Can make grass grow, coax lilies up
From bud to blossom as she watches,
Lets fish eat from her palm;
Has founded villages, planted groves
And hollowed valleys for brooks running
Cool to a land-locked bay.
I never dared question my love
About the government of her queendom
Or its geography,
Nor followed her between those birches,
Setting one leg astride the gate,
Spying into the mist.
Yet she has pledged me, when I die,
A lodge beneath her private palace
In a level clearing of the wood
Where gentians grow and gillyflowers
And sometimes we may meet.
SELDOM YET NOW
Seldom yet now: the quality
Of this fierce love between us –
Seldom the encounter,
The presence always,
Free of oath or promise.
And if we were not so
But birds of similar plumage caged
In the peace of every day,
Would we still conjure wildfire up
From common earth, as now?
TO MYRTO OF MYRTLES
Goddess of Midsummer, how late
You let me understand
My lines of head, life, fate
And heart: a broad M brand
Inerasable from either hand.
ANCHISES TO APHRODITE
Your sceptre awes me, Aphrodite,
The knot-of-wisdom in your grasp.
Though you have deigned my couch to warm
And my firm neck in love to clasp,
How am I more than a man-lion
To you a goddess, the world’s queen?
Ten thousand champions of your choice
Are gone as if they had not been.
Yet while you grant me power to stem
The tide’s unalterable flow,
Enroyalled I await your pleasure
And starve if you would have it so.
A LOST WORLD
‘Dear love, why should you weep
For time’s remorseless way?
Though today die in sleep
And be called yesterday,
We love, we stay.’
‘I weep for days that died
With former love that shone
On a world true and wide
Before this newer one
Which yours shines on.’
‘Is this world not as true
As that one ever was
Which now has fled from you
Like shadows from the grass
When the clouds pass?’
‘Yet for that would I weep
Kindly, before we kiss:
Love has a faith to keep
With past felicities
That weep for this.’
THE DANGEROUS GIFT
Were I to cut my hand
On that sharp knife you gave me
(That dangerous knife, your beauty),
I should know what to do:
Bandage the wound myself
And hide the blood from you.
A murderous knife it is,
As often you have warned me:
For if I looked for pity
Or tried a wheedling note
Either I must restore it
Or turn it on my throat.
SURGICAL WARD: MEN
Something occurred after the operation
To scare the surgeons (though no fault of theirs),
Whose reassurance did not fool me long.
Beyond the shy, concerned faces of nurses
A single white-hot eye, focusing on me,
Forced sweat in rivers down from scalp to belly.
I whistled, gasped or sang, with blanching knuckles
Clutched at my bed-grip almost till it cracked:
Too proud, still, to let loose Bedlamite screeches
And bring the charge-nurse scuttling down the aisle
With morphia-needle leveled…
Lady Morphia –
Her scorpion kiss and dark gyrating dreams –
She in mistrust of whom I dared out-dare,
Two minutes longer than seemed possible,
Pain, that unpurposed, matchless elemental
Stronger than fear or grief, stranger than love.
A black wall from the east, toppling, arches the tall sky over
To drown what innocent pale western lights yet cover
Cloud banks of expired sunset; so goodbye, sweet day!
From earliest green you sprang, in green tenderly glide away…
Had I never noticed, on watch before at a humbler height,
That crowding through dawn’s gate come night and dead of night?
THE SIMPLETON
To be defrauded often of large sums,
A whole year’s income, even,
By friends trusted so long and perfectly
He never thought to ask receipts from them:
Such had been his misfortune.
He did not undervalue money, sighed for
Those banknotes, warm in the breast pocket,
For want of which his plans were baulked;
But could not claim that any man had left him
In complete poverty.
Easier to choke back resentment,
Never to sue them, never pit in court
His unsupported oath against theirs;
Easier not to change a forsworn friend
For a sworn enemy.
Easier, too, to scoff at legal safeguards,
Promissories on pale-blue foolscap
Sealed, signed, delivered before witnesses.
What legal safeguard had a full wallet
Carried among a crowd?
But though he preened himself on calmly
Cancelling irrecoverable debts,
It vexed him not to know
Why all his oldest, dearest friends conspired
To pluck him like a fowl.
