Their honest, first reluctance to agree.
Other seasons, other thoughts and reasons,
Other fears or phases of the moon:
In loving-kindness we grow grey together –
Like Joan and Darby in their weather-lodge
Who never venture out in the same weather.
SUPERMAN ON THE RIVIERA
Looked tough, was tall and permanently bronzed
(I should guess Berkeley, do not quote me, though)
Not an ounce above the statutory weight,
Two hundred pounds, most of it bone and muscle;
Blue-eyed, with jutting chin and jutting brows.
The nose, however, did not command the chin.
Myself, I would rather have no chin at all
Than one that dared be wiser than its boss.
As for his mouth, a man-sized Cupid bow,
Curved for kissing a diminutive mother
And flashing teen-age smiles of high intent:
Was that the cause, or was it one more symptom,
Of his twin habits – equally repulsive
To us inveterate Western Europeans –
Downing a midday pint of raw cow’s milk
And treating France’s noblest vintages
Like bath-tub gin whenever he got high?
THE PICTURE NAIL
I brought a Death of Nelson home, where I
Hung it, by inadvertence, on a fly.
Down crashed the heavy frame, off the fly flew,
And how my curses rang! Frankly, I own
To a sad lack of humour when alone –
Like you, by God, and you, and even you!
OLD WORLD DIALOGUE
‘Is this,’ she asked, ‘what the lower orders call …?’
‘Yes, yes,’ replied her lover, Lord Whitehall,
‘But, hush!, the expression is a trifle crude –’
‘Much too good for them,’ cried Lady Ermintrude.
‘Nevertheless,’ resumed the tactless peer,
‘Those who excel at it – pray, do not sneer –
Are, by and large, of obscure parentage.
One girl I knew –’
‘Take that!’ she shouted, red with rage.
THE WERE-MAN
Alone, alone and well alone at last,
Sentries by stealth outwitted, frontiers passed!
Yet walking alien thoroughfares you brood
Fearfully on the man by this feat rescued.
Never before, though trusted friends were few,
Though your own love of loves her oath outgrew,
Though off to the loud wars your children ran,
Never before closeted with a were-man.
Loathing his sylvan company, unable
To bed with him or set his place at table,
A savage life you lead, condemned to share
Your hearth with one whose habitat is nowhere.
THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK
…At that moment the Author was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and on his return found to his mortification that though he retained some vague recollection of his vision, yet with the exception of eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away.
Coleridge’s preface to Kubla Khan: A Fragment
Unkind fate sent the Porlock person
To collect fivepence from a poet’s house;
Pocketing which old debt he drove away,
Heedless and gay, homeward bound for Porlock.
O Porlock person, habitual scapegoat,
Should any masterpiece be marred or scotched,
I wish your burly fist on the front door
Had banged yet oftener in literature!
From The Penny Fiddle
(1960)
THE PENNY FIDDLE
Yesterday I bought a penny fiddle
And put it to my chin to play,
But I found that the strings were painted,
So I threw my fiddle away.
A gipsy girl found my penny fiddle
As it lay abandoned there;
When she asked me if she might keep it,
I told her I did not care.
Then she drew such music from the fiddle
With help of a farthing bow,
That I offered five shillings for the secret.
But, alas, she would not let it go.
ROBINSON CRUSOE
Robinson Crusoe cut his coats
Not too narrow, not too big,
From the hides of nanny-goats;
Yet he longed to keep a pig.
Robinson Crusoe sat in grief,
All day long he sometimes sat,
Gazing at the coral reef,
Grumbling to his favourite cat.
‘Queen of Pussies,’ he would say,
‘Two things I am sure about:
Bacon should begin the day,
“Pork!” should put the candle out.’
THE SIX BADGERS
As I was a-hoeing, a-hoeing my lands,
Six badgers walked up, with white wands in their hands.
They formed a ring round me and, bowing, they said:
‘Hurry home, Farmer George, for the table is spread!
There’s pie in the oven, there’s beef on the plate:
Hurry home, Farmer George, if you would not be late!’
So homeward went I, but could not understand
Why six fine dog-badgers with white wands in hand
Should seek me out hoeing, and bow in a ring,
And all to inform me so common a thing!
