Poems Read online

  NEARLY THEY STOOD

  Nearly they stood who fall.

  Themselves, when they look back,

  See always in the track

  One torturing spot where all

  By a possible quick swerve

  Of will yet unenslaved—

  By the infinitesimal twitching of a nerve—

  Might have been saved.

  Nearly they fell who stand.

  These with cold after-fear

  Look back and note how near

  They grazed the Siren’s land,

  Wondering to think that fate,

  By threads so spidery-fine,

  The choice of ways so small, the event so great,

  Should thus entwine.

  Therefore I sometimes fear

  Lest oldest fears prove true,

  Lest, when no bugle blew

  My mort, when skies looked clear,

  I may have stepped one hair’s

  Breadth past the hair-breadth bourn

  Which, being once crossed forever unawares,

  Forbids return.

  RELAPSE

  Out of the wound we pluck

  The shrapnel. Thorns we squeeze

  Out of the hand. Even poison forth we suck,

  And after pain have ease.

  But images that grow

  Within the soul have life

  Like cancer and, often cut, live on below

  The deepest of the knife,

  Waiting their time to shoot

  At some defenceless hour

  Their poison, unimpaired, at the heart’s root,

  And, like a golden shower,

  Unanswerably sweet,

  Bright with returning guilt,

  Fatally in a moment’s time defeat

  Our brazen towers long-built;

  And all our former pain

  And all our surgeon’s care

  Is lost, and all the unbearable (in vain

  Borne once) is still to bear.

  LATE SUMMER

  I, dusty and bedraggled as I am,

  Pestered with wasps and weeds and making jam,

  Blowzy and stale, my welcome long outstayed,

  Proved false in every promise that I made,

  At my beginning I believed, like you,

  Something would come of all my green and blue.

  Mortals remember, looking on the thing

  I am, that I, even I, was once a spring.

  TO A FRIEND

  If knowledge like the mid-day heat

  Uncooled with cloud, unstirred with breath

  Of undulant air, begins to beat

  On minds one moment after death,

  From your rich soil what lives will spring,

  What flower-entangled paradise,

  Through what green walks the birds will sing,

  What med’cinable gums, what spice,

  Apples of what smooth gold! But fear

  Gnaws at me for myself; the noon

  That nourishes Earth can only sear

  And scald the unresponding Moon.

  Her gaping valleys have no soil,

  Her needle-pointed hills are bare;

  Water, poured on those rocks, would boil,

  And day lasts long, and long despair.

  TO CHARLES WILLIAMS

  Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard

  To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,

  Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,

  To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.

  The slant alters. I can’t see the old contours. It’s a larger world

  Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on the ridge.

  Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of spring?

  A hard question and worth talking a whole night on. But with whom?

  Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death

  Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?

  AFTER VAIN PRETENCE

  When the grape of the night is pressed

  Nearly dry, and the trains rest

  And roads are empty and the moon low,

  Out of my body’s breast I go,

  Insecure, as a child escaped,

  Animula flittering in the night unshaped;

  Lacking wings; but I leap so high

  It wants but a little more to fly.

  Down I swoop with a seven-league stride

  From church’s spire to river side,

  There scarce touching the ground, and then

  Up to the elm-tree tops again;

  Rising higher each leap and still

  Sinking lower again, until

  Lured to venture at last too much

  I dream of flying indeed—no touch

  Of earth between; then, holding breath

  I poise on a perilous edge. But faith

  All goes out of my soul—too late!

  Air is emptiness: man has weight.

  Unsupported I drop like lead

  To where my body awakes in bed

  Screaming-scared—and yet glad, as one

  Who, after vain pretence, has done

  With keeping company too great

  For his lean purse and low estate.

  ANGEL’S SONG

  I know not, I,

  What the men together say,

  How lovers, lovers die

  And youth passes away.

  Cannot understand

  Love that mortal bears

  To native, native land,

  All lands are theirs;

  Why at grave they grieve

  For one voice and face,

  And not, and not receive

  Another in its place.

  I above the cone

  Of the circling night

  Flying, never have known

  Less or greater light.

  Sorrow it is they call

  This cup whence my lip

  (Woe’s me!) never in all

  My endless days can sip.

  JOYS THAT STING

  Oh doe not die, says Donne, for I shall hate

  All women so. How false the sentence rings.

  Women? But in a life made desolate

  It is the joys once shared that have the stings.

