PHILIP LARKIN Days

	What are days for?
	Days are where we live.
	They come, they wake us
	Time and time over.
	They are to be happy in:
	Where can we live but days?

	Ah, solving that question
	Brings the priest and the doctor
	In their long coats
	Running over the fields.

(written 1953)

PHILIP LARKIN Afternoons

	Summer is fading:
	The leaves fall in ones and twos
	From trees bordering
	The new recreation ground.
	In the hollows of afternoons
	Young mothers assemble
	At swing and sandpit
	Setting free their children.

	Behind them, at intervals,
	Stand husbands in skilled trades,
	An estateful of washing,
	And the albums, lettered
	Our Wedding, lying
	Near the television:
	Before them, the wind
	Is ruining their courting-places

	That are still courting-places
	(But the lovers are all in school),
	And their children, so intent on
	Finding more unripe acorns,
	Expect to be taken home.
	Their beauty has thickened.
	Something is pushing them
	To the side of their own lives.

DONALD DAVIE The Hill Field

	Look there! What a wheaten
	Half-loaf, halfway to bread,
	A cornfield is, that is eaten
	Away, and harvested:

	How like a loaf, where the knife
	Has cut and come again,
	Jagged where the farmer’s wife
	Has served the farmer’s men,

	That steep field is, where the reaping
	Has only just begun
	On a wedge-shaped front, and the creeping
	Steel edges glint in the sun.

	See the cheese-like shape it is taking,
	The sliced-off walls of the wheat
	And the cheese-mite reapers making
	Inroads there, in the heat?

	It is Brueghel or Samuel Palmer,
	Some painter, coming between
	My eye and the truth of a farmer,
	So massively sculpts the scene.

	The sickles of poets dazzle
	These eyes that were filmed from birth;
	And the miller comes with an easel
	To grind the fruits of earth.

1965 SYLVIA PLATH Sheep in Fog

	The hills step off into whiteness.
	People or stars
	Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

	The train leaves a line of breath.
	O slow
	Horse the color of rust,

	Hooves, dolorous bells –
	All morning the
	Morning has been blackening,

	A flower left out.
	My bones hold a stillness, the far
	Fields melt my heart.

	They threaten
	To let me through to a heaven
	Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

SYLVIA PLATH The Arrival of the Bee Box

	I ordered this, this clean wood box
	Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
	I would say it was the coffin of a midget
	Or a square baby
	Were there not such a din in it.

	The box is locked, it is dangerous.
	I have to live with it overnight
	And I can’t keep away from it.
	There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
	There is only a little grid, no exit.

	I put my eye to the grid.
	It is dark, dark,
	With the swarmy feeling of African hands
	Minute and shrunk for export,
	Black on black, angrily clambering.

	How can I let them out?
	It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
	The unintelligible syllables.
	It is like a Roman mob,
	Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

	I lay my ear to furious Latin.
	I am not a Caesar.
	I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
	They can be sent back.
	They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

	I wonder how hungry they are.
	I wonder if they would forget me
	If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
	There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
	And the petticoats of the cherry.

	They might ignore me immediately
	In my moon suit and funeral veil.
	I am no source of honey
	So why should they turn on me?
	Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

SYLVIA PLATH Edge

	The woman is perfected.
	Her dead

	Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
	The illusion of a Greek necessity

	Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
	Her bare

	Feet seem to be saying:
	We have come so far, it is over.

	Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
	One at each little

	Pitcher of milk, now empty.
	She has folded

	Them back into her body as petals
	Of a rose close when the garden

	Stiffens and odors bleed
	From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

	The moon has nothing to be sad about,
	Staring from her hood of bone.

	She is used to this sort of thing.
	Her blacks crackle and drag.

BASIL BUNTING from Briggflatts 1966

	I
	Brag, sweet tenor bull,
	descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
	each pebble its part
	for the fells’ late spring.
	Dance tiptoe, bull,
	black against may.
	Ridiculous and lovely
	chase hurdling shadows
	morning into noon.
	May on the bull’s hide
	and through the dale
	furrows fill with may,
	paving the slowworm’s way.

	A mason times his mallet
	to a lark’s twitter,
	listening while the marble rests,
	lays his rule
	at a letter’s edge,
	fingertips checking,
	till the stone spells a name
	naming none,
	a man abolished.
	Painful lark, labouring to rise!
	The solemn mallet says:
	In the grave’s slot
	he lies. We rot.

