Striding forward into the wilderness
With eager thighs, forgetful of their oath,
Adventurous for this monster, a new man,
Their own kin – how accursed? – they haste for wonder.
RAISING THE STONE
A shaft of moon from the cloud-hurried sky
Has coursed the wide dark heath, but nowhere found
One paler patch to illumine – oats nor rye,
Chalk-pit nor waterpool nor sandy ground –
Till, checked by our thronged faces on the mound
(A wedge of whiteness) universally
Strained backward from the task that holds us bound,
It beams on set jaw and hate-maddened eye.
The vast stone lifts, turns, topples, in its fall
Spreads death: but we who live raise a shrill chant
Of joy for sacrifice cleansing us all.
Once more we heave. Erect in earth we plant
The interpreter of our dumb furious call,
Outraging Heaven, pointing
‘I want, I want.’
THE GNAT
The shepherd Watkin heard an inner voice
Calling ‘My creature, ho! be warned, be ready!’
Calling, ‘The moment comes, therefore be ready!’
And a third time calling, ‘Creature, be ready!’
This old poor man mistook the call, which sounded
Not for himself, but for his pensioner.
Now (truth or phantasy) the shepherd nourished
Fast in his brain, due earnings of transgression,
A creature like to that avenging fly
Once crept unseen in at the ear of Titus,
Tunnelling gradually inwards, upwards,
Heading for flowery pastures of the brain,
And battened on such grand, presumptuous fare
As grew him brazen claws and brazen hair
And wings of iron mail. Old Watkin felt
A like intruder channelling to and fro.
He cursed his day and sin done in past years,
Repentance choked, pride that outlawed his heart,
So that at night often in thunderous weather
Racked with the pain he’d start
From sleep, incontinently howling, leaping,
Striking his hoar head on the cottage walls,
Stamping his feet, dragging his hair by the roots.
He’d rouse the Gnat to anger, send it buzzing
Like a huge mill, scraping with metal claws
At his midpoint of being; forthwith tumble
With a great cry for Death to stoop and end him.
Now Watkin hears the voice and weeps for bliss,
The voice that warned ‘Creature, the time is come.’
Merciful Death, was it Death, all his desire?
Promised of Heaven, and speedy? O Death, come!
Only for one thought must he make provision,
For honest Prinny, for old bob-tail Prinny.
Another master? Where? These hillside crofters
Were spiteful to their beasts and mercenary.
Prinny to such? No, Prinny too must die.
By his own hand, then? Murder! By what other?
No human hand should touch the sacrifice,
No human hand;
God’s hand then, through his temporal minister.
Three times has Watkin in the morning early
When not a soul was rising, left his flock,
Come to the Minister’s house through the cold mist,
Clicked at the latch and slowly moved the gate,
Faltered, held back and dared not enter in.
‘Not this time, Prinny, we’ll not rouse them yet,
To-morrow, surely, for our death is tokened,
My death and your death with small interval.
We meet in fields beyond; be sure of it, Prinny!’
On the next night
The busy Gnat, swollen to giant size,
Pent-up within the skull, knew certainly,
As a bird knows in the egg, his hour was come…
The thrice-repeated call had given him summons…
He must out, crack the shell, out, out!
He strains, claps his wings, arches his back,
Drives in his talons, out! out!
In the white anguish of this travail, Watkin
Hurls off his blankets, tears an axe from the nail,
Batters the bed, hews table, splits the floor,
Hears Prinny whine at his feet, leaps, strikes again,
Strikes, yammering.
At that instant with a clatter,
Noise of a bursting dam, a toppling wall,
Out flies the new-born creature from his mouth
And humming fearsomely like a huge engine,
Rackets about the room, smites the unseen
Glass of half-open windows, reels, recovers,
Soars out into the meadows, and is gone.
Silence prolonged to an age. Watkin still lives?
The hour of travail by the voice foretold
Brought no last throbbings of the dying Body
In child-birth of the Soul. Watkin still lives.
Labourer Watkin delves in the wet fields.
Die weeping with his head on the outraged corpse?
Oh, he’s forgotten. A dead dream, a cloud.
Labourer Watkin delves drowsily, numbly,
His harsh spade grates among the buried stones.
THE PATCHWORK BONNET
Across the room my silent love I throw,
Where you sit sewing in bed by candlelight,
Your young stern profile and industrious fingers
Displayed against the blind in a shadow show,
To Dinda’s grave delight.
The needle dips and pokes, the cheerful thread
Runs after, follow-my-leader down the seam:
The patchwork pieces cry for joy together,
O soon to sit as a crown on Dinda’s head,
Fulfilment of their dream.
