Collected Poems 1931-74 Read online

  LAWRENCE DURRELL

  Collected Poems 1931–1974

  Contents

  Title Page

  Author’s Preface

  To the Reader

  The Gift

  Pioneer

  Inconstancy

  Happy Vagabond

  Sonnet Astray

  The Beginning

  Highwayman

  Crisis

  Dark Grecian

  Echoes: I

  Futility

  Largesse

  Echoes: II

  Candle-Light

  Christ A Modern

  A Dedication

  Finis

  Treasure

  Discovery of Love

  Plea

  Lost

  Question

  Love’s Inability

  Cueillez dès Aujourd’huy les Roses de la Vie

  Return

  Je Deviens Immortel dans tes Bras

  Retreat

  Ballade of Slow Decay

  Tulliola

  Lyric

  Wheat-Field

  Faces

  Love Poems

  Mass for the Old Year

  The Death of General Uncebunke: A Biography in Little

  Fourteen Carols

  Five Soliloquies upon the Tomb of Uncebunke

  Egyptian Poem

  Carol on Corfu

  Lines to Music

  Themes Heraldic

  Logos

  The Hanged Man

  Father Nicholas His Death: Corfu

  Adam

  Paris Journal

  The Poet

  The Egg

  A Small Scripture

  ‘A Soliloquy of Hamlet’

  The Sermon

  The Prayer-Wheel

  Green Man

  In Crisis

  At Corinth

  Nemea

  In Arcadia

  A Noctuary in Athens

  Daphnis and Chloe

  Fangbrand: A Biography

  At Epidaurus

  Letter to Seferis the Greek

  For a Nursery Mirror

  To Ping-Kû, Asleep

  To Argos

  ‘Je est un Autre’

