He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought- "Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent." Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said. Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems idle to discuss If anger or compassion leaves The bigger bangs to us. What reverence is rightly paid To a Divinity so odd He lets the Adam whom He made Perform the Acts of God? It might be jolly if we felt Awe at this Universal Man (When kings were local, people knelt); Some try to, but who can? The self-observed observing Mind We meet when we observe at all Is not alariming or unkind But utterly banal. Though instruments at Its command Make wish and counterwish come true, It clearly cannot understand What It can clearly do. Since the analogies are rot Our senses based belief upon, We have no means of learning what Is really going on, And must put up with having learned All proofs or disproofs that we tender Of His existence are returned Unopened to the sender. Now, did He really break the seal And rise again? We dare not say; But conscious unbelievers feel Quite sure of Judgement Day. Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, As dead as we shall ever be, Speaks of some total gain or loss, And you and I are free To guess from the insulted face Just what Appearances He saves By suffering in a public place A death reserved for slaves.
1958
Thanksgiving for a Habitat
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 jackets 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 Sch"onbrunn, 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, stock-taking, horse-play, worship, making love, he stays the same shape, disgraces a Royal I. To be over-admired 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 superhumanise, 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? (I 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 oesophagus, 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.
1962
The Common Life
(for Chester Kallman)
A living-room, the catholic area you (Thou, rather) and I may enter without knocking, leave without a bow, confronts each visitor with a style, a secular faith: he compares its dogmas with his, and decides whether he would like to see more of us. (Spotless rooms where nothing's left lying about chill me, so do cups used for ash-trays or smeared with lip-stick: the homes I warm to, though seldom wealthy, always convey a feeling of bills being promptly settled with cheques that don't bounce.) There's no We at an instant, only Thou and I, two regions of protestant being which nowhere overlap: a room is too small, therefore, if its occupants cannot forget at will that they are not alone, too big if it gives them any excuse in a quarrel for raising their voices. What, quizzing ours, would Sherlock Holmes infer? Plainly, ours is a sitting culture in a generation which prefers comfort (or is forced to prefer it) to command, would rather incline its buttocks on a well-upholstered chair than the burly back of a slave: a quick glance at book-titles would tell him that we belong to the clerisy and spend much on our food. But could he read what our prayers and jokes are about, what creatures frighten us most, or what names head our roll-call of persons we would least like to go to bed with? What draws singular lives together in the first place, loneliness, lust, ambition, or mere convenience, is obvious, why they drop or murder one another clear enough: how they create, though, a common world between them, like Bombelli's impossible yet useful numbers, no one has yet explained. Still, they do manage to forgive impossible behavior, to endure by some miracle conversational tics and larval habits without wincing (were you to die, I should miss yours). It's a wonder that neither has been butchered by accident, or, as lots have, silently vanished into History's criminal noise unmourned for, but that, after twenty-four years, we should sit here in Austria as cater-cousins, under the glassy look of a Naples Bambino, the portrayed regards of Strauss and Stravinsky, doing British cross-word puzzles, is very odd indeed. I'm glad the builder gave our common-room small windows through which no observed outsider can observe us: every home should be a fortress, equipped with all the very latest engines for keeping Nature at bay, versed in all ancient magic, the arts of quelling the Dark Lord and his hungry animivorous chimaeras. (Any brute can buy a machine in a shop, but the sacred spells are secret to the kind, and if power is what we wish they won't work.) The ogre will come in any case: so Joyce has warned us. Howbeit, fasting or feasting, we both know this: without the Spirit we die, but life without the Letter is in the worst of taste, and always, though truth and love can never really differ, when they seem to, the subaltern should be truth.
1963
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.