Snippets and odd ends folded by, forgotten,
With camphor on the top shelf, hard to find,
Now wake to this most happy resurrection,
To Dinda playing toss with a reel of cotton
And staring at the blind.
Dinda in sing-song stretching out one hand
Calls for the playthings; mother does not hear:
Her mind sails far away on a patchwork Ocean,
And all the world must wait till she touches land,
So Dinda cries in fear,
Then Mother turns, laughing like a young fairy,
And Dinda smiles to see her look so kind,
Calls out again for playthings, playthings, playthings,
And now the shadows make an Umbrian ‘Mary
Adoring’, on the blind.
KIT LOGAN AND LADY HELEN
Here is Kit Logan with her love-child come
To Lady Helen’s gate:
Then down sweeps Helen from the Italian room,
She, with her child of hate.
Kit’s boy was born of violent hot desire,
Helen’s of hate and dread:
Poor girl, betrayed to union with the Squire,
Loathing her marriage bed.
Kit Logan, who is father to your boy?
But Helen knows, too well:
Listen what biting taunts they both employ,
Watch their red anger swell.
Yet each would give her undying soul to be
Changed to the other’s place.
Kit from the wet road’s tasking cruelty
Looks up to silk and lace,
Helen looks down at rags, her fluttering pride
Caught in this cage of glass,
Eager to trudge, thieve, beg by the road-side,
Or starving to eat grass…
Silence. Wrath dies. For Woman�
�s old good name
Each swears a sister’s oath;
Weeping, they kiss; to the Squire’s lasting shame,
Who broke the heart in both.
DOWN
Downstairs a clock had chimed, two o’clock only.
Then outside from the hen-roost crowing came.
Why should the shift-wing call against the clock,
Three hours from dawn? Now shutters click and knock,
And he remembers a sad superstition
Unfitting for the sick-bed….Turn aside,
Distract, divide, ponder the simple tales
That puzzled childhood; riddles, turn them over –
Half-riddles, answerless, the more intense.
Lost bars of music tinkling with no sense
Recur, drowning uneasy superstition.
Mouth open he was lying, this sick man,
And sinking all the while; how had he come
To sink? On better nights his dream went flying,
Dipping, sailing the pasture of his sleep,
But now (since clock and cock) had sunk him down
Through mattress, bed, floor, floors beneath, stairs, cellars,
Through deep foundations of the manse; still sinking
Through unturned earth. How had he magicked space
With inadvertent motion or word uttered
Of too-close-packed intelligence (such there are),
That he should penetrate with sliding ease
Dense earth, compound of ages, granite ribs
And groins? Consider: there was some word uttered,
Some abracadabra – then, like a stage-ghost,
Funereally with weeping, down, drowned, lost!
Oh, to be a child once more, sprawling at ease
On smooth turf of a ruined castle court!
Once he had dropped a stone between the slabs
That masked an ancient well, mysteriously
Plunging his mind down with it. Hear it go
Rattling and rocketing into secret void!
Count slowly: one, two, three! and echoes come
Fainter and fainter, merged in the general hum
Of bees and flies; only a thin draught rises
To chill the drowsy air. There he had lain
As if unborn, until life floated back
From the deep waters.
Oh, to renew now
That bliss of repossession, kindly sun
Forfeit for ever, and the towering sky!
Falling, falling! Day closed up behind him.
Now stunned by the violent subterrene flow
Of rivers, whirling down to hiss below
On the flame-axis of this terrible earth;
Toppling upon their waterfall, O spirit….
SAUL OF TARSUS
‘Share and share alike
In the nest’ was the rule,
But Paul had a wide throat,
He loved his belly-full.
Over the edge went Peter,
After him went John,
True-blooded young nestlings
Thrown out, one by one.
If Mother Church was proud
Of her great cuckoo son,
He bit off her simple head
Before he had done.
STORM: AT THE FARM WINDOW
The unruly member (for relief
Of aching head) clacks without care;
Pastures lie sullen; hung with grief
The steading: thunder binds the air.
Gulls on the blue sea-surface rock:
The cows move lowing to scant shade;
Jess lays aside the half-worked smock,
Dan, in his ditch, lets fall the spade.
Now swoops the outrageous hurricane
With lightning in steep pitchfork jags;
The blanched hill leaps in sheeted rain,
Sea masses white to assault the crags.
Such menace tottering overhead,
Old Jess for ague scolds no more;
She sees grey bobtail flung down dead
Lightning-blazed by the barn door –
Wonder and panic chase our grief,
Purge our thick distempered blood;
Man, cattle, harvest shock and sheaf,
Stagger below the sluicing flood….
