The sun shines on the gliding river,
The river shines and presses through
Damp meadows and just yellowing trees;
The tall trees left without a breeze
Stand up against the blue.
And on one side a space for cows is
Fenced off with willow stumps and wires;
While there the place of learning drowses,
Churches and colleges and houses
Lifting their domes and towers and spires.
I can remember coming here
For the first time, and in the sun
Of such an autumn, gold and clear.
I walked alone; it was the year
Of ‘crisis’, nineteen thirty-one.
Frenchmen were wearing in lapels
Ne me parlez pas de la crise!
And one could feel the chill on stricken
England, the twilight that would thicken
And storm-wind waiting for the trees.
*
We see that time as a beginning
Now; but that only made it worse
For those beginning absolutely—
The sense of everything acutely
Young men spend too much time on time,
Trading in futures; jostling, shoving,
They strain their gullets and digestions
With gnat-like and camelious questions,
Designs for living, looting, loving.
That airy Stock Exchange would rock—
Be less like fancying shirts and ties.
Hitler’s ‘eleventh hour’ came duly—
Pits, ogres; but my own were truly
Of quite another shape and size.
And here am I now forced to try,
Thirty years later as it is,
To take their measure and unravel
Before and after—look and travel
Back over opportunities
I missed! And can I now forgive
Myself for having missed so much?
I was afraid to take or give,
Disabled or unfit to live
And love—reach out and touch.
*
It hangs in sunlight now past change
And what is worse, beyond disguise.
That past I meet is looking strange,
But says we must be friends, arrange
The meeting—and allow no lies.
Old faded photographs can so
Look new to us, and I have one
Here of my mother, I can show.
I took it all those years ago
Dressed warmly, with her sense and touch
Of rightness, by the elm-tree bole
She stands; too calm to be called tense,
Yet some defiance or defence
Looks out of her from top to sole.
It must have been my second year.
One sees the pang that all along
She had suppressed—and more was here,
More on the way: she looks quite clear
On that; and she would not be wrong.
Not that I grant her prophecy
Of even how the world would go.
And some bad cards for her and me
The pack held, that she could not see—
Some she would never know.
But she might ask what miscreated
A nature ardent and direct
In childhood, leaving it self-hated,
Self-punishing: and what awaited
The boy she could not now protect?
I could not tell but had to live
The change, and suffer—cold, confined,
Withholding what I had to give,
The love I craved; a sensitive
Of the most complicated kind.
*
Cut off from old simplicities
Others had carefully been taught
And could observe in their unease;
Among my other nudities
A precious urchin of the mind,
It was my theory I migrated
To meet with some of my own kind:
Prig—dandy—bel esprit? to find
The whole scenario was dated.
Old Mole was burrowing far and wide.
Dangers and deaths I had not reckoned
(Much like the gulf that went beside
Pascal) appeared and multiplied;
And I stood still whatever beckoned.
*
The others were a race of gods!
Over the gap of our disjunction
I scanned their features, mouth and eyes,
Wondering if there could lie the prize;
But had no foothold, root or function.
Yet it was odd, nor man nor God
(Who had apparently put a curse on
My youth, and I must pay for it)
Could bring me simply to admit
I might be an impossible person.
But that perhaps was grounded in
My sense of being right and good—
A stubborn sense quite feminine
Or childish, of the love within,
And wanting only what I should.
Therefore I would go on in pain
And still come back however often
Disappointed; tug the chain
That cut the heart, and try again
All I had left was the conviction
Everything should be different far;
But how? Perhaps I understood
It would be different when it could.
Meanwhile there was a bar.
*
Well, so the enterprise takes off
From that sad queasy unattractive
Middle-aged hindsight, in its trough
Of vain regrets—at which we scoff?
Yes, but if one can make it active,
What may come out of it can never
Be less than evidence—agree
With this or that view, prove whatever
You like; my safety and endeavour
Are but to give you what I see.
