With each refuge that tries to Counterfeit Atlantis, how Will you recognise the true?
Assuming you beach at last Near Atlantis, and begin The terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen Tundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere, i
Stone and snow, silence and air, i
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are, Travelling and tormented, Dialectic and bizarre.
Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse With all Atlantis shining Below you yet you cannot Descend, you should still be proud Even to have been allowed '
Just to peep at Atlantis !
In a poetic vision: Give thanks and lie down in peace, Having seen your salvation.
I
All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewelclass="underline" may Hermes, master of the roads, And the four dwarf Kabiri, Protect and serve you always; And may the Ancient of Days Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance, Lifting up, dear, upon you The light of His countenance.
January 1941
At the Grave of Henry James
The snow, less intransigeant than their marble, Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools atmy feet Accommodate blue now, and- echo such clouds as occur To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing Moment remarks they repeat
While the rocks, named after singular spaces Within which images wandered once that caused
All to tremble and offend, Stand here in an innocent stillness, each marking the spot Where one more series of errors lost its uniqueness And novelty came to an end.
To whose real advantage were such transactions When words of reflection were exchanged for trees?
What living occasion can Be just to the absent? 0 noon but reflects on itself, And the small taciturn stone that is the only witness To a great and talkative man
Has no more judgement than my ignorant shadow Of odious comparisons or distant clocks
Which challenge and interfere With the heart's instantaneous reading of time, time that is A warm enigma no longer in you for whom I Surrender my private cheer.
Startling the awkward footsteps of my apprehension, The flushed assault of your recognition is
The donnee of this doubtful hour: O stern proconsul of intractable provinces, O poet of the difficult, dear addicted artist, Assent to my soil and flower.
t
As I stand awake on our solar fabric,
That primary machine, the earth, which gendarmes, banks, j
And aspirin pre-suppose, On which the clumsy and sad may all sit down,
and any who will Say their a-ha to the beautiful, the common locus Of the master and the rose.
Our theatre, scaffold, and erotic city
Where all the infirm species are partners in the act
Of encroachment bodies crave, Though solitude in death is de rigueur for their flesh And the self-denying hermit flies as it approaches >
Like the carnivore to a cave.
That its plural numbers may unite in meaning, '
Its vulgar tongues unravel the knotted mass (
Of the improperly conjunct, !
Open my eyes now to all its hinted significant forms, ' Sharpen my ears to detect amid its brilliant uproar The low thud of the defunct.
O dwell, ironic at my living centre,
Half ancestor, half child; because the actual self
Round whom time revolves so fast Is so afraid of what its motions might possibly do That the actor is never there when his really important Acts happen. Only the past
Is present, no one about but the dead as, Equipped with a few inherited odds and ends,
One after another-we are Fired into life to seek that unseen target where all Our equivocal judgements are judged and resolved in One whole Alas or Hurrah.
And only the unborn remark the disaster When, though it makes no difference to the pretty airs The bird of Appetite sings,
And Amour Propre is his usual amusing self, Out from the jungle of an undistinguished moment The flexible shadow springs.
Now more than ever, when torches and snare-drum Excite the squat women of the saurian brain
Till a milling mob of fears Breaks in insultingly on anywhere, when in our dreams Pigs play on the organs and the blue sky runs shrieking As the Crack of Doom appears,
Are the good ghosts needed with the white magic Of their subtle loves. War has no ambiguities
Like a marriage; the result Required of its affaire fatale is simple and sad, The physical removal of all human objects That conceal the Difficult.
Then remember me that I may remember The test we have to learn to shudder for is not
An historical event, That neither the low democracy of a nightmare nor An army's primitive tidiness may deceive me About our predicament,
That catastrophic situation which neither Victory nor defeat can annul; to be
Deaf yet determined to sing, To be lame and blind yet burning for the Great Good Place, To be radically corrupt yet mournfully attracted By the Real Distinguished Thing.
And shall I not specially bless you as, vexed with My little inferior questions, to-day I stand
Beside the bed where you rest Who opened such passionate arms to your Bon when It ran Towards you with Its overwhelming reasons pleading All beautifully in Its breast?
O with what innocence your hand submitted To those formal rules that help a child to play,
While your heart, fastidious as :
A delicate nun, remained true to the rare noblesse Of your lucid gift and, for its own sake, ignored the Resentful muttering Mass,
Whose ruminant hatred of all which cannot Be simplified or stolen is still at large;
No death can assuage its lust To vilify the landscape of Distinction and see The heart of the Personal brought to a systolic standstill, The Tall to diminished dust.
Preserve me, Master, from its vague incitement; Yours be the disciplinary image that holds
Me back from agreeable wrong 1
And the clutch of eddying muddle, lest Proportion shed j The alpine chill of her shrugging editorial shoulder On my loose impromptu song.
Suggest; so may I segregate my disorder i
Into districts of prospective value: approve;
Lightly, lightly, then, may I dance Over the frontier of the obvious and fumble no more In the old limp pocket of the minor exhibition, Nor riot with irrelevance,
And no longer shoe geese or water stakes, but Bolt in my day my grain of truth to the barn
Where tribulations may leap With their long-lost brothers at last in the festival Of which not one has a dissenting image, and the Flushed immediacy sleep.
Into this city from the shining lowlands Blows a wind that whispers of uncovered skulls And fresh ruins under the moon,
Of hopes that will not survive the secousse of this spring Of blood and flames, of the terror that walks by night and The sickness that strikes at noon.
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works Are in better taste than their lives; because there is no end To the vanity of our calling: make intercession For the treason of all clerks.
Because the darkness is never so distant, And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings, Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author And giver of all good things.
1 Spring 1941
58
Mundus et Infans