BLACK HORSE LANE
Dame Jane the music mistress,
the music mistress;
Sharkie the baker of Black Horse Lane,
At sound of a fiddle
Caught her up by the middle –
And away like swallows from the lane,
Flying out together –
From the crooked lane.
What words said Sharkie to her,
said Sharkie to her?
How did she look in the lane?
No neighbour heard
One sigh or one word,
Not a sound but the fiddling in Black Horse Lane,
The happy noise of music –
Again and again.
Where now be those two old ’uns,
be those two old ’uns?
Sharkie the baker run off with Jane?
Hark ye up to Flint Street,
Halloo to Pepper-Mint Street,
Follow by the fells to the great North Plain,
By the fells and the river –
To the cold North Plain.
How came this passion to them,
this passion to them,
Love in a freshet on Black Horse Lane?
It came without warning
One blue windy morning
So they scarcely might know was it joy or pain,
With scarce breath to wonder –
Was it joy or pain.
Took they no fardels with them,
no fardels with them,
Out and alone on the ice-bound plain?
Sharkie he had rockets
And crackers in his pockets,
Aye, and she had a plaid shawl to keep off the rain,
An old Highland plaid shawl –
To keep off the rain.
RETURN
The seven years’ curse is ended now
That drove me forth from this kind land,
From mulberry-bough and apple-bough
And gummy twigs the west wind shakes,
To drink the brine from crusted lakes
And grit my teeth on sand.
Now for your cold, malicious brain
And most uncharitable, cold heart,
You, too, shall clank the seven years’ chain
On sterile ground for all time cursed
With famine’s itch and flames of thirst,
The blank sky’s counterpart.
The load that from my shoulder slips
Straightway upon your own is tied:
You, too, shall scorch your finger-tips
With scrabbling on the desert’s face
Such thoughts I had of this green place,
Sent scapegoat for your pride.
Here, Robin on a tussock sits,
And Cuckoo with his call of hope
Cuckoos awhile, then off he flits,
While peals of dingle-dongle keep
Troop-discipline among the sheep
That graze across the slope.
A brook from fields of gentle sun
Through the glade its water heaves,
The falling cone would well-nigh stun
That Squirrel wantonly lets drop
When up he scampers to tree-top
And dives among the green.
But no, I ask a surer peace
Than vengeance on you could provide.
So fear no ill from my release:
Be off, elude the curse, disgrace
Some other green and happy place –
This world of fools is wide.
INCUBUS
Asleep, amazed, with lolling head,
Arms in supplication spread,
Body shudders, dumb with fear;
There lif
ts the Moon, but who am I,
Cloaked in shadow wavering by,
Stooping, muttering at his ear?
Bound is Body, foot and hand,
Bound to lie at my command,
Horror bolted to lie still
While I sap what sense I will.
Through the darkness here come I,
Softly fold about the prey;
Body moaning must obey,
Must not question who or why,
Must accept me, come what may,
Dumbly must obey.
When owls and cocks dispute the dawn,
Through the window I am drawn
Streaming out, a foggy breath.
…Body waking with a sigh
From the spell that was half Death,
Smiles for freedom, blinks an eye
At the sun-commanded sky,
‘O morning scent and tree-top song,
Slow-rising smoke and nothing wrong!’
THE HILLS OF MAY
Walking with a virgin heart
The green hills of May,
Me, the Wind, she took as lover
By her side to play,
Let me toss her untied hair,
Let me shake her gown,
Careless though the daisies redden,
Though the sun frown,
Scorning in her gay habit
Lesser love than this,
My cool spiritual embracing,
My secret kiss.
So she walked, the proud lady,
So danced or ran,
So she loved with a whole heart,
Neglecting man….
Fade, fail, innocent stars
On the green of May:
She has left our bournes for ever,
Too fine to stay.
THE CORONATION MURDER
Old Becker crawling in the night
From his grave at the stair-foot,
Labours up the long flight,
Feeble, dribbling, black as soot,
Quakes at his own ghostly fright.
A cat goes past with lantern eyes,
Shooting splendour through the dark.
‘Murder! Help!’ a voice cries
In nightmare; the son dreams that stark
In lead his vanished father lies.
A stair-top glimmer points the goal.
Becker goes wavering up, tongue-tied,
Stoops, with eye to keyhole….
There, a tall candle by her side,
Delilah sits, serene and whole.
Her fingers turn the prayer-book leaves
And, free from spiritual strife,
Soft and calm her breast heaves:
Thus calmly with his cobbling knife
She stabbed him through; now never grieves.