My uncle has entered his soliloquy./He keeps vigil under the black sigil. 1
My uncle has entered his soliloquy. The candles shed their fur. 1
My uncle has entered his soliloquy;/ Under the black sigil the old white one 1
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the music-room of the Host. 1
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps in the pocket of Lapland, 1
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./He sleeps the sharp sleep of the unstrung harp 1
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./His sleep is of the Babylonian deep-sea 1
My uncle has gone beyond astronomy./Three, six, nine of the dead languages 1
My uncle sleeps in the image of death./He sleeps the steep sleep of his zone, 1
My uncle sleeps in the image of death./In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed 1
My uncle sleeps in the image of death./Not a bad sport the boys will tell you, 1
My uncle sleeps in the image of death./The shadow of other worlds, deep-water penumbra 1
Night falls. The dark expresses 1
Nine marches to Lhasa. 1
No milestones marked the invaders, 1
‘No one will ever pick them, I think,’ 1
Nostos home: algos pain: nostalgia … 1
Not from some silent sea she rose 1
Nothing is lost, sweet self, 1
Now darkness comes to Europe 1
Now earth turns her cold shoulders to us, 1
Now everywhere Spring opens 1
Now mark, the Lady one fine day 1
Now November visiting with rain 1
Now that I have given all that I could bring 1
Now the sun again, like a bloody convict, 1
Now when the angler by Bethlehem’s water 1
O Freedom which to every man entire 1
Of all the sicknesses, autumnal Paris, 1
Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white, majestic headland, 1
Old cock-pheasants when you hit one 1
On charts they fall like lace, 1
On how many of your clement springs 1
On seeming to presume 1
On the stone sill of the embalming winter 1
Once in idleness was my beginning, 1
One innocent observer in a foreign cell 1
One she floats as Venice might, 1
Only the night remains now, only the dark. 1
Only to affirm in time 1
Orpheus, beloved famulus, 1
Over the bridges the meandering scholars 1
Outside us smoulder the great 1
Pain hangs more bloody than the mystic’s taws. 1
Perfume of old bones, 1
Pity these lame and halting parodies 1
Poetry, science of intimacies, 1
Proffer the loaves of pain 1
Prospero upon his island 1
Prudence had no dog and but one cat, 1
Prudence shall cross also the great white barrier. 1
Prudence sweetly sang both crotchet and quaver, 1
Prudence was told the tale of the chimney-corner 1
Put it more simply: say the city 1
pyknics are short, fat and hairy, 1
Quiet room, four candles, red wine in pottery: 1
Reading him is to refresh all nature, 1
Red Polish mouth, 1
Remember please, time has no joints, 1
Ride out at midnight, 1
River the Roman legionary noosed: 1
Scent like a river-pilot led me there: 1
Seal up the treasury and bar the gate. 1
Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus, 1
Seemingly upended in the sky, 1
She dreams she is chased by a black buck-nigger 1
Since you must pass to-night 1
Sky star-engraved, the Pleiads up, 1
Small temptations now—to slumber and to sleep, 1
So at last we come to the writer’s 1
So back to a Paris grubby as a bowel 1
So knowledge has an end, 1
So many masks … 1
So many masks, the people that I meet, 1
So many mockers of the doctrine 1
So one fine year to where the roads 1
So Time, the lovely and mysterious 1
So today, after many years, we meet 1
So we have come to evening … graciously, 1
Soft as puffs of smoke combining, 1
Soft toys that make to seem girls 1
Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly 1
Some diplomatic mission—no such thing as ‘fate’— 1
Some, the great Adepts, found it 1
Some withering papers lie, 1
Something like the sea, 1
Sometime we shall all come together 1
Somewhere in all this grace and favour green 1
Spoonful of wine, candle-stump and eyes. 1
‘Spring’ says your Alexandrian poet 1
Stavro’s dead. A truant vine 1
‘Style is the cut of the mind.’ 1
Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage 1
Suppose one died 1
Supposing once the dead were to combine 1
Sure a lovely day and all weather 1
Sweet sorrow, were you always there? 1
Take me back where sex is furtive 1
Ten speechless knuckles lie along a knee 1
That last summer quite definitely the dead 1
That noise will be the rain again, 1
The ants that passed 1
The baby emperor 1
The big rivers are through with me, I guess; 1
The change from C major to A flat 21
The colonial, the expatriate walking here 1
The dreams of Solange confused no issues 1
The dying business began hereabouts, 1
The evil and the good seem undistinguished, 1
