouth

And all its living treasure has no dearth,

But lives, exultant, through the season's drouth

In the old hiding places of the earth.

How can the anguished world remain the same;

The crowds still pass on unreturning feet

When we have cupped our hands about a flame?

1980/
1932

In all the sad seduction of your ways

I wander as a player tries a part,

Seeking a perfect gesture all his days,

Roving the widest margins of his art.

I would drink this perfection as a wine,

Leash the wild thirst that bids me more than taste:

Hoard up the great possession that is mine,

Not squander as a drunkard makes his waste.

I will be patient if the world be wise,

And you be bountiful as you are curt,

Until a song awakes those distant eyes,

And all your weary gestures cease to hurt.

1980/
1932

You will have no more beauty in that day

When all the slow destruction of the mind,

Encompassed in a single clot of clay,

Is dust on dust, with flower-roots entwined.

No use to say ‘She was both cruel and kind.

Though all her limbs have crumbled to decay,

Yet we, remembering, gather up and bind

The harvest that was all her yesterday.'

No use to shake that dear, unhappy head,

And pray for fresh beginnings, time makes one

Of all the prayers of Syria's sleeping dead,

All the choked dust of fallen Babylon.

There is no lamentation but the hours

Mourning the silent watches of the grave.

Always the gaunt reflection of the stars

Whispers ‘Mad lovers, these you may not save.'

1980/
1932
 

There is some corner of a lover's brain

That holds this famous treasure, some dim room

That love has not forgotten, where the sane

Plant of this magic burgeons in the gloom,

And pushes out its roots into the mind,

Grown rich on the turned soil of days that pass.

I know there is enchantment yet to find:

April and whip-showers and the heavy grass

Leaning to the lance-points of the rain …

Oh we will turn someday, and find again

The pageant of the lilies as they pass

In slow procession by the lonely lake,

Down by the crying waters of the plain.

Always, to the end, these will remain,

A thirst that all our passions may not slake

April and whip-showers and the crying rain.

1980/
1932

We have no more of time nor growing old,

Nor memory of lovers that are dead

While blood is on our lips; and while you hold

Those frail and tenebrous hands about my head.

Time is snuffed out as candles in a church,

And all the fume in darkness is your hair;

Licence these burning lips and let them search

For passion that lies nearest to despair.

Let us set up a gravestone in the dark,

We who are laughing sinners, let us hold

One moment as a monument to mark

The hour from which God ceased to make us old.

1980/
1932
 

I would be rid of you who bind me so,

Thoughtless to the stars: I would refrain and turn

Along the unforgotten paths I used to know

Before these eyes were governed to discern

All beauty and all transcience in love.

I would return, hungry, inviolate,

To the sequestered woodland, arched above

With the unchanging skies that graciously await

My sure return from such inconstant love.

I would return … yet would there ever be

The same clear current at the root of things?

The same resistless tides born of the sea?

The old slurred whisper of the swallow's wings?

1980/
1932

This business grows more dreary year by year,

The season with its seasonable joys,

When there is so much extra now on beer,

And therefore so much less to spend on toys:

And now that Auntie Maud's had twins (both boys),

And all the family is knitting clothes—

It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

I realise that Cousin Jane is ‘dear',

And that sweet Minnie has such ‘grace and poise',

But why should they be planning to come here,

When Winifred my manuscript destroys,

And dearest little Bertie mis-employs

His time by crying when he sees my nose—

It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

How can a man withstand the atmosphere,

This hell compounded of such strange alloys?

Grandma's too old to do a thing but leer,

And call the home-made mince-pies ‘saveloys'.

Grandpa keeps drooling on about sepoys,

The Indian situation and the snows—

It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

Prince, if I once disturbed your equipoise,

By sending you my old discarded hose—

Perhaps you'd help me stamp and make a noise,

And wish that George would pay me what he owes?

1980/
Christmas,
1932

Only the night remains now, only the dark.

This my forever and my nevermore.

Impalpable eclipse!

Persistent as the muzzle of a dog,

Nosing me out for ever and for ever….

God! that my body slips

Between smooth liquors like a floating log,

Spinning on tides of wine

So slow that not a flaw can shift

The symmetry of liquid in this basin:

Nor a chaotic wave can lift

My nostrils to the surface-fume of spice,

Bitter and odorous in gloom.

