Collected Poems 1931-74 Read online

  Saying ‘Renounce’, the other

  Answering ‘Be’; the division

  Of the darkness into faces

  Crying ‘Too late’ ‘Too late’.

  At night the immediate

  Rubbing of the ocean on stones,

  The headlands dim in her smoke

  And always the awareness

  Of self like a point, the quiver

  As of a foetal heart asleep in him.

  Continuous memory, continual evocations.

  An old man in a colony of stones,

  Frowning, exilic, upon a thorn,

  Learning nothing of time:

  Sometimes in a windy night asleep

  His lips brushed the forbidden apples.

  Everything reproached him, the cypress

  Revising her reflection in pools,

  The olive’s stubborn silver in wind,

  The nude and statuary hills all

  Saying ‘Turn back. Turn back.

  Peace lies another way, old man’.

  It seemed to him here at last

  His age, his time, his sex even

  Were struck and past; life

  In a flood carrying all idols

  Into the darkness, struck

  Like floating tubs, and were gone.

  The pathfinder rested now,

  The sick man found silence

  Like the curved ear of a shell;

  A roar of silence even

  Diminishing the foolish cool

  Haunting note of the dove.

  By day he broke his fruit

  Humbly from the tree: his water

  From wells as deep as Truth:

  Living on snails and waterberries,

  Marvelling for the first time

  At the luminous island, the light.

  His body he left in pools

  Now dazed by fortune, like an old

  White cloth discarded where

  Only the fish were visitors.

  Their soft perverted kisses

  Melted the water on his side.

  The rich shadow of the vine’s tent

  Like a cold cloth on his skull;

  Spring water blown through sand,

  Bubbled on mineral floors,

  Ripened in smooth cisterns

  Dripped from a hairy lintel on his tongue.

  Truth’s metaphor is the needle,

  The magnetic north of purpose

  Striving against the true north

  Of self: Fangbrand found it out,

  The final dualism in very self,

  An old man holding an asphodel.

  Everywhere night lay spilled,

  Like coolness from spoons,

  And his to drink, the human

  Surface of the sky, the planes

  And concaves of the eye reflecting

  A travelling mirror, the earth.

  He regarded himself in water,

  The torrid brow’s beetle,

  The grammarian’s cranium-bone.

  He regarded himself in water

  Saying ‘X marks the spot,

  Self, you are still alive!’

  From now the famous ten-year

  Silence fell on him; disciples

  Invented the legend; now

  They search the white island

  For a book perhaps, a small

  Paper of revelation left behind.

  Comb out the populous waters,

  Study the mud: what kept,

  Held, fed, fattened him?

  The hefts of stone are the only

  Blossoms here: nothing grows,

  But the ocean expunges.

  Time’s chemicals mock the hunter

  For crumbs of doctrine; Fangbrand

  Died with his art like a vase.

  The grave in the rock,

  Sweetened by saffron, bubbles water

  Like a smile, an animal truth.

  Death interrupted nothing.

  Like guarded towns against alarms,

  Our sentries in the nerves

  Never sleep; but his one night

  Slept on their arms, Hesperus shining,

  And the unknowns entered.

  So the riders of the darkness pass

  On their circuit: the luminous island

  Of the self trembles and waits,

  Waits for us all, my friends,

  Where the sea’s big brush recolours

  The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.

  1943/1941

  AT EPIDAURUS

  The islands which whisper to the ambitious,

  Washed all winter by the surviving stars

  Are here hardly recalled: or only as

  Stone choirs for the sea-bird,

  Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.

  This civilized valley was dedicated to

  The cult of the circle, the contemplation

  And correction of famous maladies

  Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also

  By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.

  The only disorder is in what we bring here:

  Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,

  The penetration of clocks striking in London.

  The composure of dolls and fanatics,

  Financed migrations to the oldest sources:

  A theatre where redemption was enacted,

  Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.

  The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,

  And the swallow’s cot in the ruin seems how

  Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!

  Here we can carry our own small deaths

  With the resignation of place and identity;

  A temple set severely like a dice

  In the vale’s Vergilian shade; once apparently

  Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:

  A formula for marble when the clouds

  Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke

  Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.

  Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,

  The dying leaves and the reports of love.