* 1968 *
Moon Landing
It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure it would not have occurred to women to think worth while, made possible only because we like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness hurrah the deed, although the motives that primed it were somewhat less than menschlich. A grand gesture. But what does it period? What does it osse? We were always adroiter with objects than lives, and more facile at courage than kindness: from the moment the first flint was flaked this landing was merely a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's, still don't fit us exactly, modern only in this-our lack of decorum. Homer's heroes were certainly no braver than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector was excused the insult of having his valor covered by television. Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert and was not charmed: give me a watered lively garden, remote from blatherers about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where on August mornings I can count the morning glories where to die has a meaning, and no engine can shift my perspective. Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at, Her Old Man, made of grit not protein, still visits my Austrian several with His old detachment, and the old warnings still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to an ugly finish, Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition. Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
1969
River Profile
Our body is a moulded river
NOVALIS
Out of a bellicose fore-time, thundering head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche, troll country, deadly to breathers, it whelms into our picture below the melt-line, where tarns lie frore under frowning cirques, goat-bell, wind-breaker, fishing-rod, miner's-lamp country, already at ease with the mien and gestures that become its kindness, in streams, still anonymous, still jumpable, flows as it should through any declining country in probing spirals. Soon of a size to be named and the cause of dirty in-fighting among rival agencies, down a steep stair, penstock-and-turbine country, it plunges ram-stam, to foam through a wriggling gorge incised in softer strata, hemmed between crags that nauntle heaven, robber-baron, tow-rope, portage-way country, nightmare of merchants. Disemboguing from foothills, now in hushed meanders, now in riffling braids, it vaunts across a senile plain, well-entered, chateau-and-cider-press country, its regal progress gallanted for a while by quibbling poplars, then by chimneys: led off to cool and launder retort, steam-hammer, gasometer country, it changes color. Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete, now it bisects a polyglot metropolis, ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country, `a-la-mode always. Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverised wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching the tidal mark where it puts off majesty, disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country, image of death as a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely monsters, our tales believe, can be translated too, even as water, the selfless mother of all especials.
1966
A New Year Greeting
After an article by Mary J. Marples
in Scientific American, January, 1969
On this day tradition allots to taking stock of our lives, my greetings to all of you, Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics: A Very Happy New Year to all for whom my ectoderm is as Middle-Earth to me. For creatures your size I offer a free choice of habitat, so settle yourselves in the zone that suits you best, in the pools of my pores or the tropical forests of arm-pit and crotch, in the deserts of my fore-arms, or the cool woods of my scalp. Build colonies: I will supply adequate warmth and moisture, the sebum and lipids you need, on condition you never do me annoy with your presence, but behave as good guests should, not rioting into acne or athlete's-foot or a boil. Does my inner weather affect the surfaces where you live? Do unpredictable changes record my rocketing plunge from fairs when the mind is in tift and relevant thoughts occur to fouls when nothing will happen and no one calls and it rains. I should like to think that I make a not impossible world, but an Eden it cannot be: my games, my purposive acts, may turn to catastrophes there. If you were religious folk, how would your dramas justify unmerited suffering? By what myths would your priests account for the hurricanes that come twice every twenty-four hours, each time I dress or undress, when, clinging to keratin rafts, whole cities are swept away to perish in space, or the Flood that scalds to death when I bathe? Then, sooner or later, will dawn a Day of Apocalypse, when my mantle suddenly turns too cold, too rancid, for you, appetising to predators of a fiercer sort, and I am stripped of excuse and nimbus, a Past, subject to Judgement.
1969
"About suffering they were never wrong,"
About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters; how well, they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or justwalking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and thetorturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: howeverything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughmanmayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; thesun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing intothe greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that musthave seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
ARCHAEOLOGY
The archaeologist's spade delves into dwellings vacancied long ago, unearthing evidence of life-ways no one would dream of leading now, concerning which he has not much to say that he can prove: the lucky man! Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing. We do know that Man, from fear or affection, has always graved His dead. What disastered a city, volcanic effusion, fluvial outrage, or a human horde, agog for slaves and glory, is visually patent, and we're pretty sure that, as soon as palaces were built, their rulers though gluttoned on sex and blanded by flattery, must often have yawned. But do grain-pits signify a year of famine? Where a coin-series peters out, should we infer some major catastrophe? Maybe. Maybe. From murals and statues we get a glimpse of what the Old Ones bowed down to, but cannot conceit in what situations they blushed or shrugged their shoulders. Poets have learned us their myths, but just how did They take them? That's a stumper. When Norsemen heard thunder, did they seriously believe Thor was hammering? No, I'd say: I'd swear that men have always lounged in myths as Tall Stories, that their real earnest has been to grant excuses for ritual actions. Only in rites can we renounce our oddities and be truly entired. Not that all rites should be equally fonded: some are abominable. There's nothing the Crucified would like less than butchery to appease Him.
ROMAN WALL BLUES
Over the heather the wet wind blows, I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose. The rain comes pattering out of the sky, I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why. The mist creeps over the hard grey stone, My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone. Aulus goes hanging around her place, I don't like his manners, I don't like his face. Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish; There'd be no kissing if he had his wish. She gave me a ring but I diced it away; I want my girl and I want my pay. When I'm a veteran with only one eye I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
October 1937
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. [137]
137
Похоже, что последняя строка является инверсией слов известного американского историка Джона Мотли, сказанных о Вильгельме I Оранском, по прозвищу Молчаливый:
As long as he lived, he was the guilding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.(J. L. Motley. The Rise of the Dutch Republic, pt. 6, ch. 7, 1856).