Collected Poems 1931-74 Read online

  Sped the lithe God, the tall Grecian youth,

  Dark of limb, and fleet,

  With the ebony glitter of light in his hair,

  And his full, lustrous eyes

  Dim with unbidden searching.

  1980/1931

  ECHOES: I

  Can you remember, oh so long ago,

  How we wandered one twilight over the edge of the clouds

  Over the pathway to the stars, and found

  The cave …

  The cave of the silver echoes,

  And when I stood, breathless, and called your name,

  It flung it back to me in little ripples

  Of ecstatic, liquid sound.

  Can you forget how you said mockingly,

  Hand on my arm: ‘If you have need of me

  In some dim afterwards, when the gaunt years

  Have brought no fuller harvest, greater recompense:

  Or if in your poor loneliness you need my comfort,

  Come one twilight under these vacant leagues,

  These drowsy blue immensities of sky,

  And call my name,

  And I will hear,’ ‘And answer me,’ laughed I.

  1980/1931

  FUTILITY

  Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus,

  Puffed to ripe unholy promise;

  A vagueness unfulfilled lies in the venom.

  Illimitable design

  Weighed in a madman’s hand

  Who swings destruction in the huge scales.

  The broad vision of a Xerxes turns and cries,

  Seeing his Nubian mercenaries,

  The masked furies of a night,

  Wreathe and twine into the tenebrous defiles,

  A living snake of blindness …

  And to hear that old, age-weary crying,

  They are such dust before the wind.

  1980/1931

  LARGESSE

  The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood,

  And stirs the larches;

  Startles the timid moorhen’s fluffy brood

  Where the fern arches,

  Pregnant with sudden, wide-eyed loneliness.

  It touches the rounded nipples of the hills

  With amorous fingers:

  The tender crying of the wood it stills

  With a touch that lingers

  Silent and magic on the placid air.

  It threads its dainty way to your lone bed,

  And largesse throws …

  White, wrinkled leaves on your bowed head,

  White as the snows

  That coldly smile on youth and life and love.

  1980/1931

  ECHOES: II

  Last night I bowed before a destiny,

  Deep in the night; bound with my huge grief,

  Stooping beneath the desolation of my tears,

  I climbed the forgotten pathway to the stars,

  And knelt, half-man, half-child before our cave;

  And the light fingers of the little winds

  Touched my tired eyes and lips,

  And the quaint fragrance of the clover ….

  Stirred all the mournfulness of the old memories

  And darkness was kind to me ….

  When suddenly I cried in my great sorrow to the sky,

  And heard your answer, growing quietly

  Over the brimming silence of the deeps ….

  So I gained comfort from one long-since dead.

  1980/1931

  CANDLE-LIGHT

  So we have come to evening … graciously,

  Through the bewildered churning of our dreams,

  And found a day well spent; the candle-light

  Gathers the living gloom, and wistfully

  Cradles its arms about you as you sit …

  Yet you who seek a flame, ponder and write

  Bound by the hapless chatter of a quill.

  While beauty grows and stirs about your chair,

  Oh frail poet, under the candle-light …

  1980/1931

  CHRIST A MODERN

  I who have lived in death, hemmed by the spears,

  Born by grave victory, or by sore defeat,

  Finding no vain or mercenary tears

  In battle, lithe of body, fleet

  To stem a wild, vainglorious afterflow,

  I live that you may laugh, die that you may live;

  Strew some rich largesse where the best may throw

  Some broken toy, incalculably give

  The widened harness of our peaceful years

  Into your eager hands. I find no joy

  In old wives’ adoration, women’s tears,

  Or the reluctant praises of a boy,

  … Being the faint shadow of a vanguard’s wave,

  I die

  That you may live, and fear the life.

  1980/1931

  A DEDICATION

  To My Mother

  Pity these lame and halting parodies

  Of greater, better poems; from the dawn

  And from the sunset I have fashioned them

  From the white wonders of the seven seas;

  And from the memories of hours forlorn

  When I lived goodbyes, and crushed the stem

  Of conscious sadness, pillaging the sap

  Of tired youth.

  Strange yearning that I’ve had

  To climb the trough of some forgotten jest

  Or cry, and lay a tired head on your lap;

  Sing to the moon, or yet be silent lest

  In deep woods I wake some sleeping dryad….

