Mantled in grey, the dusk steals slowly in,
Crossing the dead, dull fields with footsteps cold.
The rain drips drearily; night’s fingers spin
A web of drifting mist o’er wood and wold,
5 As quiet as death. The sky is silent too,
Hard as granite and as fixed as fate.
The pale pond stands; ringed round with rushes few
And draped with leaning trees, it seems to wait
But for the coming of the winter night
10 Of deep December; blowing o’er the graves
Of faded summers, swift the wind in flight
Ripples its silent face with lapping waves.
The rain falls still: bowing, the woods bemoan;
Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.
Stands the Spring! – heralded by its bright-clothed
Trumpeters, of bough and bush and branch;
Pale Winter draws away his white hands, loathed,
And creeps, a leper, to the cave of time.
5 Spring the flowers! – a host of nodding gold,
Leaping and laughing in the boist’rous wind,
Tinged with a yellow as yet not grown old,
Green and yellow set against the soil.
Flowers the blossom! – loaded, swaying arms
10 Of sated stalks, heaped with pink and white
Of fresh youth’s cheek; they lightly throw their charms
Into the fragrance of the deep, wet grass.
Now night perfumes lie upon the air,
As rests the blossom on the loaded bough;
And each deep-drawn breath is redolent
Of all the folded flowers’ mingled scent
5 That rises in confused rapture now,
As from some cool vase filled with petals rare;
And from the silver goblet of the moon
A ghostly light spills down on arched trees,
And filters through their lace to touch the flowers
10 Among the grass; the silent, dark moon-hours
Flow past, born on the wayward breeze
That wanders through the quiet night of June.
Now time should stop; the web of charm is spun
By the moon’s fingers over lawns and flowers;
15 All pleasures I would give, if this sweet night
Would ever stay, cooled by the pale moonlight;
But no! for in a few white-misted hours
The East must yellow with to-morrow’s sun.
When night slinks, like a puma, down the sky,
And the bare, windy streets echo with silence,
Street lamps come out, and lean at corners, awry,
Casting black shadows, oblique and intense;
5 So they burn on, impersonal, through the night,
Hearing the hours slowly topple past
Like cold drops from a glistening stalactite,
Until grey planes splinter the gloom at last;
Then they go out.
I think I noticed once
10 –’Twas morning – one sole street-lamp still bright-lit,
Which, with a senile grin, like an old dunce,
Vied the blue sky, and tried to rival it;
And, leering pallid though its use was done,
Tried to cast shadows contrary to the sun.
And the walker sees the sunlit battlefield
Where winter was fought: the broken sticks in the sun;
Allotments fresh spaded: here are seen
The builders on their high scaffold,
5 And the red clubhouse flag.
The light, the turf, and all that grows now urge
The uncertain dweller blinking to emerge,
To learn the simpler movements of the jig
And free his gladder impulses from gag.
10 But there are some who mutter: ‘Joy
Is for the simple or the great to feel,
Neither of which we are.’ They file
The easy chain that bound us, jeer
At our ancestral forge:
15 Refuse the sun that flashes from their high
Attic windows, and follow with their eye
The muffled boy, with his compelling badge,
On his serious errand riding to the gorge.
Anxious to publicise and pay our dues
Contracted here, we, Bernard Noel Hughes
And Philip Arthur Larkin, do desire
To requite and to reward those whom we choose;
5 To thank our friends, before our time expire,
And those whom, if not friends, we yet admire.
First, our corporeal remains we give
Unto the Science Sixth – demonstrative
Of physical fitness – for minute dissection;
10 Trusting that they will generously forgive
Any trifling lapses from perfection,
And give our viscera their close attention.
– With one exception: we bequeath our ears
To the Musical Society, and hope
15 It finds out why they loathed the panatrope –
(And, however pointed it appears,
We leave the wash-bowls twenty cakes of soap)
Item, herewith to future pioneers
In realms of knowledge, we bequeath our books,
20 And woe pursue who to a master quotes
The funnier of our witty marginal notes.