  To take the old walks alone, or not at all,

  To order one pint where I ordered two,

  To think of, and then not to make, the small

  Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);

  To laugh (oh, one’ll laugh), to talk upon

  Themes that we talked upon when you were there,

  To make some poor pretence of going on,

  Be kind to one’s old friends, and seem to care,

  While no one (O God) through the years will say

  The simplest, common word in just your way.

  OLD POETS REMEMBERED

  One happier look on your kind, suffering face,

  And all my sky is domed with cloudless blue;

  Eternal summer in a moment’s space

  Breathes with sweet air and glows and warms me through.

  One droop of your dear mouth, one tear of yours,

  One gasp of Faith half-strangled by its foe,

  And down through a waste world of slag and sewers

  And hammering and loud wheels once more I go.

  Thus, what old poets told me about love

  (Tristram’s obedience, Isoud’s sovereignty . . . )

  Turns true in a dread mode I dreamed not of,

  —What once I studied, now I learn to be;

  Taught, oh how late! in anguish, the response

  I might have made with exultation once.

  AS THE RUIN FALLS

  All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

  I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

  I am
mercenary and self-seeking through and through:

  I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

  Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

  I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:

  I talk of love—a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—

  But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

  Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.

  I see the chasm. And everything you are was making

  My heart into a bridge by which I might get back

  From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

  For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains

  You give me are more precious than all other gains.

  PART IV

  FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

  POEM FOR PSYCHOANALYSTS AND/OR THEOLOGIANS

  Naked apples, woolly-coated peaches

  Swelled on the garden’s wall. Unbounded

  Odour of windless, spice-bearing trees

  Surrounded my lying in sacred turf,

  Made dense the guarded air—the forest of trees

  Buoyed up therein like weeds in ocean

  Lived without motion. I was the pearl,

  Mother-of-pearl my bower. Milk-white the cirrhus

  Streaked the blue egg-shell of the distant sky,

  Early and distant, over the spicy forest;

  Wise was the fangless serpent, drowsy.

  All this, indeed, I do not remember.

  I remember the remembering, when first waking

  I heard the golden gates behind me

  Fall to, shut fast. On the flinty road,

  Black-frosty, blown on with an eastern wind,

  I found my feet. Forth on journey,

  Gathering thin garment over aching bones,

  I went. I wander still. But the world is round.

  NOON’S INTENSITY

  Till your alchemic beams turn all to gold

  There must be many metals. From the night

  You will not yet withdraw her silver light,

  And often with Saturnian tints the cold

  Atlantic swells at morning shall enfold

  The Cornish cliffs burnished with copper bright;

  Till trained by slow degrees we have such sight

  As dares the pure projection to behold.

  Even when Sol comes ascendant, it may be

  More perfectly in him our eyes shall see

  All baser virtues; thus shall hear you talking

  And yet not die. Till then, you have left free,

  Unscorched by your own noon’s intensity

  One cool and evening hour for garden walking.

  SWEET DESIRE

  These faint wavering far-travell’d gleams

  Coming from your country, fill me with care. That scent,

  That sweet stabbing, as at the song of thrush,

  That leap of the heart—too like they seem

  To another air; unlike as well

  So that I am dazed with doubt. As a dungeoned man

  Who has heard the hinge on the hook turning

  Often. Always that opened door

  Let new tormentors in. If now at last

  It open again, but outward, offering free way,

  (His kind one come, with comfort) he

  Yet shrinks, in his straw, struggling backward,

  From his dear, from his door, into the dark’st corner,

  Furthest from freedom. So, fearing, I

  Taste not but with trembling. I was tricked before.

  All the heraldry of heaven, holy monsters,

  With hazardous and dim half-likeness taunt

  Long-haunted men. The like is not the same.

  Always evil was an ape. I know.

  Who passes to paradise, within that pure border

  Finds there, refashioned, all that he fled from here.

  And yet . . .

  But what’s the use? For yield I must,

  Though long delayed, at last must dare

  To give over, to be eased of my iron casing,

  Molten at thy melody, as men of snow

  In the solar smile. Slow-paced I come,

  Yielding by inches. And yet, oh Lord, and yet,

  —Oh Lord, let not likeness fool me again.

  CAUGHT

  You rest upon me all my days

  The inevitable Eye,

  Dreadful and undeflected as the blaze

  Of some Arabian sky;

  Where, dead still, in their smothering tent

  Pale travellers crouch, and, bright

  About them, noon’s long-drawn Astonishment

  Hammers the rocks with light.

