Collected Poems 1931-74 (34 page)
Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
- Faces may settle sadly
1 - Fangbrand was here once,
1 - Far away once, in Avignon, the Grey Penitents
1 - Finally I am here. Conon in exile on Andros
1 - Find time hanging, cut it down
1 - First come the Infantry in scented bodices,
1 - First draw the formal circle O
1 - For how long now have we not nibbled
1 - Four card-players: an ikon of the saint
1 - Four small nouns I put to pasture,
1 - Fraudulent perhaps in that they gave
1 - Friends, Humans, Englishmen!
1 - Friends, Romans, countrymen,
1 - From a winter of vampires he selects one,
1 - From recollection's fund
1 - From the dark viands of the church
1 - From the intellect's grosser denominations
1 - From this glass gallows in famous entertainment,
1 - From Travancore to Tripoli
1 - Further from him whose head of woman's hair
1
- Hatch me a gorilla's egg
1 - He is the man who makes notes,
1 - Heloise and Abelard
1 - Her dust has pawned kings of gold,
1 - Her sea limps up here twice a day
1 - Here in the hollow curvature of the world,
1 - Here is a man who says: Let there be light.
1 - Here on the curve of the embalming winter,
1 - How can we find the substance of the lie;
1 - How elapsing our women
1 - How loud the perfume of common gin
1 - Huit
heures
â¦
honte
heures
⦠supper will be cold.
1 - Hush the old bones their vegetable sleep,
1
- I, a slave, chained to an oar of poem,
1 - I am this spring,
1 - I built a house, far in a wilderness,
1 - I cannot fix the very moment or the hour,
1 - I cannot read Pliny without terror.
1 - I close an hinge on the memorial days.
1 - I found your Horace with the writing in it;
1 - I have brought my life to this point,
1 - I have buried my wife under a dolmen,
1 - I have nibbled the mystical fruit. Cover me.
1 - I have set my wife's lip under the bandage,
1 - I have sipped from the flask of resurrection,
1 - I have tasted my quantum of misfortune,
1
,
1 - I like to see so much the old man's loves,
1 - I, per se I, I sing on
1 - I recall her by a freckle of gold
1 - I shall die one day I suppose
1 - I should set about memorising this little room,
1 - I turned and found a new-moon at my feet:
1 - I was a vagabond; sunset and moon
1 - I who have lived in death, hemmed by the spears,
1 - I would be rid of you who bind me so,
1 - If I say what I honestly mean
1 - If seen by many minds at once your image
1 - If space curves how much the more thought,
1 - If there was a cake you'd take it
1 - Image, Image, Image answer
1 - Image of our own dust in wine!
1 - Imagine we are the living who inhabit
1 - In all the sad seduction of your ways
1 - In all this summer dust O Vincent
1 - In an island of bitter lemons
1 - In the museums you can find her,
1 - In youth the decimal days for spending:
1 - Incision of a comb in hair: lips stained
1 - Indifferent history! In such a place
1 - Instead of this or that fictitious woman
1 - It would be untrue to say that
The
Art
of
Marriage
1
- Jupiter, so lucky when he lay
1
- Ladies and gentlemen: or better still,
1 - Land of Doubleday and Dutton
1 - Last night I bowed before a destiny,
1 - Last of the great autumnal capitals
1 - Late seventeenth, a timepiece rusted by dew,
1 - Later Ariadne read of
The
Universe,
1 - Later some of these heroic worshippers
1 - Le
saltimbanque
is coming with
1 - Left like an unknown's breath on mirrors,
1 - Livin' in a functional greenhouse
1 - Look, on that hill we met
1 - Lost, you may not smile upon me now:
1 - Love on a leave-of-absence came,
1
- Madness confides its own theology,
1 - Mark has crossed over to Mount Olivet,
1 - Miss Willow, secretly known as âtit'â¦
1 - Monday escapes destruction.
1 - Mothers and sculptors work
1 - My love on Wednesday letting fall her body
1 - My lovely left-handed lover
1 - My uncle has entered his soliloquy./He keeps vigil under the black sigil.
1 - My uncle has entered his soliloquy. The candles shed their fur.
1 - My uncle has entered his soliloquy;/ Under the black sigil the old white one
1 - My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the music-room of the Host.
1 - My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the pocket of Lapland,
1 - My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps the sharp sleep of the unstrung harp
1 - My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./His sleep is of the Babylonian deep-sea
1 - My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./Three, six, nine of the dead languages
1 - My uncle sleeps in the image of death./He sleeps the steep sleep of his zone,
1 - My uncle sleeps in the image of death./In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed
1 - My uncle sleeps in the image of death./Not a bad sport the boys will tell you,
1 - My uncle sleeps in the image of death./The shadow of other worlds, deep-water penumbra
1
- Night falls. The dark expresses
1 - Nine marches to Lhasa.
