STEPHEN SPENDER SELECTED POEMS

Table of Contents
1. A Father in Time of War
2. A First War Childhood
3. A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map
4. Air Raid
5. An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum
6. Darkness and Light
7. Hampstead Autumn
8. ‘If it were not too late!’
9. In No Man’s Land
10. Missing My Daughter
11. No Orpheus, No Eurydice
12. Nocturne
13. Polar Exploration
14. Seascape
15. ‘That girl who laughed and had black eyes’
16. The Double Shame
17. The Past Values
18. The Separation
19. Two Armies
20. V
21. VIII
22. War Photograph
23. XI
24. XII
25. XIII
26. XVII
27. XXI
28. XXII
29. XXIV
30. XXVI The Express
31. XXVIII The Pylons
32. XXX
 1. A Father in Time of War

I
On a winter night I took her to the hospital.
Lying in bed, she clasped my hand
In her two hands. I watched the smile
Float on her pain-torn happy face –
Light stretched on the surface of a well
At the bottom of which, hidden from sight,
Curled a minute human phantom.

II
Next morning, I went to hospital
On a bus that drove through streets
Unwinding back to the First Day.
A solitary street cleaner
Hosed water over hopeless rubble.
In front of her charred and splintered door
A woman scrubbed
A doorstep whiter than her hair.
A ladder lifted up into the air
Arms that bore a minute human phantom.

III
Now we watch him lying in the grass
In the garden. His eyes
See branches sway. Birds fly forward
Against the backwards-flying clouds.
Brushing yellow flowers, green leaves, his eyes
Pout like his mouth across her breast:
Voluptuous wondering, drinking in
The dizzy spinning tilting upsidedown
flags of the world new born.

2. A First War Childhood

March 1916,
The middle of a war
– One night long
As all my life –
A child, I lay awake
On my bed under
The slant ceiling
Of the attic of The Bluff,
Our parents’ house
On the Norfolk coast.

Beyond the garden

Rain-matted fields
Stretched to the edge
Of the cliff, below which
A roaring Nor’easter
Heaped up waves –
White-maned horses
Charging over rocks

(I thought: ‘Deep down under sea

Submarines nose
Among shoals of fish
And waving seaweed
While high above
Zeppelins
Intent to bomb London
Throb through the night.
And near the cliff edge
Soldiers in a dugout
Keep watch on our lives.’)

Wrapped in my blanket
– A chrysalis
Wings not yet sprouted –
I stared up at
The ceiling skylight
Where, mile on mile,
Tons of dark weighed
Pressing on glass,
And stars like jewels
In cogs of a watch
Divided time
Into minutes and seconds.

Out of that Nowhere

Surrounding all
So that any point anywhere
Was at the centre,
There fell a voice
Like a waterfall
Speaking through space
I AM I AM I AM

Then a bomb exploded –

The night went up
In flame that shook
The shrubbery leaves,
And soldiers came
Out of dark speared with flame,
And carried us children
Into their dugout
Below the earth.

Ear pressed against

The khaki uniform
Of mine, in his arms,
I could hear his heart beat –
With the blood of all England.

3. A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map

A stopwatch and an ordnance map.

At five a man fell to the ground
And the watch flew off his wrist
Like a moon struck from the earth
Marking a blank time that stares
On the tides of change beneath.
All under the olive trees.

A stopwatch and an ordnance map.

He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
That opened wide the distances
Of his final loneliness.
All under the olive trees.

A stopwatch and an ordnance map.

And the bones are fixed at five
Under the moon’s timelessness;
But another who lives on
Wears within his heart for ever
The space split open by the bullet.
All under the olive trees.

4. Air Raid

In this room like a bowl of flowers filled with light

Family eyes look down on the white
Pages of a book, and the white ceiling
Like starch of a nurse, reflects a calm feeling.

The daughter, with hands outstretched to the fire,

Transmits through her veins the peaceful desire
Of the family tree, from which she was born,
To push tendrils through dark to a happier dawn.

In the ancient house or the glass-and-steel flat

The vertical descendants of the genes that
Go back far in the past, are supported by floors
And protected by walls from the weather outdoors.

