Collected Poems 1931-74 (7 page)

Ladies and gentlemen: or better still,

Men and women: or best, perhaps, of all,

My children: for we speak to the child under the title

Of players acting a play which is not the less life

For being enacted: not the less a play for being lived

On both sides of the lamp, under ordinary coats.

Understanding is a neuter gift which lies between

The mind and the heart, to neither absolute.

To understand is to become wholly aware, to become holy,

To stand between the causal and the casual

As Darwin stands grinning, between two types of ape,

As the angel stood with the knife of sex and division,

As Hamlet for all time in the helmet of the prince.

So many shadows lie between all of us here:

Between I, an actor, and the live men on the stage:

Between I, the actor, and you who are playing at life.

I would be glad to reach out among your imaginations

And touch the walker on water, your inmost saints,

But thought, like sex, is only the rubbing of two

Sticks, making only a fire by which to consume itself.

Do you understand what has gone before? Well then,

You will guess more easily what we have to follow.

Death and sex are symbols of division in chaos.

Life lies on the Whole, along a circumference pure.

Duality is distress, like the image of pins in mirrors.

The first law of optics is the eye: and the first law

Of Life is Time, the endless tepid all-consuming ray.

Consider the magic of your wife or your daughter's

Love, so partial a gift, defenceless against iron.

Why is this? Because the receiver is partial not whole.

Imperfect of reception, you are a ventriloquist's idiot,

Acting and speaking by inherited voices and vices.

Now what is dumber than the voice of the dummy?

What more deadly than the voice of Esau in Jacob?

I will provide a text for your refreshment here:

Let it come like a foreign grace between the food

And the tongue, between the lip and the next glass.

It is: nothing can save you, because salvation

Is in what is lost, not saved: what is spent unmeasured.

Think, even as you sit here blessing you are cursed.

As you turn in your minds to escape you are damned.

The detention is ended, Ladies

And gentlemen: or what is worse perhaps,

Men and women: or what is worst of all

Children: for we speak to children under the title of Man.

Farewell.

1980/
1940

Only to affirm in time

That sequence dwells in consequence,

The River's quietly flowing muscle

Turning in the hollow cup

Will teach the human compromise.

Sword and pen win nothing here

Underneath the human floor:

Loved and loving move between

The counterpoint of universes,

Neither less and neither more.

The sage upon his snowy wheel

Secure among the flight of circles

By the calculus of prayer

Underneath the human floor

Founds a commune in the heart.

Time in love's diurnal motion,

Suffering untold migrations,

Islanded and garlanded,

Deep as the ministry of fishes

Lives by a perpetual patience.

Teach us the already known,

Turning in the invisible saucer

By a perfect recreation

Air and water mix and part.

Reaffirm the lover's process,

Faith and love in flesh alloyed,

Spring the cisterns of the heart:

Build the house of entertainment

On the cold circumference

Candle-pointed in the Void.

Cross the threshold of the circle

Turning in its mesmerism

On the fulcrum of the Breath:

Learn the lovely mannerism

Of a perfect art-in-death.

Think: two amateurs in Eden,

Spaces in the voiceless garden,

Ancestors whose haunted faces

Met upon the apple's bruises,

Broke the lovely spell of pardon.

Flower, with your pure assertion,

Mythical and sea-born olive,

Share the indivisible air,

Teach the human compromise:

From a zero, plus or minus,

Born into the great Appearance,

Building cities deep in gardens,

Deeply still the law divines us

In its timeless incoherence.

What is known is never written.

By the equal distribution

He and She and It are genders,

Sparks of carbon on the circle

Meeting in the porch of sex.

Faces mix and numbers mingle

Many aspects of the One

Teach the human compromise.

Speech will never stain the blue,

Nor the lover's occult kisses

Hold the curves of Paradise.

The voices have their dying fall.

The fingers resting on the heart,

The dumb petitions in the churchyard

Under the European sword

Spell out our tribal suicide.

Grass is green but goes to smoke:

You, my friend, and you, and you,

Breathe on the divining crystal,

Cut down History, the oak:

Prepare us for the sword and pistol.

1948/
1940

Four small nouns I put to pasture,

Lambs of cloud on a green paper.

My love leans like a beadle at her book,

Her smile washes the seven cities.

I am the spring's greenest publicity,

And my poem is all wrist and elbow.

O I am not daedal and need wings,

My oracle kisses a black wand.

One great verb I dip in ink

For the tortoise who carries the earth:

A grammar of fate like the map of China,

Or as wrinkles sit in the palm of a girl.

I enter my poem like a son's house.

The ancient thought is: nothing will change.

But the nouns are back in the bottle,

I ache and she is warm, was warm, is warm.

1960/
1940

My love on Wednesday letting fall her body

From upright walking won by weariness,

As on a bed of flesh by ounces counted out,

Softer than snuff or snow came where my body was.

So in the aboriginal waterways of the mind,

No word being spoken by a familiar girl,

One may have a clear apprehension of ghostly matters,

Audible, as perhaps in the sea-shell's helix

The Gulf Stream can rub soft music from a pebble

Like quiet rehearsal of the words ‘Kneel down':

And cool on the inner corridors of the ear

Can blow on memory and conscience like a sin.

