Roland Harris – Selected Poems

The following were written in his 20’s during or just after the Second World War

and selected by Martha Harris

VERSES FOR SIMPLE PEOPLE

I have been reading new verses,

Sails set on our sad tide:

There I find regrets, and curses,

And yieldings of love that has died.

Sad are their scarfed slow barges;

They are full of lament

That none know where Red Hugh hearses

Nor care for O’Rahilly

In his banishment.

Wide sails woe’s dark sea immerses;

They boast with a quiet sorrow

That the crowns of the queens would

Be forgotten with the whores tomorrow,

But for blind singers and their verses.

To death’s idle sea their search is

Sadly foredoomed, nor act-inspire

Us till `twere pity death were so

Deathless, and the eager fire

Winged but with a chaplet of verses.

Involved as the dark blood’s course is,

Perhaps they do not speak straight,

Knowing that the silence of verse is

The immaculate – lest a fool prate

And dilate their meaning to less.

I have been reading their verses;

But my people are simple people,

Expecting everything; and if none sing

Simply for them, the bells in the steeple

Would cast down curses and not with joy ring.

Simple people, reading no real verses,

Acting folly, and loving, and making

A great love our of folly’s suffering,

And a tune out of what’s tolled in the steeple.

I will write verses for simple people –

Those simple people I despise,

Whom time in breathing mummifies,

Who pray to God (and some God blesses)

Somewhat too late for their distresses;

Flea-minds who pelmanise the mysteries –

I will speak straight, and only

Simple people shall read my verses:

Swift, acting men who make immortal

Marrow in folly’s bones and blinkers,

No heart-sinkers raising hats to hearses.

My people are the silence in those verses,

Without that reconcileless subtlety

Which buys its love shamefacedly,

Regretfully, illegally,

As if it were stolen property.

COMEDY OF OLD IRON

Sometimes I feel like an empty tin

Dumped at the derelict end of town,

Who should be shining shield to rich food within,

Not unlabelled, anonymous, ploughed-field brown.

Sometimes I think: if they only would –

Who left me here to be licked by the rat –

Make guns or bullets of me so that

I could destroy the evil and the good.

Or even fill me with grease and butter

Full as a bean to make lean burghers fat,

So that their ponderous bowels could utter

Grumbling contentment and generate.

But I lie here with a rough-toothed grin,

Void as a field which will never be sown,

Destroyer nor preserver, rusty as sin,

Holder of rain which has fallen down.

Somewhere in the world my lost fulfillment

Moves like a crab that has lost its shell,

Unable to go forward, and hesitant

Before the ironic over-sensible.

A THEME FOR POETRY

`Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’ – Yeats

Shells fall, springs waste, for poetry

No theme, passives, here-such-as-we

Who bear; famine and war act free.

Famine has no throat for arrows;

Action suffers overthrows

Of vague and intangible foes:

Nobody, nothing, things which deflate

The tragic hero and elate –

No enemy so grand as Fate,

But cloak in night, a paper plot

A pattern traced with what is not

To be encompassed, save as nought.

After a week the breast is dry

That should have suckled prophecy;

Is this no theme for tragedy?

Waking’s an actless, frozen stream;

Sleep has nightmares, but no dream:

Is not this a tragic theme?

Friend fails friend; the shy maid leers;

The just man stoops, the brave man fears;

Is not this a theme for tears?

For those that die are more that grieve;

Never suffering is passive,

Suffering that has to live.

Suffering that cannot die

Weeps between the earth and sky;

Friend, you shall have no peace, nor I

Until this theme of poetry

Is dumb, kennelled this barking day,

And no least life lives, not one flea.

COME WIND, SHAT SHALL I SING OF?

How do you choose

in the waste of sky

the way your invisible

arrows fly?

Were there a maiden,

I could pursue her!

A shrine, grow quickly

pilgrim, age in

sanctity.

Where is that fortress?

It fell before me.

In Venice’ lagoons

where do Antonio’s

galleys lie?

Well, if I fail there!

I am nothing, an air;

but I with wind share

the cloudy lightning,

and I sing

Out of the waste of sky

invincible arrows

of beauty and danger,

when the strong Stranger

bends me, and trains his eye!

A CANCER OF THE SHOULDER

Who was as bright as a sailor

As any leader of the cloudy fleet

Knows his faring day doomed

Cut black as tunnel mouth;

Walks the hard city with restless feet

Past the roadmenders: the dead

Seem cables carrying life’s power,

And graves are opened to lay them?

Bends sideways his head to listen

Where on his shoulder the cruel bird

Brought from islands below experience

Hoarsely repeats its obscene learning.

Bright leader! now as the weeds

Dark on the grey sea’s wave;

Who has only pain to ease

The panic of his dreadful knowledge.

NIGHT-WATCHMAN ON CROYDON ROAD

The roadworks hold the road

With sentinel lamps,

Far shadow-darters, fifty –

And the Greeks in their ships?

The watchman on sackcloth dozes

Before Troy’s towers,

A royal marshmallow-purple

His brazier’s flower.

