=* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *= This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a FP administrator before proceeding. This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ The Cruel Solstice _Date of first publication:_ 1944 _Author:_ Sidney Keyes (1922-1943) _Date first posted:_ Mar. 24, 2015 _Date last updated:_ Mar. 24, 2015 Faded Page eBook #20150363 This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mardi Desjardins, Alex White & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net THE CRUEL SOLSTICE by Sidney Keyes ROUTLEDGE LONDON _1944_ _First published by_ GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD. _Broadway House_, 68-74 _Carter Lane, London, E.C._ _First published January_, 1944 _Reprinted April_, 1944 _Reprinted June_, 1944 TO John Heath Stubb CONTENTS LANDSCAPE AND FIGURES Four Postures of Death— I. Death and the Maiden II. Death and the Lovers III. Death and the Lady IV. Death and the Plowman Cervières Advice for a Journey Epithalamium Moonlight Night on the Port Two Offices of a Sentry— I. Office for Noon II. Office for Midnight Seascape Greenwich Observatory Paul Klee War Poet William Yeats in Limbo Remember Your Lovers The Gardener St. John Baptist Night Estuary William Byrd Early Spring Hopes for a Lover North Sea A Hope for Those Separated by War Song: The Heart’s Assurance Design for a Monument THE CRUEL SOLSTICE The Cruel Solstice A Renunciation Lover’s Complaint— I. Nocturne II. Aubade Lament for Harpsichord: The Flowering Orchards The Migrant The Doubtful Season The Promised Landscape The Kestrels Medallion LEGENDS The Glass Tower in Galway The Bards Simon Magus Don Juan in Winter Glaucus Dido’s Lament for Aeneas Rome Remember Lament for Adonis Little Drawda Timoshenko Orestes and the Furies THE WILDERNESS Time Will Not Grant Anarchy To Keep Off Fears Being Not Proud The Uncreated Images Against Divination The Expected Guest The Wilderness _Note._ I have to thank the following for permission to reprint some of these poems: _Kingdom Come_, _The Listener_, _Modern Reading_ and _Bugle Blast_ (Messrs. Ivor Nicholson & Watson), _Poetry_ (London), _Poetry Folios_, _Poetry Quarterly_, Messrs. Faber & Faber; and The Hogarth Press. Though not precisely a sequence, the poems have been arranged in a rough order of thought; and should be read consecutively, with the section of _Legends_ as a sort of interlude. S. K. LANDSCAPES AND FIGURES Four Postures of Death I. DEATH AND THE MAIDEN He said, “Dance for me”, and he said, “You are too beautiful for the wind To pick at, or the sun to burn”. He said, “I’m a poor tattered thing, but not unkind To the sad dancer and the dancing dead”. So I smiled and a slow measure Mastered my feet and I was happy then. He said, “My people are gentle as lilies And in my house there are no men To wring your young heart with a foolish pleasure”. Because my boy had crossed me in a strange bed I danced for him and was not afraid. He said, “You are too beautiful for any man To finger; you shall stay a maid For ever in my kingdom and be comforted”. He said, “You shall be my daughter and your feet move In finer dances, maiden; and the hollow Halls of my house shall flourish with your singing”. He beckoned and I knew that I must follow Into the kingdom of no love. II. DEATH AND THE LOVERS THE LOVER: The briars fumble with the moon; Far have I come, O far away And heartsick sore, my own sweeting. THE WOMAN: I stand before the ordered prison room. I can give you no lover’s greeting. THE LOVER: Wind cracks the clouds, so has my face cracked open With longing all this while, my cold face turning Hopelessly to you, like a hound’s blind muzzle Turned to the moon. THE WOMAN: O you bring in a sickly moon And you bring in the rain: I will not open, my true love is gone, You are his ghost. O never come again. THE LOVER: My feet are bleeding, you called me and your face Called me a daylong dreary journeying. THE WOMAN: Get back, get back into your likely place. The time is past for all this havering. THE LOVER: I am a poor boy, pity A poor boy on the roads, after your love. THE WOMAN: It is too late: seek out a storied city To house your silliness. Oh, my lost love . . . DEATH: Is here behind you. Get you in Out of that muscular salacious wind. Lie down by me: I have an art To comfort you and still your restless mind. THE WOMAN: I’ll close the window; and God send We are damned easily . . . DEATH: Lie down by me, be gentle: at the end Of time, God’s quiet hands will kill your fantasy. THE LOVER: And strangle me, God’s horny fingers, huge Fingers of broken cloud, great creaking hands That so beset me; briar-nails tear free My soul into your wisdom, ravish me Since she will not . . . THE WOMAN: I am afraid, your hands are strong and cold. Are you my enemy, or my forsaken lover? DEATH: Lie soft, lie still. I am sleep’s cruel brother. III. DEATH AND THE LADY O quietly I wait by the window and my frayed fine hand Rests in the autumn sunlight. Quietly The garden trees shake down their crown of leaves. I have no fear because I have no lover. I was never acquisitive, never would bind Any man for myself: so from this brown and golden Season of loneliness let him call me softly— Expecting my compliance, not my welcome. It may be an hour’s play, this waiting for the word— He will speak softly, for they all spoke softly— Or I may fill an autumn with contrition And waiting for the arm across my shoulders. Yet he must use no lover’s talk to me, Nor shall his hand be ringed, even with sapphires. He need not dance, for I have danced with others. O let him come as bare and white as winter. The wind comes and goes. The leaves and clouds Fall through the branches. In a dream Or perhaps a picture, quite without surprise I turn to meet the question in his eyes. IV. DEATH AND THE PLOWMAN THE RIDER: O don’t, don’t ever ask me for alms: The winter way I’m riding. Beggar, shun My jingling bonebag equipage, beware My horse’s lifted hoof, the sinewed whip. I am the man started a long time since To drive into the famous land some call Posterity, some famine, some the valley Of bones, valley of bones, valley of dry Bones where a critical wind is always searching The poor dried marrow for a drop of truth. Better for you to ask no alms, my friend. THE PLOWMAN: It’s only the wind holds my poor bones together, So take me with you to that famous land. There I might wither, as I’m told some do, Out of my rags and boast at last The integrated skeleton of truth. THE RIDER: The wind creeps sharper there, my hopeful friend, Than you imagine. There the crooked trees Bend like old fingers; and at Hallowmass The Lord calls erring bones to dance a figure. THE PLOWMAN: