From Songs and other musical pieces.

XXX.

        Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
        Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
        Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
        Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

        Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
        Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
        Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
        Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

        He was my North, my South, my East and West,
        My working week and my Sunday rest,
        My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
        I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

        The stars are not wanted now; put out every one:
        Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
        Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods:
        For nothing now can ever come to any good.
    

XXXIV

        Thought determined Nature can
        Only offer human eyes
        One alternative to sleep,
        Opportunity to weep,
           Who can refuse her?
        Error does not end with youth
        But increases in the man;
          All truth,  only truth,
        Carries the ambiguous lies
          Of the Accuser.

        Thought some sudden fire of grace
        Visit our mortality
        Till a whole life tremble for
        Swans upon a river or
          Some passing stranger,
        Hearts by envy are possessed
        From the moment that they praise;
          To rejoice, to be blessed,
        Places us immediately
          In mortal danger

        Though we cannot follow how
        Evil miracles are done
        through the medium of a kiss,
        Aphrodite's garden is
          A hunted region;
        For the very signs whereby
        Lovers register their vow,
          With a look, with a sigh,
        Summon to  their meetins One
          Whose name is Legion.

        We, my darling, for our sins
        Suffer in each other's woe,
        Read in injured eyes and hands
        How we broke divine commands
          And served the Devil.
        Who is passionate enough
        When the punishment begins?
          O my love, O my love,
        In the night of fire and snow
          Save me from evil.
    

August 1968

        The Ogre does what ogres can,
        Deeds quite impossible for Man,
        But one prize is beyond his reach,
        The Ogre cannot master Speech:
        About a subjugated plain,
        Among its desperate and slain,
        The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
        While drivel gushes from his lips.
    

Epitaph on a Tyrant

        Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
        And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
        He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
        And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
        When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
        And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
    

Petition

        Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
        But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
        Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
        Curing the intolerable neural itch,
        The exhaustion of weaning, the liar's quinsy,
        And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
        Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
        And gradually correct the coward's stance;
        Cover in time with beams those in retreat
        That, spooted, they turn though the reverse were great;
        Publish each healer that in city lives
        Or country houses at the end of drives;
        Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
        New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
    

September 1, 1939

        I sit in one of the dives
        On Fifty-second Street
        Uncertain and afraid
        As the clever hopes expire
        Of a low dishonest decade;
        Waves of anger and fear
        Circulate over the bright
        And darkened lands of the earth,
        Obsessing our private lives;
        The unmentionable odour of death
        Offends the September night.
        
        Accurate scholarship can
        Unearth the whole offence
        From Luther until now
        That has driven a culture mad,
        Find what occurred at Linz,
        Find what huge imago made
        A psychopathic god:
        I and the public know
        What all schoolchildren learn,
        Those to whom evil is done
        Do evil in return.
        
        Exiled Thucydides knew
        All that a speech can say
        About Democracy,
        And what dictators do,
        The elderly rubbish they talk
        To an apathetic grave;
        Analysed all in his book,
        The enlightenment driven away,
        The habit-forming pain,
        Mismanagement and grief:
        We must suffer them all again.
        
        Into this neutral air
        Where blind skyscrapers use
        Their full height to proclaim
        The strength of Collective Man,
        Each language pours its vain
        Competitive excuse:
        But who can live for long
        In an euphoric dream;
        Out of the mirror they stare,
        Imperialism's face
        And the international wrong.
        
        Faces along the bar
        Cling to their average day:
        The lights must never go out,
        The music must always play,
        All the conventions conspire
        To make this fort assume
        The furniture of home;
        Lest we should see where we are,
        Lost in a haunted wood,
        Children afraid of the night
        Who have never been happy or good.
        
        The windiest militant trash
        Important Persons shout
        Is not so crude as our wish:
        What mad Nijinsky wrote
        About Diaghilev
        Is true of the normal heart;
        For the error bred in the bone
        Of each woman and each man
        Craves what it cannot have,
        Not universal love
        But to be loved alone.
        
        From the conservative dark
        Into the ethical life
        The dense commuters come,
        Repeating their morning vow;
        "I 
         will 
          be true to the wife,
        I'll concentrate more on my work,"
        And helpless governors wake
        To resume their compulsory game:
        Who can release them now,
        Who can reach the deaf,
        Who can speak for the dumb?