	Decay thrusts the blade,
	wheat stands in excrement
	trembling. Rawthey trembles.
	Tongue stumbles, ears err
	for fear of spring.
	Rub the stone with sand,
	wet sandstone rending
	roughness away. Fingers
	ache on the rubbing stone.
	The mason says: Rocks
	happen by chance.
	No one here bolts the door,
	love is so sore.

	Stone smooth as skin,
	cold as the dead they load
	on a low lorry by night.
	The moon sits on the fell
	but it will rain.
	Under sacks on the stone
	two children lie,
	hear the horse stale,
	the mason whistle,
	harness mutter to shaft,
	felloe to axle squeak,
	rut thud the rim,
	crushed grit.

	Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,
	head to a hard arm,
	they kiss under the rain,
	bruised by their marble bed.
	In Garsdale, dawn;
	at Hawes, tea from the can.
	Rain stops, sacks
	steam in the sun, they sit up.
	Copper-wire moustache,
	sea-reflecting eyes
	and Baltic plainsong speech
	declare: By such rocks
	men killed Bloodaxe.

	Fierce blood throbs in his tongue,
	lean words.
	Skulls cropped for steel caps
	huddle round Stainmore.
	Their becks ring on limestone,
	whisper to peat.
	The clogged cart pushes the horse downhill.
	In such soft air
	they trudge and sing,
	laying the tune frankly on the air.
	All sounds fall still,
	fellside bleat,
	hide-and-seek peewit.

	Her pulse their pace,
	palm countering palm,
	till a trench is filled,
	stone white as cheese
	jeers at the dale.
	Knotty wood, hard to rive,
	smoulders to ash;
	smell of October apples.
	The road again,
	at a trot.
	Wetter, warmed, they watch
	the mason meditate
	on name and date.

	Rain rinses the road,
	the bull streams and laments.
	Sour rye porridge from the hob
	with cream and black tea,
	meat, crust and crumb.
	Her parents in bed
	the children dry their clothes.
	He has untied the tape
	of her striped flannel drawers
	before the range. Naked
	on the pricked rag mat
	his fingers comb
	thatch of his manhood’s home.

	Gentle generous voices weave
	over bare night
	words to confirm and delight
	till bird dawn.
	Rainwater from the butt
	she fetches and flannel
	to wash him inch by inch,
	kissing the pebbles.
	Shining slowworm part of the marvel.
	The mason stirs:
	Words!
	Pens are too light.
	Take a chisel to write.

	Every birth a crime,
	every sentence life.
	Wiped of mould and mites
	would the ball run true?
	No hope of going back.
	Hounds falter and stray,
	shame deflects the pen.
	Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles
	but jogs the draftsman’s elbow.
	What can he, changed, tell
	her, changed, perhaps dead?
	Delight dwindles. Blame
	stays the same.

	Brief words are hard to find,
	shapes to carve and discard:
	Bloodaxe, king of York,
	king of Dublin, king of Orkney.
	Take no notice of tears;
	letter the stone to stand
	over love laid aside lest
	insufferable happiness impede
	flight to Stainmore,
	to trace
	lark, mallet,
	becks, flocks
	and axe knocks.

	Dung will not soil the slowworm’s
	mosaic. Breathless lark
	drops to nest in sodden trash;
	Rawthey truculent, dingy.
	Drudge at the mallet, the may is down,
	fog on fells. Guilty of spring
	and spring’s ending
	amputated years ache after
	the bull is beef, love a convenience.
	It is easier to die than to remember.
	Name and date
	split in soft slate
	a few months obliterate.

R. S. THOMAS Pietà

	Always the same hills
	Crowd the horizon.
	Remote witnesses
	Of the still scene.

	And in the foreground
	The tall Cross,
	Sombre, untenanted,
	Aches for the Body
	That is back in the cradle
	Of a maid’s arms.

R. S. THOMAS Gifts

	From my father my strong heart,
	My weak stomach.
	From my mother the fear.

From my sad country the shame.

	To my wife all I have
	Saving only the love
	That is not mine to give.

To my one son the hunger.

SEAMUS HEANEY Personal Helicon

	for Michael Longley
	As a child, they could not keep me from wells
	And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
	I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
	Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

	One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
	I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
	Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
	So deep you saw no reflection in it.

	A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
	Fructified like any aquarium.
	When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
	A white face hovered over the bottom.