Dawn comes near on stealthy foot,

And he will waken

To find his sentinels’ eyes blank,

All his towers taken –

His engines of mighty war

Grunting to roll out tar,

His guns of great caliber

Carriers of water.

A VISITOR TO THE BLIND SCHOOL

Take off your white gloves, lady.

Bare your white arms;

Here eyes are fingertips,

Pupils are palms.

Pare down those crimson arrows’

Amorous chase;

Here’s no pursuit, lady,

Sit in your place.

Pack off those suitors who are

Halled in your ears;

Greater guests enter when

Darkness appears.

On threads of wire the blind,

Lady O lady,

Pin poppy-heads, eye-beads

Reconciled darkly:

Those to whom dark is dark

Find work to hand;

Only the half-blind can

Not understand

Why day nor dark keep faith

And we are beguilded;

Stare, lady, at light-source like

This idiot child

Hand-idle as some poet,

Large head ruth-wry,

Pale lips apart, sa if

To prophesy.

Question the straight-head sure

Blindly adept

Pupils for whom dark is

A promise kept.

One late for a meeting, quiet

You enter; so

Quiet not a face stirs; and yet

Blind children know;

Half-rise with a strange unrest,

Half-curtsey to you,

Knowing you come more than guest,

As pupil too;

Take off your white gloves, lady;

In these dark schools

See with your finger tips

How the sun cools.

IN THE RUINED CITY OF DUSSELDORF

(1)

In the ruined city of Dusseldorf

Officers crowd in the bar of messes;

The young stand sprucely side by side

Like glasses turned upside down and dried

Lining shelves in the bars of messes;

The elder like old books no-one buys

In antiquarians for they are

Too little known to be ever read,

Or known so well, the poor scholar

Replaces them with a shake of the head.

Is it reserve or is it emptiness?

That talk taps like a ping-pong ball

Along the table and all in all

As very similar, if at all –

Tapping and rapping littlenesses

Like hail and rain and dust that fall

In the ruined city of Dusseldorf.

(2)

Bed-frames, cisterns, oven-tiles,

Rusted wires and bric-a-brac,

Under the railway bridge of piles

Footsteps echo, the night is black;

The thin sliver of the moon

In a clouded whey of sky

Offers to long queues of streets

A small ration of light, and by

And by the crowded trams

Shudder with sound of sheathed swords;

Rhine bridge is fallen, and the shams

Of shop-signs are fallen from words;

Black’s a la mode in the fashion-centre,

There the family dwells supreme –

Black is the fashion if you enter –

In the cellar of a dream;

And desire to live making

Remaining alive life’s end and aim

Clings to the citizen of this dream-city

With a mother’s affectionate unpity,

Or as a clinging wife taking

Submissively all his strength from him.

(3)

And at the canteen doors are met

Beggar-urchins, black-silver eyes

Like bathroom mirrors in shivering sweat;

The girls wait with a mild surmise;

A Greek plays on a clarinet,

He has yellow skin and oil-black hair,

And he grins without his eyes;

Soldiers round the tables din,

Row on row of shaven necks

Who with sixpence, teas and snacks

Preserve their similarities.

Outside it is cold and wet

Underneath the ruined stars.

In the ruined city looms

No outline, but a silhouette

Suggesting emptiness of rooms

Of palaces of broken tombs.

Underneath the ruined stars

Officers drive off in cars.

(4)

O my brother! O my companion

In messes in canteens in queues

In cellars in follies in stews,

Why do we waste our time in

Driving at one-another

Girding at one-another,

Ruling one-another not ourselves?

When the streets are distresses

And the bridges and stanchions

Ruin about us and time passes

In messes in canteens in guesses

Envies and surmise of treacheries?

Ruling one another, and never ourselves,

Till a few years will see us

As similar as now that delves

Graves in ruined cities for us;

When we are silhouetted men

In the cold sweat of might-have-been,

Wedded to dying not living then.

Inside the canteen of the bone

The worm shall find salvation;

Our failure shall be writ in stone

Too well and yet too little known;

We shall shine more white and clean

But as like as we have been

In not-loving one-another;

O my companion! O my brother!

THE MINER

He, groping in mine’s darkness, feels

Grass spray and fern, closed flowers

That swayed beneath the visiting moon

Was it time was it

In time at all?

Leaves murmur under the drill’s din

An obliggato of ancient woods;

The ring of hammer hides the voice of birds:

They call him,

Their bright plumage,

Their free wings O

Out where earth is fair and there’s a use for eyes,

And beauty is not swathed in centuries.

THE BURIAL OF MY AUNT

When my aunt died, they buried her in deal-wood,

Not cedar-wood, cypress, with musk and sweet-scented amber;

A short shrift hardly reaching to her womanhood;

Her withered hand unclenched, loosed its small hold on life;

Her flesh, grown large with sitting, and thrice stricken,

Just turning to straw-colour, the dried summer of grass;

And her eyes were closed, she looked out no more at them.

Little respect they paid her age and life of courage;

As little love they had given before this came to pass

And the great fire in her dried her body to grass.