In their complex stage settings they act out the parts

Of their bodies enclosing their human hearts
With limbs utilizing chairs, tables, cups,
All the necessities and props.

They wear the right clothes and go the right ways,

Read the news, and play golf, and fill out their days
With hobbies, meals brought from the kitchen range.
And no one sees anything eerie or strange

In all this. And perhaps they are right. Nothing is

Until an unreasoning fury impinges
From an enemy’s vision of life, on their hearth.
And explodes. And tears their loved home down to earth.

Then the inside-turned-outside faces the street.

Rubble decently buries the dead human meat.
Piled above it, a bath, wardrobe, books, telephone
Though all who could answer its ringing have gone.

Standing unscathed is one solitary wall,

Half a floor attached, forgotten to fall.
Convolvulus patterns of pink and blue line
That rectangle high up where they once used to dine.

Bemused passers-by are bound to observe

That inside-shown-outside like the deep curve
Of mother-o’-pearl exposed in a shell
Where a mollusc, long smashed, at one time did dwell.

But the house has been cracked in an enemy’s claws,

Years of love ground down to rubble in jaws,
And the tender sensitive life thrown away
By the high-flying will of the enemy’s day.

[Horizon, February 1941. 1993]

5. An Elementary School Class Room in a Slum

Far far from gusty waves, these children’s faces.

Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paperseeming
boy with rat’s eyes. The stunted unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class,
One unnoted, sweet and young: his eyes live in a dream
Of squirrels’ game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head

Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belted, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this world, are world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example

With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal –
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,

This map becomes their window and these windows
That open on their lives like crouching tombs
Break, O break open, till they break the town
And show the children to the fields and all their world
Azure on their sands, to let their tongues
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open
The history theirs whose language is the sun.

6. Darkness and Light

To break out of the chaos of my darkness

Into a lucid day is all my will.
My words like eyes in night, stare to reach
A centre for their light: and my acts thrown
To distant places by impatient violence
Yet lock together to mould a path of stone
Out of my darkness into a lucid day.

Yet, equally, to avoid that lucid day

And to preserve my darkness, is all my will.
My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse
And shut upon obscurity; my acts
Cast to their opposites by impatient violence
Break up the sequent path; they fly
On a circumference to avoid the centre.

To break out of my darkness towards the centre

Illumines my own weakness, when I fail;
The iron arc of the avoiding journey
Curves back upon my weakness at the end;
Whether the faint light spark against my face
Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight,
Centre and circumference are both my weakness.

O strange identity of my will and weakness!

Terrible wave white with the seething word!
Terrible flight through the revolving darkness!
Dreaded light that hunts my profile!
Dreaded night covering me in fears!
My will behind my weakness silhouettes
My territories of fear, with a great sun.

I grow towards the acceptance of that sun

Which hews the day from night. The light
Runs from the dark, the dark from light
Towards a black or white of total emptiness.
The world, my body, binds the dark and light
Together, reconciles and separates
In lucid day the chaos of my darkness.

7. Hampstead Autumn
In the fat autumn evening street
Hands from my childhood stretch out
And ring muffin bells. The Hampstead
Incandescence burns behind windows
With talk and gold warmth.
Those brothers who we were lie wrapped in flannel,
And how like a vase looks my time then
Rounded with meals laid on by servants
With reading alone in a high room and looking down on
The pleasures of the spoiled pets in the garden –
A vase now broken into fragments,
Little walks which quickly reach their ends,
The islands in the traffic. To questions – I know not what –
Answers hurry back from the world,
But now I reject them all.
I assemble an evening with space
Pinned above the four walls of the garden,
A glowing smell of being under canvas,
The sunset tall above the chimneys,
From behind the smoke-screen of poplar leaves
A piano cutting out its images,
Continuous and fragile as china.

8. ‘If it were not too late!’

If it were not too late!

If I could mould my thought
To the curved form of that woman
With gleaming eyes, raven hair,
Lips drawn too tight like a scar,
Eye sockets shadowed with migraine’s
Memory of earlier loves and wars
And her smile learnéd with being so human.

