Now it is over. No, we have not dreamt it. Here we really stand, down stage with red faces and no applause; no effect, however simple, no piece of business, however unimportant, came off; there was not a single aspect of our whole production, not even the huge stuffed bird of happiness, for which a kind word could, however patronisingly, be said.
Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as we ate, neither cosy nor playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void—we have never stood anywhere else,—when our reasons are silenced by the heavy huge derision,—There is nothing to say. There never has been,—and our wills chuck in their hands—There is no way out. There never was,—it is at this moment that for the first time in our lives we hear, not the sounds which, as born actors, we have hitherto condescended to use as an excellent vehicle for displaying our personalities and looks, but the real Word which is our only raison d'etre. Not that we have improved; everything, the massacres, the whippings, the lies, the twaddle, and all their carbon copies are still present, more obviously than ever; nothing has been reconstructed; our shame, our fear, our incorrigible staginess, all wish and no resolve, are still, and more intensely than ever, all we have: only now it is not in spite of them but with them that we are blessed by that Wholly Other Life from which we are separated by an essential emphatic gulf of which our contrived fissures of mirror and proscenium arch—we understand them at last—are feebly figurative signs, so that all our meanings are reversed and it is precisely in its negative image of Judgement that we can positively envisage Mercy; it is just here, among the ruins and the bones, that we may rejoice in the perfected Work which is not ours. Its great coherences stand out through our secular blur in all their overwhelmingly righteous obligation; its voice speaks through our muffling banks of artificial flowers and unflinchingly delivers its authentic molar pardon; its spaces greet us with all their grand old prospect of wonder and width; the working charm is the full bloom of the unbothered state; the sounded note is the restored relation.
Postscript
(Ariel to Caliban. Echo by the Prompter]
Weep no more but pity me, Fleet persistent shadow cast By your lameness, caught at last, Helplessly in love with you, Elegance, art, fascination, Fascinated by Drab mortality; Spare me a humiliation, ' To your faults be true: I can sing as you reply
Wish for nothing lest you mar The perfection in these eyes Whose entire devotion lies At the mercy of your will; Tempt not your sworn comrade,—only As I am can I Love you as you are— For my company be lonely
For my health be ilclass="underline" I will sing if you will cry
Never hope to say farewell, For our lethargy is such Heaven's kindness cannot touch Nor earth's frankly brutal drum; This was long ago decided, Both of us know why, Can, alas, foretell, When our falsehoods are divided,
What we shall become, One evaporating sigh
. . . I
August 1942-February 1944
61
Noon
How still it is; the horses
Have moved into the shade, the mothers
Have followed their migrating gardens.
Curlews on kettle moraines Foretell the end of time, The doom of paradox.
But lovelorn sighs ascend From wretched-greedy regions Which cannot include themselves.
And the freckled orphan flinging Ducks and drakes at the pond Stops looking for stones,
And wishes he were a steamboat, Or Lugalzaggisi the loud Tyrant of Erech and Umma.
from "The Age of Anxiety": ? 1945
n
: tfm
Lament for a Lawgiver
Sob, heavy world, Sob as you spin Mantled in mist, remote from the happy: The washerwomen have wailed all night, The disconsolate clocks are crying together,
And the bells toll and toll For tall Agrippa who touched the sky:
Shut is that shining eye Which enlightened the lampless and lifted up The flat and foundering, reformed the weeds Into civil cereals and sobered the bulls;
Away the cylinder seal, The didactic digit and dreaded voice Which imposed peace on the pullulating Primordial mess. Mourn for him now, Our lost dad, Our colossal father.
I
For seven cycles For seven years Past vice and virtue, surviving both, Through pluvial periods, paroxysms Of wind and wet, through whirlpools of heat,
And comas of deadly cold, On an old white horse, an ugly nag,
In his faithful youth he followed The black ball as it bowled downhill On the spotted spirit's spiral journey, Its purgative path to that point of rest Where longing leaves it, and saw Shimmering in the shade the shrine of gold, The magical marvel no man dare touch, Between the towers the tree of life And the well of wishes, The waters of joy.
Then he harrowed hell, Healed'the abyss Of torpid instinct and trifling flux, Laundered it, lighted it, made it lovable with Cathedrals and theories; thanks to him
Brisker smells abet us, Cleaner clouds accost our vision And honest sounds our ears. For he ignored the Nightmares and annexed their ranges, Put the clawing Chimaeras in cold storage, Berated the Riddle till it roared and fled,
Won the Battle of Whispers, Stopped the Stupids, stormed into The Fumblers' Forts, confined the Sulky To their drab ditches and drove the Crashing Bores to their bogs, Their beastly moor.
In the high heavens, The ageless places, The gods are wringing their great worn hands For their watchman is away, their world-engine Creaking and cracking, Conjured no more
By his master music to wed Their truths to times, the Eternal Objects
Drift about in a daze: O the lepers are loose in Lombard Street, The rents are rising in the river basins, The insects are angry. Who will dust The cobwebbed kingdoms now? For our lawgiver lies below his people. Bigger bones of a better kind, Unwarped by their weight, as white limestone Under green grass, The grass that fades.
from "The Age of Anxiety" : ? 1946
Under Which Lyre
A Reactionary Tract for the Times
( PHI BE T A K A P PA P O EM, H A R V A R D, 1 9 4 6 )
Ares at last has quit the field, The bloodstains on the bushes yield
To seeping showers, And in their convalescent state The fractured towns associate With summer flowers.
j
Encamped upon the college plain Raw veterans already train '
As freshman forces; i
Instructors with sarcastic tongue Shepherd the battle-weary young Through basic courses,
Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences »
They stroll or run, 1
And nerves that never flinched at slaughter Are shot to pieces by the shorter Poems of Donne.
Professors back from secret missions Resume their proper eruditions,
Though some regret it; They liked their dictaphones a lot, They met some big wheels, and do not Let you forget it.
But Zeus' inscrutable decree Permits the will-to-disagree To be pandemic,
Ordains that vaudeville shall preach And every commencement speech Be a polemic.
Let Ares doze, that other war Is instantly declared once more 'Twixt those who follow Precocious Hermes all the way And those who without qualms obey Pompous Apollo.