Austin Clarke
“The Rogue is Me” is one of Clarke’s earliest recorded publications, dated 1956, the year after he moved from Barbados to Canada. While the poem is highly symbolist, it also demonstrates Clarke’s classical training alongside his early adoption of modernist themes of decay, rebirth, and regeneration. The “grandfather’s clocks / That keep dead time, time without a beat” contrast with the “roots of my tomorrows” and the “green fertilities of youth.” “The Rogue in Me” was published in The Trinity Review, the literary arts publication of Trinity College at the University of Toronto.
In my brain are the rogue and the thief,
The thief that steals the sorrow and the blood from life;
In my brain are the nurse and the hangman’s rope
That ties life with death, and death with hope.
In my blood is the surge of trees cut down in storms,
Of rivers muddy with floods of lives and tears,
With old women’s bags, and grandfather’s clocks
That keep dead time, time without a beat;
In my fears are the fears of Cleopatra,
Fears of death, fears for the dead.
I have lived one thousand years in tree and bush,
And have died with every fall of leaf,
And withered in each rainless season;
But deep down in the roots of my tomorrows
Are many fresh green fertilities of youth.
I, the tree without a branch, am climbing,
Climbing up toward heaven where lies no god,
No mercy, no hope for the hoping, no good
For the godly. The cliff and crags of my mind
Simmer in the nightly naked tormentation
Above earth’s average human skyline . . .
Boats sail in my mind, in, and out again.
Boats without sails and spars, boats rudderless,
Like skeletons with the world’s glory
Skimming through them examiningly.