Collected Poems 1931-74 (34 page)

Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online

Authors: Lawrence Durrell

BOOK: Collected Poems 1931-74
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  • Dark birds in nature redevise
    1
  • Darkness, divulge my share in light
    1
  • Dear, behind the choking estuaries
    1
  • Deep waters hereabouts.
    1
  • Delicate desire,
    1
  • DESPATCH ADGENERAL PUBLICS EXTHE WEST
    1
  • Deus
    loci
    your provinces extend
    1
  • Down the wide shadow-streets of the city,
    1
  • Down there below the temple
    1
  • Early one morning unremarked
    1
  • Even then was he somehow able
    1
  • Faces may settle sadly
    1
  • Fangbrand was here once,
    1
  • Far away once, in Avignon, the Grey Penitents
    1
  • Finally I am here. Conon in exile on Andros
    1
  • Find time hanging, cut it down
    1
  • First come the Infantry in scented bodices,
    1
  • First draw the formal circle O
    1
  • For how long now have we not nibbled
    1
  • Four card-players: an ikon of the saint
    1
  • Four small nouns I put to pasture,
    1
  • Fraudulent perhaps in that they gave
    1
  • Friends, Humans, Englishmen!
    1
  • Friends, Romans, countrymen,
    1
  • From a winter of vampires he selects one,
    1
  • From recollection's fund
    1
  • From the dark viands of the church
    1
  • From the intellect's grosser denominations
    1
  • From this glass gallows in famous entertainment,
    1
  • From Travancore to Tripoli
    1
  • Further from him whose head of woman's hair
    1
  • Garcia, when you drew off those two
    1
  • Guilt can lie heavier than house of tortoise.
    1
  • Gum, oats and syrup
    1
  • Hatch me a gorilla's egg
    1
  • He is the man who makes notes,
    1
  • Heloise and Abelard
    1
  • Her dust has pawned kings of gold,
    1
  • Her sea limps up here twice a day
    1
  • Here in the hollow curvature of the world,
    1
  • Here is a man who says: Let there be light.
    1
  • Here on the curve of the embalming winter,
    1
  • How can we find the substance of the lie;
    1
  • How elapsing our women
    1
  • How loud the perfume of common gin
    1
  • Huit
    heures
    …
    honte
    heures
    … supper will be cold.
    1
  • Hush the old bones their vegetable sleep,
    1
  • I, a slave, chained to an oar of poem,
    1
  • I am this spring,
    1
  • I built a house, far in a wilderness,
    1
  • I cannot fix the very moment or the hour,
    1
  • I cannot read Pliny without terror.
    1
  • I close an hinge on the memorial days.
    1
  • I found your Horace with the writing in it;
    1
  • I have brought my life to this point,
    1
  • I have buried my wife under a dolmen,
    1
  • I have nibbled the mystical fruit. Cover me.
    1
  • I have set my wife's lip under the bandage,
    1
  • I have sipped from the flask of resurrection,
    1
  • I have tasted my quantum of misfortune,
    1
    ,
    1
  • I like to see so much the old man's loves,
    1
  • I, per se I, I sing on
    1
  • I recall her by a freckle of gold
    1
  • I shall die one day I suppose
    1
  • I should set about memorising this little room,
    1
  • I turned and found a new-moon at my feet:
    1
  • I was a vagabond; sunset and moon
    1
  • I who have lived in death, hemmed by the spears,
    1
  • I would be rid of you who bind me so,
    1
  • If I say what I honestly mean
    1
  • If seen by many minds at once your image
    1
  • If space curves how much the more thought,
    1
  • If there was a cake you'd take it
    1
  • Image, Image, Image answer
    1
  • Image of our own dust in wine!
    1
  • Imagine we are the living who inhabit
    1
  • In all the sad seduction of your ways
    1
  • In all this summer dust O Vincent
    1
  • In an island of bitter lemons
    1
  • In the museums you can find her,
    1
  • In youth the decimal days for spending:
    1
  • Incision of a comb in hair: lips stained
    1
  • Indifferent history! In such a place
    1
  • Instead of this or that fictitious woman
    1
  • It would be untrue to say that
    The
    Art
    of
    Marriage
    1
  • Jupiter, so lucky when he lay