1 - No milestones marked the invaders,
1 - âNo one will ever pick them, I think,'
1 - Nostos
home:
algos
pain: nostalgia â¦
1 - Not from some silent sea she rose
1 - Nothing is lost, sweet self,
1 - Now darkness comes to Europe
1 - Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us,
1 - Now everywhere Spring opens
1 - Now mark, the Lady one fine day
1 - Now November visiting with rain
1 - Now that I have given all that I could bring
1 - Now the sun again, like a bloody convict,
1 - Now when the angler by Bethlehem's water
1
- O Freedom which to every man entire
1 - Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris,
1 - Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white, majestic headland,
1 - Old cock-pheasants when you hit one
1 - On charts they fall like lace,
1 - On how many of your clement springs
1 - On seeming to presume
1 - On the stone sill of the embalming winter
1 - Once in idleness was my beginning,
1 - One innocent observer in a foreign cell
1 - One she floats as Venice might,
1 - Only the night remains now, only the dark.
1 - Only to affirm in time
1 - Orpheus, beloved famulus,
1 - Over the bridges the meandering scholars
1 - Outside us smoulder the great
1
- Pain hangs more bloody than the mystic's taws.
1 - Perfume of old bones,
1 - Pity these lame and halting parodies
1 - Poetry, science of intimacies,
1 - Proffer the loaves of pain
1 - Prospero upon his island
1 - Prudence had no dog and but one cat,
1 - Prudence shall cross also the great white barrier.
1 - Prudence sweetly sang both crotchet and quaver,
1 - Prudence was told the tale of the chimney-corner
1 - Put it more simply: say the city
1 - pyknics
are
short,
fat
and
hairy,
Â
1
- Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery:
1
- Scent like a river-pilot led me there:
1 - Seal up the treasury and bar the gate.
1 - Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus,
1 - Seemingly upended in the sky,
1 - She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger
1 - Since you must pass to-night
1 - Sky star-engraved, the Pleiads up,
1 - Small temptations nowâto slumber and to sleep,
1 - So at last we come to the writer's
1 - So back to a Paris grubby as a bowel
1 - So knowledge has an end,
1 - So many masks â¦
1 - So many masks, the people that I meet,
1 - So many mockers of the doctrine
1 - So one fine year to where the roads
1 - So Time, the lovely and mysterious
1 - So today, after many years, we meet
1 - So we have come to evening ⦠graciously,
1 - Soft as puffs of smoke combining,
1 - Soft toys that make to seem girls
1 - Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly
1 - Some diplomatic missionâno such thing as âfate'â
1 - Some, the great Adepts, found it
1 - Some withering papers lie,
1 - Something like the sea,
1 - Sometime we shall all come together
1 - Somewhere in all this grace and favour green
1 - Spoonful of wine, candle-stump and eyes.
1 - âSpring' says your Alexandrian poet
1 - Stavro's dead. A truant vine
1 - âStyle is the cut of the mind.'
1 - Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage
1 - Suppose one died
1 - Supposing once the dead were to combine
1 - Sure a lovely day and all weather
1 - Sweet sorrow, were you always there?
1
- Take me back where sex is furtive
1 - Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee
1 - That last summer quite definitely the dead
1 - That noise will be the rain again,
1 - The ants that passed
1 - The baby emperor
1 - The big rivers are through with me, I guess;
1 - The change from C major to A flat
21 - The colonial, the expatriate walking here
1 - The dreams of Solange confused no issues
1 - The dying business began hereabouts,
1 - The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
1 - The father is in death.
1 - The forest wears its coats
1 - The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.
1 - The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,
1 - The grass they cropped converting into speed
1 - The grave one is patron of a special sea,
1 - The hand is crabbed, the manuscript much defaced,
1 - The horizon like some keystone between soil and air
1 - The islands rebuffed by water.
1 - The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
1 - The little gold cigale
1 - The mixtures of this garden
1 - The old Levant which made us once
1 - The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine
1 - The old yellow Emperor
1 - The paladin of the body is rock,
1 - The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint
1 - The pure form, then, must be the silence?
1 - The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood,
1 - The rapt moonwalkers or mere students
1 - The road is a sinister pathway paved with smoke,
1 - The roads lead southward, blue
1 - The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts â¦
1 - The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs
1 - the soft
quem
quam
will be Scops the Owl
1 - The trees have been rapping
1 - The year his heart wore outâ
1 - Then walk where roses like disciples can
1 - There is a great heart-break in an evening sea;
1 - There is no strict being in this hour,
1 - There is some corner of a lover's brain
1 - There must be some slow ending to this pain:
1 - These ships, these islands, these simple trees
1 - They have taken another road,
1 - They never credit us
1 - This boy is the good shepherd.
1 - This business grows more dreary year by year,
1 - This dust, this royal dust, our mother
1 - âThis landscape is not original in its own mode.'
1 - This pain goes deeper than the fish's fathom:
1 - This rough field of sudden warâ
1 - This unimportant morning
1 - Three women have slept with my books,
1 - Thumb quantum
1 - Thy kingdom come. They say the prophet
1 - Time marched against my egg,
1 - Time quietly compiling us like sheaves
1 - Time spillers, pain killers, all such pretty women,
1 - To be a king of islands,
1 - To increase your hold
1 - To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,
1 - To you by whom the sweet spherical music
1 - To you in high heaven the unattainable,
1 - Transparent sheath of the dead cicada,
1 - Tread softly, for here you stand
1 - Trembling they appear, the Siren isles,
1
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