‘Mine old dear enemy,
my froward master’
as he was fifty
years ago in Rome,
I could see looking like
a life-mask in plaster,
when I took down from my
top shelf at home
our old Catullus
in red faded cloth,
with a crib dated by
‘thou’, ‘hath’ and ‘doth’
He was there in a moment,
the silent young man
who had made marks in pencil—
not to comment
(‘Mercifully’ I thought)
but learning how to scan
And he may be up the hill
there, still in Via Veneto;
and would I be here
for a week, not passing through,
if he had not for two
Then it was, rightly, spring,
as it is now December.
So much has come between,
it will be hard
not to remember
too much of everything.
What can this wintry sun
show that is new?
From my hotel over-run
by pilgrims, and not ‘starred’
I walk out past the porno
films—MOMENTI BLU
The graffiti then line up with
bombs and excrement:
FAITH IS A MYTH
YOU IDIOT—FIGHT
‘No God nor Government’
‘Pigs’ ROMA MERDA
Mussolini’s blank walls
had fewer scrawls.
Stencilled, they were at one
in what they shouted for:
‘Long Live Death’ ‘Up War’
I was too young then—younger
than most of my age,
and now I am too old,
for bomber or war-monger
much to engage.
And then, though not, certainly
wishing to die,
one could dislike, but try
to think those posturings
not the true Italy.
Clear marvels and lurking things
alike pointed elsewhere.
Further downhill I see
Saint Mary Major;
steps up, and the grey apse.
—Was I a fool to be
a virgin at that age, or
indeed later?
No, I would rather define
it now as privilege.
As Wyatt’s ‘dear enemy’
was Love, so mine,
that both lover and hater
I cannot, like Wyatt
bring to be judged by Reason
an unjust God of Love,
more like no-love;
and catalogue all that
he had endured and lost
The theme was from Petrarch,
and those sufferings the cost
of love, those pains the mark
of grace: all surely hollow
to Wyatt, who would wallow
for choice, in bitterness
And he may be bored by it,
but he puts it through;
and for me that part makes
my young backward self,
my jailor, seem to
have worked for both our sakes.
Sunlight cold and clear
shines in under dusky
gold roof-beams and coffers.
People stand or sit.
An old man offers
My feeling in those days
in churches great or small
was that I was outside—
as elsewhere in other ways.
Yet after three years
I was in, after all
Even now it appears
there was no other way.
These wall-tomb marbles
with their Latin saws
tell that all we can say
about it, garbles
Stone-cut crossbones are hung
in a stone ribbon;
dates and deeds are told
for two Popes, a pious old
Protonotary and young
Bohemian noble
Sacred history, built up
like prayer, glows overhead.
But we grope for a speech
less grand and immobile
than that for these dead—
which may be out of reach.
The sun floats in sublime
light blue. Above
a shop-window a plaque,
new since my time,
records that Stendhal
‘Author of The Red and Black,
Walks in Rome, On Love …’
lived in the house for three years.
I did not bring the book,
but the thought of him cheers,
and I am walking—
if more intent on stalking,
not the Roman, but my past.
Well, take Stendhal as a stick
to beat with. How would he deal
with—could he feel
with—the young man who
became a Catholic?
With his style or lack of it,
dry cryptic touch
and flicker of wit,
he would move fast.
The religion as such
America would be there,
and a failed love-affair;
more travelling about
alone, and more
‘crises’ of the coming war,
with cant, rage and palsy
Though he might be dry,
he would not leave out
one’s clever-silly notions
of art, mind and the psyche.
But the interest would lie
firmly in the emotions,
and what they determine in
the young; as in me,
no young desire or drive had
been wanting, but failed,
as if impaled
on some unwobbling pin.
Coming to San Luigi,
I doubt if anyone
could tell the story
to the greater glory
of God—the Jesuits’ glad
Our author in any case
would not try, but shun
what he called ‘emphasis’,
and keep up his pace
through the obscurity:
through deprivation,
hunger for goodness,
thirst for some purity—
of heart, of will. And so to
that year before the war,
and knowing no other door
to happiness.
Then wartime, faith as a fort,
and Fortress Britain …
—But no, if he had written
so far, he would let it go
there: it would have been too slow
and clogged for a beginning
I mean, for one of his
in a novel not cut short,
the first half; which is when
the young man, like most men
is not in love;
Yet the novel for him
was about youth—though I
did not die young;
and since Catholicism
in his art was like the sky
above and earth below,
he might, however free
and sharp his eye and tongue,
see the desire to be
re-made in mind and heart
as like first love, and not
unreal, as a new start.
Nahman of Bratslav says ‘True
faith has no need to grapple
with evidence or research.
Faith comes through silence.’
I see that too,
and enter the French Church
We come here now for the chapel
by Caravaggio.
Christ on the left wall
points a finger to call
Matthew the money-changer—
On the right there is rage,
blood, death: in his old age
a naked killer bawling
has cut him down.
