E.W., 1882–1948
It was your room they moved me to
(I, not yet four the year you died,
Not grasping how I might have cried),
Dear Father, whom I hardly knew;
And your great, polished chest-of-drawers
Was all that I inherited
Besides: it loomed above my bed:
Dark in the wood-grain still there pours,
In memory, vast, the gathered deep –
Huge waves that surged, curded to foam
(In the security of home),
And broke, as I sank into sleep.
Clearing the drawers out, now a man,
I came upon your photograph:
It seemed a visual epitaph
To one I’d never thought, till then,
I’d loved or feared. Now time had blurred
Your placid features, void of care,
Who died, as if you had no heir,
Intestate: so on me conferred
No such authority as dressed,
In my conception, all your acts;
Mere rooms to occupy as facts –
No freehold rightfully possessed.
Moreover, childish hands, untaught
In every art but innocence,
Had scribbled into radiance
And overlaid its sepia hue –
Your clothes now black and gold, your face
Crimson, the sky (your dwelling-place)
Empty but touched with purest blue –
As if a fatherless naïf,
Dreaming a different element,
Within the oval frame had meant
To translate his confused belief
Into pictorial commentary:
This was the palimpsest I’d scrawled
Glimpsing a King, beyond my world,
Who governed from across the sea.
Your power you held but to resign –
A rationally gentle reign;
I see you smiling, mild again,
Whose failing life engendered mine;
And through my childhood dreams, that face
Taught what a child could never see:
That I must never hope to be
The master of my dwelling-place.
1975