TEXT CROSS WITHIN THE BOOK ONLY CO 66926 >m CO Gift of YALE UNIVERSITY With the aid of the ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION 1949 THE NEW BRITISH POETS By Kenneth Rexroth POETRY In What Hour The Phoenix and The Tortoise The Signature of All Things EDITOR Selected Poems of D. H. Lawrence California Poets "The ^British AN ANTHOLOGY EDITED BY KENNETH REXROTH A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For permission to reprint the poems appearing in this volume acknowledgments are due to the following pub- lishers and periodicals, both British and American: Jonathan Cape Ltd., Circle, Contemporary Poetry <fc Prose ; The Cornbill, Andrew Dakers Ltd., Doubleday & Co., The Dublin Magazine, Dutton, Faber & Faber, Focus, The Fortune Press, TheGrey Walls Press, The Hogarth Press, Henry Holt & Co., Horizon, Illiterate Alfred Knopf, Leaven, John Lehmann Ltd., Life & Letters, The Listener, The London Mercury, The Macmillan Co., William McClellan, New Road, New Verse, The Oxford University Press, Poetry Chicago, Poetry Folios, Poetry London, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, Random House, George Routledge Ltd., Martin Seeker & Warburg, The Seizin Press, Time & Tide, Transformation, The Viking Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No material from this volume may be reprinted, broadcast or performed without permission in writing from its author. PRINTED IN ITALY BY THE OFFICINE TIPOGRAFICHE A. MONDADORI AT VERONA AS EVER - TO MY WIFE MARIE AND TO MY FRIEND JIM LAUGHLIN THE POETS Louis ADEANE KENNETH ALLOTT GEORGE BARKER JOHN BATE 296 JOHN BAYLISS .... 13 AUDREY BEECHAM . . . 297 ALISON BOODSON ... 18 GEORGE BRUCE .... 298 BRENDA CHAMBERLAIN . 21 ALEX COMFORT .... 24 FRANCIS DOUGLAS DAVISON 299 KEITH DOUGLAS ... 33 ADAM DRINAN .... 41 LAWRENCE DURRELL . . 44 PATRICK EVANS .... 54 GAVIN EWART .... 56 G. S. ERASER 57 ROY FULLER 63 WREY GARDINER .... 71 ROBERT GARIOCH ... 74 DAVID GASCOYNE ... 75 W. S. GRAHAM .... 85 JOHN HEATH-STUBBS . . 87 J. F. HBNDRY .... 90 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL . . 93 NIGEL HESELTINE ... 97 SEANjBNNETT IO3 GLYN JONES 108 SIDNEY KBYES .... no JAMES KIRKUP .... 300 LAURIE LEE in DEMISE LEVERTOV . . . 113 ALUN LEWIS 118 EMANUEL LITVTNOV . . 119 NORMAN McCAiG ... 122 HUGH MACDIARMID . . 124 SORLEY MACLEAN ... 129 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD 134 CHARLES MADGE . . . 139 Os MARRON 146 WILLIAM MONTGOMERY . 147 NICHOLAS MOORE ... 148 DOUGLAS NEWTON . . . 158 NORMAN NICHOLSON . . 160 JULIAN ORDE 301 PAUL POTTS 301 F. T. PRINCE .... 167 KATHLEEN RAINE ... 169 HENRY REED 179 KEIDRYCH RHYS . . . . 180 ANNB RIDLBR .... 184 LYNETTE ROBERTS ... 192 W. R. RODGERS .... 195 D. S. SAVAGE .... 207 FRANCIS SCARFE . . . . 212 SIDNEY GOODSIR SMITH . . 218 WILLIAM SOUTAR ... 221 BERNARD SPENCER . . . 227 STEPHEN SPENDER ... 229 HENRY TREECE .... 263: DEREK STANFORD . . . 234 JOHN WALLER .... 267 JULIAN SYMONS .... 237 VERNON W ATKINS . . . 270 DYLAN THOMAS .... 241 EITHNE WILKINS ... 275 TERENCE TILLER .... 250 GEORGE WOODCOCK . . 288 RUTHVEN TODD ... 256 DAVID WRIGHT .... 2p5 INTRODUCTION IN the early years of the world economic crisis, a group of young British poets came into great prominence both in England and America. From 1932 to 1937 they spoke for a world on the eve of disaster. Their success was tremendous. Everyone knows their names : W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and their friends and associates. In 1937 a change of taste, a reaction, set in. It was inconspicuous at first, but with the onset of universal war, most of the poetry being written in England was of a new and dif- ferent kind. At the least it was a new manner, at the best it was a new vision. Most of its adherents and practitioners call themselves Romantics. It is the purpose of this collection to represent the work of those British poets who have come to prominence since 1937 as extensively as possible. It is not a Romantic collection, in the sense of being weighted in favor of that tendency. I have included as wide a representation as I could of the English poets who were born during or after 1908, that is, who will be forty or under on the publication of this book. In addition, I have tried to give some picture of the extremely active Scottish literary renascence, without regard to age. Looking back, it seems today that the Auden circle was more a merchandizing co-operative than a literary school. Certainly its members have drifted far apart. Auden himself is now an American citizen. His influence in England is slight. To use Ossietsky's phrase, his voice sounded hollow across a frontier and ocean to his juniors who were sitting out die London blitz. His sympathy with Marxism, never too well grounded, has vanished and he has almost forgotten his special mythology, the Public Schoolboy, the garden party, the country house; and with Mr. Gerald Heard, sometime science popu- larizer for the B. B. C., he has become the spokesman for a pecu- liarly American, Hollywoodweary religiosity. Cecil Day Lewis, like Louis Aragon and others of that kidney, has become a conventional if not a popular writer. Louis MacNeice is trying desperately to cure himself of the bad habits of his youth, the flat, "wise," pedestrian writing that earned him the label of the perfect urban poet. Minor figures in the group, like Rex Warner, have taken to novels, or disappeared, or both. VII INTRODUCTION Only Stephen Spender has made a transition into the new period, and for reasons I shall discuss later, this has not been difficult for him. Contemporary with the Auden circle, more or less, were two other groups, not as well known in America, but, in their day, very in- fluential in England: the Cambridge metaphysicals, and the objecti- vists who contributed to New Verse. Auden's friends were mostly Oxonians. At Cambridge a group grew up around William Empson, the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, which included Charles Madge, Richard Eberhart and Kathleen Raine. There was something peculiarly American about them, something a little barbarous and Poe-esque. The Auden circle were very British, and seemed to believe that poetry could best be written from an attitude, a very British attitude exemplified by Byron's satires, Prior, Peacock, Clough, Lear, Benson, Calverly, Belloc, and the authors of the best dirty limericks. At utilitarian Cambridge, on the other hand, there is more than a suspicion that they believed that you could write poetry from a formula, and that, if you searched hard enough and with scientific methods learned from Ogden and Richards, you were sure to find the formula, wha^t with all our modern advantages. Empson's own poetry, when it is "ambiguous," is like nothing so much as something vast built with an Erector set, complex, insensitive and dispassionate. At his best he actually resembles Auden when he is at his best, simple, wistful, and conscience ridden again, not unlike Arthur Hugh Clough. In the medium he and his group tried to develop, the American meta- physicals fostered by John Crowe Ransom are incomparably bet- ter. It is significant that the American poet, Richard Eberhart, who was at Cambridge for a while, is the best poet to have come under Empson's influence. He, certainly, does not believe that it is possible to discover a recipe for writing like John Donne. Another exception is Kathleen Raine, the youngest of the group, who has moved on and grown and is one of the leading poets of the new period. Geoffrey Grigson, the editor of New Verse, is usually looked on as the founder and leader of British Objectivism, which needs careful distinction from the American school of the same name. American Objectivism, of which I happened to be an unwilling leader, took VIII INTRODUCTION off from William Carlos Williams, Pound, the Stein of Tender But- tons, Yvor Winters' early work, and a variety of French writers Cendrars, Apollinaire, Cocteau, MacOrlan, Deltiel, Soupault, and certain phases of Aragon, Tzara and Eluard. I suppose it could be called the last gasp of literary cubism. Like cubism, it depended far more on an entranced sense of hyper-reality, a sort of hallucination of fact, than on its fancied objectivity. There was nothing of this in British Objectivism, neither the learning, nor the revolt, nor the international connections, nor the rarefied aesthetics. They just put it down as it came. The results are often startling. It is difficult to understand, sometimes, what Grigson himself thought he was getting at with his inventories of seascapes and city streets one expects to find a notice of a Sheriff's Sale at the end of the poem. At its best this tendency produced writing somewhat like MacNeice's flattest exercises but with more things in it. Constituting as it did a technique of discretion and suppression, the flat, tightly cemented armor plate of stuff sometimes accumulated quite a head of steam underneath. Kenneth Allott and Bernard Smith, for instance, really have a lot of banked fire in them. Grigson did teach many to write simply, lucidly, without posturing or trickery, which is all to the good. His influence on younger men like Ruthven Todd has been nothing but salutary. Julian Symons' Twentieth Century Verse was another focus for tenden- cies indistinguishable from the Auden circle, but which included a somewhat different set of people. Symons himself, and Roy Fuller both of whom have changed considerably since those days are the most important members of this group. Fuller is one poet to whom the term classical can be applied with justice. His work has a clarity, order, and succinctness which is ex- ceptional in present day England. At the same time he is personally involved in his expression, in the same way as the best Romantic poets. Independent of all this, there was lightning in the mountains to the North Hugh Macdiarmid and the Scottish Renascence, a completely separate phenomenon in, for cultural purposes at least, a separate IX INTRODUCTION country. It is surprising how little influence the work of a major poet and hyperactive publicist like Macdiarmid has had in England. In 1948, the majority of British poets under forty consider themselves Romantics, and look on the preceding period as one of Classicism. The movement, which has certainly been a revolution, and which has very nearly swept all before it, is known officially as Romanti- cism. I realize that everybody knows what Romanticism and Classi- cism mean, but I am very suspicious of the words. They did not come into existence until well on in the Romantic period. Horace and Virgil did not look on Catullus as a Romantic. I think it is as misleading to describe Auden as a Classicist as it is so to describe Byron. It is better to try and find out what happened. On the eve of the second war, the intellectual world generally was still dominated by the gospel of artistic impersonality, inherited from the nineteenth century "scientific," "exact aesthetic," and the op- posed cult of artistic irresponsibility, "Art for Art's Sake." Mallarme, Valery, Cubism, much Marxism, the dubious "Thomism" of M. Maritain, T.S. Eliot, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, I. A.Richards, most Surrealists it was almost universally taught and believed that the work of art was not communicative, was not "about anything." Instead, it should be approached empirically, from a utilitarian basis, as an object existing in its own right, a sort of machine for precipi- tating an "aesthetic experience." The artist's job was to be a con- summate craftsman, to construct his machine so that it would go off at just the right time in the spectator's face, and have just exactly the intended effects. However, like the manufacturers of most time bombs and infernal machines, he should exercise the greatest caution not to leave any fingerprints in the machinery. As nearly as pos- sible, the work of art should seem to be a sort of minor Act of God, a sublime, impersonal accident. The job of the critic, who preferred to be called an aesthetician, was to pick up the pieces and reconstruct the machine, so that other machines like it could be made, and so that the spectator would have a clinical knowledge of what was expected of him the next time one went off. If there were any tell- tale fingerprints around, they were ignored with a nervous little laugh as the business of vulgar detectives. This theory completely INTRODUCTION dominated European art for almost half a century. There is only one trouble with it, and that is that it isn't true. There are no such works of art. The painting of Picasso, or even Mondrian, the sculpture of Brancusi, the poetry of Eliot or Vale*ry, the music of Stravinsky, they are all intensely personal. In fact, they are amongst the most personal works of art in the history of culture. I believe that this rigorous rationalism, this supression of all acknow- ledgement of personality, feeling, intuition, the denial of communi- cation and of the existence of emotion, is part of the general sickness of the world, the Romantic Agony, the splitting of the modern personality, the attempt to divorce the brain from the rest of the nervous system. Reason and emotion, Nell Gwynne and Cromwell, puritanism and libertinism, stare in each other's eyes across the mind of modern, especially modern British and American, man. Where- ever a poet of major talent has tried to hide himself behind his reason as though it were some abstract, geometrical facade, he has only succeeded in further torturing and exposing his personality. Thus the abiding unity in the work of Valery is not his sweated Racine surface, but his specialized sensibility, his pained fastidiousness, and his special hell. Minor talents flourish under the encouragement of neo-classic fashions only because there are always handy-men about with nothing to hide and nothing to expose. So with British poetry of the first years of the world crisis. All these carefully cultivated echoes of Mother Goose, the Anti-Jacobin, Ed- ward Lear, Cole Porter, W. S. Gilbert, Anglo-Saxon riddles, The Face On The Bar Room Floor, were well enough understood in America as masks, like the masks in the paintings of Max Beckman, hiding something very unhappy if not nasty. That was precisely the point. By speaking slowly and distinctly in a quiet voice, with com- mon accents, one might get the patient to pay attention. The most effective warning of onrushing disaster is presumed to be the one spoken with the minimum of affect. Then too, it is apparent that the constant theme of Auden's poetry, at least, is: "I am just as sick, if not a little sicker, than thee." The trouble was that the idiom, this strange high-brow music-hall jargon, was too artificial, too dis- honest as speech, to wear well. It was a carefully learned bedside XI INTRODUCTION manner, a kind of dialect verse; and nothing is more distressing than poor dialect verse once it has gone out of date. W. H. Auden's New Year's Letter, the worst book he has written and one of the worst books of our time, reminds me of nothing so much as J. V. Weaver's In American, or James Whitcomb Riley. It is just the unsuccessful recording of the patois of a different social level. As a matter of fact, Auden has consistently preached personal involvement, personal responsibility but his language has slipped deeper and deeper into his own special literary cocktailese, it has grown harder and harder to believe him. He never seems, himself, to be really involved, to ever practice what he preaches. His Chinese, Iceland and Spanish books have a shallow, flippant impersonality about them which makes very unpleasant reading. Sometimes this all falls away, as in the September 1939 poem and "Human on my faithless arm;'* again and again in Auden there is a profoundly moving, despairing, nightbound, personal cry, and then back again comes the old snide bright jargon. I think the reaction against him is much less than the reactors imagine. Most of them are acting on the imperatives of his best poems, and few of them have escaped from his worst fault a peculiar rhetorical imprecision of language, a tendency to talk in terms of secondary reference instead of presentational immediacy, which is the besetting sin of most British verse with the exceptions of D.H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford and Herbert Read. However much the practice of Auden himself may have been mis- understood, and however little it was lived up to, there is no doubt that there did exist in England a well established cult of imperson- ality, ultimately of artistic irresponsibility, unchallenged until the eve of the war. I think it was the events of the years 1935-36-37, more than any literary factors, which forced the issue of communi- cation, the person to person responsibility of artistic creation, back into prominence. Along with this aesthetics went, as everyone knows, a political pro- gram, or at least attitude Marxism or what passed for Marxism that is, a greater or less degree of sympathy and identification with the maneuvers of Russian foreign policy. One would think that revolutionary politics and aesthetic impersonalism would be XII INTRODUCTION contradictory, but Bolshevism is precisely an anti-personal, anti- humane revolution. The whole point of Marxism is that the mil- lenium occurs by accident, everything gets worse and worse until suddenly we are living in the best of all possible worlds. Furthermore* the artists in uniform of Bolshevik culture have no place for Blakes, Shelleys and Lawrences in their ranks. The job of the artist is to turn out, exactly as an American advertising copy writer, the most per- suasive devices possible. The content is supplied by the client, in this case, the Russian Bureaucracy. This led to a lot of agonized theorizing about the relation of form and content amongst the more honest fellow travellers. This is a childish question, which answers itself, and it was pitiful to see men of intelligence fretting themselves over a pseudo problem which had never before appeared in serious cri- ticism or aesthetics. The reason being, of course, that humane men had never before got themselves in such a predicament. Today, lit- erary Marxism has vanished in England, but it would be very un- wise to underestimate its importance. At one time it was all-powerful. The attempted Marxization of literature had effects not unlike the forced collectivization of agriculture in Russia. People noticed the baby going down the drain with the bath. Poetry was ceasing to be about anything more important than sociological formulae. Just at this time the Spanish War broke out. Then, after the first flush of enthusiasm had been cultivated carefully by the Popular Front, came the Moscow Trials, like a year-long bludgeoning of the naked heart, and, following the Trials, the manifest butchery of the Spanish Revo- lution for the exigencies of Russian foreign policy. The terror and betrayal of those years seem to have had a far more profound effect over there. In America the intellectual Left took it all pretty much in stride. It seemed, from the distance of Hollywood or 57th Street at least, no worse than Al Capone's antics, and it was for the worthiest of objects, the eventual brotherhood of man. The humane tradition did not die so easily in England. British opinion was outraged, and revolted violently. Then too, most British obser- vers in Spain were at least partially independent of the Stalinists and their whiskey-soaked, hairy-chested journalists who looked on the SpanishWar as a somewhat more thrilling bull fight. The Independent XIII INTRODUCTION Labor Party had a group there, naturally in sympathy with the most persecuted Spanish group, the P.O.U.M., there were many Labor Party people, and even the British Stalinists were controlled by their political commissars only with difficulty. This is all important. I believe that Spain, more than the Trials, the Pact, or even the War itself, marked the climacteric in British intellectual life, and I have never spoken or corresponded with anyone who did not agree with me. The moral earnestness and personal integrity which have been supposed to be typically British virtues reasserted themselves decidedly, even in the ranks of those who should have recovered from such petty bourgeois deviations. It is precisely these characteristics which were to be sought and cultivated deliberately in the ensuing period, and it is a moral quality, rather than a literary theory, which marks the New Romanticism. After the Spanish War it is almost as though literary England with- drew in a sort of uneasy, wounded isolation from European letters. There was a brief, half-hearted attempt to popularize Surrealism. Her- bert Read talked about it and wrote about it. There were Surrealist magazines and galleries. David Gascoyne, then a very young man, became its most enthusiastic spokesman and exponent. British Sur- realism never fell into the idle silliness of male hair dressers and par- fumistes, like its American counterpart, but it never took on. Since it had already died at its source the best French Surrealists had long since become Stalinists the British, closer to France than the Amer- icans, realized that Breton's little remant were as isolated, as fu- rious, and as meaningless, as their political bedfellows, the Trotskyites. Then too, if Marxism was not the answer, the vulgar Freudianism mixed with Old Bolshevik intransigeance of Surrealism was not the answer either. Both were patently mechanistic, anti-personal inter- pretations of the human situation. Further, as the crisis of Western culture deepened, it was obvious that Surrealism was empirically a failure. It simply could not do what it proposed to do. It was unable to live up to its very rash promises. A few painstakingly constructed exercises in "free association" written in the monotonous argot of the Freudian couch were no match for the actual nightmares come XIV INTRODUCTION true that went on in the newspapers. Certainly such pathetic toys were never going to "revolutionize the human sensibility as such," in the brave words of Andr Breton. In fact, they rapidly degene- rated into the sterile cliches of a dying popular fad, about as revo- lutionary as "knock, knock," Pee-Wee Golf, and "Confucius say," their somewhat more or less vulgar contemporaries. In the meantime, independent of programs and manifestos, changes were taking place in the practice of poetry. Even the more astute early reviewers of the work of Stephen Spender had noticed that there really wasn't much in common between him and the rest of the Auden circle. Those who compared him to Shelley were not far wrong. To avoid the words Classic and Romantic, if Auden and Day Lewis and MacNeice were primarily constructive artists, Spender was pri- marily an expressive one. Further, he was much more interested in himself and his own integration into the world than in any political solution. Even his politics was exceptional. He was never seduced by the attractively disguised blandishments of Stalinism. It is no accident that he wrote, not about the battles of the Popular Front, so carefully disciplined by the tommy-guns of the G.P.U., but about the lonely and hopeless struggle of the Viennese working class, those desperate heroes who died out of moral stubbornness, and whom the Red salons were calling "Social Fascists" at the very mo- ment they were falling under the cannonades of Fascism. During these years, besides his own poetry, Spender was working on the series of translations of Rainer Maria Rilke which he published with J.B.Leishman. These translations have had a tremendous effect on contemporary British verse, greater possibly than Spender's own poetry, and, I believe, mostly for the bad. Rilke is extremely popular with young writers in England, but even for those who read Ger- man, and few do, he seems to come to them as he has been transformed by Spender. Now Rilke may have lived in a cloud of patchouli, but it was a well defined cloud. If Stefan George may be said to have written German as though it was English, Rilke certainly wrote it with the clarity of French. There are few modern poets with a more active vocabulary. His nouns and adjectives are sharp and pre- cise and present immediate images, his verbs positively writhe with XV INTRODUCTION einfuhlung. There is none of this in the Spender-Leishman transla- tions. Everything is reduced to an amorphous, ruminative melancholy, thought about thought, words about words. All is imprecision, mood, like formless background music played by a good orchestra, Werner Jansen's sobbing violins accompanying the trivial pathos of a point- less movie. Young writers were turning away from the objectivism of Grigson and his school, because it was an objectivism without content, the photograph of a meal instead of a good dinner. Empson's verbal puzzles grew quickly boring, Auden's Byronic glitter had turned to brass, the Spender-Leishman Rilke gave the prestige of a great name to a vague, hypnotic sentimentality. The end of its influence is not yet. At the present time, the most conspicuous, though not the most important, difference between American and British verse is the rhe- torical imprecision and verbal lassitude of the latter. Spender's own verse may suffer from similar faults at times, but it contains no cheap-jack solutions, no political or religious confidence games, no smart aleck stylistic trickery. He never made any bold public statements about it, but he quietly moved away from those who suffered most from such faults. Reading him, one has the sense of a man trying desperately hard to be absolutely honest. I think it is for this reason that he is still a living influence on younger writers in England. In The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats had noticed another break with the dominant style of the time, and had prophesied that here was very likely a forerunner of a future literary revolution. I refer of course to George Barker. If the work of the previous generation was rhetorical, if the self was hidden behind panaceas for the world ill, in Barker, rhetoric is pushed to the critical point where it turns into its opposite. The world ill is taken into the self. Barker seems to swallow the sick public soul, neutralize it with his own spiritual intoxications, and then cast it forth, and his own occult inwardness along with it. This may not be the most lucid description of what is actually an impressive and exciting artistic process to observe, but it is obviously far removed from the ambulatory, jaded eye of Louis XVI INTRODUCTION MacNeice. Barker's verse is not just exhortative, like a political speech, it really is excited, its dynamism does not come from a rhe- torical formula, but from a disturbed and disturbing internal vortex. Barker has often been compared to Blake. He is rather like Blake, but like Blake in reverse, a mirror image. Blake objectified his in- ternal conflicts, not the absurd "conflicts" of the Freudian clinic but the actual struggle that always goes on in the awakened soul of man. He made mythological dramatis personae out of the elements of the self, and set them at war with each other. In many ways his method was not unlike that later developed by Carl Jung. Barker, on the other hand, has taken the figures of the collective unconscious which have assumed a terrible reality in our time, shorn them of their hypo- statization, and set them at war within his own self. If this were the end of the matter, the situation would be uncontrollable, and unen- durable, and would soon degenerate into madness or total irrespon- sibility. Barker's earliest work did, often, seem to stop here, but in later work the savior, the harrier of this interior hell, becomes more and more manifest. He is, as one might guess, the Divine Eros fleshed, the simple abandon and finding of the self in the act of love. In style too, Barker resembles a reversed Blake. Where Blake hunted for the particulars, the inescapable objectivity to garb his subjective vision, Barker pushes the subjective hallucination to the point where it takes body for others. This is what some Surrealists say, programma- tically, that they attempt. Barker does not try to reach a predeter- mined goal in the reader's consciousness by the use of psychiatric devices. He is, with great passion, a kind of person. If Auden dominated the recent past, Dylan Thomas dominates the present. There can be no question but that he is the most influential young poet writing in England today. The unanimity with which everyone except unreconstructed Stalinists and tame magazine ver- sifiers points to him as the greatest phenomenon in contemporary poetry is simply astonishing. Considering that something like this was once the case with Auden, it bodes ill for Thomas 'reputation some ten years hence. However, it was not always thus. When he first appeared, he was greeted with tolerant but embarrassed consterna- tion, as though he had just made a muss. Spender said his poems dripped like water out of a tap. Symons said he twisted words to the XVII INTRODUCTION shape of his reader's ears. He reminded Hugh Gordon Porteus of an unconducted tour of Bedlam, or a night out in a land of gibbering highbrows. And so on down the line, it was as though something had escaped that had been locked, up in Wild Wales since the Synod of Whitby, and was clanking its chains and yammering in the Rectory drawing room. Something terribly unbritish seemed to be happening. It was. Thomas is far more shameless than Barker. He doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve. He takes you by the neck and rubs your nose in it. He hits you across the face with a reeking, bloody heart, a heart full of worms and needles and black blood and thorns, a werewolf heart. This is the hairy wenid that has been peeping through the shutters since the Saxon drew his lines in Shropshire. In the old age of the English, it has burst in the door and settled down on top of the Sunday dinner. At first the noise was deafening, adders, she-bears, witches on the mountain, exploding pit-heads, menstruating babies, hounds with red ears, Welsh revivalists throwing dynamite and semen in all directions. Thomas smote the Philistine as hard a blow with one small book, Eighteen Poems, as Swinburne had with Poems and Ballads. The terrific racket has long since died down. It is possible now to inspect the early Thomas coolly and discover what he is saying and what he is talking about. Many elements went to form his idiom, all bound together by the reeling excitement of a poetry-intoxicated schoolboy. First, I would say, Hopkins' metric and his peculiar, neurasthenic irritability of perception; second, Hart Crane, whom Thomas greatly resembles; third, possibly, translations of Rimbaud and Maldoror, though he could have got most of this from Crane; fourth, Welsh poetry and mythology, with its gnarled metrics and its imagery of a barbaric and forested country, a land literally wild; fifth, the Old Testament, as it came to him through the savage Welsh Nonconformity; sixth, a mass of uncontrolled, boyish omnivorous reading: detective stories, translated Surrealism, "science fiction," horror tales, sex books, occultism, Shakespeare, Blake, Lawrence, Henry Miller, A.E.Waite, Arthur Machen, an orgy of literary sen- xvm INTRODUCTION sationalism. Yeats once said of somebody that he remained a bar- barian because he was born in the provinces and never had a chance to associate with a man of real culture until he was grown. Thomas wrote as though he had never met a human being who had ever bathed or used a toothbrush. On the other hand, there is nothing squalid about it. Thomas wrote like a savage chief on a scalp-taking expedition amongst the palefaces. He definitely belonged to the heroes of Toynbee's "external proletariat" not to the drudges and tramps of his "internal proletariat/* The early Thomas does not add up to just another barbaric yawp, however heroic. It all meant something. Possibly it was a raucous and primitive cry, but it was the most primitive and terrible cry in the world, the cry of parturition, the dual cry of mother and child. If Jung served to elucidate Barker somewhat, Rank can serve even better for Thomas. Most of his early poetry is about the agony and horror of being born and of childbirth. The substance of Rank's The Artist is that the artist is, psychologically, his own mother. Few have ever realized this as thoroughly and as violently as Thomas. For him the crucifixion and the virgin birth are one simultaneous process, archetypes of the act, or rather catastrophe, of the creative consciousness. Other men, Baudelaire for instance, have talked about their agonies as creators. Thomas discovered poetry on his hands like blood, and screamed aloud. I mentioned that Thomas resembled Hart Crane. This is as far as Crane was able to go the horror of creative birth. I once heard a preacher say that Christ's agony in the garden and his relations with his mother showed the terrible responsibility of sonship. Certainly this phrase can be applied to the early Thomas and to Crane. Crane's solution, his myth, the Bridge, did not work. It is possible to worship the mother, the father, the self, but a saving symbol cannot be made of the umbilicus alone, it must be connected to something. So Crane's poetry and his personality began to break up and deteriorate. This has not happened to Thomas. His recent work has developed in the only way that it could from such antecedents, towards a deeper mystical insight. He has moved away from the old, excited, tem- XIX INTRODUCTION pestuous possession, and toward the' humility and calm of ecstatic vision. So his influences have been, in his later poems, those entranced Welshmen, Vaughan and Herbert. I do not believe that Thomas is in any danger of falling into the appliqud metaphysical verse once fashionable in the Empson circle and in America. If an atheist don tries to write like Donne or Cra- shaw, the result is pretty sorry stuff. If one actually has an intensely religious, baroque personality, one doesn't have to try, one falls naturally into step with one's ancestors. I think it quite possible that the religious expression of the baroque sensibility is not the most profound of the varieties of religious experience, but it is certainly genuine, and it is certainly Thomas* vision, thoroughly and sincerely. The deepest regions of the soul may have been accessible only to the sculptors of the Bon Dieu of Amiens, and the Yakshini of the gate of Sanchi, or to the Zen landscapists, but it would be wicked to quarrel with the explorations of an El Greco or a Grunewald when they are undertaken once again in a naughty world. Thomas' impact was not just literary, it was in a special sense social, a cultural coup d'etat. Nothing less like a Marxist from a Good School being raffish at a country house could be imagined. After Thomas, literature was wide open to others than the sons of gentlemen, if they could find some way to keep alive. This is far more important than itjnight seem in America. And it is surprising how many of the significant younger poets in Britain today did not go to a Public School or to "either" University. In this regard too, Thomas resembled Hart Crane. He had the same sort of pariah integrity, and made the same violent assault upon official culture. The thin erudition of the previous generation, the result of judicious schooling and back num- bers of The Criterion, seemed idle stuff beside his wolfing of books. I think it important too that in Thomas the spiritual underworld of a suppressed civilization, the Celtic shadow cast by the Saxon torch, found voice and took flesh. Even today, however much he has quieted down, one still feels that a different culture speaks through him. This accounts for his barbaric aristocracy. The Highland "kings" encountered by Sam Johnson may have been barefoot, illiterate and lousy, but they were far more aristocratic than the Whig lords in XX INTRODUCTION their vast houses to the South, and more regal than the German bourgeois on his throne of compromise. About this time, the poetry of W.R.Rodgers began to appear in magazines. Although it is easy to write extensively about Barker and Thomas and still say something important, it is not so easy to do with Rodgers, and that is just the point. There is nothing spectac- ular about him. In fact his verse has a sort of dogged earnestness about it, although it is far from pedestrian. His great virtue is that he speaks for himself. He is relatively free of the fashionable influences of the day, and he has almost no visible connection with the previous generation. His work is as simple and profound as he can make it. His effects are achieved quietly, and they are always the direct out- come of integral experience. He never depends upon secondary re- ferences to chic reading matter and current postures. One of his peculiar virtues is a special sonority a sort of gong and woodwind depth and color of long vowel and labial, sibilant, and nasal music which is, as it were, a kind of counter Hopkins. Hopkins' baroque irritability expressed itself in staccato vowels and plosives and stops and a restive metrical distortion. Rodgers has the confidence of So- lesmes or the pre-Bach organists the marching, sure, unperturbed musical development of Byrd and Gibbons and Frescobaldi a Pro- testant, or at least pre-Tridentine answer to Hopkins. The quality I associate most clearly with his work is a rugged, protestant magna- nimity, courteous and polished enough superficially, but with, still underneath, a certain strongly masculine gaucherie. The comparison that springs to mind is Andrew Marvel. All one has to do is list these qualities to see how unusual and refreshing they would seem in the literary atmosphere of the time of his first appearance. It is difficult to measure Rodgers' influence, because, to the best of my knowledge, it has been effortless, he has never made any attempt to wield any. I think, however, that it has been considerable; depth, expression, simplicity, and integrity are certainly marked qualities in the work of many who have come after him. There was nothing programmatic about the new direction taken by Barker, Thomas and Rodgers. They were simply different from the generation that preceded them. Very soon, however, their innova- XXI INTRODUCTION tioas, especially Thomas*, were reduced to a program. The New Apocalypse was a well organized movement of the continental type, almost as well organized as the Auden circle or Breton's Surrealism. At one time it included George Fraser, Norman McCaig, Vernoii Watkins, J. F. Hendry, and Henry Treece. Today only Treece and Hendry still seem to think of themselves as Apocalyptics. In the beginning there was a slight air of reformed Marxist self-con- sciousness about Apocalypse. Lip service at least was still paid to the long since foundered Revolution. Sometimes there was almost a suspicion that the Apocalyptics looked forward to a day when there would be an Apocalyptic majority in the House of Commons with the Book of Revelations as a party platform. Certainly there was an effort to colonize the areas in the consciousness opened up by Thomas in the name of the main tradition of the revolt of the previous pe- riod, and at the same time to personalize the Revolution. As one looks back on Apocalypse, it is apparent that the name was fortunately chosen. Not only did it fit the times, but it meant more than its proponents realized. It conjured up memories of D. H. Law- rence and Albert Schweitzer. It implied what the latter called an "eschatological world view," a morality based on the assumption that we live in the imminence of judgment and destruction by fire, which happened to be literally true in a moderate degree. To quote from the Apocalyptic program: "i) That human, includ- ing poetic, development must be towards wholeness, and must recog- nize heart no less than head, the dream, no less than the waking world. 2) That man has become the victim of mechanization, and must be freed if his personality is to survive; which freedom may come via Myth, Imagination (in Coleridge's sense) or a personal Religion as opposed to a Mass Creed." This sounds not unlike Jolas' valiant and vain effort to shift the base of Surrealism from Freud to Jung. Like Jolas, the Apocalypse failed as a movement, the participants scattered, aesthetically speaking, and some of them seem, today, a little ashamed of their connection. I believe Apocalypse failed because it was not a radical enough break with the past. It still bore marks of both literary Marxism and Sur- XXII INTRODUCTION realism. You cannot personalize a revolution which is, by definition , as impersonal as an earthquake. The science of seismology has no place for human values. The problem must be approached from the other end. One must revolutionize the concept and position of per- sonality, so degraded by our dying civilization. This is not just a rhetorical antithesis. In fact, it is what happened. Today Treece is one of the editors of the yearbook Transformation. As I see it, Trans- formation is attempting to do something similar to what Eliot did with The Criterion. It is trying to give England a new ideological center, this time a "Personalist" one, around which can be gathered a new generation, and from which all aspects of our culture could be approached consistently, judged and revalued. It is significant that Transformation has come more and more under the influence of the recently deceased Russian Orthodox philosopher and theologian Berdyaev. At the same time, Berdyaev himself had been reforming his philosophy into what can only be called a new and dynamic variety of religious anarchism. Treece himself has often been called an imitator of Thomas. It is true that Treece wrote an enthusiastic brochure about him when Thomas' total oeuvre was exactly Eighteen Poems, but there really is not a great deal of resemblance. Both are Welsh, but Thomas speaks, as I said, for the aristocratic underworld of a suppressed civilization. He is always the Druid, passing on his occult wisdom within the sound of the church bells. Treece uses a material much closer to folk art, to the changeless, gnomic tales of the universal peasant, Teuton, Celt or Finn. In fact, his best poems are very Germanic, marchen poetry, Grimm capsules. In spite of his Personalist professions, it is very difficult to come at the personal core in his poems, they slip away into anonymity, like handicrafts or Gothic woodcarvings. Originally greatly under the influence of D. H. Lawrence, D. S. Savage has developed along similar lines. He makes the rather acute point that a thoroughly integrated person would not go about calling himself a "personalist," but his book, The Personal Principle is a review of the masters of a generation, Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot, Crane, Auden, in terms of their ability to achieve personal integration or integral personality. The fact that he gives critical approval only to Harold XXUI INTRODUCTION Monro casts a cprtain suspicion on his method, but the book has some penetrating insights and has been very influential. His poetry certainly shows forth an integral personality lost in the violent, noisy, squalid darkness of a de-personalized and collapsing society. Savage, once the British editor of the forthrightly Lawrentian maga- zine Phoenix, is one of the possible channels through which D. H. Law- rence has re-emerged as a powerful, even dominant influence. How- ever, I think this was more a spontaneous and diffuse matter. After all, his books are still accessible. Of the major figures of the period immediately after the first war, he is, with Herbert Read, the only one who could be said to be potent today. It is not just the superfi- cial aspects of Lawrence, his abstract merits as a novelist or poet which are taken seriously, but his philosophy of life and his aesthetics. Fan- tasia of the Unconscious, Apocalypse, the posthumous papers and letters, certain of the more didactic poems, are being read by younger men, not just because they enjoy them, but because, largely, they agree with them. Another major influence which is difficult to measure is that of Henry Miller. All over the world Miller has acted as the liberator of a gen- eration. Not since Ibsen has an author had so catalytic an effect, nor has the reaction produced by his catalysis been so violent. Miller is not as great an artist as Lawrence or Ibsen or Neitzche or Strindberg, other, similar prophets of modern man, but his voice has been especi- ally loud and clear because he spoke when everyone else kept si- lent. No other person of his generation has had so great an influence on the young who were being asked to die for very dubious reasons in a second world war. I think it should be realized that those of combat age believed very little of what they were told by those who were not. Miller expressed their disbelief, and their emergent be- liefs, not just their distrust of the putative aims of their governments, but their rejection of the whole social lie of a diseased and tawdry civilization, and their hope to find a new foundation for life in a cleansed and redeemed love relationship. There were other things to be found in Miller, too his apocalyptic style, his disdain of fancy writ- ing and all the donnish recipes for ambiguity and chic, and, most important, his rejection of the State and all other complexes of power and irresponsibility as evil hoaxes. In the years when a monstrous XXIV INTRODUCTION social fraud was destroying the world, Miller pointed out that the Emperor did not have any clothes on. There is another side of Miller, his quietism, his ability to bend in the storm, his shunning of the violence of urban culture and literary conflict, his simple appetites and good nature, all of which add up to a kind of sensual Taoism or spiritualized hedonism. It is this aspect of Miller which is most pronounced in the work of his friend Law- rence Durrell. In the days when Miller's Tropics were creating a sensation, Durrell produced a somewhat similar novel, The Black Book. As a study of moral exhaustion it has seldom been equaled. There is a certain naivete* about Miller, he is very much like the Eight- eenth Century naive writer Restif de la Bretonne, but there is no- thing naive about The Black Book. It is as though Pascal had turned his scientific and passionate eye on the behavior of some trivial dia- bolist of the gutter. Having produced so accurate a diagnosis of the world ill, Durrell retired to the island of Corfu. There, eventually, the war caught up with him, but not until he had perfected a poetic expression of uniquely self sufficient tranquillity. Since then he seems to have undergone many of the vicissitudes of a moderately success- ful diplomatic career, but the interior idyll which he constructed for himself has remained undisturbed, certainly an indication of its authenticity. Miller was not quite alone. In England at least, one other older man spoke out, clearly and forcefully, Herbert Read. Sometimes I think Read is a little like Dryden. His personal development has had an unfortunate coincidence with historical movements and changes in the popular mind. He has been any number of things, or at least he has been influenced by a large number of popular intellectual vagaries Thomism, Humanism, Marxism, Freudianism, Surrea- lism, and so on. I believe this has not been because he was a band- wagon rider, for he has always climbed off the bandwagon before the calliope struck up a march, but because he has been very much alive, and awake to, and accessible to, the storms that have swept over Twentieth Century thought. Then too, there are a number of atti- tudes, principles and tastes which he has stuck to and never changed. He has always been a Platonist of a somewhat heretical sort. He has XXV INTRODUCTION always been interested in psychoanalysis, not just in Freud, but in all aspects of the subject, and seems to have read extensively all the masters. He has always had a strong sense of caste, of being a Plato- nic * 'guardian," somehow, by virtue of his sensibility and insight, like Confucius' gentleman, chun tzu, responsible for the public health. He has always been genuinely humane, always searching for an organic life in an organic society. He has always been interested in education, especially an education that would develop, as primi- tive society does, the intuitive, feeling, aesthetic, aspects of the per- sonality, as well as the reasoning and manipulative. Lastly, he has always had a special attachment to Wordsworth, in whom he has found, down the years, not Marxism, Humanism, Freudianism, Sur- realism, and so on, but what he, Herbert Read, meant by those things. When the second war came, Read stuck to the position he had as- sumed after the first one, he remained a pacifist. He had come out of the Spanish War years, the years of the Moscow Trials, convinced of the soundness and necessity of anarchism. He says somewhere that anarchism possiBly may sound impractical, but certainly less impractical than the modern capitalist nation-state would sound if described to someone in another civilization; and it is obvious that nothing else will work; any form of State is bound to fail from now on, and fail disastrously. Further, in various critical writings, Read had built up a whole phil- osophy of what he called Romanticism. It was an odd Romanticism, which always included the permanent elements of his mind I men- tioned above. Its poetics was based on Plato, Milton's phrase, "simple, sensuous and passionate," the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. It seems to me that this is a Romanticism which would fitly describe most Greek and Roman poetry; and since, in addition, he has distinguished himself, the Romantic, from T. S. Eliot, the Classicist, I must confess that I for one, am all at sea. But no matter. In Read it is possible to see all the strains of the time converge. His recent writing on art approximates the position of the Catholic anar- chist Eric Gill. He speaks of the necessity for an organic art, deeply XXVI INTRODUCTION imbedded in life and growing from it, and not hung on the walls of museums. It happens that as Lawrence lay dying in Vence he was writing a review of Gill's first book.