Likewise, we leave the Modern Sixth the jokes
This year has fostered, and to him who croaks
Of Higher School Certificates, ten sore throats.
25 Item, our school reports we leave the Staff,
To give them, as we hope, a hearty laugh;
And Kipling’s ‘If’ to hang upon their wall.
Sympathy for the impossible task
Of teaching us to swim the six-beat crawl
30 We leave our swimming master. Item, all
Our Magnets and our Wizards we consign
To the Librarian in the cause of Culture
And may his Library flourish well in future;
Next (now the troops have taken their departure)
35 With ever-grateful hearts we do assign
To our French master, all the Maginot Line.
Essays, and our notes on style and diction,
We leave our English master, confident
He won’t consider them as an infliction.
40 Our German master, for the sore affliction
Of teaching us, we humbly present
With an Iron Cross (First Class, but slightly bent);
To the Art Master, as the only one
Appreciative (and, Philistines to thwart)
45 We leave a blue cap and four ties that stun:
And all the Scholarships we never won
We give to those who want things of that sort:
And to the Savings Groups … our full support.
Our Games Master we leave some high-jump stands
50 – The reason why we know he understands –
And to the Carpenter the grass he’s mown.
To Paul Montgomery, a sturdy comb
To discipline his rough and ruddy strands;
And Mr H. B. Gould we leave … alone.
55 We leave our Latin cribs to William Rider,
And may his shadow never disappear;
To the Zoologists, a common spider;
And, for their services throughout the year,
To the Air Defence Cadets a model glider;
60 And to the First XV a cask of beer.
Item, to Percy Slater we now send
A candle he can burn at either end,
And hours of toil without the ill-effects;
Our badges we resign to future Prefects,
65 The lines-book, too; to F. G. Smith, our friend,
We leave a compact and a bottle of Cutex;
And all the paper that we never needed
For this Coventrian, to Ian Fraser,
And may he triumph where we’ve not succeeded:
70 To his subordinates, an ink eraser …
And this Magazine itself? Well, there’s always a
Lot of people queer enough to read it.
Herewith we close, with Time’s apology
For the ephemeral injury,
75 On this 26th of July, 1940.
But we must build our walls, for what we are
Necessitates it, and we must construct
The ship to navigate behind them, there.
Hopeless to ignore, helpless instruct
5 For any term of time beyond the years
That warn us of the need for emigration:
Exploded the ancient saying: Life is yours.
For on our island is no railway station,
There are no tickets for the Vale of Peace,
10 No docks where trading ships and seagulls pass.
Remember stories you read when a boy
– The shipwrecked sailor gaining safety by
His knife, treetrunk, and lianas – for now
Tired of a landscape known too well when young:
The deliberate shallow hills, the boring birds
Flying past rocks; tired of remembering
The village children and their naughty words,
5 He abandoned his small holding and went South,
Recognised at once his wished-for lie
In the inhabitants’ attractive mouth,
The church beside the marsh, the hot blue sky.
Settled. And in this mirage lived his dreams,
10 The friendly bully, saint, or lovely chum
According to his moods. Yet he at times
Would think about his village, and would wonder
If the children and the rocks were still the same.
But he forgot all this as he grew older.
‘Interesting, but futile,’ said his diary
Where day by day his movements were recorded
And nothing but his loves received inquiry;
He knew, of course, no actions were rewarded,
5 There were no prizes: though the eye could see
Wide beauty in a motion or a pause,
It need expect no lasting salary
Beyond the bowels’ momentary applause.
He lived for years and never was surprised:
10 A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
A month ago in fields
Rehearsals were begun;
The stage that summer builds
And confidently holds
5 Was floodlit by the sun
And habited by men.
But parts were not correct:
The gestures of the crowd
Invented to attract
10 Need practice to perfect,
And balancing of cloud
With sunlight must be made;
So awkward was this May
Then training to prepare
15 Summer’s impressive lie –
Upon whose every day
So many ruined are
May could not make aware.
Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock,
The hand impervious to nervous shock,
The future proofed against our vain suspense;
5 But since the tideline of the incoming past
Is where we walk, and it is air we breathe,
Remember then our only shape is death
When mask and face are nailed apart at last.
Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears,
10 Machine-gun practice on the heart’s desires
Speak of a government of medalled fears.
Shake, wind, the branches of their crooked wood,
Where much is picturesque but nothing good,
Time running beneath the pillow wakes
Lovers entrained who in the name of love
Were promised the steeples and fanlights of a dream;
Joins the renters of each single room
5 Across the tables to observe a life
Dissolving in the acid of their sex;
Time that scatters hair upon a head
Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn;
Signing an annual permit for the frost
10 Ploughs the stubble in the land at last
To introduce the unknown to the known
And only by politeness make them breed;
Time over the roofs of what has nearly been
Circling, a migratory, static bird,
15 Predicts no change in future’s lancing shape,
And daylight shows the streets still tangled up;
Time points the simian camera in the head
Upon confusion to be seen and seen.
A white girl lay on the grass
With her arms held out for love;
Her goldbrown hair fell down her face,
And her two lips move:
5 See, I am the whitest cloud that strays
Through a deep sky:
I am your senses’ crossroads,
Where the four seasons lie.
She rose up in the middle of the lawn
10 And spread her arms wide;
And the webbed earth where she had lain
Planted deeper than roots,
This chiselled, flung-up faith
Runs and leaps against the sky,
A prayer killed into stone
5 Among the always-dying trees;
Windows throw back the sun
And hands are folded in their work at peace,
Though where they lie
The dead are shapeless in the shapeless earth.
10 Because, though taller the elms,
It forever rejects the soil,
Because its suspended bells
Beat when the birds are dumb,
And men are buried, and leaves burnt
15 Every indifferent autumn,
I have looked on that proud front
And the calm locked into walls,
I have worshipped that whispering shell.
Yet the wound, O see the wound
20 This petrified heart has taken,
Because, created deathless,
Nothing but death remained
To scatter magnificence;
And now what scaffolded mind
25 Can rebuild experience
As coral is set budding under seas,
Though none, O none sees what pattern it is making?
A box of teak, a box of sandalwood,
A brass-ringed spyglass in a case,
A coin, leaf-thin with many polishings,
Last kingdom of a gold forgotten face,
5 These lie about the room, and daily shine
When new-built ships set out towards the sun.
If they had any roughness, any flaw,
An unfamiliar scent, all this has gone;
They are no more than ornaments, or eyes,
10 No longer knowing what they looked upon,
Turned sightless; rivers of Eden, rivers of blood
Once blinded them, and were not understood.
The hands that chose them rest upon a stick.
Let my hands find such symbols, that can be
15 Unnoticed in the casual light of day,
Lying in wait for half a century
To split chance lives across, that had not dreamed
Such coasts had echoed, or such seabirds screamed.
Her hands intend no harm:
Her hands devote themselves
To sheltering a flame;
Winds are her enemies,
5 And everything that strives
To bring her cold and darkness.
But wax and wick grow short:
These she so dearly guards
Despite her care die out;
10 Her hands are not strong enough
Her hands will fall to her sides
And no wind will trouble to break her grief.
Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don’t care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
5 Choose something you know all about
Your childhood, your Dad pegging out,
How you sleep with your wife.
But that’s not sufficient, unless
10 You make me feel good –
Whatever you’re ‘trying to express’
Let it be understood
That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads,
Makes ‘all for the best’,
15 That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be ‘depressed’.
For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket –
20 So stop looking blue
And start serving up your sensations
Before it’s too late;
Just please me for two generations –
You’ll be ‘truly great’.
On shallow slates the pigeons shift together,
Backing against a thin rain from the west
Blown across each sunk head and settled feather.