I imagined her lying naked at night

In warm rain when the breasts are watered
Through darkness by reflecting drops of light,
Which secret light accumulates
In pools on the skin as though on fruit.

Then her light blue dress she unloosed

Till light rose in rose and blue above the trees
Not to expel sad dreams, but to shine
On flesh that overflowed my eyes,
On life locking the senses with closeness,
O dawn of all my certainties!

If it were not too late.

If I could still concentrate
To clench my mind into a husk for love
I’d be too hot and ripe for ghosts,
Winds down side walks with swords of ice,
All betraying lies and lights.

For everything but she leads away

By brambles and along mechanic lines
To the suffering figures under trees
Of heroes who have wrecked happiness
And whose love is accomplished alone
In a spasm on the outer surface of the brain.

9. In No Man’s Land

Only the world changes, and time its tense

Against the creeping inches of whose moons
He launches his rigid continual present.

The grass will grow its summer beard and beams

Of sunlight melt the iron slumber
Where soldiers lie locked in their final dreams.

His corpse be covered with the white December

And roots push through his skin as through a drum
When the years and fields forget, but the bones remember.

10. Missing My Daughter

This wall-paper has lines that rise

Upright like bars, and overhead,
The ceiling’s patterned with red roses.
On the wall opposite the bed
The staring looking-glass encloses
Six roses in its white of eyes.

Here at my desk, with note-book open

Missing my daughter, makes those bars
Draw their lines upward through my mind.
This blank page stares at me like glass
Where stared-at roses wish to pass
Through petalling of my pen.

An hour ago, there came an image

Of a beast that pressed its muzzle
Between bars. Next, through tick and tock
Of the reiterating clock
A second glared with the wide dazzle
Of deserts. The door, in a green mirage,

Opened. In my daughter came.

Her eyes were wide as those she has,
The round gaze of her childhood was
White as the distance in the glass
Or on a white page, a white poem.
The roses raced around her name.

11. No Orpheus, No Eurydice

Nipples of bullets, precipices,

Ropes, knives, all
Now would seem as gentle
As the far away kisses
Of her these days remove
– To the dervish of his mind
Lost to her love.

There where his thoughts alone

Dance round his walls,
They paint his pale darling
In a piteous attitude standing
Amongst blowing winds of space,
Dead, and waiting in sweet grace
For him to follow, when she calls.

For how can he believe

Her loss less than his?
‘True it is that she did leave
Me for another’s kiss;
Yet our lives did so entwine
That the blank space of my heart
Torn from hers apart,
Tore hers too from mine.’

O, but if he started
Upon that long journey
Of the newly departed
Where one and all are born poor
Into death naked,
Like a slum Bank Holiday
Of bathers on a desolate shore;
If, with nerves strung to a harp,
He searched among the spirits there,
Looking and singing for his wife
To follow him back into life
Out of this dull leaden place,
He would never find there
Her cold, starry, wondering face.

For he is no Orpheus,
She no Eurydice.
She has truly packed and gone
To live with someone
Else, in pleasures of the sun,
Far from his kingdoms of despair
Here, there, or anywhere.

12. Nocturne

Their six-weeks-old daughter lies

in her cot, crying out the night. Their hearts
Are sprung like armies, waiting
To cross the gap to where her loneliness
Lies infinite between them. This child’s cry
Sends rays of a star’s pain through endless dark;
And the sole purpose of their loving
Is to disprove her demonstration
Of all love’s aidlessness. Words unspoken
Out of her mouth unsaying, prove unhappiness
Pure as innocence, virgin of tragedy,
Unknowing reason. Star on star of pain
Surround her cry to make a constellation
Where human tears of victims are the same
As griefs of the unconscious animals.

Listening, the parents know this primal cry

Out of the gates of life, hollows such emptiness,
It proves that all men’s aims should be, all times,
To fill the gap of pain with consolation
Poured from the mountain-sided adult lives
Whose minds like peaks attain to heights of snow:
The snow should stoop to wash away such grief.
Unceasing love should lave the feet of victims.

