Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels, "On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: i
"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; I
There are only the various envies, all of them sad." j
They were right, my dear, all those voices were right And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site Where something was settled once and for alclass="underline" A backward j
And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite: f
It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these solid statues which so obviously doubt His antimythological myth; and these gamins, j
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught, \ Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble 5
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point: The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
May 1948
66
Song
Deftly, admiral, cast your fly Into the slow deep hover, Till the wise old trout mistake and die; Salt are the deeps that cover The glittering fleets you led, White is your head.
Read on, ambassador, engrossed
In your favourite Stendhal; The Outer Provinces are lost, Unshaven horsemen swill The great wines of the Chateaux Where you danced long ago.
Do not turn, do not lift, your eyes
Toward the still pair standing On the bridge between your properties, Indifferent to your minding: In its glory, in its power, This is their hour.
Nothing your strength, your skill, could do
Can alter their embrace Or dispersuade the Furies who At the appointed place With claw and dreadful brow Wait for them now.
June 1948
67
A Walk After Dark
A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring; |
After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way.
It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be as shocking as they said If that would still be there After the shocked were dead.
Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to dislike the young,
I am glad those points in the sky May also be counted among The creatures of middle-age.
It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen.
Yet however much we may like The stoic manner in which The classical authors wrote, Only the young and the rich Have the nerve or the figure to strike The lacrimae rerum note.
For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did.
Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:
But the stars burn on overhead, Unconscious of final ends, As I walk home to bed, Asking what judgement waits My person, all my friends, And these United States.
August 1948
Memorial for the City
In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning.
Juliana of Norwich
I
The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open
Onto Homer's world, not ours. First and last
They magnify earth, the abiding
Mother of gods and men; if they notice either
It is only in passing: gods behave, men die,
Both feel in their own small way, but She
Does nothing and does not care,
She alone is seriously there.
The crow on the crematorium chimney
And the camera roving the battle
Record a space where time has no place.
On the right a village is burning, in a market-town to the left
The soldiers fire, the mayor bursts into tears,
The captives are led away, while far in the distance
A tanker sinks into a dedolent sea.
That is the way things happen; for ever and ever
Plum-blossom falls on the dead, the roar of the waterfall covers
The cries of the whipped and the sighs of the lovers
And the hard bright light composes
A meaningless moment into an eternal fact
Which a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:
One enjoys glory, one endures shame;
He may, she must. There is no one to blame.
The steady eyes of the crow and the camera's candid eye See as honestly as they know how, but they lie. The crime of life is not time. Even now, in this night Among the ruins of the Post-Virgilian City Where our past is a chaos of graves
and the barbed-wire stretches ahead Into our future till it is lost to sight, Our grief is not Greek: As we bury our dead We know without knowing there is reason for what we bear, That our hurt is not a desertion, that we are to pity Neither ourselves nor our city; Whoever the searchlights catch,
whatever the loudspeakers blare, We are not to despair.
II
Alone in a room Pope Gregory whispered his name
While the Emperor shone on a centreless world From wherever he happened to be; the New City rose
Upon their opposition, the yes and no Of a rival allegiance; the sword, the local lord
Were not all; there was home and Rome; Fear of the stranger was lost on the way to the shrine.
The facts, the acts of the City bore a double meaning:
Limbs became hymns; embraces expressed in jest A more permanent tie; infidel faces replaced The family foe in the choleric's nightmare; The children of water parodied in their postures
The infinite patience of heaven; Those born under Saturn felt the gloom of the day of doom.
Scribes and innkeepers prospered; suspicious tribes combined
To rescue Jerusalem from a dull god, And disciplined logicians fought to recover thought
From the eccentricities of the private brain For the Sane City; framed in her windows, orchards, ports,