When they carried her gravewards, that shoddy aristocrat

Her brilliant husband followed, talented and sardonic;

Her younger sons were leaves whirled in the war’s wild season;

One daughter had early eloped to New Zealand with a lover;

She had been left to stare at the flags in the garden

And the old Angoras, mangy for want of care.

A few mourners followed: a daughter well-established,

A sister with ogre-eye directed to pettiness; the eldest son,

And my mother, blind with the knowledge of new solitude,

Of an opportunity gone for ever, for everyone.

They came from dark aisles of yew and steeple-shadow,

A small cortege, in rough winds, under broken cloud,

By ponderous headstones to the cheap end’s iron railing:

I tell you, there was nothing splendid, nothing fitting,

Save the sorrow in my mother’s heart and the son’s!

And the bearers were all small men, weighed down by the coffin.

I recall these indignant things, for I recall

How often in ungoverned childhood she patiently

Guided my spirit, and soothed my body’s clumsiness,

Shielding me from the grey whip of her husband’s eyes.

They came between black marbles to the open house of her;

The priest who led them wrapped his black cloak about him.

But the path rose from Autumn, a majesty came on him,

His cloak loosed slow wings lined with the crimson of blood.

One of them dirty foreigners, the sister said –

His black hair, spade-beard jet black, and long slow pace

Were monuments of death; he towered above her,

Over that slow and impotent cortege; he did honour

To the sunken magnificence and glory gone for ever!

His shoulders covered the sky an angry cloud.

He turned then; the earth descended, the blessed earth covered her;

But we felt our shame and nakedness cold and alone for ever.

The cloak turned back from the clasp, its slow ominous wings

Flashed once, and were folded; then only the somber showed;

The sky overcame us, the wind grew cold, we were left alone

With no sorrow only of death, but the sorrow of life

Seized on by no equal spirit that could reveal it glorious,

But given to spendthrifts; until a better trustee

Recalled it, and gave cerement equal with kings and saviours.

So we turned to ourselves, and left her with fitting companions.

FRANCISCAN MASS

The organ loft

views tonsured heads

where hair will grow

mouse-brown and soft.

Robes purple-gold

pontificate,

hide, underneath,

the bifurcate.

Sanctity seems

a joined garment.

The prelate bows

to Host-descent;

Ah Christ! in pagan seed

I drift with the wind,

divide as a wound;

I bow with the reed.

THE SCHOOLROOM EMPTIES

The schoolroom empties; down stone steps tumble

a babble of children’s voices; straight-backed desks

look upright and surprised; learning humble

as litter lies in wastepaper arabesques.

The sun clings quiet on the distempered wall

in tall oblongs flawed by the window glass.

The master closes a book, and breathes contented,

with the inward smile of one who has seen swans pass

morning time under old elms in the park,

on the tree-dark lake breasting dust from the water;

a vision of swans into October work.

The book closes, but questions one to ten

recur unanswered. It is difficult for a man

to enter the minds of children like a swan;

or to close the book on them, for they return

for something they have forgotten, or some whim,

when he is quiet as milk, inch deep in cream,

with their rough tongues they lap at him;

and when he sleeps, they stir him with a dream.

Most often he is wakened by one vague child,

high-bridged, streak-toothed, distemper faced, with spoiled

slum eyes unwinking, wide and wild.

This hair-fallen-forward wrapped-in-self wax idiot,

light-of-life flawed by window of man and wife

faulty or cheap glass, comes in like a cheat

and picks the mind’s pocket of all other thought;

runs off and buys himself a gimcrack mirror;

sees ever no world new, nor other self

such as, head down through legs, a boy sees clear

with supernatural creative error;

but least like children, as from growth most far;

nor in one plane, the present, like them all,

but in one place of it, himself, lives caged and small.

Between fulfillment and its prophecy

we live, between worlds unborn and dead;

growth is the principle of our beauty,

striving to speak the inward sense of things:

not learnt-by-heart, nor shop-bought rootless flower,

nor million dead perfections of newsprint,

nor ordered anarchy of absolute political power;

nor holy Aquinas even, scholared saint, in the Vatican,

save as he is both after and before:

one with the tangled childish script, and

with long roots like a prophet’s beard and hair.

But not so complex is the idiot present,

made of a past identical and empty,

and futured so to no development.

Cracked in the fit’s heat, Dostoevsky’s held

All in the fragile vase; but this child ill

with emptiness is dropsy-full of wind.

The master thinks: an outworn style in masonry,

eventually too the poetry is still;

growth moves, and beauty, like a vision of swans.

His peace the idiot pierces to the centre,

child who in enters, whom he cannot enter.

The outworn school dark prison high and fast;

the cast-off socks of learning, like waste paper,

are not the tragic buskin of plays past.

It would be well, he thinks, losing his swans,

to hold the wall as effortless as the sun

brightens the steep, drab, school partition,

in centuries of flame quiet as a nun;

which rises, as on seamen long adrift,

first warm from night (stirring the swans at home);

then high and fierce its terrible gaze does loom

over their vacant faces, grazed by the sheetless boom.