    1
  • Katharine, Queen Eleanor's shadow hovers over you
    1
  • Known before the expurgation of gods
    1
  • Ladies and gentlemen: or better still,
    1
  • Land of Doubleday and Dutton
    1
  • Last night I bowed before a destiny,
    1
  • Last of the great autumnal capitals
    1
  • Late seventeenth, a timepiece rusted by dew,
    1
  • Later Ariadne read of
    The
    Universe,
    1
  • Later some of these heroic worshippers
    1
  • Le
    saltimbanque
    is coming with
    1
  • Left like an unknown's breath on mirrors,
    1
  • Livin' in a functional greenhouse
    1
  • Look, on that hill we met
    1
  • Lost, you may not smile upon me now:
    1
  • Love on a leave-of-absence came,
    1
  • Madness confides its own theology,
    1
  • Mark has crossed over to Mount Olivet,
    1
  • Miss Willow, secretly known as ‘tit'…
    1
  • Monday escapes destruction.
    1
  • Mothers and sculptors work
    1
  • My love on Wednesday letting fall her body
    1
  • My lovely left-handed lover
    1
  • My uncle has entered his soliloquy./He keeps vigil under the black sigil.
    1
  • My uncle has entered his soliloquy. The candles shed their fur.
    1
  • My uncle has entered his soliloquy;/ Under the black sigil the old white one
    1
  • My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the music-room of the Host.
    1
  • My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the pocket of Lapland,
    1
  • My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps the sharp sleep of the unstrung harp
    1
  • My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./His sleep is of the Babylonian deep-sea
    1
  • My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./Three, six, nine of the dead languages
    1
  • My uncle sleeps in the image of death./He sleeps the steep sleep of his zone,
    1
  • My uncle sleeps in the image of death./In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed
    1
  • My uncle sleeps in the image of death./Not a bad sport the boys will tell you,
    1
  • My uncle sleeps in the image of death./The shadow of other worlds, deep-water penumbra
    1
  • Night falls. The dark expresses
    1
  • Nine marches to Lhasa.
    1
  • No milestones marked the invaders,
    1
  • ‘No one will ever pick them, I think,'
    1
  • Nostos
    home:
    algos
    pain: nostalgia …
    1
  • Not from some silent sea she rose
    1
  • Nothing is lost, sweet self,
    1
  • Now darkness comes to Europe
    1
  • Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us,
    1
  • Now everywhere Spring opens
    1
  • Now mark, the Lady one fine day
    1
  • Now November visiting with rain
    1
  • Now that I have given all that I could bring
    1
  • Now the sun again, like a bloody convict,
    1
  • Now when the angler by Bethlehem's water
    1
  • O Freedom which to every man entire
    1
  • Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris,
    1
  • Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white, majestic headland,
    1
  • Old cock-pheasants when you hit one
    1
  • On charts they fall like lace,
    1
  • On how many of your clement springs
    1
  • On seeming to presume
    1
  • On the stone sill of the embalming winter
    1
  • Once in idleness was my beginning,
    1
  • One innocent observer in a foreign cell
    1
  • One she floats as Venice might,
    1
  • Only the night remains now, only the dark.
    1
  • Only to affirm in time
    1
  • Orpheus, beloved famulus,
    1
  • Over the bridges the meandering scholars
    1
  • Outside us smoulder the great
    1
  • Pain hangs more bloody than the mystic's taws.
    1
  • Perfume of old bones,
    1
  • Pity these lame and halting parodies
    1
  • Poetry, science of intimacies,
    1
  • Proffer the loaves of pain
    1
  • Prospero upon his island
    1
  • Prudence had no dog and but one cat,
    1
  • Prudence shall cross also the great white barrier.
    1
  • Prudence sweetly sang both crotchet and quaver,
    1
  • Prudence was told the tale of the chimney-corner
    1
  • Put it more simply: say the city
    1
  • pyknics
    are
    short,
    fat
    and
    hairy,
     