A boy wails, and an angel
dives with the martyr’s crown
Another angel, behind
the altar between Calling
and Death, indites
the Gospel, and he writes,
looking up as in doubt
of his own mind
At both beginning and end,
grouped as bystanders,
gaudily-dressed idle young
cronies, well-fed parasites
and older panders,
lazily attend
Christ’s face is mysterious,
oblique in the strong lights
and shadows. The dense
wild canvases
bully and in the end weary us
So, feeling himself like us,
back of the murder-scene
Michelangelo Merisi
da Caravaggio
turning, about to go,
looks pale and queasy.
By this time I have been
too long on my feet,
seen too much and am tiring,
and must sit down and eat
when I look back
from Matthew to the plaque.
The painter’s face—if
it is that—from yesterday
came back on the stiff
bare climb to the Capitol.
I have done without the Holy
Child, a white and golden doll,
but gone through the two
Museums rather slowly:
and am now gazing through
glass at a cold sunlit garden,
with frozen birdbath
and a pebble path
But I am still, or
again trying to place
(Caravaggio or not)
that pale scornful face;
and find it far away back,
at just the end of the war
He was one of a mixed lot,
Sicilian, a prisoner
of forty years ago,
when for six months or so
I was their interpreter.
but waiting, after defeat
and capture, captivity
and the dour years of exile,
to be sent home to meet
what might be waiting for them
in a wrecked Italy.
And meanwhile there was some bile,
some bitterness,
if more patience found.
Like me they were more or less
tired, tired, and looking round
and feeling older
One was hollow, not fulfilled,
but bewildered most
to find the post-war post
strength and decision;
but not post the sense of waste,
and dull old self-division.
The garden is less chilled.
Twelve o’clock has struck.
The sun has melted
and left a space in
the thin ice of the basin,
I try for the feeling
of that time, and see late light
and starlings wheeling
in a great horde drunkenly.
In the truck, on my right
my Florentine driver, ex-
taximan, tries to recall
a poem by Pascoli
about starlings. And in camp once
a proverb capped it all:
‘The bird in a cage
sings not for joy, but rage’
They vanished like birds too.
And I was thirty-three,
the age of Christ, they said.
I wonder how those not dead
would see now, as old men,
their lives before and since then?
They would surely see no true
end there, no such dying
as I felt, in a daze;
only perhaps, applying
that wartime phrase,
the end of the beginning.
My last morning and so, here
I come again to the end
of a beginning, my mere
seven days; and walk along
a gallery like a long,
very long corridor
There are painted cupboards for
books, and painted wall-maps.
One looks out on the Pope’s
empty garden-walks and slopes,
to where a crow flaps
on a cedar tree
The ceiling has panels
from monastic annals,
framed in Pompeian
airy arabesque:
good deeds Benedictine,
Franciscan, Dominican
—Doctrine and discipline
like angels taming chaos!
And the Gospel as that seed
or pearl, dogma and creed
as vision, work as prayer:
Rome like the corridor
celebrates unendingly
her unending war
of sanctity.
And by that token she exists
for the barbarians,
and for the Antichrists,
who creep or strut the stage
always, on earth again.
But everything in old age
can sadden, and at times
it is hard to say Amen
And I had rather go on
without the seeming
ending of Amen,
‘So be it’, when
so many have come and gone
that were not conclusions.
But all those and the other ones
at once look stale,
as from two days ago
the dusky solid pale
marred Risen Christ
comes back, set awkwardly
between a dark wide aisle
and wide high sanctuary.
True naked man and God,
he stands with Cross and cord
and sponge and rod
Too beautiful and bare,
with head aside, not bent,
he seems a Lord
who could be indifferent:
but is so intensely there,
and calm, he stuns
And I give up Raphael
and the Sistine Alpha
and Omega, although
it may very well
be my last chance;
but I decide to go,
and come first with relief
to the irrelevance
of a big shallow court,
where the Roman bronze Pine-cone
sits on its throne:
It would not have been enough
for what was waiting,
the Stanze and the rest
(and which will always be
too much to digest)
and still less for ruminating
what nobody agrees on,
equally, alive or dead—
the definition of love;
and faith that would not be faith,
as the zaddik said,
if it had need of reason
But if I have lived out
my half-century and more
of debate, with or
without, round and about,
those two conundrums, faith
and human passion:
why should not my old ration
of both, after a week here,
keep me, however near
the end, still on my feet,
and loitering in another
Looking, trying to see,
I go down the ranks,
as between two banks,
of portrait heads not bowed
under the stroke
of anonymity
Moon-coloured marble men
and women, but ill-used
and brought here bruised;
matrons and brides with hair
dressed in a wreath or toque,
but in disrepair
young men with curly beards
or a beard coming, scrawled
featherlike on the cheek;
the old men shaved and bald.
And all, so dead and gone
look in no way antique,
unless in that they might
be thought, here, to have waited:
—as they wait still,
while I come to a great gated
and locked iron grille.
a half-arcaded mall,
bare and silent in the dry
and faintly frosty sunlight,
with a sarcophagus
and tablets on the wall.
No need then to ask why
I turn back through the street
of heads, pleased with a conceit
of the sun, which is one light,
being there more luminous
and weaker here,
but moderately clear.