  The land’s lie, held safe from the sea,

  Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,

  Provides a context understandably natural

  For men who could divulge the forms of gods.

  Here the mathematician entered his own problem,

  A house built round his identity,

  Round the fond yet mysterious seasons

  Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.

  Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,

  And the hum of the chorus enchanted.

  We, like the winter, are only visitors,

  To prosper here the breathing grass,

  Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing

  Nothing, enduring the sun like girls

  In a town window. The earth’s flowers

  Blow here original with every spring,

  Shines in the rising of a man’s age

  Into cold texts and precedents for time.

  Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order

  Of old captains who sleep in the hill.

  Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,

  Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,

  Unlocking this world which is not our world.

  The somnambulists walk again in the north

  With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.

  Useless a morality for slaves: useless

  The shouting at echoes to silence them.

  Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,

  Four ragged travellers in Homer.

  All causes end within the great Because.

  1943/1941

  LETTER TO SEFERIS THE GREEK

  ‘Ego dormio sed cor meum vigilat’

  (1941)

  No milestones marked the invaders,

  But ragged harps like mountains
here:

  A text for Proserpine in tears: worlds

  With no doors for heroes and no walls with ears:

  Yet snow, the anniversary of death.

  How did they get here? How enact

  This clear severe repentance on a rock,

  Where only death converts and the hills

  Into a pastoral silence by a lake,

  By the blue Fact of the sky forever?

  ‘Enter the dark crystal if you dare

  And gaze on Greece.’ They came

  Smiling, like long reflections of themselves

  Upon a sky of fancy. The red shoes

  Waited among the thickets and the springs,

  In fields of unexploded asphodels,

  Neither patient nor impatient, merely

  Waited, the born hunter on his ground,

  The magnificent and funny Greek.

  We will never record it: the black

  Choirs of water flowing on moss,

  The black sun’s kisses opening,

  Upon their blindness, like two eyes

  Enormous, open in bed against one’s own.

  Something sang in the firmament.

  The past, my friend compelled you,

  The charge of habit and love.

  The olive in the blood awoke,

  The stones of Athens in their pride

  Will remember, regret and often bless.

  Kisses in letters from home:

  Crosses in the snow: now surely

  Lover and loved exist again

  By a strange communion of darkness.

  Those who went in all innocence,

  Whom the wheel disfigured: whom

  Charity will not revisit or repair,

  The innocent who fell like apples.

  Consider how love betrays us:

  In the conversation of the prophets

  Who daily repaired the world

  By profit and loss, with no text

  On the unknown quantity

  By whose possession all problems

  Are only ink and air made words:

  I mean friends everywhere who smile

  And reach out their hands.

  Anger inherits where love

  Betrays: iron only can clean:

  And praises only crucify the loved

  In their matchless errand, death.

  Remember the earth will roll

  Down her old grooves and spring

  Utter swallows again, utter swallows.

  Others will inherit the sea-shell,

  Murmuring to the foolish its omens,

  Uncurving on the drum of the ear,

  The vowels of an ocean beyond us,

  The history, the inventions of the sea:

  Upon all parallels of the salt wave,

  To lovers lying like sculptures

  In islands of smoke and marble,

  Will enter the reflections of poets

  By the green wave, the chemical water.

  I have no fear for the land

  Of the dark heads with aimed noses,

  The hair of night and the voices

  Which mimic a traditional laughter:

  Nor for a new language where

  A mole upon a dark throat

  Of a girl is called ‘an olive’:

  All these things are simply Greece.

  Her blue boundaries are

  Upon a curving sky of time,

  In a dark menstruum of water:

  The names of islands like doors

  Open upon it: the rotting walls

  Of the European myth are here

  For us, the industrious singers,

  In the service of this blue, this enormous blue.

  Soon it will be spring. Out of

  This huge magazine of flowers, the earth,

  We will enchant the house with roses,

  The girls with flowers in their teeth,

  The olives full of charm: and all of it

  Given: can one say that

  Any response is enough for those

  Who have a woman, an island and a tree?

  I only know that this time

  More than ever, we must bless

  And pity the darling dead: the women

  Winding up their hair into sea-shells,

  The faces of meek men like dials,

  The great overture of the dead playing,

  Calling all lovers everywhere in all stations

  Who lie on the circumference of ungiven kisses.