* Lawrence and Read share with Gill a whole world view, not just an aesthetic the rejection of me- chanistic civilization, sterile scientism, and topheavy rationalism, the quest for a true integrality of the person, a belief in the importance of sacramental marriage. This is also Berdyaev's philosophy, and with him too, and with all the others, Read shares a belief in the im- portance of ritual, reverence for life, the reverent performance of the acts of life, sacramentalism. Now "reverence for life" is a key term in the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer, and Schweitzer is the father of the "apocalyptic world view." Similarly, Read has spoken of the essential characteristic of a humane society, a reverence for other persons that one should treat his fellow not as a he, she, or it, but as a thou, in the words of Martin Buber. So all the threads draw together. It is well that they should be drawn together in Read. He is incomparably the most civilized as he is the eldest of the poets of the Romantic movement, and he is probably the only one who has read all the testaments of what, by now it should be obvious, is not just a new school of poetry, but a new world outlook from Chuang Tzu to Henry Miller and from Carl Jung to Martin Buber. Also, and not least important, he is a highly polished artist, and the effect of his wartime collection of verse, A World Within A War, owed much to the sheer perfection of its writing. It said the same things the younger men were saying, but it said them with a maturity, depth and finesse of which most of them were, at least as yet, incapable. Read was not alone in advocating anarchism. During the Spanish War the anarchist paper Spain and the Revolution, formerly, and now agam, Freedom, was one of the most reliable sources of information for British radicals. Most of the other radical papers were at least tendentious, and in the case of the Stalinists simply mendacious. Then too, the impression made by the Catalan anarchists on the Brit- ish volunteers and observers was, in a personal sense, revolutionary. Their bravura, and the genuine freedom of their lives, were poles removed from the dry, doctrinaire, circumspect, sociological behav- ior of the traditional British Left. British radicalism, no matter how red, was bound up in the strait-jacket of Fabianism and Methodism, XXVII INTRODUCTION and when it, or rather its younger representatives under arms, en- countered hot nights, bad cognac, dark eyes, sweat and dynamite, the strait-jacket exploded. In many ways, British anarchism is a revolt in favor of all those beautiful things in life which aren't British. Spain introduced another note, via Garcia lorca in literature, "Black Spain," with its Muslim fascination with death and sweating lust and danger and pain, unbritish subjects hitherto ignored by the best taste. The young anarchist poet George Woodcock started a magazine Now, at first a most unpretentious poetry sheet, and later a quite influential paper. Originally purely literary, it gradually came to encompass most of the aspects of the new tendency and its catholicity of editorial policy was probably a shock to those who expect of a radical publication the heresy hunting and dogmatism of the Marx- ist journals. Similarly, Woodcock's own poetry has been anything but tendentious. With the exception of Read, Alex Comfort is the nearest thing to a systematic Romantic. He has a well thought out and consistent phil- osophy of life with which he seems to be able to encounter most con- tingencies, and by which his literary practice is illuminated and rein- forced. Central to it is the concept of the personality at war with death physical death, or the mechanization of the State, and all the other institutions of irresponsibility and spiritual sloth.With Comfort, physician and experimental physiologist, the arts of literature and medicine may reinforce each other. Certainly he has a maturity and grasp, a sense of mastery of his material, which is rare in so young a man. He has a universality about him in many ways reminiscent of Albert Schweitzer. I would be inclined to say that he, Woodcock, and Savage are the most remarkable of the young men who came first to prominence during the War, and it is significant that they are all anarchists, "personalists," and pacifists. In his critical book, What I Mean by Apocalypse Treece also calls himself an anarchist. I say young men, because the war years also produced a number of remarkable women poets. It seems somewhat false to discuss a writer on the basis of her sex, as a woman poet, or worse, poetess. Still, poets like Anne Ridler, Kathleen Raine, Lynette Roberts, Bren- da Chamberlain, Eithne Wilkins, Denise Levertov, Alison Boodson^ XXVIII INTRODUCTION all share an intense femininity, if nothing else. The previous period was not very strong on women poets, I can think of none offhand. It is not just that the men were off to war and the field was left open which brought out so many women, but rather, I think, the reorienta- tion towards personal expression, and away from construction and political rhetoric. So these women have written about the things that matter, not about current delusions lovers and husbands leaving for war, babies, death, birth, love, all subjects frowned on in earlier years. Certainly if Audcn and his friends ever had any babies, they never wrote about them. Nicholas Moore, although he has figured prominently in the growth of the Romantic movement, both as an editor and as the perso- nal friend of many of its leading figures, stands somewhat outside the general picture. It seems to me that he owes more to American poetry, especially to Wallace Stevens and to the Fugitives group. He is past master of a relaxed, civilized, conversational tone. It is really amazing how natural his lines sound. It is so casual and offhand un- til one pays close attention to what he is talking about, and then it turns out that he is one of the most intense and visionary of the Ro- mantics, and a consummate craftsman of effects of great subtlety. It is as though Baudelaire were to be rewritten, over the biscuits and sherry, by Walter Bagehot. I might point out that this idiosyncratic mode of expression has no similarity to the "public speech" of the previous period. Fred Murnau, a Czech emigre living in England, has been very in- fluential, as an editor, a poet, and personally, in the development of the new Romanticism. His work, written in German and translated by Ernest Sigler, has reinforced the tendencies which first appeared in the Spender-Leishman Rilke. His poetry has a dreamy, nostalgic sorrow about it, reminiscent of autumn evenings in the Wienerwald before the other war, lights on the river at Budapest, Smetana's Moldau, Brahms at his most ruminative. It isn't about any of these things, but it is certainly saturated in the special sentiment of bygone Middle Europe. In poets like Denise Levertov this tendency reaches its height in slow, pulsating rhythms, romantic melancholy and un- XXIX INTRODUCTION defined nostalgia. Once these qualities would have been considered blemishes, today they are outstanding, virtues. For the first time, schwarmerei enters English verse. Has the Romantic Movement reached its apogee, produced an idiom, an expression which will be as definitive as the best work of Auden was for his period? The idiom, yes. There can be no question but that a new and different medium has been developed, but it is doubtful if the major works in that idiom have been written. I do not believe that Thomas should be grouped with the Romantics, anymore than Donne should be grouped with Shelley. Spender, Barker and Rod- gers are really precursors of the movement rather than members. The younger people are still developing, some of them so fast it has been hard to keep up with them. The religious personalism and political anarchism which provide the dominant ideology of the movement is still young as a Weltanschau- ung. It is not something taken over from their bureaucratic betters by poetic fellow travellers, but has been developed, in situ and from the heart by Read, Comfort, Woodcock, Savage, Treece, and the rest, as they went along. So it can still stand an enormous amount of critical shaping. Its relations with the orthodox "anarchist move- ment," a rather doctrinaire body at the best, as well as its relations with Catholic and Protestant Christianity, are still to be defined. At least it can be said that contemporary English thought has avoided the diffuse, eclectic, heterodox religiosity represented by Huxley, Heard, Isherwood and other Anglo-Hollywood mystics, and, on the other hand, has shown no signs of being captivated by the masochistic kitsch which passes for profundity amongst the continental Existen- tialists and certain circles in New York. That is an undeniable blessing. There is one place where many of the leading ideas of the New Ro- manticism are not new, in fact they are part of the accepted consen- sus of informed opinion, and that is the Catholic Church. Contem- porary Catholic apologetic has made much of the importance of the person, the value of ritual and sacramentalism as an expression of respect for life, the drive of the modern State towards mechanical evil, the significance of marriage as a channel of spiritual realization, XXX INTRODUCTION the irresponsibility of modern warfare. So it is that there has been a certain convergence. The wave of revolt against modern materialism has brought some poets into the Church, other Catholic poets have been fairly closely identified with Romanticism from its inception, and Catholic anarchists and personalists like Gill and Berdyaev have had a great influence in England. Kathleen - Raine, Anne Ridler, Norman Nicholson, all Catholics, are amongst the best poets writing in England today. Kathleen Raine's work is remarkable for her concentration on absolute purity of sen- sibility. She reminds me of the modern French Catholic verse which has learned from Valdry. Originally the youngest member of the Cambridge group, her work has always seemed far more intense and ^ethereal than theirs. In recent years personal tragedy and con- version to the Church have given it new poignancy and meaning. She is not the least member of a tradition which includes Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell, and Michael Field. Anne Ridler writes about love, marriage, children, the loneliness of parting, all the simple, sacramental facts of a woman's life, a sort of Tertiary Franciscan poe- try. Some of her later work, possibly influenced by Eliot's Four Quartets, has moved on to larger mystical and moral themes. Nichol- son is a strange exception to the general run of English poetry today. He lives in one of the most beautiful of English counties, Cumber- land, withdrawn from the distractions, the tragedies and vast issues and petty spites of life in the capital, and his verse is withdrawn too. It has the same peace, care, and mystical stillness that Wordsworth sought, and sometimes found, in the same region. There are others who seem to be on the border of Catholicism. Nigel Heseltine and Rayner Heppenstall (two of the most easily confused names in con- temporary letters!) both write an ambiguous, Gnostic sort of poetry, which, however heterodox, certainly makes very free use of Catholic symbolism. Derek Savage, again, has much in common with con- temporary Catholic radicalism, and David Gascoyne's Gravel Pit Field, whatever its sectarian religious background, if any, is one of the finest mystical poems I know. Thomas, Treece, Watkins, Lynette Roberts, Keidrych Rhys, Brenda Chamberlain, Heseltine, Glyn Jones, Woodcock, are all Welsh. There XXXI INTRODUCTION is a more or less deliberate Welsh School which centers around Rhys* magazine Wales. A heavy odor of the modernism of the Twenties still hangs over the poetry in Wales. Most of this stuff is dreadful and I have not included it. Keidrych Rhys and Lynette Roberts, both fine poets, are, however, somewhat blemished by it. Brenda Chamberlain is, I feel, one of the very few (another is Eithne Wilkins) younger poets who has been able to recapture and transmit or transmute some of the technical, syntactical, psychological devices and felicities of those days into the Romantic idiom. She is one of the poets in Britain whose work I think may, by a thesis-antithesis-synthesis develop- ment in relation to the previous generation, presage the growth of a new, post-romantic style. Although there is considerable talk of a Welsh renascence, most of the poetry of Welsh writers has entered immediately into the main stream of British verse. I think it is signi- ficant however, that London has not produced anything resembling its proportion of writers. This seems to be true always of decaying capitals; generation by generation, the major Roman poets come from farther and farther away from Rome. Contemporary Scots writing, on the other hand, has nothing to do with England. The Scots Renascence is dominated by Hugh Macdiarmid. Someone once said of him that he had done for Scots verse what Parnell did for Irish politics, a doubtful, though fitting compliment. It is certainly true that the Renascence is so under his influence that it suffers from his faults and is limited by his crotchets. He has plenty of both and to spare. In fact, he is regarded, South of the Border, as pretty much of a professional oddy. This is probably true, but it is unjust. He is unquestionably one of the most important writers in the British Isles, and a genuine world literary figure, but he is also a deliberate eccentric, a man of very mixed and incongruous notions, all held with the maximum bigotry. He seems to be a Bol- shevik, a Scotch Republican, and sometimes talks as though he were a Stuart Legitimist as well. Recently, noticing the commotion to the South, he has added that he is an anarchist, Stalinism being only a technique for achieving anarchism! His reading is immense, not just omnivorous, but gluttonous, and it is served up in large chunks of ill-digested quotation at the most opportune and inopportune times in everything he writes, prose or verse. In many ways he resembles XXXII INTRODUCTION Ezra Pound, and at one time they had considerable admiration for each other. His dislike of Auden and his circle is extreme, and dates back to the very beginning. Possibly this is due to the fact that he is, like Laura Riding, one of Auden's most carefully concealed "an- cestors." All the Auden program is there, "public speech" (?), Marx- ism, rationalism (he has actually said that Stalinism should be called "mentalism" because it is the doctrine that man can save himself by the exercise of his reason; however, he has said other things, completely contradictory) sentimentalism, the attack on the Public School and Suburbia and the Empire Mind, and the constant por- trayal of the signs of death in bourgeois society. In my opinion it is all done much better, as it was done much earlier, by Macdiarmid. A common criticism of Macdiarmid is that he does not write a true, dialectical Scotch, but a dictionary language made up by consulting a Scots dictionary and substituting Doric wherever pos- sible for English. This produces an inorganic and unnatural lingo never spoken by man, something like babu English, and motivated really by a factitious pseudo-nationalism. This is a difficult criticism to assess. It depends largely on whether Macdiarmid gets away with it sometimes he does not but very often he does, brilliantly. Possibly the Scots words in poems like The Watergaw, The Eewis-stane, O who's been here afore me, lass, come from different dialects but the effect is integral. Possibly the synthetic character of the vocabulary is what gives some of the earlier longer poems the sound of jargon. The later long elegies seem more compact and natural, as far as the use of Scots goes. At the present time Macdiarmid is writing long poems, full of quotations from many languages, and jam-packed with every notion, important or not, contradictory or not, that crosses his mind. These things are fun to read, but I can think of no principle on which one could select any passage for anthologizing. His early lyrics are amongst the finest in the Scots language, some of them the equal of Burns. By contemporary taste they have one grave fault. Although they have an unforgettable music and an atmosphere as weird as it is poignant, they are strangely impersonal. Even more than Pound, behind lyric or elegy it is very hard to find a living man. This could hardly be said of the Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean. His poems have been compared to the songs of the Tain bo Cualgne* XXXIII INTRODUCTION the Cuchulain epic, and to Simonide;, but there is no doubt that they are about himself. If other people can write poetry like this in Gaelic, there is no question but what it will again be a living language. Al- though he has been translated by others into Scots verse, notably by Douglas Young, I prefer his own prose-poem translations which are at least as remarkable as the somewhat similar work of Lady Gregory. William Soutar's verse is unique. Paralyzed for many years, he lay in bed, looked out through an immense window into his garden, and wrote innumerable poems - thousands - both in English and Scots. Most of them are pure and honest, but really occasional verse. A few are startling things to come on in modern literature. They have a directness and absolute simplicity, and at the same time a sweetness and perfection that has very seldom been equalled. These are poems that at their best rise to near levels occupied only by Cowper. Soutar, incidently, was, though bedridden, a very active pacifist and opponent of the State. I have included a section from J. B. Macleod's Ecliptic, a poem pub- lished a good while ago, but in my opinion undeservedly forgotten. Pushed aside by the highly organized claque of the Thirties, Macleod seems to have given up poetry, which is a great pity. Ruthven Todd and George Fraser, though both Scottish, seem in recent years to have been pretty much absorbed into English literature. It happens that both write verse characterized by directness and honesty and unabashed sentiment not unlike the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I should not be surprised if this special medium which they share should not become more common in the near future. I have not printed anyone simply because he was a "soldier poet" or was killed in the war, anymore than I have included anyone be- cause he was a conscientious objector, a cripple or a woman. I do not believe that such things have much to do with poetry. On the other hand, I agree with Yeats that, by and large, war poetry is pretty dreadful stuff. It serves its purpose in its day, but whatever the pity of its circumstance, it is soon forgotten. Owen, Yeats to the contrary, is remembered, but he would have been, whatever he wrote about. The second war had its Owens, grave losses to British letters, XXXIV INTRODUCTION but most of them too young to estimate exactly what they would have grown into. One man's death, however, was an unquestionable literary catastrophe. Keith Douglas from his very first poems as an Oxford undergraduate, had a control of his medium which only is given to those who are going to become very great writers. I con- sider his poems beyond question the best written under combat in the second war. Not only that, but far more than Todd or Fraser, I think he pointed a new direction towards simplicity and candor, which is very possibly going to be the dominant mode of the next phase of British poetry. There are several poets whom I have not been able to fit into this survey. Some lie outside the general pattern, like Sean Jennett, Eithne Wilkins, Vernon Watkins, Terence Tiller, Laurie Lee. Others, like Allott, Spencer, Madge, belong in style if not in age to the preced- ing period. I have, as I said, tried to include everyone, of whatever style, whom I consider a good poet, who was born in 1908 or later. Besides the Scots, I have made only two exceptions that I know of; one is Vernon Watkins, who only began to appear with the Apo- calypse, who is allied to, if not part of, the Romantic movement; and the other, Charles Wrey Gardiner, whose serious poetic devel- opment dates only from his meeting with Comfort, Moore, Murnau and the rest. His journal of one year of Romanticism, family, money and erotic difficulties, buzz bombs and passionate conversation in intellectual pubs, The Dark Thorn, is the best picture of the world of contemporary British poetry which I know. In closing I might mention the more important periodicals. Magazines of the previous period, like Scrutiny, New Verse, New Signatures, Twentieth Century Verse, have all perished, and with them, many of those of the Romantic movement, such as Seven and Kingdom Come. Strictly within the field of poetry the magazine that has moved the most mountains has been Tambimuttu's (the name is Singhalese) Poetry London. In the first issue, on the very eve of war, Tambi published a "Letter" which sounded less like a literary manifesto than a series of excerpts from the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. Speaking as an Oriental, with perfect confidence in his non-European background, he was able to marshall a "history" of Western civilization in terms XXXV INTRODUCTION of causes, diagnosis, pathology remedies, behavior and prognosis, with a cogency and insight which very few English poets could have mustered. The effect seems to have been galvanic. Poets rallied to him immediately. For all the years of the war he published the best verse and the newest verse in England. Recently PL has come out only sporadically, at long intervals. Without Tambimuttu the picture might have been different, more like America where the generation that came up during the war is still struggling for a hearing. Somewhat later Wrey Gardiner began to open the pages of Poetty Quarterly, originally a pretty dull, conventional, Poetry Club sort of magazine, to the new movement. Soon he was in the midst of the stream. Poetry Quarterly has been less erratically published than Poetry London; once convinced, Gardiner has persevered with greater concentration and singleness of purpose than Tambimuttu. His publishing house, Grey Walls Press, also issues a yearbook, New Road, edited by Fred Murnau or Alex Comfort, or both together, which has provided a more permanent medium of publication for the Romantic movement, and which also prints plays, fiction and criticism. Both Grey Walls and Poetry London also publish books of verse. Routledge, a large, old and well-established firm, of which Herbert Read is an editor, has published small booklets of many of the Ro- mantic poets, and it has published them early, while they were still young, and at very modest prices. We do things diifcrently in America, where Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are still known to reviewers as "young poets of the experimental generation." John Lehmann's yearbook, New Writing, well known in America, has not shown much sympathy with Romanticism. Lehmann has tended to concentrate on his own circle of poets, most of whom I find very uninteresting, or to publish well recognized names. Te- rence Tiller and Laurie Lee, both very fine, somewhat "classical** poets, the latter much influenced by Garcia Lorca, are favorites of Lehmann's and he must be commended for first having printed Gas- coyne's Gravel Pit Field. XXXVI INTRODUCTION Life and Letters To-day, edited by Robert Herring, has been very eclectic, interested primarily in what the editor considers good writ- ing rather than in giving expression to any particular school. Herring, himself Scots, has given more space than most English publications to the Scots Renascence and the work of Welsh writers. Horizon plays a role in contemporary literary England not unlike that once assumed by The Dial in America and The Criterion in Bri- tain. I do not think Cyril Connolly has been very interested in Ro- manticism as a movement. He again, has printed primarily what seemed to him to be good writing. With true English hyper- or hemi-insularity, he seems to be unaware of the really rather deafening commotion going on in Scotland. I have mentioned Wales, Now and Transformation. There is also a small magazine published whenever he has enough material, by Alex Comfort, called Poetry Folios. Its most distinctive quality is its judi- cious editing; a file of Poetry Folios would make an excellent anthol- ogy of contemporary verse, English, American and European. William Maclcllan is sort of the official publisher to the Scots Re- nascence. He has printed all the leading figures in handsome, cheap editions, and his Poetry Scotland and Scottish Life and Letters are amongst the most stimulating periodicals I know. I have tried to make this collection as comprehensive as possible. In some cases I have had to cut down on the amount of space given to a poet because of high anthology fees, in others, I have been unable to reach, or at least to obtain an answer from the poets I should have like to have included. I am deeply grateful for all the help I have received from many people. To Wrey Gardiner, Brenda Chamber- lain, Derek Savage, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Nicholas Moore, Denise Levertov, whose advice and correspondence have been valuable to me beyond thanks or estimate. To Poetry London, Grey Walls Press, George Routledge Ltd., Faber and Faber, John Lehmann, Lindsay Drummond, Andrew Dakers, and other pub- lishers, who have sent me books and forwarded letters. To the staff of The California State Library and its Sutro Branch in San Fran- XXXVII INTRODUCTION cisco, who have been very helpful. And, finally, as always in these cases, to my wife, who has done mountains of typing, and with whom I have discussed the selections at length. It is to her that this book is dedicated, as well as to James Laughlin, to whom it has been a great trial, but who has ultimately always yielded and given me my way, and to whom I, as well as many another, owe more than a book dedication, both as publisher and as friend. KENNETH RBXROTH XXXVIII Louis Adeane POEM ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH The angry future like a winter builds Storms in the trees and branches in the fields. The voices threaten in the thickening stream And thunders frowning in the summer's dream Shake down the doves like snow, Turn the quick hourglass low. The past as heavy as the patterned hand Moulding the landscape, opens and is stained; The memory mocks us in its painted cage And simian gestures on a rural stage Bidding time's jest begin, Summon our yokel grin. Oh leave the dancers and their antic hour, Prophets with crystals, mirrors of the fair ; The growing present like a tree prepares These newly branching roots, this storm of leaves, repairs Gently, oh falling mould, The loss of what is born, the lapse of what is old. FOUR POEMS FOR APRIL I Now by this lake, this fallen thunderstorm, Her gold-struck hair is beaten with the grass; Her limbs lie slackly in the darkening soil, Grief sifts its pallor on her doom-stained face. LOUIS ADEANE My terrible kindness coiled within her will Still saps her anger with a soothing tongue; The startling cloud of love, unbearable, Descends dispersed to silt the struggling wing. My merciless anima, impending death, I see your world behind today's caress, The strangled kitten in the innocent hands, The dreaming horror and maternal kiss, And through your candled future I can tell Our fear-filled present opening like a fan, The dazzling eyelid tempted into fire, The transient shadow and the twist of pain. Yet poise again your love, my beautiful, Raise quick the innocent child, the smiling flesh, Lift your white anger and your whip-red mouth And send your mercy like a lightning flash. Rise from the waves, my river ing one Curving your slenderness cold and gold Glimmering on the rocks, or by the sands Finger the water's wavering line. There where you ride on clarity Playing all day with coins of foam I should beware your buoyancy Seeing at last that you have come Out of a whirlpool's fluency Siren curling a shell of home LOUIS ADEANE Rose as your love's delivering womb, Knowing the tenderness that I hold Murmuring always mocks, and in my hands Lingers the warning bell of doom. 3 Through your grey eyes evasive heaven Vistas at last the certain happiness And across skies the sunrise of my vision Spaces your hair in strands of gold and rose; Your fountain body melts, the hills of distance Shimmer to clouds through your transparent pose. Landscape my lovely dream of hawthorne Pausing with blossom by the trembling lake Where the swan glides and poising children Watch today's smiling image shake Like unaccountable tears, stay still and valley Always the curving vase that time could break. Stay still, my butterfly screen transposing Thinly the mountains of my view With delicate wings the webs of crystal, Veins of your rising love, the crimson dew; Stay still, my quivering dream, remember Landscape and future both arc you. 4 Gone, my white tangible angel falling Over the edge of the world into the south, Daring like emigrant bird the terrible journey, The swelling exultant exhausted breasts, the Smiling and bleeding mouth. LOUIS ADEANE Blown with the dust and desires in your revelling Tangled unsleeping untouchable hair, Travelling under the serpent and over the reaching Forests of parasites flowering, leaping, Avid with arching fire, Torn, my immaculate angel the tactile White and gold covering down to the blood Beating like suns through your beauty, the quivering Flushing flesh parting, the blood-circles spinning Staining your curve to red. Thrown between moving rocks, the impacting Merciless icebergs sliding to kill, The blizzard blurring to snow and the soft deluding South enfolding your wings, accepting your Spent and pitiful will, Stone, my intractable strangled angel, The painted girl in the ice, Flashing your jewels of tears and swaying Down in the glacier, silent, gliding, Frozen for bravery, beautiful. THE NIGHT LOVES US This is our love, these wheels and chains, Walls, windows, vistas, fettered edge of foam. Our blood blew red and melted; these remains Are love cooled down to solid shapes of home. LOUIS ADEANE Yet outside place, beyond our brittle light Spread fields incredible, the planes of love; Invisibly they flood towards our sight, Our little city stands within a wave. And growing greenly in subversive park Their secret fountains flourishing impel The child to feel love falling from the dark, The wishing girl to dream beside a well. So leaping flowers in the burning town May light the marble gardens of our thought And running visions melt our coldness down To fire the insurgent freedom of the heart. Kenneth Allott DEPARTURE PLATFORM It will always be like this At the unmeeting place: The scrambling crowds and air When the gilt clock-hands move Across the wet moon-face (Seen cheek touching lip Through your distracting hair) To enter time again Where disappointments live In shabby comradeship. KENNETH ALLOTT All this is nothing new. Still on the stroke of four A wilderness of rail Into which we have come Feeling like all the lost Ten tribes of Israel, Maybe to see and hear The hobbled tree of steam Lofting between the wheels Its paradisal hiss Under a dripping roof; The rain still falling now To share a jealous dream Of pert and slithering heels In the rain's puddled glass Who have the time I leave, And all the afternoon A bitter nail, a clove, A high blind window pane, When the black pistons drive Where but away from love. Now there is nothing new. CHESHIRE CAT Tonight the rain sheets down. After an hour It does not seem there can be any more; And I am moved, KENNETH ALLOTT Stripped of whatever's English for savoir-faire, To tell you, where you are, How you are loved, And how your harm I mean if once believed. Streakingly listening in a rain-darkened door To roof and railing drip Beaded like idiot's trembling underlip, And nervous as a hare; By a sky deepening like a bruise I suck the hollow tooth Of absence, absence until the wet slates whirl: A syllable would spoil My choked rage at the between-us leagues of air. Now the black houses lean Peopling with your face My loneliness; And I mislay the minimum of phlegm Which furnishes to time Parodies of what I am (Oh, scissors and wing-collars of routine) For all-elastic Gobis of migraine On a damned continent without a name. George Barker This is that month, Elizabeth, When at the equinox Biological life divests its death GEORGE BARKER Equating the paradox That crosses its dovetails underneath All internecine sex. Where silent once, where silent once, Bedded in negatives we Held hands across the Winter whence This April lets us free, Now up in the solstice dance We join with biology. Generation towards generation stirs Of human and animal; Prime causes, giving birth to stars, Gives equally to all The multiplication of universe In animal and amoeba. This is that day, Elizabeth, The lamb and child have fed From your abundant hand when both Begged you for love and food. The cuckoo, recalling in aftermath, When he was your performer, Remember shall in Winter with Double delight this Summer. Scattering wreaths the spectres rise Taking their first deep breath; The seas go gadding with bright eyes, Dead desires get up and rejoice At circumventing death, GEORGE BARKER And to all these I join my voice In Love, Elizabeth. II So in a one man Europe I sit here Thinking a peace and a perfect map Also for the epileptic hemisphere. What now obsesses us all is shape Whose horrible mutations, like a birth, Shed more blood than they're worth, Like idiot sons. The shape of hope Is nevertheless innumerable and rises From all the postures and the disguises Of loss and defeat and even Europe. * But whistling in the dark brings images Back that were for a moment on a furlough, And so my dark is full of mirages And voices make a birdcage of my pillow. Ill And now there is nothing left to celebrate But the individual death in a ditch or a plane Like a cock o* the north in a hurricane. Out of the bogus glory and the synthetic hate, The welter of nations and the speeches, O step down You corpse in the gold and blue, out of a cloud, My dragonfly, step down into your own: The ditch and the dislocated wings and the cold Kiss of the not to be monumental stone. GEORGE BARKER This is the only dignity left, the single Death without purpose and without understanding Like birds boys drop with catapults. Not comprehending Denudes us of the personal aim and angle, And so we are perfect sacrifice to nothing. IV Everywhere is our wilderness everywhere. I hear the scapegoat's scream wherever I go And not only from my throat but also Everyone is our scapegoat everyone. When by the ilex I lie in the sun Thinking I'm free a moment, then the crown Of bleeding christian leaves comes down, The scapegoat coronation also there. Or in a world of palm and anthropoid The shape of Darwin gibbering descends Out of the leaves of life and from a void Condemns me to a beginning and an end. Thus everywhere is our wilderness everywhere, And everyone is our scapegoat everyone. V O Golden Fleece she is where she lies tonight Trammelled in her sheets like midsummer on a bed, Kisses like moths flitter over her bright Mouth, and, as she turns her head, All space moves over to give her beauty room. Where her hand, like a bird on the branch of her arm, Droops its wings over the bedside as she sleeps, 10 GEORGE BARKER There the air perpetually stays warm Since, nested, her hand rested there. And she keeps Under her green thumb life like a growing poem. My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex I feed with meat that you tear from my side Crowning your nine months with the paradox: The love that kisses with a homicide In robes of red generation resurrects. The bride who rides the hymenacal waterfall Spawning all possibles in her pools of surplus, Whom the train rapes going into a tunnel, The imperial multiplicator nothing can nonplus: My mother Nature is the origin of it all. At Pharaoh's Feast and in the family cupboard, Gay corpse, bright skeleton, and the fly in amber, She sits with her laws like antlers from her forehead Enmeshing everyone, with flowers and thunder Adorning the head that destiny never worried. LOVE POEM Less the dog begged to die in the sky Immortal and transfixed, Or the tall tree to grow on ground Later axed and annexed, Than my dark one, my sweet stark one, Begged the knife in the breast, The long lie, the lying worm in the bed, The cheat I attest. ii GEORGE BARKER But bull without a bell I trod Among her mysteries, Simpleton with a bomb I hid Shivering in her caves; And her hand came down out of a cloud, Her beauty from the shadows Emerged and suffered what I did To mitigate my sorrows. LOVE POEM O tender under her right breast Sleep at the waterfall My daughter, my daughter, and be at rest As I at her left shall. At night the pigeon in the eaves Leaves open its bright eye; Nor will the Seven Sisters cease To watch you where you lie. The pine like a father over your bed Will bend down from above To lay in duty at your head The candles of its love. And in their mothering embrace, Sleep on the Rockies' bosom; The Okanogan Valley shall grace Canada round your cradle. 12 GEORGE BARKER The silver spoon and the one-eyed man, The rabbit's foot and the clover, Be at your bed from morning till As now, the day is over. LOVE POEM My joy, my jockey, my Gabriel Who bares his horns above my sleep Is sleeping now. And I shall keep him In valley and on pinnacle And marvellous in my tabernacle. My peace is where his shoulder holds My clouds among his skies of face; His plenty is my peace, my peace: And like a serpent by a boulder His shade I rest in glory coiled. Time will divide us and the sea Wring its sad hands all day between; The autumn bring a change of scene. But always and for ever he At night will sleep and keep by me. John Bayliss OCTOBER It is now the tenth hour of this October night with the wind coming in from the sea and the balances weighing the chances of war. 13 JOHN BAYLISS And, as I write, for the fourth year Mars stands firm in the ascendant and the sea breaks on lonely stones under cloud-blur and blare of an east wind bringing the sound of guns. Where shall we set our histories? Who are the errant, the aimless ones outside the village boundaries, dead meteorites from long dead suns, unfree travellers at whose end none stirs. The meanest priest preserved from dust wound from wind in mummy-cloth has more eternity than us our character is lost in death and what are we to passers-by but grey stone in a field of green? We have no Arab story here to bring us hope of Singing Bird or magic water on our hair to give us back our former shape. Unmarried now we lie alone, a gold ring and a skeleton. Yeats from darkness drew a tower, built to cloud and trod the stair; alone upon a barren moor communed with wind and star and bird; from rifled tomb and sacred book bled secrets till his ageing blood grew agonies that drove to break 14 JOHN BAYLISS his wisdom on the sensual rood. Aware of creed and craftsman's work, he found eternity in this, the wild and dancing turns of grace young lovers take in the long grass. Arc there not, then, two histories? Remember Egypt in the Pharaohs' day; how the artificer against the dust settling, soft, shifting, built a sarcophagus to last the spirit till it enter its new house. Remember dust gathering by Nile and Thames, still witness among the tombs of life defeated. On diadems touching, on lips disfiguring, covering face and lace, sceptre and king, smothering echoes, inside door and window deadening, insidious as an old man's love-making. Imagine how on low divan Cleopatra lay, or in great mansion Lady took lust's occasion, silken the sheets, the coverlet of satin, floor richly carpeted, door shut lest dust enter on slow foot. Fate curtained out, cushions, delight torches and wine taken late the air scented, aphrodisiac, 15 JOHN BAYLISS for her sake. But candle guttering, lips grown hard, eyes tired, hair against gold couch, drag to the herd. A grey coach drawn up on the gravel, delight hid deep under grave or pyramid. No water-clock or ormolu, sundial, measure made of sand, turn for any but Time's hand. Only myth and legend lie powerful in the memory. Isis and Osiris are sun and moon, and many a star that rose upon an ancient sky lives for us and still looks down with the same pity and disdain. Here in East and West two armies stand angering the hot air; their metals bend blister and warp; the flies reap rich harvest from the dusty mere. Here is a cemetery of wire where tank and lonely sentry keep the buzzard company. A fire smokes desultorily. Over this battlefield the Medc, Phoenician and Arab rode: the Pharaohs satisfied their greed for power and raging Typhon trod swift upon Osiris' heel. 16 JOHN BAYLISS Weapons made from modern steel lie above the ancient bronze and new bodies lie above Egyptian bones. This is a strange universe of star-shell, flare and falling bomb, where the tall searchlight, like a vase stands above metallic rain, and the bombers dull as bees drone among forgotten stars. Day and night among the dunes the guns recoil, the long pursuit slackens, wavers and returns. In Gibraltar yellow fruit hangs iin gathered; here lips burn. Here what shall ambition gather? memories of lying together English girl, Circassian, Greek, bead or imitation pearl, letters coining week by week, the hopeless passionate appeal; dead faces, the torn photograph and here no written epitaph. Sennaccherib with golden plaque commemorated victories, but broken town and sunken ship and all the prophesying voices, impatience and sarcastic quip must suffice for such as these who die for profit of a claque. Have we not learnt our histories e Alison Boodson CAROL Fire is what's precious now, is more than gold and under snow the badger sleeps in peace dreaming winter away. What's precious now is to lie close-held guarded warm wrapped in like the ship in the bay or the coal in the crisp flame. All things fold in all things close together in kindness the lamb to the ewe, the field to the snow . the mouth to the breast. Turn into me, turn to me, you who are cold out there; this is the season of charity come in by the fire. NIGHT ALERT A girl awaiting her lover is not more still with fear than I am, awaiting your kiss. She does not take more pains to win his wonder than I have lying here in the dark waiting for you. 18 ALISON BOODSON All the secrets of joy she holds in her body preserving them zealously. I also have secrets from you: you will have to force them from me part of me is still reluctant. She hears his tread, feels his breath hot on her check. A last panic pervades her, then a long peace. if I am afraid when you draw near me, remember o lover o death I will be tranquil afterwards. And now his body and hers arc one, the secrets arc one by one unfolded. There is no further division between them. I too will submit to your love; I too will disclose and reveal, and morning shall find us identified forever. POEM 1 do not want to be your weeping woman holding you to me with a chain of sorrow. 1 can more easily stand the flame of your anger than the frost of your kisses empty of desire. 1 do not want to be your gentle lover drawing you to me on a rope of pity. ALISON BOODSON Sooner that you never touched me than that you ever should touch me from a distance made of mercy. I do not want to be your second mother always forgiving and smiling and never loving. If you forget me, forget me utterly. Never come to my arms without interest. I shall know it. I do not want to be your weeping woman pinning you to me on a sword of tears. POEM He lying spilt like water from a bowl himself the shadow of his own passion probes with his secret fingers my terrible ' need and sees it is beyond reason. The dark head laid like dreams on a bare pillow once was dreams only but now stirs under my kiss and slowly slowly he wakes and remembers. O gifts his hands are on my happy breasts; he is all warmth and all kindness in his long arms I sleep at last, and peace is in his kiss. March 1946: for J. N. 20 Brenda Chamberlain POEM You, who in April laughed, a green god in the sun; Sang in the bowel-rock below me Words unknown, but how familiar-strange Your voice and presence. Other quests But led to this, to lie unseen and watch, From cloud-ascending rib and slab of stone Your downward passage, greendrake garmented; A blade of wheat, watered in desolation. love in exile now, 1 keep the hill-paths open for you; call The shifting screes, warm rock, the corniced snows To witness, that no wall Precipitous, ice-tongued, shall ever stand Between us, though we rot to feed the crow. SONG-TALYSARN Bone-aged is my white horse; Blunted is the share; Broken the man who through sad land Broods on the plough. Bone-bright was my gelding once; Burnished was the blade; Beautiful the youth who in green Spring Broke earth with song. 21 BRF.NDA CHAMBERLAIN LAMENT My man is a bone ringed with weed. Thus it was on my bridal night, That the sea, risen to a green wall At our window, quenching love's new delight, Stood curved between me and the midnight call Of him who said I was so fair He could drown for joy in the salt of my hair. We sail, he said, Like the placid dead That have long forgotten the marriage bed. On my bridal night Brine stung the window. Alas, in every night since then .These eyes have rained For him who made my heart sing At the lifting of the latch, For him that will not come again Weary from the sea. The wave tore his bright flesh in her greed: My man is a bone ringed with weed. SONG Heron is harsh with despair For the felled pine of the upland: Curlew is torn in her love For the sea and the hill. BRENDA CHAMBERLAIN Heart iii my breast is a stone That my man cannot hold me When hawthorn and plum are Brave with the blossom of Spring. DEAD PONIES There is death enough in Europe without these dead horses on the mountain. (They are the underlining, the emphasis of death.) It is not wonderful that when they live their eyes are shadowed under mats of hair. Despair and famine do not gripe so hard When the bound earth and sky are kept remote behind clogged hairs. The snow engulfed them, pressed their withered haunches flat, filled up their nostrils, burdened the cage of their ribs. The snow retreated. Their bodies stink to heaven, Potently crying out to raven, hawk, and dog, Come pick us clean, cleanse our fine bones of blood. They were never lovely save as foals before their necks grew long, uncrested; but the wildness of the mountain was in their stepping, the pride of Spring burnt in their haunches; they were tawny as rushes of the marsh. The prey-birds have had their fill and preen their feathers: soft entrails have gone to make the hawk arrogant. Alex Comfort THE LOVERS Across the round field, under the dark male tower drift the two horses, the chestnut and the black, aloof and quiet as two similar clouds alike and distant, heads toward the wind and the grass a green pool under moving clouds, under the sickle gulls, the grey-eyed screaming girls. Only at night around the standing tower the stallion's white teeth in the brown mare's shoulder those eight hoofs fly like thunder in the wind, like water falling under the night's drum. FEAR OF THE EARTH In these cold evenings, when the rain streams, and the leaves stand closer shuffling feet the woods grow perilous. They are hungry, the trees, eavesdropping, sending long shoots to tap the pane. I can hear you, root, under my hearthstone moving; white finger, longer since yesterday, nearer the marrow. In these evenings the earth leans closer: stones quietly jostle. I can hear you, under my foot bending your strange finger. I have heard cold fruits of my flesh plotted, soft globes swaying have known of my skin a leaf foreshadowed. 