    1
  • Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery:
    1
  • Reading him is to refresh all nature,
    1
  • Red Polish mouth,
    1
  • Remember please, time has no joints,
    1
  • Ride out at midnight,
    1
  • River the Roman legionary noosed:
    1
  • Scent like a river-pilot led me there:
    1
  • Seal up the treasury and bar the gate.
    1
  • Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus,
    1
  • Seemingly upended in the sky,
    1
  • She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger
    1
  • Since you must pass to-night
    1
  • Sky star-engraved, the Pleiads up,
    1
  • Small temptations now—to slumber and to sleep,
    1
  • So at last we come to the writer's
    1
  • So back to a Paris grubby as a bowel
    1
  • So knowledge has an end,
    1
  • So many masks …
    1
  • So many masks, the people that I meet,
    1
  • So many mockers of the doctrine
    1
  • So one fine year to where the roads
    1
  • So Time, the lovely and mysterious
    1
  • So today, after many years, we meet
    1
  • So we have come to evening … graciously,
    1
  • Soft as puffs of smoke combining,
    1
  • Soft toys that make to seem girls
    1
  • Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly
    1
  • Some diplomatic mission—no such thing as ‘fate'—
    1
  • Some, the great Adepts, found it
    1
  • Some withering papers lie,
    1
  • Something like the sea,
    1
  • Sometime we shall all come together
    1
  • Somewhere in all this grace and favour green
    1
  • Spoonful of wine, candle-stump and eyes.
    1
  • ‘Spring' says your Alexandrian poet
    1
  • Stavro's dead. A truant vine
    1
  • ‘Style is the cut of the mind.'
    1
  • Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage
    1
  • Suppose one died
    1
  • Supposing once the dead were to combine
    1
  • Sure a lovely day and all weather
    1
  • Sweet sorrow, were you always there?
    1
  • Take me back where sex is furtive
    1
  • Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee
    1
  • That last summer quite definitely the dead
    1
  • That noise will be the rain again,
    1
  • The ants that passed
    1
  • The baby emperor
    1
  • The big rivers are through with me, I guess;
    1
  • The change from C major to A flat
    21
  • The colonial, the expatriate walking here
    1
  • The dreams of Solange confused no issues
    1
  • The dying business began hereabouts,
    1
  • The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
    1
  • The father is in death.
    1
  • The forest wears its coats
    1
  • The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.
    1
  • The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,
    1
  • The grass they cropped converting into speed
    1
  • The grave one is patron of a special sea,
    1
  • The hand is crabbed, the manuscript much defaced,
    1
  • The horizon like some keystone between soil and air
    1
  • The islands rebuffed by water.
    1
  • The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
    1
  • The little gold cigale
    1
  • The mixtures of this garden
    1
  • The old Levant which made us once
    1
  • The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine
    1
  • The old yellow Emperor
    1
  • The paladin of the body is rock,
    1
  • The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint
    1
  • The pure form, then, must be the silence?
    1
  • The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood,
    1
  • The rapt moonwalkers or mere students
    1
  • The road is a sinister pathway paved with smoke,
    1
  • The roads lead southward, blue
    1
  • The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts …
    1
  • The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs
    1
  • the soft
    quem
    quam
    will be Scops the Owl
    1
  • The trees have been rapping
    1
  • The year his heart wore out—
    1
  • Then walk where roses like disciples can
    1
  • There is a great heart-break in an evening sea;
    1
  • There is no strict being in this hour,
    1
  • There is some corner of a lover's brain
    1
  • There must be some slow ending to this pain:
    1
  • These ships, these islands, these simple trees
    1
  • They have taken another road,
    1
  • They never credit us
    1
  • This boy is the good shepherd.
    1
  • This business grows more dreary year by year,
    1
  • This dust, this royal dust, our mother
    1
  • ‘This landscape is not original in its own mode.'
    1
  • This pain goes deeper than the fish's fathom:
    1
  • This rough field of sudden war—
    1
  • This unimportant morning
    1
  • Three women have slept with my books,
    1
  • Thumb quantum
    1
  • Thy kingdom come. They say the prophet
    1
  • Time marched against my egg,
    1
  • Time quietly compiling us like sheaves
    1
  • Time spillers, pain killers, all such pretty women,
    1
  • To be a king of islands,
    1
  • To increase your hold
    1
  • To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,
    1
  • To you by whom the sweet spherical music
    1
  • To you in high heaven the unattainable,
    1
  • Transparent sheath of the dead cicada,
    1
  • Tread softly, for here you stand
    1
  • Trembling they appear, the Siren isles,
    1

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