THE ART CLASS

Nature pours sheet over the meadow;

Stripes tiger and spots pard to go

Patterned in perilous shadow.

Drives dragons of cloud to run

Round the hesperidean sun;

Wrinkles the sultry plain;

Sets sails on the roughskinned sea,

On the snake’s slough, which he

Discards indifferently;

Graves glass with frostiness’

Careless inexactness;

Timeless and formless

Infinite forms,

Spaceless and traceless

Patterns and norms:

She, careless of wealth,

Alters all with a breath,

Leaves no trace beneath –

As the bird in the sky

Forgets its pathway

Quicker than watcher’s eye.

With scalpel and potato, I

Get no pattern, yet employ

An indelible, dark dye.

Ah, having no need

For time and form and greed,

Nor doing for reward:

Hymns are for sinners here –

The angels in their sphere

Burn silent, careless, clear.

THE PROCESSION OF TOM MURGATROYD

Tom Murgatroyd a long time sat

Still on his life’s tombstone,

Quite dead, not in the least upset,

Comfortable and alone.

Thirty years, they say, he sat there,

Sheltered from wind and rain,

And none knew if he lived, or where,

Or if he would again.

But now he buried must be,

And risk a positive move,

Poor Tom! a man whom none did see

In danger or in love;

Decent, provident, and kind

He, as his mourners, was;

They don full black, pull down the blind,

And follow Tom’s black hearse.

The plumes shake out their dusty years,

The steeds stamp slow as thought;

There followed twice a hundred cars,

And all a town on foot.

Decent and orderly death took

The streets by mild consent,

Priest and lawyer in his book

Signed their last testament.

As they had died, so lived they then

On Tom’s fine funeral day,

All followed his example

As they had done alway.

GUY FAWKES’ NIGHT

A folded handkerchief, November night

Blindfolds the pale facades, the plaster grief

Of so many, of so many

Respectable houses which fringe the Square.

Quickly the small Prometheans gather,

Smoke in dark vultures spreads, wheels thickly,

Flames mount, griefs glimmer and fade.

The small artillery of remembrance crackles.

Piles of October leaves; fallen chill and damp,

Kerchiefs of numberless platforms of farewell,

Show unexpected ardour,

Transmuted by the searching tongue of fire.

Figures of wild myth leap beside the glow;

Parched stars sparkle skyward to grapple withi

The fixed serene immortals;

Night is huge with a small child’s shadow.

ON THE SEAFRONT

Walk on the front at night, lamps throw

Your shadow on the rocks below:

Over sea, over sands

With equal ease it goes or stands;

Is wrecked, unites unhurt; drowns dry;

Leaps at a wall, falls without cry.

All qualities accrue to it

Of hero, god, or hypocrite:

Complaisant, hurtles quite

And bold. Yet manlike turns from light;

Stretches out on the rack of time;

Huddles beneath a sleeping form.

THE HIGH COUNTRY

Hazed in itself hides visions of distance

Away towards source of light a high country;

Here burns heart by the smoke-blind mirror,

Here swims hope in the tide-thwarting sea:

Dash down the mirror to sprinkle like water!

Frost in the night, still early in April,

Gathers the silver-scaled fragments in pattern:

Heart astonished in a dream of marvel

Sees hints while house sleeps that challenge wonder;

The fair line forms on the translucent screen.

Lovely the leaf-veined hands of patient winter

That on morning’s window frostily glimmer,

Guide heart awakening to the amazing mirror,

Then vanish as spirits, revealing joyous

To bright-voiced dawn the outbursting life.

As through a window fronded with frost

Eye unreflecting tangles in beauty,

Leaps loose as salmon from swiftfall net,

Through carved waters cuts from the coast

To its high country of original light,

So the nightridden heart is hot to forget

Images of itself at the spurred hag’s heels;

Protean to downsurge of a whitefall beauty

Draws to that deep pool, poised – then startles through

To vision of distance hid in the white hills.

THE NIGHT PHONE

(from Pictures in a Hospital)

Phone’s bell

showers ice

cold drops

over

darkness.

Gasping

from night’s

pool it

shakes out

night in

our eyes.

Someone

answers:

like rain

in gusts

intel-

ligence

of pain

spits, flits

across

ether:

is known.

So, in the night of day

rarely, rarely,

beauty

startles

and we obey.

PARTING IN HOSPITAL

(from Pictures in a Hospital)

You had better say goodbye

To him now, for he must die.

Nothing further to be said.

Standing by the quiet bed;

Nothing further will he hear;

Nothing now to call him near.

In his mind a dragon curled

Around the apple of the world.

In the travail of his birth

There was much pain and little mirth.

In his growing he gathered might

As an oak, from dark and light:

Going now to sleep and night.

Then goodbye, my dove, my fair one, then goodbye.

Nothing further to be said

Care-wan by the quiet bed,

Standing by the quiet bed.

THE SPARROW

to whom

every crumb

is an affair of violence and debate

jerks with a

hop with a

rapid lust, then wriggles belly-down

in the dust.

