19/01/2008

Dylan Thomas

Collected Poems

1934-1952

To Caitlin

Table of Contents

Note

Author’s Prologue

I see the boys of summer

A process in the weather of the heart

Before I knocked

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

My hero bares his nerves

Where once the waters of your face

If I were tickled by the rub of love

Our eunuch dreams

Especially when the October wind

When, like a running grave

From love’s first fever to her plague

In the beginning

Light breaks where no sun shines

I fellowed sleep

I dreamed my genesis

My world is pyramid

All all and all the dry worlds lever

I, in my intricate image

This bread I break

Incarnate devil

To-day, this insect

The seed-at-zero

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

Here in this spring

Do you not father me

Out of the sighs

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month

Was there a time

Now

Why east wind chills

A grief ago

How soon the servant sun

Ears in the turrets hear

Foster the light

The hand that signed the paper

Should lanterns shine

I have longed to move away

Find meat on bones

Grief thief of time

And death shall have no dominion

Then was my neophyte

Altarwise by owl-light

Because the pleasure-bird whistles

I make this in a warring absence

When all my five and country senses see

We lying by seasand

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell

O make me a mask

The spire cranes

After the funeral

Once it was the colour of saying

Not from this anger

How shall my animal

The tombstone told when she died

On no work of words

A saint about to fall

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’

Twenty-four years

The Conversation of Prayer

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Poem in October

This Side of the Truth

To Others than You

Love in the Asylum

Unluckily for a Death

The Hunchback in the Park

Into her Lying Down Head

Do not go gentle into that good night

Deaths and Entrances

A Winter’s Tale

On a Wedding Anniversary

There was a Saviour

On the Marriage of a Virgin

In my Craft or Sullen Art

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

Once below a time

When I Woke

Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Vision and Prayer

Ballad of the Long-legged Bait

Holy Spring

Fern Hill

In country sleep

Over Sir John’s hill

Poem on his birthday

Lament

In the white giant’s thigh

[Ebook producer’s note: Most editions of Collected Poems, 1934-1952 include a posthumously published poem titled “Elegy.” It has been omitted here because of its uncertain copyright status.]

Note

The prologue in verse, written for this collected edition of my poems, is intended as an address to my readers, the strangers.

This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve. Some of them I have revised a little, but if I went on revising everything that I now do not like in this book I should be so busy that I would have no time to try to write new poems.

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.

November 1952.

Author’s Prologue

This day winding down now

At God speeded summer’s end

In the torrent salmon sun,

In my seashaken house

On a breakneck of rocks

Tangled with chirrup and fruit,

Froth, flute, fin, and quill

At a wood’s dancing hoof,

By scummed, starfish sands

With their fishwife cross

Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,

Out there, crow black, men

Tackled with clouds, who kneel

To the sunset nets,

Geese nearly in heaven, boys

Stabbing, and herons, and shells

That speak seven seas,

Eternal waters away

From the cities of nine

Days’ night whose towers will catch

In the religious wind

Like stalks of tall, dry straw,

At poor peace I sing

To you strangers (though song

Is a burning and crested act,

The fire of birds in

The world’s turning wood,

For my swan, splay sounds),

Out of these seathumbed leaves

That will fly and fall

Like leaves of trees and as soon

Crumble and undie

Into the dogdayed night.

Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,

And the dumb swans drub blue

My dabbed bay’s dusk, as I hack

This rumpus of shapes

For you to know

How I, a spining man,

Glory also this star, bird

Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.

Hark: I trumpet the place,

From fish to jumping hill! Look:

I build my bellowing ark

To the best of my love

As the flood begins,

Out of the fountainhead

Of fear, rage read, manalive,

Molten and mountainous to stream

Over the wound asleep

Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.

Hoo, there, in castle keep,

You king singsong owls, who moonbeam

The flickering runs and dive

The dingle furred deer dead!

Huloo, on plumbed bryns,

O my ruffled ring dove

In the hooting, nearly dark

With Welsh and reverent rook,

Coo rooning the woods’ praise,

Who moons her blue notes from her nest

Down to the curlew herd!

Ho, hullaballoing clan

Agape, with woe

In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!

Heigh, on horseback hill, jack

Whisking hare! who

Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship’s

Clangour as I hew and smite

(A clash of anvils for my

Hubbub and fiddle, this tune

On a tounged puffball)

But animals thick as thieves

On God’s rough tumbling grounds

(Hail to His beasthood!).

Beasts who sleep good and thin,

Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked

Hollow farms in a throng

Of waters cluck and cling,

And barnroofs cockcrow war!

O kingdom of neighbors finned

Felled and quilled, flash to my patch

Work ark and the moonshine

Drinking Noah of the bay,

With pelt, and scale, and fleece:

Only the drowned deep bells

Of sheep and churches noise

Poor peace as the sun sets

And dark shoals every holy field.