Pity me, swimming here.

Pity me, Cicero's daughter.

All the embalmer's poor artifice was this:

To strip me of the cogs and wheels of sense—

Those inner toys of motion,

Purse up my dead lips in a kiss,

And freeze the small shell of me,

Freeze me so stiff and regimental,

Then launch me in this vault's aquarium

Upon a tide of spices.

Pity me, swimming here.

Pity me, Cicero's daughter,

Partnered by inner darkness and one solemn light.

1980/
1934

I am this spring,

This interlocked torment of growth.

I am leaf folding,

Leaves falling and folding,

Leaf upon leaf upon spray,

Sweet pod and sticky:

Buds that are speckled, bursting, breaking-

I am this hour.

O unbearable sliding and twining

Sinews of creeper,

Unbearable fret in the burdenous mould!

I am seed pressing,

Seeds straining and scoring

A runnel to dayshine:

All seed and all potence,

Invincible growth,

Clamped in the moist clog of soil.

I am the surge:

The shaking and loosing of strands:

Weed creaking,

Earth slipping from fingers of tendrils

And bindings of moss.

Hear me you earth-drums

Babbing and drubbing

Invincibly onward to life!

Hear me!

             
I
am
this
spring,

I
am
this
forest
in flux,

Urging
and
burgeoning.

1980/
1934

And all this standing butter-coloured flood

Where the vast field goes tilting to the sky,

Tilting and lifting to a red dancing sun,

A man destroys, destroys….

Old arms, brown arms,

Twinkles the grinning scythe-blade in the wheat….

Though the dry wind, defensive,

Break cover and descend,

Shuffling the yellow heads like cards,

Hampered and driving:

Though there is consternation and amaze,

A man destroys, destroys,

While the sun freckles the orchard

A man in a red cloak destroys.

   I have been so in dreams: rooted

And standing with the warm male sperm in me,

Hideously wary of death.

   I have been rooted wheat—

A legless stalk hanging on the ground

While a destroyer roves

Nearer and always nearer: oblivious:

Twisting the wicked sickle in my roots—

An old man

Who destroys

Under a dancing sun.

1980/
1934

So many masks, the people that I meet,

So many coloured faces—

Carnival idols wagging in a lanterned street,

Plaster and pigment grimaces.

Not one but wears smooth porcelain for a frown,

Not one the livelong daytime,

Can I say: ‘Here loveliness'? or ‘Here walks guile'?

Always beneath the smile

I know the apparatus of the bone,

The structure pinned with ligament,

The sliding gristle, coil of artery:

All, all, delicate, nimble, wired, machinery,

Snugly buttoned in

A supple glove of flesh,

A snake-smooth film of skin,

Smooth, smooth, flawless and bland as rubber….

And, if I smile

What can you see, what guess?

Your own, your little idiot uniformity

Reciprocates a perfect puppet nothingness;

A null collision of minute desires

Transliterated thus by muscle-play….

Behold,

Behold your mincing jowls a-swing on wires!

No, no. My friend

We are void idols still,

Ridiculous clicking dolls,

Mumming the silly ciphers of pretence:

Always intent to end

Our awful emptiness by alphabets.

Our speech, our hapless intercourse

Seems always just removed from actual sense.

Can you deny me that the laughter-mask

Clamps back upon itself to trace

Only the raving jaw-line of the skeleton?

That in your hanging face

A smile is an expression of despairs,

With mouth a hanging flap,

A slip of skin twiddled by subcutaneous hairs,

A juggling parody of what you say?

In fine,

Your mouth's a letter-box,

A hippo's bun-trap …

Your mouth, my friend … and mine!

So many masks …

So very many faces….

Will you remember, then, when next we walk

Among the lanterns and the lights,

Among the half-light of your chance desires

We are but carnival idols still—

Poor rag-dolls twitched on wincing wires

Fingered by impulse?

A couple of barking cattle

With a fool rictus gouged upon our faces!

Will you remember as we yapp and boom

How poor a condolence

The formal utterance is

For being two bloody zeros,

Mnemotechnic heroes:

Sick hack-satires on meaning by Infinity,

With not one working sense

That does not illustrate our own

And all humanity's impertinence?

1980/
1934