venerdì 24 giugno 2011

W.H.Auden. Selected poems

W. H. Auden by J. D. McClatchy

     The Wanderer
     O Where Are You Going?
     Our Hunting Fathers
     On This Island
     As I Walked Out One Evening
     Fish in the Unruffled Lakes
     Autumn Song
     Death's Echo
     Musée des Beaux Arts
     from In Time of War
     In Memory of W. B. Yeats
     Law Like Love
     Under Which Lyre
     A Walk After Dark
     The More Loving One
     The Shield of Achilles
     Friday's Child
     Thanksgiving for a Habitat
     The Common Life
     August 1968
     Moon Landing
     River Profile
     A New Year Greeting


     In certain poems the audio version differs from the published text.

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    W. H. AUDEN

(from a preface by J. D. McClatchy) When he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate, W. H. Auden went to see his tutor in literature, who asked the young man what he meant to do in later life. "I am going to be a poet," Auden answered. "Ah, yes," replied the tutor, and began a small lecture on verse exercises improving one's prose. Auden scowled. "You don't understand at all," he interrupted. "I mean a great poet." --------

    The Wanderer

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. Upon what man it fall In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing, Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face, That he should leave his house, No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women; But ever that man goes Through place-keepers, through forest trees, A stranger to strangers over undried sea, Houses for fishes, suffocating water, Or lonely on fell as chat, By pot-holed becks A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird. There head falls forward, fatigued at evening, And dreams of home, Waving from window, spread of welcome, Kissing of wife under single sheet; But waking sees Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices Of new men making another love. Save him from hostile capture, From sudden tiger's leap at corner; Protect his house, His anxious house where days are counted From thunderbolt protect, From gradual ruin spreading like a stain; Converting number from vague to certain, Bring joy, bring day of his returning, Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn. 1930 --------

    O Where Are You Going?

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider, "That valley is fatal where furnaces burn, Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden, That gap is the grave where the tall return." "O do you imagine," said fearer to farer, "That dusk will delay on your path to the pass, Your diligent looking discover the lacking, Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?" "O what was that bird," said horror to hearer, "Did you see that shape in the twisted trees? Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease." "Out of this house"---said rider to reader, "Yours never will"---said farer to fearer "They're looking for you"---said hearer to horror, As he left them there, as he left them there. 1931 --------

    Hunting Fathers

Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw in the lion's intolerant look, Behind the quarry's dying glare, Love raging for, the personal glory 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? 1934 --------

    On This Island

Look, stranger, on this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea. Here at a small field's ending pause Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges Oppose the pluck And knock of the tide, And the shingle scrambles after the suck- -ing surf, and a gull lodges A moment on its sheer side. Far off like floating seeds the ships Diverge on urgent voluntary errands, And this full view Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do, That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter. 1935 --------

    As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: "Love has no ending. "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, "I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. "The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world." But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: "O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. "In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. "In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. "Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. "O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. "The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. "Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. "O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress; Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. "O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked nelghbour With your crooked heart." It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on. 1937 --------

    Fish in the Unruffled Lakes

Fish in the unruffled lakes Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove; Lion, fish and swan Act, and are gone Upon Time's toppling wave. We, till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock, The goodness carefully worn For atonement or for luck; We must lose our loves, On each beast and bird that moves Turn an envious look. Sighs for folly done and said Twist our narrow days, But I must bless, I must praise That you, my swan, who have All gifts that to the swan Impulsive Nature gave, The majesty and pride, Last night should add Your voluntary love. 1936 --------

    Autumn Song

Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on. Whispering neighbours, left and right, Pluck us from the real delight; And the active hands must freeze Lonely on the separate knees. Dead in hundreds at the back Follow wooden in our track, Arms raised stiffly to reprove In false attitudes of love. Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain's lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. 1936 --------

    Death's Echo

"O who can ever gaze his fill," Farmer and fisherman say, "On native shore and local hill, Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand? Father, grandfather stood upon this land, And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand." So farmer and fisherman say In their fortunate hey-day: But Death's low answer drifts across Empty catch or harvest loss Or an unlucky May. The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it, Not to be born is the best for man; The end of toil is a bailiff's order, Throw down the mattock and dance while you can. "O life's too short for friends who share," Travellers think in their hearts, "The city's common bed, the air, The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach, Where incidents draw every day from each Memorable gesture and witty speech." So travellers think in their hearts, Till malice or circumstance parts Them from their constant humour: And slyly Death's coercive rumour In that moment starts. A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus, Not to be born is the best for man; An active partner in something disgraceful, Change your partner, dance while you can. "O stretch your hands across the sea," The impassioned lover cries, "Stretch them towards your harm and me. Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed, The stream sings at its foot, and at its head The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed." So the impassioned lover cries Till the storm of pleasure dies: From the bedpost and the rocks Death's enticing echo mocks, And his voice replies. The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can. "I see the guilty world forgiven," Dreamer and drunkard sing, "The ladders let down out of heaven, The laurel springing from the martyr's blood, The children skipping where the weeper stood, The lovers natural and the beasts all good." So dreamer and drunkard sing Till day their sobriety bring: Parrotwise with Death's reply From whelping fear and nesting lie, Woods and their echoes ring. The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, The dance's pattern; dance while you can. Dance, dancefor the figure is easy, The tune is catching and will not stop; Dance till the stars come down from the rafters; Dance, dance, dance till you drop. 1936 --------