We will ride out alone, and then,

Under the stars of Wales,

Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across

The water lidded lands,

Manned with their loves they’ll move,

Like wooden islands, hill to hill.

Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!

Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,

Tom tit and Dai mouse!

My ark sings in the sun

At God speeded summer’s end

And the flood flowers now.

I see the boys of summer

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

There in their heat the winter floods

Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,

Sour the boiling honey;

The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;

There in the sun the frigid threads

Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;

The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers

Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,

Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;

There in the deep with quartered shades

Of sun and moon they paint their dams

As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing

Stature by seedy shifting,

Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;

There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse

Of love and light bursts in their throats.

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter

Into a chiming quarter

Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;

There, in his night, the black-tongued bells

The sleepy man of winter pulls,

Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

We are the dark deniers, let us summon

Death from a summer woman,

A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,

From the fair dead who flush the sea

The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,

And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,

Green of the seaweeds’ iron,

Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,

Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth

To choke the deserts with her tides,

And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,

Heigh ho the blood and berry,

And nail the merry squires to the trees;

Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,

Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.

O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see you boys of summer in your ruin.

Man in his maggot’s barren.

And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.

I am the man your father was.

We are the sons of flint and pitch.

O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

When once the twilight locks no longer

When once the twilight locks no longer

Locked in the long worm of my finger

Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,

The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,

The milky acid on each hinge,

And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked

And all the dry seabed unlocked,

I sent my creature scouting on the globe,

That globe itself of hair and bone

That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,

Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses timed to charge his heart,

He blew like powder to the light

And held a little sabbath with the sun,

But when the stars, assuming shape,

Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,

He drowned his father’s magics in a dream.

All issue armoured, of the grave,

The redhaired cancer still alive,

The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;

Some dead undid their bushy jaws,

And bags of blood let out their flies;

He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

Sleep navigates the tides of time;

The dry Sargasso of the tomb

Gives up its dead to such a working sea;

And sleep rolls mute above the beds

Where fishes’ food is fed the shades

Who periscope through flowers to the sky.

When once the twilight screws were turned,

And mother milk was stiff as sand,

I sent my own ambassador to light;

By trick or chance he fell asleep

And conjured up a carcass shape

To rob me of my fluids in his heart.

Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,

A worker in the morning town,

And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;

The fences of the light are down,

All but the briskest riders thrown

And worlds hang on the trees.

A process in the weather of the heart

A process in the weather of the heart

Turns damp to dry; the golden shot

Storms in the freezing tomb.

A weather in the quarter of the veins

Turns night to day; blood in their suns

Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarns

The bones of blindness; and the womb

Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye

Is half its light; the fathomed sea

Breaks on unangled land.

The seed that makes a forest of the loin

Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,

Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone

Is damp and dry; the quick and dead

Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world

Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child

Sits in their double shade.

A process blows the moon into the sun,

Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;

And the heart gives up its dead.

Before I knocked

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,

With liquid hands tapped on the womb,

I who was shapeless as the water

That shaped the Jordan near my home

Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter

And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,

Who knew not sun nor moon by name,

Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,

As yet was in a molten form

The leaden stars, the rainy hammer

Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,

The darted hail, the childish snow,

And the wind was my sister suitor;

Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;

My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;

Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;

The rack of dreams my lily bones

Did twist into a living cipher,

And flesh was snipped to cross the lines

Of gallow crosses on the liver

And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure

Of skin and vein around the well

Where words and water make a mixture

Unfailing till the blood runs foul;

My heart knew love, my belly hunger;

I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature

To drift or drown upon the seas

Acquainted with the salt adventure

Of tides that never touch the shores.

I who was rich was made the richer

By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither

A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.

And I was struck down by death’s feather.

I was a mortal to the last

Long breath that carried to my father

The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,

Remember me and pity Him

Who took my flesh and bone for armour

And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks

Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

Turns mine to wax.

And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins

How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool

Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

Hauls my shroud sail.

And I am dumb to tell the hanging man

How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;

Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood

Shall calm her sores.

And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind

How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

My hero bares his nerves

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist

That rules from wrist to shoulder,

Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,

Leans on my mortal ruler,

The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull

Ache on the lovelorn paper

I hug to love with my unruly scrawl

That utters all love hunger

And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart

Tread, like a naked Venus,

The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;

Stripping my loin of promise,

He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from this box of nerves

Praising the mortal error

Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,

And the hunger’s emperor;

He pulls that chain, the cistern moves.

Where once the waters of your face

Where once the waters of your face

Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,

The dead turns up its eye;

Where once the mermen through your ice

Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers

Through salt and root and roe.

Where once your green knots sank their splice

Into the tided cord, there goes

The green unraveller,

His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose

To cut the channels at their source

And lay the wet fruits low.

