from Adonais

Peace, peace he is not dead, he doth but sleep -

He hath awakened from the dream of life -

‘Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings. - We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

 

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;

Envy and calumny and hate and pain,

And that unrest which men miscall delight,

Can touch him not and torture not again;

From the contagion of the world’s slow stain

He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;

Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,

With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

 

He lives, he wakes - ’tis Death is dead, not he;

Mourn not for Adonais. - Thou young Dawn

Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee

The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!

Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air,

Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown

O’er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

 

He is made one with Nature: there is heard

His voice in all her music, from the moan

Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;

He is a presence to be felt and known

In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,

Spreading itself where’er that Power may move

Which has withdrawn his being to its own;

Which wields the world with never-wearied love,

Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

 

*****************

The one remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments. - Die,

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled! - Rome’s azure sky,

Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak

The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

 

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!

A light is past from the revolving year,

And man, and woman; and what still is dear

Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.

The soft sky smiles, - the low wind whispers near:

‘Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,

No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

 

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,

That Beauty in which all things work and move,

That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love

Which through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

 

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!

I am born darkly, fearfully, afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

from Vacillation

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

And open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

 

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

(W B Yeats)

The Crowded Bed

You move your hands on me; I feel their faces -

This one’s soft slow aging smile,

That one’s wordless yes.

You lie beside me here: yet I must share you -

The German speaking in her sleep,

Your fragile Countess,

And those three few you loved,

Those three lost Orientals, turning

Their faces to me from your crowded dreams.

You ask me why in sleep I move away

To find some quiet corner.

I leave them room to come,

To turn to you, as you explore

Their well remembered essences

Upon the planes of this new body.

Then, I leave them space

To sleep in peace between us -

As I seek stillness in a crowded bed.

(Elizabeth Boleman Herring)

For The Tall Sailor’s Son

I was twelve when you were not at all,

My dear. Your mother taught me what

She knew. I saw the sailors come to call -

I heard the tall one’s voice long after she forgot

Him. You must know these things, and yet

You come and stare and ask me to say yes,

Your voice all breath, your hands all wet -

You come with ink-stained fingers to caress

Me. Oh dear God! Am I to teach you now

The things I learned from her? Endure

Your poems, your face around her tender eyes? How

Can I do the things you ask? For I am sure

She sees and knows: I had your father too some

Twenty years ago. But yes, against all reason, come.

(Elizabeth Boleman Herring)

No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven’s glories shine,

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear.

 

O God within my breast,

Almighty ever-present Deity!

Life, that in me has rest

As I Undying Life have power in Thee!

 

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds,

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

 

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

 

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears.

 

Though Earth and moon were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in thee.

 

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Since thou art Being and Breath,

And what thou art may never be destroyed.

(Emily Bronte)

One Cigarette

No smoke without you, my fire.

After you left,

your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray

and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey

I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal

of so much love. One cigarette

in the non-smoker’s tray.

As the last spire

trembles up, a sudden draught

blows it winding into my face.

Is it smell, is it taste?

You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.

Out with the light.

Let the smoke lie in the dark.

Till I hear the very ash

sigh down among the flowers of brass

I’ll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

(Edwin Morgan)

To Yu-Tsan

Yu-Tsan, loveliest of jades

or water lilies,

lilies of the field, lilies of the fern

lily of the valleys

 

how can I ever believe

that you, heart of my heart

lily of all lilies, cost as little as

any other tart?

 

(George Barker)

From Anno Domini

at a time of bankers

to exercise a little charity;

at a time of soldiers

to cultivate small gardens;

at a time of categorical imperatives

to guess about clouds;

at a time of politicians

to trust only to children and demigods.

And from those who occupy seats of power

to turn, today, away

without incurring permanent reprisals.

When the instruments of torture

are paraded in public places

permit us to transmute them,

somehow, into ploughshares.

When the tribulations of some tribes, or persons,

seem, as so often, to exceed a reasonable allotment,

condescend, superior, to examine fate

and make sure that its machinery has not gone wrong.

When those who deserve little more than

a severe whipping, wake up to a morning of pink

champagne and strawberries,

visit them, surely, with one moment of retribution

and slight indigestion. Expunge

from the punishment book of the frivolous

those impositions incurred for singing at funerals;

and to the hopelessly optimistic

award if you will a few kisses

[...]

