Collected Poems 1931-74 (15 page)

In Europe, bound by Europe,

I saw them moving, the possessed

Fëdor and Anna, the last

Two vain explorers of our guilt,

Turn by turn holding the taws,

Made addicts of each other lacking love,

Friendless embittered and alone.

The lesser pities held them back

Like mice in secrecies,

Yet through introspection and disease,

Held on to the unflinching bone,

The sad worn ring of Anna,

Loyal to filth and weakness,

Hammered out on this slender bond,

Fëdor's raw cartoons and episodes.

By marriage with this ring,

Companioned each their darkness.

In cracked voices we can hear

These hideous mommets now

Like westering angels over Europe sing.

So knowledge has an end,

And virtue at the last an end,

In the dark field of sensibility

The unchanging and unbending;

As in aquariums gloomy

On the negative's dark screen

Grow the shapes of other selves,

So groaned for by the heart,

So seldom grasped if seen.

Love bears you. Time stirs you.

Music at midnight makes a ground,

Or words on silence so perplex

In hidden meanings there like bogies

Waiting the expected sound.

Art has limits and life limits

Within the nerves that support them.

So better with the happy

Discover than with the wise

Who teach the sad valour

Of endurance through the seasons,

In change the unchanging

Death by compromise.

Now darkness comes to Europe

Dedicated by a soft unearthly jazz.

The greater hearts contract their joys

By silence to the very gem,

While the impertinent reformers,

Barbarians with secretaries move,

Whom old Cavafy pictured,

Whom no war can remove.

Alexandria
‘
The
mythical
Yellow
Em
peror,
first
exponent
of
the
Tao
'.
Classical
Chinese
Philosophy

Through the ambuscades of sex,

The follies of the will, the tears,

Turning, a personal world I go

To where the yellow emperor once

Sat out the summer and the snow,

And searching in himself struck oil,

Published the first great Tao

Which all confession can only gloze

And in the Consciousness can only spoil.

Apparent opposition of the two

Where unlocked numbers show their fabric,

He laid his finger to the map,

And where the signs confuse,

Defined the Many and the None

As base reflections of the One.

‘Duality,
the
great
European
art-subject,
which
is
re
solved
by
the
Taoist
formulas'.
Anaïs
Nin

What bifid Hamlet in the maze

Wept to find; the
döppelgänger

Goethe saw one morning go

Over the hill ahead; the man

So gnawed by promises who shared

The magnificent responses of Rimbaud.

All that we have sought in us,

The artist by his greater cowardice

In sudden brush-strokes gave us clues—

Hamlet and Faust as front-page news.

The yellow emperor first confirmed

By one Unknown the human calculus,

Where feeling and idea,

Must fall within this space,

This personal landscape built

Within the Chinese circle's calm embrace.

‘The
Con
tinuous
I
be
h
ind
dis
continuous
Me's'.
E.
Graham
Howe

Dark Spirit, sum of all

That has remained unloved,

Gone crying through the world:

Source of all manufacture and repair,

Quicken the giving-spring

In ferns and birds and ordinary people

That all deeds done may share,

By this our temporal sun,

The part of living that is loving,

Your dancing, a beautiful behaviour.

Darkness, who contain

The source of all this corporal music,

On the great table of the Breath

Our opposites in pity bear,

Our measure of perfection or of pain,

Both trespassers in you, that then

Our Here and Now become your Everywhere.

    The old yellow Emperor

    With defective sight and matted hair

    His palace fell to ruins

    But his heart was in repair.

    Veins like imperfect plumbing

    On his flesh described a leaf.

    His palms were mapped with cunning

    Like geodesies of grief.

    His soul became a vapour

    And his limbs became a stake

    But his ancient heart still visits us

    In Lawrence or in Blake.

    All cities plains and people

    Reach upwards to the affirming sun,

    All that's vertical and shining,

    Lives well lived,

    Deeds perfectly done,

    Reach upwards to the royal pure

    Affirming sun.

    Accident or error conquered

    By the gods of luck or grace,

    Form and face,

    Tribe or caste or habit,

    All are aspects of the one

    Affirming race.

