FOR WALTER ALLEN
Let us not call it progress: movement certainly
And under direction, though what directions we move in
Is anyone’s guess. … It is as if a man
Leapt from one ship to another, and instantly looks round
And the ship he leapt from has dropped below the horizon
Or sunk. But not without trace.
The world we were young in has
Disintegrated; yet scraps of it bob in our wake like flotsam.
Not the great wars, discoveries, revolutions –
They have done their worst, or best, and are accomplished,
As the young I has become an historic figure already
Subject to history’s over- and under-simplifications.
No, it’s the marginal crises, the magical trivia
Which, against all reason, haunt me.
Finding white heather on a Mayo hillside,
A boy lamenting his toy boat lost on its first voyage,
A girl’s first glance – no hint of the bliss and bane that would follow –
In such small relics my dead world lives on.
Time, that has proved we can survive, puts back
The sirens on their rock, the Cyclops in his cave:
We see their point now we no longer fear them.
Those desperate straits are never the world’s end:
There is always more beyond, marvels beyond to draw us,
Movement certainly: perhaps we may call it progress.
1 First appeared in On the Novel edited by B. S. Benedikz – a present for Walter Allen’s 60th birthday.