Since Merit but a dunghill is, I mount the rostrum unafraid: Indeed, 'twere damnable to ask If I am overpaid.
Spirit is willing to repeat Without a qualm the same old talk, But Flesh is homesick for our snug Apartment in New York.
A sulky fifty-six, he finds A change of mealtime utter hell, Grown far too crotchety to like A luxury hotel.
The Bible is a goodly book I always can peruse with zest, But really cannot say the same For Hilton's Be My Guest,
Nor bear with equanimity The radio in students' cars, Musak at breakfast, or—dear God!— Girl-organists in bars.
Then, worst of all, the anxious thought, Each time my plane begins to sink And the No Smoking sign comes on: What will there be to drink?
Is this a milieu where I must How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig! Snatch from the bottle in my bag An analeptic swig?
Another morning comes: I see, Dwindling below me on the plane, The roofs of one more audience I shall not see again.
God bless the lot of them, although I don't remember which was which: God bless the U.S.A., so large, So friendly, and so rich.
? June 1963'
85
Et in Arcadia Ego
Who, now, seeing Her so Happily married, Housewife, helpmate to Man,
Can imagine the screeching Virago, the Amazon, Earth Mother was?
Her jungle growths Are abated, Her exorbitant Monsters abashed,
Her soil mumbled,
Where crops, aligned precisely,
Will soon be orient:
Levant or couchant, Well-daunted thoroughbreds Graze on mead and pasture,
A church clock subdivides the day, Up the lane at sundown Geese podge home.
As for Him:
What has happened to the Brute Epics and nightmares tell of?
No bishops pursue
Their archdeacons with axes,
In the crumbling lair
Of a robber baron Sightseers picnic Who carry no daggers.
I well might think myself A humanist,
Could I manage not to see
How the autobahn Thwarts the landscape In godless Roman arrogance,
The farmer's children
Tiptoe past the shed
Where the gelding knife is kept.
? May 1964
Thanksgiving for a Habitat
Funes ceciderunt mihi in praeclaris: etenim hereditas mea praeciara est mihi.
Psalm XVI, 6
I Prologue: The Birth of Architecture
(FOR JOHN BAYLEY]
From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king
to Low Mass and trailer camp is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I
don't count that way nor do you: already itis millions of heartbeats ago
back to the Bicycle Age, before which is no After for me to measure,
just a still prehistoric Once where anything could happen. To you, to me,
Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral, the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial
are works by the same Old Man under different names: we know what He did,
what, even, He thought He thought, but we don't see why. (To get that, one would have
to be selfish in His way, without concrete or grapefruit.) It's our turn now
to puzzle the unborn. No world wears as well as it should but, mortal or not,
a world has still to be built because of what we can see from our windows,
that Immortal Commonwealth which is there regardless: It's in perfect taste
and it's never boring but it won't quite do. Among its populations are masons and carpenters
who build the most exquisite shelters and safes,
but no architects, any more than there are heretics or bounders: to take
umbrage at death, to construct a second nature of tomb and temple, lives must know the meaning of If.
? Spring 1962
II Thanksgiving for a Habitat
(FOR GEOFFREY GORER)
Nobody I know would like to be buried
with a silver cocktail shaker, a transistor radio and a strangled daily help, or keep his word because
of a great-great-grandmother who got laid
by a sacred beast. Only a press lord could have built San Simeon: no unearned income can buy us back the gait and gestures
to manage a baroque staircase, or the art
of believing footmen don't hear human speech. (In adulterine castles our half-strong might hang their j ackets
while mending their lethal bicycle chains:
luckily, there are not enough crags to go round.) Still, Hetty Pegler's Tump is worth a visit, so is Schonbrunn,
to look at someone's idea of the body
that should have been his, as the flesh Mum formulated shouldn't: that whatever he does or feels in the mood for,
stocktaking, horseplay, worship, making love,
he stays the same shape, disgraces a Royal l. To be overadmired is not good enough: although a fine figure
is rare in either sex, others like it have existed before. One may be a Proustian snob or a sound Jacksonian democrat, but which of us wants
to be touched inadvertently, even
by his beloved? We know all about graphs and Darwin, enormous rooms no longer superhumanize, but earnest
city planners are mistaken: a pen
for a rational animal is no fitting habitat for Adam's sovereign clone. I, a transplant
from overseas, at last am dominant over three acres and a blooming conurbation of country lives, few of whom I shall ever meet, and with fewer
converse. Linnaeus recoiled from the Amphibia
as a naked gruesome rabble, Arachnids give me the shudders, but fools who deface their emblem of guilt
are germane to Hitler: the race of spiders
shall be allowed their webs. I should like to be to my water-brethren as a spell of fine weather: Many are stupid,
and some, maybe, are heartless, but who is not
vulnerable, easy to scare, and jealous of his privacy? (1 am glad the blackbird, for instance, cannot
tell if I'm talking English, German or
just typewriting: that what he utters I may enjoy as an alien rigmarole.) I ought to outlast the limber dragonflies
as the muscle-bound firs are certainly going to outlast me: I shall not end down any esophagus, though I may succumb to a filter-passing predator,
shall, anyhow, stop eating, surrender my smidge
of nitrogen to the World Fund with a drawn-out Oh (unless at the nod of some jittery commander
I be translated in a nano-second to a c.c. of poisonous nothing in a giga-death). Should conventional blunderbuss war and its routiers
invest my bailiwick, I shall of course
assume the submissive posture: but men are not wolves and it probably won't help. Territory, status,
and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:
what I dared not hope or fight for is, in my fifties, mine, a toft-and-croft where I needn't, ever, be at home to
those I am not at home with, not a cradle,
a magic Eden without clocks, and not a windowless grave, but a place I may go both in and out of.
August 1962
III The Cave of Making
(IN MEMORIAM LOUIS M ACNEICE]
For this and for all enclosures like it the archetype
is Weland's Stithy, an antre more private than a bedroom even, for neither lovers nor
maids are welcome, but without a bedroom's secrets: from the Olivetti portable,
the dictionaries (the very best money can buy), the heaps of paper, it is evident