SPENDER, Stephen

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

The Pylons

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek
So tall with prophecy
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

The Double Shame

You must live through the time when everything hurts

When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon

Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen

And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone

And green stares back where you stare alone,

And the walking eyes throw flinty comments,

And the words which carry most knives are the blind

Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts

The furniture carries cargoes of memory,

The staircase has corners which remember

As fire blows reddest in gusty embers,

And each empty dress cuts out an image

In fur and evening and summer and spring

of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed

And clasp the hour in the glass of one room

Against your mouth like a crystal doom.

Take up the book and stare at the letters

Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless –

Here birds crossed once and a foot once trod

In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

The story of others who made their mistakes

And of one whose happiness pierced like a star

Eludes and evades between sentences

And the letters break into eyes which read

The story life writes now in your head

As though the characters sought for some clue

To their being transcendently living and dead

In your history, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare

Their tragic sublime with your tawdry despair

And they have fingers which accuse

You of the double way of shame.

At first you did not love enough

And afterwards you loved too much

And you lacked the confidence to choose

And you have only yourself to blame.


Ultima Ratio Regum

The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.

Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?

O night O trembling night O night of sighs

O night when my body was a rod O night

When my mouth was a vague animal cry

Pasturing on her flesh O night

When the close darkness was a nest

Made of her hair and filled with my eyes

(O stars impenetrable above

The fragile tent poled with our thighs

Among the petals falling fields of time

O night revolving all our dark away)

O day O gradual day O sheeted light

Covering her body as with dews

Until I brushed her sealing sleep away

To read once more in the uncurtained day

Her naked love, my great good news.


Daybreak

At Dawn she lay with her profile at that angle

Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.

Her hair a harp, the hand of a breeze follows

And plays, against the white cloud of the pillows.

Then, in a flush of rose, she woke, and her eyes that opened

Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.

From her dew of lips, the drop of one word

Fell like the first of fountains: murmured

'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird.

'My dream becomes my dream,' she said, 'come true.

I waken from you to my dream of you.'

Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume

The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams

Poured into each other's arms, like streams.

Poem

I hear the cries of evening, while the paw

Of dark creeps up the turf;

Sheep’s bleating, swaying gulls’ cry, the rook’s caw,

The hammering surf.

I am inconstant yet this constancy

Of natural rest twangs at my heart;

Town-bred, I feel the roots of each earth-cry

Tear me apart.

These are the creakings of the dusty day

When the dog night bites sharp,

These fingers grip my soul and tear away,

And pluck me like a harp.

I feel this huge sphere turn, the great wheel sing,

While beasts move to their ease:

Sheep’s love, gull’s peace – I feel my chattering

Uncared by these.

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.

Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:

The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-

seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir

Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,

His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class

One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream

Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,

Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.

Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map

Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these

Children, these windows, not this map, their world,

Where all their future's painted with a fog,

A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky

Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example.

With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —

For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes

From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children

Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel

With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.

All of their time and space are foggy slum.

So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,

This map becomes their window and these windows

That shut upon their lives like catacombs,

Break O break open till they break the town

And show the children to green fields, and make their world

Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues

Run naked into books the white and green leaves open

History theirs whose language is the sun.


The Landscape near an Aerodrome

More beautiful and soft than any moth

With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path

Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines

Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall

To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,

Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

Lulled by descent, the travellers across sea

And across feminine land indulging its easy limbs

In miles of softness, now let their eyes trained by watching

Penetrate through dusk the outskirts of this town

Here where industry shows a fraying edge.

Here they may see what is being done.

Beyond the winking masthead light

And the landing-ground, they observe the outposts

Of work: chimneys like lank black fingers

Or figures frightening and mad: and squat buildings

With their strange air behind trees, like women's faces

Shattered by grief. Here where few houses

Moan with faint light behind their blinds,

They remark the unhomely sense of complaint, like a dog

Shut out and shivering at the foreign moon.

In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields

Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day

Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds

Settle upon the nearest roofs

But soon are hid under the loud city.

Then, as they land, they hear the tolling bell

Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,

To where larger than all the charcoaled batteries

And imaged towers against that dying sky,

Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.