In a time of fashionable evangelists

to retire to small vegetable allotments;

in a time of doctors and aristocratic actresses

to eavesdrop on the dialogues of worms;

in a time of national anthems and brass bands

to conduct rigorous callisthenics for corpses;

in a time of bald-headed administrators

to erect beribboned maypoles and

encourage cardsharpers; in a time of Scandinavian

architecture and pornography to wrestle

with incubi and succubi; in a time of magicians and water diviners

to remember, nevertheless, that we can fly.

[...]

In a time of vipers I will show

my sign. But if I walk down a street

in which I see no one else at all

but hear the footsteps and feel the presence

of a second person walking behind me,

shall I say, nevertheless, that I am alone,

or shall I confess that

I am subject to hallucinations?

What is the logic, Aquinas,

of this confusing image? All that I

think I perceive is rational and

conditioned by laws of

responsibility and reason: this,

in the simple sense, is reality. But those

footsteps persist and that presence

continues to follow or to precede me.

[...]

Let who will lay upon the stone

of the run-over child a wreath

inscribed: Dei voluntas. I will not

[...]

I have looked, as have so many others,

in so many catacombs and hecatombs

that echo only with our futile footsteps,

for you, the absconded. Who have gone

from all the places, gone from the grave and fountain,

from the cave of the mind, gone from the shrine

and the forgotten shibboleth, gone from the fallen and

shit-littered temple, the pissoir tabernacle,

gone from the infested altar and

the screaming cathedrals,

left only cold air and the zero booming about us,

gone from the heart where once

you surely broke bread in the human house

without a sup of sorrow, gone from those

transfigured seas where an amoeba rose and

monstrously prophesied revolution over

Darwinian waters -

so many in so many clefts of the mind

seek even now. I have found nothing. Nothing.

Not so little as on the rock

an Adam footprint, or the mind overturned

to commemorate your passing.

Only, in the void an invisible

alcove enshrining the huge sibyl

of your absence. Singing Lamb, sweet Pascal,

not the god of Abraham or Isaac,

not the god of philosophers and scholars,

not even in the end the X one, but

whatever or whoever it is that

we were invented to venerate.

Behind all the altars and the entablatured

tabernacles, behind the mantra and the

unfolding mandelion, behind the mandala and the

May magnificat, the sanctum sanctum sanctorum,   

beyond even the void, the ideos  and the logos,                                                                         eos snd the l

behind all that can be spoken or imagined,

is it really there, the one thing

we cannot ever know?

[...]

Let ghosts walk in Battersea Park

without dreading an earthly encounter,

and rectify all the errors we make

in our golden account books. Allow

us to sit down at open-air tables

without observing the dawn of

the Dies Irae, or the clock

at last striking midnight. (Why do cupidons

with gold wings loop garlands

in the air over those who dislike

all children? Why do those

who love roses possess gangrened fingers,

amd why will the heroic salmon

never learn circumspection?

What carpenter can construct

doors that open only to our good angel? What

statesman listens to the dying sighs

of the while giants?)

The snows of yesterday have returned

to those clouds from which they will fall

tomorrow disguised as summer and

one day the seas will part and from the fissure

Orpheus rise up festooned

with telephone wires to teach us

the triumph of the incommunicable.

Why are heroism and devotion like

great works of art? Because

they have no object beyond themselves?

Why do poets stand around

like telegraph poles? Because

all they can do is pass on messages?

At a time of bankers

to exercise a little charity -

 

(George Barker)  

Villa Stellar XIII

And there in the May Borghese Gardens with a foam of

blossoming flowers around us we sat at a small table

she with a hat like a huge waterlily and a glass of iced

lemonade sweating in sunshine and the Roman sky like the

interior of an enormous pearl, and semi-precious lizards scooting

among the hibiscus. I said: ‘It is pleasant here.’

She answered: ‘The sun is not Scottish. I feel faint.

Yes, it is heavenly here. But I think of the misted November

evenings and clouds coming up over the Cairngorms

and the violent gusts of rain and the cold amber streams jumping

among the lichened gullies and the rowan hissing in rain

and a single horned sheep standing still as stone against the sky.’

 

(George Barker)

In Memory of David Archer XX

Mother O Mother, what is that star

Like a nail in the sky?

My little babe, it is only the candle

I see you by.

 

Mother O Mother, what is this wound

I feel here at my side?

My little babe, it is only the straw

You lie beside.

 

Mother O Mother, what is the thorn

I feel here at my brow?

My little babe, it is only a rose

On a small bough.

 

Mother O Mother, what is this love

That tears me apart?

My little babe, it is only the shake and

Sob of my heart.

 

Mother O Mother, do not weep.

I see the bright star

And the nail and the wound and the crown rise up over

All things that are.

 

(George Barker)