	Others had echoes, gave back your own call
	With a clean new music in it. And one
	Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
	Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

	Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
	To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
	Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
	To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

1967 TED HUGHES Thistles

	Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
	Thistles spike the summer air
	Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

	Every one a revengeful burst
	Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
	Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

	From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
	They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
	Every one manages a plume of blood.

	Then they grow grey, like men.
	Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
	Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

TED HUGHES Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

	And you listening.
	A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
	A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
	To tempt a first star to a tremor.

	Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –
	A dark river of blood, many boulders,
	Balancing unspilled milk.

‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

JOHN MONTAGUE from A Chosen Light

	II rue Daguerre
	At night, sometimes, when I cannot sleep
	I go to the atelier door
	And smell the earth of the garden.

	It exhales softly,
	Especially now, approaching springtime,
	When tendrils of green are plaited

	Across the humus, desperately frail
	In their passage against
	The dark, unredeemed parcels of earth.

	There is white light on the cobblestones
	And in the apartment house opposite –
	All four floors – silence.

	In that stillness – soft but luminously exact,
	A chosen light – I notice that
	The tips of the lately grafted cherry-tree

Are a firm and lacquered black.

GEORGE THEINER from the Czech of Miroslav Holub The Fly

	She sat on a willow-trunk
	watching
	part of the battle of Crécy,
	the shouts,
	the gasps,
	the groans,
	the tramping and the tumbling.

	During the fourteenth charge
	of the French cavalry
	she mated
	with a brown-eyed male fly
	from Vadincourt.

	She rubbed her legs together
	as she sat on a disembowelled horse
	meditating
	on the immortality of flies.

	With relief she alighted
	on the blue tongue
	of the Duke of Clervaux.

	When silence settled
	and only the whisper of decay
	softly circled the bodies

	and only
	a few arms and legs
	still twitched jerkily under the trees,

	she began to lay her eggs
	on the single eye
	of Johann Uhr,
	the Royal Armourer.

	And thus it was
	that she was eaten by a swift
	fleeing
	from the fires of Estrées.

GEOFFREY HILL Ovid in The Third Reich 1968

	non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,
	solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
	(AMORES, III, XIV)

	I love my work and my children. God
	Is distant, difficult. Things happen.
	Too near the ancient troughs of blood
	Innocence is no earthly weapon.

	I have learned one thing: not to look down
	So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
	Harmonize strangely with the divine
	Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

GEOFFREY HILL September Song

	born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42
	Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
	you were not. Not forgotten
	or passed over at the proper time.

	As estimated, you died. Things marched,
	sufficient, to that end.
	Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
	terror, so many routine cries.

	(I have made
	an elegy for myself it
	is true)

	September fattens on vines. Roses
	flake from the wall. The smoke
	of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

ROY FISHER As He Came Near Death

	As he came near death things grew shallower for us:
	We’d lost sleep and now sat muffled in the scent of tulips, the medical odours, and the street sounds going past, going away;
	And he, too, slept little, the morphine and the pink light the curtains let through floating him with us,
	So that he lay and was worked out on to the skin of his life and left there,
	And we had to reach only a little way into the warm bed to scoop him up.

	A few days, slow tumbling escalators of visitors and cheques, and something like popularity;
	During this time somebody washed him in a soap called Narcissus and mounted him, frilled with satin, in a polished case.

	Then the hole: this was a slot punched in a square of plastic grass rug, a slot lined with white polythene, floored with dyed green gravel.
	The box lay in it; we rode in the black cars round a corner, got out into our coloured cars and dispersed in easy stages.

After a time the grave got up and went away.

ROY FISHER The Memorial Fountain

	The fountain plays
	through summer dusk in gaunt shadows,
	black constructions
	against a late clear sky,
	water in the basin
	where the column falls
	shaking,
	rapid and wild,
	in cross-waves, in back-waves,
	the light glinting and blue,
	as in a wind
	though there is none,
	Harsh
	skyline!
	Far-off scaffolding
	bitten against the air.

	Sombre mood
	in the presence of things,
	no matter what things;
	respectful sepia.

	This scene:
	people on the public seats
	embedded in it, darkening
	intelligences of what’s visible;
	private, given over, all of them –

Many scenes.

Still sombre.