So like a hermit with a flask
Of ink I sit and drive a quill;
Push on, bent over at the task
Of truth-telling. And if I ask
Why, it is at a demon’s will.
Some god or demon turns a pin;
A door swings open, cut in rock.
The door shuts, and I am shut in
With pen and paper, to begin
My calculations and unlock
Old passages and messages,
And wrestle till they come out right.
Only if then there seems to fall
Sometimes on the rocky wall,
Quivering, shifting, soft and bright—
It is an angel of the Lord!
For it brings the hope of flight,
With the sense of what I write
Living of its own accord.
Somewhere in Mauriac a girl
Sees the young man (the so-recurring
Young man in Mauriac) as ‘preserved’,
That is to say untouched, reserved;
And wonders to herself, demurring,
‘For what? …’ All things are preparations:
Our birth and parentage—when, where—
And the ups and downs of foreign nations;
Sunsets and pets and railway-stations;
The nursery frieze, an old Scotch air.
And English and French novelists
Once dwelt on home as preparation
Through good plain love. If asked ‘For what?’
They might have said at least ‘Why not
To live again in our narration?’
*
It was a wide blue British sky
That arched above deep seas in foam,
Where ships in glossy paint went by
To India, China and Shanghai
And back to England, back to ‘home’.
And liners and hotels had Punch
And Ideal Homes, the Tatler, Sphere
And the Illustrated London News;
Cartoons by H. M. Bateman; views
That world was ours, no matter where;
So brave and staid it stretched away
Through the unthinking pastimes of
Colonial England, bridge and golf,
Tea-parties—tea four times a day—
Saturday racing, drives on Sunday …
Yet through those acres of dry thorn
And sun and dust and boulders ran—
Not quite a ghost—a thought of man
And God and law; not quite outworn.
Trophies and scars of faded wars,
A hillside grave seen from the train;
An empty blockhouse by the bridge
And granite needle on the ridge,
Might tell of greed and pride and pain.
And the other, further war (of course
We won) was worse—incomprehensible!
But reason surely must increase
And what was left of hatred cease;
That would be only sensible.
*
My father from the time I claim
Remembrance, on his mantel-shelf
Had standing always in the same
Silver and dark-blue velvet frame
A small old photograph of himself:
At twenty, at his most beautiful—
Long-jacketed, pale-faced, dark-eyed.
Like a young moon that nears the full
And gazes on a twilight pool,
I had left home before he died,
Young as the picture showed him then.
Afterwards—sore, unsatisfied,
I begged it and was not denied;
But it had gone, no one knew when
Or where! And I recall the room,
The silence. No one spoke because
Everyone saw the question loom
‘He had given it—but to whom?’
We held our breath and left the pause.
*
My mother blamed his education
For faults and lessons never learned:
His puns and self-depreciation,
Wrong choice of friends, and speculation—
Gambling with money so well-earned.
Thinking himself a common man
He gave himself with too much trust.
Stubborn in weakness, dumb in pride—
His deepest hopes unsatisfied
Were apt to end in self-disgust.
I had adored then hatefully
Rejected him, in an immense
Hard rage and boyish misery.
Yet now in all he was I see
A strange and saving innocence.
I grieve that we were never friends.
It hurts; but neither would know how.
What that I say can make amends?
I leave it, knowing how it ends,
For now he is beyond our reach
I share and understand too well—
And let his love of music teach
Me, like a touch not needing speech—
Things he could never tell.
*
But I must thank my mother’s mind,
Her fiery rational sense of right
And love of all things well-designed,
Books, furniture and people—signed
With logic, courage, wit and light.
She gave us pictures and adventures,
Ballads and stories by the fire,
Echoes of Ruskin and Carlyle,
The notion that there could be ‘style’;
But most herself and her desire.
She was Jane Eyre and Maggie Tulliver,
Those ardent women! only free,
After such hardships—childhood scrapes,
Young visions, efforts and escapes—
As in the mind’s eye we could see.