TWO RHYMES ABOUT FATE AND MONEY
‘Neighbour, neighbour, don’t forget:
Thirty shillings due tomorrow!’
Fate and mammon rule us yet,
In the midst of life we are in debt,
Here to pay and gone to borrow.
How and why
Poets die,
That’s a dismal tale:
Some take a spill
On Guinea Hill,
Some drown in ale,
Some get lost
At sea, or crossed
In love with cruel witches,
But some attain
Long life and reign
Like Popes among their riches.
THE TWO WITCHES
O sixteen hundred and ninety-one,
Never was year so well begun,
Backsy-forsy and inside out,
The best of years to ballad about.
On the first fine day of January
I ran to my sweetheart Margery
And tossed her over the roof so far
That down she fell like a shooting star.
But when we two had frolicked and kissed
She clapped her fingers about my wrist
And tossed me over the chimney stack,
And danced on me till my bones did crack.
Then, when she had laboured to ease my pain,
We sat by the stile of Robin’s Lane,
She in a hare and I in a toad
And puffed at the clouds till merry they glowed.
We spelled our loves until close of day.
I wished her good-night and walked away,
But she put out a tongue that was long and red
And swallowed me down like a crumb of bread.
BURN IT!
Fetch your book here.
That you have fought with it for half a year
(Chri
stmas till May)
Not intermittently but night and day
Need but enhance your satisfaction
In swift and wholesome action.
Write off the expense
Of stationery against experience,
And salvage no small beauties or half-lines.
You took the wrong turn, disregarded signs
Winking along your track,
Until too close-committed to turn back.
Fetch the book here
And burn it without fear,
Grateful at least that, having gone so far,
You still know what truth is and where you are,
With better things to say
In your own bold, unmarketable way.
SONG: COME, ENJOY YOUR SUNDAY!
Into your outstretched hands come pouring
Gifts by the cornucopiaful –
What else is lacking?
Come, enjoy your Sunday
While yet you may!
Cease from unnecessary labours,
Saunter into the green world stretching far,
Light a long cigar,
Come, enjoy your Sunday
While yet you may!
What more, what more? You fended off disaster
In a long war, never acknowledging
Any man as master;
Come, enjoy your Sunday
While yet you may!
Are you afraid of death? But death is nothing:
The leaden seal set on a filled flask.
If it be life you ask,
Come, enjoy your Sunday
While yet you may!
On a warm sand dune now, sprawling at ease
With little in mind, learn to despise the sea’s
Unhuman restlessness:
Come, enjoy your Sunday
While yet you may!
From Collected Poems 1961
(1961)
RUBY AND AMETHYST
Two women: one as good as bread,
Bound to a sturdy husband.
Two women: one as rare as myrrh,
Bound only to herself.
Two women: one as good as bread,
Faithful to every promise.
Two women: one as rare as myrrh,
Who never pledges faith.
The one a flawless ruby wears
But with such innocent pleasure
A stranger’s eye might think it glass
And take no closer look.
Two women: one as good as bread,
The noblest of the city.
Two women: one as rare as myrrh,
Who needs no public praise.
The pale rose-amethyst on her breast
Has such a garden in it
Your eye could trespass there for hours,
And wonder, and be lost.
About her head a swallow wheels
Nor ever breaks the circuit:
Glory and awe of womanhood
Still undeclared to man.
Two women: one as good as bread,
Resistant to all weathers.
Two women: one as rare as myrrh,
Her weather still her own.
From The More Deserving Cases
(1962)
THE MILLER’S MAN
The imperturbable miller’s man
Whose help the boy implored, drowning,
Drifting slowly past the mill,
Was a stout swimmer, yet would not come between
The river-god and his assured victim.
Soon he, too, swimming in the sun,
Is caught with cramp; and the boy’s ghost
Jeers from the reeds and rushes.
But he drowns valiantly in silence,
This being no one’s business but his own.
Let us not reckon the miller’s man
With Judas or with Jesus,
But with the cattle, who endure all weathers,
Or with the mill-wheel foolishly creaking,
Incurious of the grain in the bins.
JULY 24TH
July the twenty-fourth, a day
Heavy with clouds that would not spill
On the disconsolate earth.
Across the road in docile chorus
School-children raised their morning hymn to God
Who still forgot their names and their petitions.
‘What an age to be born in!’ cried old Jamboree.