  Conon in Exile

  On First Looking into Loeb’s Horace

  On Ithaca Standing

  Exile in Athens

  A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson

  Coptic Poem

  Mythology

  Matapan

  Echo

  This Unimportant Morning

  Byron

  La Rochefoucauld

  Pearls

  Heloise and Abelard

  Conon in Alexandria

  Mareotis

  Conon the Critic on the Six Landscape Painters of Greece

  Water Music

  Delos

  The Pilot

  The Parthenon

  In Europe

  Pressmarked Urgent

  Two Poems in Basic English

  Ships. Islands. Trees

  Near El Alamein

  Levant

  Greek Church: Alexandria

  Notebook

  Eight Aspects of Melissa

  By the Lake

  Cairo

  The Adepts

  The Encounter

  Petron, the Desert Father

  The Rising Sun

  Visitations

  A Prospect of Children

  Possible Worlds

  Alexandria

  Poggio

  Blind Homer

  Fabre

  Cities, Plains and People

  Rodini

  In the Garden: Villa Cleobolus

  Eternal Contemporaries: Six Portraits

  Manoli of Cos

  Mark of Patmos

  Basil the Hermit

  Dmitri of Carpathos

  Panagiotis of Lindos

  A Rhodian Captain

  Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels

  Pomona de Maillol

  Anniversary

  The Critics

  Phileremo

  Song for Zarathustra

  Politics

  The Daily Mirror

  Song

  Penelope

  Swans

  Bere Regis

  On Seeming to Presume

  Self to Not-Self

  Patmos

  The Lost Cities

  Funchal

  High Sierra

  Green Coconuts: Rio

  Christ in Brazil

  The Anecdotes

  In Cairo

  In Cairo

  At Rhodes

  At Rhodes

  In Athens

  At Alexandria

  At Alexandria

  In Patmos

  In Patmos

  In Britain

  In Britain

  In Rhodes

  In Paris

  In Beirut

  In Rhodes

  In Rio

  A Water-Colour of Venice

  Deus Loci

  Epitaph

  Education of a Cloud

  The Sirens

  Chanel

  Cradle Song

  Clouds of Glory

  River Water

  Sarajevo

  A Bowl of Roses

  Lesbos

  Letters in Darkness

  On Mirrors

  Orpheus

  Mneiae

  Niki

  The Dying Fall

  Poem

  At Strati’s

  The Tree of Idleness

  Bitter Lemons

  Near Kyrenia

  Episode

  The Meeting

  John Donne

  Ballad of Psychoanalysis: Extracts from a Case-Book

  At the Long Bar

  Style

  Thasos

  A Portrait of Theodora

  Asphodels: Chalcidice

  Freedom

  Near Paphos

  The Octagon Room

  Eva Braun’s Dream

  The Cottager

  Night Express

  Mythology

  Cavafy

  Ballad of Kretschmer’s Types

  Ballad of the Oedipus Complex

  Aphrodite

  Eleusis

  A Persian Lady

  Pursewarden’s Incorrigibilia

  Frankie and Johnny: New Style

  Byzance

  Ode to a Lukewarm Eyebrow

  Olives

  Scaffoldings: Plaka

  Stone Honey

  Congenies

  Piccadilly

  Strip-Tease

  In the Margin

  Poemandres

  Portfolio

  Prix Blondel

  Summer

  Delphi

  Salamis

  Troy

  Io

  One Grey Greek Stone

  Leeches

  Geishas

  The Ikons

  Apteros

  Keepsake

  Cape Drasti

  North West

  The Initiation

  Acropolis

  Persuasions

  Moonlight

  Blood-Count

  Kasyapa

  Vidourle

  Paullus to Cornelia

  Press Interview

  Confederate

  Owed to America

  The Outer Limits

  Solange

  The Reckoning

  Nobody

  Rain, Rain, Go to Spain

  Aphros Meaning Spume

  A Winter of Vampires

  Faustus

  Pistol Weather

  Lake Music

  Stoic

  ?

  Sixties

  Avis

  One Place
/>   Revenants

  The Land

  Joss

  Avignon

  Incognito

  Swimmers

  Blue

  Mistral

  Envoi

  Last Heard Of

  Seferis

  Vega

  Poem for Katharine Falley Bennett’s Birthday

  Vaumort

  Spring Song

  Hey, Mister, There’s a Bulge in Your Computer

  On the Suchness of the Old Boy

  The Ophite

  Alphabeta

  A Farewell

  Mandrake Root

  Apesong

  Want to Live Don’t You?

  The Grey Penitents

  Dublin

  Sages

  By the Sea

  Cicada

  The Muses

  Certain Landfalls

  A Patch of Dust

  Postmark

  In Deep Grass

  Index of First Lines

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  An invitation to make this edition of my Collected Poems (the third) definitive and comprehensive could not have been accepted had chance not put in my way a Canadian scholar, Dr James Brigham, who, in the pursuit of his own studies, had collected and indexed the whole of my published work. He was kind enough to let me profit from his toil, and the editing and arranging of this edition is entirely his work, which has been aided and shaped by the bibliography of Alan G. Thomas. My warm thanks go to both men for this exemplary edition which I would not have been able to assemble unaided.

  LAWRENCE DURRELL

  1980

  To the Reader

  This third collection of Lawrence Durrell’s poems makes generally available for the first time all of the poems published between 1931 and 1974. The earliest items are now all quite scarce: Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Ages of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931); Ten Poems (1932); Ballade of Slow Decay (Christmas, 1932); Transition: Poems (1934); Mass for the Old Year (1935). Durrell’s first real volume of verse, in terms of availability to the public, was A Private Country (1943), and it was followed by Cities, Plains and People (1946) and On Seeming to Presume (1948). Deus Loci (1950) and Private Drafts (1955) marked a brief return to private, limited editions, but Durrell has remained a truly public poet since The Tree of Idleness (also 1955). That volume was followed by Selected Poems (1956); the first Collected Poems (1960); Selected Poems, 1935–1963 (1964); The Ikons and Other Poems (1966); the second Collected Poems (1968); Vega and Other Poems (1973), which included the poems published in The Red Limbo Lingo (1971); and Selected Poems (1977). All the poems published in these volumes are collected here, as are those poems which were published in little magazines but which were never collected. However, poems published as integral parts of plays or novels are not included, nor are poems which exist only in manuscript form.

  My two goals in compiling this edition have been to give the reader a sense of the publishing history of Durrell’s poems, and to retain the sense of intimacy which the arrangement of poems in earlier editions has given.

  The poems have been arranged chronologically by year of first publication. Two dates are given beneath each poem: the date on the left is the year in which the poem was first gathered by its author as part of a volume of verse; the italicized date on the right is the year of first publication. Poems which were originally dated by the poet retain those dates, in parentheses, beneath their titles.

  Over the years, and for various reasons, many of the original dedications to the poems had been removed; they have been restored in this edition. Similarly, original author’s or prefatory notes which had been either pared down or completely excised have here been reinstated. Finally, epigrams from Georges Blin and Mila Repa which appeared in first editions as ‘keys to a mood’ but have not appeared in collected editions have been slipped into this edition in their original chronological settings.

  JAMES A. BRIGHAM

  Okanagan College

  1980

  THE GIFT

  Now that I have given all that I could bring

  Slit the wide, silken tassel of the purse,

  Scattered its myriad bounties to the Spring.

  To the rich Autumn leaves:

  The crumbled dust

  Of ancient adorations, murmurings,

  And the dull story of some faded lust,

  Will you remember it and, mother-wise

  Thank me in these chill after-days

  When I am empty-handed … with your eyes?

