Collected Poems 1931-74 (8 page)

This boy is the good shepherd.

He paces the impartial horizons,

Forty days in the land of tombs,

Waterless wilderness, seeking waterholes:

Knows the sound of the golden eagle, knows

The algebraic flute blue under Jupiter:

Supine in myrtle, lamb between his knees,

Has been a musical lion upon the midnight.

This was the good shepherd, Daphnis,

Time's ante-room by the Aegean tooth,

Curled like an umber snake above the spray,

Mumbling arbutus among the chalk-snags,

The Grecian molars where the green sea spins,

Suffered a pastoral decay.

This girl was the milk and the honey.

Under the eaves the dark figs ripen,

The leaves' nine medicines, a climbing wine.

Under the tongue the bee-sting,

Under the breast the adder at the lung,

Like feathered child at wing.

Life's honey is distilled simplicity:

The icy crystal pendant from the rock,

The turtle's scorching ambush for the egg,

The cypress and the cicada,

And wine-dark, blue, and curious, then,

The metaphoric sea.

This was Chloe, the milk and honey,

Carved in the clear geography of Time,

The skeleton clean chiselled out in chalk,

For our Nigerian brown to study on.

From the disease of life, took the pure way,

Declined into the cliffs, the European waters,

Suffered a pastoral decay.

1943/
1941

Fangbrand was here once,

A missionary man,

Borne down by the Oxus,

Pursued by the lilies,

Inhabited by the old voice of sorrows,

In a black hat and sanitary boots.

The island recognised him,

Giving no welcome, lying

Trembling among her craters:

The blue circlets of stone,

On a sea blotted with fictions.

He came to the wharf with long oars.

The Ocean's peculiar spelling

Haunts here, cuddled by syllables

In caves perpendicular, a blue recitation

Of water washing the dead,

On the pediments of the statues,

Came the strange man, the solitary man,

Fangbrand the unsuspecting,

Missionary one in thick soles,

Measuring penance by the pipkin,

Step-brother to the gannet,

Travelling the blue bowl of the world,

His virtues in him rough as towels.

His brows that bent like forests

Over the crystal-gazing eyes;

His brows that bent like forests,

A silver hair played on his neck.

He saw this rock and the seal asleep,

With the same mineral stare.

This place he made pastance

For the platonic ass; in this

Cottage by the water supported

The duellers, the twins,

Of argument and confusion,

Alone in a melancholy hat.

Those who come to this pass,

Ask themselves always how

A rock can become a parish,

Pulpits whitened by the sea-birds,

Mean more than just house, rock,

A tree, a table and a chair.

His window was Orion;

At night standing upon the deep,

His eyes smaller than commas

Watched without regret the ships

Passing, one light in a void,

One pure point on the wave's floor.

Measured in the heart's small flask

The spirit's disturbance: the one voice

Saying ‘Renounce', the other

Answering ‘Be'; the division

Of the darkness into faces

Crying ‘Too late' ‘Too late'.

At night the immediate

Rubbing of the ocean on stones,

The headlands dim in her smoke

And always the awareness

Of self like a point, the quiver

As of a foetal heart asleep in him.

Continuous memory, continual evocations.

An old man in a colony of stones,

Frowning, exilic, upon a thorn,

Learning nothing of time:

Sometimes in a windy night asleep

His lips brushed the forbidden apples.

Everything reproached him, the cypress

Revising her reflection in pools,

The olive's stubborn silver in wind,

The nude and statuary hills all

Saying ‘Turn back. Turn back.

Peace lies another way, old man'.

It seemed to him here at last

His age, his time, his sex even

Were struck and past; life

In a flood carrying all idols

Into the darkness, struck

Like floating tubs, and were gone.

The pathfinder rested now,

The sick man found silence

Like the curved ear of a shell;

A roar of silence even

Diminishing the foolish cool

Haunting note of the dove.

By day he broke his fruit

Humbly from the tree: his water

From wells as deep as Truth:

Living on snails and waterberries,

Marvelling for the first time

At the luminous island, the light.

His body he left in pools

Now dazed by fortune, like an old

White cloth discarded where

Only the fish were visitors.

Their soft perverted kisses

Melted the water on his side.

The rich shadow of the vine's tent

Like a cold cloth on his skull;

Spring water blown through sand,

Bubbled on mineral floors,

Ripened in smooth cisterns

Dripped from a hairy lintel on his tongue.

Truth's metaphor is the needle,

The magnetic north of purpose

Striving against the true north

Of self: Fangbrand found it out,

The final dualism in very self,

An old man holding an asphodel.

Everywhere night lay spilled,

Like coolness from spoons,

And his to drink, the human

Surface of the sky, the planes

And concaves of the eye reflecting

A travelling mirror, the earth.

He regarded himself in water,

The torrid brow's beetle,

The grammarian's cranium-bone.

He regarded himself in water

Saying ‘X marks the spot,

Self, you are still alive!'

From now the famous ten-year

Silence fell on him; disciples

Invented the legend; now

They search the white island

For a book perhaps, a small

Paper of revelation left behind.

Comb out the populous waters,

Study the mud: what kept,

Held, fed, fattened him?

The hefts of stone are the only

Blossoms here: nothing grows,

But the ocean expunges.

Time's chemicals mock the hunter

For crumbs of doctrine; Fangbrand

Died with his art like a vase.

The grave in the rock,

Sweetened by saffron, bubbles water

Like a smile, an animal truth.

Death interrupted nothing.

Like guarded towns against alarms,

Our sentries in the nerves

Never sleep; but his one night

Slept on their arms, Hesperus shining,

And the unknowns entered.