What figure, friend? Why should I fear that dancing? THE RIDER: No man may reasonably dance That figure, friend. One saw it, one Ezekiel Was only spared to tell of it. That valley Is no man’s proper goal, but some must seek it. THE PLOWMAN: I might get clothing there. A skeleton Cannot go naked. THE RIDER: Naked as the sky And lonely as the elements, the man Who knows that land. The drypoint artist there Scrabbles among the wreckage; poets follow The hard crevasses, silly as starved gulls That scream behind the plow. Don’t stop me, friend, Unless you are of those, and your fool’s pride Would lure you to that land. . . . THE PLOWMAN: I will go with you. Better plow-following, the searching wind About my bones than this nonentity. THE RIDER: Then get you up beside me, gull-brained fool. BOTH: We’re driving to the famous land some call Posterity, some famine, some the valley Of bones, valley of bones, valley of dry Bones where there is no heat nor hope nor dwelling: But cold security, the one and only Right of a workless man without a home. Cervières Look, Aimée, and you, Victor, look— The birds have taken all our cherries— Down in the brown-walled orchard on the hillside The cherry-trees are weeping for their fruit; Only the clusters of green stalks Remain; the stones are scattered on the grass. There will be no more cherries, not this summer Nor next, if we get another. God! It’s beyond bearing that they eat our cherries And fly away and leave the trees in mourning. Soon an invader will be taking more than cherries: They’ll be stealing our dreams or breaking up Our history for firewood. Children, see The avenues of cherry-trees are broken And trampled boughs crawl in the dust. See, Victor, How the sun bouncing off the mountain strikes Christ’s wooden throat above the cemetery: Flesh broken like our cherry-trees and ravished. The path runs open and smiling down the hill; It leaps the walls and hides behind the ruins. Now take this moment and create its image Impregnable to time or trespasser, And turn your mind to realise your loss. The cherry-trees are broken and their fruit Sown on the indecipherable mountains. Realise your loss and take it in your hands And turn it like a pebble. You perceive It has a stone’s dumb smell; its patterns Plot some forgotten map. Regard your loss. Planting this lump of pain, perhaps a flower Might burst from it; perhaps a cherry-tree, Perhaps a world or a new race of men. Regard your loss. The blossoms of the cherry Are rotten now; the branch is violated; The fruit is stolen and our dreams have failed. Yet somewhere—O beyond what bitter ranges?— A seed drops from the sky and like a bomb Explodes into our orchard’s progeny, And so our care may colonise a desert. They cannot break our trees or waste our dreams, For their despoiling is a kind of sowing. Aimée and Victor, stop crying. Can’t you understand They cannot steal our cherries or our joy? Let them take what they want, even our dreams. Somewhere our loss will plant a better orchard. Advice for a Journey The drums mutter for war and soon we must begin To seek the country where they say that joy Springs flowerlike among the rocks, to win The fabulous golden mountain of our peace. O my friends, we are too young For explorers, have no skill nor compass, Nor even that iron certitude which swung Our fathers at their self-fulfilling North. So take no rations, remember not your homes— Only the blind and stubborn hope to track This wilderness. The thoughtful leave their bones In windy foodless meadows of despair. Never look back, nor too far forward search For the white Everest of your desire; The screes roll underfoot and you will never reach Those brittle peaks which only clouds may walk. Others have come before you. The immortal Live like reflections and their frozen faces Will give you courage to ignore the subtle Sneer of the gentian and the iceworn pebble. The fifes cry death and the sharp winds call. Set your face to the rock; go on, go out Into the bad lands of battle, into the cloud-wall Of the future, my friends, and leave your fear. Go forth, my friends, the raven is no sibyl; Break the clouds’ anger with your unchanged faces. You’ll find, maybe, the dream under the hill— But never Canaan, nor any golden mountain. Epithalamium for R. B. and H. S., October ’42 O you will have no bells and the winter is coming, But now the corn lies down to the stumbling thresher, The sycamore drops its yellow-winged projectiles And winter is coming, but first the season of fruit. Your bells will be the voices of autumn rivers, Your wine will be the dew on the fallen apple: I sing for you who at the end of summer Have crowned the year and come together at last. There’s so much burning in the autumn world. The flames spread through the stubble, and the wind Comes out of Russia with a smell of fire. The reapers do not sing, but the sickle whispers Among the leaning wheat in the heat of noon. O you have seen, as I have seen, the folly Of those who think lost time can be repaid: The girl who, mad with sorrow, hung her ring On the wind’s finger, was not half so vain. I sing for you who at the end of summer Have crowned the year and come together at last. These nights are kind as the memory of a mother. The geese track south across the heavy moon. Your winter will be a triumph of clear decision And what incredible spring may lie beyond? O live and love to see your happy children Deny the sorrow of a burning world. Though you will have no bells and the winter is coming I sing your courage, who expect the spring. Moonlight Night on the Port Some were unlucky. Blown a mile to shoreward Their crossed hands lie among the bitter marsh-grass. Link arms and sing. The moon sails out Spreading distraction on the faces, drawing The useful hands to birdclaws. . . . If a ring Flashes, what matter? Other hands are ringless. We’ll never go home to-night, never to-night. And some shall be pulled down, revolving sickly On the tide’s whim, their bare feet scraping sand. The moon is out, my lady; lady of different Voices and gestures, with the same cold eyes. The buoy swings ringing. Under the curved seawall My hands reveal your soundings all the same. Some were more gallant, dragged across the seabed In iron cages, coughing out their lungs. Singing in bars, running before the seven Set winds of the heart; bearing our weakness bravely Through all the frigid seasons, we have weighed The chances against us, and refuse no kisses— Even the tide’s kiss on this dog-toothed shore. For some are lucky, leaving their curved faces Propped in the moonlight while their bodies drown. Two Offices of a Sentry I. OFFICE FOR NOON At the field’s border, where the cricket chafes His brittle wings among the yellow weed, I pause to hear the sea unendingly sifted Between the granite fingers of the cape. At this twelfth hour of unrelenting summer I think of those whose ready mouths are stopped. I remember those who crouch in narrow graves. I weep for those whose eyes are full of sand. II. OFFICE FOR MIDNIGHT The ones who gave themselves to every moment Till time grew gentle as a sated lover; The young swift-footed and the old keen-eyed, Whose roads are freedom and whose stars are constant, Stand by me as I watch this empty town. I am in love with the wildness of the living. I am in love with the rhythms of dead limbs. I am in love with all those who have entered The night that smells of petals and of dust. Seascape For R.