  Exhausted rivers ending in the sand;

  Windmills of the old world winding

  And unwinding in musical valleys your arms.

  The contemptible vessel of the body lies

  Lightly in its muscles like a vine;

  Covered the nerves: and like an oil expressed

  From the black olive between rocks,

  Memory lulls and bathes in its dear reflections.

  Now the blue lantern of the night

  Moves on the dark in its context of stars.

  O my friend, history with all her compromises

  Cannot disturb the circuit made by this,

  Alone in the house, a single candle burning

  Upon a table in the whole of Greece.

  Your letter of the 4th was no surprise.

  So Tonio had gone? He will have need of us.

  The sails are going out over the old world.

  Our happiness, here on a promontory,

  Marked by a star, is small but perfect.

  The calculations of the astronomers, the legends

  The past believed in could not happen here.

  Nothing remains but Joy, the infant Joy

  (So quiet the mountain in its shield of snow,

  So unconcerned the faces of the birds),

  With the unsuspected world somewhere awake,

  Born of this darkness, our imperfect sight,

  The stirring seed of Nostradamus’ rose.

  1943/1941

  FOR A NURSERY MIRROR

  Image, Image, Image answer

  Whether son or whether daughter,

  The persuader or the dancer:

  A bird’s beak poking out of the flesh,

  A bird’s beak singing between the eyes.

  ‘The earth is a loaf,

  Image, Image, Image,

  The wet part is joined to the dry,

  Like the joints of Adam.’

  It is dark now. Rise.

  Between the Nonself and the Self

  Cover the little wound

  With soft red clay,

  From the hit of the wind of Death,

  From the chink of the pin of Day.

  The heart’s cold singing part,

  Image of the Dancer in water,

  Close up with the soft red clay

  The wound in the mystical bud:

  For the dancers walking in the water

  This is the body, this the blood.

  1946/1942

  TO PING-KÛ, ASLEEP

  You sleeping child asleep, away

  Between the confusing world of forms,

  The lamplight and the day; you lie

  And the pause flows through you like glass,

  Asleep in the body of the nautilus.

  Between comparison and sleep,

  Lips that move in quotation;

  The turning of a small blind mind

  Like a plant everywhere ascending.

  Now our love has become a beanstalk.

  Invent a language where the terms

  Are smiles; someone in the house now

  Only understands warmth and cherish,

  Still twig-bound, learning to fly.

  This hand exploring the world makes

  The diver’s deep-sea fingers on the sills

  Of underwater windows; all the wrecks

  Of our world where the sad blood leads back

  Through memory and sense like divers working.

  Sleep, my dear, we won’t disturb

 
; You, lying in the zones of sleep.

  The four walls symbolise love put about

  To hold in silence which so soon brims

  Over into sadness: it’s still dark.

  Sleep and rise a lady with a flower

  Between your teeth and a cypress

  Between your thighs: surely you won’t ever

  Be puzzled by a poem or disturbed by a poem

  Made like fire by the rubbing of two sticks?

  1943/1942

  TO ARGOS

  The roads lead southward, blue

  Along a circumference of snow,

  Identified now by the scholars

  As a home for the cyclops, a habitation

  For nymphs and ancient appearances.

  Only the shepherd in his cowl

  Who walks upon them really knows

  The natural history in a sacred place;

  Takes like a text of stone

  A familiar cloud-shape or fortress,

  Pointing at what is mutually seen,

  His dark eyes wearing the crowsfoot.

  Our idols have been betrayed

  Not by the measurement of the dead ones

  Who are lying under these mountains,

  As under England our own fastidious

  Heroes lie awake but do not judge.

  Winter rubs at the ice like a hair,

  Dividing time; and a single tree

  Reflects here a mythical river.

  Water limps on ice, or scribbles

  On doors of sand its syllables,

  All alone, in an empty land, alone.

  This is what breaks the heart.

  We say that the blood of Virgil

  Grew again in the scarlet pompion,

  Ever afterwards reserving the old poet

  Memorials in his air, his water: so

  In this land one encounters always

  Agamemnon, Agamemnon; the voice

  Of water falling on hair in caves,

  The stonebreaker’s hammer on walls,

  A name held closer in the circles

  Of bald granite than even these cyclamen,