Family-fussed

he flies in Sunday mobs to a brown Kew,

unaware (one suspects0 of a fruitful

isolation:

so passion

intense but trivial pecks every brown

berry of his

communities.

Self, important in inverse proportion,

he flits and feeds,

timid as reeds

but brave as air, in the very mouth

of the terrible

crocodile,

town – impudent and assertive, as if

well aware

that God does care.

THE CORMORANT

On a tall post

weed-grown and black,

perches

the cormorant

with undulant neck:

his sharp beak black

on the silver stars,

the shallow diver’s

bane of the silver fishes!

THE HERON

A reedy rivulet

in a bare meadow

will sometimes shelter

the lightning-beaked

long-legged heron,

knobbly-kneed –

as circumstance

articulates straightness in the world,

distorting to make feasible –

he, startled, will rise

with slow, ungainly

haste; but once at proper

broad-winged attitude,

moves like a grey wind.

Resting again,

on one

leg,

he demonstrates the

superfluity

of rational argument

to a winged creature.

SWANS

Swans flying fly hard, not high,

Pass close over with angry striving wings,

Air crying out under their beat and gust;

They carry their heavy crowns, as fleeing kings.

Unreadily take air’s opportunity;

Their beauty, heavy as a summer tree’s,

Clings to the water, which equal carries

Islands and continents, as these

Whose gentle habitat is rivers,

Lakes, ponds, sheltered and willowed lane;

No giant barbaric albatross, the easy rider

Carefree in the vertical tempest’s mane.

Their song mere make-believe; their lurching walk

Ungainly; appetite rude, and stretch

Of spiteful strength – Helen so seen

Magnifies swiftly to a Glumdalclitch.

But see them rather like the vanguard cloud

With arched wings in the heaven-reflecting wars;

Or convoying their young in watchful order,

Sharing all nature’s fears and hopeful dares;

Serenely moving in the windward calm

Among burnt Autumn in the evening reach,

As in the twilight of lost life we glimpse

Things which we most regret, and cannot touch;

Or in moment of dire need, as Gogarty

Recalled their beauty in the perilous river,

Recall those desperate wings against the wind

Struggling to rise from the long, dark water

As men from knowledge strive to mysteries;

Then yield; recall the soft returning surge

When water receives them once more, and in dusk they burn

On the smooth lake in phantom, silver fires.

THE GREY GULL

The only bird which does not fly

as a black silhouette,

but is chameleon to light,

the lark,

is a white song in a white sky,

known only by the ariette

and shadow of its sound,

a faint radiance of song,

a colourless music like the October sun,

a poplar leaf turningn in silver-grey on the edge of form,

something gone far but which you can almost remember,

the sea in the pearl-drift spiral found beyond eye of proof,

the sky-sunken star screened by filmy distance and veils of openness;

its nest also hidden in open

insignificance, of grass –

a bodyguard even for importance people.

Coming one day upon

such naïve privacy where the plough must pass,

my farmer,

a lark-like practical man

of shy inward song

preserved that island oasis

under its branching palms of song

green in the brown fertile desert,

avoiding it with his iron heel –

a tribute we are more in need of than the lark –

there stayed the shy bird with her eggs

and a heart too loud for singing,

but though in peril

happier than in a vague a-sexual love;

knowing peril lodges in the branches too,

for there is only one room in a city

and we had better stay where we belong

there by like paradox of faint invisible music

preserve strong heart and be valued by country minds.

THE THREE CROWS

On crossed staves of anger –

prophet-fleshless, prophet-lean,

beggar-ragged, time-has-been,

symbol of that intersection

Eliot spoke of and saint knows, -

shaken by the southern

violence of the wind,

hang three crows.

As weed under dark water,

or under the blank face

of a boy learning, trace

memory, anticipation,

the timeless moment of play,

the note under the desk,

so lifted feathers refined

lustres of dark day.

Now they to warn another

are kept in and punished,

their rash, unagile burnished

stook-thief companion,

to whom, nervous but phlegmatic,

danger comes unexpected but

not thought of; undermined

by long-sighted gun-didactic.

There hang the three crows with

quizzical perkiness that made

life possible for them but did

not save them, cockney-fashion

in a trench; thin, dead, and small,

with not even their gleaned crumbs

under the seagull’s shifting table of wind –

but Autumn, fulfiller of all,

has emptied of their

bright night, their ruffled wings of flight,

their dark eyes of light,

cocked heads of curious question;

the white mere fable survives,

is immortal; the swallows’

round nests, they too are blind

under the eaves.

All our fears, all our despairs

are secret hopes, the squirrel

granary, the sheaves, are full;

and I no sucked man,

still in first husk whole of hope,

record this sadly only,

no laughter-cynical south wind,

nor justice leaden misanthrope.

FAITH AND LOVE

The three substitutes

In love for faith

Are memory, hope

And sudden death.

O bracelet of bright

Hair; O golden reef

Wherein the stately

Galleons lie

Etched on a grief

Of tapestry,

Faintly stirring

In an antique air,

Out of the danger

Of dreams moored

Unreal ships! all

On the pool of night.

