If that or this worked otherwise.’
He ponders where the Primal Den can be,
He holds the web to have no finity
And boldly adds, ‘Attercop has no base
In any sure discoverable place,
Lost in his own complexities of lace;
A most capricious Beast
Whose tricks need not concern us in the least.
He’s mad or possibly long years deceased;
But this web serves as flooring for us flies.
Who disregards this web binding the skies,
That man himself denies.
The Web! Life! Liberty! All else is lies!’
Lyrical Walter cannot speak
Philosophy, nor use the same technique,
But listen to his natural-magic charm
Potent, as he thinks, for harm
Against the tyrant Attercop.
‘Brush down the cobwebs from the cupboard-top
With a long feather-mop.
Go, cheerily stride at dawn
With careless feet about the lawn
Breaking the threads of gossamer;
This, then, shall prove a token
Of Liberty, my sapient sir,
Attercop, whose proud name with hate be spoken,
His net too shall be broken.’
ANTINOMIES
Lying in long grass one hot afternoon,
Between two eighteenth-century garden statues,
‘Furor Poeticus’ and ‘Phryne Judged’,
I observed my muse in likeness of a grasshopper
Trilling ’Sing, Sing, child!’ So I answered her,
‘What can I sing, Muse?’ And she told me plainly,
‘Always the first thing floating in your mind.
A formless, lumpish, nothing-in-particular.
You take, toss, catch it, turn it inside out,
Do new things with it; wean it, breech it, school it,
Bring it to man’s estate; in your old age
It should support you out of filial duty.’
My mind was empty as the summer sky,
And sleepy with the hum of bees and midges,
Until a sudden clashing clamour began,
The church bells ringing up for evensong.
They checked my natural-magic reveries,
Tuning the mind to more parochial thought,
To Mrs. Ames, the widow, and Miss Bold,
Setting their caps, if gossip may be trusted,
At Cutt, the rector, very bitter rivals.
Red-gowned and surpliced, sawing with his hands,
This Cutt pours rhetoric from my mental pulpit.
The text about the flesh warring with spirit,
Spirit with flesh. Cutt takes the spirit’s part,
Poor, baffled soul; though why he speaks through me
I dare not tempt my curious muse to enquire.
‘Sing, Sing!’ the grasshopper warning comes again.
‘I’ll sing, but here’s fair Phryne’s nakedness
Demands inclusion; let the Sculptor’s Mistress
Plead with a sympathetic voice for flesh.
Now, listen, Muse, what will you make of this?’
His gorgon eyes make stone
Of sweetest flesh and bone;
Resigning true-love’s part
He lets a pedant art
Academize his heart.
For him my body is
A thing of surfaces
For chisels to uncover;
Mathematician-lover
He lets love-splendour pass
In thoughts of line and mass,
And craftsman-like observes
The straightenings and the curves
Of my young excellence
Making its fond expense.
Go, fool! be done with this!
Let steel and marble kiss,
Transcribing the disgrace
Of our untrue embrace,
Let the brisk flakes that fly
Beneath your careful eye
Disclose for all to see
Love’s virtuosity,
Your mind in terms of me,
On either part the same,
Scorned beauty, deadness, shame.
‘That’s well enough,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?
A biased history, purporting no more;
Craftily written, rather too precise;
Strung on the thread of an experience
Too sympathetic to the heroine’s case.’
‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse! wait, let the theme develop!
We’ll speak a sympathetic word for Spirit.
Here, then! the sculptor’s talking.’
She came as my true friend,
This art our common end.
Who could have guessed at first,
Seeing her so demure,
Wistful and seeming pure,
I’d fixed my love secure
In a strumpet of the worst,
A fly-by-night accurst,
A most malignant slut,
Whose mouth I could not shut
Nor long evade her call?
Flesh was her all-in-all;
I fell, and in this fall
Here, woman, you shall view
This marble ruined too,
My mind in terms of you,
On either part the same,
Scorned beauty, passion, shame.
‘That’s very well,’ my muse said, ‘yet what of it?
Here’s plaintiff and defendant, Roe with Doe,
Cunningly balanced; rather too precise.
A clear antinomy, purporting no more.
Where does it lead us? Mutual ruination,
Deadlock, but have you nothing to suggest,
No swift solution of these tangled knots
By Alexander’s way, or Solomon’s?’
‘Muse,’ I said, ‘Muse, when were you ever content?
I gave you wronged Othello, Shakespeare-like,
And you said “Well enough,” or “None too bad,”
But asked for wronged Iago; that I gave you,
Plainer than Shakespeare, proving very clearly
Misunderstanding never makes a villain.
There was a definite wrong Iago suffered
From this same Moor. I gave that wrong in full.
