May be fittingly done, And done in anamnesis Of what is excellent Yet a visible creature,
Earth, Sky, a few dear names.
September 1953
i
II Woods j
(FOR NICOLAS NABOKOV) i
Sylvan meant savage in those primal woods
Piero di Cosima so loved to draw,
Where nudes, bears, lions, sows with women's heads
Mounted and murdered and ate each other raw,
Nor thought the lightning-kindled bush to tame
But, flabbergasted, fled the useful flame. '
Reduced to patches owned by hunting squires j
Of villages with ovens and stocks,
They whispered still of most unsocial fires,
Though Crown and Mitre warned their silly flocks The pasture's humdrum rhythms to approve And to abhor the license of the grove.
Guilty intention still looks for a hotel That wants no details and surrenders none; A wood is that, and throws in charm as well, And many a semi-innocent, undone, Has blamed its nightingales who round the deed Sang with such sweetness of a happy greed.
Those birds, of course, did nothing of the sort, And, as for sylvan nature, if you take A snapshot at a picnic, O how short And lower-ordersy the Gang will look By those vast lives that never took another And are not scared of gods, ghosts, or stepmother.
Among these coffins of its by-and-by The Public can (it cannot on a coast) Bridle its skirt-and-bargain-chasing eye, And where should an austere philologist Relax but in the very world of shade From which the matter of his field was made.
Old sounds re-educate an ear grown coarse, As Pan's green father suddenly raps out A burst of undecipherable Morse, And cuckoos mock in Welsh, and doves create In rustic English over all they do To rear their modern family of two.
Now here, now there, some loosened element, A fruit in vigor or a dying leaf, Utters its private idiom for descent, , And late man, listening through his latter grief, Hears, close or far, the oldest of his joys, Exactly as it was, the water noise.
A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady's grace; Someone is not disgusted, or at least Is laying bets upon the human race Retaining enough decency to last; The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul.
A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods! A culture is no better than its woods.
August 1952
III Mountains I
(FOR HEDWIG PETZOLD)
I know a retired dentist who only paints mountains, ' But the Masters seldom care
That much, who sketch them in beyond a holy face
Or a highly dangerous chair; While a normal eye perceives them as a wall *
Between worse and better, like a child, scolded in France, j
Who wishes he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps: Caesar does not rejoice when high ground Makes a darker map, Nor does Madam. Why should they? A serious being Cries out for a gap.
And it is curious how often in steep places
You meet someone short who frowns, ,
A type you catch beheading daisies with a stick:
Small crooks flourish in big towns, But perfect monsters—remember Dracula— Are bred on crags in castles; those unsmiling parties,
Clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery For points up, are a bit alarming; They have the balance, nerve And habit of the Spiritual, but what God Does their Order serve?
A civil man is a citizen. Am I
To see in the Lake District, then, Another bourgeois invention like the piano?
Well, I won't. How can I, when I wish I stood now on a platform at Penrith, Zurich, or any junction at which you leave the express For a local that swerves off soon into a cutting? Soon Tunnels begin, red farms disappear, Hedges turn to walls, Cows become sheep, you smell peat or pinewood, you hear Your first waterfalls,
And what looked like a wall turns out to be a world
With measurements of its own And a style of gossip. To manage the Flesh,
When angels of ice and stone Stand over her day and night who make it so plain They detest any kind of growth, does not encourage Euphemisms for the effort: here wayside crucifixes Bear witness to a physical outrage, And serenades too Stick to bare fact :—"0 my girl has a goitre, I've a hole in my shoe!"
Dour. Still, a fine refuge. That boy behind his goats
Has the round skull of a clan That fled with bronze before a tougher metal.
And that quiet old gentleman With a cheap room at the Black Eagle used to own Three papers but is not received in Society now:
These farms can always see a panting government coming; I'm nordic myself, but even so I'd much rather stay Where the nearest person who could have me hung is Some ridges away.
I
To be sitting in privacy, like a cat
On the warm roof of a loft, Where the high-spirited son of some gloomy tarn
Comes sprinting down through a green croft, Bright with flowers laid out in exquisite splodges Like a Chinese poem, while, near enough, a real darling Is cooking a delicious lunch, would keep me happy for What? Five minutes? For an uncatlike Creature who has gone wrong, Five minutes on even the nicest mountain Is awfully long.
? July 1952
IV Lakes
(FOR ISAIAH BERLIN)
A lake allows an average father, walking slowly,
To circumvent it in an afternoon, And any healthy mother to halloo the children
Back to her bedtime from their games across: (Anything bigger than that, like Michigan or Baikal, Though potable, is an "estranging sea").
Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;
They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:
A month in a lacustrine atmosphere Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.
No wonder Christendom did not get really started
Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails, Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake
And by that stork-infested shore invented The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure Of three small fishes in a triangle.
Sly Foreign Ministers should always meet beside one,
For, whether they walk widdershins or deasil, Its path will yoke their shoulders to one liquid centre
Like two old donkeys pumping as they plod; Such physical compassion may not guarantee A marriage for their armies, but it helps.
Only a very wicked or conceited man,
About to sink somewhere in mid-Atlantic, Could think Poseidon's frown was meant for him in person,
But it is only human to believe The little lady of the glacier lake has fallen
In love with the rare bather whom she drowns.
The drinking water of the city where one panics
At nothing noticing how real one is May come from reservoirs whose guards are all too conscious
Of being followed: Webster's cardinal Saw in a fish-pool something horrid with a hay-rake; I know a Sussex hammer-pond like that.
A haunted lake is sick, though; normally, they doctor
Our tactile fevers with a visual world Where beaks are dumb like boughs and faces safe like houses;
The water-scorpion finds it quite unticklish, And, if it shudder slightly when caressed by boats, It never asks for water or a loan.
Liking one's Nature, as lake-lovers do, benign
Goes with a wish for savage dogs and man-traps: One Fall, one dispossession, is enough, I'm sorry;
Why should I give Lake Eden to the Nation Just because every mortal Jack and Jill has been The genius of some amniotic mere?