‘Two world wars in one generation!’
‘However,’ said I, ‘the plum crop should be heavy!’
What was the glass doing? The glass was low.
The Germans claimed to have stormed the town of Rostov.
Sweden dismissed the claim as premature.
Not a single painter left in the neighbourhood –
All were repainting ruined Exeter.
We had no earthly right to grumble… No?
I was reading a book about bone artifacts
In the age of the elk or woolly rhinoceros.
Already, it seems, man had a high culture.
A clerk wrote from the Ministry of Labour
To ask what reasons (if any) would prevent me
From serving in the Devonshire Home Guard.
Soon the Americans would be here: the patter
Of their rubber heels sounding like summer rain.
So pleasantly passed my forty-seventh birthday.
SAFE RECEIPT OF A CENSORED LETTER
As the war lengthened, the mail shrank:
And now the Military Censor’s clerk
Caught up with correspondence twelve months old –
But letters in a foreign language waited
Five months more.
‘Time,’ he said, ‘is the best Censor:
Secret movements of troops and guns, even,
Become historical, cease to concern.
These uninterpretable items may be
Passed at last.’
Your letter was among the favoured –
Dateless familiar gossip of the village.
Thus you (who died a year ago) succeed,
Old rogue, in circumventing a more rigid
Censorship.
From New Poems 1962
(1962)
RECOGNITION
When on the cliffs we met, by chance,
I startled at your quiet voice
And watched the swallows round you dance
Like children that had made a choice.
Simple it was, as I stood there,
To penetrate the mask you wore,
Your secret lineage to declare
And your lost dignities restore.
Yet thus I earned a poet’s fee
So far out-distancing desire
That swallows yell in rage at me
As who would set their world on fire.
THE WATCH
Since the night in which you stole
Like a phantom to my bed,
Seized my throat and from it wrung
Vows that could not be unsaid,
Here beneath my arching ribs
Red-hot embers, primed to be
Blown upon by winds of love,
Scorch away mortality.
Like sledgehammers my two fists,
My broad forehead grim with pride,
Muscles corded on my calves
And my frame gigantified.
Yet your watching for an hour
That our mutual stars will bless
Proves you more entranced than I
Who go parched in hope of less.
NAME DAY
Tears of delight that on my name-day
She gave me nothing, and in return
Accepted every gift I heaped upon her –
Call me the richest poet alive!
UNCALENDARED LOVE
The first name cut on a rock, a King’s,
Marked the beginning of time’s annals;
And each new year would recapitulate
The unkind sloughings and rene
wals
Of the death-serpent’s chequered coat.
But you with me together, together, together,
Survive ordeals never before endured:
We snatch the quill out of Enoch’s hand
To obliterate our names from his black scroll –
Twin absentees of time.
Ours is uncalendared love, whole life,
As long or brief as befalls. Alone, together,
Recalling little, prophesying less,
We watch the serpent, crushed by your bare heel,
Rainbow his scales in a deathward agony.
THE MEETING
We, two elementals, woman and man,
Approached each other from far away:
I on the lower wind, she on the upper.
And the faith with which we came invested
By the blind thousands of our twin worlds
Formed thunder clouds about us.
Never such uproar as when we met,
Nor such forked lightning; rain in a cataract
Tumbled on deserts dry these thousand years.
What of the meteorologists?
They said nothing, turned their faces away,
Let the event pass unrecorded.
And what of us? We also said nothing.
Is it not the height of silent humour
To cause an unknown change in the earth’s climate?
LACK
Born from ignoble stock on a day of dearth
He tramps the roads, trailing his withered branch,
And grudges every beauty of the wide earth.
Lack is his name, and although in gentleness
You set him honourably at the high table
And load his plate with luxury of excess,
Crying: ‘Eat well, brother, and drink your fill’,
Yet with hunger whetted only, he boasts aloud:
‘I have never begged a favour, nor ever will!’
His clothes are sad, but a burly wretch is he,
Of lustreless look, slack mouth, a borrowed wit,
And a sigh that would charm the song-bird from her tree.
Now he casts his eye in greed upon your demesne
With open mockery of a heart so open
It dares this gallows-climber to entertain.
NOT AT HOME
Her house loomed at the end of a Berkshire lane,
Tall but retired. She was expecting me;