  Partly because I’m writing this to you

  Perhaps because I’m only human too,

  I make excuse for each strange, hopeless song:

  For all this unintelligible throng

  Of words inadequate. I only plead

  That I have lived them all these lonely few

  And made them personal … quaint offering

  Each one some little magic that belongs to you.

  1980/1931

  FINIS

  There is a great heart-break in an evening sea;

  Remoteness in the sudden naked shafts

  Of light that die, tremulous, quivering

  Into cool ripples of blue and silver …

  So it is with these songs:

  the ink has dried,

  And found its own perpetual circuit here,

  Cast its own net

  Of little, formless mimicry around itself.

  And you must turn away, smile …

  and forget.

  1980/1931

  TREASURE

  Seal up the treasury and bar the gate.

  We have enough of wonders in our store

  To sit awhile at evening and relate

  Wonderingly, what we did not have before.

  Here in the counting-house, while daylight speeds

  Nearer to us and nearer, let us tell,

  Soft-voiced, with reverence, as a monk tells beads,

  All the possessions that we love so well;

  And fear not. In the hour before the dawn,

  When cressets tremble in the icy wind

  That shumbles in the parched and sleepy corn,

  These will be safe for other’s hands to find.

  These treasures that are hoarded in our trust

  Others will touch with hands, but find them dust.

  1980/1932

  DISCOVERY OF LOVE

  I turned and found a new-moon at my feet:

  All the long day and night made measureless:

  New glamour in the traffick of the street,

  And in your glance a secret holiness.

  Here is a wonder that has made us wise,

  Discovered all creation in a song.

  We have found light and shining of the eyes,

  And loyalty is with us all day long.

  Most merciful, since you have turned your face,

  And given this perfection to my hand,


  Earth has become an autumn dancing place,

  And I a traveller in enchanted land;

  And all the rumour of the earth’s decay

  Remoter than to-morrow seems to-day.

  1980/1932

  PLEA

  There must be some slow ending to this pain:

  Surely some pitying god will give release,

  Guerdon for service, leaving us again

  The old magnificence and peace?

  May we who serve such cruel apprenticeship

  Find no more answer than an empty guess,

  Knowing that every lip to questing lip

  Must give for answer ‘Yes’?

  Oh turn your mind from such ungodly thought,

  Let your dear, trembling mouth no longer guess:

  Pleasure is greatest pain so dearly bought,

  And love unfaithfulness.

  1980/1932

  LOST

  For Nancy

  ‘Angels desire an alms.’ MASSINGER

  We had endured vicissitude and change,

  Laughter and lanterns, colours in the grass,

  And all the foreign music of the earth:

  Starlight and glamour: every subtle range

  Of motion, rhythm, and power that gave us birth.

  Now that the ink has dried and left its rust

  On the forgotten words, the growing rhythms

  Have thundered into peace; shaken to dust

  Are all the restless, savage, drowsy hymns:

  Vanished the echo where the music was,

  Faded the lanterns: colours in the grass

  Died with the laughter of the old foolish rhymes …

  Quietly we stand aside and let them pass.

  1980/1932

  QUESTION

  You have so dressed your eyes with love for me

  That all my mind’s entangled in a flame,

  Crying the old despair for all to see,

  The wonder of your name.

  I must believe the passion of your mouth

  And all its living treasure has no dearth,

  But lives, exultant, through the season’s drouth

  In the old hiding places of the earth.

  How can the anguished world remain the same;

  The crowds still pass on unreturning feet

  When we have cupped our hands about a flame?

  1980/1932

  LOVE’S INABILITY

  In all the sad seduction of your ways

  I wander as a player tries a part,

  Seeking a perfect gesture all his days,

  Roving the widest margins of his art.

  I would drink this perfection as a wine,

  Leash the wild thirst that bids me more than taste:

  Hoard up the great possession that is mine,

  Not squander as a drunkard makes his waste.

  I will be patient if the world be wise,

  And you be bountiful as you are curt,

  Until a song awakes those distant eyes,

  And all your weary gestures cease to hurt.

  1980/1932

  Cueillez dès Aujourd’huy les Roses de la Vie

  RONSARD, Sonnets

  You will have no more beauty in that day

  When all the slow destruction of the mind,

  Encompassed in a single clot of clay,

  Is dust on dust, with flower-roots entwined.

  No use to say ‘She was both cruel and kind.