And we were Oliver and Jim
Hawkins and David Copperfield;
And Absalom with gold hair in
The Bible, and young Benjamin
And Jairus’ daughter that was healed.
I owe her my delight in verse
But some part too of misery—
Were that for better or for worse:
Fear of ‘the body’ like a curse,
That would so long bewilder me.
She had wished that she could believe;
Said once ‘the basis of our lives
Is wrong’; and once that she could feel
Something mysterious, an appeal
That ‘opens like a flower—revives’.
For he died early, she lived on,
Through all the latter part of life
Bitter, but gradually less,
And chafing yet not comfortless.
But now, the thought is like a knife,
That they could have such confidence
And win so far, but be defeated!
Nothing be left of it at length,
Their hope, young arrogance and strength—
Their work undone or uncompleted.
But—childhood, music in the summer
Garden and the first fire lit
On a cold sunny afternoon;
Apricot blossom—bees in tune—
Butterflies that alight and sit
And sun themselves and wag their wings!…
Our moderate greatness went awry,
But not before we had these things,
Fenced with their love; and if it wrings
The memory, that all went by—
Yet they were lucky all the same,
Both he and she, and those who live
Have far more to regret or blame.
We only took, but they can claim
They taught the way to give.
Fretted discoloured towers and domes
And crumbling walls that rose upright:
Their mixture of the dry and rich
And dull, made up a message which
At times looked heavy—void of light.
And many times the buildings lay
With a dead weight like paving-stones
On my sick heart. What did they say,
Law—duty—God? It seemed a way
Of death in life, like skull and bones;
So old, sardonically old!
And they looked so much older then;
Not as they do, re-faced and bold
And looking down in grey and gold
On other, younger men.
While my young face has left me, if
It leaves me with a mind unfaded—
Indeed less faded; for my thought
Was styptic, withering what it brought,
And self-despised and self-invaded.
So old, so battered, so forlorn
I might have seemed at twenty-one;
A breathing body yet unborn,
Or blown, and withering on the thorn—
Ten poor enigmas tied in one.
Things that look small at such a space
Can yet be bitter on the tongue.
But is that all—a common case,
Where we can smile and say this place
Like youth, is wasted on the young?
I take it further. Sitting at
My table, if I care to look
I see a little grassy plat
Hidden behind the college, that
Contrives a garden in the nook.
A green bronze athlete lifts his hand,
Head bent beneath the clustered towers.
The airy path is wide and free
That leads to wounds and agony—
Death, glory—in this war of ours.
There I launched out, and if I see
Returning it is no less true
That I was wretched here, I find
The wretchedness itself a kind
Of gage, a promise, a way through,
A way of beating out my fate:
To seize and carry early on
The nameless difference like a weight;
What I would be in love and hate—
Etiamsi omnes ego non.
*
Put the case, and I see myself
Quite easily as other than
I am—a question-mark below it;
Not mad enough to be a poet
Architect, engineer or lawyer.
How can one think the self away
Or feel identity can change?
Yet occupations to estrange
Me less, might well have come my way.
But above others hard to seek
Instead—of all most difficult
The kingdom that I chose was weak,
Neglected, poor; the way oblique
And quite uncertain of result.
—It was no choice, I could not choose.
Much rather had it caught me, pinned
Or pinioned by a leash, a bond
Of cobweb, to a thought beyond
This earth and sea and sun and wind;
Dying and burning in faint fire
As if spring feared to come and trod
Half-cowering, shivering in desire
And naked in that thin attire
Of bud and twig and dusty clod.
For so I figure it, as weak,
Uncertain; but a thing ‘of might’,
A thread that leads to the abyss
Of love, thought, death. And it was this
That held me, drew to harder sight:
Held me half-blinded by my need
Or by slow torment drew me on;
Forced me to know myself and heed
My own necessities indeed.
Yet when I summoned it, was gone.
And time would pass and here there was
Nothing, for me no end in view.
Ranging I thought it might appear,
Though sure of nothing but a fear
Of finding nothing new.