JOCK O’ BINNORIE
King Duncan had a fool called Leery
And gave him very high pay
To tell him stories after dinner,
A new one every day;
But if the stories failed him
(As Leery did agree)
The King would call his merry men all
And hang him from a tree.
Leery began with Jim o’ Binnorie
Who danced on Stirling Rock
And emptied a peck of pickled eels
All over his brother Jock;
Yet Jock refrained from unkind words
That many a lad might use,
And while Jim slept on a load of hay
Put five live eels in his shoes.
Leery had told nine hundred tales
And found no others to tell,
He started from the first once more –
King Duncan knew it well.
‘Old friends are best, dear Fool,’ he cried,
‘And old yarns heard again.
You may tell me the story of Jock o’ Binnorie
Every night of my reign!’
From More Poems 1961
(1961)
LYCEIA
All the wolves of the forest
Howl for Lyceia,
Crowding together
In a close circle,
Tongues a-loll.
A silver serpent
Coiled at her waist
And a quiver at knee,
She combs fine tresses
With a fine comb:
Wolf-like, woman-like,
Gazing about her,
Greeting the wolves;
Partial to many,
Yet masked in pride.
The young wolves snarl,
They snap at one another
Under the moon.
‘Beasts, be reasonable,
My beauty is my own!’
Lyceia has a light foot
For a weaving walk.
Her archer muscles
Warn them how tightly
She can stretch the string.
I question Lyceia,
Whom I find posted
Under the pine trees
One early morning:
‘What do the wolves learn?’
‘They learn only envy,’
Lyceia answers,
‘Envy and hope,
Hope an
d chagrin.
Would you howl too
In that wolfish circle?’
She laughs as she speaks.
SYMPTOMS OF LOVE
Love is a universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares –
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such grief
At any hand but hers?
THE SHARP RIDGE
Since now I dare not ask
Any gift from you, or gentle task,
Or lover’s promise – nor yet refuse
Whatever I can give and you dare choose –
Have pity on us both: choose well
On this sharp ridge dividing death from hell.
UNDER THE OLIVES
We never would have loved had love not struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other’s answering
Sigh of unreasonableness –
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud.
THE VISITATION
Drowsing in my chair of disbelief
I watch the door as it slowly opens –
A trick of the night wind?
Your slender body seems a shaft of moonlight
Against the door as it gently closes.
Do you cast no shadow?
Your whisper is too soft for credence,
Your tread like blossom drifting from a bough,
Your touch even softer.
You wear that sorrowful and tender mask
Which on high mountain tops in heather-flow
Entrances lonely shepherds;
And though a single word scatters all doubts
I quake for wonder at your choice of me:
Why, why and why?
FRAGMENT
Are you shaken, are you stirred
By a whisper of love?
Spell-bound to a word
Does Time cease to move,
Till her calm grey eye
Expands to a sky
And the clouds of her hair
Like storms go by?
APPLE ISLAND
Though cruel seas like mountains fill the bay,
Wrecking the quayside huts,
Salting our vineyards with tall showers of spray;
And though the moon shines dangerously clear,
Fixed in another cycle
Than the sun’s progress round the felloe’d year;
And though I may not hope to dwell apart
With you on Apple Island
Unless my breast be docile to the dart –
Why should I fear your element, the sea,
Or the full moon, your mirror,
Or the halved apple from your holy tree?
THE FALCON WOMAN
It is hard to be a man
Whose word is his bond
In love with such a woman,
When he builds on a promise
She lightly let fall
In carelessness of spirit.
The more sternly he asks her
To stand by that promise
The faster she flies.
But is it less hard
To be born such a woman
With wings like a falcon
And in carelessness of spirit
To love such a man?
TROUGHS OF SEA
‘Do you delude yourself?’ a neighbour asks,
Dismayed by my abstraction.
But though love cannot question love
Nor need deny its need,
Pity the man who finds a rebel heart
Under his breastbone drumming
Which reason warns him he should drown
In midnight wastes of sea.
Now as he stalks between tormented pines
(The moon in her last quarter)
A lissom spectre glides ahead
And utters not a word.