    Ego, my dear, and id

    Lie so profoundly hid

    In space-time void, though feeling,

    While contemporary, slow,

    We conventional lovers cheek to cheek

    Inhaling and exhaling go.

    The rose that Nostradamus

    In his divining saw

    Break open as the world;

    The city that Augustine

    Founded in moral law,

    By our anguish were compelled

    To urge, to beckon and implore.

    Dear Spirit, should I reach,

    By touch or speech corrupt,

    The inner suffering word,

    By weakness or idea,

    Though you might suffer

    Feel and know,

    Pretend you do not hear.

Bombers bursting like pods go down

And the seed of Man stars

This landscape, ancient but no longer known.

Only the critic perseveres

Within his ant-like formalism

By deduction and destruction steers;

Only the trite reformer holds his own.

See looking down motionless

How clear Athens or Bremen seem

A mass of rotten vegetables

Firm on the diagram of earth can lie;

And here you may reflect how
genus
epileptoid

Knows his stuff; and where rivers

Have thrown their switches and enlarged

Our mercy or our knowledge of each other

Wonder who walks beside them now and why,

And what they talk about.

There is nothing to hope for, my Brother.

We have tried hoping for a future in the past.

Nothing came out of that past

But the reflected distortion and some

Enduring, and understanding, and some brave.

Into their cool embrace the awkward and the sinful

Must be put for they alone

Know who and what to save.

Small temptations now—to slumber and to sleep,

Where the lime-green, odourless

And pathless island waters

Crossing and uncrossing, partnerless

By hills alone and quite incurious

Their pastures of reflection keep.

For Prospero remains the evergreen

Cell by the margin of the sea and land,

Who many cities, plains, and people saw

Yet by his open door

In sunlight fell asleep

One summer with the Apple in his hand.

1946/
1946

Windless plane-trees above Rodini

To the pencil or the eye are tempters

Where of late trees have become ears in leaf

Curved for the cicada's first monotony.

Hollow the comb, mellow the sweetness

Amber the honey-spoil, drink, drink.

In these windless unechoing valleys

The mind slips like a chisel-hand

Touching the surface of this clement blue

Yet must not damage the solitary Turk

Gathering his team and singing, in whose brain

The same disorder and the loneliness—

The what-we-have-in-common of us all.

Is there enough perhaps to found a world?

Then of what you said once, the passing

Of something on the road beyond the tombstones

Reflecting on dark hair with its sudden theft

Of blue from the darkness of violets

And below the nape of the neck a mole

All mixed in this odourless water-clock of hours.

So one is grateful, yes, to the ancient Greeks

For the invention of time, lustration of penitents,

Not so much for what they were

But for where we lie under the windless planes.

1948/
1946

The mixtures of this garden

Conduct at night the pine and oleander,

Perhaps married to dust's thin edge

Or lime where the cork-tree rubs

The quiet house, bruising the wall:

And dense the block of thrush's notes

Press like a bulb and keeping time

In this exposure to the leaves,

And as we wait the servant comes,

A candle shielded in the warm

Coarse coral of her hand, she weaves

A pathway for her in the golden leaves,

Gathers the books and ashtrays in her arm

Walking towards the lighted house,

Brings with her from the uninhabited

Frontiers of the darkness to the known

Table and tree and chair

Some half-remembered passage from a fugue

Played from some neighbour's garden

On an old horn-gramophone,

And you think: if given once

Authority over the word,

Then how to capture, praise or measure

The full round of this simple garden,

All its nonchalance at being,

How to adopt and raise its pleasure?

Press as on a palate this observed

And simple shape, like wine?

And from the many undeserved

Tastes of the mouth select the crude

Flavour of fruit in pottery

Coloured among this lovely neighbourhood?

Beyond, I mean, this treasure hunt

Of selves, the pains we sort to be

Confined within the loving chamber of a form,

Within a poem locked and launched

Along the hairline of the normal mind?

Perhaps not this: but somehow, yes,

To outflank the personal neurasthenia

That lies beyond in each expiring kiss:

Bring joy, as lustrous on this dish

The painted dancers motionless in play

Spin for eternity, describing for us all

The natural history of the human wish.