24 ALEX COMFORT The captive roses jostle under the hedge. The celandine is innocent. Underneath her finger fumbles eyeholes. Every petal speaks man not hardy nor perennial. The trees grow perilous. The patient dandelion should not remain at large in our terrible garden. THE POSTURES OF LOVR I saw a woman in a green field Threading upon her hands the bright beads of song threading her voice among the tall bright ears and her skin like the skin of water lay over her body where the light was moving and from her breasts the daisies dropped like milk there sang a woman in a field^of ears under a midday heavy as a shroud and on its windless pool her white song fell and when the song moved the crop moved with it and the skyline's blue dust began to rise the milky flowers in its upright wind and from the hedges her song called white children and from the dropping tree above her head her song's long finger shook a river down there sang a woman in a field of ears and her song like bright beads scattered fell round her thighs among the grass 25 ALEX COMFORT for this song is living, is time no virgin knows this song but women only There is a white mare that my love keeps unridden in a hillside meadow white as a white pebble, veined like a stone a white horse, whiter than a girl And now for three nights sleeping I have seen her body naked as a tree for marriage pale as a stone that the net of water covers and her veined breasts like hills the swallow islands still on the corn's green water: and I know her dark hairs gathered round an open rose her pebbles lying under the dappled sea. And I will ride her thighs' white horses. 3 In the stony night move the stars' white mouths a net of mouths is looking for food I think we are their food they will unlock our fingers, even if we lie closer than bone to bone closer than the grave's white tangled dancers. The streams and the sea will help them we shall not be able to touch each other when we feel cold. Somewhere I saw two Christian lovers waiting in the sand and round them went the lion, like the stars 26 ALEX COMFORT in that last minute feeling each others flesh and love whose silence, like the bright silence of wind washes the trees and islands until night: till their joined hands sink in a darkness of sand This was Briseis' way: she was a bridge, a white flute for her master's fingers he smelling of war and she of woman breaking her wheeling waves against his rock This was Milanion's way (the crowd gone home, and she, trembling to be alone with him) pinioned his white swan there after the race and made her thighs a necklace of his own or this was Helen's way, she, a dark mare let down her mane, his mouth upon her nape kneeling, a penitent, her face hidden, and feeling only Paris in his hands This was Octavia's way, the rider's way straight like a candle, her hair a flame, and outstretched Anthony saw in her half-light her white horse galloping beside his own or this was Lais' way, an outspread ship arid he a swimmer on her whitening pool spanning her hollows with his open hand wide opened, like a county or a star 27 ALEX COMFORT And then the sleep, in various figures, still his face between her breasts, and she awake holding him sleeping, listening to the clocks 5 The moon fills up its hollow bowl of milk bodies grow blue like pebbles in a stream and light falls like a wind in summer stripping girls into statues, showing their round limbs moving but frozen under the watery cloth: tonight I watch her mask move into sleep her breathing like a bee on a wood's floor coming and going to and from the light She is my field, and in her furrows run my ways like rain, and the crops of her shadows are pools, are a wild sea. And she has mountains stranger than feathers, hard as fishes. There fall in her hollows shadows of orchard trees that follow the moon's circle like a tide grassy nets that move on the dropped apples. Body, white continent on all whose beaches break the seas of years this is the surf they say the dying hear. We both are islands, and our grassy edge creeps inwards, like the healing of a wound. And the windy light is time, a limitless water, a white sea lying restless as a hand where no rock rests the gull, and no tree stands ever, forever moving, lifeless, alone. 28 ALEX COMFORT PICK UPON PICK . . . Pick upon pick in the sun at the sea edge the prisoners sing and longer the raw trench runs, and the hourglass white sand marks their time and the tide treads its limits, flat as oil At night the sea falls sharper, the moon fills their footprints up, and crowding from far out the waves press earnestly on the streaming edge of the wire-bright tidemark, and still the prisoners sing while in their sleep the diggers' feet tread home Such voices over the wet sand and fields as carry far inland, restless as a wheel one long uneasy seaborne howl, the concourse of voices worn by space to a wordless cry a shadow of smoke that crosses fields at night and the sleeping town that turns in its bed can catch no words but the coming and going hum, the hands that thunder on doors, o brothers, and is afraid to hear the prisoners singing in the sea. NOTES FOR MY SON Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom Look carefully see who it is that they want you to butcher. Remember, when you say that the old trick would not have fooled you for a moment That every time it is the trick which seems new. 29 ALEX COMFORT Remember that you will have to put in irons Your better nature, if it will desert to them. Remember, remember their faces watch them carefully: For every step you take is on somebody's body And every cherry you plant for them is a gibbet And every furrow you turn for them is a grave Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you If they persuade you that it will thaw the world Beware. The blood of a child does not smell so bitter If you have shed it with a high moral purpose. So that because the woodcutter disobeyed they will not burn her today or any day So that for lack of a joiner's obedience The crucifixion will not now take place So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption You will gather the spit of your chest And plant it in their faces. SONG FOR THE HEROES I wonder sometimes if the soldiers lying under the soil, wrapped in their coats like beggars sleeping under an arch, their hands filled with leaves ALEX COMFORT could take vengeance for once on the men who sent them, coming back like beggars, seeing the homes and fields that their obedience lost to them, the men of all countries whether they would have anything to say as ghosts at frosty windows to sons or brothers other than this " Obedience is death." If you are willing to die, then choose obedience. "We who are here now, men of all nations, our hands full of twigs, stones on our eyes, half-afraid of what we have done (but that is forgotten a short wild dream, when we were other men not ourselves but now we are ourselves again tradesmen, farmers, students it is we who are telling you) you must choose carefully, for your life, and not only your life will depend on it, in years or days, between believing like us, that by obedience you could help or profit the land, the fields, the people; and saying "Death is obe- dience." "Because we know now that every cause is just and time does not discriminate between the aggressor and the dead child, the Regrettable Necessity and the foul atrocity the grass is objective and turns all citizens into green mounds we have had time, as soldiers always have time, 31 ALEX COMFORT resting before Plataea. or Dunkirk or Albuhera to think about obedience though we will still spring up at the whistle; it is too late to withdraw that someone must pay for all this, and it will be the people. "We have nothing to tell you but this: to choose carefully and if you must still obey, we are ready, your fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, to find you a place at our dry table, to greet you as soldiers with a dry nod, and sit, elbow to elbow silently for always under the sky of soil: but know you are choosing. When they begin to appeal to your better nature, your righteous indignation, your pity for men like yourselves, stand still, look down and see the lice upon your hide. 4 'It may be that you, or else your children, at last will put down your hand and crush them. But if not remember that we are waiting, good men as you, not fools, but men who knew the price of obeying, the lice for what they were, the Cause for a fraud, hoped for no good and cherished no illusions; and we will see your mounds spring up in clusters beside our own, and welcome you with a nod, crucified like us all, all fellow-ghosts together, ALEX COMFORT not fooled by the swine, but going with open eyes. 44 You have only to speak once they will melt like smoke, you have only to meet their eyes they will go howling like devils into bottomless death but if you choose to obey, we shall not blame you for every lesson is new. We will make room for you in this cold hall, where every cause is just. Perhaps you will go with us to frosty windows putting the same choice as the years go round eavesdropping when the Gadarenes call our children or sit debating when will they disobey? wrapped in our coats against the impartial cold." All this I think the buried men would say clutching their white ribs and their rusted helmets nationless bones, under the still ground. Keith Douglas LEUKOTHEA When you were alive, my Leukothea your loveliness was puzzling and only I knew the processes by which my ornament lived and breathed. And when you died I was persuaded to store you in the earth, 33 KEITH DOUGLAS and I remember when they put you there your too expressive living eye being covered by the dark eyelash and by its lid for a cerement. At that moment those who looked at you wondered, I know, how you could be made in such exquisite material, and I would not explain for the world. Even when they put the soil above you they saw its unusual texture. The very grass was a strange plant, previous as emeralds. So all these years I have lived securely. I knew I had only to uncover you to see how the careful earth would have kept all as it was, untouched. I trusted -the ground I knew the worm and the beetle would go by and never dare batten on your beauty. Last night I dreamed and found my trust betrayed only the little bones and the great ones, disarranged. TIME EATING Ravenous Time has flowers for his food in Autumn, yet can cleverly make good each petal; devours animals and men, but for ten dead he can create ten. If you enquire how secretly you've come to mansize from the smallness of a stone it will appear his effort made you rise so gradually to your proper size. 34 KEITH DOUGLAS But as he makes he eats; the very part where he began, even the elusive heart, Time's ruminative tongue will wash and slow juice masticate all flesh. That volatile huge intestine holds material and abstract in its folds: thought and ambition melt and even the world will alter, in that catholic belly curled. But Time, who ate my love, you cannot make such another; you who can remake the lizard's tail and the bright snakeskin cannot, cannot. That you gobbled in too quick, and though you brought me from a boy you can make no more of me, only destroy. CANOE Well, I am thinking this may be my last summer, but cannot lose even a part of pleasure in the old-fashioned art of idleness. I cannot stand aghast at whatever doom hovers in the background: while grass and buildings and the somnolent river, who know they are allowed to last for ever, exchange between them the whole subdued sound of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate can alter my shade wandering next year from a return? Whistle and I will hear 35 KEITH DOUGLAS and come again another evening when this boat travels with you alone towards Iffley: as you lie looking up for thunder again, this cool touch does not betoken rain; it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly. ON A RETURN FROM EGYPT To stand here in the wings of Europe disheartened, I have come away from the sick land where in the sun lay the gentle sloe-eyed murderers of themselves, exquisites under a curse; here to exercise my depleted fury. For the heart is a coal, growing colder when jewelled cerulean seas change into grey rocks, grey water-fringe, sea and sky altering like a cloth rill colour and sheen are gone both: cold is an opiate of the soldier. And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers come back, abandoning the expedition; the specimens, the lilies of ambition still spring in their climate, still unpicked: but time, rime is all I lacked to find them, as the great collectors before me. The next month, then, is a window and with a crash I'll split the glass. 36 KEITH DOUGLAS Behind it stands one I must kiss, person of love or death a person or a wraith I fear what I shall find. THE OFFENSIVE Written in Egypt shortly before Montgomery's attack To-night's a moonlit cup and holds the liquid time that^will run out in flame jR in poison we shall sup. The moon's at home in a passion of foreboding. Her lord, the martial sun, abroad this month will see time fashion the action we begin and Time will cage again the devils we let run whether we lose or win. In the month's dregs will a month hence some descry the too late prophecy of what the month lets fall. This overture of quiet is a minute to think on the quiet like a curtain when the piece is complete. 37 KEITH DOUGLAS So in conjecture stands my starlit body; the mind mobile as a fox sneaks round the sleepers waiting for their wounds. This overture of quiet is a minute to think on the quiet like a curtain when the piece is complete. REMEMBER ME Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I'm dead. As the processes of earth strip off the colour and the skin: take the brown hair and blue eye and leave me simpler than at birth, when hairless I came howling in as the moon entered the cold sky. Of my skeleton perhaps, so stripped, a learned man will say "He was of such a type and intelligence," no more. Thus when in a year collapse particular memories, you may deduce, from the long pain I bore the opinions I held, who was my foe and what I left, even my appearance, but incidents will be no guide. 38 KEITH DOUGLAS Time's wrong-way telescope will show a minute man ten years hence and by distance simplified. Through the lens see if I seem Substance or nothing: of the world deserving mention or charitable oblivion, not by momentary spleen or love into decision hurled, leisurely arrive at an opinion. Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I'm dead. A ROUND NUMBER The monotonous evil clock is creeper-climbing on my heart and with rank ivy will pull down my hope of happiness and renown. My sacred lady who needs no art gives an idiot place to mock. I know the fragrant girl is dead, and perished with my innocence and died two hundred years ago: or twice that time if Time is slow. And so reflect for recompense She only lived inside my head. 39 KEITH DOUGLAS Then she is gone, I still remember my early promise, looking for obliging fame to make amends, and here my last existence ends. For I cannot feed hope any more and Time has reached a round number. POEM These grasses, ancient enemies waiting at the edge of towns, conceal a movement of live stones, the lizards with hooded eyes of hostile miraculous age. It is not snow on the green spurs of hilltops, only towns of white whose trees are populous with fruit; with girls whose velvet beauty is handed down to them, gentle ornaments. Somewhere in the hard land and vicious scrub, or fertile place of women and productive trees you think you see a devil stand fronting a creature of good intention, or fair apples where the snake plays don't you? Sweet leaves but poisonous, or a mantrap in a gay house, a murderer with a lover's face, seem to you the signs of this country? 40 KEITH DOUGLAS But devil and angel do not fight, they are the classic Gemini for whom it's vital to agree whose interdependent state this two-faced country reflects. Curiously though foreigners we surely shall prove this background's complement, the kindly visitors who meant so well all winter but at last fell unaccountably to killing in the spring. Adam Drinan i LOVE SONG Soft as the wind your hair, gull-gleaming your breasts. I hoard no treasure there. I do not grope for rest. I seek you as my home, that all your sensitive life may fuse into my own, and the world match with my wife. I carry you out of this to no enchanted isle. Blood is tart in our kiss, and no dream in your smile. Bitter, bitter the hours 4* ADAM DRINAN and coasts of our patrol, Foggy tnis Minch of ours, But I sail with your soul. I come to you in the flame of a burst and broken land. There is acid in my brain and withering in my hand. Your touch will plot us wise, your quiet keep it true; and joy be the starlight to what we have to do. II Graceful as butterfly orchid fresh as wet birches in sunshine bright as the pearly wheatear whenever she leaves them lambs and collie pups follow her. Modest, patient, as sundew loyal as collie to master sagacious as mountain-doe whenever she leaves them eyes of the old folk follow her. Despite the pines and the heather Death holds her by the breast; as surprised, and resigned, they will be whenever she leaves them, as when each of her sisters follows her. 42 ADAM DRIKAN III Our pastures are bitten and bare our wool is blown to the winds our mouths are stopped and dumb our oatfields weak and thin. Nobody fishes the loch nobody stalks the deer. Let us go down to the sea. The friendly sea likes to be visited. Our fathers sleep in the cemetery their boats, cracked, by their side. The sea turns round in his sleep pleasurecraft nod on the tide. Sea ducks slumber on waves sea eagles have flown away. Let us put out to sea. The fat sea likes to be visited. Fat sea, what's on your shelf? all the grey night we wrestled. To muscle, to skill, to petrol, Hook oo rin yoL. one herring! and of that only the head. Dogfishes had the rest, a parting gift from the sea. The merry sea likes to be visited. Merry sea, what have you sent us? a rusty english trawler? The crew put into the hotel the engineer overhauls her. ,43 ADAM DRINAN Gulls snatch offal to leeward. We on the jetty unite gifts of the cod we can't afford... The free sea likes to be visited. Free were our fathers' boats whose guts are strewn on the shore. Steamships were bought by the rich cheap from the last war. They tear our nets to pieces and the sea gives them our fishes. Even he favours the rich. The false sea likes to be visited. Lawrence Durrell DELOS (For Diana Gould) On charts they fall like lace, Islands consuming in a sea Born dense with its own blue And like repairing mirrors holding up Small towns and trees and rivers To the still air, the lovely air, From the clear side of springing Time In clement places where the windmills ride Turning over grey springs in Mykonos, In shadows with a gesture of content. 44 LAWRENCE DURRELL The statues of the dead here Embark on sunlight, sealed Each in her model with the sightless eyes, The modest stones of Greeks Who gravely interrupted death by pleasure. And in harbours softly fallen The liver-coloured sails, Sharp-featured brigantines with eyes, Ride in reception so like women The pathetic faculty of girls To register and utter a desire In the arms of men upon the new-mown waters, Follow the wind with their long shining keels Aimed across Delos at a star. THIS UNIMPORTANT MORNING This unimportant morning Something goes singing where The capes turn over on their sides And the warm Adriatic rides Her blue and sun washing At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs. Day rings in the higher airs Pure with cicadas and slowing Like a pulse to smoke from farms, Extinguished in the exhausted earth, Unclenching like a fist and going. Tress, fume, cool, pour and overflowing Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake 45 LAWRENCE DURREIL Carpets in windows, brush with dew The up-and-doing, and young lovers now Their little resurrections make. And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep Stitched up and wake, my darling, wake; The impatient Boatman has been waiting Under the house, his long oars folded up Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake. TO PING-KU, ASLEEP You sleeping child asleep, away Between the confusing world of forms, The lamplight and the day; you lie And the pause flows through you like glass, Asleep in the body of the nautilus. Between comparison and sleep, Lips that move in quotation; The turning of a small blind mind Like a plant everywhere ascending. Now our love has become a beanstalk. Invent a language where the terms Are smiles; someone in the house now Only understands warmth and cherish, Still twig-bound, learning to fly. This hand exploring the world makes The diver's deep-sea fingers on the sills Of underwater windows; all the wrecks 46 LAWRENCE DURRELL Of our world where the sad blood leads back Through memory and sense like divers working. Sleep, my dear, we won't disturb You, lying in the zones of sleep. The four walls symbolise love put about To hold in silence which so soon brims Over into sadness: it's still dark. Sleep and rise a lady with a flower Between your teeth and a cypress Between your thighs: surely you won't ever Be puzzled by a poem or disturbed by a poem Made like fire by the rubbing of two sticks ? EIGHT ASPECTS OF MELISSA i: BY THE LAKE If seen by many minds at once your image As in a prism falling breaks itself, Or looking upwards from a gleaming spoon Defies: a smile squeezed up and vanishing In roundels of diversion like the moon. Yet here you are confirmed by the smallest Wish or kiss upon the rising darkness But rootless as a wick afloat in water, Fatherless as shoes walking over dead leaves; A patient whom no envy stirs but joy And what the harsh chords of your experience leave This dark soft eye, so liquid now and hoarse With pleasure: or your arms in mirrors 47 LAWRENCE DURRELL Combing out softly hair As lovely as a planet's and remote. How many several small forevers Whispered in the rind of the ear Melissa, by this Mediterranean sea-edge, Captured and told? How many additions to the total silence? Surely we increased you by very little, But as with a net or gun to make your victims men? 2: THE NIGHT Cut from the joints of this immense Darkness up the face of Egypt lying, We move in the possession of our acts Alone, the dread apostles of our weakness. For look. The mauve street is swallowed And the bats have begun to stitch slowly. At the stable-door the carpenter's three sons Bend over a bucket of burning shavings Warming their inwardness and quite unearthly As the candle-marking time begins. Three little magi under vast Capella, Beloved of all as shy as the astronomer, She troubles heaven with her golden tears, Tears flowing down upon us at this window, The children rapt, the mauve street swallowed, The harps of flame among the shadows In Egypt now and far from Nazareth. LAWRENCE DURRELL 3: THE ADEPTS Some, the great Adepts, found it A lesser part of them ashes and thorns Where this sea-sickness on a bed Proved nothing calm and virginal, But animal, unstable, heavy as lead. Some wearied for a sex Like a science of known relations: A God proved through the flesh or else a mother. They dipped in this huge pond and found it An ocean of shipwrecked mariners instead, Cried out and foundered, losing one another. But some sailed into this haven Laughing, and completely undecided, Expecting nothing more Than the mad friendship of bodies, And farewells undisguised by pride: They wrote those poems the diminutives of madness While at a window some one stood and cried. 4: THE ENCOUNTER At this the last yet second meeting, Almost the autumn was postponed for us Season when the fermenting lovers lie Among the gathered bunches quietly. So formal was it, so incurious: The chime of glasses, the explorer, 49 LAWRENCE DURRELL The soldier and the secret agent With a smile inviting like a target. Six of a summer evening, you remember. The painful rehearsal of the smile And the words: "I am going into a decline, Promised by summer but by winter disappointed/' The face was turned as sadly as a hare's, Provoked by prudence and discretion to repeat: "Some of them die, you know, or go away. Our denials are only gestures can we help it?" Turn to another aspect of the thing. The cool muslin dress shaken with flowers It was not the thought that was unworthy Knowing all you knew, it was the feeling. Idly turning from the offered tea I saw As swimmers see their past, in the lamplight Burning, particular, fastidious and lost Your figure forever in the same place, Same town and country, sorting letters On a green table from many foreign cities, The long hare's features, the remarkable sad face. 5: PBTRON, THE DESERT FATHER Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness Of Mareotis, this was the beginning: Dry reeds touched by the shallow beaks he heard On the sand trash of an estuary near Libya, This dense yellow lake, ringing now With the unsupportable accents of the Word. 50 LAWRENCE DURRELL Common among the commoners of promise He illustrated to the ordinary those Who found no meaning in the flesh's weakness- The elegant psychotics on their couches In Alexandria, hardly tempted him, With talk of business, war and lovely clothes. The lemon-skinned, the gold, the half-aware Were counters for equations he examined, Grave as their statues fashioned from the life; A pioneer in pleasure on the long Linen-shaded colonnades he often heard Girls' lips puff in the nostrils of the fife. Now dense as clouded urine moved the lake Whose waters were to be his ark and fort By the harsh creed of water-fowl and snake, To the wave-polished stone he laid his ear And said: "I dare not ask for what I hope, And yet I may not speak of what I fear/' 6: THE RISING SUN Now the sun again, like a bloody convict, Comes up on us, the wheels of everything Hack and catch the luckless rising; The newly married, the despairing, The pious ant and groom, Open like roses in the darkened bed-room. The bonds are out and the debentures Shape the coming day's adventures, The revising of money by strategy or tears 51 LAWRENCE DURRBLL And here we lie like riders on a cloud Whom kisses only can inform In breath exhaling twenty-thousand years Of curses on the sun but not too loud, While the days of judgment keep, Lucky ladies sleek with sleep, Lucky ladies sleek with sleep. 7: VISITATIONS Left like an unknown's breath on mirrors, The enchanters, the persuaders Whom the seasons swallow up, Only leave us ash in saucers, Or to mice the last invaders Open cupboard-doors or else Lipstick-marks upon a cup. Fingerprint the crook of time, Ask him what he means by it, Eyes and thoughts and lovely bodies, David's singing, Daphne's wit Like Eve's apple undigested Rot within us bit by bit. Experience in a humour ends, Wrapped in its own dark metaphor, And divining winter breaks: Now one by one the Hungers creep Up from the orchards of the mind Here to trouble and confuse Old men's after-dinner sleep. 52 LAWRENCE DURRELL 8: A PROSPECT OF CHILDREN All summer watch the children in the public garden, The tribe of children wishing you were like them These gruesome little artists of the impulse For whom the perfect anarchy sustains A brilliant apprehension of the present, In games of joy, of love or even murder On this green springing grass will empty soon A duller opiate, Loving, to the drains. Cast down like asterisks among their toys, Divided by the lines of daylight only From adventure, crawl among the rocking-horses, And the totems, dolls and animals and rings To the tame suffix of a nursery sleep Where all but few of them The restless inventories of feeling keep. Sleep has no walls. Sleep admits The great Imago with its terror, yet they lie Like something baking, candid cheek on finger, With folded Up and eye Each at the centre of the cobweb seeking His boy or girl, begotten and confined In terror like the edges of a table Begot by passion and confirmed in error. What can they tell the watcher at the window, Writing letters, smoking up there alone, Trapped in the same limitation of his growth And yet not envying them their childhood Since he endured his own? 53 Patrick Evans AT MORNING AN IRIS The dead do not specially depress me. The happiest hour of my life Was in an Athenian cemetery In the green of the gold of the light Of the grass where they grew underfoot. Something kept coming up through From their bones, the root and the fruit Of their past, and the present, and me. All was one, and as wide as the blue Aegean, impersonal, fresh, and free. But the dead do most specially impress me As some of the living do Not only the men and women (Man is so self-important) but three Beasts: the bull, the fish and the bee. For these, like the dead and the living, Warmer, more bright and more wise Without learning, keep wisdom of flowers, The power of a goddess's thighs (Pallas Athene or Venus). The fisherman combs out the lea Of the starfish inhabited sea With his nets for his bread; and all these Share with the peaceful dead In their tombs, with their potsherds and toys, Their tokens, their terrors and joys, Their broken and painted memories, The whispering threat of the terrible seas, 54 PATRICK EVANS The memento mori, the pleasure of bread That the teeth cut; the crackle and apprehension That invade the room when my lover At morning, an iris, Combs her electrical head. GREEN GRASS GROWING Green grass growing upward splits the concrete pavement. Who shall tell us of the loveliness of women? Their words are water, all the fond describers'. The green grass growing splits the concrete pavement. No man living tells the majesty of women. The river flows away, the imperial Thames. The wrist watch and the alarum clock run, oh, they run down But no one knows the majesty of women, The depth of those their bodies, time's soft river. Clocks run down, but time obeys no watch, Time stays the same, while fade the imperial women. The buttocks are an empire and the breasts Two Indias, while the escarpment of the spine Is lonely as the Andes. Who loves the Andes, Who shall expound the loneliness of women, Women most loved but never understood, Their sex enduring as the enormous Andes, Their throats where desire croaks and cowslips grow, Eyes whose betrayal speaks but utters never a sound? The taxis dart and overtake the buses, The colours are bastard and the time is true. Who shall explain the majesty of women To us? to us? Exaltation, softness, pleasure. 55 Gavin Ewart POEM To go, to leave the classics and the buildings So tall and false and intricate with spires, To run in joy from the imagined wood As children who have never heard of good, To feed the flames of the forgotten fires. This is my wish but my wish cannot be. At times I should be dead like skull or stone Or living with the slow life of a tree Or half-asleep as one would think the sea Or anything content to be alone. Not living like this, ticking of a clock, Afraid of friends and cataloguing wants, Knowing so little, wanting far too much . . . What else is tenderness but touch? And what so far from me, though nearer once; MISS TWYE Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in her bath When she heard behind her a meaningful laugh And to her amazement she discovered A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard. G. S. Eraser SONNET My simple heart, bred in provincial tenderness, And my cold mind, that takes the world for theme, With local pain, with universal remedy, Avert the real, disturb the noble dream: And if my hand could touch you timidly, Or I could laugh with you, and worry less About the loud guns laughing over Europe, I might find a local remedy, a province's hope: Or if I had the hard steel mind of Lenin, The skill, or even the rage of Catiline Against the corrdpt, the comfortable. Then in The pages of history one page might be mine. But for my heart my mind must lose its scope, And for my mind my heart must give up hope. CRISIS My room as usual a disorder of books, Nothing to my hand, my clothes flung on a chair, My desk squalid and fussy with useless papers, I had shut myself up from the clean shock of day. I was asleep: like a criminal, without dreams, There was nothing I desired but my own pride. 57 G. S. FRASEK Then it seemed to me the earth opened, I was on a green slope, an unsafe hillside, With rocks there and rivers; there was that lady And one man, my enemy. We three clung together And rolled down the hill. The river whelmed, I gripped her greedily. Then came sorrow, She was not with me, I drowned alone: That man mocked on the bank. I almost awakened, But sorrow and sleep together bind fast. Falling far, I came to a strange city, No one knew me, I walked in sorrow alone. Past smoke-black brick and yellow muslin curtains, Vainly round interminable corners, For these streets were familiar and not familiar (The old tenements of Glasgow and my childhood) And I knew I would never find my own house. Then I met myself in my dream, I said clearly, "I am going soon, take care of yourself, find friends/" But my own eyes looked through me, my voice said, "Traitor!" And I saw then All the terrible company of the defeated, Lost but in the courage of shapes of stone: The stone mouths of the rigid orators, The elbow half-lifted in a thousand club-rooms And the steady hand on the trigger turned to stone: Then I awoke, sweating: I came out to the window, In the evening light saw the snow grey on the ground, I turned to my darkening room, I saw my papers 58 G. S. FRASER Scattered about, my life too lately Had been all in bits. "My God," I said, "there is something Far wrong, certainly, somewhere. But with me or the world?" A POEM ABOUT LOVE All that I got from love Was the impulse to write Verse for my own and others' But seldom her delight, Her whom my verse transforms As the plain image in time Loses particular presence In the tapestry of rhyme, That flowing tapestry Where mingled like a stream All possible delights And lost fulfillments gleam: And time transforms her, too, And all her light would die But for this echo, this effect, This agonising cry. What image is intact From all that brilliant crowd But those that wrung my heart And made me cry aloud? 59 G. S. FRASER ELEGY The waxen and the false grace of tulips, The scentless heads in many drawing-rooms, Pursue what I write, like the piano-note, The velvet dress, and the cake-crumbs, And the path sweeping up the mossy Lawns, impoverished by great trees, And the conservatory's tomato-plants And all my idle and infertile days: And you to whom I remain an evil enigma Remember pleasantly the white of birds Against the old quad's green, remember How friendship for us was not upon the cards. Remember your old coats, your golf umbrella, Your loud laughter, growth of thought and taste: And me, in whom your sweet civility Found only barren soil, a churlish waste. lady, had I speech as I have words And had I love as I have images . . . Think of me silent, awkward, blind, And wait until the world is at my knees. 1 may be pleasant then! Poor egoist With this one gift, and could but be at ease With you, who might have saved me from my poetry, Who offered life, instead of lonely days. 60 G. S. PHASER LEAN STREET Here, where the baby paddles in the gutter, Here, in the slaty greyness and the gas, Here, where the women wear dark shawls and mutter A hasty word as other women pass, Telling the secret, telling, clucking and tutting, Sighing, or saying that it served her right, The bitch! the words and weather both are cutting In Causewayend, on this November night. At pavement's end and in the slaty weather I stare with glazing eyes at meagre stone, Rain and the gas are sputtering together A dreary tune. O leave my heart alone, O leave my heart alone, I tell my sorrows, For I will soothe you in a softer bed And I will numb your grief with fat to-morrows Who break your milk teeth on this stony bread! x They do not hear. Thought stings me like an adder, A doorway's sagging plumb-line squints at me, The fat sky gurgles like a swollen bladder With the foul rain that rains on poverty. ON A MEMORY OF BEAUTY How can the heart for sea and stone Be cumbered, and forget a face That moved it once to fret and moan- Forget the woman, see the place? 61 G. S. FRASER But was it one or was it two, Was it a statue or a girl? Might every spring her form renew And the white sea-froth be her curl? Beauty but for a moment shone, The likeness of a cloud or wave Whose momentary aspect, gone, The sieve of memory cannot save. Right at the back of my head, I know, Incredible, wild things Struggle like swans half-blind with snow- And the dying swan sings. S. S. CITY OF BENARES The bell that tolls my syllables can tell An underwater tale, clang how there fell Suddenly out of a surface shouting world Into dumb calm doomed children, and there curled (Currents' sick fingers whispering at their hair) Round them a coiling clutch, was our despair. Sea's soft sad pressure, like the sprawl of love, Darkly spreadeagled, so they could not move, The wide wet mouth was heavy, they would choke, Till in that cold confusion pity spoke: "This is a nightmare and one is asleep. This is a dream, my brave one, do not weep; Often may drown in dreams and not be dead: Such weight is mother leaning on your bed." 62 G. S. FRASER But having thought of this to cheat my pain, That woe and wonder harrows me again, Fat clouds seem bulked like whales, while through the green Grave tons of twilight, in a submarine Solidity of air like sea I move, Pressure of horror how our hate hurts love. Deeper than grief can plummet, mercy lies, But not so deep as trust in children's eyes, Justice is high in heaven, but more high Blood of the innocent shall smear the sky Or think that red the flame of seraph wings, See stained-glass heaven, where each darling sings In God's dark luminous world of green and gold As lovely as death's waters, but less cold: Think what you will, but like the crisping leaf In whipped October, crack your thoughts to grief. In the drenched valley, whimpering and cold, The small ghosts flicker, whisper, unconsoled. Roy Fuller WINTER NIGHT An owl is hooting in the grove, The moonlight makes the night air mauve, The trees are regular as crystals, The thawing road shines black as pistols, And muffled by the quiet snow The wind is only felt to blow. Dread bird that punctually calls! Its sound inhuman strangely falls 63 ROY PULLER Within the human scale; and I Am forced to place, besides the cry, The moon, the trees, the swollen snow, Reluctantly with what I know. Even the road conveys the sense Of being outside experience; As though, this winter night of war, The world men made were man's no more. THE GIRAFFES I think before they saw me the giraffes Were watching me. Over the golden grass, The bush and ragged open tree of thorn, From a grotesque height, under their lightish horns, Their eyes fixed on mine as I approached them. The hills behind descended steeply: iron Coloured outcroppings of rock half covered by Dull green and sepia vegetation, dry And sunlit: and above, the piercing blue Where clouds like islands lay or like swans flew. Seen from those hills the scrubby plain is like A large-scale map whose features have a look Half menacing, half familiar, and across Its brightness arms of shadow ceaselessly Revolve. Like small forked twigs or insects move Giraffes, upon the great map where they live. When I went nearer, their long bovine tails Flicked loosely, and deliberately they turned, An undulation of dappled grey and brown, 64 ROY FULLER And stood in profile with those curious planes Of neck and sloping haunches. Just as when Quite motionless they watched I never thought Them moved by fear, a desire to be a tree, So as they put more ground between us I Saw evidence that there were animals with Perhaps no wish for intercourse, or no Capacity. Above the falling sun Like visible winds the clouds are streaked and spun, And cold and dark now bring the image of Those creatures walking without pain or love. NATIVE WORKING ON THE AERODROME Curls powdered with chalk like a black roman bust, This prisoner, convicted of a lust For maize, is whipped to building a great shed For bombers; and bears the earth upon his head. LETTER TO MY WIFE The loud mechanical voices of the sirens Lure me from sleep and on the heath, like stars, Moths fall into a mounting shaft of light. Airplanes whirr over and then the night stays quiet; The moon is peeled of cloud, its gold is changed On stone for silver and the cap of sky Glitters like quartz, impersonal and remote. This surface is the same, the clock's bland face, Its smiling moustaches, hide the spring, knotted Like muscles, and the crouching jungle hammer. 65 ROY FULLER The same but so different with you not here. This evening when I turned from the clothes you left, Empty and silk, the souls of swallows flickered Against the glass of our house: I felt no better Along the tree massed alleys where I saw The long pale legs on benches in the dark. It was no vague nostalgia which I breathed Between the purple colloids of the air: My lust was as precise and fierce as that of The wedge-headed jaguar or the travelling Flaubert. But I only encountered the ghosts of the suburb, Those ghosts you know and who are real and walk And talk in the small public gardens, by the tawdry Local monuments; the Witch and Big Head And the others, fleeting and familiar as Our memories and ambitions, and just as dead. Being alone they stopped me; Big Head first. Removing her unbelievable hat, she showed me What before I had only conjectured, and she whispered: lucky you you might have been born like this. 1 knew it was true, but, hurrying on, the Witch Lifted her cane and barred the way; she is Lean and very dirty but hanging round That skeleton are rags of flesh still handsome. Moving her lips madly and in a foreign tone she said: Oh do not hope, boy you will come to this. I ran, being certain that she had not erred, Back to our room where now the only noise Is the icy modulated voice of Mozart And the false clock ticking on the mantelpiece. 66 ROY FULLER Now in the bubble of London whose glass will soon Smear into death, at the still calm hour of four, I see the shadows of our life, the Fates We narrowly missed, our possible destiny. I try to say that love is more solid than Our bodies, but I only want you here. I know they created love and that the rest Is ghosts: war murders love I really say. But dare I write it to you who have said it Always and have no consolation from the ghosts? EPITAPH ON A BOMBING VICTIM Reader, could his limbs be found Here would lie a common man: History inflicts no wound But explodes what it began. And with its enormous lust For division splits the dust. Do not ask his nation; that Was History's confederate. GOOD-BYE FOR A LONG TIME A furnished room beyond the stinging of The sea, reached by a gravel road in which Puddles of rain stare up with clouded eyes: The photographs of other lives than ours ; The scattered evidence of your so brief Possession, daffodils fading in a vase. 67 ROY FULLER Our kisses here as they have always been, Half sensual, half sacred, bringing like A scent our years together, crowds of ghosts. And then among the thousand thoughts of parting The kisses grow perfunctory; the years Are waved away by your retreating arm. And now I am alone. I am once more The far-off boy without a memory, Wandering with an empty deadened self. Suddenly under my feet there is the small Body of a bird, startling against the gravel. I see its tight shut eye, a trace of moisture. And ruffling its gentle breast the wind, its beak Sharpened by death: and I am yours again, Hurt beyond hurting, never to forget. THE END OF A LEAVE Out of the damp black night, The noise of locomotives, A thousand whispering, Sharp-nailed, sinewed, slight, I meet that alien thing Your hand, with all its motives. Far from the roof of night And iron these encounter; In the gigantic hall 68 ROY FULLER As the severing light Menaces, human, small, These hands exchange their counters. Suddenly our relation Is terrifyingly simple Against wretched times, Like a hand which mimes Love in this anguished station Against a whole world's pull. POEM Pity, repulsion, love and anger, The vivid allegorical Reality of gun and hangar, Sense of the planet's imminent fall : Our fathers felt these things before In another half-forgotten war. And our emotions are caught part From them; their weaponed world it is They should have left to the abyss Or made it an image of their heart. SPRING 1942 Once as we were sitting by The falling sun, the thickening air, The chaplain came against the sky And quietly took a vacant chair. 