LARGESSE TO THE POOR
I had been God’s own time on travel
From stage to stage, guest-house to guest-house,
And at each stage furnished one room
To my own comfort, hoping God knows what,
Most happy when most sure that no condition
Might ever last in God’s own time –
Unless to be death-numb, as I would not.
Yet I was always watchful at my choices
To change the bad at least for a no worse,
And I was strict nowhere to stay long.
In turn from each new home passing
I locked the door and pocketed the key,
Leaving behind goods plainly mine
(Should I return to claim them legally)
Of which I kept particular register –
In nightly rooms and chattels of the occasion
I was, to my own grief, a millionaire.
But now at last, out of God’s firmament,
To break this endless journey –
Homeless to come where that awaits me
Which in my mind’s unwearying discontent
I begged as pilgrim’s due –
To fling my keys as largesse to the poor,
The always travel-hungry God-knows-who,
With, ‘Let them fatten on my industry
Who find perfection and eternity
In might-be-worse, a roof over the head,
And any half-loaf better than no bread,
For which to thank God on their knees nightly.’
THE FELLOE’D YEAR
The pleasure of summer was its calm success
Over winter past and winter sequent:
The pleasure of winter was a warm counting,
‘Summer comes again, when, surely.’
This pleasure and that pleasure touched
In a perpetual spring-with-autumn ache,
A creak and groan of season,
In which all moved,
In which all move yet – I the same, yet praying
That the twelve spokes of this round-felloe’d year
Be a fixed compass, not a turning wheel.
TIME
The vague sea thuds against the marble cliffs
And from their fragments age-long grinds
Pebbles like flowers.
Or the vague weather wanders in the fields,
And up spring flowers with coloured buds
Like marble pebbles.
The beauty of the flowers is Time, death-grieved;
The pebbles’ beauty too is Time,
Life-wearied.
It is easy to admire a blowing flower
Or a smooth pebble flower-like freaked
By Time and vagueness.
Time is Time’s lapse, the emulsive element coaxing
All obstinate locks and rusty hinges
To loving-kindness.
And am I proof against that lovesome pair,
Old age and childhood, twins in Time,
In sorrowful vagueness?
And will I not pretend the accustomed thanks:
Humouring age with filial flowers,
Childhood with pebbles?
ON RISING EARLY
Rising early and walking in the garden
Before the sun has properly climbed the hill –
His rays warming the roof, not yet the grass
That is white with dew still.
And not enough breeze to eddy a puff of smoke,
And out in the meadows a thick mist lying yet,
And nothing anywhere ill or noticeable –
Thanks indeed for that.
But was there ever a day with wit enough
To be always early, to draw the smoke up straight
Even at three o’clock of an afternoon,
To spare dullness or sweat?
Indeed, many such days I remember
That were dew-white and gracious to the last,
That ruled out meal-times, yet had no more hunger
Than was felt by rising a half-hour before breakfast,
Nor more fatigue – where was it that I went
So unencumbered, with my feet trampling
Like strangers on the past?
ON DWELLING
Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening
From rustic lips fail as the town encroaches:
Soon nothing passes but the cold quick stare
Of eyes that see ghosts, yet too many for fear.
Here I too walk, silent myself, in wonder
At a town not mine though plainly coextensive
With mine, even in days coincident:
In mine I dwell, in theirs like them I haunt.
And the green country, should I turn again there?
My bumpkin neighbours loom even ghostlier:
Like trees they murmur or like blackbirds sing
Courtesies of good-morning and good-evening.
ON NECESSITY
Dung-worms are necessary. And their certain need
Is dung, more dung, much dung and on such dung to feed.
And though I chose to sit and ponder for whole days
On dung-worms, what could I find more to tell or praise
Than their necessity, their numbers and their greed
To which necessity in me its daily tribute pays?