1948/
1947

Down there below the temple

Where the penitents scattered

Ashes of dead birds, Manoli goes

In his leaky boat, a rose tied to the rudder.

This is not the rose of all the world,

Nor the rose of Nostradamus or of Malory:

Nor is it Eliot's clear northern rose of the mind,

But precisely and unequivocally

The red rose Manoli picked himself

From the vocabulary of roses on the hill by Cefalû.

1948/
1947

Mark has crossed over to Mount Olivet,

Putting aside the banneret and the drum.

He inhabits now that part of himself

Which lay formerly desolate and uncolonized.

He works that what is to pass may come

And the birth of the common heart be realized.

What passed with him? A flower dropped

In the boat by a friend, the cakes

His sister brought with the unposted letter.

Yet all the island loafers watched, disturbed,

The red sails melt into the sky, distended,

And each turned angrily to his lighted house

Feeling, not that something momentous

Had begun, but that their common childhood

Had foundered in the Syrian seas and ended.

1948/
1947

Banished from the old roof-tree Patmos

Where the dynasts gathered honey,

Like dancing bears, with smoking rituals,

Or skimmed the fat of towns with levy-money,

Uncaring whether God or Paradise exist,

Laid up themselves estates in providence

While greed crouched in each hairy fist,

Basil, the troubled flower of scepticism,

Chose him a pelt, and a cairn of chilly stone,

Became the author of a famous schism:

A wick for oil, a knife, a broken stool

Were all, this side of hell, he dared to own.

For twenty years in Jesus went to school.

Often, looking up, he saw them there

As from some prism-stained pool:

Dark dots like birds along the battlements,

Old rooks swayed in a rotten tree.

They waved: he did not answer, although he

Felt kindly to them all, for they could do

What he could not: he did not dare to pray.

His inner prohibitions were a sea

On which he floated spellbound day by day.

World and its fevers howled outside: within

The Omen and the Fret that hemmed him in,

The sense of his complete unworthiness

Pressed each year slowly tighter like a tourniquet.

1948/
1947

Four card-players: an ikon of the saint

On a pitted table among eight hands

That cough and spit or close like manacles

On fortunate court-cards or on the bottle

Which on the pitted paintwork stands.

Among them one whose soft transpontine nose

Fuller of dirty pores pricked on a chart

Has stood akimbo on the turning world,

From Cimbalu to Smyrna shaken hands,

Tasted the depths of every hidden sound:

In wine or poppy a drunkard with a drunkard's heart

Who never yet was known to pay his round.

Meanwhile below in harbour his rotten boat,

Beard green from winter quarters turns

Her scraggy throat to nudge the northern star,

And like a gipsy burns and burns; goes wild

Till something climbs the hill

And stands beside him at the tavern table

To pluck his drunken elbow like a child.

1948/
1947

Dark birds in nature redevise

Their linings every year: are not

The less like these weaving fishermen

Bent so exactly at their tattered seines

On a rotten wharf, their molten catch

Now sold and loaded: though they feather only

For fathoms of sea and the fishes within it,

Needles passing in a surf of lights.

Panagiotis has resigned it all

For an enamel can and olive shade:

His concern a tavern prospect,

Miles of sweet chestnut and borage.

This armament of wine he shares now

With the greatest philosopher, the least

Inventor, the meanest doctrine of rest,

Mixing leisure and repose like wine and water,

Tutor and pupil in the crater.

His dark sleep is bruised by each

Sink of the sun below the castle

Where the Sporades have opened

Their spokes, and the whole Aegean

In brilliant soda turns the darkening bays.

1948/
1948

Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee

Among their veins, gone crooked over voyages,

Made by this ancient captain. Life has now

Contracted like the pupil of an eye

To a slit in space and time for images—

All he has seen of sage and arbutus:

Touched berries where the golden eagle crashes

From its chariot of air and dumb trap:

Islands fortunate as Atlantis was …

Yet while we thought him voyaging through life

He was really here, in truth, outside the doorpost,

In the shade of the eternal vine, his wife,

With the same tin plate of olives on his lap.

1948/
1947