Yet, when they lift their heads out of such truths,

Today mocks at their prayers. To think this even
Suffices to remind them of far worse
Man-made man-destroying ills which threaten
While they try to lull a child. For she
Who cries for milk, for rocking, and a shawl,
Is also subject to the rage of causes
Dividing peoples. Even at this moment
Eyes might fly between them and the moon,
And a hand touch a lever to let fall

That which would make the street of begging roofs

Pulverize and creep skywards in a tower:
Down would fall baby, cradle, and them all.
That which sent out the pilot to destroy them
Was the same will as that with which they send
An enemy to kill their enemy. Even in this love
Running in shoals on each side of her bed,
Is fear, and hate. If they shift their glances
From her who weeps, their eyes meet other eyes
Willed with death, also theirs. All would destroy
New-born, innocent streets. Necessity,
With abstract head and searing feet, men’s god
Unseeing the poor amulets of flesh,
Unhearing the minutiae of prayer.

Parents like mountains watching above their child,

Envallied here beneath them, also hold
Upon their frozen heights, the will that sends
Destruction into centres of the stones
Which concentrated locked centennial stillness
For human generations to indwell.

Hearing their daughter’s cry which is the speech

Of indistinguishable primal life,
They know the dark is filled with means which are
Men’s plots to murder children. They know too
No cause is just unless it guards the innocent
As sacred trust: no truth but that
Which reckons this child’s tears an argument.

13. Polar Exploration

Our single purpose was to walk through snow
With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass iron. As clerks in whited banks
With bird-claw pens column virgin paper,
To snow we added foot-prints.
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time’s suspended blank.
That was in Spring and Autumn. Summer struck
Water over rocks, and half the world
Became a ship with a deep keel, the booming floes
And icebergs with their little birds:
Twittering Snow Bunting, Greenland Wheatear,
Red-throated Divers; imagine butterflies
Sulphurous cloudy yellow; glory of bees
That suck from saxifrage; crowberry,
Bilberry, cranberry, Pyrola Uniflora.
There followed Winter in a frozen hut
Warm enough at the kernel, but dare to sleep
With head against the wall – ice gummed my hair!
Hate Culver’s loud breathing, despise Freeman’s
Fidget for washing: love only the dogs
That whine for scraps, and scratch. Notice
How they run better (on short journeys) with a bitch.
In that, different from us.
Return, return, you warn. We do. There is
A network of railways, money, words, words, words.
Meals, papers, exchanges, debates,
Cinema, wireless: the worst, is Marriage.
We cannot sleep. At night we watch
A speaking clearness through cloudy paranoia.
These questions are white rifts: – Was
Ice our anger transformed? The raw, the motionless
Skies, were these the Spirit’s hunger?
The continual and hypnotized march through snow,
The dropping nights of precious extinction, were these
Only the wide inventions of the will,
The frozen will’s evasion? If this exists
In us as madness here, as coldness
In these summer, civilized sheets: Is the North,
Over there, a tangible, real madness,
A glittering simpleton, one without towns,
Only with bears and fish, a staring eye,
A new and singular sex?

14. Seascape
 (in memoriam M.A.S.)

There are some days the happy ocean lies

Like an unfingered harp, below the land.
Afternoon gilds all the silent wires
Into a burning music of the eyes.
On mirroring paths between those fine-strung fires
The shore, laden with roses, horses, spires,
Wanders in water, imaged above ribbed sand.

The azure vibrancy of the air tires

And a sigh, like a woman’s, from inland
Brushes the golden wires with shadowing hand
Drawing across their chords some gull’s sharp cries
Or bell, or gasp from distant hedged-in shires:
These, deep as anchors, the silent wave buries.

Then, from the shore, two zig-zag butterflies,

Like errant dog-roses cross the hot strand
And on the ocean face in spiralling gyres
Search for foam-honey in reflected skies.
They drown. Witnesses understand
Such wings torn in such ritual sacrifice,

Remembering ships, treasures and cities.

Legendary heroes, plumed with flame like pyres
On flesh-winged ships fluttered from their island
And them the sea engulfed. Their coins and eyes
Twisted by the timeless waves’ desires,
Are, through the muscular water, scarcely scanned
While, above them, the harp assumes their sighs.