THE FOOLISH SENSES
Feverishly the eyes roll for what thorough
Sight may hold them still,
And most hysterically strains the throat
At the love song once easy to sing out
In minstrel serfdom to the armoured ill –
Let them cease now.
The view is inward, foolish eye: your rolling
Flatters the outward scene
To spread with sunset misery. Foolish throat,
That ill was colic, love its antidote,
And beauty, forced regret of who would sing
Of loves unclean.
No more, senses, shall you so confound me,
Playing your pageants through
That have outlived their uses in my mind –
Your outward staring that is inward blind
And the mad strummings of your melancholy,
Let them cease now.
DEVILISHLY PROVOKED
Devilishly provoked
By my officious pen –
Where I demand one word
It scrawls me nine or ten;
But each surviving word
Resentfully I make
Sweat for those nine or ten
I blotted for its sake.
And even more provoked
By my officious heart
Whose emblems of desire
From every corner start:
So little joy I find
In their superfluous play
I curse the spell that drives
My only love away.
THE LEGS
There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.
And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.
And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.
What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping,
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.
Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.
My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,
Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.
Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.
My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?
Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.
OGRES AND PYGMIES
Those famous men of old, the Ogres –
They had long beards and stinking arm-pits,
They were wide-mouthed, long-yarded and great-bellied
Yet not of taller stature, Sirs, than you.
They lived on Ogre-Strand, which was no place
But the churl’s terror of their vast extent,
Where every foot was three-and-thirty inches
And every penny bought a whole hog.
Now of their company none survive, not one,
The times being, thank God, unfavourable
To all but nightmare shadows of their fame;
Their images stand howling on the hill
(The winds enforced against those wide mouths),
Whose granite haunches country-folk salute
With May Day kisses, and whose knobbed knees.
So many feats they did to admiration:
With their enormous throats they sang louder
Than ten cathedral choirs, with their grand yards
Stormed the most rare and obstinate maidenheads,
With their strong-gutted and capacious bellies
Digested stones and glass like ostriches.
They dug great pits and heaped huge mounds,
Deflected rivers, wrestled with the bear
And hammered judgements for posterity –
For the sweet-cupid-lipped and tassel-yarded
Delicate-stomached dwellers
In Pygmy Alley, where with brooding on them
A foot is shrunk to seven inches
And twelve-pence will not buy a spare rib.
And who would judge between Ogres and Pygmies –
The thundering text, the snivelling commentary –
Reading between such covers he will marvel
How his own members bloat and shrink again.
TO WHOM ELSE?
To whom else other than,
To whom else not of man
Yet in human state,
Standing neither in stead
Of self nor idle godhead,
Should I, man in man bounded,
Myself dedicate?
To whom else momently,
To whom else endlessly,
But to you, I?
To you who only,
To you who mercilessly,
To you who lovingly,
Plucked out the lie?
To whom else less acquaint,
To whom else without taint
Of death, death-true?
With great astonishment
Thankfully I consent
To my estrangement
From me in you.
AS IT WERE POEMS
I
In the legend of Reynard the Fox, Isegrim the Wolf, Grymbart the Brock, Tybert the Cat, Cuwart the Hare, Bellyn the Ram, Baldwin the Ass, Rukenawe the She-Ape and the rest of that company, where was I?
I was in the person of Bruin the Bear. And through the spite of Reynard and my own greed and credulity I left behind my ears and the claws of my fore-feet wedged in the trunk of a honey-tree.
In the legend of Troy where was I?
I was in the person of Ajax the son of Telamon. And Odysseus cheated me of the prize of dead Achilles’ arms. For he suborned Trojan captives to testify that it was he who of us all had done their city the most harm. Angered by this, I drove Troy’s whole forces single-handed from the field. But he covertly disposed slaughtered sheep in the place of the dead men that I had strewn behind me and so fastened on me the name of madman.
In the legend of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, where was I?
I would prefer to be written down for the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin’s enemy. But the natural truth is that I played the part of jolly Friar Tuck. I took and gave great buffets. I was the gross fool of the greenwood.
