Collected Poems 1931-74
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
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,