Huddling round the warm stack suits them best,
5 Till winter daylight weakens, and they grow
Hardly defined against the brickwork. Soon,
Light from a small intense lopsided moon
Shows them, black as their shadows, sleeping so.
Tops heel and yaw,
Sent newly spinning:
Squirm round the floor
At the beginning,
5 Then draw gravely up
Like candle-flames, till
Moving, yet still.
So they run on,
10 Until, with a falter,
A flicker – soon gone –
Their pace starts to alter:
Heeling again
As if hopelessly tired
15 They wobble, and then
The poise we admired
Reels, clatters and sprawls,
Pathetically over.
– And what most appals
20 Is that first tiny shiver,
That stumble, whereby
We know beyond doubt
They have almost run out
And are starting to die.
To fail (transitive and intransitive)
I find to mean be missing, disappoint,
Or not succeed in the attainment of
(As in this case, f. to do what I want);
5 They trace it from the Latin to deceive …
Yes. But it wasn’t that I played unfair:
Under fourteen, I sent in six words
My Chief Ambition to the Editor
With the signed promise about afterwards –
10 I undertake rigidly to forswear
The diet of this world, all rich game
And fat forbidding fruit, go by the board
Until – But that until has never come,
And I am starving where I always did.
15 Time to fall to, I fancy: long past time.
The explanation goes like this, in daylight:
To be ambitious is to fall in love
With a particular life you haven’t got
And (since love picks your opposite) won’t achieve.
20 That’s clear as day. But come back late at night,
You’ll hear a curious counter-whispering:
Success, it says, you’ve scored a great success.
Your wish has flowered, you’ve dodged the dirty feeding,
Clean past it now at hardly any price –
25 Just some pretence about the other thing.
Words as plain as hen-birds’ wings
Do not lie,
Do not over-broider things –
Are too shy.
5 Thoughts that shuffle round like pence
Through each reign,
Wear down to their simplest sense,
Yet remain.
Weeds are not supposed to grow,
10 But by degrees
Some achieve a flower, although
No one sees.
Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are,
As bribes to teach them how to execute
Sixteen sexual positions on the sand;
5 This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,
Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and
On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub
By private car.
Such uncorrected visions end in church
10 Or registrar:
A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;
Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme
With money; illness; age. So absolute
Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream
15 Of naked native girls who bring breadfruit
Whatever they are.
The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough,
Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
5 Just for your own sake.
What cheek it must take.
And then the unselfish side –
How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
10 So that you come off worst?
My life is for me.
As well ignore gravity.
Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
15 Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
Is ever wholly rebuffed,
And he can get stuffed.
When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?
Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of L.S.E.?
How high they build hospitals!
Lighted cliffs, against dawns
Of days people will die on.
I can see one from here.
5 How cold winter keeps
Our need now for kindness.
Spring has got into the wrong year.
How few people are,
10 Held apart by acres
Of housing, and children
With their shallow violent eyes.
On pillow after pillow lies
The wild white hair and staring eyes;
Jaws stand open; necks are stretched
With every tendon sharply sketched;
5 A bearded mouth talks silently
To someone no one else can see.
Sixty years ago they smiled
At lover, husband, first-born child.
Smiles are for youth. For old age come
10 Death’s terror and delirium.
Continuing to live – that is, repeat
A habit formed to get necessaries –
Is nearly always losing, or going without.
It varies.
5 This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise –
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
10 You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
15 All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
20 And that one dying.
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your own way
5 – A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that’s been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I’ve never done what I don’t.
So the shit in the shuttered château
10 Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
15 (Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) …
Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
20 The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
I hope games like tossing the caber
Are never indulged in at Faber;
To balance a column
Of cash is more solemn
5 And much more rewarding a labour!
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
5 Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
10 Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
15 Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
20 And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
25 And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
30 The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
35 And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
40 Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
45 Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
50 Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
In times when nothing stood
But worsened, or grew strange,
There was one constant good:
The fire is ash: the early morning sun
Outlines the patterns on the curtains, drawn
The night before. The milk’s been on the step,
The Guardian in the letter-box, since dawn.
