TO CALLIOPE
Permit me here a simple brief aside,
Calliope,
You who have shown such patience with my pride
And obstinacy:
Am I not loyal to you? I say no less
Than is to say;
If more, only from angry-heartedness,
Not for display.
But you know, I know, and you know I know
My principal curse:
Shame at the mounting dues I have come to owe
A devil of verse,
Who caught me young, ingenuous and uncouth,
Prompting me how
To evade the patent clumsiness of truth –
Which I do now.
No: nothing reads so fresh as I first thought,
Or as you could wish –
Yet must I, when far worse is eagerly bought,
Cry stinking fish?
THE STRAW
Peace, the wild valley streaked with torrents,
A hoopoe perched on his warm rock. Then why
This tremor of the straw between my fingers?
What should I fear? Have I not testimony
In her own hand, signed with her own name
That my love fell as lightning on her heart?
These questions, bird, are not rhetorical.
Watch how the straw twitches and leaps
As though the earth quaked at a distance.
Requited love; but better unrequited
If this chance instrument gives warning
Of cataclysmic anguish far away.
Were she at ease, warmed by the thought of me,
Would not my hand stay steady as this rock?
Have I undone her by my vehemence?
THE FOREBODING
Looking by chance in at the open window
I saw my own self seated in his chair
With gaze abstracted, furrowed forehead,
Unkempt hair.
I thought that I had suddenly come to die,
That to a cold corpse this was my farewell,
Until the pen moved slowly upon paper
And tears fell.
He had written a name, yours, in printed letters:
One word on which bemusedly to pore –
No protest, no desire, your naked name,
Nothing more.
Would it be tomorrow, would it be next year?
But the vision was not false, this much I knew;
And I turned angrily from the open window
Aghast at you.
Why never a warning, either by speech or look,
That the love you cruelly gave me could not last?
Already it was too late: the bait swallowed,
The hook fast.
CRY FAUGH!
Caria and Philistia considered
Only pre-marital adventures wise;
The bourgeois French argue contrariwise.
Socrates and Plato burked the issue
(Namely, how man-and-woman love should be)
With homosexual ideology.
Apocalyptic Israelites, foretelling
The Imminent End, called only for a chaste
Sodality: all dead below the waist.
Curious, various, amoral, moral –
Tell me, what elegant square or lumpish hamlet
Lives free from nymphological disquiet?
‘Yet males and females of the lower species
Contrive to eliminate the sexual problem,’
Scientists ponder: ‘Why not learn from them?’
Cry faugh! on science, ethics, metaphysics,
On antonyms of sacred and profane –
Come walk with me, love, in a golden rain
Past toppling colonnades of glory,
The moon alive on each uptilted face:
Proud remnants of a visionary race.
HERCULES AT NEMEA
Muse, you have bitten through my fool’s-finger.
Fierce as a lioness you seized it
In your white teeth most amorously;
And I stared back, dauntless and fiery-eyed,
Challenging you to maim me for my pride.
See me a fulvous hero of nine fingers –
Sufficient grasp for bow and arrow.
My beard bristles in exultation:
Let all Nemea look and understand
Why you have set your mark on this right hand.
DIALOGUE ON THE HEADLAND
She: You’ll not forget these rocks and what I told you?
He: How could I? Never: whatever happens.
She: What do you think might happen?
Might you fall out of love? – did you mean that?
He: Never, never! ‘Whatever’ was a sop
For jealous listeners in the shadows.
She: You haven’t answered me. I asked:
‘What do you think might happen?’
He: Whatever happens: though the skies should fall
Raining their larks and vultures in our laps –
She: ‘Though the seas turn to slime’ – say that –
‘Though water-snakes be hatched with six heads.’
He: Though the seas turn to slime, or tower
In an arching wave above us, three miles high –
She: ‘Though she should break with you’ – dare you say that?
‘Though she deny her words on oath.’
He: I had that in my mind to say, or nearly;
It hurt so much I choked it back.
She: How many other days can’t you forget?
How many other loves and landscapes?
He: You are jealous?
She: Damnably.
He: The past is past.
She: And this?
He: Whatever happens, this goes on.
She: Without a future? Sweetheart, tell me now:
What do you want of me? I must know that.
He: Nothing that isn’t freely mine already.
She: Say what is freely yours and you shall have it.
He: Nothing that, loving you, I could dare take.
She: O, for an answer with no ‘nothing’ in it!
He: Then give me everything that’s left.
She: Left after what?