So I remember other places—
Mountains and tenements and towns;
Shadows of trees in lighted squares;
Cafés, the sound of distant fairs,
And woods and fields and downs.
I saw new faces, rare pure faces
Or hard and coarse, but as before
Was held back even by the intense
Perception—like a violence
That crouched and would recoil in war.
Drawn out, drawn forward by the sight,
Not dead at heart but separated—
Separated by that ‘weak might’,
The lack of meaning, from delight.
—Slowly the elements related:
The endless aching waste of feeling
And death, some kind of purity;
That silent madness of my youth,
The need—and hope and fear—of truth
Must be the same as poetry.
Yes, and must be the same as faith!
The mind might shudder and misgive,
But that weak power would pine and grieve,
And press the thought that to believe
A light broke in the thought that love
Can earn love: as it crossed my brain
‘Surely this longing must draw love.’
I can remember it, above
A patch of woodland, in a lane.
There were some voices in the distance,
Children at play. It was a dull
Day, but one felt the spring for sure,
The faint warm breath; and then that pure
Insight that nothing could annul.
*
I have my clue that takes me through
And as it led me glimmering there,
Brings me to an imperfect saint,
Longing for certainty and faint
From the uncertainties of prayer.
Sant’Angela who was perhaps
No more a saint than me or you,
Escaped the canon; and one sees
Why—there is sorrow and unease
In all she does or tries to do.
—Sorrow, unease or desperation:
But that is why she offers me
An emblem of the hope and strife
And death in life—the choice of life
In death—I’d have you see.
*
She tells how passing by the church
Alone in the deserted square
She could hardly walk or stand;
An impulse gripped her like a hand,
She would imagine some wild death
High in the mountains, by a shrine
With broken boulders. Or a word
Seemed spoken, that she thought absurd:
‘I have chosen you, you are mine.’
She would resist and mock, deny it,
Until one day she chanced to see
The picture of a saint embraced
By Christ, with arms about his waist;
And it said ‘So you could be.’
The picture must have been of Francis.
And still it said to her ‘So you
Could be’; and she would put it by—
Laugh at it secretly and try
To prove it never could be true.
What shall we say of weirder fancies—
Her taste for bitter food, and sighing
To have a death accompanied
With ridicule and shame; her need
To be near the sick and dying?
She asked God why he made man—why,
Once having made him, let him sin?
And why redeem the world by pain?
Then it would suddenly be plain,
As if daylight entered in:
That God could have done otherwise
But nothing better, she could see.
And then she saw beyond her will
A thing fixed and unshakeable
Which she could only say was all-good.
She saw no love, but this fixed thing;
And in the wafer of the bread
A fair boy sitting, crown on head,
With a gold rod and a ring.
Therefore she had felt certainty,
Saw with the eyes of faith and peace
The evidence—looked piercingly,
Intently, into clarity;
So that she thought it could not cease.
Yet she had watched it out of sight,
And again saw herself dejected!
Naked, in wretchedness of mind
And choked with faults of every kind;
If chosen, chosen to be rejected.
*
She left no teaching or advice,
Only what she had seen and known—
Plain statements if the soul can read:
Too bitter and too hard to plead
For any failure but her own;
But look at them as thought, as need,
Hunger—it is alive, a version
Of living out the dream, by light
And darkness, through mistrust and fright;
But most through silence and desertion.
Plato says that in Heaven there is
Laid up the pattern of a city
Which the man who desires it sees;
And he can follow its decrees
And live in justice, truth and pity.
Whether it does or ever will
Exist, that city, is another
Matter: the man who sees it still
Can live according to its will,
And be subject to no other.
Nothing could on the face of it
Be less like my experience
Than Plato’s claim—that I admit.
And yet it can be made to fit
I think, the glimpse I had, the sense
Of that ‘poor kingdom’. There it stood
Waiting, if one but stopped and groped—
Waiting for one who never came,
Or passed—the empty path, a name;
And some were dead who loved and hoped …
—Or as a lamp shines on a ceiling,
The curtains wide: through foggy night
One sees it from the country lane,
Feels quiet warm life behind the pane—
There if one would! … It was the hope
Within my hope, that gave it wings;
However it may sound obscure
The thing itself is clear and sure—
Not the exigencies it brings.