69 ROY FULLER And under the tobacco smoke: "Freedom," he said, and "Good" and "Duty." We stared as though a savage spoke. The scene took on a singular beauty. And we made no reply to that Obscure, remote communication, But only stared at where the flat Meadow dissolved in vegetation. And thought: O sick, insatiable And constant lust; O death, our future; O revolution in the whole Of human use of man and nature! " CRUSTACEANS Upon the beach are thousands of crabs; they are Small, with one foreclaw curiously developed. Against the ashen sand I see a forest Of waving, pink, in some way human, claws. The crabs advance or, perhaps, retreat a step And then like Hamlet's father slowly beckon With that flesh-coloured, yes, obscene, incisor. These actions in the mass take on a rhythm The sexual display of animals, The dance of the tribe, or the enthusiasm Of a meeting. If you go closer to the crabs You see that with their normal claws they are making Spheres from the sand, small perfect rounds, which they, After a little preliminary twiddling, 70 ROY FULLER Produce from beneath their bodies suddenly, Like jugglers, and deposit by their holes. While this goes on, that monstrous foreclaw, that Button hole, is motionless. And all around The shafts sunk by these creatures lie the eggs Of sand, so patiently, endlessly evolved. At last I stretch and wave my hand: the crabs Instantly bolt down their holes and pull a sphere, A trap door, after them, and in a second The beach is still. While I was watching them My eyes unfocused with the effort, or Maybe it was the whole activity Which like an idea detached itself from its Frame, background: and I thought, are these that I Regard with such pity, disgust, absorption, crabs? Wrey Gardiner WALKING IN LONDON Walking between the ruined walls Where the stone falls and the dust blows With the wind from the black desert Of mankind we do not see Or do not want to see I drift with a brown leaf Whirled by the unseen storm about me, 71 WREY GARDINER Leaf in a green world that falls Long before autumn because the time Is a dry season of withered hearts Without love, without the beating and ecstatic rain. And in my pockets are poems rustling Like the solitary dry leaf, and a little sand From last year's beaches, and my eyes See the images of the real and the unreal city Floating over the river, remembered Like the picture we cannot forget Of the haughty sneering cavalier, Or the outstretched arms of the crucified man. OUR TRUE BEGINNINGS Time breaks our passion but the Virgin smiles Her hands are clasped in the blue mantle of heaven And the sea, her haven, is flecked with the white of love Falling like the reflection of walls in the even water. For humanity that hears the drum must come to love, Light leaves in the rain, the memory of night Coming suddenly over the sea darkening the evil Of a sad day remembering the lonely evening. The rails rusted by the deserted quayside, The ships abandoned to the stone white gulls. Only in the cold of the solitary hour We find the crabbed certainty of our true beginnings. WREY GARDINER POETRY IS HAPPINESS Poetry is happiness; and happiness is the shadow of poetry Like the shape of Orion in the midnight sky Spread across the darkening and dreadful future, A cold icicle pure as our merciless nature. I am the idiot lost on a winter's morning Bedevilled by despair of the ancient works of man, Ink on my fingers and murder in my heart, Lonely as angels or the ghost of time. Love is my happiness and love my learning, Words are my undiluted wisdom, not hard my meaning, Clear as the unseen blackbird singing alone. Poetry is life and life lies lazy in the sun. DR. COPPELIUS Water-still is the shade of old Coppelius, Winding his toys alone in the empty room So soon to be filled with the poetry of light And white limbs listening at the enigmatic door. Water-silk are the dreams of old Coppelius, Lost in the attics of all the forgotten towns Of time, hazy with light of another century, Only the music now will bring out of the memory. Days are now dark and dreams are of the dying; No magic skill is lavished on the doll With the bright staring eyes and steps like light Shimmering on the quiet floor of our private world. 73 Robert Garioch GHAISTIES Cauld are the ghaisties in yon kirk yaird an' cauld the airms that they mell wi' the mists o' the timni breists o' their loves; at the heid o' their bed cauld angels staund on guaird, an' marble doves. They ken na' the fear o' Code, as they sleep ayont sin, nor the terror o' man an' there's nane but the angels tae glunch at their trueloves' chairms, yet they lang for the reek o' the creeshy swat frae the skin, an' the grup o' a huun'. But we in the warld are alowe wi' the glawmer o' bluid-reid flame that loups ti the bluid in your tongue's tip as it tingles on mine, an' the howe o' the back we loo wi' oor finger-tips, an' the wame, brent-white, wi' a flush aneath like cramosie wine, hoo it curves ti meet ma ain! O ma sonsie frow what though the flesh be bruckle, an' fiends be slee, the joys o' the solid earth we'll pree or they dwine, we'll lauch at daith, an' man, an* the fiend, aw three, afore we dee. (See page 312 for glossary for this poem.) 74 David Gascoyne THE GRAVEL-PIT FIELD Beside the stolid opaque flow Of rain-gorged Thames; beneath a thin Layer of early-evening light Which seems to drift, a ragged veil, Upon die chilly March air's tide: Upwards in shallow shapeless tiers A stretch of scurfy pock-marked waste Sprawls laggardly its acres till They touch a raw brick-villa' d rim. Amidst this nondescript terrain Haphazardly the gravel-pits' Rough-hewn rust-coloured hollows yawn, Their steep declivities away From the field-surface dropping down Towards the depths below where rain- Water in turbid pools stagnates Like scraps of sky decaying in The sockets of a dead man's stare. The shabby coat of coarse grass spread Unevenly across the ruts And humps of lumpy soil; the bits Of stick and threads of straw; loose clumps Of weeds with withered stalks and black Tatters of leaf and scorched pods : all These intertwined minutiae 75 DAVID GASCOYNE Of Nature's humblest growths persist In their endurance here like rock. As with untold intensity On the far edge of Being, where Life's last faint forms begin to lose Name and identity and fade Away into the void, endures The final thin triumphant flame Of all that's most despoiled and bare: So these last stones, in the extreme Of their abasement might appear, Like ( rare stones such as could have formed A necklet worn by the dead queen Of a great Pharaoh, in her tomb . . . So each abandoned snail-shell strewn Among these blotched dock-leaves might seem In the pure ray shed by the loss Of all man-measured value, like Some priceless pearl-enamelled toy Cushioned on green silk under glass. And who in solitude like this Can say the unclean mongrel's bones Which stick out, splintered, through the loose Side of a gravel-pit, are not The precious relics of some saint, Perhaps miraculous? Or that The lettering on this Woodbine- Packet's remains ought not to read: Mene mene tekel upharsin? 76 DAVID GASCOYNE Now a breeze gently breathes across The wildernesses cryptic face; The meagre grasses scarcely stir; But when some stranger gust sweeps past, Seeming as though an unseen swarm Of sea-birds had disturbed the air With their strong wings' wide stroke, a gleam Of freshness hovers everywhere About the field; and tall weeds shake, Leaves wave their tiny flags, to show That the wind blown about the brow Of this poor plot is nothing less Than the great constant draught the speed Of Earth's gyrations makes in Space . . . As I stand musing, overhead The Zenith's stark light thrusts a ray Down through dusk's rolling vapours, casts A last lucidity of day Across the scene: And in a flash Of insight I behold the field's Apotheosis : No-man's-land Between this world and the beyond, Remote from men and yet more real Than any human dwelling-place: A tabernacle where one stands As though within the empty space Round which revolves the Sages' Wheel. Spring 1941. 77 DAVID GASCOYNE ECCE HOMO Whose is this horrifying face, This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed, Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun? Whose are these holllow red-filmed eyes And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side? Behold the Man: He is Man's Son. Forget the legend, tear the decent veil That cowardice or interest devised To make their mortal enemy a friend, To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell, Lest the great scandal be no more disguised: He is in agony till the world's end, And we must never sleep during that time! He is suspended on the cross-tree now And we are onlookers at the crime, Callous contemporaries of the slow Torture of God. Here is the hill Made ghastly by His spattered blood. Whereon He hangs and suffers still: See, the centurions wear riding-boots, Black shirts and badges and peaked caps, Greet one another with raised-arm salutes; They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips; Yet these His brothers know not what they do. And on his either side hang dead A labourer and a factory hand, 78 DAVID GASCOYNE Or one is maybe a lynched Jew And one a Negro or a Red, Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman, Spaniard or German democrat. Behind His lolling head the sky Glares like a fiery cataract Red with the murders of two thousand years Committed in His name and by Crusaders, Christian warriors Defending faith and property. Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands, Exuding darkness as indelible As guilty stains, fanned by funereal And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands And clefted landslides our about-to-be Bombed and abandoned cities stand. He who wept for Jerusalem Now sees His prophecy extend Across the greatest cities of the world, A guilty panic reason cannot stem Rising to raze them all as He foretold; And He must watch this drama to the end. Though often named, He is unknown To the dark kingdoms at His feet Where everything disparages His words, And each man bears the common guilt alone And goes blindfolded to his fate, And fear and greed are sovereign lords. 79 DAVID GASCOYNE The turning point of history Must come. Yet the complacent and the proud And who exploit and kill, may be denied Christ of Revolution and of Poetry The resurrection and the life Wrought by your spirit's blood. Involved in their own sophistry The black priest and the upright man Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb, Christ of Revolution and of Poetry, While the rejected and condemned become Agents of the divine. 'Not from a monstrance silver- wrought But from the tree of human pain Redeem our sterile misery, Christ of Revolution and of Poetry, That man's long journey through the night May not have been in vain. MISERERE Le desespok a des ailes L'amour a pour aile nacre Le dsespoir Les societes pcuvcnt changer. PIERRE JEAN JOUVE Tetiebrae "It is finished." The last nail Has consummated the inhuman pattern, and the veil Is torn. God's wounds are numbered. 80 DAVID GASCOYNE All is now withdrawn: void yawns The rock-hewn tomb. There is no more Regeneration in the stricken sun, The hope of faith no more, No height no depth no sign And no more history. This may it be: and worse. And may we know Thy perfect darkness. And may we into Hell descend with Thee. Pieta Stark in the pasture on the skull-shaped hill, In swollen aura of disaster shrunken and Unsheltered by the ruin of the sky, Intensely concentrated in themselves the banded Saints abandoned kneel. And under the unburdened tree Great in their midst, the rigid folds Of a blue cloak upholding as a text Her grief-scrawled face for the ensuing world to read, The Mother, whose dead Son's dear head Weighs like a precious blood-incrusted stone On her unfathomable breast: Holds Him God has forsaken, Word made flesh Made ransom, to the slow smoulder of her heart Till the catharsis of the race shall be complete. 81 DAVID GASCOYNE De Profundis Out of these depths: Where footsteps wander in the marsh of death and an Intense infernal glare is on our faces facing down: Out of these depths, what shamefaced cry Half choked in the dry throat, as though a stone Were our confounded tongue, can ever rise: Because the mind has been struck blind And may no more conceive Thy Throne . . . Because the depths Are clear with only death's Marsh-light, because the rock of grief Is clearly too extreme for us to breach: Deepen our depths, And aid our unbelief. Kyrie Is man's destructive lust insatiable? There is Grief in the blow that shatters the innocent face. Pain blots out clearer sense. And pleasure suffers The trial thrust of death in even the bride's embrace. The black catastrophe that can lay waste our worlds May be unconsciously desired. Fear masks our face; And tears as warm and cruelly wrung as blood Are tumbling even in the mouth of our grimace. 82 DAVID GASCOYNE How can our hope ring true? Fatality of guilt And complicated anguish confounds rime and place; While from the tottering ancestral house an angry voice Resounds in prophecy. Grant us extraordinary grace, O spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep, And bring to light the dream out of our sleep. Lachrytnae Slow are the years of light: and more immense Than the imagination. And the years return Until the Unity is filled. And heavy are The lengths of Time with the slow weight of tears. Since Thou didst weep, on a remote hill-side Beneath the olive-trees, fires of unnumbered stars Have burnt the years away, until we see them now: Since Thou didst weep, as many tears Have flowed like hourglass sand. Thy tears were all. And when our secret face Is blind because of the mysterious Surging of tears wrung by our most profound Presentiment of evil in man's fate, our cruellest wounds Become Thy stigmata. They are Thy tears which fall. Ex Nilrilo Here am I now cast down Beneath the black glare of a netherworld's Dead suns, dust in my mouth, among Dun tiers no tears refresh: am cast Down by a lofty hand, 83 DAVID GASCOYNE Hand that I love! Lord Light, How dark is thy arm's will and ironlike Thy ruler's finger that has sent me here! Far from Thy face I nothing understand, But kiss the Hand that has consigned Me to these latter years where I must learn The revelation of despair, and find Among the debris of all certainties The hardest stone on which to found Altar and shelter for Eternity. Sanctus Incomprehensible O Master fate and mystery And message and long promised Revelation! Murmur of the leaves Of life's prolific tree in the dark haze Of midsummer: and inspiration of the blood In the ecstatic secret bed: and bare Inscription on a prison wall, "For thou shalt persevere In thine identity...": a momentary glimpsed Escape into the golden dance of dust Beyond the window. These are all. Uncomprehending. But to understand Is to endure, withstand the withering blight Of winter night's long desperation, war, Confusion, till at the dense core Of this existence all the spirit's force Becomes acceptance of blind eyes To see no more. Then they may see at last; And all they see their vision sanctifies. W. S. Graham GIGHA That firewood pale with salt and burning green Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay. Quietly this morning beside the subsided herds Of water I walk. The children wade the shallows. The sun with long legs wades into the sea. NIGHT'S FALL Night's fall unlocks the dirge of the sea To pour up from the shore and befriending Gestures of water waving, to find me Dressed warm in a coat of land in a house Held off the drowned by my blood's race Over the crops of my step to meet some praise. The surge by day by night turns lament And by this night falls round the surrounding Seaside and countryside and I can't Sleep one word away on my own for that Grief sea with a purse of pearls and debt Wading the land away with salt in his throat. By this loud night traded into evidence Of a dark church of voices at hand I lie, work of the gruff sea's innocence And lie, work of the deaths I find On the robbed land breathing air and The friendly thief sea wealthy with the drowned. 85 W. S. GRAHAM DEFINITION OF MY BROTHER Each other we meet but live grief rises early By far the ghost and surest of all the sea Making doorway to within me. My bowed-down holy Man of the watchman minute begs that reply, Your voice or mine. One another I leave into Eden with. I commit The grave. Poverty takes over where we two meet. Time talks over the fair boy. His hot heartbeat Beats joy back over the knellringing till defeat. It's a contrary son I'm of. My wave-felled kin Steal out on the worlding waters far back again Away to the whirling beaches to reach his alone Lost eyes and sprinkled miracles of destruction. Beggar to shine In once the whales way wearing the starboard freights, I promise I'll ship the mad nights to bright benefits To that seastrolling voice in waves and states Not mine but what one another contrary creates. Or do we know a prince bleeding more gently Away to best the morning at its gates? POEM O gentle queen of the afternoon Wave the last orient of tears. No daylight comet ever breaks On so sweet an archipelago As love on love. 86 W. S. GRAHAM The fundamental negress bnilt In a cloudy descant of the stars Surveys no sorrow, invents no limits Till laughter the watcher of accident Sways off to God. O gentle queen of the afternoon The dawn is rescued dead and risen. Promise, O bush of blushing joy, No daylight comet ever breaks On so sweet an archipelago As love on love. John Heath-Stubbs BEGGAR'S SERENADE I'm a peevish old man with a penny-whistle Blowing under your window this blessed evening But pause a moment and hear the tune I'm playing I never was handsome and my limbs aren't straight But I raise my finger and the girls all follow me And leave some of the spruce young fellows gaping I had a painted girl whom none spoke well of And I had a milkmaid who didn't know cow from bull And a girl with green flesh out of a lucky hill And I had a lady as fine and as proud as you To follow me forty leagues and bed under a bush And I left her weeping at the long lane's end And are you sure where you will lie to-night, woman? 8? JOHN HEATH-STUBBS THE GHOST IN THE CELLARAGE Climb then by spiral stairways of cold thought Into the singing darkness you shall find God's healing hands are numb-transfixed By sharp star-splinters to the cruel sky, And impotent, extended through the night. O rebel brain, burn through the too-tight skull Or turn me loose to graze -but then the needle Pierces more sharply to the unpurged organ; Flesh is betrayed by flesh, and Love unkindly Linked to a symmetry of skin and sinew. No delicate dial is the blood-pump heart, And all uncircumcised the tender eye-ball. O you who have found out your love's anatomy A painful dryness, think of a wounded mole Working in the earth, And the poor ghost under the castle pavement. TWO MEN IN ARMOUR Stark by the Eastern gate Stand the two iron men Full-throated singing As when before-dawn darkness Lolls on the Earth, the impossible season Of flesh subsided or nerves drawn tighter, The fire-hackled, blood-wattled, needle-spurred cock Stretches his wings through the blackness, proclaims, 88 JOHN HEATH-STUBBS The iron hand is on your shoulder The iron hand is on your head When pickpocket water strips the flesh Green-fingered, lurching the drowned limbs, choking The pale throat, drums on the bursting eyes; And rolls and rolls where monstrous things go by, All selfhood murdered, twitched beneath that tide (The iron hand is in your hand) When fire filches the proud heart from you, faggoting Your bones for kindling oh my Prince Let music go up then, let praise go up Like shepherds' fluting on the lonely hills. Till Love construe the cryptic iron faces. VIRGIN AND UNICORN Oh that bright impossible beast of the mind He was as wild as the wind, and his own pride Had turned him savage, And solitary in his solitary forest; But my eyes were mirrors and my lap spices, And he bowed his gold head down, gentle as cornstalks Under the wind, under the reaping sickle; And when they wrenched the horn from his splintering skull He was as full of tears and trust as a child. J. F. Hendry INVERBERG Sliced with shade and scarred with snow A mountain breaks like Mosaic rock And through the lilt of mist there flow Restless rivers of pebble, pocked And speckled, where moss and the centuries grow. Tree, married to cloud as stem is to feather, Branches and straddles the convex of sky, Death is aflame in the bracken where heather Rears semaphore smoke into high Blue messenger fire through soundless weather. Below, like bees, the ivies swarm, Cast in leaping veins, their trunk, a crippled Animal of thighs pounced from loch-water, storms The slated shores of the past into ripples Interpreting man's fretted cuneiform. TIR-NAN-OG A man is born, a man dies, And in between are miseries. In between he is alive But cannot be allowed to live Since, body's hunger never fed. The mind is never satisfied 90 J. F. HENDRY And hands and feet and head and eyes Are hourly humbled to the knees. A man dies, a man is born, And in between a burden borne. In between, by force of love A grief in life is made alive Whose mind is more than satisfied And body's hunger always fed, Whose hands rise up from feet and knees, Encircle head and rub the eyes. THE SHIP Here is a ship you made Out of my breast and sides As I lay dead in the yards Under the hammers. Here is the hull you built Out of a heart of salt, Sky-rent, the prey of birds Strung on the longshore. Here is her rigging bound Nerve, sinew, ice and wind Blowing through the night The starred dew of beads. 91 J. F. HENDRY Here her ribs of silver Once steerless in a culvert Climb the laddered centuries To hide a cloud in a frame. THE CONSTANT NORTH (For Dee) Encompass me, my lover, With your eyes' wide calm. Though noonday shadows are assembling doom, The sun remains when I remember them; And death, if it should come, Must fall like quiet snow from such clear skies. Minutes we snatched from the unkind winds Are grown into daffodils by the sea's Edge, mocking its green miseries; Yet I seek you hourly still, over A new Atlantis loneliness, blind As a restless needle held by the constant north we always have in mind. ORPHEUS I shall always come to find you here, forever among the debris of winter. In this half-world, this cataract of water where the elements of vision are dissolved 92 J. F. HENDRY An ocean pours into the hold of summer, whose hopes, with ours, are ripped and shelved: Brown leaf, still branch, sere stick, the shore is strewn with the season's shipwreck, And landward through the rains, the sea unrolls a proud vast tragedy. Rayner Heppenstall CONSOLATION IN JULY Father, be praised for a white jasmine Thrown over a balcony of flaking iron. The odour faint, florets quickly discoloured, It roots in builder's rubble And the vile, sour clay of London, A soil for which none living feel affection, Rubbing it amorously between the fingers. A skein of brittle stalks, this dormant vine Yet expressed White, opaque flesh and the socketed pistil, The six joined petals and fivefold spears. Alas, they say The one inimitable perfume May now be feigned with bitter almonds, Tonquin beans, vanilla, that we need No longer travel to China in our dreams. And yet I feel with each new efflorescence My interest in earth is permanent, 93 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL A current lack of love Easily compensated in another life. Nudeleaf, yellow jasmine, Pale haunters of the winter, potted primula, Cold cyclamen, the yellow bush that Fortune Fetched from the heights of lost Yunnan, Fruitless cherry and the paeony's frilled drumsticks Promise, promise, when the year is early, And as the dog-day comes and the parched leaf Curls on the tree, with eight fingers Lupin promises (in the anxious palm A drop of dew like quicksilver). Promises a late wind, Tossing the ripe corn to the flying clouds, And last before there comes an aconite This ice-bound music crying to be loosed Promises. Promise all, beyond performance Unless it be, O Father, by your leave. SPRING SONG I have renounced already that hope. I renounce the sudden Whole, And I will not hope any longer to live my days in the clothedness of a vision Accidents of the numerous daytime so hate. Yet no days live if still, as I say, Timelessly long, still in the same thought, no more untied from Time, Abroad on the red-bellied bowl of oil, I figure the string of the small flame Of any dark chapel, staring aloft at an image painted last year. 94 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL I will have patience. Above all things I will be patient. I knelt last year With John of Ruysbroeck. And he showed me how it is possible for the small flame Of the soul to be blown into a conflagration that laps God round whole, How the spirit will bound up like an arrow, like the strenuous lark. Only my vision Is not his. If I stole the ciborium of St. Catherine now and gave the hosts to the Jews as, they say, Once John of Leuwen, the Jews should prick them and they would not bleed, as they would still in John of Ruysbroeck' s time. No, I will walk abroad, suffer and comb the days. In this time, With bounding of sap, without shame, the natural world rides out on the peaks of the year, And in the warm nights the body cries for a lover. Now Body is flame, Not Spirit. No bounty of God, no supernatural Light, no breath of the Whole Can break through these domes of the hawthorn. If any man in this weather were to say Other than bridegroom's prayers, the sun would flow down out of Heaven and burn up his vision. Therefore, I say, Maximus of Tyre shall be my master. I will use images. I will say The beaten gold, ivory and silver content me, that plants and rivers, in Time, 95 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL Peaks and the mountain torrents name Him. The actual lineaments of the Whole Are not present. Yet I will take pleasure in a lyre, a little spear, the particular vision, A chair, a running-ground, the Lover used. I will hold up the particles of the year To catch the Light. I will watch the Most Ample's refraction flicker in the small flame. And, most of all, I will suffer all losses, take from the Jews a flame To leave all my soul a desert where all men may tread. I will make out of Time, Before any host lies steaming upon my tongue, all the days of the year A cataract of knowledges and pain. I will neither say Nor see, nor keep any sense from the knife, but at the last, without either names or vision, Stretch my hand out in the close room and feel the Whole. So I make satisfaction. Such is my satispassion. Towards my winter vision It shall be so. No days live otherwise. Men must ride out of Time Or get unbroken joys out of Time. There is no third thing No man will say, If it were not so, I would have found another use for the days of the year. 96 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL HAGIOGRAPH That he would never have any rest this side of his death, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion, The many-hearted, knew. For the joy to relish her with, Holy as good blue pigments, as lucid as holy things, Is mastered in one place only. That is what had made strange The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. At the gates of cities, catching a dawn through the wild plains, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion Scattered out still his many hearts. He gathered a glance In the nerve as blue as contemplation, blue as the voice of a dove, That would shake loose more sacramental textures and savours than God ever gave, The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. This, at the last, was he that baited the mountain gallows, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion, The many-hearted man. And whoever will run into follies As holy as the morning sea, as the landward flute, Must cry out for his intercession. He lives in the heaviest light, The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. Nigel Heseltine from MICROCOSMOS I I enter and as I enter all is abandoned like the apple and like the apple in my hand yet naked 97 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL Peaks and the mountain torrents name Him. The actual lineaments of the Whole Are not present. Yet I will take pleasure in a lyre, a little spear, the particular vision, A chair, a running-ground, the Lover used. I will hold up the particles of the year To catch the Light. I will watch the Most Ample's refraction flicker in the small flame. And, most of all, I will suffer all losses, take from the Jews a flame To leave all my soul a desert where all men may tread. I will make out of Time, Before any host lies steaming upon my tongue, all the days of the year A cataract of knowledges and pain. I will neither say Nor see, nor keep any sense from the knife, but at the last, without either names or vision, Stretch my hand out in the close room and feel the Whole. So I make satisfaction. Such is my satispassion. Towards my winter vision It shall be so. No days live otherwise. Men must ride out of Time Or get unbroken joys out of Time. There is no third thing No man will say, If it were not so, I would have found another use for the days of the year. 96 RAYNER HEPPENSTALL HAGIOGRAPH That he would never have any rest this side of his death, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion, The many-hearted, knew. For the joy to relish her with, Holy as good blue pigments, as lucid as holy things, Is mastered in one place only. That is what had made strange The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. At the gates of cities, catching a dawn through the wild plains, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion Scattered out still his many hearts. He gathered a glance In the nerve as blue as contemplation, blue as the voice of a dove, That would shake loose more sacramental textures and savours than God ever gave, The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. This, at the last, was he that baited the mountain gallows, Wailing around the image, Pygmalion, The many-hearted man. And whoever will run into follies As holy as the morning sea, as the landward flute, Must cry out for his intercession. He lives in the heaviest light, The saint Pygmalion, saint, beggar and thief. Nigel Heseltine from MICROCOSMOS I I enter and as I enter all is abandoned like the apple and like the apple in my hand yet naked 97 NIGEL HESELTINE stand and the apple in my hand slanting on the desolate shore slanting on the desolate shore. O golden bright bright here bright O bright here the light passes in my skin my skin. My hand cannot smooth your sigh nor bind your tear, nor scraping mark your present grave: my hand and yours unyoked the day, unyoked our year, our golden eyes' enchanted sight, and grasping learned the lying frame. Your grave I know below the roots of turning pines, your rotted face I resurrect, your hand and mine one bone one flesh. 7 He compares his beloved to a snake, sees that the blossom falling on her head is snow; she is the calm eye looks and sees nothing, she The swift dove and melting meadow. I give you my hand I dare and I dare not say yes trembles my heart trembles see there it is there 98 NIGEL HESELTINE if I knew I were happy there lets go I dare and I dare . . . I give my hand. 10 Suck the bare sob out of the heart because the sobbing guts reach for a life of their own. 16 what, will he come for me tall and terrible, with silk hanging from his shoulders? what can I set against his smile? 17 The worm cries not against the storm the worm that tunnels in the storm the worm in collapsed ruins moves among the moss and grasses. 20 r mysteries: if a nymph naked and golden naked as a nymph gold as the skin of a magic woman, naked as she lies like a cloud in our dreams: She lying sighing and crying at the sky singing and crying Love love love love. 25 Going to sing about Emily now they put her in a grave, 99 NIGEL HESELTINE she was the buried one and she didnt die of love. Now who came to her window he never came back again, if she ever saw him, he looked in and he's gone. Her yellow box fits her like they never looked after her a blowing summer dress on her they never went after her. So we put her there neatly where the scutch grass is plentiful, and now they've done that for her That's all we can do for her. Going to forget about Emily Because we wont remember her, Bury her in summertime And forget her by winter. 32 There are figures like the dark figures dark three figures in black, they shadow her they shadow her live lithe back, soaring I my eye on her lithe live body in love I love her stretched skin and from her leg so longing I longing I loving 100 NIGEL HESELTINE mounting eye carried higher her leaning back tight breasts shallow breasts breathing I cannot touch cannot grasp cannot slide cannot hide in my eye cannot. Three figures dark figures cherish her shadow her leaning there, three dark they together, they. 33 In the winter when the wet lanes hissed and sucked, I walked and whistled and capered in the muck: I sang Deep River, and that night I would be dancing. When every path was streaming I splashed my feet about the floating twigs, and in me was a sweet girl's name: three weeks to that day I'd kissed her where we crouched on a dark stairway. In the dark woods when I had shot at quick pigeons against the green sky, I held her to me in a sweet embrace and kissed the bark of a tree where I pressed my face. 35 I was sat in the church of their Lord and they told me I was a slave, and a fat-bellied parson aloft said I'd a soul he could save; but I dreamed on a man like a lion come down from the sky in his glory of muscle and fire and iron, and I spat on their Lord's story. 101 NIGEL HESELTINE 40 Come near me, for the night brings some cold thing near me: I am your door, your hand. What if the boards'* voices come crying as we lay? Dear, I am your door, your hand. That autumn when the partridges called in the stubble I waded the wet beet to my knees and angrily fired at birds who had no part in my trouble, and blew them apart and walked all day till I was tired. Gnawing in me that drove my feet on, her face in every wall her walk upon the hill, her voice, her tall body below the trees. The hot September sun was like a prison binding me in parched heat where I trod up and down and never could reach the horizon 43 I walked the mountains lonely for you among the windy grasses, lay like an ear in the night searching for you in every whisper. 46 Sion the son of Evan sang like a blind harper in his forge: I dreaming of dragons in the sparks, sniff the sharp smoke, and sniff the weapons that hang long on the smoked walls where carters had drawn hearts. 102 NIGEL HESELTINI- 56 I am like bound because of Abraham's knife is the core of his heart: my angels are angels are wraiths are like gone like bound: how shall I cry when he so holds my life? 57 1 cannot dry my eyes when I think of the distant time The evening was green and transparent behind the cypress and pine, where the rooks flew home cawing and in every bush the blackbirds chaffered in their own darkness and would not hush till the night melted into the hills, and in the black space of the sky down twinkled the stars like a gentle loving face. Sean Jennett THE QUICK i The blossoms dropped before we really saw them, for we had been so occupied that year that only death could hold us. And the spring breathed out its heart in air and fell away back to the old eclectic earth, and seed swelled on the naked stalk. The cuckoo's throat grew harsh and singing birds forgot their fresh delight for languid, buxom summer. SEAN JENNETT And we ignored the change, even the alteration in ourselves, the bubbling race of blood, the singing heart, the reins that tlirust in season: all sounds and pulses smothered by the dread that built its image in the unknown shadow and saw in the flowering brake a hideous threat. The seasons now have taken other colours by which we know them and divide in sections that can be the more neatly understood the confused course, the wild scrawl of war. The spring is ominous we have seen it full of fear and hate and triumph. Summer dogs with danger every casual thought. Autumn swells the harvest of defeat. And winter is the ragged night of sleep split with fire and the anger of the guns; and webbed with our intention of revenge, accumulation of the means of death, and slow perfection of the secret plan. Another spring grows to its summer fusion and no eye watches how the small green nipple spreads into leaf. The time is only important for the way men use it, and how God turns his finger in the twig or pushes a bent knuckle through the soil is a detail we have lost the care for, or never known because the years repeat it, each with its separate tongue mouthing the same syllable. 104 SEAN JENNETT And yet, we must outlast the time, we have no choice but to be simple-minded who must resist the headline and the sponsored lie, for there is no escape from circumstance in this live world, important, quarrelling earth, this dwarf star seething at conception's centre, troublesome second of eternal time. 3 War is not a dream, a nightmare to be banished by the shock of water, or the shaking ot a shoulder. Starting, it will continue in its way though Christ's wounds gape and that cross rooting in the bloody earth grows to die gallows in the conquered city; and while we struggle now to integrate custom and usage and the rasp of need life stumbles from our shadow and is lost and we know how these years of war came empty-handed, wolfed, and went their way, and paid us only die sharp coins of pain, hate and despair, vengeance and revenge. The mutilation of the body rears no architecture for our peaceful days, nor can the broken or the severed arm maintain the state. Bitterness and despair, corroding the foundations of the mind, will war against us at the end of war and in the moment of our gaudy triumph ruin all our gain. 105 SEAN JENNETT 4 < Christ taught it at the march of Zabulon, in Capaernaum, to the eager, thoughtless crowd; casting out evil spirits from the mad to drive the malice from the sane and wise: now in this later time of the tongueless word when war enmeshes the slow limbs of God, fight without bitterness, meet without despair the shock of death; with no hate take the double pressure on the delicate trigger. But that loud politician, ranting right look out for him, for he is totally blind among the one-eyed and the cataracts, arid his way leads to hell: not only now, but, as for our own fathers, after our time, when the child we have conceived in love shall grow to manhood in a world at war. AND THE DEAD I saw them coming in the eyeless day in that wan landscape of the undreaming dead, and they had come so far their bodies leaned like the thin bent-grass on the wind-lapped moor. No-one knew of their coming: only the heart had known, and the idle bones foreseen the hard bone's breaking: for it ends in this, the living bone is useless in the end. O who will shoot the murderer O who destroy the curse of death 106 SEAN JENNETT and throw the smoking gun away: for him the febrile battlefields shall flower and he shall walk enchanted with his breath. This one in Libya by the rats dispersed; this his companion, on the stock cut in his nick, cut for each silent corpse; this one in the Donetz, and this in France, and these who soiled the unforgiving sea: "blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead!" The earth is theirs for ever, arid the waters under are swung by their shadowy breath. Alive they cried out on the other's horror, charged with unreason of the lunatic their brother coward, enemy, and killer, and raper of the cloistered nun and girls fresh from school. And each to his own banner gathered from country and from town, and raised it up for God, and sang their fellowing songs: and ground the bayonet sharp and charged the gun. O who will shoot the ranting man O who destroy the evil glory and throw the smoking gun away: though he shall be betrayed and sold for gold yet he shall live in this or any story. The evil of that life they know no more that in their day enraged the shoot of blood or seared with fear: its residue is shame; and their hearts are too ashy now for anger. 107 SEAN JENNETT Against the liar and the inflaming word they lie protected by the traps of death who to this commonwealth at last attain from daylight dream and the wild rage of the world. So jowl by jowl the sunken veterans come to this equation: here they are all their own and like a swallow of material day have split the hiatus, escaped the pulse of time, its long frustration and its flare of fear : nor shall we understand, who suffer still the thrusting heart and binding ligament perfection in the final negative. Glyn J ones SONG I kept neat my virginity, No love gulled me to bed; I whistled up the mountain stones My unseen arms outspread Lustrous, the lord-star sprang to me, He was my son instead. I felt my woody hair pour out Like water from my head To see my nipples serpent-mouthed, My sucking star-child dead. Lambleddian. 108 GLYN JONES GOLD A midday half-moon slopes in heaven, tipped And empty, with her golden liquor spilt. She rolls transparent on the floor of heaven. She has splashed her wine of gold upon the broom And poured it over golden chain adrip With honey-drench, and emptied it between My hands where rests the gold-clot of my love's Fair head, her chainmail cap of golden curls. Penbyn Gnyr. NIGHT This shadow flesh of risen man Bears on my bones the blurt of pain, Budges the rock and walks the quays The choking bandog snaps his chain. Her upright body floats the tide, Fish-teeth pluck cheek-bones bare; Naked Mary's candled wave Blows in the harvest of her hair. Mark the scandal on the hill Before our feather-raided sea; Sway like a bell-tongue, hanging man, And fret your Judas-fruited tree. The angelled air, the sea is edged With fever where black Patmos lies; 109 GLYN JONES Beneath his island aching oak My thunder-hearted lover dies. Like grief the rowdy swans return, Rain has her earring on the thorn; With broken hands I roll my rock Back on the Pasc of this raw dawn. L/anon. Sidney Keyes THE SNOW They said, It will be like snow falling To-night a hollow wind beating the laurels, And in the morning quiet, the laurels quiet, The soft sky resting on the treetops and The earth not frying any more. I read it would be safe, like snow lying Locked in a secret promise with the ground. And the clear distances, the friendly hills Would whisper, It is easy, easy as sleep To the lost traveller frozen in the field. But now it's come, how different without Those reassuring voices. Now I face The bright white glare of January, naked Among the clashing laurels, while the earth Stumbles and cries like any lonely lover. no SIDNEY KEYES THE WILDERNESS The red rock wilderness Shall be my dwelling-place. Where the wind saws at the bluffs And the pebble falls like thunder I shall watch the clawed sun Tear the rocks asunder. The seven-branched cactus Will never sweat wine: My own bleeding feet Shall furnish the sign. The rock says "Endure," The wind says "Pursue." The sun says "I will suck your bones And afterwards bury you." Laurie Lee LARCH TREE Oh, larch tree with scarlet berries sharpen the morning slender sun sharpen the thin taste of September with your aroma of sweet wax and powder delicate. Fruit is falling in the valley breaking on the snouts of foxes in LAURIE LEE breaking on the wooden crosses where children bury the shattered bird. Fruit is falling in the city blowing a woman's eyes and fingers across the street among the bones of boys who could not speak their love. I watch a starling cut the sky a dagger through the blood of cold and grasses bound by strings of wind stockade the sobbing fruit among the bees. Oh, larch tree, with icy hair your needles thread the thoughts of snow while in the fields a shivering girl takes to her breast the sad ripe apples. JUNIPER Juniper holds to the moon a girl adoring a bracelet; as the hills draw up their knees they throw off their jasmine girdles. You are a forest of game, a thought of nights in procession, you tread through the bitter fires of the nasturtium. I decorate you to a smell of apples, I divide you among the voices 112 LAURIE LEE of owls and cavaliering cocks And woodpigeons monotonously dry. I hang lanterns on your mouth and candles from your passionate crucifix, and bloody leaves of the Virginia drip with their scarlet oil. There is a pike in the lake whose blue teeth eat the midnight stars piercing the water's velvet skin and puncturing your sleep. I am the pike in your breast, my eyes of clay revolve the waves while cirrus roots and lilies grow between our banks of steep embraces. Denise Levertov CHRISTMAS 1944 Bright cards above the fire bring no friends near, fire cannot keep the cold from seeping in. Spindrift sparkle and candles on the tree make brave pretence of light; but look out of doors: Evening already surrounds the curtained house, draws near, watches; gardens are blue with frost, and every carol bears a burden of exile, a song of slaves. Come in, then, poverty, and come in, death: DENISE LEVERTOV this year too many, lie cold, or die in cold, for any small room's warmth to keep you out. You sit in empty chairs, gleam in unseeing eyes; having no home now, you cast your shadow over the atlas, and rest in restlessness of our long nights as we lie, dreaming of Europe. A painted bird or boat above the fire, a fire in the hearth, a candle in the dark, a dark excited tree, fresh from the forest, are all that stand between us and the wind. The wind has tales to tell of sea and city, a plague on many houses, fear knocking on the doors; how venom trickles from the mouth of death, arid trees are white with rage of alien battles. Who can be happy while the wind recounts its long sagas of sorrow? Though we are safe in a flickering circle of winter festival We dare not laugh; or if we laugh, we lie, hearing hatred crackle in the coal, the voice of treason, the voice of love. THE ANTEROOM Out of this anteroom whose light is broken by slatted blinds and rustling portieres, a tentative room too near the street, pierced with street voices and the sound of horns, uneasy halting place of travelling ghosts : out of this season of uprooted hours, where time, that should grow round as hanging fruit, rushes like showers of dry and shrivelled leaves, 114 DENISE LEVERTOV and no hour quickens into truth; where love, confused, can never touch or penetrate a growing dream, but hovers at its side: that love, that dream, must travel into wide landscapes where the heart has rest, and quietly (as stones, pure on the still earth, await a strange completion into dream, by the slow rain, or by a man's desire) await their transformation into life. FOLDING A SHIRT Folding a shirt, a woman stands still for a moment, to recall warmth of flesh ; her careful hands heavy on a sleeve, recall a gesture, or the touch of love; she leans against the kitchen wall, listening for a word of love, but only finds a sound like fear running through the rooms above. With folded clothes she folds her fear, but cannot put desire away, and cannot make the silence hear. Unwillingly she puts away the bread, the wine, the knife, smooths the bed where lovers lay, 115 DENISE LEVERTOV while timers unhesitating knife cuts away the living hours, the common rituals of life. THE BARRICADES If now you cannot hear me, it is because your thoughts are held by sounds of destiny or turn perhaps to darkness, magnetized, as a doomed ship upon the Manacles is drawn to end its wandering and down into the stillness under rock and wave to lower its bright figurehead; or else you never heard me, only listening to that implicit question in the shade, duplicity that knaws the roots of love. If now I cannot see you, or be sure you ever stirred beyond the walls of dream rising, unbroken battlements, to a sky heavy with constellations of desire, it is because those barricades are grown too tall to scale, too dense to penetrate, hiding the landscape of your distant life in which you move, as birds in evening air far beyond sight trouble the darkening sea with the low piping of their discontent. AUTUMN JOURNEY Out of autumn like a blade mysteriously engraved, flashes the frost; stars and leaves are blown to the brown earth, 116 DENISE LEVERTOV and burn distantly, encircle evening in a web of smoke. Now once again the wanderer deserts the comfortable myth and the drowsy mansion where all these months he lay entranced, and heard the soft forgetful murmur of his flowers, lovingly bent over their mirrored doubles. As he looks back, a window lit fantastic lemon fruit in the northern woods, lost in a high facade suggests a latent music, and he knows the sound is both "Farewell" and promises of treasure, over the hill, among the burning worlds. POEM Some are too much at home in the role of wanderer, watcher, listener; who, by lamplit doors that open only to another's knock, commune with shadows and are happier with ghosts than living guests in a warm house. They drift about the darkening city squares, coats blown in evening winds and fingers feeling familiar holes in pockets, thinking: Life has always been a counterfeit, a dream where dreaming figures danced .behind the glass. Yet as they work, or absently stand at a window letting a tap run and the plates lie wet, while the bright rain softly shines upon slates, they feel the whole of life is theirs, the music, colour, and warmth, and light; hands held JI7 DEMISE LEVERTOV safe in the hands of love; and trees beside them dark and gentle, growing as they grow, a part of the world with fire and house and child. The undertone of all the solitude is the unceasing question, "Who am I? A shadow's image on the rainy pavement, walking in wonder past the vivid windows, a half contented ghost among my ghosts? Or one who, imagining light, air, sun, Can now take root in life, inherit love?" Alun Lewis IN HOSPITAL: POONA Last night I did not fight for sleep But lay awake from midnight while the world Turned its slow features to the moving deep Of darkness, till I knew that you were furled, Beloved, in the same dark watch as I. And sixty degrees of longitude beside Vanished as though a swan in ecstasy Had spanned the distance from your sleeping side. And like to swan or moon the whole of Wales Glided within the parish of my care: I saw the green tide leap on Cardigan, Your red yacht riding like a legend there. And the great mountains Dafydd and Llewelyn, Plynlimmon, Cader Idris and Eryri 118 ALUN LEWIS Threshing the darkness back from head and fin, And also the small nameless mining valley Whose slopes are scratched with streets and sprawling graves Dark in the lap of firwoods and great boulders Where you lay waiting, listening to the waves My hot hands touched your white despondent shoulders And then ten thousand miles of daylight grew Between us, arid I heard the wild daws crake In India's starving throat; whereat I knew That Time upon the heart can break But love survives the venom of the snake. Emanuel Litvinov POEM FOR THE ATOMIC AGE It is when they come with questions, how then shall we answer without shame? Shall we speak parables of barley and fishers, raise images falsely rural to vex the candid eye? There was a tree of evil: some had gathered fruit: it was better so, cutting the root and its worshippers. It was better so: there were black and white, just like a game in the parlour. Only this was played by heroes and we have verses to prove it. Once in the war a smooth stranger, more travelled than Columbus, explained: Races are different, each has a smell. 