He: After whatever happens:
Skies have already fallen, seas are slime,
Watersnakes poke and peer six-headedly –
She: And I lie snugly in the Devil’s arms.
He: I said: ‘Whatever happens.’ Are you crying?
She: You’ll not forget me – ever, ever, ever?
LOVERS IN WESTER
The posture of the tree
Shows the prevailing wind;
And ours, long misery
When you are long unkind.
But forward, look, we lean –
Not backward as in doubt –
And still with branches green
Ride our ill weather out.
ESAU AND JUDITH
Robbed of his birthright and his blessing
Esau sought refuge in the wilderness,
An outlaw girding at the world’s deceit.
He took to wife Judith, daughter of Heth,
Tall and grey-eyed, a priestess of her grove.
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
She was that sea which God had held corrupt;
Her tides he praised and her curvetting fish,
Though with no comprehension of their ways;
As a man blind from birth fondly adores
Fantasies of imagined gold and blue –
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
For how might Esau strive against his blood?
Had Isaac and Rebekah not commanded:
‘Take thee a daughter from thy father’s house!’ –
Isaac who played the pander with Rebekah,
Even as Abraham had done with Sarah?
The curse lay heavy on their marriage-couch.
THE MARK
If, doubtful of your fate,
You seek to obliterate
And to forget
The counter-mark I set
In the warm blue-veined nook
Of your elbow crook,
How can you not repent
The experiment?
No knife nor fang went in
To lacerate the skin;
Nor may the eye
Tetter or wen descry:
The place which my lips pressed
Is coloured like the rest
And fed by the same blood
Of womanhood.
Acid, pumice-stone,
Lancings to the bone,
Would be in vain.
Here must the mark remain
As witness to such love
As nothing can remove
Or blur, or hide,
Save suicide.
WITH THE GIFT OF A RING
If one of thy two loves be wroth
And cry: ‘Thou shalt not love us both,
Take one or ’tother!’, O then choose
Him that can nothing thee refuse!
Only a rogue would tear a part,
How small soever, from thy heart;
As Adam sought to plunder Eve’s
(What time they clad themselves in leaves),
Conjuring her to make an end
Of dalliance with her cursèd friend –
Too late, now she had learned to tell
False love from true, and ill from well.
LIADAN AND CURITHIR
Even in childhood
Liadan never would
Accept love simply,
But stifled longing
And went away to sing
In strange company.
Alas, for Liadan!
To fear perfection
Was her ill custom:
Choosing a scruple
That might seem honourable,
For retreat therefrom.
Herself she enticed
To be nunned for Christ,
Though in marriage sought
By a master-poet
On whom her heart was set –
Curithir of Connaught;
And raised a wall
As it were of crystal
Her grief around.
He might not guess
The cause of her fickleness
Nor catch one sound.
She was walled soon after
Behind stones and mortar,
From whence too late
He heard her keening,
Sighing and complaining
Of her dire self-hate.
THE SEA HORSE
Since now in every public place
Lurk phantoms who assume your walk and face,
You cannot yet have utterly abjured me
Nor stifled the insistent roar of sea.
Do as I do: confide your unquiet love
(For one who never owed you less than love)
To this indomitable hippocamp,
Child of your element, coiled a-ramp,
Having ridden out worse tempests than you know of;
Under his horny ribs a blood-red stain
Portends renewal of our pain.
Sweetheart, make much of him and shed
Tears on his taciturn dry head.
THE DEVIL AT BERRY POMEROY
Snow and fog unseasonable,
The cold remarkable,
Children sickly;
Green fruit lay thickly
Under the crab-tree
And the wild cherry.
I heard witches call
Their imps to the Hall:
‘Hey, Ilemauzar,
Sack-and-Sugar,
Peck-in-the-Crown,
Come down, come down!’
I heard bells toll
For a monster’s soul
That was born, half dead,
With a double head;
I saw ghosts leap
From the ruined keep;
I saw blows thwack
On the raw back
Of a dying ass.
Blight was on the grass,
Poison in the cup
(Lover, drink up!),
With envy, slander,
Weasels a-wander,
Incest done
Between mother and son,
Murder of hags
For their money-bags,
Wrath, rape,
And the shadowy ape
Which a lady, weeping,
Leads by a string
From first twilight
Until past midnight
Through the Castle yard –
‘Blow winds, blow hard!’
So the Devil snaps his chain
And renews his reign
To the little joy
Of Berry Pomeroy.
REPROACH TO JULIA
Julia: how Irishly you sacrifice
Love to pity, pity to ill-humour,
Yourself to love, still haggling at the price.