  1980/1931

  PIONEER

  I built a house, far in a wilderness,

  Against the arid ramparts of a sky,

  Proof against occult art or wizardry:

  Against my distant wanderings, comradeless.

  I planted the straight, cool pine-trees all around,

  And brimmed the garden with wild peony;

  Here I kept silence, lived only to see

  The magic in the trees, the friendly ground

  Turn and put forth its tendrils of new life

  Into the glowing grass: and here I dwelt,

  No eloquent shadows that could break or melt

  My great content;

  Only a living strife

  Calling me back from this core of desolation,

  To seek an ultimate twilight in a life.

  1980/1931

  INCONSTANCY

  Child, in the first few hours I lived with you,

  Time beat the generous pulses of desire,

  And churned the embers of a faded light to livid fever heat;

  The fleeting moments laughed in mockery;

  Fled with the light abruptness of a dream …

  Time was asleep … Night and the stars remained

  The bitter emptiness of nothing gained,

  The queer half-witted stagnancy of Love

  Passed like a covert whisper in the night.

  And yet, they say, beneath some other skies,

  Grey in the dusk there’ll be another one

  Another with perhaps diviner eyes.

  1980/1931

  HAPPY VAGABOND

  (Amsterdam 1930)

  I was a vagabond; sunset and moon

  Found me a place in their hearts.

  Gladly I saw

  The still, white summits of the friendly hills,

  And snatched a wraith of sadness from the core

  Of the deep sea, the unresisting earth:

  Sang to the moon, and wove a melody

  Deep in the strident archways of the sky;

  Or felt the benediction of rebirth

  That stirred strange anguish in this vagrant heart …

  So there was silence in the wind that followed after,

  Dim with a memory I’d left behind

  Chilled into terror by the phantom of your laughter.

  1980/1931

  SONNET ASTRAY

  We had a heritage that we have lost,

  Ours was the whiteness and the godliness

  Wings of the twilight; child-like we caress

  The tawdry fragments of old dreams, embossed

  With all the garishness of wandering minds,

  Crazed and distraught; palsied with senile age.

  The wisdom of a fool that seeks and finds

  An emptiness, a gaunt penultimate stage

  Before perfection! Reason fades and dies

  Beneath the burden of such blasphemies;

  Life is a loneliness, and heritage

  A whispered mockery; yet first to go,

  Killed by the fitful ravings of a sage

  Was youth; youth has been dead a painted age ago …

  Sometimes the gross pendulum of time

  Is swung back an aeon;

  And I,

  Bewilderingly wonder at my great foolishness

  To leave you forever alone that night by a star swept sea,

  With the laughter of the dark surf
in your eyes …

  Godless, and yet so very much a God.

  1980/1931

  THE BEGINNING

  Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white, majestic headland,

  And to feel the clean wisdom of the curving sea,

  And the dear mute calling of the wind

  On the masked heels of the twilight….

  Greying away to sundown, winding into the west;

  And oh! heart of my heart to find

  Dreams so oft forgotten, few fulfilled.

  1980/1931

  HIGHWAYMAN

  The road is a sinister pathway paved with smoke,

  A faint, white tremor; in the encircling trees

  Grow the little whispers, oak to friendly oak,

  Sentinels of the road.

  Darker than these

  Full in the shadow of the leaning elm

  A restive horse pads on the level grass,

  And counts the seconds; dark, immobile sits

  The masked rider, gleaming oblique slits

  For eyes, watching the timid minutes pass

  On stealthy feet, hurrying the approach

  Of time;

  Far out upon the curving road

  Glitters, an unsuspecting prey, the Midnight Coach.…

  1980/1931

  CRISIS

  How can we find the substance of the lie;

  Trace the huge source of deadlock, and complain

  Of wealth denied, when we who paid the cost

  Thwart our forbidden ends of destiny,

  And mock our own wild laughter?

  We have lost

  In the lithe whips of the soft, blinding rain,

  More than a century of mingled hates …

  More than these years of recompense forget:

  Turbulence at a sleeping city’s gates:

  The pathos of a victim still, beset

  By a reluctant Hector, finding light

  In the huge heart-break of its shaken tears,

  A width … a tenderness … some ultimate height

  To stem the vanguard of to-day with years.

  1980/1931

  DARK GRECIAN

  Down the wide shadow-streets of the city,

  By the white marble steps

  Where the quiet, soft-robed people

  Crowd to the glamour of the music,

  Deep between the pallid shadows of the houses,

  And the white fantasy of the Moonlight

  Among the columns;

  Through the glazed signature of the mists

  Across the great Dome,