Always far from the centre of our names, The little workshop of love: yes, but how wrong We were about the old manors and the long Abandoned Folly and the children's games.
Only the acquisitive expects a quaint Unsaleable product, something to please An artistic girl; it's the selfish who sees In every impractical beggar a saint.
We can't believe that we ourselves designed it,
A minor item of our daring plan
That caused no trouble; we took no notice of it.
Disaster comes, and we're amazed to find it The single project that since work began Through all the cycle showed a steady profit.
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice, Again and again we sigh for an ancient South, For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise, For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth.
Asleep in our huts, how we dream of a part In the glorious balls of the future; each intricate maze Has a plan, and the disciplined movements of the heart Can follow for ever and ever its harmless ways.
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains; We live in freedom by necessity, A mountain people dwelling among mountains.
1938 (except XII, 1936)
41
The Capital
Quarter of pleasures where the rich are always waiting, Waiting expensively for miracles to happen, O little restaurant where the lovers eat each other, Cafe where exiles have established a malicious village;
n
You with your charm and your apparatus have abolished The strictness of winter and the spring's compulsion; Far from your lights the outraged punitive father, The dullness of mere obedience here is apparent.
Yet with orchestras and glances, Q, you betray us To belief in our infinite powers; and the innocent Unobservant offender falls in a moment Victim to the heart's invisible furies.
In unlighted streets you hide away the appalling; Factories where lives are made for a temporary use Like collars or chairs, rooms where the lonely are battered Slowly like pebbles into fortuitous shapes.
But the sky you illumine, your glow is visible far Into the dark countryside, the enormous, the frozen, Where, hinting at the forbidden like a wicked uncle, Night after night to the farmer's children you beckon.
December 1938
42
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
December 1938
43
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.
January 1939
44
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
(d. January 1939)
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the
floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which
they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost
convinced of his freedom; A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something
slightly unusual.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well.
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
February 1939
45
Refugee Blues
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for-us, my dear, yet there's no place for mi.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.