-J. Our country was a country drowned long since, By shark-toothed currents drowned: And in that country walk the generations, The dancing generations with grey eyes Whose touch would be like rain, the generations Who never thought to justify their beauty. There once the flowering cherry grasped the wall With childish fingers, once the gull swung crying Across the morning or the evening mist; Once high heels rattled on the terrace Over the water’s talk, and the wind lifted The hard leaves of the bay; the white sand drifted Under the worm-bored rampart, under the white eyelid. Our country was a country washed with colour. Its light was good to us, sharp limning The lover’s secret smile, the fine-drawn fingers; It drew long stripes between the pointed jaws Of sea-bleached wreckage grinning through the wrack And turned cornelian the flashing eyeball. For here the tide sang like a riding hero Across the rock-waste, and the early sun Was shattered in the teeth of shuttered windows. But now we are the gowned lamenters Who stand among the junipers and ruins. We are the lovers who defied the sea Until the tide returning threw us up A foreign corpse with blue-rimmed eyes, and limbs Drawn limp and racked between the jigging waves. Greenwich Observatory This onion-dome holds all intricacies Of intellect and star-struck wisdom; so Like Coleridge’s head with multitudinous Passages riddled, full of strange instruments Unbalanced by a touch, this organism From wires and dials spins introverted life. It never looks, squat on its concrete shoulders Down at the river’s swarming life, nor sees Cranes’ groping insect-like activity Nor slow procession of funnels past the docks. Turning its inner wheels, absorbed in problems Of space and time, it never hears Birds singing in the park or children’s laughter. Alive, but in another way, it broods On this its Highgate, hypnotised In lunar reverie and calculation. Yet night awakes it; blind lids open Leaden to look upon the moon: A single goggling telescopic eye Enfolds the spheric wonder of the sky. Paul Klee The short-faced goblins with their heavy feet Trampled your dreams, their spatulate Fingers have torn the tracery of your wisdom: But childlike you would not cry out, transforming Your enemies to little angry phantoms In clarity of vision exorcised. Until at last they conquered by attrition, And draining the last dregs of love away, They left you from the angular Prison of primary fears no way but flight: Yet never could invade your waterworld of spirit Since half divining there among the dance Of shadowed currents lurking ever Their unguessed image, luminous with fear. And so they stirred the shallows till the sky Flew blue in shards and thought sank even deeper, Where crouched your passion’s residue confined: The evil centre of a child’s clear mind. War Poet I am the man who looked for peace and found My own eyes barbed. I am the man who groped for words and found An arrow in my hand. I am the builder whose firm walls surround A slipping land. When I grow sick or mad Mock me not nor chain me: When I reach for the wind Cast me not down: Though my face is a burnt book And a wasted town. William Yeats in Limbo Where folds the central lotus Flesh and soul could never seek? Under what black-scar’d mountain May Pallas with Adonis meet? Spirit-bodies’ loveliness Cannot expiate my pain: How should I learn wisdom Being old and profane? My thoughts have swarmed like bees In an old ruined tower: How should I go to drive them out Lacking joy and power? How could I learn youth again, With figured symbols weaving Truth so easily, now I Am old and unbelieving? By what chicanery of time May sword and sheath be separated? Silent be the singer who thinks of me And how I was defeated. Remember Your Lovers Young men walking the open streets Of death’s republic, remember your lovers. When you foresaw with vision prescient The planet pain rising across your sky We fused your sight in our soft burning beauty: We laid you down in meadows drunk with cowslips And led you in the ways of our bright city. Young men who wander death’s vague meadows, Remember your lovers who gave you more than flowers. When truth came prying like a surgeon’s knife Among the delicate movements of your brain We called your spirit from its narrow den And kissed your courage back to meet the blade— Our anæsthetic beauty saved you then. Young men whose sickness death has cured at last, Remember your lovers and covet their disease. When you woke grave-chilled at midnight To pace the pavement of your bitter dream We brought you back to bed and brought you home From the dark antechamber of desire Into our lust as warm as candle-flame. Young men who lie in the carven beds of death, Remember your lovers who gave you more than dreams. From the sun sheltering your careless head Or from the painted devil your quick eye, We led you out of terror tenderly And fooled you into peace with our soft words And gave you all we had and let you die. Young men drunk with death’s unquenchable wisdom, Remember your lovers who gave you more than love. The Gardener If you will come on such a day As this, between the pink and yellow lines Of parrot-tulips, I will be your lover. My boots flash as they beat the silly gravel. O come, this is your day. Were you to lay your hand like a veined leaf Upon my square-cut hand, I would caress The shape of it, and that would be enough. I note the greenfly working on the rose. Time slips between my fingers like a leaf. Do you resemble the silent pale-eyed angels That follow children? Is your face a flower? The lovers and the beggars leave the park— And still you will not come. The gates are closing. O it is terrible to dream of angels. St. John Baptist I, John, not reed but root; Not vested priest nor saviour but a voice Crying daylong like a cricket in the heat, Demand your worship. Not of me But of the traveller I am calling From beyond Jordan and the limestone hills, Whose runner and rude