        Defenceless under the night
        Our world in stupor lies;
        Yet, dotted everywhere,
        Ironic points of light
        Flash out wherever the Just
        Exchange their messages:
        May I, composed like them
        Of Eros and of dust,
        Beleaguered by the same
        Negation and despair,
        Show an affirming flame.
    

The Labyrinth

        Anthropos apteros for days
        Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
        Relying happily upon
        His temperament for getting on.

        The hundredth time he sighted, though,
        A bush he left an  hour ago,
        He halted where four alleys crossed,
        And recognised that he was lost.

            "Where am I? Metaphisics says
            No question can be asked unless
            It has an answer, so I can
            Assume this maze has got a plan.

            If theologians are correct,
            A Plan implies an Architect:
            A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
            The Universe in miniature.

            Are data from the world of Sense,
            In that case, valid evidence?
            What in the universe I know
            Can give directions how to go?

            All Mathematics would suggest
            A steady straight line as the best,
            But left and right alternately
            Is consonant  with History.

            Aesthetics, though, belives all Art
            Intends to gratify the Heart:
            Rejecting disciplines like these,
            Must I, then, go which way I please?

            Such reasoning is only true
            If we accept the classic view,
            Which we have no right to assert,
            According to the Introvert.

            His absolute pre-supposition
            Is - Man creates his own condition:
            This maze was not divinely built,
            But is secreted by my guilt.

            The centre  that I caaannot find
            Is known to my Unconscious Mind;
            I have no reason to despair
            Because I am already there.

            My problem is how not to will;
            They move most quickly who stand still;
            I'm only lost until I see
            I'm lost because I want to be.

            If this should fail, perhaps I should,
            As certain educators would,
            Content myself with the conclusion;
            In theory there is no solution.

            All statements about what I feel,
            Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
            My knowledge ends where it began;
            A hedge is taller than a man."

        Anthropos apteros, perplexed
        To know which turning to take next,
        Looked up and wished he were the bird
        To whom such doubts must seem absurd.
    

Kairos and Logos

        
                           I
        
        Around them boomed the rhetoric of time,
        The smells and furniture of the known world
        Where conscience worshipped an aesthetic order
        And what was unsuccessful was condemned;
        And, at the centre of its vast self-love,
        The emperor and his pleasures, dreading death.

        In lovely verse that military order,
        Transferring its obsession onto time,
        Besieged the body and cuckolded love;
        Puzzling the boys of an atheletic world,
        These only feared another kind of Death
        To which the time-obsessed are all condemned.

        Night and the rivers sang a chthonic love,
        Destroyer of cities and the daylight order,
        But seemed to them weak arguments for death;
        The apple tree that cannot measure time
        Might taste the apple yet not be condemned;
        They, to enjoy it, must renounce the world.

        Friendly to what the sensual call death,
        Placing their lives below the dogs who love
        Their fallen masters and are not condemned,
        They came to life within a dying order;
        Outside the sunshine of its civil world
        The savage waited their appointed time.

        Its brilliant self-assertions were condemned
        To interst the forest and draw death
        On aqueducts and learning; yet the world,
        Through them, had witnessed, when predestined love
        Fell like a daring meteor into time,
        The condescension of eternal order.

        So, sown in little clumps about the world,
        The fair, the faithful and the uncondemned
        Broke out spontaneously all over time,
        Setting against the random facts of death
        A ground and possibility of order,
        Against defeat the certainty of love.

        And never, like its own, condemned the world
        Or hated time, but sang until their death:
        "O Thou who lovest, set its love in order."


                           II

        Quite suddenly her dream became a word:
        There stood the unicorn, declaring - "Child";
        She kissed her dolls good-bye and one by one
        Embraced the faithful roses in the garden,
        Waved for the last time to her mother's home,
        And tiptoed out into the silent forest.

        And seemed the lucky, the predestined one
        For whom the stones made way without a word;
        And sparrows fought to make her feel at home,
        And winds restrained their storms before the child;
        And all the children of that mother-forest
        Were told to let her treat it as her garden.

        Till she forgot that she was not at home
        Where she was loved, of course, by everyone,
        Could always tell the rose-bush - "Be a forest."
        Or make dolls guess when she had thought a word,
        Or play at being Mother in the garden
        And have importance as her only child.

        So, scampering like a sparrow through the forest,
        She piled up stones, pretending they were Home,
        Called the wild roses that she picked "My Garden,"
        Made any wind she chose the Naughty One,
        Talked to herself as to a doll, a child
        Whose mother-magic knew the Magic Word.

