Each man wants to move the boat
Clockwise with fashionable hands
Reading history on how to float
Upon the wash with watermusic bands.
One calls the tune but others play the music
And idle waves of Neptune make the crew sick.
The rats devise solutions for each lake
Each overture and song reduce to easy,
Fix stabilizers firm from wind to wake:
And still the crew persist in feeling queasy.
Old antagonisms rage:
Rat-machinations roped with force
Imprison beauty in a cage,
Encircle it with propaganda morse.
‘Corruption is corruption, sometimes sweet
Is only dangerous when it stagnates:
Corrupt before, corrupted ever
Only keep it moving to be safe.’
First Rat: Feed, house, educate and teach
Place anti-seasick tablets in their reach.
Second Rat: Dope, rope, spiflicate and preach
Colour them by sunray lamps or bleach.
Third Rat: Dazzle, flash, warp their speech
Send them every Sunday to the beach.
Fourth Rat: Deceive, demand, even beseech
Cleverly, cleverly — they’ll never screech!
9
Retreat like Scythians, like men of hair
Back into folding earth and lair:
Burn and scorch black the rich fields that you leave,
Once tilled with freedom and passion-verse.
Prepare to destroy that for which you grieve:
It is already ruined by the worse
Rat venom. Do not wish for what was there
Before Rats came but keep the cleansed air
Uncloyed, devoid of devil-noses
And perverted paper roses
Who pander to each scheme that rat proposes.
When on the rack-and-pinion of retreat
Earn your wayside cigarettes and bread
By giving lessons on the rats’ defeat
Disguised in languages more live than dead:
Tutor yourselves in map-reading and crime
And devil’s courage for the bleak time
When you alone will face the empty plain
Armed only with a visionary brain
That tried to understand how earth and sky
Could meet beyond the reach of feet and eye.
The would-be Rat-destroyers may feel this:
Burdened with a glimpse of emptiness
Night after night, with dreams that kiss
Despair as a king’s seal, and nothingness:
A dull light gleaming on continual fight
In a retreat that leads beyond the end of night.
10
It was a rabbit skin, without meat
That took me to the fleapit for a treat:
The wasteland that seemed to Mr Eliot death
Nurtured me with passion, life and breath
To prolong for one more generation
A wasteland satellite of veneration:
A bottle-top, a piece of bone, a stone
Marked on no posters or big banners
To catapult against the rodent planners.
… the rock stop and turbo-drill that goes
Through granite like a knife through butter
(Shall I follow Mr Eliot’s nose
And clinch this verse by using ‘gutter’?)
Rock-a-bye-baby, reach the tree top
Sing as you reap the apple crop;
Rob each garbled voice of Wednesday’s ash
Ring out the mardi gras to grab and smash:
Hook-up your ribbons to a new Maypole.
The wasteland was a place where I best played
As a snotty-nosed bottle-chasing raggèd-arsed kid:
From a rusty frame and two cot-wheels I made
A bike that took me on a roll and skid
Between canal banks, tip and plain
And junk shops advertising ‘Guns for Spain’.
I read the tadpole angler quite complete
What Katy did at her first Christmas treat
Envied Monte Cristo’s endless riches
But not Eliza’s shame at her dropped stitches,
The splendid sack of Usher’s houses
By philanthropists with ragged trousers.
In wintertime were rabbit skins fair game
For keeping warm the embers of such knowledge:
The wasteland was my library and college.
11
What’s past is past, what still to come:
King, queen and godhead of Time’s guide.
Show your bottom-dogs and sparkling fangs
In conspiratorial well-clawed gangs.
Open Baedeker’s Handbook to the Jungle
A thin-leaved blood-bound untried book to plan
All expeditions on, and scan
Its well-mapped footpaths (thornbush to the right):
Mined offices avoid at any cost;
Advice from all contributors is sound
Gathered by ears pressed firmly to the ground.
Ignore policemen if you’re lost
By-pass the Customs, frontier weak at X
Step on the skeletons of vanguard wrecks
Hillslopes good for cover, summit wrong,
Travellers had better go by night
And eat ripe berries as they walk along.
Landmarks described with economic prose:
This cathedral has a mildewed nose
From decades of unmedicated sores.
Decay comes quicker when it flouts Time’s laws.
See this castle? Rotten doors:
King left owing bills for bread and cheese
Queen stored perfumes in deepfreeze
Was tricked for absolution with the whores.
Take those statues by the wall
Carved on a diet of olive-oil and galclass="underline"
Unbribable stern servants of the realm
Turned up their noses and let go the helm.
12
Watch the sky. Watch the warning
Floating down of an autumn morning.
Barricade your colleges and schools
Sharpen slide-rules into fighting tools.
Paper to a depth of thirty inches
May stop a bullet and prove good defences,
But fire will desolate consume and scorch
That to begin needs but a single torch.
A red sky at night will be their delight
And red in the morning the Rats’ night dawning.
Admitted, you gave them ale and telly
But in return took each man’s name and age
And locked his magic in a wicker cage
Burning it in secret while they filled
Unwittingly their bellies after hunger.
You cannot read the writing on the walclass="underline"
They were not given bread at all
But food to make them strong (and sane)
Enough to understand your orders.