The father is in death. 1
The forest wears its coats 1
The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired. 1
The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland, 1
The grass they cropped converting into speed 1
The grave one is patron of a special sea, 1
The hand is crabbed, the manuscript much defaced, 1
The horizon like some keystone between soil and air 1
The islands rebuffed by water. 1
The islands which whisper to the ambitious, 1
The little gold cigale 1
The mixtures of this garden 1
The old Levant which made us once 1
The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine 1
The old yellow Emperor 1
The paladin of the body is rock, 1
The Pleiades are sinking calm as paint 1
The pure form, then, must be the silence? 1
The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood, 1
The rapt moonwalkers or mere students 1
The road is a sinister pathway paved with smoke, 1
The roads lead southward, blue 1
The rubber penis, the wig, the false breasts … 1
The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs 1
the soft quem quam will be Scops the Owl 1
The trees have been rapping 1
The year his heart wore out— 1
Then walk where roses like disciples can 1
There is a great heart-break in an evening sea; 1
There is no strict being in this hour, 1
There is some corner of a lover’s brain 1
There must be some slow ending to this pain: 1
These ships, these islands, these simple trees 1
They have taken another road, 1
They never credit us 1
This boy is the good shepherd. 1
This business grows more dreary year by year, 1
This dust, this royal dust, our mother 1
‘This landscape is not original in its
own mode.’ 1
This pain goes deeper than the fish’s fathom: 1
This rough field of sudden war— 1
This unimportant morning 1
Three women have slept with my books, 1
Thumb quantum 1
Thy kingdom come. They say the prophet 1
Time marched against my egg, 1
Time quietly compiling us like sheaves 1
Time spillers, pain killers, all such pretty women, 1
To be a king of islands, 1
To increase your hold 1
To the lucky now who have lovers or friends, 1
To you by whom the sweet spherical music 1
To you in high heaven the unattainable, 1
Transparent sheath of the dead cicada, 1
Tread softly, for here you stand 1
Trembling they appear, the Siren isles, 1
Unblade the brighter passions one by one. 1
Unrevisited perhaps forever 1
Vagina Dentata I love you so, 1
Veronese grey! Here in the Octagon Room 1
Walk upon dreams, and pass behind the book, 1
Waterbirds sailing upon the darkness 1
Waters rebribing a new moon are all 1
We aliens are too greedy. They took their time, 1
We had a heritage that we have lost, 1
We had endured vicissitude and change, 1
We have no more of time nor growing old, 1
We suffer according to the terms we make 1
What would you have me write? 1
When one smile grazed the surface 1
When they brought on the sleeping child 1
Who first wrapped love in a green leaf, 1
Who told you you were it, 1
Wind among prisms all tonight again: 1
Windless plane-trees above Rodini 1
Winter and love are Euclid’s properties. 1
With dusk rides up the god-elated night, 1
Wrap your sulky beauty up, 1
Writing this stuff should not have been like 1
Yellow bottles in a barber’s door 1
You and who else? 1
You gone, the mirrors all reverted, 1
You have been surely as a great moon. 1
You have so dressed your eyes with love for me 1
‘You look at this landscape for five years.’ 1
You saw them, Sabina? Did you see them? 1
You sleeping child asleep, away 1
You too will pass as other lovers pass. 1
You were that search for the Sovereign Form 1
You who pass the islands will perhaps remember 1
You will have no more beauty in that day 1
Your panic fellowship is everywhere, 1
Your ship will be leaving Penang 1
Zarian was saying: Florence is youth 1
About the Author
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. His first literary work, The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books: Prospero’s Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell’s wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet he wrote the two-decker Tunc and Nunquam. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. Caesar’s Vast Ghost, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death in Sommières in 1990.
Copyright
First published in 1957
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Completely revised in 1980
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Lawrence Durrell, 1957, 1960, 1968, 1971, 1977, 1980
The right of Lawrence Durrell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28880–9
Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems 1931-74
(Series: # )
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