Byzantium is no

Harbour eternal.

O lovely queen,

Resolute Judith,

Deirdre and Helen!

If deep regret

Could realize hope,

Those ancient queens

Should be lovely yet.

Angelo’s roof

Flakes, but not fast

As wing or hoof

Who knows no past;

Hope, that is fear

In bas-relief,

Is woman’s wit

Unreconciled

At knowing she is

Born plain, not mild.

There is no faith

In hope at all.

O bright bullet

Keeper of faith,

And olivet

To savage death,

To promises that came

That came to naught

But ruinous shame!

In hese ruined

Streets abound

Prophecies

Of rusty sound,

Palaced outlines,

Anterooms –

But day which brings

Fulfillment round

Shows them as no

Outlines but as

Silhouettes and tombs.

O shrill swift song

Of shortest lines,

Saloome to tedious johns,

Plucking the beard

Of prophecies –

For the bracelet

Of bright hair,

And the rage at

Time and death

The resignation that

Is not reconciled beneath,

And the kindred

With those blind

Lions and leopards,

And the lovely

Emanations

Of the spirit and the mind

In the mummified

Verse confined,

Are unfaith

Unfaith unfaith

To Deirdre, Helen,

Judith, and their kind –

O shrill swift song,

You are sure but

You are wrong;

For the notes of music are

Silent as the furthest star;

Notes of the musician

Music’s silence are.

There is no faith,

No faith at all,

In loss of life,

Hope, grief, of all.

But I know why,

Brothers, why

You sing thus,

And thus could I.

I know that when

Parting happens I

Shall be unmanned

Shall cry and

Before torture best

Is best to say

Goodbye now

Before we are unmanned.

Regrets and angers,

Fears of decay,

Are things that will not

Be allayed;

But love radars

Their dangers and burns

Their hangars and they

Melt in the short

Anguish of a raid.

Faith! she and I

Have faith, and risk the saying;

Who have heard

The voice crying

Like a mocking bird

Beware beware

A false happiness

Is sadder than despair –

Have the intense

Substitute for experience.

The time will come

When we shall b

Semantic in our unity,

Fit only for verses,

Beyond fear or the

Sudden song of death;

Moored in the anchorage

Of intellect

Beyond sound of the sea.

When old men walk, hands

Unfit for caressing

Dangle at arms’ ends

Like puppets’ hands –

I have watched mine

Veined with blue ribbands

At blood’s ebb; and hers,

Hers will be hands of sorrow.

Love, we hve not

Forgot tomorrow.

But when the danger

Of dreams is over,

The hammering of gold

Through night and day,

And the materialist

Pathos of poets

Has said their angry

Sorrowful say –

Their omephagous worm

Shall devour us! –

When the grey ice

Draws over our eyes

And song is still,

Like a frozen bird;

We shall still see

The bird as it flies,

We shall still hear

The song we heard:

For what they could never

Capture in verse –

The silence of music,

The beauty of queens –

That we have won

From us through us

Through the divine

Gift of grace,

Which is, surpassing

The told and untold

In the passing of Judith,

Deirdre, Helen, and now –

For it may be today –

Of her my beloved, joining

The queens of old. 

For there is no faith,

No faith at all,

But in loss ofl iffe,

Hope, grief, and all.

PRIVATE WORLDS

These our delights are

To us and we share

Them together, no other

Is there with us,

No other, none;

They vanish with us.

And these are our sorrows

Private to us,

Like drops of the sea

Shining only for us

Bitterly; which we share;

They vanish with us.

If you stay longer

Than I, or I hunger

For after you here

With this memory,

We whichever

Stays separate from us

Shall be first person

In a world of ones

Third-personed he, it, she;

Shall wonder at what

Has vanished utterly

With you, or with me.

TO HER WHO FOR HER GRACE MUST ABSENT BE

The holy fathers, the high saints,

Who in the desert dwelt,

With palms of peace and gentleness,

Guiltless to share our guilt,

God in his courteous mercy sent

Companions of his grace

When they world-sick and weary

Found solitude no peace;

Such was their deserving love!

So great, dear love, to m e,

The chastening of your absence’s

Heart-breaking courtesy.

I in the desert of quiet mind,

You far, shall never rest,

Nor can its deep sands soften

The knocking in my breast.

When that is silent, dear, at last

All time beneath my feet

To make the trackless journey far

Beyond the cells of Scete,

Then on this coward carrion

Where warlock vultures wheel,

Confer your mercy\s merciless

Deserted burial;

Still welcome! as to travellers

The well beside the road,

Or to the desert fathers

The visiting grace of God.

VICTORIA AFTER THE OFFICE

At evening hour,

when cold creeps about ankles, hides under footsoles,

and lost walkers

and last walkers

are a sound only or only a deeper shadow

wearing with icy bravado a jaunt-feather of frosty breath

to prove they live;

at the hour of icicled air’s nocturnalities,

I remember the noon of your arms.