        And took the earth for granted as her garden:
        Till the day came the children of the forest
        Ceased to regard or treat her as a child;
        The roses frowned at her untidy home,
        The sparrows laughed when she misspelt a word,
        Winds cried:"A mother should behave like one."

        Frightened and cruel like a guilty child,
        She shouted all the roses from her garden,
        And threw stones at the winds: without a word
        The unicorn slipped off into the forest
        Like an offended doll, and one by one
        The sparrows flew back to her mother's home.

        Of course  the forest overran her garden,
        Yet, though, like everyone, she lost her home,
        The Word still nursed Its motherhood, Its child.


                          III

        If one could name the father of these things,
        They would not happen to decide one's fate:
        He woke one morning and the verbal truth
        He went to bed with was no longer there;
        The years of reading fell away; his eyes
        Beheld the weights and contours of the earth.

        One must be passive to conceive the truth:
        The bright and brutal surfaces of things
        Awaited the decision of his eyes,
        These pretty girls, to be embraced by fate
        And mother all the objects of the earth;
        The fatherhood of knowledge stood out there.

        One notices, if one will trust one's eyes,
        The shadow cast by language upon truth:
        He saw his role as father to an earth
        Whose speechless, separate, and ambiguous things
        Married at his decision; he was there
        To show a lucid passion for their fate.

        One has good reason to award the earth
        The dog-like dumb devotion of the eyes;
        Death, love, dishonour are predicted there,
        Her arbitrary moments are the truth;
        No, he was not the father of his fate;
        The power of decision lay with things.

        To know, one must decide what is not there,
        Where sickness is, and nothing: all that earth
        Presented was a challenge to his fate
        To father dreams of talking oaks, of eyes
        In walls, catastrophes, sins, poems, things
        Whose possibilities excluded truth.

        What one expects is not, of course, one's fate:
        When he had finished looking at them, there
        Were helpless images instead of things
        That had looked so decided; instead of earth
        His fatherless creation; instead of truth
        The luckiest convention of his eyes:

        That saw himself there with an exile's eyes
        Missing his Father, a thing of earth
        On whose decision hung the fate of truth.


                           IV

        Castle and crown are faded clean away,
        The fountain sinks into a level silence;
        What kingdom can be reached by the occasions
        That climb the broken ladders of our lives?
        We are imprisoned in unbounded spaces,
        Defined by an indefinite confusion.

        We should have wept before these occasions,
        We should have given what is snatched away;
        O columns, acrobats of cheering spaces,
        O songs that were the royal wives of silence,
        Now you are art and part of our confusion;
        We are at loggerheads with our own lives.

        The order of the macrocosmic spaces,
        The outward calm of their remote occasions,
        Has lost all interest in our confusion;
        Our inner regimen has given way;
        The subatomic gulfs confront our lives
        With the cold stare of their eternal silence.

        Where are the kings who routed all confusion,
        The bearded gods who shepherded the spaces,
        The merchants who poured gold into our lives?
        Where the historic routes, the great occasions?
        Laurel and language wither into silence;
        The nymphs and oracles have fled away.

        And cold and absence echo on our lives:
        "We are your conscience of your own confusion
        That made a stricken widow of the silence
        And weeping orphans of the unarmed spaces,
        That laid time waste behind you, stole away
        The birthright of innumerable occasions."

        O blessing of reproach. O proof that silence
        And condemnation presuppose our lives:
        We are not lost but only run away,
        The authors and the powers of confusion;
        We are the promise of unborn occasions;
        Our presence is required by all the spaces.

        The flora of our lives could guide occasions
        Without confusion on their frisking way
        Through all the silences and all the spaces.
    

As We Like It.

        Certainly our city with its byres of poverty down to
        The river's edge, its cathedral, its engines, its dogs;
          Here is the cosmopolitan cooking
          And the light alloys and the glass.

        Built by the conscience-stricken, the weapon-making,
        By us. Wild rumours woo and terrify the crowd,
          Woo us. Betrayers thunder at, blackmail
          Us. But where now are They.

        Who without reproaches showed us what our vanity
           has chosen,
        Who pursued understanding with patience like a sex,
           had unlearnt
          Our hatred and towaards the really better
          World had turned their face?

