That reason's gift would add, The liberal appetite and power, The rightness of a god.
Who nurtured in that fine tradition
Predicted the result, Guessed love by nature suited to
The intricate ways of guilt? That human ligaments could so His southern gestures modify, And make it his mature ambition
To think no thought but ours, To hunger, work illegally, And be anonymous?
? May 1934
23
Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I'm led Through the night's delights and the day's impressions, Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood; Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe And the Danube flood.
Looking and loving our behaviours pass The stones, the steels and the polished glass; Lucky to Love the new pansy railway, The sterile farms where his looks are fed, And in the policed unlucky city Lucky his bed.
He from these lands of terrifying mottoes Makes worlds as innocent as Beatrix Potter's; Through bankrupt countries where they mend the roads Along the endless plains his will is Intent as a collector to pursue His greens and lilies.
i
Easy for him to find in your face The pool of silence and the tower of grace, To conjure a camera into a wishing rose; Simple to excite in the air from a glance The horses, the fountains, the sidedrum, the trombone And the dance, the dance.
Summoned by such a music from our time,
Such images to audience come 1
As vanity cannot dispel nor bless: [ Hunger and love in their variations
Grouped invalids watching the flight of the birds I
And single assassins. |
Ten thousand of the desperate marching by I Five feet, six feet, seven feet high: Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses
Churchill acknowledging the voters' greeting 1
Roosevelt at the microphone, Van der Lubbe laughing |
And our first meeting. |
But love, except at our proposal, |
Will do no trick at his disposal; Without opinions of his own, performs
The programme that we think of merit, And through our private stuff must work His public spirit.
Certain it became while we were still incomplete There were certain prizes for which we would never compete; A choice was killed by every childish illness, The boiling tears among the hothouse plants, The rigid promise fractured in the garden, And the long aunts.
And every day there bolted from the field Desires to which we could not yield; Fewer and clearer grew the plans, Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred, And early among my interesting scrawls Appeared your portrait.
You stand now before me, flesh and bone These ghosts would like to make their own. Are they your choices? O, be deaf When hatred would proffer her immediate pleasure, And glory swap her fascinating rubbish For your one treasure.
Be deaf too, standing uncertain now, A pine tree shadow across your brow, To what I hear and wish I did not: The voice of love saying lightly, brightly— "Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good Daily, nightly."
The power that corrupts. that power to excess . The beautiful quite naturally possess: To them the fathers and the children turn: And all who long for their destruction, The arrogant and self-insulted, wait The looked instruction.
w
Shall idleness ring then your eyes like the pest? O will you unnoticed and mildly like the rest, Will you join the lost in their sneering circles, Forfeit the beautiful interest and fall
Where the engaging face is the face of the betrayer, '
And the pang is all?
I
Wind shakes the tree; the mountains darken; And the heart repeats though we would not hearken: "Yours is the choice, to whom the gods awarded The language of learning and the language of love, Crooked to move as a moneybug or a cancer
Or straight as a dove." n
November 1934
24
The Summer holds: upon its glittering lake
Lie Europe and the islands; many rivers
Wrinkling its surface like a ploughman's palm.
Under the bellies of the grazing horses
On the far side of posts and bridges
The vigorous shadows dwindle; nothing wavers.
Calm at this moment the Dutch sea so shallow
That sunk St. Paul's would ever show its golden cross
And still the deep water that divides us still from Norway.
We would show you at first an English village: You shall
choose its location Wherever your heart directs you most longingly to look; you
are loving towards it: Whether north to Scots Gap and Bellingham where the black
rams defy the panting engine: Or west to the Welsh Marches; to the lilting speech and the magicians' faces:
Wherever you were a child or had your first affair
There it stands amidst your darling scenery:
A parish bounded by the wreckers' cliff; or meadows where
browse the Shorthorn and maplike Frisian As at Trent Junction where the Soar comes gliding; out of green Leicestershire to swell the ampler current.
Hiker with sunburn blisters on your office pallor, Cross-country champion with corks in your hands, When you have eaten
your sandwich, your salt and your apple, When you have begged
your glass of milk from the ill-kept farm, What is it you see?
I see barns falling, fences broken,
Pasture not ploughland, weeds not wheat.
The great houses remain but only half are inhabited,
Dusty the gunrooms and the stable clocks stationary.
Some have been turned into prep-schools where the diet is in
the hands of an experienced matron, Others into club-houses for the golf-bore and the top-hole. Those who sang in the inns at evening have departed; they
saw their hope in another country, Their children have entered the service of the suburban areas;
they have become typists, mannequins and factory operatives; they desired a different rhythm of life. But their places are taken by another population, with views about nature,
Brought in charabanc and saloon along arterial roads;
Tourists to whom the Tudor cafes
Offer Bovril and buns upon Breton ware
With leather-work as a sideline: Filling stations
Supplying petrol from rustic pumps.
Those who fancy themselves as foxes or desire a
special setting for spooning Erect their villas at the right places, Airtight, lighted, elaborately warmed;
And nervous people who will never marry Live upon dividends in the old-world cottages With an animal for a friend or a volume of memoirs.
Man is changed by his living; but not fast enough. His concern to-day is for that which yesterday did not occur. In the hour of the Blue Bird and the Bristol Bomber, his thoughts are appropriate to the years of the Penny Farthing: He tosses at night who at noonday found no truth.
Stand aside now: The play is beginning
In the village of which we have spoken; called Pressan Ambo: ie, Here too corruption spreads its peculiar and emphatic odours And Life lurks, evil, out of its epoch.
The young men in Pressan to-night Toss on their beds
Their pillows do not comfort Their uneasy heads.
The lot that decides their fate Is cast to-morrow,
One must depart and face Danger and sorrow.
Is it me? Is it me? Is it ... me? !
I;
Lookin your heart and see: There lies the answer.
Though the heart like a clever Conjuror or dancer
Deceive you often into many
A curious sleight t
And motives like stowaways j