In the legend of Jesus and his companions, where was I?
I was not Jesus himself, I was not John the Baptist, nor Pontius Pilate, nor Judas Iscariot, nor even Peter. I was Lazarus sickening again in old age long after the Crucifixion, and knowing that this time I could not cheat death.
In the legend of Tobit, where was I?
I was not old Tobit himself, nor his kinsman Raguel, nor Sarah, Raguel’s daughter, nor the angel Raphael, nor the devil Asmodaeus. I was Tobias, in sight of the towers of Ecbatana, with the gall, heart and liver of the fish in a pouch by my side.
In the legend of that Lucius whom a witch of Thessaly turned into a dumb ass and who after many cruel adventures was restored to human shape by the intervention of the goddess Isis, where was I?
I was that impassioned ass in the gold trappings.
In the legend of Isis, of Python the destroyer, and of Osiris yearly drowned, where was I?
I was the drowned Osiris.
II
A sick girl went from house to house fitting people into legends of her own making. For you and for me she made a legend of the Christ and of King West the Shepherd and of the Golden Seal of Solomon long hidden in a cave of a hill at Jerusalem. You were the Christ-Woman and I was King West and she was Queen East with whom King West takes ship to Palestine: to find the Golden Seal. You as of old nursed the souls of the dead; she and I led the living.
But you reasoned with the sick girl: in the legend of the Christ there is no room for a sequel, it is a page covered with writing on both sides. Whoever would take the story further must find a clean page.
And I scolded angrily: Jesus, the Christ-Man, was a timid plagiarist. He made no new legends but said over the old ones, fitting himself into them. He was the Child foretold by Isaiah and the other prophets. Born at Bethlehem, equivocally of the seed of David, riding through Zion in prophesied glory on an ass’s colt, stiffnecked to eschew love that he might be duly rejected and despised, busying himself vexatiously with the transgressions of others – he was true to the smallest articles of the legend and was drawn at last miserably to a well-documented death.
III
And how shall I call you, between the name concealed in the legends and that open name by which reason calls you and in which you reasonably answer–your name to whosoever would not have his fellow levelheads say, ‘Look, he is mad, he is talking with a familiar spirit’?
‘Call me,’ you say, ‘by my open name, so that you do not call upon any of those false spirits of the legends, those names of travesty. For in my open name I am jealous for my hinder name, that it should not be belied in drunken mystifications: am I not the most levelheaded of all your fellows? So let my open name be my closed name, and my closed name, my open name.’
To which I answer, ‘And so the names of the travesty vanish into a single name against the meddling of men with the unchangeable import of the name: Isis, the secrecy of the import. In Egypt she was the holy name of the year of holy months: she was known to her priests as the invisible removed one, and to her people as the manifoldly incomprehensible. Every new moon crowned her with its peculiar head-dress – a rose, a star, an ear of barley, the horns of a goat: and she became the Moon itself, the single head of variety, Hecate by name. And Lilith, the owl of wisdom, because her lodges were held in stealthy darkness. At length the priests themselves forgot whom they meant in Isis. They even confounded her with the cowish Demeter, the blind force of Nature, and made her wife to Osiris.
‘Now let all the false goddesses sprung from Isis – Pallas, Diana, Juno, Ceres and the rest – return to Isis, the greatly unnamed and greatly unseen and greatly unspoken with. Had but a single man seen her in Egypt, face to face, and known her for herself, then she would have been human woman, for other men to pass by and not know.
‘So likewise Osiris was myself greatly meddling, Osiris the triple-named. He was Apollo in bright strength who dries up the floods. He was Dionysus, the growth of the vine. And he was Pluto, the dead man of the pit, the flooded Egypt to which life ever returns. Every year he rose again from the dead, but every year returned to the dead again. For she was only Isis, a closed name.’
ON PORTENTS
If strange things happen where she is,
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.