What did you tell me then? “A mere antinomy,
Cunningly balanced, rather too precise,
Strung on the thread of an experience
Not sympathetic to Iago’s case.”
I tell you, Muse, you’ll have to stay content
This great while yet with such antinomies.
Until all history’s written in that style
(Absolutism made ridiculous),
There’s no room for constructing newer forms.
Be content, Muse, you’re driving me too hard.’
Yet, still, among the clashing noise of bells
And buzzing brazen echoes when they ceased,
My grass-hid muse whirred her dissatisfaction,
‘Critical Box and Cox, Roe against Doe,
Unsolved antinomies, have you nothing else?
Sing, child, a fuller song. Sing, Sing,’ she trilled.
‘A fuller song? Sweet Muse, how can that be,
While I must yet continue implicate
With life half-strangled by its own free-will?
Always, when I am called to approve the rights
Of one or other side in any brawl,
To hold both claims at fault can make no sense.
How can the plaintiff hear me, still recalling
The old wrong done, the insult unavenged,
Drowning my saws with shrill reiteration?
It’s then I brief myself as advocate
For the defence, I advance counter-claims
Raising my voice as loud as his or louder.
“Deny it, plaintiff, nevertheless it’s true.”
He’ll bite on that, dis
tasteful though it be,
And the quarrel marches one step nearer peace.
No one loves conflict on its own account,
But for the hoped-for triumphs it entails.
Then since I hold that, though no conflict ends
Except in ruin of opposing views,
Yet till antinomies plainly stand opposed
Truth cannot rise to knock the swords aside,
What’s to be done? The immediate action’s plain,
To throw my weight the other side of the scales.
Trimming? Contrariness? Equivocation?
Nothing of that. Muse, here’s a novel turn
To Aesop’s fable of the Man and Satyr: –
Blow hot to warm your hands, cold for your porridge.
Then though the simple Satyr stands aghast
Warning his brethren to beware your mouth,
Not even a Satyr could deny this much
That hands need warming, porridge demands cooling,
Rather than frost-bite or the scalded tongue.’
NORTHWARD FROM OXFORD
(An Architectural Progress)
First from, Beaumont Street:
Do you know Beaumont Street in Oxford, city of ghosts and damps?
The eighteenth century curves up, broadly, from Worcester College,
And apart from the ‘Cave of Forty Thieves’* lit by Ruskin’s Lamps
The street has an air of knowledge, strength and confidence in knowledge,
Not the knowledge and strength, admitted, that delights me best,
But politeness, grand proportions, decorum and the rest:
Pass on, then, from Beaumont Street; gloomy but impressed.
Next to Banbury Road,
Leaving St. Giles’s, passing the old bounds of the city.
It begins with the young Victoria, and ends with Edward’s age,
And the middle compromises, solid state with pretty-pretty,
Oh, the Struggle-for-Existence-God’s-in-His-Heaven-Art-for-Art’s-sake stage,
Red brick and gables, Gothic spires, freestone and knick-knackery,
Steep, narrow stairs, dark kitchens, the greenhouse, the rockery,
Beards, bustles, black silk dresses, and the glazed art crockery!
So to Summertown,
By ’bus, to a row of post-war villas, neurotically built,
Standing each at different curious angles to the road,
Each with the most extravagantly individualistic shrug and tilt
Of roof, wall, porch and gutter, as though each abode,
Rosslyn, Sans Souci, Mons defied the serjeant-major, would not dress,
Dumbly blaspheming Banbury Road’s ordered pretentiousness,
The semi-detached pairs writhing in a loveless caress.
So on from Oxford:
Come home with me these three miles beyond Summertown –
If the Cherwell does not flood the fields between –
Our house is older than Beaumont Street, at first sight rather tumble-down
But solid enough; and the windows open, and floors are easy to clean:
A house self-certain, not divided, with a good feng shwee. §
Beaumont Street, Banbury Road and Summertown cannot come to see,
Whom I can no more understand than they can me.
WITCHES
These churchyard witches in pursuit
Of magics most abominate
Urge out their sieves from the cliff’s foot
The midnight seas to navigate,
Or high in air through roaring glooms
With brooms their covens levitate.
I have watched their Sabbath pack –
North Berwickward in flight they came –
Nutcracker face and knobbled back,
Or young breasts bare and eyes like flame,
Twelve to the coven, with one more;
Him they adore in Hell’s own name.
Wedgewise by thirteens they flew,
Each devil sounding his Jews’ trump,
The witches chanting psalms thereto
Mouthing and clapping hand on rump,
That we who watched from Tweed’s far brink
Felt the heart sink like a lead lump.
Such feats on oath we testify
To whom like powers have long been known,
But we for love the cold heavens fly
Which other whiles for lust are flown,
We walk the swellings of the sea
Dryshod and free, for love alone.