servant I am only. Not man entirely but God’s watchman, I dwell among these blistered rocks Awaiting the wide dawn, the wonder Of His first coming and the Dove’s descent. Night Estuary And yet the spiked moon menacing The great humped dykes, scaring the plaintive seafowl, Makes no right image, wakes no assertive echo. Though one may stride the dykes with face upturned To the yellow inflammation in the sky And nostrils full of the living samphire scent, There is no kindness in man’s heart for these. In this place, and at this unmeaning hour, There is no home for a man’s hope or his sorrow. O you lion-hearted poet’s griefs, or griefs Wild as the curlew’s cry of passage; O hope uneasy as the rising ebb Among the sedges, cold and questing guest; Leave me alone this hour with the restive night. Allow me to accept the witless landscape. William Byrd I have come very far, Lord. In my time Men’s mouths have been shut up, the gabble and whine Of shot has drowned the singing. You will pardon My praise that rises only from a book— (How long shall that book be hidden Under a scarecrow gown, under evil writings?) And you will pardon the tricks, the secret rooms, The boarded windows, your house again a stall. These things have made my house of praise more holy. And so I try to remember how it was When lovers sang like finches, and the Word Was music. Lord, I am no coward, But an old man remembering the candle-flames Reflected in the scroll-work, frozen trees Praying for Advent, the willow cut at Easter. The quires are dumb. My spirit sings in silence. You will appoint the day of my arising. Early Spring Now that the young buds are tipped with a falling sun— Each twig a candle, a martyr, St. Julian’s branched stag— And the shadows are walking the cobbled square like soldiers With their long legs creaking and their pointed hands Reaching the railings and fingering the stones Of what expended, unprojected graves: The soil’s a flirt, the lion Time is tamed, And pain like a cat will come home to share your room. Hopes for a Lover I’d have you proud as red brocade And such a sight as Venus made Extravagantly stepping from a shell. I’d have you clear your way before With such a look as Aias wore On his way back from hell. I’d have you strong as spider’s strand And all volcanic as the land Where the nymph fooled that cunning Ulysses. I’d have you arrogantly ride Love’s flurry, as the turning seas Bore Arion upon a fish. My last and dearest wish— That you should let the arrows of my pride Come at you again and again and never touch you. North Sea The evening thickens. Figures like a frieze Cross the sea’s face, their cold unlifted heads Disdainful of the wind that pulls their hair. The brown light lies along the harbour wall. And eastward looking, eastward wondering I meet the eyes of Heine’s ghost, who saw His failure in the grey forsaken waves At Rulenstein one autumn. And between Rises the shape in more than memory Of Düsseldorf, the ringing, river-enfolding City that brought such sorrow on us both. A Hope for Those Separated by War They crossed her face with blood, They hung her heart. They dragged her through a pit Full of quick sorrow. Yet her small feet Ran back on the morrow. They took his book and caged His mind in a dark house. They took his bright eyes To light their rooms of doubt. Yet his thin hands Crawled back and found her out. Song: The Heart’s Assurance O never trust the heart’s assurance— Trust only the heart’s fear: And what I’m saying is, Go back, my lovely— Though you will never hear. O never trust your pride of movement— Trust only pride’s distress: The only holy limbs are the broken fingers Still raised to praise and bless. For the careless heart is bound with chains And terribly cast down: The beast of pride is hunted out And baited through the town. Design for a Monument The stone doves settle on the lady’s tomb. Grey scrolls of lettering upon her eyes Will never hide the image of regret; And she who walked in a rich robe of safety Now shrinks beneath the rough immodest shroud. O elegies are empty as the waiting Of timid ancestors and scraping parents Who worked so long towards that ruined face. All walks at evening among the stolid yews, And mornings at high windows, are forgotten Like folds in a gold robe laid out to rot. The lovers who rode with her lie scattered Among their horses’ big-eyed skulls in the meadow; The yellow charlock scratches at her door. It is not easy to lament a lady Whose past was greater than the singer’s age. They who fly falcons at the angry sun Or ride black horses through the armoured night Have wept for her a day, then fallen sick And laid their bones in cold heraldic houses: And I am left to pause before her tomb Where grey doves cover her with granite leaves. THE CRUEL SOLSTICE The Cruel Solstice To-night the stranger city and the old Moon that stands over it proclaim A cruel solstice, coming ice and cold Thoughts and the darkening of the heart’s flame. “Stand up”, speaks soul, “let wisdom turn the time Into an image of your day’s despite”; O clever soul, we were born separate, Held only in hard glance or studied rhyme. “Sleep then, tired singer, stop the mouth Of the unhappy month and take your rest.” O cunning voice, I have not strength enough, Being no stranger here, but uncouth guest. So must I walk or falter by the wall Wondering at my impotence Of thought and action; at the fall Of love and cities and the heart’s false diligence. To-night I cannot speak, remembering For all my daily talk, I dare not enter The empty month; can only stand and think Of you, my dearest, and the approaching winter. A Renunciation Strong angels bear God’s canopy, Strong horsemen ride the loose immoderate wind: But O my dark girl from her balcony Laughs down and puts their glory out of mind. Sharp stars are wiser than the astronomer, The stinking goat more potent than the great Lover of girls, that cold Casanova: And righteous wars forget the cause of hate. The high djinn-master Solomon Could never understand his women’s talk: So I would be an unobservant man Frequenting gardens where dark women walk. Lover’s Complaint I. NOCTURNE The trains cry and are frightened Far from my distraction; spare My peace, my voice, my city Of desolation, desolate because you are there. There was a month and two people walked in it But were not you or I: My sight is broken and the signs are taken That kept me safe in abject poetry. Spare too my willing mind That served your images: There is a night and two people lie in it, And the green planet rages. Were I to pass now on the creaking stair You would not know my face: The months and the night and my own mind Have taken a ghost’s grace. For my private streets