15. ‘That girl who laughed and had black eyes’

That girl who laughed and had black eyes

Spoke here ten days ago. She smiles
Still in my thought; the lip still promises
The body lives, and the quick eye beguiles.

Now that she’s dead, I feel the living flame

Move across walls and twist across my sight:
Through tilting, smothering waters of Death’s name,
Through the transparent grave, I see her bright.

She lives beneath our common objects, dust

And chairs, and her few poems about the room.
Although death play its tricks, and the earth’s crust
Swallow her up in the enormous tomb,

I meet her every turn; the muffled part

The stilled applause, the pageant to appal,
Startle her shade to take birth in my heart:
I see her dancing through the solid wall!

16. The Double Shame

You must live through the time when everything hurts

When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts

The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows red in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and gold
Of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed

And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and look at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless –
Here birds crossed once and cries were uttered
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

For the story of those who made mistakes

Of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
What the blood is now writing in your head,
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being so perfectly living and dead
In your story, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare

Their tragic bliss with your trivial despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

17. The Past Values

Alas for the sad standards

In the eyes of the old masters
Sprouting through glaze of their pictures!

For what we stare at through glass

Opens on to our running time:
As nature spilled before the summer mansion
Pours through windows in on our dimension.

And the propeller’s rigid transparent flicker

To airman over continental ranges
Between him and the towns and river
Spells dynamics of this rotating
Age of invention, too rapid for sight.

Varnish over paint and dust across glass:

Stare back, remote, the static drum;
The locked ripeness of the Centaurs’ feast;
The blowing flags, frozen stiff
In a cracked fog, and the facing
Reproach of self-portraits.

Alas for the sad standards

In the eyes of the freshly dead young
Sprawled in the mud of battle.

Stare back, stare back, with dust over glazed

Eyes, their gaze at partridges,
Their dreams of girls, and their collected
Faith in home, wound up like a little watch.

To ram them outside time, violence

Of wills that ride the cresting day
Struck them with lead so swift
Their falling sight stared through its glass.
Our sight stares back on death, like glass
Infringing the rigid eyes with toneless glaze,
Sinking stretched bodies inch-deep in their frames.

Through glass their eyes meet ours

Like standards of the masters
That shock us with their peace.

18. The Separation

When the night within whose deep

Our minds and bodies melt in love,
Instead of joining us, divides
With winds and seas that tear between
Our separated sleep –

Then to my lidless eyes that stare

Beyond my dark and climbing fears,
Your answering warm island lies
In the gilt wave of desire
Far as the day from here.

Here where I lie is the hot pit

Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.

Our vivid suns of happiness

Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.

The present voices and the faces

Of strangers mirroring each other
In their foreign happiness,
Lay waste and populate my map
With meaningless names of places.

To bring me back to you, the earth

Must turn, the aeroplane
Must fly across the glittering spaces,
The clocks must run, the scenery change
From mountains into town.
Against a wheel I press my brain,
My blood roars through a night of wood
But my heart uncoils no shoot
From the centre of a silence
Of motionless violence.

And when we meet – the ribs will still

Divide the flesh-enfolding dream
And the winds and seas of time
Ruin the islands with their stream
However compassed be the will;

Unless within the turning night

Where we are ever separate,
Our eyes drink in each other’s silence,
Unmeasuring patience
Threaded upon their secret light.

Shuttered by dark at the still centre

Of the world’s circular terror,
O tender birth of life and mirror
Of lips, where love at last finds peace
Released from the will’s error.
19. Two Armies

Deep in the winter plain, two armies

Dig their machinery, to destroy each other.
Men freeze and hunger. No one is given leave
On either side, except the dead, and wounded.
These have their leave; while new battalions wait
On time at last to bring them violent peace.

All have become so nervous and so cold

That each man hates the cause and distant words
Which brought him here, more terribly than bullets.
Once a boy hummed a popular marching song,
Once a novice hand flapped the salute;
The voice was choked, the lifted hand fell,
Shot through the wrist by those of his own side.