DETHRONEMENT
With pain pressing so close about your heart,
Stand (it behoves you), head uncovered,
To watch how she enacts her transformations –
Bitch, vixen, sow – the laughing, naked queen
Who has now dethroned you.
Hymns to her beauty or to her mercy
Would be ill-conceived. Your true anguish
Is all that she requires. You, turned to stone,
May not speak nor groan, shall stare dumbly,
Grinning dismay.
But as the play ends, or in its after-hush,
O then, deluded, flee! Her red-eared hounds
Scramble upon your track; past either cheek
Swan-feathered arrows whistle, or cruelly comb
Long furrows in your scalp.
Run, though you hope for nothing: to stay your foot
Would be ingratitude, a sour denial
That the life she bestowed was sweet.
Therefore be fleet, run gasping, draw the chase
Up the grand defile.
They will rend you to rags assuredly
With half a hundred love-bites –
Your hot blood an acceptable libation
Poured to Persephone, in whose domain
You shall again find peace.
CAT-GODDESSES
A perverse habit of cat-goddesses –
Even the blackest of them, black as coals
Save for a new moon blazing on each breast,
With coral tongues and beryl eyes like lamps,
Long-leggèd, pacing three by three in nines –
This obstinate habit is to yield themselves,
In verisimilar love-ecstasies,
To tatter-eared and slinking alley-toms
No less below the common run of cats
Than they above it; which they do for spite,
To provoke jealousy – not the least abashed
By such gross-headed, rabbit-coloured litters
As soon they shall be happy to desert.
THE BLUE-FLY
Five summer days, five summer nights,
The ignorant, loutish, giddy blue-fly
Hung without motion on the cling peach,
Humming occasionally: ‘O my love, my fair one!’
As in the Canticles.
Magnified one thousand times, the insect
Looks farcically human; laugh if you will!
Bald head, stage-fairy wings, blear eyes,
A caved-in chest, hairy black mandibles,
Long spindly thighs.
The crime was detected on the sixth day.
What then could be said or done? By anyone?
It would have been vindictive, mean and what-not
To swat that fly for being a blue-fly,
For debauch of a peach.
Is it fair, either, to bring a microscope
To bear on the case, even in search of truth?
Nature, doubtless, has some compelling cause
To glut the carriers of her epidemics –
Nor did the peach complain.
RHEA
On her shut lids the lightning flickers,
Thunder explodes above her bed,
An inch from her lax arm the rain hisses;
Discrete she lies,
Not dead but entranced, dreamlessly
With slow breathing, her lips curved
In a half-smile archaic, her breast bare,
Hair astream.
The house rocks, a flood suddenly rising
Bears away bridges: oak and ash
Are shivered to the roots – royal green timber.
She nothing cares.
(Divine Augustus, trembling at the storm,
Wrapped sealskin on his thumb; divine Gaius
Made haste to hide himself in a deep cellar,
Distraught by fear.)
Rain, thunder, lightning: pretty children.
‘Let them play,’ her mother-mind repeats;
‘They do no harm, unless from high spirits
Or by mishap.’
THE HERO
This prince’s immortality was confirmed
With envious rites paid him by such poor souls
As, dying, were condemned to flit like bats
In endless caverns of oblivion:
For he alone, amid excessive keening,
Might voyage to that island paradise,
In the red West,
Where bees come thronging to the apple flow
And thrice three damsels in a tall house
Tend the mead-vat of inspiration.
They feel no envy now, those poor souls.
Did not some bald Cilician sell them
Mansions in Heaven, and at a paltry price:
Offering crowns of gold for scabbed heads,
Robes of state for vitiliginous backs?
No blood is poured now at the hero’s tomb,
No prayers intoned,
The island paradise is unfrequented,
And neither Finn, nor Ogier, nor Arthur,
Returns to prophesy our common doom.
MARGINAL WARNING
Prejudice, as the Latin shows,
Means that you follow your own nose
Like an untutored spaniel; hence,
A nose being no good evidence
That Farmer Luke hangs from a limb
With cart-rope tightly trussing him,
Till twelve unblinking pairs of eyes
Can view the corpse and authorize
A coroner to shake his head
For: ‘Gentlemen, this man is dead’,
Your blind prognostication is
Roundly condemned as prejudice;
And should you further speculate,
Snuffing once more, upon what date
His cowman strung him to the tree:
The case being now sub judice,
Contempt of court will be the cry
To challenge and arrest you by –
What will your children think of you,
Docked of your nose and your ears too?