  Oh, for but one cool breath in seven,

  One air from northern climes,

  The changing and the castle-clouded heaven

  Of my old Pagan times!

  But you have seized all in your rage

  Of Oneness. Round about,

  Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage,

  I flutter, but not out.

  FORBIDDEN PLEASURE

  Quick! The black, sulphurous, never quenched,

  Old festering fire begins to play

  Once more within. Look! By brute force I have wrenched

  Unmercifully my hands the other way.

  Quick, Lord! On the rack thus, stretched tight,

  Nerves clamouring as at nature’s wrong.

  Scorched to the quick, whipp’d raw—Lord, in this plight

  You see, you see no man can suffer long.

  Quick, Lord! Before new scorpions bring

  New venom—ere fiends blow the fire

  A second time—quick, show me that sweet thing

  Which, ’spite of all, more deeply I desire.

  THE NAKED SEED

  My heart is empty. All the fountains that should run

  With longing, are in me

  Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one

  That drips to find the sea.

  I have no care for anything thy love can grant

  Except the moment’s vain

  And hardly noticed filling of the moment’s want

  And to be free from pain.

  Oh, thou that art unwearying, that dost neither sleep

  Nor slumber, who didst take

  All care for Lazarus in the careless tomb, oh keep

  Watch for me till I wake.

  If thou think for me what I cannot think, if thou

  Desire for me what I

  Cannot desire, my soul’s interior Form, though now

  Deep-buried, will not die,

  —No more than the insensible dropp’d seed which grows

  Through winter ripe for birth

  Because, while it forgets, the heaven remembering throws

  Sweet influence still on earth,

  —Because the heaven, moved moth-like by thy beauty, goes

  Still turning round the earth.

  SCAZONS

  Walking to-day by a cottage I shed tears

  When I remembered how once I had walked there

  With my friends who are mortal and dead. Years

  Little had healed the wound that was laid bare.

  Out little spear that stabs! I, fool, believed

  I had outgrown the local, unique sting,

  I had transmuted wholly (I was deceived)

  Into Love universal the lov’d thing.

  But Thou, Lord, surely knewest thine own plan

  When the angelic indifferencies with no bar

  Universally loved, but Thou gav’st man

  The tether and pang of the particular,

  Which, like a chemic drop, infinitesimal,

  Plashed into pure water, changing the whole,

  Embodies and embitters and turns all

  Spirit’s sweet water into astringent soul,

  That we, though small, might quiver with Fire’s same

  Substantial form as Thou—not reflect merely


  Like lunar angels back to Thee cold flame.

  Gods are we, Thou hast said; and we pay dearly.

  LEGION

  Lord, hear my voice, my present voice I mean,

  Not that which may be speaking an hour hence

  (For I am Legion) in an opposite sense,

  And not by show of hands decide between

  The multiple factions which my state has seen

  Or will see. Condescend to the pretence

  That what speaks now is I; in its defence

  Dissolve my parliament and intervene.

  Thou wilt not, though we asked it, quite recall

  Free will once given. Yet to this moment’s choice

  Give unfair weight. Hold me to this. Oh strain

  A point—use legal fictions; for if all

  My quarrelling selves must bear an equal voice,

  Farewell, thou hast created me in vain.

  PILGRIM’S PROBLEM

  By now I should be entering on the supreme stage

  Of the whole walk, reserved for the late afternoon.

  The heat was to be over now; the anxious mountains,

  The airless valleys and the sun-baked rocks, behind me.

  Now, or soon now, if all is well, come the majestic

  Rivers of foamless charity that glide beneath

  Forests of contemplation. In the grassy clearings

  Humility with liquid eyes and damp, cool nose

  Should come, half-tame, to eat bread from my hermit hand.

  If storms arose, then in my tower of fortitude—

  It ought to have been in sight by this—I would take refuge;

  But I expected rather a pale mackerel sky,

  Feather-like, perhaps shaking from a lower cloud

  Light drops of silver temperance, and clovery earth

  Sending up mists of chastity, a country smell,

  Till earnest stars blaze out in the established sky

  Rigid with justice; the streams audible; my rest secure.

  I can see nothing like all this. Was the map wrong?

  Maps can be wrong. But the experienced walker knows

  That the other explanation is more often true.

  SONNET

  Dieu a établi la prière pour communiquer à ses creatures la dignité de la causalité.