At the going home

to chance lodgings become habitual,

past the trust relying on stone, concrete, steel,

bronze safes, the written word, the signature, the lawyer’s stamp,

and all the giant distrustful securities of the city;

in the winter evening

while hens huffle featherspread together in quiet country coops

and only the fox burns slinking in night or the

torch on the waters raising the unwary fish;

at the hour of thieves;

I remember the resurrection of your embrace,

the firm frail-hope of flesh,

and under the great arch of stations

in the sour smell of steam

from night’s arch immense

hang like a lamp from an invisible wire

trust to the tenuous fidelity of the soul,

(as the stars in the stations of the East)

and burn brightly!

RENDEZVOUS

First greeting’s

true sign is

friction’s meeting,

parts too apart

alighting in design,

as a abird breaks

into its image

in the tensioned lake;

a sudden

foreknowledge

of death,

and the life between

unknown and the remembered

the winged meeting

rising skyward,

a windhover.

Mind is a lone lake

in the high mountains,

with its pine and star;

and meeting should be there.

But the tongue shapes

courtesies of convention,

wings are folded

as an umbrella,

the scene

no more convincing

than a poster.

Ah! first meeting is

twi-pained of thirst

and after-thirst;

a little lake shut

in the mountain walls

of getting and forgetting;

the zenith of a star

between the coming

and the going away;

A London day

ingemmed with pavements gray,

bargesail’s birdwing,

the river swirling,

the gallery of portraits,

yours in wineglass gleaming;

the noise of train and tram;

the roadway’s macadam

shining in the rain,

a shining bar

that holds us joined

and far.

Memory dip down

toward the lake;

the shy bird ripples

under your hair.

Memory awake

between the fore

and afterpain

those intercool

fresh images

of London’s dustiness

laved in a mountain pool.

INSCRIPTION TO A BOOK OF CHINESE GHOST AND LOVE STORIES

This present scene were it not Chinese,

I should have hesitated,

To send to you, unread;

But so will surely please

With Orient taste and symmetries.

What separates is what unites:

Under the willow tree

These lovers linkedly

Death now draws closer by

A myriad days and nights.

Some always were, now are all ghosts –

A rare condition

In life, hurtles as stone,

Harmless as air, of none

Advised; admired and pitied most.

Separateness and rarity

Are the strongest bond and state

Out of place, out of date;

So with these lovers we

Extenuate affinity.

So loved they at a far remove!

Star in their day, for all

Lovers to follow; and shall

In night the East above

Orientalise our love.

ANOTHER INSCRIPTION TO THE SAME BOOK

If I could express complete

Proportion in a perfect love,

Such a few lines would I choose,

And a verse set on a fly-leaf.

Chinese draftsmen have engraved

Dynasties a thumbnail wide.

On these lovers long since dead

Centuries have commented.

What is long life, if not this

Commentary to a kiss?

This learned edition

Of a lyric poem?

So this book, love, like a wise

Scholar shall amend my text;

Where I fail, shall clearly tell

When it speaks of true love well.

EPILOGUE TO THE SAME

You have not a lotus flower,

Or plum blossom to let fall in my way;

Nor I the blue gown of a scholar

Nor orchid-perfumed ink to make air fragrant.

Yet we’re with ghosts familiar:

Have we not often, alone or companied,

Disturbedly known a spirit near;

And smiled, beloved, at the empty air?

LOVE’S ABSENCE

Within this little room at night

The lamp a small horizon makes,

Two hemispheres, of shade and light,

In a small world of books.

Earth darkens, and the pane absorbs

The meaning of the room: the head

Bent to its books; faint notes, papers,

Three chairs, and a bed.

Beyond this shadow sounds the sea.

The lamp burns cold and round.

So is my life, when she’s away,

A shadow and a sound.

THIS WOMAN WHOM I LOVE…

This woman whom I love

More than all things which move

Or as a summer grove

Drowse the day through;

This woman through whose love

I love all things which move,

In her my thoughts rove

All the day through;

In her my thoughts rove;

And as all things which love

Truly find rest in love,

My thoughts rest too.

LOVE ON HOLIDAY

My love is a crowded beach

Full of gay holiday;

She is the wave than runs

Shining along the bay.

My love is the pleasure ship

That carries all to find

Treasures in a small voyage

On seas smooth and kind.

She is the cliff-coach climbing

To the height of heaven’s hill.

Joy to the strong, joy is she,

And strength to the weak will.

Were she the lonely sand

The salt tides cover,

Were she the ship of death

I will voyage with her;

I will stand by her side

When the waves come over,

Though heaven’s chariot’s fall

To darkness ever!

MENACE

Doors are locked, windows closed;

A soft lamp-sun warms the air.

Happiness might surely be

Here in a country cottage found,

With simple people, free from care.

One by one small tapers go

Stairwards from that private sun,

Loaned stars, whose only office is

To seal the wax of sleep about

Our eyelids, one by one.

All’s out, and toil in peace composed.

The youngling dark about the house

Licks up the firemilk of last light.

The owl of evil hunts unheard,

The haunted wood’s extraneous.

But one there cannot sleep because

Love’s absence wakes him with sharp claws;

Him the greater night enfolds,

The greater night who holds

Limp centuries in its jaws.

