In The Poetry

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on- on- and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away… O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

I had the good fortune to visit Antarctica some years ago, and I wrote one or two poems down there. I imagined, for example, a polar explorer dying of hypothermia, and then it occurred to me that ‘hypothermia’ sounded like the name of a Greek goddess, so I wrote this poem.

The Polar Explorer’s Love Song

The goddess Hypothermia
came and held me tight
and as we kissed we drifted
in the pale, pure light.

Antarctica was in her heart
and ice lay on her breast;
she was the warmest lover
and the best.

She made the glaciers advance,
she made the ice shelf shine,
she made the skua bird take flight
above her love and mine.

Swimming in the Woods

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood
was a swimmer moving through a pool:
fractal, finned by leaf and light;
the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus
wobbling coins of sunlight.
When she stopped, the water stopped,
and the sun re-made her as a tree,
banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries, condemned
to these patterns of love and loss,
I stare at the wet shape on the tiles
till it fades; when she came and sat next to me
after her swim and walked away
back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.

Something About

A poem set in Dublin, St Stephen’s Green

Something About

those huge black canvases in Newman’s
church, St Stephen’s Green — restoration
botched perhaps — Raphael Cartoons,
copies, loved by Newman, quite gone out.

Something about,
outside, Joyce’s head, too silver sharp,
too shrunk, facing stone steps he argued up
of the house where Hopkins sweated, found his heart,
his shaping spirit, turned ‘widow of an insight
lost’ (which we know something about).

Something about
a pigeon flight above the little lake, dark then white
as they turn as one bird and repeat
black into white (as ruined paint will not)
nine times precisely and like one bird depart.

Strange the fate –
insight spoiled, wanting rhymes too neat,
whichever way we think, wherever look –
to snuffle like setters in a winter garden
excitedly nosing old leaves, mortally certain
there is (certainly was — night’s odorous traffic)

something, somewhere, about.

O Taste and See

Because of a kiss on the forehead
in the long Night’s infirmary,
through the red wine let light shine deep.

Because of the thirtysix just men
that so stealthily roam this earth
raise high the glass and do not weep.

Who says the world is not a wedding?
Couples, in their oases, lullabye.
Let glass be full before they sleep.

Toast all that which seems to vanish
like a rainbow stared at, those bright
truant things that will not keep;

and ignorance of the last night
of our lives, its famished breathing.
Then, in the red wine, taste the light.

In a lot of the poems the idea of death comes as a friend – I was thinking of that Roman emperor, one of the cruellest of them, who used to visit his poor prisoners in cramped dungeons in great pain. So they would beg him for death, but he would say, “Oh no, oh no, we are not yet friends enough.” He meant they were not yet friends enough to give them death. The Frog Prince has a feeling of hope in death.

The Frog Prince

I am a frog
I live under a spell
I live at the bottom
of a green well.

And here I must wait
Until a maiden places me
On her royal pillow
And kisses me
In her father’s palace.

The story is familiar
Everybody knows it well
But do other enchanted people feel as nervous
As I do? The stories do not tell,

Ask if they will be happier
When the changes come
As already they are fairly happy
in a frog’s doom?

I have been a frog now
For a hundred years
And in all this time
I have not shed many tears,

I am happy, I like the life,
Can swim for many a mile
(When I have hopped to the river)

And am for ever agile.

And the quietness,
Yes, I like to be quiet
I am habituated
To a quiet life,

But always when I think these thoughts
As I sit in my well
Another thought comes to me and says:
It is part of the spell

To be happy
To work up contentment
To make much of being a frog
To fear disenchantment.

Says, it will be heavenly
To be set free,
Cries, Heavenly the girl who disenchants
And the royal times, heavenly
And I think it will be.

Come then, royal girl and royal times,

Come quickly,
I can be happy until you come
But I cannot be heavenly,

Only disenchanted people

Can be heavenly.

This was written when I was out in Montana near a town called Wolf Creek, and it’s another love poem.

The River at Wolf

Coming east we left the animals
pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake
their hair and skin and feathers
their eyes in the dark: red and green.
Your finger drawing my mouth.

Blessed are they who remember

Thay what they now have they once longed for.

A day a year ago last summer
God filled me with himself, like gold, inside,
deeper inside than marrow.

This close to God this close to you:
walking into the river at Wolf with
the animals. The snake’s
green skin, lit from inside. Our second life.

The Waste Land

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carv

A Flying Song

Last night I saw the sword Excalibur
It flew above the cloudy palaces
And as it passed I clearly read the words
Which were engraven on its blade
And one side of the sword said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away

I met my lover in a field of thorns
We walked together in the April air
And when we lay down by the waterside
My lover whispered in my ear
The first thing that she said was Take Me
The last thing that she said was Cast Me Away

I saw a vision of my mother and father
They were sitting smiling under summer trees
They offered me the gift of life
I took this present very carefully
And one side of my life said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away

The following poem is dedicated to a whole generation of women – that would have been my grandmother’s generation – who did hand-painting on china and many of us in my generation have their hand-painted china in our china cupboards that we get out on special occasions and so on. And I’ve always been fascinated by that generation and their handwork and so on and this poem is a little tribute to them.

The China Painters

They have set aside their black tin boxes,

scratched and dented,

spattered with drops of pink and blue;

and their dried-up, rolled-up tubes

of alizarin crimson, chrome green,

zinc white, and ultramarine;

their vials half full of gold powder;

stubs of wax pencils;

frayed brushes with tooth-bitten shafts;

and have gone in fashion and with grace

into the clouds of loose, lush roses,

narcissus, pansies, columbine,

on teapots, chocolate pots,

saucers and cups, the good Haviland dishes

spread like a garden

on the white lace Sunday cloth,

as if their souls were bees

and the world had been nothing but flowers.