and summers Are any alien comer’s; And the tall miraculous city That I walked in will never house me. II. AUBADE O sing, caged lark, sing caged Poetical bird, you liar; Sing high to-day, your female Rapture, your cagebird fire Won’t fool me now, the day’s already aged Ten years and your voice falls stale. O sing, erotic season, sing Dream-heavy mind; Light’s terrible ministry Perform, clear morning wind. But my ears have aged and everything Has turned round wretchedly. Lament for Harpsichord: The Flowering Orchards The days and faces: O to take the faces And crumbling features of my love and build them Into a wall about our flowered April. Rain seeks the root. The cloudy spring approaches. If we could for a moment be alone, Had it been possible for us to meet Among the flowering orchards of the South Or when the summer flashed and rocketed Between green sedges like a kingfisher: If we could be alone, my dear, my dearest, With the pale light of April and the open Roads of a tired heart, my far, my farthest, There might be hope and heavy trees this summer Instead of these hard blooms, this backward spring— The gapped walls and the falling faces, The scraggy birds that will not learn to sing. Those flowering orchards, O to save those orchards Of starred illusion from the climbing blight. Silver it settles on the leaves and fissures The strong bole slowly, to its circled heart. If we could be alone for a moment only While the spring grows, while blossoms fight Within the bud. . . . If we had met before And in another place, what wonders might we see Sheltered by days and faces, under a flowering tree? The Migrant Slimmer than thrush, the ringneck ousel Haunts these black becks, recalling chalk-ribbed downs You walk this month; the heavy wrack Stumbling across them in the winter dusk; The gulls’ extended shadows on the turf; A Hampshire naturalist seeking, noting The flocks, the fluting birds, (was it indeed Migration brought them, or mere Providence?) The ringnecked birds in autumn on those downs. So by the millrace and the stony ridge I look for something different, for a sign That love has flown into another country, Migrating from this frost—not, as I fear, Frozen and starved. The quick bird calls Thinly among the willows, and I think Of spring and of that winter friend. O voice, O bird-throat, bird-throat, you know not My deeper fear of time, my silly hope That spring may find us eager and unchanged. The Doubtful Season The doubtful season of the brain’s black weather Blew through me, but you waited for its end. My months were all named backwards till you showed me That even the mind is not deceived for ever. O in October it would be the blazoned Leaves of the chestnut on the cobbled pavement: And we would seek in the corridors of autumn Denial of faith and of the summer’s achievement. And in the early year it was another Sign of evasion when the poplars clattered To sharpened ears above the metal river— And I would turn to find your eyes were shuttered. Even that almost parting on the stair I could not understand, nor why the candles Sprouted such flowers between our sculptured faces: Nor why the river glinted in your hair. O in July it was our love was started Like any hare among the watchful grasses; Its running is my song, my only story How time turns back and the doubtful season passes. The Promised Landscape For R.-J. How shall I sing for you— Sharing only The scared dream of a soldier: A young man’s unbearable Dream of possession? How shall I sing for you With the foul tongue of a soldier? We march through new mountains Where crows inhabit The pitiful cairns. At morning, the rock-pools Are matted with ice. But you are the mountains And you the journey. We lie in a ruined farm Where rats perform Marvels of balance Among the rafters. And rain kisses my lips Because you are the sky That bends always over me. How shall I sing for you Knowing only The explorer’s sorrow, The soldier’s weariness? New ranges and rivers Are never quite revealing Your promised figure. How dare I sing for you I the least worthy Of lovers you’ve had: You the most lovely Of possible landscapes? September, 1942 The Kestrels When I would think of you, my mind holds only The small defiant kestrels—how they cut The raincloud with sharp wings, continually circling About a storm-rocked elm, with passionate cries. It was an early month. The plow cut hard. The may was knobbed with chilly buds. My folly Was great enough to lull away my pride. There is no virtue now in blind reliance On place or person or the forms of love. The storm bears down the pivotal tree, the cloud Turns to the net of an inhuman fowler And drags us from the air. Our wings are clipped. Yet still our love and luck lies in our parting: Those cries and wings surprise our surest act. Medallion Bull-chested and iron-eyed heroes And weeping women Surround me while I sleep; Waking, I meet the continual procession Of hawk-headed, bird-clawed women And weeping men. LEGENDS The Glass Tower in Galway I One was an eye and others Snake-headed travesties; one high-legged and mincing As a stork. And there were whining small ones Like sickly children. O they were a beastly Sea-born race, spawned on the rocks of Galway Among the dried shark-eggs and the dirty froth. They moved and cried and the wind blew hard from the West, Ruffling the treacherous pale places over the reefs. They cried, “Ours is the land”, And the gulls dared not dispute them Nor even the old falcon circling the misty cape. They took the crooked fields and straggling coasts Of Galway, spreading later East and South Through heather-topped hills and the stinking bogs of Connaught, To caper lastly on the inland pastures Where only the moon and the waving grasses mocked them. But where the sea had retched them up They built a tower, above the cross-grained tides And wheezing potholed beaches, on a headland; Of glass they reared it, riveted askew, Sustained by witchcraft; in the autumn gales Ringing like a goblet till the mountains quivered. It was their shrine, and cruel sea-rites Went forward there while they possessed the land: Sometimes it shook with screaming and children’s corpses Drifted southward, mauled by the grumbling seals. Yet still on summer nights impassively It faced the empty West with its inane transparency. II But as the inhuman years neared their completion A race came from the South; sun-bronzed Cloud-riding Danaan people out of Egypt. And there were battles. First among the ravaged Hills and then raging by the stony beaches. Wars passed; the sea took many dead, the tower Fell and its rites were celebrated Now only in the deep sea caverns where its masters Sought refuge; now the fretful tide Coughed round