more time fi meditate
more time fi create
more time fi livin
more time fi life
more time
wi need more time
gi wi more time
PHILIP LARKIN
Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not – Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
CAROL ANN DUFFY
Mrs Sisyphus
That’s him pushing the stone up the hill, the jerk.
I call it a stone – it’s nearer the size of a kirk.
When he first started out, it just used to irk,
but now it incenses me, and him, the absolute berk.
I could do something vicious to him with a dirk.
Think of the perks, he says.
What use is a perk, I shriek,
when you haven’t the time to pop open a cork
or go for so much as a walk in the park?
He’s a dork.
Folk flock from miles around just to gawk.
They think it’s a quirk,
a bit of a lark.
A load of old bollocks is nearer the mark.
He might as well bark
at the moon –
that feckin’ stone’s no sooner up
than it’s rolling back
all the way down.
And what does he say?
Mustn’t shirk –
keen as a hawk,
lean as a shark
Mustn’t shirk!
DEREK WALCOTT
Ebb
Year round, year round, we’ll ride
this treadmill whose frayed tide
fretted with mud
leaves our suburban shoreline littered
with rainbow muck, the afterbirth
of industry, past scurf-
streaked bungalows
and pioneer factory;
but, blessedly, it narrows
through a dark aisle
of fountaining, gold coconuts, an oasis
marked for the yellow Caterpillar tractor.
We’ll watch this shovelled too, but as we file
through its swift-wickered shade there always is
some island schooner netted in its weave
like a lamed heron
an oil-crippled gull;
a few more yards upshore
and it heaves free,
it races the horizon
with us, railed to one law,
ruled, like the washed-up moon
to circle her lost zone,
her radiance thinned.
The palm fronds signal wildly in the wind,
but we are bound elsewhere,
from the last sacred wood.
The schooner’s out too far,
too far that boyhood.
Sometimes I turn to see
the schooner, crippled, try to tread the air,
the moon break in sere sail,
but without envy.
For safety, each sunfall,
the wildest of us all
mortgages life to fear.
And why not? From this car
there’s terror enough in the habitual,
miracle enough in the familiar. Sure…
ARTHUR CLOUGH
Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main,
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Work Without Hope
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair –
The bees are stirring – birds are on the wing –
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
JOHN MILTON
from Paradise Lost, Book IV
Now came still ev’ning on, and twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied, for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
A
nd o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.
When Adam thus to Eve: Fair consort, th’ hour
Of night, and all things now retired to rest
Mind us of like repose, since God hath set
Labour and rest, as day and night to men
Successive, and the timely dew of sleep
Now falling with soft slumb’rous weight inclines
Our eye-lids; other creatures all day long
Rove idle unemployed, and less need rest;
Man hath his daily work of body or mind
Appointed, which declares his dignity,
And the regard of Heav’n on all his ways;
While other animals unactive range,
And of their doings God takes no account.
Tomorrow ere fresh morning streak the east
With first approach of light, we must be ris’n,
And at our pleasant labour, to reform
Yon flow’ry arbours, yonder alleys green,
Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,
That mock our scant manuring, and require
More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth:
Those blossoms also, and those dropping gums,
That lie bestrewn unsightly and unsmooth,
Ask riddance, if we mean to tread with ease;
Meanwhile, as nature wills, night bids us rest.
W. H. DAVIES
Leisure
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
LOUIS MACNEICE
Meeting Point
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down;
The stream’s music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.
The bell was silent in the air
Holding its inverted poise –
Between the clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.
The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.
Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
RICHARD BARNFIELD
Sighing, and sadly sitting by my Love,
He ask’d the cause of my heart’s sorrowing,
Conjuring me by heaven’s eternal King
To tell the cause which me so much did move.
Compell’d: (quoth I) to thee will I confess,
Love is the cause; and only love it is
That doth deprive me of my heavenly bliss.
Love is the pain that doth my heart oppress.
And what is she (quoth he) whom thou dos’t love?
Look in this glass (quoth I) there shalt thou see
The perfect form of my felicity.
When, thinking that it would strange Magic prove,
He open’d it: and taking off the cover,
He straight perceiv’d himself to be my Lover.
BEN OKRI
I Held You in the Square
I held you in the square
And felt the evening
Re-order itself around
Your smile.
The dreams I could never touch
Felt like your body.
Your gentleness made the
Night soft.
And even if we didn’t know
Where we were going,
Nor what street to take
Or what bench to sit on
What chambers awaited
That would deliver us our
Naked joy,
The restlessness for a journey
Whose beauty lies
In the arriving moment
Of each desire.
Holding you in the evening square,
I sealed a dream
With your smile as the secret pact.
March 1986
THOMAS MOORE
Did Not
’Twas a new feeling – something more
Than we had dared to own before,
Which then we hid not;
We saw it in each other’s eye,
And wish’d, in every half-breath’d sigh,
To speak, but did not.
She felt my lips’ impassioned touch –
’Twas the first time I dared so much,
And yet she chid not;
But whisper’d o’er my burning brow,
‘Oh! do you doubt I love you now?’
Sweet soul! I did not.
Warmly I felt her bosom thrill,
I press’d it closer, closer still,
Though gently bid not;
Till – oh! the world hath seldom heard
Of lovers, who so nearly err’d,
And yet, who did not.
FLEUR ADCOCK
Against Coupling
I write in praise of the solitary act:
of not feeling a trespassing tongue
forced into one’s mouth, one’s breath
smothered, nipples crushed against the
ribcage, and that metallic tingling
in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:
unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –
such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
listening to the vegetal
rustle within her, as his gaze
stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.
There is much to be said for abandoning
this no longer novel exercise –
for not ‘participating in
a total experience’– when
one feels like the lady in Leeds who
had seen The Sound of Music eighty-six times;
or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress
producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream
for the seventh year running, with
yet another cast from 5B.
Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
the hole in the wall can still
be troublesome.
I advise you, then, to embrace it without
encumbrance. No need to set the scene,
dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
enough – in the bath, or to fill
that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.
OGDEN NASH
Reflections on Ice-Breaking
Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
EDMUND WALLER
To Phillis
Phillis, why should we delay
Pleasures shorter than the Day?
Can we (which we never can)
Stretch our lives beyond their Span,
Beauty, like a Shadow, flies,
And our Youth before us Dies.
Or, would Youth and Beauty stay,
Love hath Wings, and will away.
Love hath swifter Wings than Time;
Change in Love to Heaven doth climb.
Gods that never change their state
Vary oft their Love and Hate.
Phillis, to this Truth we owe
All the Love betwixt us two.
Let not you and I require
What has been our past desire;
On what Shepherds you have smil’d,
Or what Nymphs I have beguil’d;
Leave it to the Planets too,
What we shall hereafter do;
For the Joys we now may prove,
Take advice of present Love.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
[A Summary of Lord Lyttleton’s
‘Advice to a lady’]