  Though all her limbs have crumbled to decay,

  Yet we, remembering, gather up and bind

  The harvest that was all her yesterday.’

  No use to shake that dear, unhappy head,

  And pray for fresh beginnings, time makes one

  Of all the prayers of Syria’s sleeping dead,

  All the choked dust of fallen Babylon.

  There is no lamentation but the hours

  Mourning the silent watches of the grave.

  Always the gaunt reflection of the stars

  Whispers ‘Mad lovers, these you may not save.’

  1980/1932

  RETURN

  There is some corner of a lover’s brain

  That holds this famous treasure, some dim room

  That love has not forgotten, where the sane

  Plant of this magic burgeons in the gloom,

  And pushes out its roots into the mind,

  Grown rich on the turned soil of days that pass.

  I know there is enchantment yet to find:

  April and whip-showers and the heavy grass

  Leaning to the lance-points of the rain …

  Oh we will turn someday, and find again

  The pageant of the lilies as they pass

  In slow procession by the lonely lake,

  Down by the crying waters of the plain.

  Always, to the end, these will remain,

  A thirst that all our passions may not slake

  April and whip-showers and the crying rain.

  1980/1932

  Je Deviens Immortel dans tes Bras

  OVIDE, Les Amours

  We have no more of time nor growing old,

  Nor memory of lovers that are dead

  While blood is on our lips; and while you hold

  Those frail and tenebrous hands about my head.

  Time is snuffed out as candles in a church,

  And all the fume in darkness is your hair;

  Licence these burning lips and let them search

  For passion that lies nearest to despair.

  Let us set up a gravestone in the dark,

  We who are laughing sinners, let us hold

  One moment as a monument to mark

  The hour from which God ceased to make us old.

  1980/1932

  RETREAT

  I would be rid of you who bind me so,

  Thoughtless to the stars: I would refrain and turn

  Along the unforgotten paths I used to know

  Before these eyes were governed to discern

  All beauty and all transcience in love.

  I would return, hungry, inviolate,

  To the sequestered woodland, arched above

  With the unchanging skies that graciously await

  My sure return from such inconstant love.

  I would return … yet would there ever be

  The same clear current at the root of things?

  The same resistless tides born of the sea?

  The old slurred whisper of the swallow’s wings?

  1980/1932

  BALLADE OF SLOW DECAY

  This business grows more dreary year by year,

  The season with its seasonable joys,

  When there is so much extra now on beer,

  And therefore so much less to spend on toys:

  And now that Auntie Maud’s had twins (both boys),

  And all the family is knitting clothes—

  It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

  I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

  I realise that Cousin Jane is ‘dear’,

  And that sweet Minnie has such ‘grace and poise’,

  But why should they be planning to come here,

  When Winifred my manuscript destroys,

  And dearest little Bertie mis-employs

  His time by crying when he sees my nose—

  It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

  I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

  How can a man withstand the atmosphere,

  This hell compounded of such strange alloys?

  Grandma’s too old to do a thing but leer,

  And call the home-made mince-pies ‘saveloys’.

  Grandpa keeps drooling on about sepoys,

  The Indian situation and the snows—

  It makes me want to stamp and make a noise:

  I wish that George would pay me what he owes.

  ENVOI

  Prince, if I once disturbed your equipois
e,

  By sending you my old discarded hose—

  Perhaps you’d help me stamp and make a noise,

  And wish that George would pay me what he owes?

  1980/Christmas, 1932

  TULLIOLA

  ‘… there was found the body of a young lady swimming in a kind of bath of precious oyle or liquor, fresh and entire as if she had been living, neither her face discolour’d, nor her hair disorder’d: at her feete burnt a lamp which suddainely expir’d at the opening of the vault; having flam’d, as was computed, now 1,500 yeares, by the conjecture that she was Tulliola, the daughter of Cicero whose body was thus found, as the inscription testified.’

  Only the night remains now, only the dark.

  This my forever and my nevermore.

  Impalpable eclipse!

  Persistent as the muzzle of a dog,

  Nosing me out for ever and for ever….

  God! that my body slips

  Between smooth liquors like a floating log,

  Spinning on tides of wine

  So slow that not a flaw can shift

  The symmetry of liquid in this basin:

  Nor a chaotic wave can lift

  My nostrils to the surface-fume of spice,

  Bitter and odorous in gloom.

  Pity me, swimming here.

  Pity me, Cicero’s daughter.