those altars without sacrifice; Outlawed by history, the sea-born race Rotted off Galway, the Atlantic shark And groping spider-crab their only heir. Those reefs and beaches now lay shadowless Under the moon; the wheeling falcon saw A new age coming, like the early sun Gilding the spindrift, bronze on the wet sand. III But even that age is dead and songs Forget its buried kings who lie Under high cairns, their requiem the curlews’ Insatiable crying, their epitaph In lichens written, and great deeds engraved On buried shards of bronze. For history Despises even them, turning their prowess Into a tale of ogres, fame and truth Lost in the wreck of their enormous bones. IV Bats roost in the high white halls And the heroes are finished. Their swords are stacked for scrap In the cold waste places. Their tombs scattered and broken Nourish the blue thistle. For time will never repent Nor the seasons pity them. There’s no hope in hoping now: God has left us like a girl. The Bards Now it is time to remember the winter festivals Of the old world, and see their raftered halls Hung with hard holly; tongues’ confusion; slow Beat of the heated blood in those great palaces Decked with the pale and sickled mistletoe; And voices dying when the blind bard rises Robed in his servitude, and the high harp Of sorrow sounding, stills those upturned faces. O it is such long learning, loneliness And dark despite to master The bard’s blind craft; in bitterness Of heart to strike the strings and muster The shards of pain to harmony, not sharp With anger to insult the merry guest. O it is glory for the old man singing Dead valour and his own days coldly cursed. How ten men fell by one heroic sword And of fierce foray by the unwatched ford, Sing, blinded face; quick hands in darkness groping Pluck the sad harp; sad heart forever hoping Valhalla may be songless, enter The moment of your glory, out of clamour Moulding your vision to such harmony That drunken heroes cannot choose but honour Your stubborn blinded pride, your inward winter. Simon Magus The hands affright, it is the cunning hands Have driven my weak masters out of doors: For a gold piece or healing water-kiss Shaped like a cross, make my hands strong as yours. The hand fails because of the unpurged eye. The kiss fails because of the cold coin. There is no power on earth can circumvent The stubborn intellect, proud as a god’s pain. Go pray, Simon; hide your noisy heart Clapper-tongued and lolling with conceit. Meet your master in his house of fire And practise wonders on the silly dead. For you the mathematics of desire, The frigid neophyte, the cold symbolic bed. Don Juan in Winter Where once it was under archways The legendary two-backed beast and bright As younger years the moonlight, dog-legged shadows Hunting not then, sparing your hopeful night: Now they run loose about the traitor streets, You see in archways waiting the wronged man You spitted, and the beast run down and cornered Can only howl, harder its hunting than The shame and terror of its own past quarry, The cry at midnight. Now the hunt is up For every dealer in expensive passion And every drinker from the jewelled cup. Alone in winter now, you dare not loiter Along old ways, beside the terraced shore: Your steps avoid the high-wrought palaces Whose keys your fingers were, but are no more. It is not vengefully nor yet in wisdom You’re punished so. The night will never fail; But pretty faces fall and fail and never Escape from their tired mirrors. Years as pale As shipwreck are your portion, you once diver; Once hunter, hunting. Serenaded windows yawn Satirically like old gap-toothed women, And age’s dunghill cock crows up your dawn. Glaucus The various voices are his poem now. Under the currents, under the shifting lights Of midway water, rolls his fleshy wreck: Its gurnard eye reflects those airy heights Where once it noted white Arcturus set. Gull-swift and swerving, the wet spirit freed Skims the huge breakers. Watching at the prow Of any southbound vessel, sailor, heed Never that petrel spirit, cruel as pride. Let no cliff-haunting woman, no girl claim Kinship with Glaucus, neither sow The tide with daffodils, nor call his name Into the wind, for he is glorified— And cold Aegean voices speak his fame. Dido’s Lament for Aeneas He never loved the frenzy of the sun Nor the clear seas. He came with hero’s arms and bullock’s eyes Afraid of nothing but his nagging gods. He never loved the hollow-sounding beaches Nor rested easily in carven beds. The smoke blows over the breakers, the high pyre waits. His mind was a blank wall throwing echoes, Not half so subtle as the coiling flames. He never loved my wild eyes nor the pigeons Inhabiting my gates. Rome Remember The bright waves scour the wound of Carthage. The shadows of gulls run spiderlike through Carthage. The cohorts of the sand are wearing Carthage Hollow and desolate as a turning wave; But the bronze eagle has flown east from Rome. Rome remember, remember the seafowls’ sermon That followed the beaked ships westward to their triumph. O Rome, you city of soldiers, remember the singers That cry with dead voices along the African shore. Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled With figures from the east like running nooses. The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare Of falling torches cannot stir your passion. Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom. Remember the soft funereal Etruscans. O when the rain beats with a sound like bells Upon your bronze-faced monuments, remember This European fretful-fingered rain Will turn to swords in the hand of Europe’s anger. Remember the Nordic snarl and the African sorrow. The bronze wolf howls when the moon turns red. The trolls are massing for their last assault. Your dreams are full of claws and scaly faces And the Gothic arrow is pointed at your heart. Rome remember your birth in Trojan chaos. O think how savage will be your last lamenters. How alien the lovers of your ghost. Lament for Adonis I bring you branches and sing scattering branches. My feet have never turned this way before. My tears are statues in my lighted eyes. My mind is a stone with grief going over it Like white brook-water in the early year. I bring you tears and sing scattering tears. My grief for you is cold and heavy as iron. Your beauty was a wound in the world’s side. I bring you blood and sing scattering blood. Little Drawda All Souls, ’41 Under the shaken trees, wait O unlucky Returner, you rejected one: There is no way of comforting you. Wait Under the shaken trees and the clock striking one. In the moon’s wicked glitter linger now You tired ghost: You have no stance of safety but shift In the moon’s