119 EMANUEL LITVINOV Negroes are rank like sweat, the Russian reeks of mothballs and potato, Germans of corpses, the Jews of gold and the gaudy Wop breathes garlic. But do not the English smell, we asked, just a little? Ah, I can only speak of soldiers. The characteristic odour is strong of Lifebouy soap: it is very good. And I, I do not smell, he said. There was another, a very wise owl with a mouse in his beak hooting sermons to the broken rafters: It is a matter of history, someone must write it and dead men, dead men tell no tales. And there was an Eye, cold as an oyster, with the green fire of the sea, and a Brain like a grey crab crawling intent upon the movement of its legs; but worst was the silence whose words stung like whips and remained unspoken. Egypt, December , NOTE FROM AN INTIMATE DIARY You must remember this, the cold turning year when absence was arbitrary and the silent hours wound endlessly a bright filament of pain when the thin children huddled against winter starving the earth of smiles and over Europe gnarled trees stood bare as crosses 120 EMANUEL LITVINOV you must remember for it is soon forgotten how easily a crust can give joy to birds and children in a time of famine evil should not be forgotten when idyllic summer throws bread to avid pigeons and the desperate amours of air-raid shelters become once more the white swans who gracefully symbolised love in the parks of our youth and whimsical rain spattered your summer frock to be happy once more is not enough one must remember what it is to be unhappy and how slyly the devils lurk in unwary shadows: let us not forget, my dear, our December of absence when we were fortunate still to be alive even though our brothers and sisters were dead like Caesar we must reward Jupiter for our luck and all those lesser gods who are fickle and vain else will they turn to crows and peck out our eyes: and one day we will weep so much a new lake will sail our children's swans . . . it will be the day when we remember. Egypt, December, 121 Norman McCaig TWO MUSICS In any hour the singers with mouths of gold and fates transparent on their brows like words trembling out of the mirror of a myth will trail their sad procession through your head, in a caterwauling night, in the storm of worlds insinuating the honeycomb from the grumbling wave in whose slow sides you see your den of love. This is your hand, this ivory nest of ghosts, and this your famished eye whose mediaeval feith dances worlds upon a needle nerve; angel with worlds and devil with his doubts will both surrender them; each to his rival will grant the space you walk in, and their love will chivvy you in tribes of another hand and through the peoples of an eye still blind. Falseness can never then speak in your look words I have never heard, nor faithfulness make its short pilgrimage from you to me, that will be all my treasure when I seek in the repeated song your silent voice. Nothing will change or grow under the sky but the transmuting myth whose words you'll be singing and sounding under the grumbling sea. 122 NORMAN MCCAIG YOU WITHIN LOVE You within love are lion leaping in darkness glorifying night with a fiercer day, passion of rivers leaping in curled dances, greed of sun in all the whirling dew. And love around you echoing only you conjures the spring in the year's every day. Bold sun, slim moon that trembles beyond virgin 1 creep with you behind the lion's pounces, vanish in a morning glitter, rise with passion in an echoing spring burn every day. THE TYRANT APPLE IS EATEN You spoke keys and looked out of your mind's black book charming, unspeakable clues that led my learning eyes to split the world's ball and greet magician and devil, who now make you ancient and love a century's habit. We lie in your cunning kindness, my grey in your thin hands, quiet as a cobweb, dumb-struck like a devil in a saint's book. 123 Hugh Macdiarmid THE MAN IN THE MOON The moonbeams kelter i the lift, An Earth, the bare auld stane, Glitters aneath the seas o Space, White as a mammoth's bane. An, lifted owre the gowden wave, Peers a dumfoun'ered Thocht, Wi keethin sicht o a' there is, An bodily sicht o nocht. (kelter - undulate; lift - sky; keethin sicht - sight of the keethings or subsurface shimmer caused by a school of fish) THE GLEN OF SILENCE By this cold shuddering fit of feAr My heart divines a presence here, Goddess or ghost yclept; Wrecker of homes . . . Where have I heard a silence before Like this that only a lone bird's cries And the sound of a brawling burn to-day Serve in this wide empty glen but to emphasize? Every doctor knows it the stillness of foetal death, The indescribable silence over the abdomen then! A silence literally heard because of the way It stands out in the auscultation of the abdomen. 124 HUGH MACDIARMJD Here is an identical silence, picked out By a bickering burn and a lone bird's wheeple The foetal death in this great cleared glen Where the fear-tholladh nan tighern has done his foul work The tragedy of an unevolved people. (Fear-tholladh nan tighem - Destroyer of homes) PERFECT (On the Western Seaboard of South Uist) (Los muertos abren los ojos a los quc viven) I found a pigeon's skull on the machair, All the bones pure white and dry, and chalky, But perfect, Without a crack or a flaw anywhere At the back, rising out of the beak, Were twin domes like bubbles of thin bone, Almost transparent, where the brain had been That fixed the tilt of the wings. (machair - shingle or cobble beach) O WHA'S BEEN HERE AFORE ME, LASS O wha's the bride that cairries the bunch O' thistles blinterin white? Her cuckold bridegroom little dreids What he sail ken this nicht. For closer than gudeman can come And closer to'r than hersel, 125 HUGH MACDIARMID Whs. didna need lier maidenheid Has wrocht his purpose fell. wha's been here afore me, lass, And hoo did he get in? A man that deed or I was born This evil thing has din. And left, as it were on a corpse, Your maidenheid to me? Nae lass, gudeman, sin Time began 'S hed ony mair to gie. But I can gie ye kindness, lad, And a pair o willin hands, And ye sail hae my briests like stars, My limbs like willow wands. And on my lips ye'll heed nac mair, And in my hair forget, The seed o a' the men that in My virgin womb hae met... (blintering - glimmering; Nae lass etc. -no lass, good man, since time began, has had any more to give) MILK-WORT AND BOG COTTON Cwa een like milk-wort and bog-cotton hair! 1 love you, earth, in this mood best o' a' When the shy spirit like a laich wind moves And frae the lift nae shadow can fa' 126 HUGH MACDIARMID Since there's nocht left to thraw a shadow there Owre een like milk- wort and milk-white cotton hair. Wad that nae leaf upon anither wheeled A shadow either and nae root need dern In sacrifice to let sic beauty be! But deep surroondin' darkness I discern Is aye the price o' licht. Wad licht revealed Naething but you, and nicht nocht else concealed. (cwa - come away; cen - eyes; milk- wort - the bluebell; laich - low; lift - sky) MUNESTRUCK When the warl's couped roun' as a pcerie That licht-lookin craw o a body, the mime, Sits on the fower cross-win's Peerin aa roun. She's seen me she's seen me an straucht Loupit clean on the quick o my hert. The quhither o cauld gowd's fairly Gicn me a stcrt. An the roorin o oceans noo Is peeriewcerie to me: Thunner's a tinklin bell: an Time Whuds like a flee. (couped - tumbled; pcerie - spinningtop; licht - light; craw - crow; munc - moon; fower - four; straucht - straight; loupit - leapt; quhither - beam; peerieweeric - diminished to a mere thread of sound) 127 HUGH MACDIARMID THE EEMIS-STANE T the how-dumb-deid o the cauld hairst nicht The warl like an eemis-stane Wags i the lift; An my eerie memories fa' Like a yowdendrift. Like a yowdendrift so's I couldna read The words cut oot i the stane Had the fug o fame An history's hazelraw No' yirdit thaim. (how-dumb-deid - "the dead of night"; hairst - harvest-autumn; warl - world; eemis-stane - tiltingrock; lift - sky; yowendrift - swirl of snow; fug - moss; hazelraw - lichen) THE WATERGAW Ae weet forenicht i the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing. A watergaw wi its chitterin licht Ayont the on-ding; An I thocht o the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i the laverock's hoose That nicht-an nane i mine; But I hae thocht o that foolish licht Ever sin syne; An I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then. (weet - wet; yow-trummle - ewe-tremble : a cold spell after sheep shearing; antrin - rare; wutergaw - rainbow; chitterin - shivering; ayont - against; on-ding - downpour; reek - smoke; laverock's - lark's; hoose - house) 128 HUGH MACDIARMID IN THE HEDGEBACK It was a wild black nicht, But i the hert o't we Drave back the darkness wi a bleeze o licht, Ferrer than een could see. It was a wild black nicht, But o the snell air we Kept juist eneuch to hinder the heat Meltin us utterly. It was a wild black nicht, But o the win's roar we Kept juist eneuch to hear oor herts beat Owre it triumphantly. It was a wild black nicht, But o the Earth we Kept juist eneuch underneath us to ken That a warl used to be. (sncll - bitter cold) Sorley Maclean (from his own Gaelic) KNIGHTSBRIDGE OF LIBYA (>*, 19*2) Though I am to-day against the breast of battle, not here my burden and extremity; not Rommel's guns and tanks, but that my darling should be crooked and a liar. 129 SORLEY MACLEAN TO A DEPRAVED LYING WOMAN If I were dead in the Desert as you would like me to be would not your lies be luxuriant, many-coloured on my corpse. For every grain of dry sand choking my mouth and eye, you would have a lie to match it Himeimat would not be such a pile. There would not be a corpse between El Ragil and bloody Eleut El Tamar who would not prefer as clothing his load of sand to your nimble lie. After your adultery and Nancy-boy who misled you with his warm money, your ready lie would put a cloak over the sordidness of your vicissitudes. THE NIGHTMARE Oiie night of the two bad years when I thought my love was maimed with a hurt as bad as woman has had since Eve's generation, we were together in a dream beside the stone wall that is between the boys' and girls' playgrounds of my first school; she was in my arms and my mouth was going to her lips when the loathsome head started suddenly from behind the wall; and the long foul dim fingers seized my throat in a sudden grip, and the words of despair followed: Too late, you fool. from DAIN EILE My eye is not on Calvary, nor on Bethlehem the Blessed, but on a foul-smelling backland in Glasgow, where life rots as it grows; and on a room in Edinburgh, a room of poverty and pain, where the diseased infant writhes and wallows till death. 130 SORLEY MACLEAN from DAIN do EIMHIR XVII Multitude of the skies, gold riddle of millions of stars, cold, distant, lustrous, beautiful, silent, unconscious, unwelcoming. Fullness of knowledge in their course, emptiness of chartless ignorance, a universe moving in silence, a mind alone in its bounds. Not they moved my thoughts, not the marvel of their chill course; to us there is no miracle but in love, lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face. XIX I gave you immortality and what did you give me? Only the sharp arrows of your beauty, a harsh onset and piercing sorrow, bitterness of spirit and a sore gleam of glory. If I gave you immortality you gave it to me; you put an edge on my spirit and radiance in my song. And though you spoiled my understanding of the conflict, yet, were I to see you again, I should accept more and the whole of it. Were I, after oblivion of my trouble, to see before me on the plain of the land of youth the gracious form of your beauty, I should prefer it there, although my weakness would return, and to peace of spirit again to be wounded. O yellow-haired, lovely girl, you tore my strength and in- clined my course from its aim: but, if I reach my place, the high wood of the men of song, you are the fire of my lyric you made a poet of me through sorrow. SORLEY MACLEAN I raised this pillar on the shifting mountain of time, but it is a memorial-stone that will be heeded till the Deluge, and, though > you will be married to another and ignorant of my struggle, your glory is my poetry, after the slow rotting of your beauty. XXII I walked with my reason out beside the sea : we were together but it kept a little distance from me. Then it turned saying: Is it true you heard that your fair love is marrying early on Monday? I checked the heart that rose in my torn, swift breast and said: most likely, why should I lie? How should I think I would seize the radiant golden star, that I could catch it and put it prudently in my pocket? I did not take a cross's death in the sore extremity of Spain, and how then should I expect the one new gift of fate? I followed only a way that was small, mean, low, dry, and lukewarm: and how then should I meet the thunderbolt of love? But had I the choice again, and stood on that headland, I should leap from heaven or hell with a whole spirit and heart. 132 SORLEY MACLEAN XXX A Bolshevik who never gave heed to queen or to king, yet, had we Scotland free, Scotland equal to our love, a white, spirited, generous- Scotland, without petty, paltry, vapid bour- geoisie, without the loathesomeness of capitalists, without hateful, crass graft, the mettlesome Scotland of the free, the Scotland of our blood, the Scotland of our love, I would break the legitimate law of the kings, I would break the sure law of the wise, I would proclaim you queen of Scotland in spite of the new republic. LIV You were dawn on the Cuillin and benign day on the Clarach , the sun on his elbows in the golden stream and the white rose that breaks the horizon. Glitter of sails on a sunlit firth, blue of the ocean and aureate sky, the young morning in your head of hair and in your clear lovely cheeks. My jewel of dawn and night your face and beloved kindness, though with the grey shaft of grief my young morning is transfixed. LV I do not see the sense of my toil putting thoughts in a dying tongue, now when the whoredom of Europe is murder erect and agony: but we have been given a million years, a frag- ment of a sad, growing portion, the courage and patience of the many and the marvel of a beautiful face. 133 Joseph Gordon Macleod From THE ECLIPTIC: CANCER, or, THE CRAB V Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elephantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: "region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator." But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon? (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but "burial grounds abhorred by the moon?" And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. 134 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs o'ut its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: "Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation (prandial)." But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother Barbarieus said: "I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for Prainoe" But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's eyelashes Galonus said: "The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the value of its beauty." Decanus said: "Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it." But Galonus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. 135 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD Epinondas said: "I have been a liar, now no longer so." Zeuxias said: " What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool." Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodoras traced his disease to college, Iphogenes saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, aye, and the Persian, With variegated gutturals and sibilants, the Gaelic with diphthongs and triphthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refused to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he was never seen but composed himself, thus : Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? 136 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, nor an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to die faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has suffered because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive 137 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping our souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus-Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My poor Catullus, do stop being such a Fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is gone. O, once the days shone very bright for you, when where that girl you loved so (as 110 other will be) called, you came and came. And then and there were odd things done and many which you wanted and she didn't not want. Yes indeed the days shone very bright for you. But now she doesn't want it. Don't you either, booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened. Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened, doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not keen though sorry you'll be to be not asked. Yes, poor sinner... what is left in life for you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted? Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to? Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphrodite Panddmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal 138 JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek Greek to Persian Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways Circling from no point returning through no point Endlessly skidding as long as man skids, though never moving, Wavers, topples, dissolves like a sandcastle into acidity. Is there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imper- ceptible? Nothing. Charles Madge IN CONJUNCTION Now in the circulating torrent of the stars Certain events are drawn correct and clear Faces that wear expressions of anguish and delight Signs unmistakable of the heavenly progress The flying planet leaves the night house The two twined figures fill the highest hemisphere 139 CHARLES MADGE From which we conclude peace, and grateful offerings While the bird of war, thunderless on leaden roof No shadow shows on the galactic brilliance of the streaming breast And beyond the fated, tragic, foursquare, immovable house Evenings under trees of calm, descending evening of rest Relenting over battlefields, evenings upholding us Among alarms, rust and the dead, waiting to be blest. THE BIRDS OF TIN The birds of tin We cannot eat. We play with them They cost us nothing The birds of tin Municipal They fly, they float They wave to us From far away They come to rest Perfectly flat medals Of innumerable sizes On the surface of the sea. Some are enormously large Some are six feet high Some you can hold Some you can put in your mouth 140 CHARLES MADGE Some slip through your fingers And there are microscopic tiny birds. In vain we speak to them In vain we call to them Or entreat them to open their wings. They are affixed to walls Pinned to the sky Attached by screws Tied by chains The birds of tin Are dead. DELUSIONS VI Without surprise, on that not distant shore Wandering feet mounting towards the trees A pilgrim guide, until, just as before The infant brook and half-hid house he sees. The same, the inarticulate music moves Depending foliage of annual green And mutters through the fastness of his groves Meaningless comment on the well-known scene. He listens, ears pricked up, and strains his eyes On to the polar image of his heart. A retina matured with other skies Receives the impressions that the woods impart. Oh wanderer, do not turn back your feet To the green haunt and the imprisoned wood. Enough that trickling streams ever repeat Their senseless noise to perfect solitude. 141 CHARLES MADGE A NIGHTLY DEED Sir, the night is darker now And the wind blows stronger, Fails my heart I know not how I can go no longer. Spectres rise on every side, Spectres of the Brocken, With their bony arms out wide I can see them mocking. Empty as an old tin can Is each horrid phantom, Neither ghost they are nor man, I can't understand 'em. If Napoleon's in his grave And Bruin in the mountain, This must be the ocean wave Roaring in the fountain. Eyes no eyes but drops of lead Pennies and- a farthing, There is nothing to be said, But the poor man starving. See his cold and empty grate, See his little cottage, See his cold and empty plate, He has got no pottage. 142 CHARLES MADGE Sir the night is darker now, And the wind blows cruel, Let us go, I know not how, And fetch him winter fuel. RUMBA OF THE THREE LOST SOULS Cold and holy oak Hear the raven croak: The policeman's helmet Has bewitched our feet. The helmet on the stalk Is the way that we walk And we sit, having dived, Fully dressed, on the seat. Here together where we fell By the merman's well In the light of the trees Of the dead man's street. Undivided are we Numbers one two and three We were let down By the knotted sheet. Rhythm beyond control Is the lot of each soul And because we fell together Here again we meet. The wizard in the yard Took the heart that was hard. Not all Scotland can recall What the eagles eat. 143 CHARLES MADGE TO MAKE A BRIDGE To make a bridge Between poetry and prose To make a movable bridge Between this year and next year To know the male from the female embryo By auscultation To enable the plotting of barometric areas To make a bridge Between heaven and earth To make a bridge Between man and man And between men ^nd men A bridge across the grey dividing river A skeleton bridge (Their bones fly electrically To arch themselves in a system of stresses Exactly and patiently Between the lines of the two camps) A flying bridge In the dark 'air Sensible of the currents A bridge between you and me To make such a bridge Foresight and cunning The development of additional organs 144 CHARLES MADGE In peace The building of new brains Lobe by lobe In the wide spaces and the free pathways of the wind The collection of materials The sorting of minerals The naming of substances The enumeration of all these And the congratulation of all those Who live in a certain part of a certain place The co-ordinates of pleasure In the category of bridges We have this bridge and that bridge But whatever the bridge And wherever the bridge There is only one space Hungry, roaring and indivisible Under the bridge To be kind to each other To help in construction To be sorry To be aware of the difficulties To give treatment To arrange food supplies To make shelters and centres for the construction of bridg< To allow time To put together and to take to pieces Talking quietly and thinking loudly We have undertaken. 145 Os Matron NOCTURNAL The roof of midnight, hushed and high; covers the house in silence deep; then I hear laughter from my daughter in her sleep. So gay a laugh yet like a folk song hung from the secret melancholy thread holding all happiness. I know that summer has facades disturbed like curtains on a stage by small winds of sadness blossom in joy lets fall a white tear the curving moon can be a scimitar roses are barbed. So must her dreams be. Her girlish light must scale the cliff of sleep by paths unimagineably pure. O sea forgo this dreamer, for her dear gold I covet; her daylight laughter caught so lovingly in sleep slips like light into dark water to a desperate fathom. So must her dreams be ... 146 William Montgomerie ELEGY FOR WILLIAM SOUTAR A narrowing of knowledge to one window to a door Swinging inward on a man in a windless room On a man inwardly singing on a singing child Alone and never alone a lonely child Singing in a mirror dancing to a dancing child Memory sang and words in a mimic dance Old words were young and a child sang. A narrowing of knowledge to one room to a doorway To a door in a wall swinging bringing him friends A narrowing of knowledge to an arrow in bone in the marrow An arrow death strung on the string of the spine. To the live crystal in the palm and the five fingers To the slow- thirty years' pearl in the hand Shelled in a skull in the live face of a statue Sea-flowered on the neck of broken marble Sunken fourteen years in that aquarium. 147 Nicholas Moore WINTER AND RED BERRIES Come, put off your gown of smooth lilac, And whisper your intricacies to winter. The snow will have a better ear than I For all that lovers say red heresies! How can I be a heretic? How can I who am man be any other thing? My answer is compounded of sad guns Answering other guns with sounds as sad, And these repeat the questions of the last. My dear, the time for murmurings is past. Here come the conquerors, here tread the beasts, Wolves, antelopes fleeing before the wind, And nothing I can say will now be kind! Befriend the wolf, befriend the stricken deer, Befriend the camel and the shy tapir, These animals are lovelier than... O yet strip off your lilac gown, Whisper and sing, and I will slide between Your hands like so much sand: like so much wine The bouquet of your flesh turn sad by mine. 148 NICHOLAS MOORE THE HAIR'S-BREADTH (For Priscilla) Tell me, hair of her head, where I should lie Who wish to praise her in my poetry? Tell me, hair of her thigh, what I should do Who wish to make my image of her true? Dog by the lamp-post, God above the clouds, Am I to follow either with my words? Is she a bitch to be by flesh accosted, Or holy image and by blood attested? Tell me, hair of her whole anatomy, With what attentions I may make her happy? Tell me, hair of her heart, what I can be To tender her in all world's misery? The blood of love may flow from me to her, But how can I describe it by a hair? FRED APOLLUS AT FAVA'S My sexual feats It is accounts of these Each friend entreats. They do not care what women wear or what artistic fashion meets My best approval. Love is all. 149 NICHOLAS MOORE There are no swans But Leda's, and its hiss, Majestic once, Grows tame with telling over tea and the inevitable buns. They hate Picasso Art's no go. They only like the rude Reclining nude The shiny-covered magazines all show, This svelte form, The velvet norm Of their romantic discipline, Whose wild imaginations flow Towards flesh more bright than I have ever seen. And am I like a god Who sit and nod At their remarks? Experienced in all The ways of love, Each subtle move? I hate them as their hard words rise Over their plates of pork and fall Against my ear. They take me by surprise; For, suddenly, I know myself a jealous man, An also-ran Unfit to face the company of such, Who obviously touch Such transports of delight as I Have never known. How can I qualify? 150 NICHOLAS MOORE It only seems I have my dreams and hopes, Those bitter shapes Of unloved breasts and thighs that pass, (Each one my golden ass!) My sexual feats are all my friends', Not mine. Not me to whom the red tongue sends Such thrills. (It is the thought that kills!) These men (How vainly!) turn towards me again. ACT OF LOVE The lover, the lover will always remember That dark man grown hideous with age His rough hands upon her white thighs, and the vessel Gleaming with liquids, ready for his rage, Holding this moment out of his whole past, The indecisive dream of wonder, romance: He will see her as an angel, the nicest Person in the world, and himself as once He was, handsome, young. He will always Remember how she took him to her bed And performed there under his burning hands, Until in a cool sleep they lay like dead. And she too will remember this great love. It will be bright in her mind. She will live In the thought of it, and the real present Will indeed be most hard to forgive. NICHOLAS MOORE And he, too, has been betrayed, Will see her lover poised forever over her, Held in that lusty pose. And he will stop, As his hand moves like a wind in her deep hair, To contemplate this infidelity, How upon his marriage-bed in joy they lay. And forgiveness, which is so easy, will mean nothing To one who cannot forget that perfidy. THE PHALLIC SYMBOL I saw my scattered hopes upon the floor, And with them played a horned girl. She was true To that sculpturesque definition. She was blue In a bright dress, blue with blue bows. Behind her stood a man beside the door To which my eyes rose as he entered, false With relief I did not feel, certain It could not be myself, though who else Could ever have found the room or known The scene? It was as though a shadow Of my old self stood indolent by the door, His face hidden in the grey veil of evening Which, a shadow itself, encroached across the floor. Then all the toys cowered in childish terror In the corner of the room, and the girl became A little goat, with a beard grey as the river, 152 NICHOLAS MOORE Standing uncertain in such a curious meadow Of dusty floor and cowering toys : and dread Passed like a shadow across the waiting room. The man turned from the door and went away: I saw him retreating down an avenue, Sinister, unequivocal. And I knew When I looked at the room again the girl would be Blue, with the blue dress, and the bow blue In her beautiful bronze hair: that she would stand Like a statue, cold and pure, her lips shaped To a smile: that she would be kind and womanly, The very definition of what 1 hoped To find. And 1 saw the shadow had filled The room, and in the darkness I saw nothing. I heard the dry pad of an animal's feet in the hall, And then I knew I had no hope at all. O ROSE, O RAINBOW Watching the night contract the viridian fields Into the closeness of its hands, the moon Athwart the dewy grass, Mr. Orlimpit Raises his hands towards the glossy dawn, Imagining daybreak. "O Rose, O Rainbow, O hymn of truth, O dew, Wet my hands, bring me wonder, bring me You, O great Venus, O doll, o ventriloquist, Thy sweet rainbow-coloured hands in the evening mist, Bringing me rapture 153 NICHOLAS MOORE The exact cadence of his prayer is difficult To capture; nor do the fields, closed In the hands of night, feel anything but dark As towards the dawn his vain hymns are composed, Vainly imploring That dry-eyed goddess. Time in itself is robbed By the dewy dark of the fields, and the houses stand Like scaffolds thrown in the shadows Of the frigid moon. Who can expect to demand The rose or the rainbow? Mr. Orlimpit wanders among his scaffolds, Erect in the bleak night, false as is dark, Hoping always for a new star to break, hearing Only the vain lovers chittering in the park, Hoping for heaven. "I am a fool," says Mr. Orlimpit, "to hope For anything beyond death. Death is surely Peace enough. I shall die some day." And then Mr. Orlimpit imagines his daybreak, its limpid, purely Crystalline virtue, ALCESTIS IN ELY (for Priscilla) Entering casually the precincts of the Cathedral, Those old walls, the courtyard with the chestnuts, Alcestis moves, unmindful of Admetos, The modern woman. 154 NICHOLAS MOORE Yet her face is pale under the crumbling arches, As she touches the unnatural red of her lips With gentle fingers and like a ghost wanders Over the cobbles. And there is no-one to bring her back from death Nor to remind her of that unmindful king: Alcestis is alone and cold in Ely Among the ancient Glories of a newer religion. As she takes Her coffee in Ye Olde Teashoppe she cries In exasperation, "Where are that man's strong arms?" In this town of whispers. And on its old stones the great Cathedral rises Like an enormous beast', shaking loose stones From its side; and the wind blows in the chestnuts, Gently discerning. THE LITTLE GIRL Yes, true, children will take advantage of Any little gesture: yet here I saw More than the villainous eye, the loving Yet loathing, irrepressible dilemna. The little girl was old enough to be My lover, yet she faltered, and I knew That to my hand her breast would make reply Hazardously, and probably not true J5S NICHOLAS MOORE With responses curious and defined By some irreparable hoydenish glamour. O I tried hard to reach her mind, Yet in her eye there was no glimmer; Only her legs stretched long upon the sheet And the big, grown-up, cold-looking feet. INCIDENTS IN PLAYFAIR HOUSE I There are questions that must be asked That will not we think be answered. Fury is hand in glove with fate: the lion Is solemn behind the door, the weeping forest Claims us with its juices, its citrons and pears. We are all alike unemployed soldiers. And then at a distance a girl stands, Hands upon her breasts, expectant, fond, As if waiting for the dark future to come And wink at her with the eyes of a clown. We see her. But do not believe. Deceive Yourself, sir, with many speculations! Go, drown your horror with philosophy! Yet what are these questions but the truth that we deserve? 156 NICHOLAS MOORE II O there are monstrous storms! Even the evil If we arc to believe in such, originally Protest at the greatest evils, devils That irk even the illiterate heart. Start Praying now, fathomless mouths! The green Boy is in the field watching the cows And the prancing horses. The dance, The horse-dance, the cow-dance, the love-dance Advances to its climax. Perfection Through all storm gleams like a sheet. Ill Janet, the girl with the bow-tie, the male Of her family, innately female, Pisses into the bath-tub. It is her shrubbery. When she was five it is our custom To probe the past to find die present She played with little Antony's penis, And envied it. And this all ended In a bow-tie. What a comical history! And now the rush of her water in the bath-tub Causes the erect Colonel listening in his study The greatest excitement of his life, the Colonel Who has murdered Zulus and shot fifteen bears. NICHOLAS MOORE Janet is a queer girl, but very handsome: Much sought after, she is beautiful, but cold. IV There is much to be sought. The two plain girls, One of whom dresses like a man, Love to be violent as men, to Talk of art and literature. They like The male about them. O attractively The words lisp. The hero grins In the doorway like a monkey, while they, Oblivious to the watching eye, make passes, Body to body, breast to breast, and lie In a purely literary agony. O how the oval suns revolve Blindingly behind each lover's eye! Douglas Newton GAIETY OF DESCENDANTS A Sailor's Song My calm and herculean dad Had muscles and the rarest knack To shrug the muscles that he had DOUGLAS NEWTON Along his back into a mask: Mask of a lion's white grimace. But ah! Alas! It scared my mother from his bed, So he's alqne and she's alone: But I will wear a nightingale Tattooed upon my shoulder to Entice my friends into my arms; Or if my heart's intentions fail To fly me to the Scilly Islands, Isles of Scilly, Scilly. INVASION WEATHER Two August voices The summer flows in golden waves To wash the trees and clean away A winter's umber from the leaves And leave them light as glazer's green. The valley lakes of gold divide Before the binders' even pace, Ebb and abide in lively pools, Until the labourers come To labour home the wheaty foam. Harvest! Harvest! the farmers all The Fathers roll their eyeballs underground- All the young fork-bearing Neptunes ah! 159 DOUGLAS NEWTON But now the avid Fathers sit them down Upon the fresh raw wracks to supervise The madmen coupled to the squealing swine: Yet still the lovers lie between the sheaves Though an enormous head glares through the soil Still thigh is whispering to thigh, And the gold breast rolls on the bronze chest, An orange softly rolled upon a table; The little drummer, even's, allowed his dance; So summer flows. While under Mycenae The ghost of Agamemnon, like a bee, Hums in the groining of his vaulted tomb. . Norman Nicholson THE BURNING BUSH When Moses, musing in the desert, found The thorn bush spiking up from the hot ground, And saw the branches on a sudden bear The crackling yellow barberries of fire, He searched his learning and imagination For any logical, neat explanation, And turned to go, but turned again and stayed And faced the fire and knew it for his God. I too have seen the briar alight like coal, The love that burns, the flesh that's ever whole, And many times have turned and left it there, Saying: "It's prophecy but metaphor/' 160 NORMAN NICHOLSON But stinging tongues like John the Baptist shout: "That this is metaphor is no way out. It's dogma too, or you make God a liar; The bush is still a bush, and fire is fire." NOW IN THE TIME OF THIS MORTAL LIFE Frost is tight upon the land Constricts it with a bony hand, Yet with blade sharp as a nail The immanent crocus drills the soil. Man's nerves aver his spinal wish And feel the Word becoming Flesh. God watches soil and spirit mated, And consecrates what he created, By raising manhood unto God, By raising raisins unto blood; The sacramental prongs reach down And lift earth to the skies again. Incarnate God shines brighter than Flower or frost, or sea or sun. The Spirit in the limbs of man Hardens like a skeleton, And the earth feels a new life burrow Along its stony bones like marrow. For now the ritual seed is sown To grow the stalk to bear the grain To yield the flour to make the bread That sinful hands shall turn to God. 161 NORMAN NICHOLSON The hooks of love are in our limbs And hoist through the scholastic times When bursting bud and bomb deny The Manichaean heresy. And man finds voice to curse once more The evil in the holy fear, And man finds heart to praise again The hope within the evil pain, Christ-knife heals the wound it prunes, And carves its gospel on the bones, That man may hear what God has heard, And feel the Flesh becoming Word. FOR THE NEW YEAR The stars wheel past the windows Like flocks of winter sparrows; The bell clangs out the hours, And frost sparkles like stars, And the wind blows up the dawn With spring behind it and rain And the spikes of daffodils And June on fire in the hills. The apples crowd the bough Beneath the frosty Plough, And autumn snow is blown White as a harvest moon On currant and raspberry cane, And the wild ganders fly Nightly across the sky. The seasons flit like linnets, And years whirl past like planets, 162 NORMAN NICHOLSON And the earth's orbit mars The changeless map of stars. The splintered light which now Gently probes my eye Is of a star that burned When the Scots fired the land, When the Norsemen robbed the dales And hacked their names on the fells, Or when the iceberg lakes Elbowed among the rocks And carried the Devil's stone To the hill above the town, Where through my dormer bay Drizzles the Milky Way. COCKLEY MOOR, DOCKRAY, PENRITH Outside, the cubist fells are drawn again Beneath the light that speaks ex tempore; The fur of bracken thickens in the rain And wrinkles shift upon the scurfy scree. Inside, like tiles the poet's pleasures lie, Squares laid on circle, circle laid on square, And pencilled angles of eternity Are calculated on the doubled stair. Outside, the curlew gargles through the mist, The mountain pansies shut up shop and fade, The wheatear chisels with his crystal fist, And day on day like stone on stone is laid. 163 NORMAN NICHOLSON Inside, are cows on canvas, painted bloom Fresh as a girl's thin fingers burst to flower, Bright leaves that do not fall, but fence the room With the arrested growth of a June hour. The curving cloud embellishes the sky, The geometric rain slants to the corn; Inside, a man remembers he must die, Outside, a stone forgets that it was born. THE PREACHERS The Lord God smiled At the mild words As He heard St. Francis Preach to the birds. Preach of a tree With berries on, That a woman ate And gave to a man; The juice was sweet But tart the core, No herb in field Their gripes could cure; But another tree Grew redder fruit, And there God grafted The antidote. 164 NORMAN NICHOLSON Sparrow and starling, Jackdaw and rook Perched on slates And chimney stack. Tits trapezed Upon the spouts, Starlings dropped lime Like marguerites. They sang to the saint With scornful beak: "The berries give us No bellyache. "But the pips split And sprout in man, And through the thigh The roots grow down." The Lord God laughed At the wild fancies As He heard the birds Preach to St. Francis. CLEATOR MOOR From one shaft at Cleator Moor They mined for coal and iron ore. This harvest below ground could show Black and red currants on one tree. 165 NORMAN NICHOLSON In furnaces they burnt the coal, The ore was smelted into steel, And railway lines from end to end Corseted the bulging land. Pylons sprouted on the fells, Stakes were driven in like nails, And the ploughed fields of Devonshire Were sliced with the steel of Cleator Moor. The land waxed fat and greedy too, It would not share the fruits it grew, And coal and ore, as sloe and plum, Lay black and red for jamming time. The .pylons rusted on the fells, The gutters leaked beside the walls, And women searched the ebb-tide tracks For knobs of coal or broken sticks. But now the pits are wick with men, Digging like dogs dig for a bone: For food and life we dig the earth In Cleator Moor they dig for death. Every waggon of cold coal Is fire to drive a turbine wheel; Every knuckle of soft ore A bullet in a soldier's ear. The miner at the rockface stands, With his segged and bleeding hands Heaps on his head the fiery coal, And feels the iron in his soul. 1 66 NORMAN NICHOLSON CAROL Mary laid her Child among The bracken-fronds of night And by the glimmer round His head All the barn was lit. Mary held her Child above The miry, frozen farm And by the fire within His limbs The resting roots were warm. Mary hid her Child between Hillocks of hard sand By singing water in His veins Grass sprang from the ground. Mary nursed her Child beside The gardens of a grave And by the death within His bones The dead became alive. F. T. Prince AT A PARADE We watch the only eagles in the world, How under the crimson flags they have unfurled They ruffle in furs and plumes, a rod Bear or a brazen bonnet nod, And at their side Under embroidered sashes long swords, ride 167 F. T. PRINCE Horses dancing under arms And bosom-friends to their alarms: Till with those bugles blowing The space before the wetly-glowing Low-lying palace filled up with that crowd, Your heart and my heart seem to cry aloud. And standing together and watching, you and I Have thrown our hearts like caps into the sky. For as I serve you, so I find And martialize Luxurious lucid mind and eyes To celebrate the moving world. And though a madness is unfurled, Though rage and greed would be at blows And Europe's noisier than a bawdy-house, What else can I be good for but to praise And to defend the world, even in these days? And the soldier is also only a kind of tool And may be dissolute, foul-mouthed or a fool, Yet by that animal expense Bodily brilliance, insolence It seems that he May gain peculiar humility. Therefore we too must be bold And say these gild the field they hold Though serving anything Commended by a criminal century or king They cover their breasts and shoulders with bright rills Of glory. It lies in pools about the horses' heels. 168 F. T. PRINCE Each is the incorruptible masculine And each remains, though dipped in blood and sin The lion coloured like a lady And riding out at dawn is ready And understands Why all rewards are wrung out of his hands Why he dies and knows alone The order of what was to be done: I therefore seize those manners, And moving with that music under banners I have preserved the pieties that were used And all the gilded tissues lost, unloosed. Kathleen Raine THE CRYSTAL SKULL I At the focus of thought there is no face, the focus of the sun is in crystal with no shadow. Death of the victim is the power of the god. Out of the eyes is the focus of love, the face of love is the sun, that all see, the skull of the victim is the temple of sight. The eyes of the victim are the crystal of divination. Sun clears the colours of life. The crystal of the skull is the work of the sun. 169 KATHLEEN RAINE The stone of my destruction casts no shadow. The sun kills perfectly with the stroke of noon. The clarity of the crystal is the atonement of the god. The perfection of man is the pride of death, the crystal skull is the perpetuity of life. The power of the god is the taking of love. The perfection of light is the destruction of the world,, death and love turn the faces of day and night. The illumination of the skull is the joy of the god. II All that will be remembered Is a fire Rising up to God. The snow on my love's shoulders Will melt in air Like a rose fading into night All that will remain Is the fire That kindled the heart. Our lips were the sun setting on snow, A cloud By day and fire by night. (All that will be remembered Is snow Falling on a star) Now suns are like desire, And snow like death And eyes the source of light 170 KATHLEEN RAINE But all that will be remembered Is love Kindling the night. Love was in the beginning the desire That made a star, Made man. All that will remain Is desire Returning to God, All that will be remembered Is that the sun Became the heart. All that will remain Is man Consumed by the sun, All that will remain Is what the heart remembers Of die sun. All that will remain Is the love That burns away the sun. (July /5>//>, 1941) "TU NON SE' IN TERRA, SI COME TU CREDI..." Not upon earth, as you suppose tower these rocks that turn the wind, for on their summits angels stand. 