	As for the fountain:
	nothing in the describing
	beyond what shows
	for anyone;
	above all
	no ‘atmosphere’.
	It’s like this often –
	I don’t exaggerate.
	And the scene?
	a thirty-five-year-old man,
	poet,
	by temper, realist,
	watching a fountain
	and the figures round it
	in garish twilight,
	working
	to distinguish an event
	from an opinion;
	this man,
	intent and comfortable –

Romantic notion.

1969 MICHAEL LONGLEY Persephone

	I
	I see as through a skylight in my brain
	The mole strew its buildings in the rain,

	The swallows turn above their broken home
	And all my acres in delirium.

	II
	Straitjacketed by cold and numskulled
	Now sleep the welladjusted and the skilled –

	The bat folds its wing like a winter leaf,
	The squirrel in its hollow holds aloof.

	III
	The weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox
	Move hand in glove across the equinox.

	I can tell how softly their footsteps go –
	Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow.

DOUGLAS DUNN A Removal from Terry Street

	On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
	A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
	Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
	In surplus US Army battle-jackets
	Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
	Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
	Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
	And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
	There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
	Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
	That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

DOUGLAS DUNN On Roofs of Terry Street

	Television aerials, Chinese characters
	In the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.

	Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,
	Urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.

	Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
	A builder is repairing someone’s leaking roof.

	He kneels upright to rest his back.
	His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.

NORMAN MACCAIG Wild Oats

	Every day I see from my window
	pigeons, up on a roof ledge – the males
	are wobbling gyroscopes of lust.

	Last week a stranger joined them, a snowwhite
	pouting fantail,
	Mae West in the Women’s Guild.

	What becks, what croo-croos, what
	demented pirouetting, what a lack
	of moustaches to stroke.

	The females – no need to be one of them
	to know
	exactly what they were thinking – pretended
	she wasn’t there
	and went dowdily on with whatever
	pigeons do when they’re knitting.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH Shall Gaelic Die?

	Translated by the author
	1
	A picture has no grammar. It has neither evil nor good. It has only colour, say orange or mauve.
	Can Picasso change a minister? Did he make a sermon to a bull?
	Did heaven rise from his brush? Who saw a church that is orange?
	In a world like a picture, a world without language, would your mind go astray, lost among objects?

	2
	Advertisements in neon, lighting and going out, ‘Shall it… shall it… Shall Gaelic… shall it… shall Gaelic… die?’

	3
	Words rise out of the country. They are around us. In every month in the year we are surrounded by words.
	Spring has its own dictionary, its leaves are turning in the sharp wind of March, which opens the shops.
	Autumn has its own dictionary, the brown words lying on the bottom of the loch, asleep for a season.
	Winter has its own dictionary, the words are a blizzard building a tower of Babel. Its grammar is like snow.
	Between the words the wild-cat looks sharply across a No-Man’s-Land, artillery of the Imagination.

	4
	They built a house with stones. They put windows in the house, and doors. They filled the room with furniture and the beards of thistles.
	They looked out of the house on a Highland world, the flowers, the glens, distant Glasgow on fire.
	They built a barometer of history.
	Inch after inch, they suffered the stings of suffering.
	Strangers entered the house, and they left.
	But now, who is looking out with an altered gaze?
	What does he see?
	What has he got in his hands? A string of words.

	5
	He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses his language loses his world.
	The space ship that goes astray among planets loses the world.
	In an orange world how would you know orange? In a world without evil how would you know good?
	Wittgenstein is in the middle of his world. He is like a spider.
	The flies come to him. ‘Cuan’ and ‘coill’ rising.
	When Wittgenstein dies, his world dies.
	The thistle bends to the earth. The earth is tired of it.

	6
	I came with a ‘sobhrach’ in my mouth. He came with a ‘primrose’.
	A ‘primrose by the river’s brim’. Between the two languages, the word ‘sobhrach’ turned to ‘primrose’.
	Behind the two words, a Roman said ‘prima rosa’.
	The ‘sobhrach’ or the ‘primrose’ was in our hands. Its reasons belonged to us.

W. S. GRAHAM Malcolm Mooney’s Land 1970

	I
	Today, Tuesday, I decided to move on
	Although the wind was veering. Better to move
	Than have them at my heels, poor friends
	I buried earlier under the printed snow.
	From wherever it is I urge these words
	To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle

	Of silence cranes to watch. Footprint on foot
	Print, word on word and each on a fool’s errand.
	Malcolm Mooney’s Land. Elizabeth
	Was in my thoughts all morning and the boy.
	Wherever I speak from or in what particular
	Voice, this is always a record of me in you.
	I can record at least out there to the west
	The grinding bergs and, listen, further off
	Where we are going, the glacier calves
	Making its sudden momentary thunder.
	This is as good a night, a place as any.