    Musée 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. 1938 --------

    from In Time of War

I So from the years the gifts were showered; each Ran off with his at once into his life: Bee took the politics that make a hive, Fish swam as fish, peach settled into peach. And were successful at the first endeavour; The hour of birth their only time at college, They were content with their precocious knowledge, And knew their station and were good for ever. Till finally there came a childish creature On whom the years could model any feature, And fake with ease a leopard or a dove; Who by the lightest wind was changed and shaken, And looked for truth and was continually mistaken, Ana envied his few friends and chose his love. VIII He turned his field into a meeting-place, And grew the tolerant ironic eye, And formed the mobile money-changer's face, And found the notion of equality. And strangers were as brothers to his clocks, And with his spires he made a human sky; Museums stored his learning like a box, And paper watched his money like a spy. It grew so fast his life was overgrown, And he forgot what once it had been made for, And gathered into crowds and was alone, And lived expensively and did without, And could not find the earth which he had paid for, Nor feel the love that he knew all about. XXI The life of man is never quite completed; The daring and the chatter will go on: But, as an artist feels his power gone, These walk the earth and know themselves defeated. Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for The wounded myths that once made nations good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for. Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel; but where They may regret they must; their life, to hear The call of the forbidden cities, see The stranger watch them with a happy stare, And Freedom hostile in each home and tree. XXV Nothing is given: we must find our law. Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination; Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation The low recessive houses of the poor. We have no destiny assigned us: Nothing is certain but the body; we plan To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man. Children are really loved here, even by police: They speak of years before the big were lonely, And will be lost. And only The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell Some future reign of happiness and peace. We learn to pity and rebel. 1938 --------

    In Memory of W. B. Yeats

(d. Jan. 1939) I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have 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. What instruments we have 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 making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on 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. 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 firming 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. 1939 --------

    Law Like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, Law is the one All gardeners obey To-morrow, yesterday, to-day. Law is the wisdom of the old, The impotent grandfathers feebly scold; The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young. Law, says the priest with a priestly look, Expounding to an unpriestly people, Law is the words in my priestly book, Law is my pulpit and my steeple. Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose, Speaking clearly and most severely, Law is as I've told you before, Law is as you know I suppose, Law is but let me explain it once more, Law is The Law. Yet law-abiding scholars write: Law is neither wrong nor right, Law is only crimes Punished by places and by times, Law is the clothes men wear Anytime, anywhere, Law is Good-morning and Good-night. Others say, Law is our Fate; Others say, Law is our State; Others say, others say Law is no more, Law has gone away. And always the loud angry crowd, Very angry and very loud, Law is We, And always the soft idiot softly Me. If we, dear, know we know no more Than they about the Law, If I no more than you Know what we should and should not do Except that all agree Gladly or miserably That the Law is And that all know this, If therefore thinking it absurd To identify Law with some other word, Unlike so many men I cannot say Law is again, No more than they can we suppress The universal wish to guess Or slip out of our own position Into an unconcerned condition. Although I can at least confine Your vanity and mine To stating tirmidly A timid similarity, We shall boast anyway: Like love I say. Like love we don't know where or why, Like love we can't compel or fly, Like love we often weep, Like love we seldom keep. 1939 --------