The inner man is surely a native of God

And his wife a brilliant novice of nature.

The woman walks in the dark like a lantern swung,

A white spark blown between points of pain.

We do not speak, embracing with the blood,

The tolling heart marking its measures in darkness

Like the scratch of a match or the fire-stone

Struck to a spark in the dark by a colder one.

So, lying close, the enchanted boy may hear

Soon from Tokio the crass drum sounding,

From the hero's hearth the merry crotchet of war.

Flame shall swallow the lady.

Tall men shall come to cool the royal bush,

Over the grey waters the bugler's octaves

Publish aloud a new resurrection of terror.

Many will give suck at the bomb's cold nipple.

Empty
your
hearts:
or
fill
from
a
purer
source.

That
what
is
in
men
can
weep,
having
eyes:

That
what
is
in
Truth
can
speak
from
the
responsible
dust

And
O
the
rose
grow
in
the
middle
of
the
great world.

1943/
1940

At Corinth one has forgiven

The recording travellers in the same past

Who first entered this land of doors,

Hunting a precise emotion by clues,

Haunting a river, or a place in a book.

Here the continuous evocations are washed

Harder than tears and brighter,

But less penetrating than the touch of flesh,

(Our fingers pressed upon eyelids of stone),

Yet more patient, surely, watching

To dissolve the statues and retire

Night after night with a dissolving moon.

The valley mist ennobles

Lovers disarmed by negligence or weather,

And before night the calm

Discovers them, breathing upon the nerves,

The scent of the exhausted lamps.

Here stars come soft to pasture,

And all doors lead to sleep.

What lies beneath the turf forbids

A footstep on the augustan stair,

The intrusion of a style less pure,

Seen through the camera's lens,

Or the quotations of visitors.

My skill is in words only:

To tell you, writing this letter home,

That we, whose blood was sweetened once

By Byron or his elders in the magic,

Entered the circle safely, found

No messenger for us except the smiles.

Owls sip the wind here. Well,

This place also was somebody's home,

Whipped by the gulf to thorns,

A house for proverbs by a broken well.

Winter was never native here: nor is.

Men, women, and the nightingales

Are forms of Spring.

1943/
1940

A song in the valley of Nemea:

Sing quiet, quite quiet here.

Song for the brides of Argos

Combing the swarms of golden hair:

Quite quiet, quiet there.

Under the rolling comb of grass,

The sword outrusts the golden helm.

Agamemnon under tumulus serene

Outsmiles the jury of skeletons:

Cool under cumulus the lion queen:

Only the drum can celebrate,

Only the adjective outlive them.

A song in the valley of Nemea:

Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.

Tone of the frog in the empty well,

Drone of the bald bee on the cold skull,

Quiet, Quiet, Quiet.

1943/
1940

By divination came the Dorians,

Under a punishment composed an arch.

They invented this valley, they taught

The rock to flow with odourless water.

Fire and a brute art came among them.

Rain fell, tasting of the sky.

Trees grew, composing a grammar.

The river, the river you see was brought down

By force of prayer upon this fertile floor.

Now small skills: the fingers laid upon

The nostrils of flutes, the speech of women

Whose tutors were the birds; who singing

Now civilized their children with the kiss.

Lastly, the tripod sentenced them.

Ash closed on the surviving sons.

The brown bee memorized here, rehearsed

Migration from an inherited habit.

All travellers recorded an empty zone.

Between rocks ‘O death', the survivors.

O world of bushes eaten like a moon,

Kissed by the awkward patience of the ant.

Within a concave blue and void of space.

Something died out by this river: but it seems

Less than a nightingale ago.

1943/
1940

I have tasted my quantum of misfortune,

Have prayed before the left-handed woman;

Now as the rain of heaven downfalling tastes of space,

So the swimmer in the ocean of self, alone,

Utters his journey like a manual welcome,

Sculptures his element in search of grace.

I have sipped from the flask of resurrection,

Have eaten the oaten cake of redemption,

And love, sweet love, who weeps by the water-clock

Can bring if she will the sexton and the box,

For I wear my age as wood wears voluble leaves,

The temporal hunger and the carnal locks.

I have buried my wife under a dolmen,

Where others sleep as naked as the clouds,

Where others lie and weigh their dreams by ounces,

Where tamarisk, lentisk lean to utter sweets,

And angels in their shining moods retire:

Where from the wells the voice of truth pronounces.

I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.

In the desert, the cities of ash and feathers,

In front of others I have spoken the vowel,

Knelt to the curly wool, the uncut horns;

Have carried my tribulation in a basket of wattle,

Solitary in my penitence as the owl.

I have set my wife's lip under the bandage,

O pound the roses, bind the eye of the soul,

Recite the charm of the deep and heal soon,

For the mountains accuse, and the sky's walls.

Let the book of sickness be put in the embers.

I have tasted my quantum of misfortune.

1943/
1940