glitter, an uprooted ghost. On this strong night, remain you lonely Seeker beside me, though my heart is dumb: We may together solve the unexpected Secret of living, now that the clock is dumb. Timoshenko Hour ten he rose, ten-sworded, every finger A weighted blade, and strapping round his loins The courage of attack, he threw the window Open to look on his appointed night. Where lay, beneath the winds and creaking flares Tangled like lovers or alone assuming The wanton postures of the drunk with sleep, An army of twisted limbs and hollow faces Thrown to and fro between the winds and shadows. O hear the wind, the wind that shakes the dawn. And there before the night, he was aware Of the flayed fields of home, and black with ruin The helpful earth under the tracks of tanks. His bladed hand, in pity falling, mimicked The crumpled hand lamenting the broken plow; And the oracular metal lips in anger Squared to the shape of the raped girl’s yelling mouth. He heard the wind explaining nature’s sorrow And humming in the wire hair of the dead. He turned, and his great shadow on the wall Swayed like a tree. His eyes grew cold as lead. Then, in a rage of love and grief and pity He made the pencilled map alive with war. Orestes and the Furies This self-absorbed Orestes speaking riddles Wanders the falling woods of his own past; Remembering the pillared house, he weeps for A mother murdered and a sister lost. Of Agamemnon felled like groaning timber— Alas the day he turned his back on Troy— The hunted hero muses, and his mother Who made him tremble like a lovestruck boy. The mask of tragic pride upon his features Is painted with inexorable art. The guilty hands of mother and of sister Are both the iron hand upon his heart. Observing shapes of judgment in the sky He seeks the dark, yet dare not turn his back Upon those shattered mirrors where he sees The snake-haired Furies running on his track. THE WILDERNESS Time Will Not Grant Time will not grant the unlined page Completion or the hand respite: The Magi stray, the heavens rage, The careful pilgrim stumbles in the night. Take pen, take eye and etch Your vision on this unpropitious time; Faces are fluid, actions never reach Perfection but in reflex or in rhyme. Take now, not soon; your lost Minutes roost home like curses. Nicolo, Martin, every unhoused ghost Proclaims time’s strange reverses. Fear was Donne’s peace; to him, Charted between the minstrel cherubim, Terror was decent. Rilke tenderly Accepted autumn like a rooted tree. But I am frightened after every good day That all my life must change and fall away. Anarchy Rising, the light ran round inside his eyes. Then at a later hour, without surprise, He noted singing birds that raked the sky With pointed rods of sound like surgeons’ knives. The walls were scrawled with moss. The trees Grabbed at the sun like grey anemones. At noon he met a girl whose body sang Thin as a cricket, till his eardrums rang. Black dancers crossed his brain. The bearded sun Whirled past him, locked with prancing Capricorn. A dog began to howl; until he cried It was too much. And then his wonder died. Evening found him lost but unafraid Surveying the wry landscape in his head. Night ravished him, and so was brought to birth A great cold passion to destroy the earth. To Keep Off Fears Fear of jammed window and of rising footsteps Out of fear’s stair, where a tall phantom mounts Through time and action at the brain: Fear of the enormous mountain leaning Across thought’s lake, where blinded fishes move As cold and intricate as love: Fear of the fisherman Who raised Leviathan On a steel line from his creative mirror: Fear of the moonlight shifting against the door: Fear finally of tripwire and garotte Reaching possessive from an easy air: These bring the careful man into despair. Then let me never crouch against the wall But meet my fears and fight them till I fall. Being Not Proud Being not proud to praise a lonely man’s Heroic loveless dream-humility most often Comes to the drunken or the moonstruck mind— I seek new pain to soften Like rain the stony soul, or careful wind. Moses’ great parleying on Sinai Brought anger on him and defeat: Love, being no frigid stonecrop-flower, Blooms not among pride’s wrack and sleet Nor ornaments an introverted tower. The bones of heroes crowned with stone and statue Nourish no flower nor bitter cry; Yet groping painfully, love’s roots may save The dumb soul of a stone, or justify The holed heart in a crossroad grave. The Uncreated Images The commerce of lithe limbs is fool’s delight. O hours and watches, O unending summer Within the lover’s blood and cloudy blooms That nightly rise and break about the body— These are the currency of dreams and language, The uncreated images of truth. Night’s wink is momentary, and dividing The coloured shapes of passion which it spawned, Night strikes through the membrane to the gristled socket And tumbles like a pebble through the skull. There is no speech to tell the shape of love Nor any but the wounded eye to see it; Whether in memory, or listening to the talk Of rain among the gutters; or at dawn The sentry’s feet striking the chilly yard, There is no synonym for love’s great word— No way of comforting the limbs That have lain lovelocked at an earlier season, Nor any coin to close the tired eye That day chastises with its rods of light. The separate limbs perform a faithless task— The eye devours created images. The commerce of lithe limbs is fool’s delight, Cry limb and eyeball, waiting for the night. Against Divination Not in the night time, in the weary bed Comes wisdom, neither to the wild Symbolic leaf of autumn. Never seek Your solace from the automatic hand Of medium, or lover’s partial gaze: Truth is not found in book or litten glass At midnight. Ghosts are liars. None may turn Winter’s hard sentence but the silly man, The workless plowman or the unhoused poet Who walks without a thought and finds his peace In tall clouds mounting the unbroken wind, In dry leaves beating at the heavens’ face. The Expected Guest The table is spread, the lamp glitters and sighs; Light on my eyes, light on the high curved iris And springing from glaze to steel, from cup to knife Makes sacramental my poor midnight table, My broken scraps the pieces of a god. O when they bore you down, the grinning soldiers, Was it their white teeth you could not forget? And when you met the beast in the myrtle wood, When the spear broke and the blood broke out on your side What Syrian Veronica above you Stooped with her flaxen cloth as yet unsigned? And either way, how could you call your darling To drink the cup of blood your father filled? We are dying to-night, you in the agèd darkness And I in