THE ENCOUNTER
Soon after dawn in hottest June (it may
For all I know, have been Midsummer’s Day)
An hour at which boulevardiers are few,
From either end of the grand avenue
Flanked with basilicas and palaces
And shaded by long rows of ancient trees,
A man drew near, his lips in rage compressed,
Marching alone, magnificently dressed –
This, rose on green; that, mulberry on gold –
Two tall unyielding men of the same mould
Who wore identical helmets, cloaks and shoes
And long straight swords they had well learned to use,
Both being luckless fellows, paired by fate
In bonds of irremediable hate.
Closer they steered: although the walk was wide,
A scant inch served as margin to their pride.
The encounter surely could but end in blows;
Yet neither thought to tweak his enemy’s nose,
Or jostle him, or groan, or incur guilt
By a provocative grasp at the sword hilt,
Each setting such reliance on mischance
He sauntered by without a sidelong glance.
I’M THROUGH WITH YOU FOR EVER
The oddest, surely, of odd tales
Recorded by the French
Concerns a sneak thief of Marseilles
Tried by a callous Bench.
His youth, his innocency, his tears –
No, nothing could abate
Their sentence of ‘One hundred years
In galleys of the State.’
Nevertheless, old wives affirm
And annalists agree,
He sweated out the whole damned term,
Bowed stiffly, and went free.
Then come, my angry love, review
Your sentence of today.
‘For ever’ was unjust of you,
The end too far away.
Give me four hundred years, or five –
Can rage be so intense? –
And I will sweat them out alive
To prove my impenitence.
WITH HER LIPS ONLY
This honest wife, challenged at dusk
At the garden gate, under a moon perhaps,
In scent of honeysuckle, dared to deny
Love to an urgent lover: with her lips only,
Not with her heart. It was no assignation;
Taken aback, what could she say else?
For the children’s sake, the lie was venial;
‘For the children’s sake’, she argued with her conscience.
Yet a mortal lie must follow before dawn:
Challenged as usual in her own bed,
She protests love to an urgent husband,
Not with her heart but with her lips only;
‘For the children’s sake’, she argues with her conscience,
‘For the children’ – turning suddenly cold towards them.
THE BLOTTED COPY-BOOK
He broke school bounds, he dared defy
The Master’s atrabilious eye,
Diced, swigged raw brandy, used foul oaths,
Wore shamelessly Corinthian clothes,
And taught St Dominic’s to mock
At gown and hood and whipping-block.
The boy’s a nabob now, retired
With wealth enough to be admired
Even by the School Governors
(Benignly sycophantic bores)
Who call on him to give away
Prize-medals on Foundation Day.
Will he at last, or will he not,
His yellowing copy-book unblot:
Accede, and seriously confess
A former want of seriousness,
Or into a wild fury burst
With: ‘Let me see you in Hell first!’?
THE SACRED MISSION
The ungainsayable, huge, cooing message
Hurtles suddenly down the dawn streets:
Twenty loudspeakers, twenty lovesick voices
Each zealous to enlarge his own range
And dominate the echoing border-zones.
Now the distressed whimper of little children,
The groans of sick men cheated in their hope
Of snatching a light sleep from the jaws of pain,
The curses, even, of the unregenerate –
All are submerged in the rising sea of noise
Which floods each room and laps round every pillow,
Roaring the mercy of Christ’s limitless love.
FROM THE EMBASSY
I, an ambassador of Otherwhere
To the unfederated states of Here and There
Enjoy (as the phrase is)
Extra-territorial privileges.
With heres and theres I seldom come to blows
Or need, as once, to sandbag all my windows.
And though the Otherwhereish currency
Cannot be quoted yet officially,
I meet less hindrance now with the exchange
Nor is my garb, even, considered strange;
And shy enquiries for literature
Come in by every post, and the side door.
SIROCCO AT DEYÁ
How most unnatural-seeming, yet how proper;
The sea like a cat with fur rubbed the wrong way,
As the sirocco with its furnace flavor
Dashes at full tilt around the village
[‘From every-which-a-way, hot as a two-buck pistol’]
Stripping green olives from the blown-back boughs,
Scorching the roses, blinding the eyes with sand;
While slanderous tongues in the small cafés
And in the tightly-shuttered limestone houses
Clack defamation, incite and invite
Knives to consummate their near-murders….
Look up, a great grey cloud broods nonchalant
On the mountain-top nine hundred feet above us,
Motionless and turgid, blotting out the sun,
And from it sneers a supercilious Devil:
‘Mere local wind: no messenger of mine!’