171 KATHLEEN RAINE Nor from the earth these waters rise to quench not thirst, but ecstasy the waterfall leaps from the sky. Those nameless clouds that storm and swirl about the mountain are the veil that from these sightless eyes shall fall when senses faint into the ground, and time and place go down the wind. ENVOI Take of me what is not my own, my love, my beauty, and my poem the pain is mine, and mine alone. See how against the weight in the bone the hawk hangs perfect in mid-air the blood pays dear to raise it there, the moment, not the bird, divine. And sec the peaceful trees extend their myriad leaves in leisured dance they bear the weight of sky and cloud upon the fountain of their veins. In rose with petals soft as air I bind for you the tides and fire the death that lives within the flotoer, oh gladly, love, for you I bear! 172 KATHLEEN RAINE STILL LIFE The hour of sight Flower of light And unendurable Wings of flight All turn to fossil Turn to stone The delicate shell And the mighty bone. The blood the nerves The trace of thought That cross the night From the source of the world. The play of light In the wake of the sun Is suddenly still Like a frozen stream Suddenly still Bird, flower and shell That love has created, Life-shaped and perfected, So to remain. LOVE POEM Yours is the face that the earth turns to me. Continuous beyond its human features lie The mountain forms that rest against the sky. 173 KATHLEEN RAINE With your eyes, the reflecting rainbow, the sun's light Sees me; forest and flowers, bird and beast Know and hold me for ever in the world's thought, Creation's deep untroubled retrospect. When your hand touches mine, it is the earth That takes me the deep grass, And rocks and rivers; the green graves, And children still unborn, and ancestors, In love passed down from hand to hand from God. Your love comes from the creation of the world, From those paternal fingers, streaming through the clouds That break with light the surface of the sea. Here, where I trace your body with my hand, Loves' presence has no end; For these, your arms that hold me, are the world's. In us, the continents, clouds and oceans meet Our arbitrary selves, extensive with the night, Lost, in the heart's worship, and the body's sleep. LONDON NIGHT The sky above London Last night over my house shone with two kinds of being And poised between the external and the symbol I saw Christ's imagined resurrection Arrayed behind the real September moonlight. My heart loved and was still, And to the verge of Heaven so near I stood That all my lifetime was made less than a moment For no such Now comes ever with the years' flight. 174 KATHLEEN RAINE Not in the grave where we laid our love shall we find him; The adored one for whom the moonlight was a shroud Has laid aside the raiment of clouds on the roofs of the houses Elsewhere and far He died, but here, oh at heart, He rises! (September 22nd> 194?) ON LEAVING ULLSWATER I The air is full of a farewell deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned. II The lake is in my dream, the tree is in my blood, die past is in my bones, the flowers of the wood I love with long past loves. I fear with many deaths the presence of the night, and in my memory read the scripture of the leaves Only myself how strange to the strange present come! 175 KATHLEEN RAINE NIGHT IN MARTINDALE Not in the rustle of water, the air's noise, the roar of storm, the ominous birds, the cries the angel here speaks with a human note. Stone into man must grow, the human word carved by our whispers in the passing air is the authentic utterance of cloud, the speech of flowing water, blowing wind, of silver moon and stunted juniper. Words say, waters flow, rocks weather, ferns wither, winds blow, times go, I write the sun's Love, and the stars' No. IN TIME The beautiful rain falls, the unheeded angel lies in the street, spreadeagled under the footfall that from the divine face wears away the smile whose tears run in the gutter, melting where the stationary cars wait for departure; the letter that says Ave is passed over for at the ever-present place the angel waits, passes through walls and hoardings, in dark porches his face, wounded by us, for us and over us watches. 176 KATHLEEN RAINE FOR POSTERITY (On a drawing of Patterdale in 1830) All life, tumbled together in a storm And the crags stand out clear in the lightning. The wind, like a bolting horse, pounds down the valley, The sheep, like vegetation, draw to earth, And trees, like animate things, tear at their roots and groan. That was in 1830. That storm long since was over. So, my tempestuous love, closed in a quiet book, And in a quiet grave, disturbs no heart but yours, Reader, stretched on the summer grass Waiting for tea-time, and shadows growing longer. I94J- REQUIEM Past love, past sorrow, lies this darkness Where, your face hidden for ever, you are at heart, Lost from the world yet known to this blind prayer. Light that divides Sun from leaf, Leaf from water, Water from shadow, Stone from eye, Eye from mountain, The lover from the rose, Divided us. 177 KATHLEEN RAINE Da} made us apart, Lent scope to hate, To desire, distances, To despair, perspectives, To fancies, colour, To thought, a maze, To art, semblances. Light breaks the heart And shatters love. But in this dark Over all dark Interior dark, The house of the heart, Dkrkness of God, Blindness of love Whose eyes have seen In the sun a cloud On the perfect face There is a place Where living and dead In love are one. Your sleep is in my heart, My dark your rest, My prayer your peace, Your death my passion. April 4t I 7 8 Henry Reed MORNING Look, my love, on the wall, and here, at this Eastern picture. How still its scene, and neither of sleep nor waking: No shadow falls from the tree or the golden mountain, The boats on the glassy lake have no reflection, No echo would come if you blew a horn in those valleys. And look away, and move. Or speak, or sing: And voices of the past murmur among your words, Under your glance my dead selves quicken and stir, And a thousand shadows attend you where you go. That is your movement. There is a golden stillness, Soundless and fathomless, and far beyond it; When brow on brow, or mouth to mouth assembled, We lie in the calm of morning. And there, outside us, The sun moves on, the boat jogs on the lake, The huntsman calls. And we lie here, our orient peace awaking, No echo, and no shadow, and no reflection. THE DOOR AND THE WINDOW My love, you are timely come, let me lie by your heart. For waking in the dark this morning, I woke to that mystery, Which we can all wake to, at some dark time or another: Waking to find the room not as I thought it was, But the window further away, and the door in another di- rection. 179 HENRY REED This was not home, and you were far away And I woke sick, and held by another passion, In the icy grip of a dead, tormenting flame, Consumed by the night, watched by the door and the window. On a bed of stone, waiting for the day to bring you. The door has opened: and can you, at last beside me, Drive under the day that frozen and faithless darkness, With its unseen torments flickering, which neither The dearest look nor the longest kiss assuages? Keidrych Rhys THE GOOD SHEPHERD (translated from his own Welsh) Go and spy on the sheep My father would say Before I went to school every morning Today snow covers the ground On field the sun shone And the fat sheep cut the trodden patches I counted them I looked at their tails! I found one new lamb and put him to suck In the zig-zag shelter Of the hedge by the crooked cart-road. 180 KEIDRYCH RHYS I smoked a cigarette That the hired man gave me There was a lovely slide across the river I scared the sheep I bulged after Through the gap to Old David's cow pasture Teacher said I never polish my shoes. THIRD AND FOURTH When stone-hewn storms knock against our cottage, What shall we do, my love, my love. Prove the aspirations of the fourth generation? Soft buckets from the ivied coalhouse Out of a too-dear two hundred weights ration Sitting dusty in seven-day cindcry contemplation. Sprawl on peasant divans on the gingham-checked cushions darling It's war. How shall I feed my unborn baby Now I'm unemployed and have no money? Breast feed him? we're a civilized country. Lord be good raise a fire in both rooms Light up the books and rugs the pots and pans But what if the rain-drops seep in at windowsill And the wallpaper is damp and dripping? Is it our nine-days Wind-baby howling outside the house- walls ? Now when the garden is old-audacious with snows 181 KEIDRYCH RHYS Must we put up black-outs against heaven's carpentry? Prove the aspirations of the fourth generation? What shall we do, what shall we do? The retired tavern-keeper is seated alongside our primitive villagers under idiot oak-beams Dismisses the tainted ravings of our poacher-hating farmer With the double-barrelled B. S. A. shotgun But should poets half-use binoculars? Shall I phone for the country G. P., have first-aid ready. The hot water boiling, a towel. Everything sanitary. Say: I fear a miscarriage: not diet, worry. Out of the window, a stack, the cowshed, the smithy. Ssh! Are you quite happy? You miss me when I go out of the room. Announcers and Messerschmitts exhale over our Welsh earthsmells Can't bale out in an Irving: Haw-Haw poisoning the wells. Dusk's hushed figures slink in the doorways of darkness They're carrying jugs of water, they're breathless The pink limed cottages cluster mysterious Around the four-cornered tower's stillness. Cast down by hollow suffering I recall Children in the shade of the Old Chapel wall The schoolmaster buying a packet of fags at "the Shop" Kisses on nape of neck pass for a test of heart 182 KEIDRYCH RHYS In a time of cynicism and rum So many, so many are longing for husbands to come Up and squeeze them to their hearts But here your dear warm afternoon body remains Proud against pillowslips cross-colour pains Three wardrobe gargoyles stare at where Two golden-winged cupids look down from above in their rare profusion of hair Look down upon what cut our bed of love My love my love what is to be done darling shall we curse the Hand above The Hound of Heaven, the bitchy Joy master, And the cheap carved bum-dimpled Bacchus, be tried By all the fertile nightmares of felicity which cried and lied: Be interrupted in the flame of midnight by demands Imagination hearkening along bumpy catcall lands . . . And once for months, Oh absent months with tears Quick tears, I sickened for your off-blue whiteness! No. Step out of shoulder-straps marriage resurrects holiness? Who saddens us now with bellowing . . . ties also the clovergift? Does the storm abate its puffed-cheek breath, then start again? Who says: There is a spot moving somewhere in air? Is there no-one no-one no-one to prove, prove aspiration Prove the aspirations of the fourth generation 1 ponder too long the X-ray child in his mother's womb. 183 Anne Ridler A DREAM OBSERVED Out from his bed the breaking seas By waking eyes unseen Now fall, aquatic creatures whirl And he whirls through the ambient green. The sea lion and the scolopendra Lolling in sleep he sees Strange in their ways, and the swift changes Their landscape makes, from shells to trees. Down English lanes a camel walks, Or untrammelled flies. But I, wakeful and watching, see How chilly out of the clothes he lies. Easy an act to cover him warm: Such a lover's small success Like the heaped mind so humble in sleep But points our actual powerlessness. Monsters in dreams he sees, yet lies At peace in his curling bed; Blessings that outdo all distress Implicit in his sleeping head. 184 ANNE RIDLER BEFORE SLEEP Now that you lie In London afar, And may sleep longer Though lonelier, For I shall not wake you With a nightmare, Heaven plant such peace in us As if no parting stretched between us. The world revolves And is evil; God's image is Wormeat'en by the devil; May the good angel Have no rival By our beds, and we lie curled At the sound unmoving centre of the world. In our good nights When we were together, We made, in that stillness Where we loved each other, A new being, of both Yet above either: So, when I cannot share your sleep, Into this being, half yours, I creep. FOR A CHILD EXPECTED Lovers whose lifted hands are candles in winter, Whose gentle ways like streams in the easy summer, Lying together 185 ANNE RIDLER For secret setting of a child, love what they do, Thinking they make that candle immortal, those streams forever flow, And yet do better than they know. So the first flutter of a baby felt in the womb, Its little signal and promise of riches to come, Is taken in its father's name; Its life is the body of his love, like his caress, First delicate and strange, that daily use Makes dearer and priceless. Our baby was to be the living sign of our joy, Restore to each the other's lost infancy; To a painter's pillaging eye Poet's coiled hearing, add the heart we might earn By the help of love; all that our passion would yield We put to planning our child. The world flowed in; whatever we liked we took: For its hair, the gold curls of the November oak We saw on our walk; Snowberries that make a Milky Way in the wood For its tender hands; calm screen of the frozen flood For our care of its childhood. But the birth of a child is an uncontrollable glory; Cat's cradle of hopes will hold no living baby, Long though it lay quietly. And when our baby stirs and struggles to be born It compels humility: what we began Is now its own. 186 ANNE RIDLER For as the sun that shines through glass So Jesus in His Mother was. Therefore every human creature, Since it shares in His nature, In candle gold passion or white Sharp star should show its own way of light. May no parental dread or dream Darken our darling's early beam: May she grow to her right powers Unperturbed by passion of ours. BUNHILL'S FIELDS Under cool trees the City tombs extend, and nearer lie stones above Blake's and Bunyan's bones to Vivian's working days than I. Since he is gentle, wild and good as you were, peaceable Shades, there may he go within your care as in my heart his love resides. Such a care as held unharmed the tree within the fire; spread wings like those that led Tobias in the dangerous shire. And if I fear his death too much, let me not learn more faith by sad trial of what I dread, nor grieve him by my own death. 187 ANNE RIDLER For our faith is one which may convert but not console: we shall not, except by our own will, part for ever in the gape of hell. EDLESBOROUGH Beyond the Chiltern coast, this church: A lighthouse in dry seas of standing corn. Bees hive in the tower; the outer stone Pared and frittered in sunlight, flakes with the years: Clunch crumbles, but silence, exaltation, endures. The brass-robed Rector stretched on his tomb endures. Within, we go upon the dragon and the bat, Walk above the world, without, Uplifted among grey lavender, beech and sycamore, Shades of the sea-born chalk, indelible and austere. If we see history from this hill It is upon its own conditions, here Each season swirls and eddies the circle of a year Round the spectator church, and human eyes Take, on its plinth, a long focus of centuries. We seem like gods on any hill. From here all toil resembles rest, and yet Unlike a god we feel ourselves shut out. Surely that farm in a carved blue curve of trees So still with all its creatures, holds the unattainable peace? It is Time's camouflage deceives us. There it extends like space: whatever moves 188 ANNE RIDLER (A horse to drink, a reaper to stack the sheaves) Displays the movement in its whole succession, Not a change of terms, only a changed relation. Deceit or truth? The dead possess the hill In battlements of Totternhoe or slate; The view is ours, the range and ache of sight. If Time serves: in a common space unrolls This Resurrection field, with sheaves in glory like risen souls. POEM FOR A CHRISTMAS BROADCAST Woman s Voice Perhaps you find the angel most improbable? It spoke to men asleep, their minds ajar For once to admit the entrance of a stranger. Few have heard voices, but all have made a journey: The mind moves, desiring dedication, Desiring to lay its gifts, as a dog its bone, At the feet of the first creation. "Take it or leave it" Says pride, "You made it; You must bear the blame." But secretly the heart "O make it good." "Either God acts in vain, or this is God." 1st King Melchior brings gold. O teach me to give, For this was infancy's first love: Its first possession; its adult passion O new creation Take my treasure and make me free. 189 ANNE RIDLER 2nd King Caspar, incense: all that is strange, Oblique, projected beyond the range Of the First Person. Such mediation O new creation Take, that we dare the direct sight. yd, King Death is a strong wish. Balthasar Brings his desire in a gift of myrrh ; Seeking perfection in pain and cessation O new creation Die for me, make me desire to live. All Three Mary, who nourished glory on human kindness By springs of power hidden from the mind, Here is our small self-knowledge, now Make it acceptable, or teach us how. Mary He will accept it, never fear, For his audacity is my despair. O do not give what he should not bear. His boldness is beyond belief, His threats, his lightnings, his short grief. Is it divine or mortal confidence? Mortal ignorance, godlike innocence. Brazen, he takes love as a right; 190 ANNE RIDLliR He knows to demand is to give delight. Youngling, here we offer love What have we to offer but love? And what is our love? Greed and despair. O do not take what you should not bear, Or tainted love by true convince: Let us not harm you, helpless Prince. Sin is the chance of mercy; Then even sin contrives your greater glory. THE SPRING EQUINOX Now is the pause between asleep and awake: Two seasons take A colour and quality each from each as yet. The new stage-set Spandril, column and fan of spring is raised against the winter backdrop Murrey and soft; Now aloft The sun swings on the equinoctial line. Few flowers yet shine: The hellebore hangs a clear green bell and opulent leaves above dark mould; The light is cold In arum leaves, and a primrose flickers Here and there; the first cool bird-song flickers in the thicket. Clouds arc pale as the pollen from sallows; March fallows are white with lime like frost. This is the pause between asleep and awake: The pause of contemplation and of peice, 191 ANNE RIDLER Before the earth must teem and the heart ache. This is the child's pause, before it sees That the choice of one way has denied the other ; Must choose the either, or both, of to care and not to care; Before the light or darkness shall discover Irreparable loss; before it must take Blame for the creature caught in the necessary snare: Receiving a profit, before it holds a snare. Lynette Roberts POEM FROM LLANYBRI If you come my way that is ... Between now and then, I will offer you A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank The valley tips of garlic red with dew Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank In the village when you come. At noon-day I will offer you a choice bowl of cawl Served with a "lover's" spoon and a chopped spray Of leeks or savori fach, not used now, In the old way you'll understand. The din Of children singing through the eyelet sheds Ringing 'smith hoops, chasing the butt of hens; Or I can offer you Cwmcelyn spread With quartz stones from the wild scratchings of men: You will have to go carefully with clogs Or thick shoes for it's treacherous the fen, The East and West Marshes also have bogs. 192, LYNETTE ROBERTS Then I'll do the lights, fill the lamp with oil, Get coal from the shed, water from the well; Pluck and draw pigeon, with crop of green foil This your good supper from the lime-tree fell. A sit by the hearth with blue flames rising, No talk. Just a stare at "Time" gathering Healed thoughts, pool insight, like swan sailing Peace and sound around the home, offering You a night's rest and my day's energy. You must come start this pilgrimage Can you come? send an ode or elegy In the old way and raise our heritage. THE SHADOW REMAINS To speak of everyday things with ease And arrest the mind to a simpler world Where living tables arc stripped of a cloth; Of wood on which I washed, sat at peace: Cooked duck, shot on an evening in peacock cold: Studied awhile: wrote: baked bread for us both. But here by the hearth with leisured grace I prefer to speak of the vulgar clock that drips With the falling of rain: woodbine tips, and yarrow Spills, lamp, packet of salt, and twopence of mace That sit on the shelf edged with a metal strip, And below, brazier fire that burns our sorrow, Dries weeping socks above on the rack: that knew Two angels pinned to the wall again two. 193 LYNETTE ROBERTS LOW TIDE Every waiting moment is a fold of sorrow Pierced within the heart. Pieces of mind get torn off emotionally In large wisps. Like a waif I lie, stillbound to action: Each waiting hour I stare and see not, Hum and hear not, nor care I how long The lode mood lasts. My eyes are raw and wide apart Stiffened by the salt bar That separates us. You so far; I at ease at the hearth Glowing for a welcome From your heart. Each beating moment crosses my dream So that wise things cannot pass As we had planned. Woe for all of us : supporting those Who like us fail to steel their hearts, But keep them wound in clocktight rooms, 111 found. Unused. Obsessed by time. Each beating hour Rings false. 194 W. R. Rodgers THE SWAN Bottomed by tugging combs of water The slow and loath swan slews and looks Coldly down through chutes of stilled chatter Upon the shadows in flight among the stones. Into abashed confusions of ooze It dips, and from the muddy fume The filtered and flute like fishes rise Endlessly up through all their octaves of gloom. To where the roofed swan suavely swings Without qualm on the footling wave That laves it on, with elbowing wings swelled Wide under its eyes' held look and architrave. Slow slow it slides, as if not to chafe The even sleeve of its approach Stretched stiff and oval in front of it, Siphoning it on, selfless, silent and safe. Jonquil-long its neck adjudicates Its body's course, aloof and cool It cons the nonchalant face of air With its incurious and dispassionate stare. On that grey lake frilled round with scuffUiigs Of foam, and milled with muttering, W. R. RODGERS I saw, lingering late and lightless, A single swan swinging, sleek like a sequin. Negligently bright, wide wings pinned back, It mooned on the moving water, And not all the close and gartering dark Or levering winds could lift or flatter That small and dimming image into flight, Far from shore and free from foresight, Coiled in its own indifferent mood It held the heavens, shores, waters and all their brood. AUTUMN Going out, those bold days, O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale- wash Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze, What a hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen Such a running-over of clover, such tissue sheets Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings all On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way, Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat, But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back And up like sticking bones shockingly unkinncd. How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me, No longer crushing against cushions of air, 196 W. R. RODGERS Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts. Who could not dance on, and be dandled by such a day Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line Into whips and whirl-spools of light, when every ash-shoot shone Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash. Who could not feel it? the uplift and total substraction Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance, The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes, But, gullible, then drank them back again. And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things; In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees; And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping. LENT Mary Magdalene, that easy woman, Saw, from the shore, the seas Beat against the hard stone of Lent; Crying "Weep, seas, weep For yourselves that cannot dent me more." "O more than all these, more crabbed than all stones, And cold, make me, who once Could leap like water, Lord. Take me 197 W. R. RODGERS As one who owes now Nothing to what she was. Ah, naked. My waves of scent, my petticoats of foam, Put from me and rebut; Disown. And that salt lust stave off That slavered me O Let it whiten in grief against the stones And outer reefs of me. Utterly doff, Nor leave the lightest veil Of feeling to heave or soften. Nothing cares this heart What hardness crates it now or coffins. Over the balconies of these curved breasts I'll no more peep to see The light procession of my loves Surf-riding in to me Who now have eyes and alcove, Lord, for Thee." "Room, Mary," said He, "ah make room for me Who am come so cold now To my tomb/* So, on Good Friday, Under a frosty moon They carried Him and laid Him in her womb. A grave and icy mask her heart wore twice, But on the third day it thawed, And only a stone's-throw away Mary saw her God. Did you hear me? Mary saw her God. 198 W. R. RODGERS Dance, Mary Magdalene, dance, dance and sing, For unto you is born This day a King. "Lady/* said He, "To you who relent I bring back the petticoat and the bottle of scent/ 1 NEITHER HERE NOR THERE In that land all is, and nothing's Ought; No owners or notices, only birds; No walls anywhere, only lean wire of words Worming brokenly out from eaten thought; No oats growing, only ankle-lace grass Easing and not resenting the feet that pass; No enormous beasts, only names of them; No bones made, bans laid, or boons expected, No contracts, entails, hereditaments, Anything at all that might tie or hem. In that land all's lackadaisical; No lakes of coddled spawn, and no locked ponds Of settled purpose, no netted fishes; But only inkling streams and running fronds Fritillaricd with dreams, weedy with wishes; Nor arrogant talk is heard, haggling phrase, But undertones, and hcsitance, and haze; On clear days mountains of meaning arc seen Humped high on the horizon; no one goes To con their meaning, no one cares or knows. In that land all's flat, indifferent; there Is neither springing house nor hanging tent, No aims are entertained, and nb thing is meant, 199 W. R. RODGERS For there are no ends and no trends, no roads, Only follow your nose to anywhere. No one is born there, no one stays or dies, For it is a timeless land, it lies Between the act and the attrition, it Marks off bound from rebound, make from break, tit From tat, also to-day from to-morrow. No Cause there comes to term, but each departs Elsewhere to whelp its deeds, expel its darts; There are no homecomings, of course, no good-byes In that land, neither yearning nor scorning, Though at night there is the smell of morning. SONG FOR WAR Put away the flutes Into their careful clefts, And cut the violins that like ivy climb Flat to their very roots; All that a subtler time Allowed us we must now commute To commoner modes; for here come The hieratic trumpet and demotic drum Fall in and follow, let the beat Hyphenate your halved feet, Feel its imbricating rhythm Obliterating every schism And split through which you might espy The idiosyncratic I; Let the assumptive trumpets pace And pattern out the sounding space Into stillnesses that numb 200 W. R. RODGERS By iteration and by sum, Till the walls of will fall down Round the seven-times-circled town Of your mind, and not a jot Is left of fore or after thought. O slowly go and closely follow, Toe to heel and hill to hollow, All the ditto feet that lead You onward in a millipede To the battle where, as one, A hundred thousand tip and run. But when the burning sun again Behind the hill Slides down and leaves the separate slain Frosted and still, Then over the rued fields that drum and trumpet fled Slow musics rise like mists and wreathe their requiem Round the bruised rccds, and coldy mounts the moon Of thought, and rules among the quorum of the dead. SONG FOR PEACE See, the ruthless victor comes With tooth of trumpet, claw of drums, Have ready on his route A fanfare of strumpets and a salute Of fifty bums; This, this will be his randy-vous With destiny; have handy, too, The boostings of applause To blow his fuses and effect a pause. And you, you tuneless walls, 201 W. R. RODGERS Open wide the windows of your huff And hang out every hoarse hurrah, Brighten your doorways, do your stuff, And draw him from his coup d'etat; Bring out the dancing flute And the frivolous fiddle, Merry-go-round and inveigle Him into the middle, Until his sidelong glances scrape Across the feminine violin-shape, And his obedient battalions Caper on curtseying feet like stallions. Yet if this fails, fails to move Him from his humdrummed groove, And if the hammered round Of order and routine Allows no new, no extraordinary sound To dent, to enter, or to intervene; If in the fixed receipt Of war's auricular beat He marches on unvarying and complete, Then some disharmony we must devise Him to divide against himself and civilise : Then let the still small voice Connive, contrive To enter a caveat against Each move by which he would arrive: Veto no destination, but instead Insert a doubt into his very tread; See that his single track of feeling frays Into two sudden, different, equal ways; 202 W. R. RODGERS Between his "I will" and "I ought" Cause him to halt and stand in thought; Force him to pick and predicate Each walking step and waking state; Till his one-way-street of going Vacillates into to-and-froing, And his flowing roundabout Of feeling flounders into doubt And angular analysis Of self and its paralysis. At last, at last his listless hand lets fall The pulseless drum. And the uncertain trumpet asks The way to kingdom-come. And Peace conies forward now, him to inurn. Ring bells, and bawl hooray. Empty is war's highway, And men to subtler routes and set pursuits return. And yet, As quavering rings of sound Surround the clanged gong, Wrinkling on long after and far out, In mind we may prolong Beyond the body's bound The wavering flounces of that martial shout That once called all men up and coiled them round With rhythm that now is fallen utterly into rout. NATIVITY His holly hair, his berry eye are here, And his chrysanthemum wound, 203 W. R. RODGERS This Christmas day; by symbols once again The Mystery's importuned. Hisses the singing kettle of his blood Out of his sanguine side, Poked by the sibling spear it ebbs and flows In a hub-bubble tide That dyes the silent room. The gay young god, Dog in the manger now, Growls in the hearth, and bares old teeth against The Ass in us, the Cow. There are the portly bottle-loins, and there The wine-marks of his birth Upon the straw, the biscuit-brittle straw Broken by Mary's girth. And here, most meek, most eager, and most hushed, The angelic agents hover, A great prudential company, all come To offer him life-cover. Comes Sentiment with frozen tears lent By Memory, melting sweet, Her hothead cries boil over and congeal Again at her cold feet. And Grief, deep in her crushed and tinfoil wrap, Brokenly glares to-day Among the ashes and the cruel butt- Ends of this Christmas play. 204 W. R. RODGERS And there's the tapering tree of his descent, Hitched toa kingly star, Earth is its horizontal, heaven and hell Its upright centre-spar. The very tree of life, so base, so wide, And with such longing fraught, Up the step-ladder of our looks it spires Into a point of thought. In the stark winter of our tinselled pride Its frozen growth now stands Waiting the fiery gift, the melting dew Spangled from heavenly hands. Ah look! The bush is candlabraed now With yellow and with blue, Types of the spirit, sweet and bitter both, Opposed but wholly true. Outside, like rootless souls the silent trees Sail past on trays of mist; The miser-icicle on the pane still marks The place that Judas kissed. His thistle breath still lingers in the air, Spiky with eagerness, It hovers on the garden, and the grass Whitens at his caress. Robin with rusty bib no longer can Pull out the worm-like nail, 205 W. R. RODGERS Dumpy with impotence it droops and humps Upon the wooden rail. And hark! The Herod-angels sing tonight! Over the Magi's tents Their heartless song drones on through grumbling glooms And weeping continents. High on his farthing floor the airman moons Above the mourning town Of Bethlehem; it is his footling root And he the flower and crown. O Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazcr, Come from your caravan And tell me where you go, and what new star You saw in Teheran: And what new man now hurries to be born Out of our addled earth, And O what silly corner of ourselves Will sec the mangy birth. Strike, strike the gong of our song till souls take fire, Clasp hands and bellow, Dance, dance, leap higher and longer, and hug Each with its fellow. Lord, in this wintry interval we send Our indolent regards And grey regrets. Make fluent all the pens Of all the frozen bards. 206 W. R. RODGERS Lay the live coal upon their lips that they May leap uproariously Out of their huff of words, and let the thorns Crackle with prophecy. Resume, and reimburse the silent wood, Elaborate its saps, Bid the bare trees blurt into bloom, and fill With leaf the hungry gaps, And in its head set the heart's singing birds. D. S. Savage WINTER OFFERING All I can offer now is a cracked china jug Of water, and, grown with tedious sweat and toil, Potatoes from the back-garden clods dug, Cut with the blunt spade-edge, clogged with heavy soil. I wish 1 could give you apples, grapes and pears, I wish I could give you cider and sour wine, Hut the orchard has been rank and green for years And its fruit won't ripen without sunshine. Potatoes cement bone, keep body and soul together, Water costs nothing and will do for the present. It's difficult enough to be gay in this wretched weather Without useless regrets for living like a peasant. We'll make no virtue of enforced economy, Strike no impressive plaster or tin attitudes. 207 D. S. SAVAGE Poverty's fixed, archaic physiognomy Projects only through masks where nothing else extrudes. THE WILD SWAN The evening spread its rags of melancholy over the marshes where the pylons traced a windy track. The air was desolate with sorrow unexpressed, and the birds sang as though their songs were the faint whispers of wind that broke, sighing, upon the singing reeds. Wind faltered hesitantly through the viaduct that spanned the river, and stilled on the cold surface of stone. My mind was hard and sensitive as that dark mirror in its loneliness; but as my glancing eyes met the still waters the lake was splintered by a lacing swan: my mood was shattered with its calm explosion. FEBRUARY Ebbs from soiled fields the last drab vestige of snow, Through February's veils the hazy distance looms, In sunken woods no melancholy horn is blown, Only an invisible process of decay consumes. I have sat at this window and watched the day Consumed as though its substance were a powdering wood In whose grey embers the origin of all decay Smopldered, as it patiently smoulders within my blood. 208 D. S. SAVAGE Rotting vegetation, a leaf like a leather glove, A glove or a fleshless hand, of a corpse or a tree; Excrement; a dead dog buried in a garden grave; I am all these, and all these moulder in me. I am the limestone in the cave, the putrefying bone, The seashell mashed and splintered by the mechanical surf, The green, soft fallen tree-trunk, the crumbling stone, The waterlogged carrion under the thatch of turf. The odour of mortality rises from the death of the day, Earth's subtle chemistry proceeds ; water drips from the boughs ; Nourished on black corruption, warmed in the breath of decay The seeds of Spring lie swelling in their soaking house. SCENARIO A door creaks in the house. Outside the window rain streams upon the flat, deserted landscape. It falls from everlasting to everlasting. The earth hungers. Trees spread their gaunt limbs wider. "I had a lover, but because of my soul's depravity Time soured him like a crust, we were chained like prisoners. Now he replenishes the earth, his breast is hollow, he is gone from me like a rotten tooth, leaving an aching cavity. "I, alone, beneath the groaning rooftree, agonize in desperation, and in a crazy fashion I am like a wet fag-end left smouldering on the edge of a fouled sink, rank with my wry passion." 209 D. S. SAVAGE The wind rattles the windows. In a dirty saucer mix ash and tea-stains. The woman wanders. Cinematic memory unwinds the defunct weathers of a hundred wasted seasons, but supplies no answer. SEPARATION All day I have been completely alone, and now the night Descends, swathing in shadow and swaddling all, And all but a smother and blur is bandaged from sight, Blots and blotches of shadow clotting on ceiling and wall. I lift the glass chimney, and light the oil-lamp's wick, The quick lick of the flame flickers, and shadows distend, The elongations of fingers sprawl on the wall, and the tick Of the tin clock in the silence and the tick of my pulse contend. In this prolongation of solitude, I am estranged Even from myself, in you; in your absence I dwindle apart In a ghostly attenuation of feeling, till all my deranged Consciousness aches in the void for the physical thud of your heart. LIVING The smoky blue of evening wreathes from fields Of tumbled clay, And lanes where summer's trampled body sprawls In damp decay. Through the thin mist, a heavy tread encroaching, I greet my neighbor 210 D. S. SAVAGE Clumsily slouching homeward to his cottage, Tired after labour. Alone with dusk, I light a cigarette, But let it smoulder. Another year burns down to stub and ash, And I am older. CONFESSION You have said, for certain To be true, to be good Words must be written In the heart's blood. I have tried, I have tried, I have labored and toiled Till the ink dried Or the blood cooled. I know that blood is bitter, That ink tastes sour, The hand runs better When the heart is sure. I walk among men With my labour and pain, Blood on the pen, Ink in the vein. 211 D. S. SAVAGE ABSENT CREATION I wait for wonder, or the weather's turn To teach my tongue to wind its tangled skein Of loss or love, lilt out its awkward words, Or learn a rhythm from the weaving rain. I await that ease and excellence of mind That intimates suave movement to the hand, Letting the typewriter shuttle off its lines To a slow march, or stately saraband. But time and tide-turn, running past the ear, Seethe with distraction on a wasting sound, The hour-sands plunge, my fingers plough through care, I hear an endless clock thud underground. Upon this desert coast, this sea examinate, Lord, burst a cyclone, or a soothing rain, Detonate dams, flood cities, souse or intoxicate, That I may live, and feel, and speak again! Francis Scarfe TYNE DOCK The summer season at Tyne Dock Hoisted my boyhood in a crane Above the shaggy mining town, Above the slaghills and the rocks, Above the middens in backlanes And wooden hen-huts falling down. 212 FRANCIS SCARFE Vermilion grass grew in the street Where the blind pit-ponies pranced And poppies screamed by butchers' stalls Where bulls kicked sparks with dying feet, And in the naked larks I sensed A cruel god beneath it all. Over the pit-head wheel the moon Was clean as a girl's face in school; I envied the remote old man Who lived there, happy and alone, While in the kitchen the mad spool Unwound as Annie's treadle ran. The boyish season is still there For clapping hands and leaping feet Across the slagheaps and the dunes; And still it breaks into my care, Though I will never find the street, Nor catch the old, impulsive tune, Nor ever lose that child's despair. (April, 1947) THE GROTTO The sea still plunges where as naked boys We dared the currents and the racing tides That stamped red weals of fury on our thighs, Yet did not know our first love was the sea That rolled like colts between our shining knees, While under us the sands in golden curls Coiled round our bodies like the plaits of girls. 213 FRANCIS SCARFE We came oblique to passion on that shore Identified with our blind will to danger, As when we explored the slipping walls of caves Booming with dark more fearful than the waves Whose silence magnified the heart's deep roar Till senses beat that were asleep before, And in ourselves we recognized a stranger. Or when we scaled by Frenchman's Bay the cliff No man has dared though boys there in the night Still prove their manhood on its hostile side That was our climb from innocence to life; And yet, if I could be there once again, My love, I'd pause amazed among the gulls, Afraid of both the triumphs and the falls. In sea and grotto where we found our hearts Our youth remained, and all our days return In dream and vision to the mocking sea Where womanhood and manhood proudly stirred Within our silence like a singing bird, And never a dawning day will break as pure As our grave adoration, immature. THE CLOCK Far away is one who now is sleeping In the same world and the same darkness, But not in my keeping. Oh no, my arms could never stretch so far And my hands trembling with tenderness Cannot hope to caress Her limbs, save by remembering what they arc. 214 FRANCIS SCARFE Oh no, my words must never reach her ears That lie so white against her sombre hair, No, no, she must not hear My voice that has no happiness to bring, For she also is lost in a realm where My cry and my despair Are out of tune whatever song they sing. Perhaps as I lie waking she is dreaming, But not of me, for dreams are not so kind; While my eyes arc brimming With images of things that might have been, And my lips for a prayer for her peace of mind That, early, she may find A love more delicate and more serene. And all my body prays her to forget One who long cared for her too bitterly, One who is in her debt For the clock of suffering that kept, twelve years The hours of absence and futility, Who could love utterly Beyond the meaning of these words and tears. CATS Those who love cats which do not even purr Or which are thin and tired and very old, Bend down to them in the street and stroke their fur And rub their ears, and smooth their breast, and hold Them carefully, and gaze into their eyes of gold. 215 FRANCIS SCAllFB For how can they pass what does not ask for love But draws it out of those who have too much, Frustrated souls who cannot use it all, who have Somewhere too tight and sad within them, such A tenderness it flows through all they touch. They are the ones who love without reward, Those on whom eyes are closed, from whom heads turn, Who know only too well they can afford To squander love, since in the breast it burns With the cold anguish every lover learns. So they pass on, victims of silent things, And what they love remains indifferent And stretches in the sun and yawns, or licks the rings That sheathe its claws, or sleeps and is content, Not knowing who she was, or what she meant. THE WINDOW In after years, when you look back upon This time, and upon me, who am no more Close to your heart nor a shadow in your sun, Perhaps you will stand still and lean on the door Or lay down something, feeling quite undone. Some passing stranger, or a turn of phrase, Or any echo or shade, will be enough, Anything that is worn and almost effaced, Anything half finished, will be proof I was no natural but an acquired taste. 216 FRANCIS SCARFE So you will stand there, looking back, inspired As though the curtains parted on some view Not quite to be believed in, nor desired, And which did not exist except for you, Like some clay thing the potter never tired. No, it would not be wise to throw the window wide. Close it quickly, before it hurts, and go About your usual tasks, and let time hide Beneath mountains of hours, what you know Cannot be lived again, yet has not died. PROGRESSION See that satan pollarding a tree, That geometric man straightening a road: Surely such passions are perverse and odd That violate windows and set the north wind free. No doubt tomorrow the world will be too straight. Five hundred miles an hour will churn our dreams Like surprised whales, when we lie a dead weight In an ignorant sleep, and things will be what they seem. Tomorrow we will hear on the gramophone The music of the Spheres, registered H.M.V. By a divorced contralto: we shall perhaps Meet Adam under glass in a museum Fleshless and most unlovely, complete with pedigree. Or else, tomorrow, workers, kings and crooks Will all have aeroplanes and be fast friends, In a world no longer divided by dividends, Where love will be almost as simple as it looks. 