*
Or so I think this afternoon,
And passing through a Roman arch
Of yellow stone vermiculated,
Sit down and ponder in belated
Sunshine, by a tuft of larch.
The gardens are for birds in bushes
And one slow fountain; walled in stone
And set on low ground by the river,
They shelter—though the tree-tops quiver,
Continually, lightly blown.
So light a stir will not deter
The bees which are intent on going
Through that wisteria on the wall.
The sprays of blossom break and fall
And dangle, honey-scented, glowing.
And yet their delicate mauve clusters
Even in this good year are muffled
By that peculiar silky pale
Brown foliage; they had been too frail
To come without it, chilled and ruffled.
You must have seen a plant like this,
In some strange climate but assuming
The task of being what it is—
Spreading and budding, not to miss
Finally it is rich and sweet—
Spills, offers up the incense hoarded
In penury; the robe it spun
Floats and is starry in the sun;
All that was drab or sad and sordid
Melts into light! And looked at so,
Of course the plant has come together
With life, thought, impulse—all one sees
As lasting through our century’s
Long tale of broken weather.
*
For so we live it out displaced,
And caught by every wind that blows:
Revolt, mere flatulence or waste—
Terror, confusion—loveless haste,
And malice reaping as it sows.
And all these things can blast the spirit
And leave it old, and ill, and mad.
But I survived and persevered—
Even had luck, as it appeared;
So I was given—what I had.
And that was—well, what any man
At times, and even the dead world knows,
And every line should have conveyed.
If not, it is too late; they fade,
The wind drops and the sunlight goes,
And I can only moralise
What Plato said. There was a vision—
Verse, music—but the centre lies
Beyond; and my wisteria tries,
To give itself in love and light.
Which if we do, the rest is ‘sent’;
Nothing that comes can come amiss,
No evil, loss or pain. And this
May be what Plato meant.
Being incontentabile
Like Foscolo, in making verse;
Not to be satisfied but lingering
Cutting, cancelling, rubbing, fingering—
And sometimes changing bad for worse;
I might do better to end here,
Put down the pen and close my eyes.
But only to be free I’ll add
One other memory I had,
That nothing else will exorcise.
I’ll call up Shelley, give him thanks
And praise, tell him in gratitude
How at about thirteen I won
Some books at school—his book was one—
And how it rapt my solitude.
That book begot a dream in me—
To wander out alone and bare
And be a naked man and free
(And yet one would not want to be
Alone, another should be there …)
But opening to the wilderness
Of light, air, music, in the sun
Be fused with all and not repress
Love, joy and goodness that could bless
Be drunk with dew and winds that blow
Sand-dunes and budding thorns, and hope—
A sweetness like the form and glow
Of human limbs—the body so
Alive and quivering, to have scope!
*
You lie nearby, carved as if found
Washed up in nakedness, dead-white
And lax; yet not released but bound
In marble, and more deeply drowned
By that almost subaqueous light.
So at last broken, there you lie.
—No, but you breathe and burn and shine,
And from the breaking wave and dying
Flame, and the withered leaf and flying
Cloud on the barren Apennine,
The rays go out, grow out, shine here—
Everywhere! And who knows what share
You had in this, my coming here
And my desire and hope and fear;
And all that came of it elsewhere?
*
It is all like a damp-stained book,
England, an old biography—
Layer on layer where we look
Dismayed at what those people took
For life, supposing it to be
Their melancholy public labours!
—Not Shelley’s verse that spurns the crowd,
Breaks from the wreck of empires, wars,
Rebellions, and flings wide the doors
I catch at visions, worlds in brief
That point to the unchangeable,
As if I could insert a leaf
Illumined in the same belief
In art and thought and living will.