    Under Which Lyre

A REACTIONARY TRACT FOR THE TIMES (Phi Beta Kappa Poem, Harvard, 1946) Ares at last has quit the field, The bloodstains on the bushes yield To seeping showers, And in their convalescent state The fractured towns associate With summer flowers. Encamped upon the college plain Raw veterans already train As freshman forces; Instructors with sarcastic tongue Shepherd the battle-weary young Through basic courses. Among bewildering appliances For mastering the arts and sciences They stroll or run, And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter Are shot to pieces by the shorter Poems of Donne. Professors back from secret missions Resume their proper eruditions, Though some regret it; They liked their dictaphones a lot, They met some big wheels, and do not Let you forget it. But Zeus' inscrutable decree Permits the will-to-disagree To be pandemic, Ordains that vaudeville shall preach And every commencement speech Be a polemic. Let Ares doze, that other war Is instantly declared once more 'Twixt those who follow Precocious Hermes all the way And those who without qualms obey Pompous Apollo. Brutal like all Olympic games, Though fought with similes and Christian names And less dramatic, This dialectic strife between The civil gods is just as mean, And more fanatic. What high immortals do in mirth Is life and death on Middle Earth; Their a-historic Antipathy forever gripes All ages and somatic types, The sophomoric Who face the future's darkest hints With giggles or with prairie squints As stout as Cortez, And those who like myself turn pale As we approach with ragged sail The fattening forties. The sons of Hermes love to play, And only do their best when they Are told they oughtn't; Apollo's children never shrink From boring jobs but have to think Their work important. Related by antithesis, A compromise between us is Impossible; Respect perhaps but friendship never: Falstaff the fool confronts forever The prig Prince Hal. If he would leave the self alone, Apollo's welcome to the throne, Fasces and falcons; He loves to rule, has always done it; The earth would soon, did Hermes run it, Be like the Balkans. But jealous of our god of dreams, His common-sense in secret schemes To rule the heart; Unable to invent the lyre, Creates with simulated fire Official art. And when he occupies a college, Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge; He pays particular Attention to Commercial Thought, Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport, In his curricula. Athletic, extrovert and crude, For him, to work in solitude Is the offence, The goal a populous Nirvana: His shield bears this device: Mens sana Qui mal y pense. To-day his arms, we must confess, From Right to Left have met success, His banners wave From Yale to Princeton, and the news From Broadway to the Book Reviews Is very grave. His radio Homers all day long In over-Whitmanated song That does not scan, With adjectives laid end to end, Extol the doughnut and commend The Common Man. His, too, each homely lyric thing On sport or spousal love or spring Or dogs or dusters, Invented by some court-house bard For recitation by the yard In filibusters. To him ascend the prize orations And sets of fugal variations On some folk-ballad, While dietitians sacrifice A glass of prune-juice or a nice Marsh-mallow salad. Charged with his compound of sensational Sex plus some undenominational Religious matter, Enormous novels by co-eds Rain down on our defenceless heads Till our teeth chatter. In fake Hermetic uniforms Behind our battle-line, in swarms That keep alighting, His existentialists declare That they are in complete despair, Yet go on writing. No matter; He shall be defied; White Aphrodite is on our side: What though his threat To organize us grow more critical? Zeus willing, we, the unpolitical, Shall beat him yet. Lone scholars, sniping from the walls Of learned periodicals, Our facts defend, Our intellectual marines, Landing in little magazines, Capture a trend. By night our student Underground At cocktail parties whisper round From ear to ear; Fat figures in the public eye Collapse next morning, ambushed by Some witty sneer. In our morale must lie our strength: So, that we may behold at length Routed Apollo's Battalions melt away like fog, Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue, Which runs as follows:--- Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration. Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. Thou shalt not be on friendly terms With guys in advertising firms, Nor speak with such As read the Bible for its prose, Nor, above all, make love to those Who wash too much. Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views. 1946 --------

    A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this Can set the spirit soaring: After a tiring day The clockwork spectacle is Impressive in a slightly boring Eighteenth-century way. It soothed adolescence a lot To meet so shameless a stare; The things I did could not Be so shocking as they said If that would still be there After the shocked were dead. Now, unready to die But already at the stage When one starts to resent the young, I am glad those points in the sky May also be counted among The creatures of Middle-age. It's cosier thinking of night As more an Old People's Home Than a shed for a faultless machine, That the red pre-Cambrian light Is gone like Imperial Rome Or myself at seventeen. Yet however much we may like The stoic manner in which The classical authors wrote, Only the young and the rich Have the nerve or the figure to strike The lacrimae rerum note. For the present stalks abroad Like the past and its wronged again Whimper and are ignored, And the truth cannot be hid; Somebody chose their pain, What needn't have happened did. Occurring this very night By no established rule, Some event may already have hurled Its first little No at the right Of the laws we accept to school Our post-diluvian world: But the stars burn on overhead, Unconscious of final ends, As I walk home to bed, Asking what judgement waits My person, all my friends, And these United States. 1948 --------

    The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time. 1957 --------

    The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign. Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; Column by column in a cloud of dust They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. She looked over his shoulder For ritual pieties, White flower-garlanded heifers, Libation and sacrifice, But there on the shining metal Where the altar should have been, She saw by his flickering forge-light Quite another scene. Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs, the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy; a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept, Or one could weep because another wept. The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long. 1952 --------

    Friday's Child

(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945) 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 Schönbrunn, 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 *

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    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, à-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