        Who knows? The peaked and violent faces are exalted,
        The feverish prejudiced lives do not care, and lost
          Their voice in the flutter of bunting, the glittering
          Brass of our great retreat,

        And the malice of death. For the wicked card is dealt and
        The sinister tall-hatted botanist stoops at the spring
          With his insignificant phial and looses
          The plague on the ignorant town.

        Under their shadows the pitiful subalterns are sleeping;
        The moon is usual; the necessary lovers touch;
          The river is alone and the trampled flower;
          And through years of absolute cold

        The planets rush towards Lyra in a lion's charge. Can
        Hate so securely bind? Are they dead here? Yes.
          And the wish to wound has the power. And tomorrow
          Comes. It's a world. It's a way.
    

We're Late.

        Clocks cannot tell our time of day
        For what event to pray
        Because we have no time, because
        We have no time until
        We know what time we fill,
        Why time is other than time was.
        Nor can our question satisfy
        The answer in the statue's eye:
        Only the living ask whose brow
        May wear the Roman laurel now;
        The dead say only how.

        What happens to the living when we die?
        Death is not understood by Death; nor You, nor I.
    

Atlantis.

        Being set on the idea
          Of getting to Atlantis,
        You have discovered of course
          Only the Ship of Fools is
        Making the voyage this year,
        As gales of abnormal force
          Are predicted, and that you
          Must therefore be ready to
        Behave absurdly enough
          To pass for one of The Boys,
        At least appearing to love
          Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

        Should storms, as may well happen,
          Drive you to anchor a week
        In some old harbour-city
          Of Ionia, then speak
        With her witty sholars, men
        Who have proved there cannot be
          Such a place as Atlantis:
          Learn their logic, but notice
        How its subtlety betrays
          Their enormous simple grief;
        Thus they shall teach you the ways
          To doubt that you may believe.

        If, later, you run aground
          Among the headlands of Thrace,
        Where with torches all night long
          A naked barbaric race
        Leaps frenziedly to the sound
        Of conch and dissonant gong:
          On that stony savage shore
          Strip off your clothes and dance, for
        Unless you are capable
          Of forgetting completely
        About Atlantis, you will
          Never finish your journey.

        Again, should you come to gay
          Carthage or Corinth, take part
        In their endless gaiety;
          And if in some bar a  tart,
        As she strokes your hair, should say
        "This is Atlantis, dearie,"
          Listen with attentiveness
          To her life-story: unless
        You become acquainted now
          With each refuge that tries to
        Counterfeit Atlantis, how
          Will you recognise the true?

        Assuming you beach at last
          Near Atlantis, and begin
        That terrible trek inland
          Through squalid woods and frozen
        Thundras where all are soon lost;
        If, forsaken then, you stand,
          Dismissal everywhere,
          Stone and now, silence and air,
        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.

        All the little  household gods
          Have started crying, but say
        Good-bye now, and put to sea.
          Farewell, my dear, farewell: 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.
    

Are You There?

        Each lover has some theory of his own
        About the difference between the ache
        Of being with his love, and being alone:

        Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
        That really stirs the senses, when awake,
        Appears a simulacrum of his own.

        Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
        He cannot join his image in the lake
        So long as he assumes he is alone.

        The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
        Are always up to mischief, though, and take
        The universe for granted as their own.

        The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
        To think of love as a subjective fake;
        The more they love, the more they feel alone.

        Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
        Why every lover has a wish to make
        Some kind of otherness his own:
        Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
    

Another Time.

        For us like any other fugitive,
        Like the numberless flowers that cannot number
        And all the beasts that need not remember,
        It is today in which we live.

        So many try to say Not Now,
        So many have forgotten how
        To say I Am, and would be
        Lost, if they could, in history.

        Bowing, for instance, with such old-world grace
        To a proper flag in a proper place,
        Muttering like ancients as they stump upstairs
        Of Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.

        Just as if time were what they used to will
        When it was gifted with possession still,
        Just as if they were wrong
        In no more wishing to belong.

        No wonder then so many die of grief,
        So many are so lonely as they die;
        No one has yet believed or liked a lie,
        Another time has other lives to live.
    

Aero sub Lege.

        The Hidden Law does not deny
        Our laws of probability,
        But takes the atom and the star
        And human beings as they are,
        And answers nothing when we lie.
        
        It is the only reason why
        No government can codify,
        And verbal definitions mar
                         The Hidden Law.