From their numb harvest all would flee, except

For discipline drilled once in an iron school
Which holds them at the point of a revolver.
Yet when they sleep, the images of home
Ride wishing horses of escape
Which herd the plain in a mass unspoken poem.
Finally, they cease to hate: for although hate
Bursts from the air and whips the earth like hail
Or pours it up in fountains to marvel at,
And although hundreds fall, who can connect
The inexhaustible anger of the guns
With the dumb patience of these tormented animals?

Clean silence drops at night when a little walk

Divides the sleeping armies, each
Huddled in linen woven by remote hands.
When the machines are stilled, a common suffering
Whitens the air with breath and makes both one
As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms.

Only the lucid friend to aerial raiders,

The brilliant pilot moon, stares down
Upon the plain she makes a shining bone
Cut by the shadow of many thousand bones.
Where amber clouds scatter on no-man’s-land
She regards death and time throw up
The furious words and minerals which kill life.

20. V

Acts passed beyond the boundary of mere wishing

Not privy looks, hedged words, at times you saw.
These blundering, heart-surrendered troopers were
Small presents made, and waiting for the tram.

Then once you said ‘Waiting was very kind’

And looked surprised: surprising for me too
Whose every movement had been missionary,
A pleading tongue unheard. I had not thought
That you, who nothing else saw, would see this.

So ‘very kind’ was merest overflow

Something I had not reckoned in myself,
A chance deserter from my force. When we touched hands
I felt the whole rebel, feared mutiny
And turned away,
Thinking, if these were tricklings through a dam,
I must have love enough to run a factory on,
Or give a city power, or drive a train.
 21. VIII

An ‘I’ can never be great man.

This known great one has weakness
To friends is most remarkable for weakness
His ill-temper at meals, his dislike of being contradicted,
His only real pleasure fishing in ponds,
His only real desire – forgetting.

To advance from friends to the composite self

Central ‘I’ is surrounded by ‘I eating’,
‘I loving’, ‘I angry’, ‘I excreting’,
And the ‘great I’ planted in him
Has nothing to do with all these,

It can never claim its true place

Resting in the forehead, and secure in his gaze.
The ‘great I’ is an unfortunate intruder
Quarrelling with ‘I tiring’ and ‘I sleeping’
And all those other ‘I’s who long for ‘We dying’.

22. War Photograph

Where the sun strikes the rock and

The rock plants its shadowed foot
And the breeze distracts the grass and fern frond,

There, in the frond, the instant lurks

With its metal fang planned for my heart
When the finger tugs and the clock strikes.

I am that numeral which the sun regards,

The flat and severed second on which time looks,
My corpse a photograph taken by fate;

Where inch and instant cross, I shall remain

As faithful to the vanished moment’s violence
As love fixed to one day in vain.
Only the world changes, and time its tense,
Against the creeping inches of whose moon
I launch my wooden continual present.

The grass will grow its summer beard and beams

Of light melt down the waxen slumber
Where soldiers lie dead in an iron dream;

My corpse be covered with the snows’ December

And roots push through skin’s silent drum
When the years and fields forget, but the whitened bones remember.

23. XI

My parents quarrel in the neighbour room.

‘How did you sleep last night?’ ‘I woke at four
To hear the wind that sulks along the floor
Blowing up dust like ashes from the tomb.’

‘I was awake at three.’ ‘I heard the moth

Breed perilous worms.’ ‘I wept
All night, watching your rest.’ ‘I never slept
Nor sleep at all.’ Thus ghastly they speak, both.

How can they sleep, who eat upon their fear

And watch their dreadful love fade as it grows?
Their life flowers, like an antique lovers’ rose
Set puff’d and spreading in the chemist’s jar.

I am your son, and from bad dreams arise.

My sight is fixed with horror, as I pass
Before the transitory glass
And watch the fungus cover up my eyes.

24. XII

My parents kept me from children who were rough

And who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes.
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron

And their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms.
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.
They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at our world. They threw mud
And I looked another way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them, yet they never smiled.

25. XIII

What I expected was

Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long.

What I had not foreseen

Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch
The fading of body and soul
Like smoke before wind
Corrupt, unsubstantial.