So the riders of the darkness pass

On their circuit: the luminous island

Of the self trembles and waits,

Waits for us all, my friends,

Where the sea's big brush recolours

The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.

1943/
1941

The islands which whisper to the ambitious,

Washed all winter by the surviving stars

Are here hardly recalled: or only as

Stone choirs for the sea-bird,

Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.

This civilized valley was dedicated to

The cult of the circle, the contemplation

And correction of famous maladies

Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also

By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.

The only disorder is in what we bring here:

Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,

The penetration of clocks striking in London.

The composure of dolls and fanatics,

Financed migrations to the oldest sources:

A theatre where redemption was enacted,

Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.

The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,

And the swallow's cot in the ruin seems how

Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!

Here we can carry our own small deaths

With the resignation of place and identity;

A temple set severely like a dice

In the vale's Vergilian shade; once apparently

Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:

A formula for marble when the clouds

Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke

Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.

Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,

The dying leaves and the reports of love.

The land's lie, held safe from the sea,

Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,

Provides a context understandably natural

For men who could divulge the forms of gods.

Here the mathematician entered his own problem,

A house built round his identity,

Round the fond yet mysterious seasons

Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.

Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,

And the hum of the chorus enchanted.

We, like the winter, are only visitors,

To prosper here the breathing grass,

Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing

Nothing, enduring the sun like girls

In a town window. The earth's flowers

Blow here original with every spring,

Shines in the rising of a man's age

Into cold texts and precedents for time.

Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order

Of old captains who sleep in the hill.

Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,

Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,

Unlocking this world which is not our world.

The somnambulists walk again in the north

With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.

Useless a morality for slaves: useless

The shouting at echoes to silence them.

Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,

Four ragged travellers in Homer.

All causes end within the great Because.

1943/
1941

No milestones marked the invaders,

But ragged harps like mountains here:

A text for Proserpine in tears: worlds

With no doors for heroes and no walls with ears:

Yet snow, the anniversary of death.

How did they get here? How enact

This clear severe repentance on a rock,

Where only death converts and the hills

Into a pastoral silence by a lake,

By the blue Fact of the sky forever?

‘Enter the dark crystal if you dare

And gaze on Greece.' They came

Smiling, like long reflections of themselves

Upon a sky of fancy. The red shoes

Waited among the thickets and the springs,

In fields of unexploded asphodels,

Neither patient nor impatient, merely

Waited, the born hunter on his ground,

The magnificent and funny Greek.

We will never record it: the black

Choirs of water flowing on moss,

The black sun's kisses opening,

Upon their blindness, like two eyes

Enormous, open in bed against one's own.

Something sang in the firmament.

The past, my friend compelled you,

The charge of habit and love.

The olive in the blood awoke,

The stones of Athens in their pride

Will remember, regret and often bless.

Kisses in letters from home:

Crosses in the snow: now surely

Lover and loved exist again

By a strange communion of darkness.

Those who went in all innocence,

Whom the wheel disfigured: whom

Charity will not revisit or repair,

The innocent who fell like apples.

Consider how love betrays us:

In the conversation of the prophets

Who daily repaired the world

By profit and loss, with no text

On the unknown quantity

By whose possession all problems

Are only ink and air made words:

I mean friends everywhere who smile

And reach out their hands.

Anger inherits where love

Betrays: iron only can clean:

And praises only crucify the loved

In their matchless errand, death.

Remember the earth will roll

Down her old grooves and spring

Utter swallows again, utter swallows.

Others will inherit the sea-shell,

Murmuring to the foolish its omens,

Uncurving on the drum of the ear,

The vowels of an ocean beyond us,

The history, the inventions of the sea:

Upon all parallels of the salt wave,

To lovers lying like sculptures

In islands of smoke and marble,

Will enter the reflections of poets

By the green wave, the chemical water.

I have no fear for the land

Of the dark heads with aimed noses,

The hair of night and the voices

Which mimic a traditional laughter:

Nor for a new language where

A mole upon a dark throat

Of a girl is called ‘an olive':

All these things are simply Greece.

Her blue boundaries are

Upon a curving sky of time,

In a dark menstruum of water:

The names of islands like doors

Open upon it: the rotting walls

Of the European myth are here

For us, the industrious singers,

In the service of this blue, this enormous blue.

Soon it will be spring. Out of

This huge magazine of flowers, the earth,

We will enchant the house with roses,

The girls with flowers in their teeth,

The olives full of charm: and all of it

Given: can one say that

Any response is enough for those

Who have a woman, an island and a tree?

I only know that this time

More than ever, we must bless

And pity the darling dead: the women

Winding up their hair into sea-shells,

The faces of meek men like dials,

The great overture of the dead playing,

Calling all lovers everywhere in all stations

Who lie on the circumference of ungiven kisses.

Exhausted rivers ending in the sand;

Windmills of the old world winding

And unwinding in musical valleys your arms.

The contemptible vessel of the body lies

Lightly in its muscles like a vine;

Covered the nerves: and like an oil expressed

From the black olive between rocks,

Memory lulls and bathes in its dear reflections.

Now the blue lantern of the night

Moves on the dark in its context of stars.

O my friend, history with all her compromises

Cannot disturb the circuit made by this,

Alone in the house, a single candle burning

Upon a table in the whole of Greece.

Your letter of the 4th was no surprise.

So Tonio had gone? He will have need of us.

The sails are going out over the old world.

Our happiness, here on a promontory,

Marked by a star, is small but perfect.

The calculations of the astronomers, the legends

The past believed in could not happen here.

Nothing remains but Joy, the infant Joy

(So quiet the mountain in its shield of snow,

So unconcerned the faces of the birds),

With the unsuspected world somewhere awake,

Born of this darkness, our imperfect sight,

The stirring seed of Nostradamus' rose.

1943/
1941