217 Sidney Goodsir Smith LARGO Ae boat anerlie nou Fishes frae this shore, Ae black drifter lane Riggs the crammasie daw, Aince was a fleet, and nou Ae boat alane gaes oot. War ir Peace, the trawlers win An the youth turns awa .pricht wi baubles nou An thirled tae factory ir store; Their faithers fished their ain, Unmaistered; ane remains. And never the clock rins back, The free days are owre; The warld shrinks, we luik Mair t'oor maisters ilka hour Whan yon lane boat I see Daith an rebellion blinn ma ee! (anerlie - only; crammasie - crimson; daw - dawn; thirled - thralled) CAN I FORGET? Can I forget the sickle mune Owre Largo throu the driven clouds, The sea lik bilan milk at oor fit? Can I forget the snaw aroun 218 SIDNEY GOODSIR SMITH Ail the tent-flap lik a gun boom Whan the wund tuik it? Can I forget the wolves' houl Famished rinnan throu the toun O' haar an wund an lamplicht? Can I forget the staucheran news As Christ received the Spanish doom An nocht tae dae but drink o nichts? Can I forget ma black wound? Kirdcudbright, may ye be dung doun An dammed, Dundrennan too! Can I forget, (Och, never!) a luve Crottle in my twa haunds tae stour, The rose o ma hert wormed wi rue? Can I forget the Solway flows Gray as daith, or the worm i' the rose? Whiles, whiles; but it bides its hour. O, thornd nou, hert's fanatic pouer Strang as the skaith's a meisure o the luve. Can I forget whit the saul can prove, That luve is bricht as the skaith is dure, The skaith is deep as the luve is hie? Can I forget I'll neer can lose Twa tyger een nae mair nor those Lang houghs lik the silken dunes o the sea? Can I forget, ma luve, ma luve, Havana thrang wi drucken fules 219 SIDNEY GOODSIR SMITH And ye atnang them, lauchan queen? Can I forget, ma luve, ma luve, Strathyre's muckle bed in a wee room, White breists lik hills i the mime's lily learn? Can I forget the gifts o you, Yon music that's the wine o luve, The birds' wild sea-sang in yir hair? Can I forget, ma pouter doo, Voar an hairst an winter are you, Sun an mune an the warld, ma dear? (fit - feet; haar - sleet; wund - wind; staucherin - staggering; crottle - crumble away; stour - dust; skaith - wound; houghs - thighs; lauchan - laughing; learn - gleam; pouter doo - pouter dove; voar - spring; hairst - autumn) WHAN THE HERT IS LAICH Lamb, whan the hert is laich, Lourd wi' the haill warld's wecht, A boulder's whare the hert shud be, A muckle stane that burdens yee. Ye sit lik a cairn o stane yersel, The burds' blye sangs ye hear wi laith, The sakless burn rins doun tae hell, The aince-luved trees a choir o daith. An whitna cause ye mayna tell Nor casting reason bring release, Ye sit lik a stane an watch the hills That mock yir thrawan with their peace. (Laich - low, lourd - heavy, haill - whole, wecht - weight, muckle - great, laith - loathe, loth, blye - blithe, sakless - blameless, burn - brook, whitna - whatever, thrawan - throes) 22O SIDNEY GOODSIR SMITH SANG: RECOIL O SKAITH Wersh an drumlie are the lees Ma lips are suppan nou, Wersh an wan the bitter brec Bled frae the skaith o luve; O wald I'd flee the thochts that ding, Thir nichts I mayna sleep, But aye the gorgoulls gowl ahint An roun ma hert they creep. wersh the lees that curl ma lips An sick ma stoundit saul, 1 ken douce reason bids me wheesht But, luve, the hert is cauld! Yet thfou the cauldrife dirl o skaith That dings ma hert sae fell There learns yir tyger glaummcrie I maun loo i the pit o hell. (wersh - bitter, drumlie - roiled and muddy, bree - brew, skaith - wound, ding - beat, gargoulls - goblins, gowl - howl, ahint - behind, stoundit - stunned, douce - soft, cauldrife - freezing, dirl - pierce, dings - strikes, glaummerie - glamor, maun - must, loo - love) William Soutar THE STAR Whan my faither's faither was a bairn Wi nocht but bairnly care Yon haw-tree fleurin on the cairn Had weather'd a hundred year. 221 WILLIAM SOUTAR And the hill was green abune its rock, And the burn cam burblin doun, Lang, lang, afore die hamely folk Biggit our borough-toun. And yon wee licht frae its lanely place Glinted as cauld and clear Whan nicht rov'd through this howe o* space Afore a world was here. BALLAD O! shairly ye hae seen my love Doun whaur the waters wind; He walks like ane wha fears nae man And yet his e'en are kind. O! shairly ye hae seen my love At the turnin* o' the tide; For then he gethers in the nets Doun by the waterside. O! lassie I hae seen your love At the turnin' o' the ride; And he was wi' the fisher-folk Doun by the waterside. The fisher-folk were at their trade No far from Walnut Grove; They gether'd in their dreepin* nets And found your ain true love. 222 WILLIAM SOUTAR THE GOWK Half doun the hill where fa's the linn, Far frae the flaught of fowk t I saw upon a lanely whin, A lanely singin' gowk! Cuckoo, cuckoo; Behind my back The howie hill stuid up and spak, Cuckoo, cuckoo. There was nae soun', the loupin' linn Was frostit in its fa'; Nae bird was on the lanely whin Sae white with fleurs o' snaw, Cuckoo, cuckoo; I stuid stane still And gently spak the howie hill Cuckoo, cuckoo. THE TRYST luely, luely, cam she in And luely she lay doun: 1 kent her be her caller lips And her breists sae sma* and roun*. A* thru the nicht we spak nae word Nor sinder'd bane frae bane: A* thru the nicht I heard her hert Gang soundin' wi* my ain. 223 WILLIAM SOUTAR It was about the waukrife hour When cocks begin to craw That she smool'd saftly thru the mirk Afore the day wud daw. Sae luely, luely, cam she in Saie luely was she gaen; And wi* her a* my simmer days Like they had never been. WAIT FOR THE HOUR (to a poet) When day follows inarticulate day; When the mind would speak But the heart has nought to say Wait for the hour. Wait for the hour Nor fret against the sense Which is more old, more wise than intelligence. O thrust not forth your word Like a driven bird Which braves its fledgeling breast to the blasts of the air; Which strains an awkward wing To meet the spring While yet the fields are broken and the boughs are bare. Wait for the hour; As, hoarded within the bud, The leaves must wait if they would bear a flower: As wait earth's waters till their strength can flood Under the moon. Wait for the hour: 224 WILLIAM SOUTAR It is not late nor soon, But this your power To curb the fretful brain and trust the blood. THE THOCHT Young Janie was a strappin* lass Wha deid in jizzen-bed, And monie a thocht her lover thocht Lang eftir she was dead; But aye, wi' a' he brocht to mind O' misery and wrang, There was a gledness gathered in Like the owercome o' a sang: And, gin the deid are naethingness Or they be minded on, As hinny to a hungry ghaist Maun be a thocht like yon. (owercome - refrain; hinny - honey) THE PERMANENCE OF THE YOUNG MEN No man outlives the grief of war Though he outlive its wreck: Upon the memory a scar Through all his years will ache. Hope will revive when horrors cease; And dreaming dread be stilled; 225 WILLIAM SOUTAR But there shall dwell within his peace A sadness unannulled. Upon his world shall hang a sign Which summer cannot hide: The permanence of the young men Who are not by his side. Bernard Spencer AEGEAN ISLANDS 1940-41 Where white, stares, smokes or breaks, Thread white, white of plaster and of foam, Where sea like a wall falls; Ribbed, lionish coast, The stony islands which blow into my mind More often than I imagine my grassy home; To sun one's bones beside the Explosive, crushed-blue, nostril-opening sea (The weaving sea, splintered with sails and foam, Familiar of famous and deserted harbours, Of coins with dolphins on and fallen pillars.) To know the gear and skill of sailing, The drenching race for home and the sail-white houses, Stories of Turks and smoky ikons, Cry of the bagpipe, treading Of the peasant dancers; 226 BERNARD SPENCER The dark bread The island wine and the sweet dishes; All these were elements in a happiness More distant now than any date like '40, A. D. or B. C., ever can express. LETTERS Letters, like blood along a weakening body move fainter round our map. On dangerous wings, on darkness-loving keels they go, so longed for; but say no memorable things. The "dear" and "darling" and the "yours for ever" are relics of a style. But most appears mere rambling notes; passion and tenderness fall like a blot or a burst of tears. Now public truths are scarcer currency, what measure for the personal truth? how can this ink and paper coursing continents utter the clothed or the naked man? A HAND The human hand lying on my hand (The wrist had a gilt bangle on) Wore its print of personal lines Took breath as lungs and leaves and Tasted in the skin our sun. 227 BERNARD SPENCER The living palm and the near-to-bone: Fine animal hairs where the light shone. The handed mole to its earth, the stoat to the dark And this flesh to its nature nervously planned; To dig love's heart till everything is shown, To hunt, to hold its mark This loved hand. ILL Expectant at the country gate the lantern. On the night Its silks of light strained. Lighted upper window. "Is it you who sent for me?" The two go in To where the woman lies ill, upstairs, out of sight. I hear sky softly smother to earth in rain. As I sit by the controls and the car's burning dials. And always the main-road traffic searching, searching the horizons. Then those sounds knifed by the woman's Ah! of pain. Who dreamed this; the dark folding murderer's hands round the lamps? The rain blowing growth to rot? Lives passed beneath a ritual That tears men's ghosts and bodies; the few healers With their weak charms, moving here and there among the lamps? 228 Stephen Spender A CHILDHOOD I am glad I met you on the edge Of your barbarous childhood In what purity of pleasure You danced alone like a peasant For the stamping joy's own sake! How, set in their sandy sockets, Your clear, truthful, transparent eyes Shone out of the black frozen landscape Of those gray-clothed schoolboys! How your shy hand offered The total generosity Of original unforewarned fearful trust, In a world grown old in iron hatred! I am glad to set down The first and ultimate you, Your inescapable soul. Although It fade like a fading smile Or light falling from faces Which some grimmer preoccupation replaces. This happens everywhere at every time: Joy lacks the cause for joy, Love the answering love, 229 STEPHEN SPENDER And truth the objectless persistent loneliness, As they grow older, To become later what they were In childhood earlier, In a world of cheating compromise. Childhood, its own flower, Flushes from the grasses with no reason Except the sky of that season. But the grown desires need objects And taste of these corrupts the tongue And the natural need is scattered In satisfactions which satisfy A debased need. Yet all prayers are on die side of Giving strength to naturalness, So I pray for nothing new, I pray only, after such knowledge, That you may have the strength to be you. And I shall remember You who, being younger, Will probably forget. ON THE PILOTS WHO DESTROYED GERMANY IN THE SPRING OF 1945 I stood on a roof top and they wove their cage Their murmuring throbbing cage, in the air of blue crystal. I saw them gleam above the town like diamond bolts Conjoining invisible struts of wire, 230 STEPHEN SPENDER Carrying through the sky their geometric cage Woven by senses delicate as a shoal of flashing fish. They went. They left a silence in our streets below Which boys gone to schoolroom leave in their playground. A silence of asphalt, of privet hedge, of staring wall. In the glass emptied sky their diamonds had scratched Long curving finest whitest lines. These the day soon melted into satin ribbons Falling over heaven's terraces near the golden sun. Oh that April morning they carried my will Exalted expanding singing in their aeriel cage. They carried my will. They dropped it on a German town. My will expanded and tall buildings fell down. Then, when die ribbons faded and the sky forgot, And April was concerned with building nests and being hot I began to remember the lost names and faces. Now I tie the ribbons torn down from those terraces Around the most hidden image in my lines, And my life, which never paid the price of their wounds, Turns thoughts over and over like a propellor Assumes their guilt, honours, repents, prays for them. THE LABOURER IN THE VINEYARD Here are the ragged towers of vines Stepped down the slope in terraces. Through torn spaces between spearing leaves The lake glows with waters combed sideways, STEPHEN SPENDER And climbing up to reach the vine-spire vanes The mountain crests beyond the far shore Paint their sky of glass with rocks and snow. Lake below, mountains above, between Turrets of leaves, grape-triangles, the labourer stands. His tanned trousers form a pedestal, Coarse tree-trunk rising from the earth with bark Peeled away at the navel to show Shining torso of sun-burnished god Breast of lyre, mouth coining song. My ghostly, passing-by thoughts gather Around his hilly shoulders, like those clouds Around those mountain peaks their transient scrolls. He is the classic writing all this day, Through his mere physical being focussing All into nakedness. His hand With outspread fingers is a star whose rays Concentrate timeless inspiration Onto the god descended in a vineyard With hand unclenched against the lake's taut sail Flesh filled with statue, as the grape with wine. ON THE THIRD DAY On the first summer day I lay in the valley. Above rocks the sky sealed my eyes with a leaf The grass licked my skin. The flowers bound my nostrils With scented cotton threads. The soil invited My hands and feet to grow down and have roots. 232 STEPHEN SPENDER Bees and grass-hoppers drummed over Crepitations of thirst rising from dry stones, And the ants rearranged my ceaseless thoughts Into different patterns for ever the same. Then the blue wind fell out of the air And the sun hammered down till I became of wood Glistening brown beginning to warp. On the second summer day I climbed through the forest's Huge tent pegged to the mountain-side by roots. My direction was cancelled by that great sum of trees. Here darkness lay under the leaves in a war Against light, which occasionally penetrated Splintering spears through several interstices And dropping white clanging shields on the soil. Silence was stitched through with thinnest pine needles And bird songs were stifled behind a hot hedge. My feet became as heavy as logs. I drank up all the air of the forest. My mind changed to amber transfixed with dead flies. On the third summer day I sprang from the forest Into the wonder of a white snow-tide. Alone with the sun's wild whispering wheel, Grinding seeds of secret light on frozen fields, Every burden fell from me, the forest from my back, The valley dwindled to bewildering visions Seen through torn shreds of the sailing clouds. Above the snowfield one rock against the sky Shaped out of pure silence a naked tune Like a violin when the tune forsakes the instrument And the pure sound flies through the ears' gate And a whole sky floods the pool of one mind. STEPHEN SPENDER O NIGHT O TREMBLING NIGHT O night O trembling night O night of sighs O night when my body was a rod O night When my mouth was a vague animal cry Pasturing on her flesh O night When the close darkness was a nest Made of her hair and filled with my eyes (O stars impenetrable above The fragile tent poled with our thighs Among the petals falling fields of time O night revolving all^our dark away) O day O gradual day O sheeted light Covering her body as with dews Until I brushed her sealing sleep away To read once more in the uncurtained day Her naked love, my great good news. Derek Stanford THE TOMB OF HONEY SNAPS ITS MARBLE CHAINS "fecris settlement pour vous exaher." Guillaume Apollinaire Year after year before my life began I lived with lug-worms in a sunken marsh. Feet of the town stamped over me by day: clocks of the town above me chimed at night. Fossil among the gutters of the world, I grew like cactus in a pavement's crack; 234 DEREK STANFORD cigarette-ash and excrement my food, urine of dogs and rain moistened my mouth. My head was bent, my lips were glued to earth; boots strode upon the gang-plank of my neck; beetles filed through the postern of my teeth and scurried down the lift-shaft of my throat. Darkness, the taste of sourness, choking dust, the insane speech of dynasties of mice; Time in his own asylum faintly raving, contriving wreaths of slime-dank silver daisies, kissing his luminous finger-tips to Death. The arrogance of haughty high-heeled shoes, the chain-gang trudge of a multitude of slaves forged an iron echo in my shackled skull. The moon's infected spittle lay in my hair. How can I write of the buried will's revolt, that vast protracted midnight of rebellion when the heart cracks like the sepulchre of a god, and Time and Fate earth's hypocritical mourners freeze into standing shadows, and resurrection grapples and shatters its pre-determined shell? So I was born in an avalanche of carnage, torn from the jailor-image of my heart, severed in pain from die double of all my durance: reeking with crimsoned sweat I stood complete. 235 DEREK STANFORD How can I speak of the trumpets and the garlands, giant hands that tended me sheathed in gloves of flowers; choirs, beyond stars, proclaiming through the ether "Only the Free shall discover the Morning River; only the Free who are pure shall uncover My Face," I drank the Milky Way's sweet foaming cordial fresh from the spouting nipples of the sky. Now I walk upright, crowned with the bee's gold halo; sure-footed as a panther, shod with fern. For those who slake their thirst at the constellations, who wear their love like a sprig of mistle-toe, the Spring shall be a never-failing garden, and bread shall be "a star upon the tongue." CAROL FOR HIS DARLING ON CHRISTMAS DAY Tonight the Christmas landscape of the skull throngs brightly with white images of angels like parallel ropes of pearl, poised above spires, surmounting towers, ascending and descending. Streets, squares, and gardens of the tired heart's town receive snow- wise the promise of this song, shuttling its theme like a glinting row of beads between the icy earth and the granite sky. Christ, sing the voices like uplifted candles, is born anew in memory's dim manger, warmed by the friendly incense of the oxen; miraculous and immaculate as snow. 236 DEREK STANFORD The unrejoicirig heart has resurrection; joy burns in the air like an incandescent star. But this is a story for our private theatre: outside, the night is dank and uninspired. Down by the shore the wave repeats its secret of banal worth to the uninterested sand, and here the senile ash in the funeral fire utters its grey disintegrating sigh. Darling, accept these symbols of thanksgiving, these blanched and shining signs of blessedness, these jubilations of the lonely night-time, these holly rites of a happy imagination. It was your love designed this festival: your love I feel as an ether-weighted flake, as the shy white Christmas snow that falls in mye heart, stroking its dales with a tingling finger of peace. Julian Symons SPRING POEM The muscles flex, contract, Over the sprouting garden, The blood moves to shade from Faces this burning sun, Running and roaring spring Permits me to say thanks Now the tent arm includes You with the cooing pigeons. 237 JULIAN SYMONS The arm takes in its sweep The strengthening light the flowers And the hard touch of love, Not asking what is ready Or wishing what is good Is aware only of slow Movement of the body We shall possess, not keep. We know little of good And that little goes away, But the sad human heart Must always wish for joy, For the face like alabaster Which is breathing and warm And the arm falling like velvet On the opposing arm. Minutes will move and brush This season from the hand, The year moves on to worse Than we have ever known, But uncritical this moment I give thanks for the drug That turns two into one, Making casual the eye, Stopping the mind's deceit, Letting the arm select You with the flowers and pigeons. 238 JULIAN SYMONS FOR MY WIFE Sitting at evening in the warm grass I look at the barracks cradled between hills. Purring along the sky the fighters pass. A daze of heat fills Up my mind against the usual fears. I think of these last two years Stamped permanently upon our wavering lives. I think of you. The very face of love Speaks, and tells me what love gives: This power to see and move Outside ourselves, these trees and this green view: As I, alone and idle here, see you, So easily laughing and so quickly happy Or quickly sad, for whom the natural Events of life are tidal like the sea: For whom the world is all Simple, made up exclusively of people: Now, although each church steeple Reveals the power of idols, every action Involves its opposite and must disclose A painful birth of bureaucratic faction, Today when every rose Shows up its worm, I more than ever preserve This radical and single love we serve. And I present this love now as a symbol Of our best hopes, and weigh this good we've known Against the times when we betray and dissemble; 239 JULIAN SYMONS Now in this place alone I offer unaffected thanks that we, In spite of our time, being together are happy. And in the future that we move towards, I trust That whatever fails at least this may survive As compensation for our end of dust, This love, that is alive And vivid in a world of falsehood, That, where so much is doubtful, certainly is good. HOMAGE TO OUR LEADERS These larger-than-life comic characters, Churchill the moonface moocow chewing A permanent cigar, Roosevelt the gigantic False Liberal mask with syrup smile, Medicine-man Stalin like Aunt Sally at a fair, All snapping like canvas in the wind... Our world, our time, our murder Evolved these monsters: who like the allosaurus Should be remembered as a stupidity We have outgrown. Now they sprawl across Hoardings, papers, radios, these simple shapeless demons. Friend, lock your door at night: watch neighbour and wife, See that your eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, Remember that you live by permission of the police. 240 Dylan Thomas POEM Especially when the October wind With frosty fingers punishes my hair, Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire And cast a shadow crab upon the land, By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds, Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks, My busy heart who shudders as she talks Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words. Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark On the horizon walking like the trees The wordy shapes of women, and the rows Of the star-gestured children in the park. Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches, Some of the oaken voices, from the roots Of many a thorny shire tell you notes, Some let me make you of the water's speeches. Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning Flies on the shafted disc, declaims the morning And tells the windy weather in the cock. Some let me make you of the meadow's signs; The signal grass that tells me all I know Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye. Some let me tell you of the raven's sins. 241 DYLAN THOMAS Especially when the October wind (Some let me make you of autumnal spells, The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales) With fist of turnips punishes the land, Some let me make you of the heartless words. The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury. By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds. POEM A process in the weather of the heart Turns damp to dry; the golden shot Storms in the freezing tomb. A weather in the quarter of the veins Turns night to day; blood in their suns Lights up the living worm. A process in the eye forewarns The bones of blindness; and the womb Drives in a death as life leaks out. A darkness in the weather of the eye Is half its light; the fathomed sea Breaks on unangled land. The seed that makes a forest of the loin Forks half its fruit; and half drops down, Slow in a sleeping wind. A weather in the flesh and bone Is damp and dry; the quick and dead Move like two ghosts before the eye. 242 DYLAN THOMAS A process in the weather of the world Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child Sits in their double shade. A process blows the moon into the sun, Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; And the heart gives up its dead. IN MEMORY OF ANN JONES After the funeral, mule praises, brays, Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle- toed tap Tap happily of one peg in the thick Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black, The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves, Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep, Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves, That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout, After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern, I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun (Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop; She would not have me sinking in the holy Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep And need no druid of her broken body). But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads, 243 DYLAN THOMAS Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel, Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds. Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull Is carved from her in a room with a wet window In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year. I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow, Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain; And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone. These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm Storm me forever over her grave until The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill. AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea 244 DYXAN THOMAS They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be made and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion. IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. 245 DYLAN THOMAS Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Not for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art. POEM IN OCTOBER It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. 246 DYLAN THOMAS A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls, But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder ot summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels. 247 DYLAN THOMAS And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singing birds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning. POEM The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams 248 DYLAN THOMAS Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime. The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars. And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet hoes the same crooked worm. A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A CHILD IN LONDON Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn 249 DYLAN THOMAS Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn The majesty and burning of the child's death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth. Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other. Terence Tiller NO TIME You will not see the sorrow of no time. There will be birds bearing rings, ravens; hands with an empty hourglass and a sword. Things half-seen in a familiar room will rise against you. These will be dangerous friends. You will not see the sorrow of no time Or singing burst your melancholy cord. In days of nightingales, and when our streets are all nostalgic turnings, and the west 250 TERENCE TILLER a broken harbour, there will be terror walking.. You will not know the crossing of our hearts, the final stake that burrows through the breast. The cruel delicious voices of the birds will be silent for you. For you unwaking. Then all my journeys will be bellman-like, a wanderer in your city crying hours. Call me the raven friend: that cry will come. There will be nothing in the opened book but evil spoken. These are the hollowed years. Death in the longing way begins to walk. You will not see the sorrow of 110 time. PROTHALAMION The instant splendour, the swung bells that speak once to the unprepared glory of youth; then the bewildering care: and nothing more but the stag's backward look, and the approach of all we were. And this is the key of the kingdom. Oh my love, there was a time when the blue-feathered sky, the gilded haughty trees, clad the sardonic rook in the voice of the dove; when homeward streets were palaces, and earth was the delight held in a child's hand. We shook the door, stretched our hands out to the key; years closed behind. And yet 251 TERENCE TILLER we shall not lose that age; it is the hound; we turn and hear his steady feet. Over our human purpose winds go round the unpeopled spaces of the night; this night, when we shall join under their swaying canopy, we know our heart shall be a child's again. For they have blown, and the blind stag has fled, through our perfecting years. The kingdom comes though by a narrow gate. To snare his antlers in his native wood, the stag runs gladly, soon or late. This love shall fill the sky again with wings, and the trees' proud enamel of sunlight be as when our eyes were gods'. Here is the ghostly glory, and the bell swings here, in th$ mingling of our bloods. THE END OF THE STORY Put out the candle, close the biting rose, for cock and cony are asleep; the sheep in her secretive hills, with fleece at peace, now lies enfolded. The hungry sceptre-kissing mouth, the moth behind the fingers, no more eat the night; the rooting worm has crawled away from play in his wet burrows. 252 TERENCE TILLER Now the extremest joys are dreams and toys; it's darkness in a vast full-tide abed; over abandoned bodies time shall climb like the black spider. Give memory all amazing hours, all showers or sharply pouring seas between the knees; slack as a rope, the flesh is dull, and full of its perfection. And all that lately flashed and leapt is gripped into a knot of symbols; all's grown small, quiet as curtains: brave be this your grave, and fresh your garlands. BATHERS They flutter out of white, and run through the electric wind to bathe, giggling like rivers for the fun of smacking mud in the toes, of lithe and sliding bodies like their own sharp rushes, good to battle with. The child knows all delight to be naked and queer as his own name, foreign as being loved; but he feels as a kind of coming home the flags that slap his plunging knee, and the cold stocking of the stream. 253 TERENCE TILLER Coiling in wombs of water, bent backwards upon the sheets of air, his wand of sexless body lent to all that was or casts before, he strips to either element a foetus or a ravisher. So gladly virgin rivers rush down to their amniotic seas, children of cold and glittering flesh that promise harvest as they pass panics of tiny fertile fish in the fast pale of boisterous thighs. KILLED IN ACTION They know the lion's power, being now indifferent, whose eager limbs have learnt to suffer without fear or consoling love the bridal and the bed of the unearthly dead. They lie in beds of love with worn and vivid face, where fall in one embrace the dead by the alive the carnal by the just, being now indifferent to lust or monument. 254 TERENCE TILLER They have all grown just, as mindless change or growth animal life and death, blind blood of trees, thrust of the innocent spray and the pitiless flower: they know the lion's power. IMAGE IN A LILAC TREE Tireless budding and flowering of women to a child and a child; the closed evening-care of motherhood: from what slim boughs the lilac swells into lavender torches, the flesh blooms through its leaves! Or now the heart is heavy and sweet with words, and a great wind sways the tongue: oh eloquence of gardens bursting through the narrow pen into five senses, that clutch beauty as a child the breast! The lilac's evening-coloured breasts of smoke, bare like a Cretan lady's to the firm poetic moonlight: love, conception, birth, where the five tongues of living drink, and are poem and image. 255 Ruthven Todd WATCHING YOU WALK (For N) Watching you walk slowly across a stage, Suddenly I am become aware of all the past; Of all the tragic queens and maids of every age, Of Joan, whose love the flames could not arrest; Of those to whom always love was the first duty, Who saw behind the crooked world the ugly and weak, Whose kindliness was no gesture; no condescending pity Could rule their actions; those whom Time broke, But whom he could not totally destroy. Hearing the truth you give to these dead words, Whose writer feared the life they might enjoy, I can recall the mating orchestra of birds Behind your voice, as lying by the lake, You read me poems, and I, too deeply moved, Watched the swans for a moment, before I spoke The trivialities, unable to tell you how I loved. Watching your fingers curl about a painted death, I am suddenly glad that it is April, that you are queen Of all the sordid marches of my bruised heart, That, loving you, the poplars never seemed so green; Glad of my lonely walk beside the shrunken river, Thinking of you while seeing the tufts of ash, 256 RUTHVEN TODD The chestnut candles and unreal magnolia's wax flower; Glad that, in loving you, the whole world lives afresh. SIX WINTERS Six winters since, I dandled on my knee The neat-tholed toy that was my son, That yet was more than toy and more to me Than all the herodian innocents rolled in one, Or that child whose mother fled by the Egyptian sea. Now I am gallows where no mandrake grows, No bryony twines up my splintering grey shaft; Though hanging history creaks as the gale blows, My sole possessions are the leaves that drift This sodden autumn, waiting cementing snows: Or else my fancy says I am explorer still, Haunting the fringes of a never travelled land, The hypochondriac dreamer, torn by an untrue ill, Who dare not drop the guide-book from his hand, Nor venture more than eye's length from the closest hill. For these six winters of a war which stole This that I loved so much, have also taken Much that my time thought good, thought real, Been X-ray shewing the diagnostic much mistaken, Disclosed the gentle hand grown horned and cruel. 257 RUTHVEN TODt) TO A VERY BEAUTIFUL LADY (For U) And when you walk the world lifts up its head, Planets are haloed by the unembarassed stars, The town lies fallow at your feet, the ancient dead Recall their loves, their queens and emperors, Their shepherds and the quiet pastoral scene. For less than you Troy burned and Egypt fell, The corn was blasted while it still stood green And Faustus went protesting into hell. Be careful, sweet, adored by half your world, Time to its darlings is not always kind There lie the lovelies whom the years have scored Deeper than all the hearts which once repined. The knife you hold could cut an empire low, Or in your own breast place the suicidal blow. PERSONAL HISTORY: FOR MY SON O my heart is the unlucky heir of the ages And my body is unwillingly the secret agent Of my ancestors; those content with their wages From history: the Cumberland Quaker whose gentle Face was framed with lank hair to hide the ears Cropped as a punishment for his steadfast faith, The Spanish lady who had seen the pitch lake's broth In the West Indian island and the Fife farmers To whom the felted barley meant a winter's want. 258 RUTHVBN TODD My face presents my history, and its sallow skin Is parchment for the Edinburgh lawyer's deed: To have and hold in trust, as feeofee therein Until such date as the owner shall have need Thereof. My brown eyes are jewels I cannot pawn, And my long lip once curled beside an Irish bog, My son's whorled ear was once my father's, then mine; I am the map of a campaign, each ancestor has his flag Marking an advance or a retreat. I am their seed. As I write I look at the five fingers of my hand, Each with its core of nacre bone, and rippled nails; Turn to the palm and the traced unequal lines that end In death only at the tips my ancestry fails The dotted swirls are original, and are my own: Look at the fringed polyp which I daily use And ask its history, ask to what grave abuse It has been put: perhaps it curled about the stone Of Cain. At least it has known much of evil. And perhaps as much of good, been tender When tenderness was needed, and been firm On occasion, and in its past been free of gender, Been the hand of a mother holding the warm Impress of the child against her throbbing breast, Been cool to the head inflamed in fever, Sweet and direct in contact with a lover. O in its cupped and fluted shell lies all the past, My fingers close about the crash of history's storm. In the tent of night I hear the voice of Calvin Expending his hatred of the world in icy words; 259 RUTHVEN TODD Man less than a red ant beneath the towering mountain, And God a troll more fearful than the feudal lords: The Huguenots in me, flying Saint Bartholomew's Day, Are in agreement with all this, and their resentful hate Flames brighter than the candles on an altar, the grey Afternoon is lit by Catherine wheels of terror, the street Drinks blood and pity is death before their swords. The cantilever of my bones acknowledges the architect, My father, to whom always the world was a mystery Concealed in the humped base of a bottle, one solid fact To set against the curled pages and the tears of history. I am a Border keep, a croft and a solicitor's office, A country rectory, a farm and a drawing board: In me, as in so many, the past has stowed its miser's hoard, Won who knows where nor with what loaded dice. When my blood pulses it is their blood I feel hurry. These forged me, the latest link in a fertile chain, With ends that run so far that my short sight Cannot follow them, nor can my weak memory claim Acquaintance with the earliest shackle. In my height And breadth I hold history, and then my son Holds my history in his small body and the history of another, Who for me has no contact but that of flesh, his mother. What I make now I make, indeed, from the unknown, A blind man spinning furiously in the web of night. VARIOUS ENDS Sidney, according to report, was kindly hearted When stretched upon the field of death; 260 RUTHVEN TODD And in his gentleness, ignored the blood that spurted, Expending the last gutter of his flickering breath. Marlowe, whose raw temper used to rise Like boiling milk, went on the booize; A quick word and his half-startled eyes Mirrored his guts flapping on his buckled shoes. Swift went crazy in his lonely tower, Where blasphemous obscenity paid the warders, Who brought a string of visitors every hour To see the wild beast, the Dean in holy orders. And there were those who coughed out their sweet soft lungs Upon the mountains, or the clear green sea. Owen found half-an-ounce of lead with wings; And Tennyson died quietly, after tea. Sam Johnson scissored at the surgeon's stitches To drain more poison from his bloated body. And Bryon may have recalled the pretty bitches, Nursing his fevered head in hands unsteady. De Nerval finished swinging from a grid And round his neck the Queen of Sheba's garter. Swinburne died of boredom, doing as he was bid, And Shelley bobbed lightly on the Mediterranean water. Rimbaud, his leg grown blue and gross and round, Lay sweating for those last weeks on his truckle-bed; He could not die the future was unbroken ground Only Paris, Verlaine and poetry were dead. 261 RUTHVBN TODD Blake had no doubts, his old fingers curled Around dear Kate's frail and transparent hand; Death merely meant a changing of his world, A widening of experience, for him it marked no end. THE LONELY MONTH (For J) This long and lonely month With memory nagging like a broken gramophone, Evenings devoted to darts and too much beer, The early morning rising, The battering awkwardly upon the typewriter And the planting of strange seeds. This long and lonely month. This long and lonely month With the emptiness full of fluff and feathers, The silent house driving me out to walk Alone along these Essex lanes, Or to hoe the persistent weeds, The nettles and the thistles that push up Inevitably through the month. O yes, the yellow rock-rose Shews its wafer petals, and the scabious Buttons the roadsides, and the strawberry Ripens, and young apples fall. Yes, the sad prisoners thin the beet And the cuckoo presses on the ear, This long and lonely month . . . 262 RUTHVEN TODD This long and lonely month Cannot efface my visual memories, My last glance back before that corner Cut like a razor blade. Nor can I forget the small shadow Sliding away along the western sky, This long and lonely month. This long and lonely month, My love, had altered nothing in my heart; In a far country, you, too, are lonely, And these lines I write you now Send you my love and tell you that I myself Have been lonely as a leper, This long and lonely month. Henry Treece POEM In the dark caverns of the night, Loveless and alone, Friendless as wind that wails across the plains, I sit, the last man left on earth, Putting my fear on paper, Praying that love will flow from my dry pen And watching the tears make havoc on my page. And I remember then, Under the night's still mask, The gallant geese Making their way through storms, 263 HENRY TREECE The fieldmouse scattering to my door Away from the black cloud, And the gay snail Garnishing the twig before leaves came. The old ones told me, "When you grow grey you think on little things ;" Now these dreams kiss the bruises from my mind Under the night's still mask, As loveless and alone I sit, till dawn the last man left Who knows the sound of rain on summer leaves, The graceful swan breasting the blood-red stream, And heart's incompetence. POEM Death walks through the mind's dark woods, Beautiful as aconite, A lily-flower in his pale hand And eyes like moonstones burning bright. Love walks down heart's corridors Singing for a crust of bread All the tales of laughing youth Who tomorrow will lie dead. Here two summer metaphors; For even on a sun-mad day Laughter breaks into salt tears, And grave is never far away. 264 HENRY TREECE POEM Through the dark aisles of the wood Where the pine-needles deaden all sound And the dove flutters in the black boughs Through twilit vaults of the forest Where fungus stifles the roots And the squirrel escapes with a cone Through the dim alleys of pine Where the bent stick moves like a snake And the badger sniffs at the moon ^Through the green graveyard of leaves Where the stoat rehearses his kill And the white skull grins in the fern. THE WAITING WATCHERS They shall come ih the black weathers From the heart of the dead embers, Walking one and two over the hill. And they shall be with you, never farther Than your bedside. At their will The smell of putrefaction lingers And floor is carpetted with rotting hair; Or sheets are torn to shreds By the beaks of dead dry birds And the red blood clots in your cup. Put up your swords! 265 HBNR? TRBECB What steel can cut the throat of next year's dream, What tongue is tunes to speak last night's quick scream > Go alone by darkness; Burn the clippings of your nail; Donate a thousand candles. But do as you will, When sun is blind and lamps are lit once more, Two and one, they shall be standing At your door. THE HAUNTED GARDEN In this sad place Memory hangs on the air Fragile as Spring snail's tiny shell, Coming to the sympathetic ear Gentle as bud's green pulsing in the sun, Suave as sin in a black velvet glove; The old faces gaze Wistfully as birds, among the nodding leaves, They watch the pleasures they may never share; And through the twilight hours Old voices call along the river banks, And out of the high-walled garden. Why do they sigh, The gentle ones in the flowering musk; And what are the words of the song The pale stranger sings as he walks The garden's still, deserted paths, Like a boy searching for his dog? 266 John Waller THE ENEMY One night I held all Europe in my arms And all the East, Asia and Africa. Limbs were their armies, those easy lips Their long grey fleets breathing of threat And doom, even each whisper seemed An airman gliding on his swallow path. That was a conflict and a peace in one; Holding each other fast, gay enemies Then mad with love. The joyful passionate evening Was declaration of war or armistice, just how You choose to think. In the still night The hotel room cradled us into sleep. Now in the empty days I feel the loss Of this illusion. Dull faces swarm Over the seven seas and old men Nod at the moon emptiness is like that While somewhere preparing another war You charm and entangle, merrily captivate. WHEN SADNESS FILLS A JOURNEY When sadness fills a journey There is no last remorse Between accepted ending And the final turn we pass To other sights or heroes 267 JOHN WALLER Or hunger in the cold Fine air of morning sadness Where all limbs must grow old. So now I wear your picture Against my heart for love And know that you will wander Across no lonely path, But as a brighter darling, A warm guest for the night, Cry still: "My dearest favour Is not so easily caught." You, as the hour's enchanter, Made circles as you would, Posing a tricky charmer Uncharmed but not withstood, So wear this song for parting, A gay song for the day When limbs and charm and favour Are warm but worn away. LEGEND Yesterday it seems you were acting on a stage Yet so many years ago, so many years I have heard the hooves of the horses racing Through early mornings and thought of Antony When his god left him at Alexandria sleeping So, like Cavafy, dreamt of evenings and lights, Laughter amid perils, the young not to return 268 JOHN WALLER From the ominous sands, a thought stained with laughter Or lights, lights, the king cried, lights to forget The dark, only your mood was softer Was soft as the quicksilver running along limbs That must always express, crying out from the sea So certain never to be lost, a permanent pose But soft as a kitten's, graceful as a gazelle's Impatience for swiftness, light on the toes And so waking again on an early morning While the air from the window is cool, so cool The years have passed I have thought to save From that time your picture, for you were the first of All my legendary people, first of the brave. Cairo t Junt> LIMB AND MIND The disingenuous Charm of living Has its advantages Properly using Lips for smiling, Grace for posture, Limbs for loving, Inimitable gesture. The thinker enjoys A lonelier quality, Learning's shyness With philosophy's pity, The buried city 269 JOHN WALLER Of Troy or Babylon Lost in antiquity, Though breathing on. Heart will answer For limb's liveliness, Brain will wonder In mind's timelessness. O frozen dress Or whirlwind hero, All gentleness, All lust like Nero? The ponderous question Cleaves the lives Of the moral rebel And the constant loves. So the limb strives To the mind's derision And the mind drives To the lovers' schism. Vernon Watkins THE MUMMY His eyes are closed. They are closed. His eyes are closed. His hands are clenched. They are clenched. His hands arc clenched. The messenger comes. The letters are disciplined; they are disposed. The black light quivers. Earth on Earth is avenged. 270 VERNON WATKINS What has left music fast in the sockets of bone? Had all been pattern, images sight had seen, Blood would lie quiet, but something strokes the light, and a groan Of great-rooted calm repels those images: nothing they mean. Nothing here lives but the music in the eyes. Hunting-scene, warriors, chariot, palm and wing Bid the blood rest, thought perch where the time-bird sings or flies, Year chasing year, following and following. But tears wash these bones where parchments whisper to sand. Here a laid vase offers die flying stream. Sand darkening wakes a harp-string hidden, plucked by a blind hand, Crying this theme to the world, this world-surrounding theme: Valiant, alive, his voice pursued the lands, Ruled the white sea, held mountains in his keep. Leave him with delicate instruments formed for delicate hands; In this locked room of treasures let him who chose them sleep. I lean down, crying: "Touch me, lay hold on my Spring, Reach up, for I have loosened, tearing your skies, Fountains of light, ages of listening!" But the bound hands are folded, the fold its word denies. What shudder of music unfulfilled vibrates? What draws to a dust-grain's fall most distant stars? In the last taper's light what shadow meditates? What single, athletic shape never cast on wall or vase? 271 VttJKIMUIN WAJLJUm What shudder of birth and death? What shakes me most? Job his Maker answering, the Stricken exclaiming "Rejoice!" Gripping late in the shifting moment giant Earth, making Earth a ghost, Who heard a great friend's death without a change of voice. YEATS' TOWER Surely the finger of God that governs the stars And feels the flashed mystery of the moving world Stirring the waters to leaves in fold on fold, Now touches this, this long grass in the field: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. Surely the seed that stirs beneath this touch Hears in its ear the wand within the wind, The miraculous fire from which all years have waned. This, if it moves, must heal the martyr's wound: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. Surely from this the snow-white blood is blown; Gold marguerite's doom that never comes, comes soon. Dead saints, white clouds, they stop not near the shrine But cross the skeleton harp, the unplucked bone: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. Ivy entwined about the walls of pride Clings, where the tales of time in centuried scrawl Compass the delicate mind, the hand of skill Touching this fire that never formed a school: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. 272 VERNON WATKTNS The wired walls hold a castle of desertion. Already round the gate the nettle springs. Old, wily murmurs have usurped those songs. Sheer over this the kestrel ruin hangs: O under grass, O under grass the secret. Children pass by for whom a bell has chimed. Hunters pass by: for these a bell has tolled. Horns echo backward, but the tower deep-welled Hangs in the stream with all its woven scroll: O under grass, O under grass, the secret. THE MOTHER AND CHILD Let hands be about him white, O his mother's first, Who caught him, fallen from light through nine months' haste Of darkness, hid in the worshipping womb, the chaste Thought of the creature with its certain thirst. Looking up to her eyes declined that make her fair He kicks and strikes for joy, reaching for those dumb springs. He climbs her, sinks, and his mouth under darkness clings To the night-surrounded milk in the fire of her hair. She drops her arm, and, feeling the fruit of his lips, Tends him cunningly. O, what secrets are set In the tomb of each breath, where a world of light in eclipse Of a darkly worshipping world exults in the joy she gave Knowing that miracle, miracle to beget, Springs like a star to her milk, is not for the grave. 