	2
	From the rimed bag of sleep, Wednesday,
	My words crackle in the early air.
	Thistles of ice about my chin,
	My dreams, my breath a ruff of crystals.
	The new ice falls from canvas walls.
	O benign creature with the small ear-hole,
	Submerger under silence, lead
	Me where the unblubbered monster goes
	Listening and makes his play.
	Make my impediment mean no ill
	And be itself a way.

	A fox was here last night (Maybe Nansen’s,
	Reading my instruments.) the prints
	All round the tent and not a sound.
	Not that I’d have him call my name.
	Anyhow how should he know? Enough
	Voices are with me here and more
	The further I go. Yesterday
	I heard the telephone ringing deep
	Down in a blue crevasse.
	I did not answer it and could
	Hardly bear to pass.

	Landlice, always my good bedfellows,
	Ride with me in my sweaty seams.
	Come bonny friendly beasts, brother
	To the grammarsow and the word-louse,
	Bite me your presence, keep me awake
	In the cold with work to do, to remember
	To put down something to take back.
	I have reached the edge of earshot here
	And by the laws of distance
	My words go through the smoking air
	Changing their tune on silence.

	3
	My friend who loves owls
	Has been with me all day
	Walking at my ear
	And speaking of old summers
	When to speak was easy.
	His eyes are almost gone
	Which made him hear well.
	Under our feet the great
	Glacier drove its keel.
	What is to read there
	Scored out in the dark?

	Later the north-west distance
	Thickened towards us.
	The blizzard grew and proved
	Too filled with other voices
	High and desperate
	For me to hear him more.
	I turned to see him go
	Becoming shapeless into
	The shrill swerving snow.

	4
	Today, Friday, holds the white
	Paper up too close to see
	Me here in a white-out in this tent of a place
	And why is it there has to be
	Some place to find, however momentarily
	To speak from, some distance to listen to?

	Out at the far-off edge I hear
	Colliding voices, drifted, yes
	To find me through the slowly opening leads.
	Tomorrow I’ll try the rafted ice.
	Have I not been trying to use the obstacle
	Of language well? It freezes round us all.

	5
	Why did you choose this place
	For us to meet? Sit
	With me between this word
	And this, my furry queen.
	Yet not mistake this
	For the real thing. Here
	In Malcolm Mooney’s Land
	I have heard many
	Approachers in the distance
	Shouting. Early hunters
	Skittering across the ice
	Full of enthusiasm
	And making fly and,
	Within the ear, the yelling
	Spear steepening to
	The real prey, the right
	Prey of the moment.
	The honking choir in fear
	Leave the tilting floe
	And enter the sliding water.
	Above the bergs the foolish
	Voices are lighting lamps
	And all their sounds make
	This diary of a place
	Writing us both in.

	Come and sit. Or is
	It right to stay here
	While, outside the tent
	The bearded blinded go
	Calming their children
	Into the ovens of frost?
	And what’s the news? What
	Brought you here through
	The spring leads opening?

	Elizabeth, you and the boy
	Have been with me often
	Especially on those last
	Stages. Tell him a story.
	Tell him I came across
	An old sulphur bear
	Sawing his log of sleep
	Loud beneath the snow.
	He puffed the powdered light
	Up on to this page
	And here his reek fell
	In splinters among
	These words. He snored well.
	Elizabeth, my furry
	Pelted queen of Malcolm
	Mooney’s Land, I made
	You here beside me
	For a moment out
	Of the correct fatigue.

	I have made myself alone now.
	Outside the tent endless
	Drifting hummock crests.
	Words drifting on words.
	The real unabstract snow.

IAN HAMILTON The Visit

	They’ve let me walk with you
	As far as this high wall. The placid smiles
	Of our new friends, the old incurables,
	Pursue us lovingly.
	Their boyish, suntanned heads,
	Their ancient arms
	Outstretched, belong to you.

	Although your head still burns
	Your hands remember me.

IAN HAMILTON Newscast

	The Vietnam war drags on
	In one corner of our living-room.
	The conversation turns
	To take it in.
	Our smoking heads
	Drift back to us
	From the grey fires of South-east Asia.