Do you, my cribbed empiricist,
Judge these things false, then false they’ll be
For all who never swooped and kissed
Above the moon, below the sea;
Yet set no tangles in their place
Of Time and Space and Gravity.
For Space and Time have only sense
Where these are flattered and adored;
And there sit many parliaments
Where clock and compass have no word,
Where gravity makes levity,
Where reason snaps her blunted sword.
Be wary, lest on unbelief
The cloak of dark one day be spread,
Time shall be grief and Space be grief
And Love in accidie lie dead,
And broomstick rites alone remain
To lend your cramping pain relief.
[The King himself examined Agnes Sampsown: she confessed that upon the night of Allhallow E’en last she was accompanied as well as with the persons aforesaid, as also with a great many other witches to the number of two hundred, and that all went together to sea, each one in a riddle or sieve and went into the same with flagons of wine making merry and drinking by the way in the same riddles or sieves to the kirk of North Berwick in Lothian, and that after they had landed, took hands on the land, and danced this reel or short dance, singing with one voice. Giles Duncan went before them playing this reel or dance upon a small trump, called a Jew’s trump, until they entered into the kirk of North Berwick. These confessions made the King in a wonderful admiration, and sent for the said Giles Duncan, who upon the like trump did play the said dance before the King’s Majesty.]
[A True Discourse of the Apprehension of Sundry Witches lately taken in Scotland; 1591.]
ANTIGONUS: AN ECLOGUE
James, a literary historian; John, a poet.
John. Why, James!
James. Well, John? What are you writing now? Letters?
John. A poem.
James. Are you? Then I’ll go. If I had guessed…
John. ‘Person from Porlock,’* stay!
If you don’t know my only rule for writing
It’s this, to welcome all disturbances
As bearing somehow on the work in hand,
Supplying an unguessed material need.
James. Convenient rule! If you resent disturbance
As you must sometimes do, in spite of rules,
What happens?
John. Then resentment shapes the poem.
And if the scheme was cheerful at the start,
And if my mind swings back to cheerfulness
It takes some time to check the damage done:
My rule is economical in the end.
But, James, what have you walked out here to tell me?
You always spring some literary surprise –
Keats’ early punctuation? or the name
Of Marvell’s wet-nurse, and her views on God?
James. Nothing particular; oh, yes, there was.
Do you recall Antigonus and the bear?
John. ‘Antigonus, crux of the Winter’s Tale,
Running the drama past the accepted mark
That separates the comic from the tragic.’
Or, that’s the verdict that your school upholds.
James. You’ve got the point, then listen! Yesterday
A knowledgeable student of research,
But never mind the name –
John. From Aberystwyth?
James. That’s right – convinced me, giving chapter and verse
That Shakespeare’s story of Antigonus
Besides its knockabout popular appeal,
Hides a discreet political allusion,
Caviare for the courtiers in the stalls.
John. Who was Antigonus, then?
James. Philip of Spain.
John. Philip was dead a dozen years or more.
James. True, but now Spain was pressing Italy,
And England sympathetically aghast
Recalled the Armada threat. When Shakespeare’s Clown
Relates ‘Antigonus roared and the bear roared
The Tempest roaring even louder still.’
And grins ‘The bear wrenched out his shoulderblade,
And the vessel, how the sea flap-dragoned it!’
(Or words to that effect, a comic turn)
Philip was this Antigonus (of the Jews),
A nickname lent him by the pamphleteers.
Dutch, Huguenots, Italians they all used it.
The shoulderblade was actual shoulderblade
Relic of Philip’s favourite saint, St. Laurence,
In faith of which the Armada had been launched:
So, when the tempest and our English guns,
Drake’s Bear leading the van, broke Philip’s hopes,
A savage gust of merriment convulsed
Protestant Europe, with this caricature
‘The Bear tears out Antigonus’ shoulderblade’
Which jest, revived to hearten sixteen-ten
Preserves the comic unities, my friend holds.§
John. I hardly know whether you’re serious.
To accept this correspondence of ideas
Will damage your Shakespearean reputation.
Once you begin it, this political tack
Involves a most unorthodox position.
Couldn’t you try to explain it all away?
James. No mockery!
John. James, I’ll take you one street further.
I’ll tell you more about Antigonus
Than you or Aberystwyth ever guessed.
James (drily). The scientific method aptly used
Can yield results of most romantic flavour.
John. James, if I swear that Julio Romano
Whose fame lives golden in the Winter’s Tale,
Published a pamphlet – fifteen-ninety-three,
It’s most important to invent a date –
Of covert anti-Catholic imagery;
That one torn copy of this book survives
Though not for public reading, at Madrid;
That in this book, Antigonus and the bear
The tempest and the shoulderbone occur
With a deal more about this grim encounter