Invisible, your clocking tides

Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;

The weed of love’s left dry;

There round about your stones the shades

Of children go who, from their voids,

Cry to the dolphined sea.

Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids

Shall not be latched while magic glides

Sage on the earth and sky;

There shall be corals in your beds,

There shall be serpents in your tides,

Till all our sea-faiths die.

If I were tickled by the rub of love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,

A rooking girl who stole me for her side,

Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,

If the red tickle as the cattle calve

Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,

I would not fear the apple nor the flood

Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,

And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.

If I were tickled by the hatching hair,

The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,

The itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,

I would not fear the gallows nor the axe

Nor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers

That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.

I would not fear the muscling-in of love

If I were tickled by the urchin hungers

Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.

I would not fear the devil in the loin

Nor the outspoken grave.

If I were tickled by the lovers’ rub

That wipes away not crow’s-foot nor the lock

Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,

Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib

Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,

The sea of scums could drown me as it broke

Dead on the sweethearts’ toes.

This world is half the devil’s and my own,

Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl

And curling round the bud that forks her eye.

An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,

And all the herrings smelling in the sea,

I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail

Wearing the quick away.

And that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.

The knobbly ape that swings along his sex

From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast

Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six

Feet in the rubbing dust.

And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?

The words of death are dryer than his stiff,

My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.

I would be tickled by the rub that is:

Man be my metaphor.

Our eunuch dreams

I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,

Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,

Whack their boys’ limbs,

And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,

Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night

Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,

When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,

The bones of men, the broken in their beds,

By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his moll,

Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,

Strange to our solid eye,

And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;

When cameras shut they hurry to their hole

down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,

Impose their shots, showing the nights away;

We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill

Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which

Shall fall awake when cures and their itch

Raise up this red-eyed earth?

Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,

The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,

Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,

Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world: the lying likeness of

Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move

Loving and being loth;

The dream that kicks the buried from their sack

And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.

This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,

Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack

The image from the plates;

And we shall be fit fellows for a life,

And who remains shall flower as they love,

Praise to our faring hearts.

Especially when the October wind

Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair,

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire

And cast a shadow crab upon the land,

By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,

Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,

My busy heart who shudders as she talks

Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees

The wordy shapes of women, and the rows

Of the star-gestured children in the park.

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,

Some of the oaken voices, from the roots

Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,

Some let me make you of the water’s speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock

Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning

Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning

And tells the windy weather in the cock.

Some let me make you of the meadow’s signs;

The signal grass that tells me all I know

Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.

Some let me tell you of the raven’s sins.

Especially when the October wind

(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,

The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)

With fists of turnips punishes the land,

Some let me make of you the heartless words.

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

When, like a running grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,

Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,

Love in her gear is slowly through the house,

Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,

Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,

Deliver me who timid in my tribe,

Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap

Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape

Of the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,

Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,

When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time

Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,

From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,

Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,

I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice

May fail to fasten with a virgin o

In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force,

My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone

Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime,

Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain

On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.

No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer

Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.

You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar

Tells the stick, ‘fail.’

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,

The cancer’s fashion, or the summer feather

Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,

Not city tar and subway bored to foster

Man through macadam.

I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.

Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot

Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,

Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state,

Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,

(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,

Ball of the foot depending from the sun,

(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,

The actions’ end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind

With whistler’s cough contages, time on track

Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,

Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take

The kissproof world.

From love’s first fever to her plague

From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second

And to the hollow minute of the womb,

From the unfolding to the scissored caul,

The time for breast and the green apron age

When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,

All world was one, one windy nothing,

My world was christened in a stream of milk.

And earth and sky were as one airy hill.

The sun and mood shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting

Hand, the breaking of the hair,

From the first secret of the heart, the warning ghost,

And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,

The sun was red, the moon was grey,

The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,

The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed

Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,

And the four winds, that had long blown as one,

Shone in my ears the light of sound,

Called in my eyes the sound of light.

And yellow was the multiplying sand,

Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,

Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,

The boy she dropped from darkness at her side

Into the sided lap of light grew strong,

Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,

And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,

Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh

I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts

Into the stony idiom of the brain,

To shade and knit anew the patch of words

Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,

Need no word’s warmth.

The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,

That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;

The code of night tapped on my tongue;

What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,

One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;

From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,

The two-framed globe that spun into a score;

A million minds gave suck to such a bud

As forks my eye;

Youth did condense; the tears of spring

Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;

One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

In the beginning

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,

One smile of light across the empty face;

One bough of bone across the rooting air,

The substance forked that marrowed the first sun;

And, burning ciphers on the round of space,

Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,

Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,

And after came the imprints on the water,

Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;

The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail

Touched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fire

That set alight the weathers from a spark,

A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower;

Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,

Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock

The secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the word

That from the solid bases of the light

Abstracted all the letters of the void;

And from the cloudy bases of the breath

The word flowed up, translating to the heart

First characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.