Waves tasselled with dark weed come rearing up
Like castle walls, disclosing
Deep in their troughs a ribbed sea-floor
To break his bones upon.
– Clasp both your hands under my naked foot
And press hard, as I taught you:
A trick to mitigate the pangs
Either of birth or love.
THE LAUGH
Your sudden laugh restored felicity –
Everything grew clear that before would not:
The impossible genies, the extravagants,
Swung in to establish themselves fairly
As at last manageable elements
In a most daylight-simple plot.
It was the identity of opposites
Had so confused my all too sober wits.
THE DEATH GRAPPLE
Lying between your sheets, I challenge
A watersnake in a swoln cataract
Or a starved lioness among drifts of snow.
Yet dare it out, for after each death grapple,
Each gorgon stare borrowed from very hate,
A childish innocent smile touches your lips,
Your eyelids droop, fearless and careless,
And sleep remoulds the lineaments of love.
THE STARRED COVERLET
A difficult achievement for true lovers
Is to lie mute, without embrace or kiss,
Without a rustle or a smothered sigh,
Basking each in the other’s glory.
Let us not undervalue lips or arms
As reassurances of constancy,
Or speech as necessary communication
When troubled hearts go groping through the dusk;
Yet lovers who have learned this last refinement –
To lie apart, yet sleep and dream together
Motionless under their starred coverlet –
Crown love with wreaths of myrtle.
THE INTRUSION
Going confidently into the garden
Where she made much of you four hours ago
You find another person in her seat.
If your scalp crawls and your eyes prick at sight
Of her white motionless face and folded hands
Framed in such thunderclouds of sorrow,
Give her no word of consolation, man,
Dissemble your own anguish,
Withdraw in silence, gaze averted –
This is the dark edge of her double-axe:
Divine mourning for what cannot be.
PATIENCE
Almost I could prefer
A flare of anger
To your dumb signal of displeasure.
Must it be my task
To assume the mask
Of not desiring what I may not ask?
On a wide bed,
Both arms outspread,
I watch the spites do battle in my head,
Yet know this sickness
For stubborn weakness
Unconsonant with your tenderness.
O, to be patient
As you would have me patient:
Patient for a thousand nights, patient!
THE CURE
No lover ever found a cure for love
Except so cruel a thrust under the heart
(By her own hand delivered)
His wound was nine long years in healing,
Purulent with dead hope,
And ached yet longer at the moon’s changes…
More tolerable the infection than its cure.
HAG-RIDDEN
I awoke in profuse sweat, arms aching,
Knees bruised and soles cut to the r
aw –
Preserved no memory of that night
But whipcracks and my own voice screaming.
Through what wild, flinty wastes of fury,
Hag of the Mill,
Did you ride your madman?
TURN OF THE MOON
Never forget who brings the rain
In swarthy goatskin bags from a far sea:
It is the Moon as she turns, repairing
Damages of long drought and sunstroke.
Never count upon rain, never foretell it,
For no power can bring rain
Except the Moon as she turns; and who can rule her?
She is prone to delay the necessary floods,
Lest such a gift might become obligation,
A month, or two, or three; then suddenly
Not relenting but by way of whim
Will perhaps conjure from the cloudless west
A single rain-drop to surprise with hope
Each haggard, upturned face.
Were the Moon a Sun, we would count upon her
To bring rain seasonably as she turned;
Yet no one thinks to thank the regular Sun
For shining fierce in summer, mild in winter –
Why should the Moon so drudge?
But if one night she brings us, as she turns,
Soft, steady, even, copious rain
That harms no leaf nor flower, but gently falls
Hour after hour, sinking to the tap roots,
And the sodden earth exhales at dawn
A long sigh scented with pure gratitude,
Such rain – the first rain of our lives, it seems,
Neither foretold, cajoled, nor counted on –
Is woman giving as she loves.
THE SECRET LAND
Every woman of true royalty owns
A secret land more real to her
Than this pale outer world:
At midnight when the house falls quiet
She lays aside needle or book
And visits it unseen.
Shutting her eyes, she improvises
A five-barred gate among tall birches,
Vaults over, takes possession.
Then runs, or flies, or mounts a horse
(A horse will canter up to greet her)
And travels where she will;