The wearing of Time,

And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
The pulverous grief
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth –
These, I could not foresee.

For I had expected always

Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust;
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem
Or the dazzling crystal.

26. XVII
Who live under the shadow of a war,
What can I do that matters?
My pen stops, and my laughter, dancing, stop
Or ride to a gap.

How often, on the powerful crest of pride,

I am shot with thought
That halts the untamed horses of the blood,
The grip on good.

That moving whimpering and mating bear

Tunes to deaf ears:
Stuffed with the realer passions of the earth
Beneath this hearth.

27. XXI

Without that once clear aim, the path of flight

To follow for a life-time through white air,
This century chokes me under roots of night,
I suffer like history in Dark Ages, where
Truth lies in dungeons, from which drifts no whisper:
We hear of towers long broken off from sight
And tortures and war, in dark and smoky rumour,
But on men’s buried lives there falls no light.
Watch me who walk through coiling streets where rain
And fog drown every cry: at corners of day
Road drills explore new areas of pain,
Nor summer nor light may reach down here to play.
The city builds its horror in my brain,
This writing is my only wings away.

28. XXII

oh young men oh young comrades

it is too late now to stay in those houses
your fathers built where they built you to build to breed
money on money – it is too late
to make or even to count what has been made
Count rather those fabulous possessions
which begin with your body and your fiery soul: –
the hairs on your head the muscles extending
in ranges with their lakes across your limbs
Count your eyes as jewels and your valued sex
then count the sun and the innumerable coined light
sparkling on waves and spangled under trees
It is too late to stay in great houses where the ghosts are prisoned
– those ladies like flies perfect in amber
those financiers like fossils of bones in coal.
Oh comrades, step beautifully from the solid wall
advance to rebuild and sleep with friend on hill
advance to rebel and remember what you have
no ghost ever had, immured in his hall.

29. XXIV

After they have tired of the brilliance of cities

And of striving for office where at last they may languish
Hung round with easy chains until
Death and Jerusalem glorify also the crossing-sweeper:
Then those streets the rich built and their easy love
Fade like old cloths, and it is death stalks through life
Grinning white through all faces
Clean and equal like the shine from snow.

In this time when grief pours freezing over us,

When the hard light of pain gleams at every street corner,
When those who were pillars of that day’s gold roof
Shrink in their clothes; surely from hunger
We may strike fire, like fire from flint?
And our strength is now the strength of our bones
Clean and equal like the shine from snow
And the strength of famine and of our enforced idleness,
And it is the strength of our love for each other.

Readers of this strange language,

We have come at last to a country
Where light equal, like the shine from snow, strikes all faces,
Here you may wonder
How it was that works, money, interest, building, could ever hide
The palpable and obvious love of man for man.

Oh comrades, let not those who follow after

– The beautiful generation that shall spring from our sides –
Let not them wonder how after the failure of banks,
The failure of cathedrals and the declared insanity of our rulers,
We lacked the Spring-like resources of the tiger
Or of plants who strike out new roots to gushing waters.
But through torn-down portions of old fabric let their eyes
Watch the admiring dawn explode like a shell
Around us, dazing us with its light like snow.

30. XXVI The Express

After the first powerful plain manifesto

The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd outside,
The gasworks and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on ocean.
It is now she begins to sing – at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness –
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial, underneath
Goes the elate metre of her wheels.
Steaming through metal landscape on her lines
She plunges new eras of wild happiness
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like the steel of guns.
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low streamline brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is white.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.

31. XXVIII The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages.

Now over these small hills they have built the concrete
That trails black wire:
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look

And the green chestnut
Of customary root
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures

Like whips of anger
With lightning’s danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek

So tall with prophecy:
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

32. XXX

In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,

They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.

No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament

To make them birds upon my singing-tree:
Time merely drives these lives which do not live
As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

– There is no consolation, no, none

In the curving beauty of that line
Traced on our graphs through history, where the oppressor
Starves and deprives the poor.

Paint here no draped despairs, no saddening clouds

Where the soul rests, proclaims eternity.
But let the wrong cry out as raw as wounds
This Time forgets and never heals, far less transcends.