        Its utter patience will not try
        To stop us if we want to die;
        If we escape it in a car,
        If we forget It in a bar,
        These are the ways we're punished by
                         The Hidden Law.
    

Canzone.

        When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
        We cannot choose what we are free to love?
        Although the mouse we banished yesterday
        Is an enraged rhinoceros today,
        Our value is more treatened than we know:
        Shabby objections to our present day
        Go snooping round its  outskirts; night and day
        Faces, orations, battles, bait our will
        As questionable forms and noises will;
        Whole phyla of resentments every day
        Give status to the wild men of the world
        Who rule the absent-minded and this world.

        We are created from and with the world
        To suffer with and from it day by day:
        Whether we meet in a majestic world
        Of solid measurements or a dream world
        Of swans and gold, we are required to love
        All homeless objects that require a world.
        Our claim to own our bodies and our world
        Is our catastrophe. What can we know
        But panic and caprice until we know
        Our dreadful appetite demands a world
        Whose order, origin, and purpose will
        Be fluent satisfaction of our will?

        Drift, Autumn, drift; fall, colours, where you will:
        Bald melancholia minces through the world.
        Regret, cold oceans, the lymphatic will
        Caught in reflection on the right to will:
        While violent dogs excite their dying day
        To bacchic fury; snarl, though, as they will,
        Their teeth are not a triumph for the will
        But utter hesitation. What we love
        Ourselves for is our power not to love,
        To shrink to nothing or explode at will,
        To ruin and remember that we know
        What ruins and hyaenas cannot know.

        If in this dark now I less often know
        That spiral staircase where the haunted will
        Hunts for its stolen luggage, who should know
        Better than you, beloved, how I know
        What gives security to any world.
        Or in whose mirror I begin to know
        The chaos of the heart as merchants know
        Their coins and cities, genius its own day?
        For through our lively traffic all the day,
        In my own person I am forced to know
        How much must be forgotten out of love,
        How much must be forgiven, even love.

        Dear flesh, dear mind, dear spirit, O dear love,
        In the depths of myself blind monsters know
        Your presence and are angry, dreading Love
        That asks its image for more than love;
        The hot rampageous horses of my will,
        Catching the scent of Heaven, whinny: Love
        Gives no excuse to evil done for love,
        Neither in you, nor me, nor armies, nor the world
        Of words and wheels, nor any other world.
        Dear fellow-creature, praise our God of Love
        That we are so admonished, that no day
        Of conscious trial be a wasted day.

        Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
        Loose ends and jumble of our common world,
        And stuff and nonsense of our own free will;
        Or else our changing flesh may never know
        There must be sorrow if there can be love.
    

The Riddle

        Underneath the leaves of life,
        Green on the prodigious tree,
          In a trance of grief
        Stand the fallen man and wife:
        Far away the single stag
        Banished to a lonely  crag
        Gazes placid out to sea,
        And from thickets round about
        Breeding animals look in
          On Duality,
        And the birds fly in and out
          Of the world of man.

        Down in order from the ridge,
        Bayonets glittering in the sun,
          Soldiers who will judge
        Wind towards the little bridge:
        Even politicians speak
        Truths of value to the weak,
        Necessary acts are done
        By the ill and the unjust;
        But the Judgment and the Smile,
          Though these two-in-one
        See creation as they must,
          None shall reconcile.

        Bordering our middle earth
        Kingdoms of the Short and Tall,
          Rivals for our faith,
        Stir up envy from our birth:
        So the giant who storms the sky
        In an angry wish to die
        Wakes the hero in us all,
        While the tiny with their power
        To divide and hide and flee,
          When our fortunes fall
        Tempt to a belief in our
           Immortality.

        Lovers running each to each
        Feel such timid dreams catch fire
          Blazing as they touch,
        Learn what love alone can teach:
        Happy on a tousled bed
        Praise Blake's acumen who said:
        "One thing only we require
        Of each other; we must see
        In another's lineaments
           Gratified desire";
        This is our humanity;
          Nothing else contents.

        Nowhere else could I have known
        Than, beloved, in your eyes
          What we have to learn,
        That we love ourselves alone:
        All our terrors burned away
        We can learn at last to say:
        "All our knowledge comes to this,
        That existence is enough,
        That in savage solitude
          Or the play of love
        Every living creature is
          Woman, Man, and Child."