273 VBRNON WATKINS INFANT NOAH Calm the boy sleeps, though death is in the clouds. Smiling he sleeps, and dreams of that tall ship Moored near the dead stars and the moon in shrouds, Built out of light, whose faith his hands equip. It was imagined when remorse of making Winged the bent, brooding brows of God in doubt. All distances were narrowed to his waking: "I built his city, then I cast him out." Time's great tide falls; under that tide the sands Turn, and the world is shown there thousand-hilled To the opening, ageless eyes. On eyelids, hands, Falls a dove's shade, God's cloud, a velvet leaf. And his shut eyes hold heaven in their dark sheaf, In whom the rainbow's covenant is fulfilled. THE TURNING OF THE LEAVES Not yet! Do not yet touch, Break not this branch of silver-birch, Nor ask the stealthy river why it laves Black roots that feed the leaves. Ask first the flickering wren. He will move further. Ask the rain. No drop, though round, through that white miracle Will sink, to be your oracle. Not yet! Do not yet bend Close to that root so tightly bound Loosened by creeping waters as they run Along the fork's rough groin. 274 VERNON WATKINS Ask not the water yet Why the root's tapering tendrils eat Parched earth away that they may be Nearer the source those fibres must obey. Behind the bark your hands will find No Sycorax or flying Daphne faned And the brown ignorant water bindweed breeds Not caring there what brows it braids. Light in the branches weaves. Hard is the waiting moment while it waves, This tree whose trunk curves upward from the stream Where faltering ripples strum. See how it hangs in air. The leaves are turning now. We cannot hear The death and birth of life. But that disguise, Look up now, softly: break it with your eyes. Eithne Wilkins SPOKEN THROUGH GLASS Here the big stars roll down like tears all down your face; darkness that has no walls, the empty night that fingers grope for and are lost, is nightfall in your face. 275 EITHNE WILKINS The big stars roll, the glittering railway-line unwinds into the constellations. Over and under you the dark, in you the rocking night without a foothold, and no walls, no ceiling, the parallels that never meet, the pulses winding out to the stars. Night has no end. Light travelling from the stars is out before you ride along it with the black tears falling, falling, all fall down. THE DREAMERS AND THE SEA (from a cycle, "Parzival") The dreamers turn; their shoulders cast, grey mounds, a shadow on the other side, still pools of shadow in the retrogressive moon. Their dreams are in the fern; their watery dreams condense. So while the globe is losing speed sleep for all is melting of the ice age: life comes up in the unrolling mist out of the general sea. 276 EITHNE WILKINS Nor is it enough that man by night exhales a moister spirit and crawls out from his black body like a crocodile, towards his mother in that swollen sea. He has a difficulty of his own to take breaths deep enough of air: even by daylight, as he goes about on unrelenting earth, the serpent wrings him in the pit and calls him guilty. COCKCROW Oh swearing and telling is a tower falling that never reaches the ground; only the rising earth to meet us, and the rising wind. How fluttering from the fields awash these voices rise, these cries! and the idiot pigeons jumping about the stony room, where so much light is suspended in the gloom that there is no escape from reading what the message said, lifesize, and recognising everything by name. This is the tower of rescues that is reached too late. And what in the topmost storey every time is found I shall not drink tonight, but the strong tower floating in the gunmouth, in the flooded pool. For cradled in these cupped and echoing hands the gunman's head is lolling voiceless, all its reason gone; 277 EITHNE W1LKINS and finally the long view spreading through the skull into a mere at daybreak, and the drowned cockerels crow. AND ONLY OUR SHADOW WALKS WITH US (For Robert Graves) We who have no perfection but to die walk among sliding hills and crumpled grassland, feathery with premonitions of the open sea. And here some time, when thought hangs as a cloud motionless between the sun and self turned colourless, a wind arises; then the arm, severe and lonely, lifts like an apparition, turns the collar up. We cannot go again to our small house; nor is it likely we can reach the juggling sea with all its flames. Inaccurate, fragmentary, shrinking back from traces in the grass, the earlier footsteps and the patch where others or ourselves have lain some other century, with lark ascending we face the wind blowing backwards from the memory, hair streaming from the brow. For we have no completeness in ourselves, wandering between the cold sun and the wind, wandering between the shadow of our thought, the shadow, winged, hovering, and our doom etched out upon that grassland in enormous chalk. 278 . EITHNE WILKINS Here are bare hills; the curious sheep-track; stones. We are mere horizon, have no frontiers. Only the limits of our outstretched arms describe, in irony of helplessness, big love or angler's luck. ANABASIS (For Edmund Blunden) There is no sense in asking those who fought and that was in another country what they suffered, how they got that wound. Perhaps behind shut eyes they sometimes still experience the sliding rocks, the gaunt deserted coast, and night continually falling upon work unfinished and intolerable weight of arms. Or tire, without an explanation, of their duty now a servant, tireless; or they lust for some calamity, some bulk of new compulsion, secretly they might be glad of war renewed. Most, if you ask them for a reminiscence, will not understand. Only the plain man tells you it was not so bad. Most have forgotten how it was, unless in anecdote, fired off a harmless rocket for the children; and that reminds them of how far it was, that in the end arriving 279 EITHNE WILKINS their arrival did not seem a victory, they had forgotten also how to be astonished. None will get an answer from those who left pain behind them, like an emptied flask dropped useless in a ditch, so travelling lighter, lean, with what simplicity of thirst. And those for whom the thing is dangerous always, the struggle still expanding, and the pain old-timer a colossus at the gate to every sea they enter, who know too well the battle line is always level with the eyes, however high they go, give answer merely: "Oh, we fought." and to the question whether, then, such things were hard, confess, laconically: "Hard." A HIGH PLACE They had a pocketful of stories that they told: how she was partly in another country, brighter than a stone, and how her mind was an unmanageable field rough with the shards and tools of other races; by a half- buried stream nettles across the grave-mounds fought the dazzling gorse. And the headless horseman galloped at full moon. Even in her height of summer, where no traveller came, hallucinations floated in her hair transparently, a swarm of bees. 280 EITHNE WILKINS And as these things were distantly reported, as a sigh of heat on grassland, the dandelion that has no shame airily looked through her hilltop eyes. Nor was v there any question if the stories all were true, hardly acknowledging how shadow mounted from the dale and whatever mists might hover in her speech, however soon night fell. Only a rumour hinted that the way was difficult to find, the climbing difficult across forgotten gloomy villages; and that on this peak, where on clear days one might have glimpses of the sea, no one could say what violence left an outline of uncertain skeleton, of some lost key, the site of palaces still unexplained, the vanished columns standing into air, the cloud of bees. At least she would have gladly in her turn abandoned this, flying out with the huge horseman riding fleshless on the air and out of time. To need no more of the crimson tortuous mouth; no more of those valleys sunk below the mind; and how, aloft, the wild hawks clashed. PASSAGE OF AN AUGUST In solitary august, like a story he met grief's lassie with the quartz-bright hands; and she became his darling, 281 EITHNE WILKINS who was young, was sorry there among the grasses blowing over pit and brands. She walked beside him back the way he came, into the whitening hills, and cut his throat. Although she called him by another name, she was no stranger, love. And none can drive her out. 19)8 BARBED WIRE The silence, with its ragged edge of lost communication, silence at the latter end, is now a spiked north wind. Last words toss about me in the streets, waste paper or a cigarette butt in some gutter stream that overflows from crumpled darkness. "Look, I am plunged in the midst of them, a dagger in their midst." and over the edge the nightmares peer, with their tall stories and the day's unheard-of cry. 1940 282 EITHNE WILKINS FAILURE What can forgive us for the clothes left lying and the rocking journey, flashing poles and pylons standing into fields of air, in flooded fields? Something flew out of our hands, the cup incomplete, air of invasions and land of defeat. There was the tree felled in another valley, behind the flown carpet and nothing left to remember, all to forgive. Nothing to remember but the windows slammed against the cold, the helmet crushed down on the eyes. And who, beside the darkened station lamp, remembering, started back. SHARK'S FIN But what dark flag has thrown a shadow out ahead, fluttering on chalky ribs? However far we go, with our brown eyelids wrinkled from much looking out, with salty skin and bleaching hair stiff in the wind, that later dries above a tideline; 283 EITHNE WILKINS whatever exiles and high seas we call our own, still we can not shake off the whitening wake astern, the down-pull that would sift us gently, bone from bone; and how the lean shadow of another order continually follows, the unseen jars, the solitary pursuer. THE EYE I. THE EYE AS THE DESERT It is not you that move, but the running sand, and beyond, those fluid mountains, loaded range of light up-steepling through the skull. It is your shadow floating through the bones taken to be a journey, or ahead the precipice. This is the tall shadow dancing where the journey seemed to be and paints the lips still ghostlier, brilliant thirst, the shadow pouring away in mountains of light, cliffs, staggering waterfalls. Light curls on your lips and is the desert in the golden eye. The shadow, tangled in the imagined journey, clutched at flashes of the thorn, while light with its blaze of drums unfolding like a flower beats round the skull, 284 EITHNE WILKINS its trumpets growing longer as the note prolongs the moun- tains out of reach. The fingers slip in air, clash with the thornbush and the sand. The outstretched arms are locked in shadow. Yet light splashes even from the thin plant flowering at your feet, the crying flower with thorns, whose shadow glides out of the desert and blots out the sight of hills, darkens your thirst. 2. THE EYE AS THE COAST Therefore climb down into this eye with all its seas, edge of the sea, grating of pebbles and sharp coast. This is your beginning, stiff sea-holly, thistles, here with your thought hard underfoot and hard in your eye. This is beginning: in the small round eye, the staring rock-pool. Light's centre heaps inside the twisting wave, the breaking moment is alone, running to light. Here darkness has solid arms, pulling and pulling down your head, a stone with fluttering lashes, 285 EITHNE WILKINS down here among rocks, on a loose wild beach beside an approaching tide that speaks with your own voice. Look, among rocks now wakes the hollow eye, a creeping fire. And like twilight there arises the person itself, and you feel this skull a fragile burden, a terror among dreams, Then the sea-winds ebb from your forehead, and the clotted hair streaks the shadowy face like blood: the body standing with the skin unbroken, blood with its unburst dams, and bones like towers about to fall. You are your own terror in the dream, a standstill. Look! the luminous tall one. 3. THE THIRD BYE What hands are these upon your thorny shoulders? what rocks? what knives? In an empty shell the roaring of lost mountains roams at large among the rocks, the desert, and the waves. 286 EITHNE WILKINS VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY SIDNEY KEYES They said, It will be like snow falling. And the walls broke down, the soft air crumbled in our nostrils, flaked to nothingness between our fingers that were already half asleep. Then the hills mounted round our heads like pillows, and the cloudy sky was drawn up to our chins, there where we lay. For it was true, and there was snow falling, marking us out, the shadowy campaigners who had gone too far and having fallen sick, scrawled last words in the diary, in the fields of air. And so we lie half wrapped in snow, with lengthening bones, where so much light has filled the lantern jaws and leaves a dark stone in the eye. Whether it is the wandering of an unseen sun behind these falling clouds, or only darkness in the flooded eye, we guessed that it might come upon us so; and lie here under still unwritten sheets, a hatchet pointing through the drifts of time, this journey that perhaps we never should have gone through such snow falling, and so far from help. 287 George Woodcock WHITE White is the evening nature of my thought When neutral time that drains the night of green Flows through the dusk in mimic dawn of white. So pale the distance where blue morning shone Knits to the whitest crises of our stars, Burning the nightly ambience of alone, And evil evident of coloured hours Dies in this dark, whose sexless shapes of black Are only active in our twilight fears. For at day's death the whitest needs awake When seeping pallor undermines the night And white submerges all in evening lake, Where, as a lode attracting all time's light, You are white's evening nature of my thought. THE ISLAND The oars fell from our hands. We climbed the dark Slopes of kelp to the stairway up the rock. Scott went first, grasping the fraying rope. The rest of us followed, dragging the iron rack. 288 GEORGE WOODCOCK The crest was bare, but after scanty search In a bird's burrow we found the hunted man. His flesh was naked and hard as barren earth, His arms like scythes. His eyes spoke like a gun. Before him we retired, unmanned by fear. Unarmed, he seemed to move with harmful light. Scott only stood, shaming us in the end. The fugitive surrendered without fight. We laid him on the painful rack, stretched tight His limbs and bound his feet and wrists with wire, Set leaden weights upon his sunken chest And tied his head down by the matted hair. We turned the cranks and wrenched him hour by hour. In silence he endured. He would not speak Of the hidden ore. At last his joints burst out And jetting from the ruptures fire broke. Then lay before us on the rigid rack Straw limbs and a horse's polished skull. Gulls mocked as walked away across the sea The man we hunted but could not keep or kill. We threw the rack into the hungry surf And hacked the turf in anger with our swords. Then, re-embarking on our fruitless voyage, We left the island to the mice and birds. 28 GEORGE WOODCOCK MERTHYMAWR Sunday evening. The thick-lipped men binoculared Steal through the geometric groves of pines, Observing the steady and fatal hands of poachers And the young loving in wrinkles of the dunes. Grey in the wind sand tides against the turrets, And watchful sight is bridged towards the sea, Where silent the marram defends a wearing land And the seagulls climb like Junkers a plaster sky. The air is alive with voices, the loving whisper, The rodent screams at neck-constricting hand, Gulls' earthless wail and dank watchers' laughter. Always the wind whistles through teeth of sand. Night falls on the lovers, marram and voices. Dark hinders eyes, yet aids the brutal hand. Watchers depart, but the snares are filling. Wind dries the blood on the moving sand. IMAGINE THE SOUTH Imagine the South from which these migrants fled, Dark-eyed, pursued by arrows, crowned with blood, Imagine the stiff stone houses and the ships Blessed with wine and salt, the quivering tips Of spears and edges signalling in the sun From swords unscabbarded and sunk in brine, Imagine the cyclamen faces and yielding breasts Hungered after in a dead desert of icy mists, 290 GEORGE WOODCOCK Imagine, for though oblivious, you too are cast Exile upon a strange and angry coast. Going into exile away from youth, You too are losing a country in the south, Losing, in the red daylight of a new shore Where you are hemmed by solitude and fear, The loving faces far over a sea of time, The solid comfort and the humane dream Of a peaceful sky, the consoling patronage And the golden ladder to an easy age, All these are lost, for you too have gone away From your Southern home upon a bitter journey. There is no home for you marked on the compass. I see no Penelope at the end of your Odysseys, And all the magic islands will let you down. Do not touch the peaches and do not drink the wine, For the Dead Sea spell will follow all you do, And do not talk of tomorrow, for to you There will only be yesterday, only the fading land, The boats on the shore and tamarisks in the sand Where the beautiful faces wait, and the faithful friends. They will people your mind. You will never touch their hands. SONNET Looking into the windows that doom has broken Where the vague star illumines death and dust And the shadows of actions whose ends are forsaken Stir under the falling walls, senile and lost, 291 GEORGE WOODCOCK And looking into the doorways where unspoken names Shine and disintegrate on the rotting plaques, Surviving their owners who have left like dreams, Sinking into the past as sea-sucked wrecks, Remember, stranger, that here men grew and worked, Loved and were angry, and in general lived Peaceable lives till one day, spitted on their brothers' knives, Stuck to the curdling heart by nails they loved, They died in horror and their towns were left, And rotted, buried under the dust and leaves. TREE FELLING The bright axe breaks the silence in the wood, The ivory chips spray over crushed nettles, And the red slender pine sways and totters Shuddering its boughs in the chill of death. All down the hill the yellow teeth of stumps Stud the tramped moss and broken willow herb; The piled long bolls point northward to the Pole, Their fragrant lymph seeping from broken veins. Borne away in the blue wake of tractors, The lopped trees leave for ever their fitting landscape; They will grow again in the underground valleys Where the black miners creep beneath a sagging sky. And here the ploughs will traverse, as in Carthage Marking the end of a kingdom, the day of the squirrel And the blue jay shattering along the mossed valleys Between the still pines. The silence of felted needles 292 GEORGE WOODCOCK Breeding its ugly toadstools and sick brown orchids, Has ended its seeming permanence. Cyclic transition Will reign on the hillside, with its bare and ice-baked winters, And its multitudinous summer under the whispering corn. POEM FROM LONDON, 1941. The fading whistles outline our broken city Against the dead chart and distant zodiac, Against the decaying roads, empty and perilous, That join our exile with the land we seek. Kissed onward by the pistol, we all are exile, Expatriate, wandering in the illusive streets Of faked identity, which swing towards a past That is no Indies regained by circuitous sea routes. The bridges are down, the visas are invalid; We cannot turn on our tracks away from fate. I stand at the 'phone and listen in to death, And dare not stuff my ears and riug off hate. Yet I behold an angel like a falcon Bearing a speaking flame across the dark To sing in the dumb streets of cretin children For the silly hearts that cannot even break. And under the windows of a drunken pub A man sits, listening, like a wind-squat tree, Unnamed, his face a map of paper, his bone hands Moulding from the burning voice a phoenix day. 293 GEORGE WOODCOCK SUNDAY ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH Underfoot on the hill the water spurts Thickly out of the brilliant matted grasses Where the slopes fold in groins and thighs of earth And the winter sunlight in thin golden masses Falls through the lunging wind that swings the skirts Of the girls walking with their soldiers over the heath. A group of dwarf fir trees marks the crest With boughs like drowners' hands that claw the sky. Far down the slope a white springboard rears Its gaunt and skeleton frame above the grey Tossed pool where in summer the divers raced But where now only the ducks bob, resting their oars. Leaning their weight on London, the smoky roofs Below the hill stretch out their infinite folds, A stony sea, far in miasmic depth Where men sleep out their empty dreams of deeds, And towers and domes, surging like green reefs, Rise up heroic and powerful in their sloth. Here on the hilltop my friends and I sit down. They talk of prison; the conversation falls And I say, "One evening we must drink at the Spaniard's/' I do not know what they are thinking as their heels Kick out the turf and their gaze creeps over the scene, Peering through the smoke for the customary landmarks. But, going away in my mind from their shut faces, Away from the quiet hilltop and the leisurely men Digging their new gardens below in the little valley, 294 GEORGE WOODCOCK I enter the forest of rooftops and, under the grimy stone, Walk among the pipedreams of men in braces Reading in Sunday newspapers the end of faith and folly. And in the broken slums see the benign lay down Their empty, useless love, and the stunted creep, Ungainly and ugly, towards a world more great Than the moneyed hopes of masters can ever shape. In the dead, grey streets I hear the women complain And their voice is a spark to burn the myth of the state. And here where my friends talk and the green leaves spurt Quietly from waterlogged earth, and the dry twigs bud, I see a world will rise more lovely than Blake Knew in his winged dreams, and the leaves of good Will burst on branches dead from winter's hurt, When the broken rise and the silent voices speak. David Wright WALKING TO DEDHAM (To Kristin} Lean your small head against the Spring, That what's abundant of the year May be promised by the plum Orchards which all together seem to wear The frock of winter; lean Your face toward the forehead of the year, To the fresh fields pebbled with many flowers, Scattered upon a Summer's littoral. 295 DAVID WRIGHT Landscape and region of a dream, Seen from a visionary hill Between two seasons Spring And Summer, when the world becoming real, Its obverse face of pain, Of death, and of indifference to ill, Slowly unveils; but at this season Dazzles the skeleton with thick petals. What winds there, and what flowers blow Over the acreage of peace, Streams that through orchards flow, Bowed with their bloom as heavy as a fleece, The frank of winter, now Surround you in the central folds of peace No certain hurt of the hovering hours Or grief may pierce, or falling, seem to fall. John Bate COLOGNE To-day my heart is heavy with the sorrows of Cologne, the city reaps the bitter harvest its enemies have sown, and I, that enemy, am consumed with their bitterness. How can the June sun shine adding its pitiful glory 296 JOHN BATE to the cruel glare of the flames, casting shadows with a jagged line, this page of the city's story lighting, which is dark with shames. The dry confetti blossoms in this village street, where tramp off-duty airmen, lie like the sun's small, coloured tears, and here where Cologne is a word city, articulated in the cultured drone of radio announcers, thinking they have news to match the gospel, but sounding in their voice no pity, our hardened, revengeful will, of which mine is a part, will suffer, for the victor cities always discover, unaware of it before it grows, the interacting sorrow of their foes. June 1942. Audrey Beecham EXILE A wind like this tonight For such a one: To clutch his throat And bind with ice-thongs tight. 297 AUDREY BEE CHAM A shower of pointed stones To cover him Where he may fall A pall to grind his bones. Or he one night be shown An empty town, In endless rain To wander there alone: And pass the churchyard wall And see inside The long-extended arms Of the dead, stretched wide. George Bruce KINNAIRD HEAD I go North to cold, to home, to Kinnaird, Fit monument for our time. This is the outermost edge of Buchan. Inland the sea birds range, The tree's leaf has salt upon it, The tree turns to the low stone wall. And here a promontory rises towards Norway, Irregular to the top of thin grey grass Where the spindrift in storm lays its beads. The water plugs in the cliff sides, The gull cries from the clouds This is the consummation of the plain. 298 GEORGE BRUCE O impregnable and very ancient rock, Rejecting the violence of water, Ignoring its accumulations and strategy, You yield to history nothing. Francis Douglas Davison BOUGHT Fine rays of praise my asking rings from her rose and the dying warrior can do 110 more at night on frosty plains to satisfy the heart's desire creation's bloom on dying things admire the fire down empty corridors the black night makes incarnate in the strength that sleeps it so dies like days in emblems pressed on mortal thoughts and fears which follow them if pity finds a heart and fills the hunger. Her nature drawn in smiles not merely wished or guessed miles after hours I strove to hold the essence frozen only she dimmed and gave my gaze to remember empty hands on the counter fold, unfold in thoughts' weave rest unrest. 299 James Kirkup MORTALLY The garden cannot move. The terraces are sunken invisibly in snow the balustrades are there whoever leans on them will fall into the bay open the windows and the flowers will disappear or else geraniums alone remain. The lawns at evening bifurcate and grow into a woman with a grass grave for the outline of her body, i The dead that lay along the branches of an orchard creep into the season's river and the ruin. LA BETE HUMAINE The trains of thought meet generally speaking bifurcation revelation Soupault said and Zola never saw... 'les mecaniciens des locomotives ont des yeux blancs' and wrote it in his head. Certainly the enginedrivers or the ones I mean have statuary eyes. They show them to you sometimes at a terminus. 300 Paul Potts JEAN There is a wild flower growing Inside a broken vase, On a mantle in rny memory. This flower will die When you are dead, And while you live will grow. Because each petal and its stem Is like long years, of waiting and of hope, So useless and so void. Julian Orde THE CHANGING WIND Past my window runs a tree, All the leaves are in my room, A shiver of water passes over. There is no stillness ever again. I saw the table break in three, I saw the walls cascading down, I saw the hard hair of my lover Drift out upon the flowing green. I saw the clove dark enemy 301 JULIAN ORDE Stare from the bed where I had lain, I saw my face in hers to be. There is no stillness ever again. Sun and wind had come for me What is my house but a flight of wings ? A flight of leaves, a flutter of rain, A sidelong slipping of light in rings? And now a scream possesses me Too high to hear, yet can I hear it; And now transfixed upon a pain, Too thin to feel yet must I bear it This scream, this pain, they are not mine, Water and air is all I am, A tree has shaken the staircase down Then what has rustled and entered in? I knew the other ones had come. I knew my heart was theirs to claim. I felt the millions in my room. There is no being alone again. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES LOUIS ADEANE was born in 1922, and his education was "self-imposed.** He is an anarcho-pacifist and was a Conscientious Objector in WorldWar II. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs, and has published articles and "poems in Now and numerous other magazines. He has published one book of verse, The Night Loves Us. KENNETH ALLOTT is a lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool University. He was born in 1912, educated at Durham and Oxford, and has worked as a journalist, schoolmaster and tutor. He is married and has two children. He has published three books, Poems, The Ventriloquist's Doll (poems) and Jules Verne, a biography. He is now at work on a study of Matthew Arnold. GEORGE BARKER was born in 1913 and was educated at Marlborough Public School. He is one of the founders of the contemporary Romantic movement, and has published two books of prose and seven of verse. In the United States he is published by The Macmillan Company, except for his Sacred and Secular Ulegies with New Directions. JOHN BATE is a young Catholic poet and is editor of Leaven. He was educated in Birmingham, and during the War was a pacifist and worked in a Bomb Disposal Squad. He has published little, lives on a farm, and is married. JOHN BAYLISS was born in 1919. While at Cambridge he was literary editor of the Gran/a. He served in the RAF during the War. He has published two books of verse and a novel. AUDREY BEECHAM is a niece of the conductor. She was educated at Oxford, where she now lives. ALISON BOODSON is now a physician at University College Hospital, London. She was born in 1925, and received the '"usual English liberal education." Her first poems were written at the age of sixteen and pub- lished in Poetry London. GEORGE BRUCE is a Scottish poet. He was born in 1909, lives in Buthan, and has published one book, Sea Talk. BRENDA CHAMBERLAIN lives in Wales, where she was born. She studied painting at the Royal Academy School. She works at her painting and writing on an island oHf the Welsh coast or in a mountain cottage on the mainland. She is a skier and mountaineer. ALEX COMFORT was born in London in 1920, and educated at High- gate School and Trinity College, Cambridge. A physician, he is now enga- ged in private practice, research and lecturing in physiology at the London Hospital. He is the author of several books of prose and verse, two of which, The Power House, a novel, and Song of Lazarus, poems, have been 305 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES published in the United States by The Viking Press. His most recent work is The Novel and Our Time. FRANCIS DOUGLAS DAVISON was born in 1919 and educated at Cambridge. He has lived much in France, and his work was represented in Atlantic Antology. KEITH DOUGLAS was born in 1920 and educated at Christ's Hospital (a public School) and Oxford. He was killed in Normandy. Since his death Poetry London has published two books, Alamein to Zem-Zem t and BSte Noire. ADAM DRINAN is a Scottish poet. He has published four books of verse, Men of the Rocks, Ghosts of the Stratb y Women of the Happy Isle and The Macpbails of London. LAWRENCE DURRELL was born in 1912 and educated at St. Edmund's School in Canterbury. He settled in Corfu but was driven out by the War, after which he worked for the British Ministry of Information in Alexan- dria and later in Rhodes. He returned to England in 1947. He has published several books including The Black Book and Prosperous Cell. While in Egypt during the War, he edited the magazine and anthology Personal Landscape. In the United States he was published by Reynal and Hitchcock, and The Black Book is announced by Circle. PATRICK EVANS was born in 1913 and educated at Oxford. During the War he served in the Tank Corps and also as a parachutist. He lived in Greece for four years, is married, and a book of his verse is about to be published by Poetry London. GAVIN EWART served in the Army during the War. He was born in 1914 and was educated at Wellington and Cambridge. He has published one book of verse. G. S. FRASER was born in 1915 in Scotland. He served as a Sergeant- Major in the British Army during the War. He has published two books of verse and has also translated Patrice de la Tour du Pin's La Vie Recluse en Poe'sie. He has written a book about South America soon to be pub- lished by The Harvill Press, and has translated poems of Neruda. ROY FULLER is a lawyer with a practice in London. He was born in 1912, is married and has one child. During the War he served in the Royal Navy. He has published two books of verse. WREY GARDINER was born in Plymouth in 1901. He is an editor of Poetry Quarterly and chairman of Grey Walls Press. He has published sever- al books, including The Gates of Silence and The Dark Thorn. ROBERT GARIOCH, born in 1909, is a Scottish poet. He has published one book, // Poems for Sixpence. 306 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES DAVID GASCOYNE is now living in Paris, and was one of the first English poets to be influenced by Surrealism. He was bom in 1916. He is the author of Opening Day, A Short Survey of Surrealism, Man's Ufe is This Meat, Hoelderlin Poems 19)7-42, published by Poetry 'London. W. S. GRAHAM was born in 1917. He is one of the youngest and most independent Scottish poets. During the War he worked as an engineer in England. In 1947 he won an Atlantic Award in Literature, and last year he came to America and taught at New York University. He is the author of Seven Journeys, 2nd Poems, and Cage Without Grievance . JOHN HEATH-STUBBS was born in London in 1918, and was educated at Queens College, Oxford. He has published four books, including a translation of the poems of Leopardi, with New Directions. His poems will be published in the United States by William Sloane. J. F. HENDRY is now in Vienna as a member of the British Control Commission. He was born in Glasgow in 1912. He was one of the found- ers of Apocalypse, and edited the Apocalyptic anthology The White Horseman with Henry Treece. He has published two books of verse, and has long been active in the Scottish Renascence. RAYNER HEPPENSTALL is now a feature producer at the BBC. He was born in 1911 in Yorkshire, and was educated there and in France. He spent four and a half years in the Army during the War. He is married and has two children. He has published three books of poems, now gath- ered in Collected Poems, two novels, The B/a^e of Noon and Saturnine, and two books of criticism, Apology for Dancing and The Dottble Image. NIGEL HESELTINE was bom in 1916 in North Wales. He is now a medical student in Dublin, and is also studying psychoanalysis and crimin- ology. Formerly he worked in the theater and as a journalist. He has published two volumes of verse, a travel book on Albania, translations of Welsh poetry, a book of short stories, and a translation of Buchner's SEAN JENNETT was born in 1912. He began writing at the age of six, and printed his own works at eight, and has been a writer and printer or publisher ever since. He is now a director and designer for Grey Walls and Falcon Presses. He has published a book on typography, and two books of verse, Always Adam and The Cloth of Flesh. GLYN JONES is a schoolteacher in South Wales. During the War he was a Conscientious Objector. He has published one book, Poems. SIDNEY KEYES was born in 1922 and was killed in Tunisia in 1942. He was educated at Oxford. Before he died he had published one book, Collected Poems. He is published in America by Henry Holt & Company. JAMES KIRKUP is a schoolteacher. Before the War he lived for many years in France. During the War he worked on the land as a Conscientious 307 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Objector. He has done a considerable amount of translation from the French and is at present engaged in translating Pierre Jean Jouve. LAURIE LEE was born in 1914, and spent some years in Spain before the Civil War. He has recently been published in New York by Double- day & Company. DEMISE LEVERTOV was born in 1923. Her father is a Russian Jew who became an Anglican theologian; her mother is Welsh. She studied Russian ballet from the age of twelve to sixteen. During the War she served for four years as a hospital nurse, and she has worked in various odd jobs such as land girl, charwoman, children's nurse and companion to an alcoholic. She has published one book of verse, The Double Image. She recently married an American G. I. and hopes to come to the States. ALUN LEWIS was born in Wales in 1915 and died in Burma in 1944. He published two books of verse, Raider's Dawn and Ha! Ha! Amongst the Trumpets^ and one of short stories, The Last Inspection. He is published by Macmillan in the United States. EMANUEL LITVINOV states that he is no relation to the late, or mislaid, Maxim. He was born in 1915 and went to school "until fourteen but for all purposes uneducated." He spent six years in the British Army, is married and has one daughter. He has published two books, The Un- tried Soldier and A. Crown for Cain. NORMAN McCAIG teaches school in Scotland. He was born in 1910. He has published two books of verse, Far Cry and The Inward Eye. HUGH MACDIARMID (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in Scotland in 1892. He was educated at Edinburgh University and served in World War I as a non-combatant in the Medical Corps. With R. B. Cunningham- Graham and Compton Mackenzie he founded the Scottish Nationalist Party, from which he was later expelled as a Communist. He was then expelled from the Communist Party for his Scottish Nationalism. He is the leader of the revival of serious verse in the Scottish vernacular, and has published many books of verse, one, recently, with Contemporary Poetry in Baltimore. SORLEY MACLEAN (in Gaelic, Somhairle MacGhill Eathain, pro- nounced Sorley Maclean) is one of the best poets of the Gaelic Revival. He has published one book of verse, Datn do Eimhir. JOSEPH GORDON MACLEOD was born in 1903. He was educated at an English Public School and University, and was called to the Bar but never practiced. He has worked as book reviewer, private tutor, actor, play producer, director, and from 1938 to 1945 as one of the best known BBC broadcasters. He has recently been touring Russia to study the Russian theater. He has published books of verse, criticism, fiction and autobiography, and has written plays and films. 308 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES CHARLES MADGE was born in Johannesburg in 1912 and was educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford. With Tom Harrison he founded Mass Observation, a sociological research movement. He once worked as a journalist and is now an editor of Pilot Press. OS MARRON was a young miner who died in 1946 of tuberculosis. Shortly before his death he was discovered and encouraged by Alex Comfort. His poems have appeared in Poetry Folios and Poetry Quarterly. WILLIAM MONTGOMERIE is a schoolteacher. He was born in 1904, is married, and as well as verse, writes short stories and criticism. He has just completed a study of Hamlet. NICHOLAS MOORE is the son of the philosopher G. E. Moore. He was born in 1918 and educated at Cambridge. He is married and has one daughter. He now works as a publisher and has edited a selection of American short stories. He is a prolific writer and has published several books of verse, two with Poetry London. DOUGLAS NEWTON was a Conscientious Objector during the War and worked on the land in Cambridgeshire. Since the War he has Worked in publishers' offices. NORMAN NICHOLSON was born at Millom, Cumberland, in 1914, and still lives there. He lectures for the Workers' Educational Association in the mining towns of Cumberland. In the United States he is published by Dutton's. JULIAN ORDE was born in 1919 and grew up in Paris and Chelsea. She was on the stage for six years, but now writes for films and radio. PAUL POTTS is Canadian by birth. He was educated at Stowe (England) anH spent much of his youth in Italy. He has published much of his own work on broadsheets which he used to sell on the streets. During the War be served in the Army Education Corps. He has published one book of verse, Instead of a Sonnet^ is working on a study of Sdone, and has written his autobiography, which will soon be published. F. T. PRINCE is published in London by Faber & Faber, and in New York by New Directions. KATHLEEN RAINE was born in 1908 and raised in Northumberland and London. She took a degree at Cambridge in Natural Sciences. In 1944 she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. She has published two books of verse, Stone and Flower and Living in Time (Poetry London). HENRY REED is a critic, who has written notably on T. S. Eliot. His book of verse, A Map of Verona^ is published in America by Rcynal & Hitchcock. KEIDRYCH RHYS is one of the leaders of the Welsh Renascence. He is the son of a Welsh farmer. During the War he served as an anti-aircraft 309 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES gunner, but was invalided and went to work at the Ministry of Infor- mation. He is the editor of Wales. ANNE RIDLER was once secretary to T. S. Eliot. She was born in 1912, is married and has two daughters. She has published three books of verse and edited the L,ittle Book of Modern Verse (Faber). LYNETTE ROBERTS was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh parents and educated in French and Spanish convents. She is married to Keidrych Rhys. W. R. RODGERS was born in 1909 in Northern Ireland. For twelve years he was a country parson in Ireland, and he is now with the BBC. He has published one book of verse, Awake ; which also appeared in the United States, with Harcourt Brace & Co. D. S. SAVAGE was born in 1917 of "lower middle class parents." He worked for several years at an assortment of ill-paid jobs, is married and has four children. During the War he was a Conscientious Objector. He now lives in Cornwall where he and his wife run a guest house. He has published two books of verse and one of criticism. FRANCIS SCARFE was born in 1911 and educated at Durham Univer- sity, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. He worked as Supervisor in French at Trinity College, Cambridge, and as Assistant at the College Chaptal, Paris. During the War he served in the Army. He is the author of Appas- sionata (poems), and Auden and After (criticism), and has also translated L*es Chants de Maldoror and Pierre Emmanuel's poems for Poetry London. SIDNEY GOODSIR SMITH was bom in 1915 in Scotland. One of the most interesting of the younger poets writing in Doric, he has published three books of verse, Skatt Wind, The Wanderer and The Deevil*s WILLIAM SOUTAR was born in 1898. Soon after taking his M. A. at Edinburgh University he became paralyzed and spent the rest of his life bedridden, hardly able to move. His bedroom, with a great window overlooking a garden, was equipped with various devices to make it possible for him to live and work and read. Before his death in 1943 he wrote an immense mass of poetry, now reduced to one volume, Selected Poems. BERNARD SPENCER works with The British Council in Turin. He was assistent editor of New Verse, and during the War lectured at Juad University in Cairo. His book Aegean Islands has just been published in New York by Doubleday. STEPHEN SPENDER has been teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, near New York. He was born in 1909, and educated at Oxford. Before the War he spent several years in Germany, an experience which con- siderably influenced his work. He is married and has one child a son. In the United States he is published by Random House. 310 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES DEREK STANFORD was born in 1918 and educated at Latymer. During the War he worked on the land as a Conscientious Objector. He has published two books, A. Romantic Miscellany (verse, with John Bayliss), and The Freedom of Poetry (anthology). With David West he edits the magazine Resistance, and he is at work on a translation of Apollinaire, a collection of modern French poetry, and a new book of poems. JULIAN SYMONS is now working as a copy writer for an advertising agency and is writing a biography of his brother, A. J. A. Symons. He was born in 1912; during the War he served in the Royal Armoured Corps. He is the author of two books of verse, and the founder and editor of Twentieth Century Verse ; one of the liveliest verse magazines of the 1930*8. He has written two excellent detective novels, is an enthusiastic sportsman, and a critic of considerable importance. DYLAN THOMAS was born in Wales in 1914, and educated at the Swansea Grammar School. He is the subject of a book by Henry Treece, soon to be published in London by Lindsay Drummond, and probably distributed in America by New Directions. His own first book of poems was called 18 Poems, published by The Parton Press. Later came The Map of Love which included both stories and verse, Portrait of The Artist As a Young Dog (autobiographical stories, in print, with New Directions) and most recently, Deaths & Entrances. His American vol- umes, The World I breathe and New Poems are now out of print, but New Directions has re-issued the bulk of their contents in its Selected Writings of Dylan Thomas volume, with introduction by J. R. Sweeney. Thomas worked at a number of jobs until he became interested in radio broadcasting and acting. He has a fine voice and is a remarkable reader of poetry, attracting much attention with his BBC programs. He has been working recently on a novel, and writing films scripts. TERENCE TILLER now works in the Features Department of the BBC. He was born in Cornwall in 1916 and educated at Cambridge. He has lectured at Fuad University, Egypt, and at Cambridge. He is married and has one daughter. RUTHVEN TODD is now living in the United States. He was born in Scotland in 1914. He has worked at various jobs and was in the ARP during the War. He has published three books of poems, two novels, a book of essays, and has edited Gilchrist's Life of Blake. HENRY TREECE is married, lives in Lincolnshire and breeds Old English sheep dogs. His Collected Poems, gathering the work of four previous volumes, were recently published in the United States by Alfred Knopf. He has also written How I See Apocalypse (essays), and Epilogue to Death (short stories) and a book on Dylan Thomas. With Stephan Schimanski he edits the personalist bi-yearly Transformation. In the War he served as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF. 3" BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES JOHN WALLER was born in 1917 at Oxford. He was educated at Weymouth College and Worcester College, Oxford, and edited the Oxford-Cambridge review, Fords and Bridges. Later he founded the literary quarterly Kingdom Come y one of the most influential periodicals of the first expression of the new Romanticism. He served as a Captain with the British Army in the Middle East during the War. VERNON WATKINS was born in Wales in 1906, and still lives there. He has published two books of verse, The Ballad of Mart Lllwyd and The Lamp and the Veil. A collection of his poems has recently been published in the United States by New Directions. He is a banker. EITHNE WILKINS was educated at Oxford. Her first poems appeared there just before the War, and in Roger Roughton's magazine Contemporary Poetry. She has since worked in publishing houses and as a translator. GEORGE WOODCOCK is one of the editors of Freedom and the founder and editor of AW. He has published two books of verse, The White Island and The Centre Cannot Hold and also a biography of William Godwin^ a study of Aphra Eehn, and a book on anarchism, Anarchy or Chaos. He has also written several pamphlets on housing, agriculture, railways, ethics, and other questions. DAVID WRIGHT was born in South Africa in 1920 and at the age of .seven became totally deaf. He was educated in South Africa and at Oriel College, Oxford. He is now working as a journalist. NOTE The most notable omission from this collection is the poet, Edwin Muir- He has been left out of the Scottish collection because he does not write in Scots and considers himself independent of the Scots Renascence. He is older than the poets writing in English who have been included in this volume, and moreover he is well represented in several available anthologies. GLOSSARY FOR PAGE 74 (ghaisties - ghosts; airms - arms; mell - mix; timm - empty; ayont - be- yond; glunch - sneer; reek - smoke; creeshy - greasy; swat - sweat; grup - grip; alowe - below; loups - leaps; howe - hollow; wame - womb; sonsie - jolly; "The flesh be bruckle and the fiends be slee" - a quo* tation from Dunbar's Timor Mortis Conturbat Me; pree - prove; dree - dwindle; lauch - laugh.)