5 Upstairs, the beds have not been touched, and thence
Builders’ estates and the main road are seen,
With labourers, petrol-pumps, a Green Line ’bus,
And plots of cabbages set in between.
But the living-room is ruby: there upon
10 Cushions from Harrods, strewn in tumbled heaps
Around the floor, smelling of smoke and wine,
Rosemary sits. Her hands are clasped. She weeps.
She stares about her: round the decent walls
(The ribbon lost, her pale gold hair falls down)
15 Sees books and photos: ‘Dance’; ‘The Rhythmic Life’;
Miss Rachel Wilson in a cap and gown.
Stretched out before her, Rachel curls and curves,
Eyelids and lips apart, her glances filled
With satisfied ferocity; she smiles,
20 As beasts smile on the prey they have just killed.
The marble clock has stopped. The curtained sun
Burns on: the room grows hot. There, it appears,
A vase of flowers has spilt, and soaked away.
The only sound heard is the sound of tears.
New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books, too,
Old eyes renew;
5 So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin.
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
5 Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
10 Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
The words of a cantata composed by Anthony Hedges to celebrate the opening of the Humber Bridge, first performed at the City Hall in Hull on 11 April 1981.
Isolate city spread alongside water,
Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.
5 Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies
Of gold and shadows build; a filigree
Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,
Her working skyline wanders to the sea.
In her remote three-cornered hinterland
10 Long white-flowered lanes follow the riverside.
The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,
Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide
Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,
Their churches half-submerged in leaf. They lie
15 Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,
The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.
Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on,
Tall church-towers parley, airily audible,
20 Howden and Beverley, Hedon and Patrington,
While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness,
A lighted memory no miles eclipse,
A harbour for the heart against distress.
*
25 And now this stride into our solitude,
A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,
A giant step for ever to include
All our dear landscape in a new design.
The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
30 Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.
Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began
35 Seem now to reassemble and unclose,
All resurrected in this single span,
Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
40 Always it is by bridges that we live.
When Coote roared: ‘Mitchell! what about this jazz?’
Don thought, That’s just the talent Philip has;
And even if he finds it bad or worse
At least he’ll have less time for writing verse …
Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead,
Offers this doggerel instead
To carry from the frozen North
Warm greetings for the twenty-fourth
5 Of lucky August, best of months
For us, as for that Roman once –
For you’re a Leo, same as me
So lordly, selfish, vital, strong?
10 Or do you think they’ve got it wrong?),
And may its golden hours portend
As many years for you to spend.
One of the sadder things, I think,
Is how our birthdays slowly sink:
15 Presents and parties disappear,
The cards grow fewer year by year,
Till, when one reaches sixty-five,
How many care we’re still alive?
Ah, CHARLES, be reassured! For you
20 Make lasting friends with all you do,
And all you write; your truth and sense
We count on as a sure defence
Against the trendy and the mad,
The feeble and the downright bad.
25 I hope you have a splendid day
Acclaimed by wheeling gulls at play
And barking seals, sea-lithe and lazy
(My view of Cornwall’s rather hazy),
And humans who don’t think it sinful
30 To mark your birthday with a skinful.
Although I’m trying very hard
To sound unlike a birthday card,
That’s all this is: so you may find it
Full of all that lies behind it –
35 Admiration; friendship too;
And hope that in the future you
Reap ever richer revenue.
By day, a lifted study-storehouse; night
Converts it to a flattened cube of light.
Whichever’s shown, the symbol is the same:
I never remember holding a full drink.
My first look shows the level half-way down.
What next? Ration the rest, and try to think
Of higher things, until mine host comes round?
5 Some people say, best show an empty glass:
Someone will fill it. Well, I’ve tried that too.
You may get drunk, or dry half-hours may pass.
It seems to turn on where you are. Or who.