Do not go gentle into that good night, | |
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; | |
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. |
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, | |
Because their words had forked no lightning they | |
Do not go gentle into that good night. |
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright | |
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, | |
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. |
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, | |
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way. | |
Do not go gentle into that good night. |
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight | |
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, | |
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. |
And you, my father, there on the sad height, | |
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. | |
Do not go gentle into that good night. | |
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. |
The piers are pummelled by the waves; | |
In a lonely field the rain | |
Lashes an abandoned train; | |
Outlaws fill the mountain caves. |
Fantastic grow the evening gowns; | |
Agents of the Fisc pursue | |
Absconding tax-defaulters through | |
The sewers of provincial towns. |
Private rites of magic send | |
The temple prostitutes to sleep; | |
All the literati keep | |
An imaginary friend. |
Cerebrotonic Cato may | |
Extoll the Ancient Disciplines, | |
But the muscle-bound Marines | |
Mutiny for food and pay. |
Caesar’s double-bed is warm | |
As an unimportant clerk | |
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK | |
On a pink official form. |
Unendowed with wealth or pity, | |
Little birds with scarlet legs, | |
Sitting on their speckled eggs, | |
Eye each flu-infected city. |
Altogether elsewhere, vast | |
Herds of reindeer move across | |
Miles and miles of golden moss, | |
Silently and very fast. |
She looked over his shoulder | |
For vines and olive trees, | |
Marble well-governed cities, | |
And ships upon untamed seas, | |
But there on the shining metal | |
His hands had put instead | |
An artificial wilderness | |
And a sky like lead. |
A plain without a feature, bare and brown, | |
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, | |
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, | |
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood | |
An unintelligible multitude, | |
A million eyes, a million boots in line, | |
Without expression, waiting for a sign. |
Out of the air a voice without a face | |
Proved by statistics that some cause was just | |
In tones as dry and level as the place: | |
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; | |
Column by column in a cloud of dust | |
They marched away enduring a belief | |
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. |
She looked over his shoulder | |
For ritual pieties, | |
White flower-garlanded heifers, | |
Libation and sacrifice, | |
But there on the shining metal | |
Where the altar should have been, | |
She saw by his flickering forge-light | |
Quite another scene. |
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot | |
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) | |
And sentries sweated, for the day was hot: | |
A crowd of ordinary decent folk | |
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke | |
As three pale figures were led forth and bound | |
To three posts driven upright in the ground. |
The mass and majesty of this world, all | |
That carries weight and always weighs the same, | |
Lay in the hands of others; they were small | |
And could not hope for help and no help came: | |
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame | |
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride | |
And died as men before their bodies died. |
She looked over his shoulder | |
For athletes at their games, | |
Men and women in a dance | |
Moving their sweet limbs | |
Quick, quick, to music, | |
But there on the shining shield | |
His hands had set no dancing-floor | |
But a weed-choked field. |
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, | |
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird | |
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: | |
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, | |
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard | |
Of any world where promises were kept | |
Or one could weep because another wept. |
The thin-lipped armorer, | |
Hephaestos, hobbled away; | |
Thetis of the shining breasts | |
Cried out in dismay | |
At what the god had wrought | |
To please her son, the strong | |
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles | |
Who would not live long. |
The heavy mahogany door with its wrought-iron screen | |
Shuts. And the sound is rich, sympathetic, discreet. | |
The sun still shines on this eighteenth-century scene | |
With Edwardian faience adornments – Devonshire Street. |
No hope. And the X-ray photographs under his arm | |
Confirm the message. His wife stands timidly by. | |
The opposite brick-built house looks lofty and calm | |
Its chimneys steady against a mackerel sky. |
No hope. And the iron knob of this palisade | |
So cold to the touch, is luckier now than he | |
‘Oh merciless, hurrying Londoners! Why was I made | |
For the long and the painful deathbed coming to me?’ |
She puts her fingers in his as, loving and silly, | |
At long-past Kensington dances she used to do | |
‘It’s cheaper to take the tube to Piccadilly | |
And then we can catch a nineteen or a twenty-two.’ |
They are lang deid, folk that I used to ken, | |
their firm-set lips aa mowdert and agley, | |
sherp-tempert een rusty amang the cley: | |
they are baith deid, thae wycelike, bienlie men, | |
5 | heidmaisters, that had been in pouer for ten |
or twenty year afore fate’s taiglie wey | |
brocht me, a young, weill-harnit, blate and fey | |
new-cleckit dominie, intill their den. | |
Ane tellt me it was time I learnt to write – | |
10 | round-haund, he meant – and saw about my hair: |
I mind of him, beld-heidit, wi a kyte. | |
Ane sneerit quarterly – I cuidna square | |
my savings bank – and sniftert in his spite. | |
Weill, gin they arena deid, it’s time they were. |
The huge wound in my head began to heal | |
About the beginning of the seventh week. | |
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still: | |
For joy I did not move and dared not speak, | |
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient skill. |
And constantly my mind returned to Troy. | |
After I sailed the seas I fought in turn | |
On both sides, sharing even Helen’s joy | |
Of place, and growing up – to see Troy burn – | |
As Neoptolemus, that stubborn boy. |
I lay and rested as prescription said. | |
Manoeuvered with the Greeks, or sallied out | |
Each day with Hector. Finally my bed | |
Became Achilles’ tent, to which the lout | |
Thersites came reporting numbers dead. |
I was myself: subject to no man’s breath: | |