the white room my pride has rented. And either way, we have to die alone. The laid table stands hard and white as to-morrow The lamp sings. The West wind jostles the door. Though broken the bread, the brain, the brave body There cannot now be any hope of changing The leavings to living bone, the bone to bread: For bladed centuries are drawn between us. The room is ready, but the guest is dead. The Wilderness I The red rock wilderness Shall be my dwelling place. Where the wind saws at the bluffs And the pebble falls like thunder I shall watch the clawed sun Tear the rocks asunder. The seven-branched cactus Will never sweat wine: My own bleeding feet Shall furnish the sign. The rock says “Endure”. The wind says “Pursue”. The sun says “I will suck your bones And afterwards bury you”. II Here where the horned skulls mark the limit Of instinct and intransigeant desire I beat against the rough-tongued wind Towards the heart of fire. So knowing my youth, which was yesterday, And my pride which shall be gone to-morrow, I turn my face to the sun, remembering gardens Planted by others—Longinus, Guillaume de Lorris And all love’s gardeners, in an early May. O sing, small ancient bird, for I am going Into the sun’s garden, the red rock desert I have dreamt of and desired more than the lilac’s promise. The flowers of the rock shall never fall. O speak no more of love and death And speak no word of sorrow: My anger’s eaten up my pride And both shall die to-morrow. Knowing I am no lover, but destroyer, I am content to face the destroying sun. There shall be no more journeys, nor the anguish Of meeting and parting, after the last great parting From the images of dancing and the gardens Where the brown bird chokes in its song: Until that last great meeting among mountains Where the metal bird sings madly from the fire. O speak no more of ceremony, Speak no more of fame: My heart must seek a burning land To bury its foolish pain. By the dry river at the desert edge I regret the speaking rivers I have known; The sunlight shattered under the dark bridge And many tongues of rivers in the past. Rivers and gardens, singing under the willows, The glowing moon. . . . And all the poets of summer Must lament another spirit’s passing over. O never weep for me, my love, Or seek me in this land: But light a candle for my luck And bear it in your hand. III In this hard garden where the earth’s ribs Lie bare from her first agony, I seek The home of the gold bird, the predatory Phœnix. O louder than the tongue of any river Call the red flames among the shapes of rock: And this is my calling. . . . Though my love must sit Alone with her candle in a darkened room Listening to music that is not present or Turning a flower in her childish hands And though we were a thousand miles apart . . . This is my calling, to seek the red rock desert And speak for all those who have lost the gardens, Forgotten the singing, yet dare not find the desert— To sing the song that rises from the fire. It is not profitable to remember How my friends fell, my heroes turned to squalling Puppets of history; though I would forget The way of this one’s failure, that one’s exile— How the small foreign girl Grew crazed with her own beauty; how the poet Talks to the wall in a deserted city; How others danced until the Tartar wind Blew in the doors; or sitting alone at midnight Heard Solomon Eagle beat his drum in the streets: This is the time to ask their pardon For any act of coldness in the past. There is no kind of space can separate us: No weather, even this cruel sun, can change us; No dress, though you in shining satin walk Or you in velvet, while I run in tatters Against the fiery wind. There is no loss, Only the need to forget. This is my calling. . . . But behind me the rattle of stones underfoot, Stones from the bare ridge rolling and skidding: A voice I know, but had consigned to silence, Another calling: my own words coming back. . . . “And I would follow after you Though it were a thousand mile: Though you crossed the deserts of the world to the kingdom of death, my dear, I would follow after you and stand beside you there.” IV Who is this lady, flirting with the wind, Blown like a tangle of dried flowers through the desert? This is my lover whom I left Alone at evening between the candles— White fingers nailed with flame—in an empty house. Here we have come to the last ridge, the river Crossed and the birds of summer left to silence. And we go forth, we go forth together With our lank shadows dogging us, scrambling Across the raw red stones. There is no parting From friends, but only from the ways of friendship: Nor from our lovers, though the forms of love Change often as the landscape of this journey To the dark valley where the gold bird burns. I say, Love is a wilderness and these bones Proclaim no failure, but the death of youth. We say, You must be ready for the desert Even among the orchards starred with blossom, Even in spring, or at the waking moment When the man turns to the woman, and both are afraid. All who would save their life must find the desert— The lover, the poet, the girl who dreams of Christ, And the swift runner, crowned with another laurel: They all must face the sun, the red rock desert, And see the burning of the metal bird. Until you have crossed the desert and faced that fire Love is an evil, a shaking of the hand, A sick pain draining courage from the heart. We do not know the end, we cannot tell That valley’s shape, nor whether the white fire Will blind us instantly. . . . Only we go Forward, we go forward together, leaving Nothing except a worn-out way of loving. V Flesh is fire, the fire of flesh burns white Through living limbs: a cold fire in the blood. We must learn to live without love’s food. We shall see the sky without birds, the wind Will blow no leaves, will ruffle no new river. We shall walk in the desert together. Flesh is fire, frost and fire. We have turned in time, we shall see The Phœnix burning under a rich tree. Flesh is fire. Solomon Eagle’s drum shall be filled with sand: The dancers shall wear out their skilful feet, The pretty lady be wrapped in a rough sheet. We go now, but others must follow: The rivers are drying, the trees are falling, The red rock wilderness is calling. And they will find who linger in the garden The way of time is not a river but A pilferer who will not ask their pardon. Flesh is fire, frost and fire: Flesh is fire in this wilderness of fire Which is our dwelling. Printed at The Westminster Press 411a Harrow Road London, W.9 TRANSCRIBER NOTES It was unclear at several page breaks whether a new stanza was started. Our best guess was used. [The end of _The Cruel Solstice_ by Sidney Keyes]