HAVENS

The gull is fair whose glancing shakes

Sea-light on long dark hills,

And on the storm of winter makes

A haven of strong wings.

The green woods strip for winter

That makes the summer fair,

They hold to the earth’s centre

And wrestle with the air.

So bright, so fair, her presence is,

So winged, so strong is she

When in chill winter’s absence

Ships still must stand the sea.

The glancing winged beauty,

It calls the land to mind,

Where deep roots guard for ever

Harbours of no wind.

IN A VOLUME OF CHINESE POETRY

These pages’ silent lutes

Your fingers, opening, play;

All that death mutes.

These innocent who kneel

At the jade throne of death,

Your Mandarin-eyes repeal.

These ghosts at the green doorway

Who turn, and sadly wave –

Exile unfriending all! –

You with your voice recall,

All that death mutes.

THE MARRIED LOVER

Love you forever? ‘Tis a task

Would set on unlove love’s death-mask.

Before we two may rest as one

We must be two and each alone;

Should you one sundered moment steal

And we live so linked-separate

I must be for one hour less real

And time be undeterminate.

Rather, I know, would you give place,

Than choose this mask without a face.

There is a time when I must be

Sever’d from you and you from me

For love is free, but life must chime

To the strict clock and keep his time:

Living stays us man and wife

It is the working-out of life;

Living we must together come,

Are not the answer, but the sum;

And could we live one we must be

Separate for eternity.

For ever love as promise is

Not sequent to life’s premises;

I must turn and face the spears

Of every minute’s sixty fears;

Every day is born a foe;

Every night an overthrow;

Every year a giant does grow

Imperilling our walled towers.

Yet in your kisses lost and hair

I halt the giant world of despair.

Love as a dancer flaunts the pall,

Blood’s cloak deceives the heavenly bull.

There is a problem long has lain

David-moment to Giant Disdain,

Shaping, smoothing, colours choosing

Past the future of time’s losing,

And matadorial as a dart,

This stone, the burning of the heart,

Flings to enflare another star

That shall be fair as you, love, are.

You have the Egyptian’s star, which led

Antony from the war, instead

By yours and love’s lode compassed,

And death, the rock that whitens all;

Bright exequy and funeral!

Having too the casuistical

Venomed gift of God to Eve

Love’s si, the ear which will believe;

And freeing me, love, do more enslave

To yours and love’s than to death’s grave.

I have my moon, my love, as you.

Wanings of shut reserve renew

Tracery delicate as air

Which my own uglinesses tear.

Wandering between death and birth

Call me not suddenly to earth,

Unless persuasion magical

Has power to charm a spirit’s ear;

Else am I far, when seeming near.

Who would be near! and more away

To be more present coldly stay.

For know, my love, though halves make whole,

Two wholes may make an oversoul.

Then this our planetary desire,

Tiding our wishes equal pull,

Shall make us one with earth and fire.

Since then, nor death nor life dissever

But parting strengthens our together.

What’s time to love? And what is ever?

THOSE WHO HAVE POWER TO BLESS

We are of those blessed lovers

Who loved before they knew,

Without pursuit or fleeing;

And met as pilgrims do.

Whose eyes, bent on the going,

Turn once to ask the day

And find their end’s companion

Travelling that same way.

I did not pass through sense to touch

The spirit in you shrined;

You took my hand, my dear, but when

Your love had made it kind.

You did not my embracing reach

Secondary to a fear;

For we were one, my darling,

Before we once were near.

I think the earth would tremble

If arm in arm were crossed

Without this imperceptible

Commingling; the kindest lust

Burns out the spirit’s centre

Responsive though to need;

And death therein doth enter

His doomed and fruitful seed.

But in our spirit’s completing

Is life where senses meet,

For skies are one about us,

And time one to our feet.

We are of those blessed pilgrims

Whom the immortals guide

To find for all salvation

And worship side by side.

WHAT MEN NEED

Certain things are needed, they are few;

Love, warmth, and food, and we can do.

Soil rich, strong spade, and dig with sweat

Or find a kind neighbour, you shall eat.

Plait close, small osiers, sure of skill,

You shall find shelter, if you will.

But love is a gift of no proportion,

Courage irrelevant as caution:

Plant nine good deeds in a row,

If the gods nod, then, love will grow;

Beckon the beggar-child out from the wind,

Love will not see you, love is blind.

Love is a needle drawing the wound

Of solitude together; a healing sound

Out of hearing of all calling:

Unhappy doers and diggers! knowing

Power as inadequate as pity

To fire a gun, to hear that ditty.

IN THE CONCLUSION…

In the conclusion

Is the dedication

Of what is worthy

To the creator.

I send back these songs

For signature;

To be corrected by

The making eye.

Were word there aught

Worthy of thy

Report, one shine as if

It were not mine,

That I make over

To her my lover,

All that is worthy

That I discover.

Not as thy maker

O divine loveliness!

But as a walker

Humbly in meadows,

Who seeing the flower

Growing so fair,

Would pluck it and place

It in her hair.