My own commander was my enemy. | |
And while my belt hung up, sword in the sheath, | |
Thersites shambled in and breathlessly | |
Cackled about my friend Patroclus’ death. |
I called for armour, rose, and did not reel. | |
But, when I thought, rage at his noble pain | |
Flew to my head, and turning I could feel | |
My wound break open wide. Over again | |
I had to let those storm-lit valleys heal. |
The eye can hardly pick them out | |
From the cold shade they shelter in, | |
Till wind distresses tail and mane; | |
Then one crops grass, and moves about | |
– The other seeming to look on – | |
And stands anonymous again. |
Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps | |
Two dozen distances sufficed | |
To fable them: faint afternoons | |
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps, | |
Whereby their names were artificed | |
To inlay faded, classic Junes – |
Silks at the start: against the sky | |
Numbers and parasols: outside, | |
Squadrons of empty cars, and heat, | |
And littered grass: then the long cry | |
Hanging unhushed till it subside | |
To stop-press columns on the street. |
Do memories plague their ears like flies? | |
They shake their heads. Dusk brims the shadows. | |
Summer by summer all stole away, | |
The starting-gates, the crowds and cries – | |
All but the unmolesting meadows. | |
Almanacked, their names live; they |
Have slipped their names, and stand at ease, | |
Or gallop for what must be joy, | |
And not a fieldglass sees them home, | |
Or curious stop-watch prophesies: | |
Only the groom, and the groom’s boy, | |
With bridles in the evening come. |
Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass | |
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass | |
The water in the horse-trough shines. | |
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines. |
A hen stares at nothing with one eye, | |
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky | |
A swallow falls and, flickering through | |
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue. |
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass, | |
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as | |
This grasshopper with plated face | |
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space. |
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand | |
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand | |
Lift the farm like a lid and see | |
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me. |
Barely a twelvemonth after | |
The seven days war that put the world to sleep, | |
Late in the evening the strange horses came. | |
By then we had made our covenant with silence, | |
But in the first few days it was so still | |
We listened to our breathing and were afraid. | |
On the second day | |
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer. | |
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north, | |
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day | |
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter | |
Nothing. The radios dumb; | |
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, | |
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms | |
All over the world. But now if they should speak, | |
If on a sudden they should speak again, | |
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, | |
We would not listen, we would not let it bring | |
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick | |
At one great gulp. We would not have it again. | |
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, | |
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, | |
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. | |
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening | |
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting. | |
We leave them where they are and let them rust: | |
‘They’ll moulder away and be like other loam’. | |
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs, | |
Long laid aside. We have gone back | |
Far past our fathers’ land. | |
And then, that evening Late in the summer the strange horses came. | |
We heard a distant tapping on the road, | |
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again | |
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder. | |
We saw the heads | |
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid. | |
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time | |
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us | |
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield | |
Or illustrations in a book of knights. | |
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited, | |
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent | |
By an old command to find our whereabouts | |
And that long-lost archaic companionship. | |
In the first moment we had never a thought | |
That they were creatures to be owned and used. | |
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts | |
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, | |
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden. | |
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads | |
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. | |
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning. |
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: | |
Something else is alive | |
Beside the clock’s loneliness | |
And this blank page where my fingers move. |
Through the window I see no star: | |
Something more near | |
Though deeper within darkness | |
Is entering the loneliness: |
Cold, delicately as the dark snow | |
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; | |
Two eyes serve a movement, that now | |
And again now, and now, and now |
Sets neat prints into the snow | |
Between trees, and warily a lame | |
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow | |
Of a body that is bold to come |
Across clearings, an eye, | |
A widening deepening greenness, | |
Brilliantly, concentratedly, | |
Coming about its own business |
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox | |
It enters the dark hole of the head. | |
The window is starless still; the clock ticks, | |
The page is printed. |
Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors | |
The winking signal on the waste of sea. | |
Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind. | |
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key. |
Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors | |
The strong man pained to find his red blood cools, | |
While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors | |
The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules. |
Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors | |
The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep. | |
Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross | |
Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep. |
Nobody heard him, the dead man, | |
But still he lay moaning: | |
I was much further out than you thought | |
And not waving but drowning. |