The brain was celled and soldered in the thought

Before the pitch was forking to a sun;

Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,

Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light

The ribbed original of love.

Light breaks where no sun shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter’s robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics die,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

I fellowed sleep

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,

Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,

Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.

So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man

And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,

Reaching a second ground far from the stars;

And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,

My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;

I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’

‘This that we tread was, too, your father’s land.’

‘But this we tread bears the angelic gangs,

Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.’

‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,

As, blowing on the angels, I was lost

On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;

I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed

Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air

Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,

I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,

How light the sleeping on this soily star,

How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,

Each rung a love or losing to the last,

The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.

An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,

My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.

I dreamed my genesis

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking

Through the rotating shell, strong

As motor muscle on the drill, driving

Through vision and the girdered nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled

Off from the creasing flesh, filed

Through all the irons in the grass, metal

Of suns in the man-melting night.

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly

A creature in my bones I

Rounded my globe of heritage, journey

In bottom gear through night-geared man.

I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel

Rammed in the marching heart, hole

In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled

Death on the mouth that ate the gas.

Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest

Of hemlock and the blades, rust

My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing

My second struggling from the grass.

And power was contagious in my birth, second

Rise of the skeleton and

Rerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood

Spat up from the resuffered pain.

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen

Twice in the feeding sea, grown

Stale of Adam’s brine until, vision

Of new man strength, I seek the sun.

My world is pyramid

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles

His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,

Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles

To-morrow’s diver in her horny milk,

Bisected shadows on the thunder’s bone

Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled

Corrosive spring out of the iceberg’s crop,

The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled

The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,

For half of love was planted in the lost,

And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,

The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,

Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble

Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,

And stake the sleepers in the savage grave

That the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded

The wild pigs’ wood, and slime upon the trees,

Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,

And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,

Rotating halves are horning as they drill

The arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death’s feather? tremble

The halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air,

And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.

The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,

The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew

Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer

Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt

Incising summer.

My Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet,

I scrape through resin to a starry bone

And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.

I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards

Red in an Austrian volley.

I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,

Screwing their bowels from a hill of bones,

Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.

The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,

Drip on my dead house garden.

Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth

The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn

Through the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel

On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,

Bearding the unborn devil,

Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.

The tongue’s of heaven gossip as I glide

Binding my angel’s hood.

Who blows death’s feather? What glory is colour?

I blow the stammel feather in the vein.

The loin is glory in a working pallor.

My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,

The secret child, I sift about the sea

Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

All all and all the dry worlds lever

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,

Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,

All from the oil, the pound of lava.

City of spring, the governed flower,

Turns in the earth that turns the ashen

Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,

Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,

Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

All all and all, the corpse’s lover,

Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,

All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,

Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,

Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.

Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,

The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,

Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,

Know now the flesh’s lock and vice,

And the cage for the scythe-eyed raven.

Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,

Fear not the screws that turn the voice,

And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,

Ghost with her ghost, contagious man

With the womb of his shapeless people.

All that shapes from the caul and suckle,

Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,

Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people’s fusion,

O light in zenith, the coupled bud,

And the flame in the flesh’s vision.

Out of the sea, the drive of oil,

Socket and grave, the brassy blood,

Flower, flower, all all and all.

I, in my intricate image

I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,

Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator

Laying my ghost in metal,

The scales of this twin world tread on the double,

My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor,

To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,

Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season

Worked on a world of petals;

She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble

Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain

Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,

Image of images, my metal phantom

Forcing forth through the harebell,

My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,

I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,

Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,

A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,

No death more natural;

Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,

In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance:

The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel,

No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire

Mount on man’s footfall,

I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,

In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,

Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,

Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,

Finding the water final,

On the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells,

Sail on the level, the departing adventure,

To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,

Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,

Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;

They see the squirrel stumble,

The haring snail go giddily round the flower,

A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles,

The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,

The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel

Turn the long sea arterial

Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy

Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,

Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,

Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,

The neck of the nostril,

Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody

The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,

Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,

The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,

A cock-on-a-dunghill

Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,

Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,

Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift

Rings out the Dead Sea scale;

And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,

Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft,

Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,

The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning

Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,

Let the wax disk babble

Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.

These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,

Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,

The flight of the carnal skull

And the cell-stepped thimble;

Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel

Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,

Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly

Star-set at Jacob’s angle,

Smoke hill and hophead’s valley,

And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral,

Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,

Be by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored

The stoved bones’ voyage downward

In the shipwreck of muscle;

Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,

The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,

My great blood’s iron single

In the pouring town,

I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle,

No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,

Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,

Time in the hourless houses

Shaking the sea-hatched skull,

And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,

All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle,

Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,

My ghost in his metal neptune

Forged in man’s mineral.

This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,

And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.

This bread I break

This bread I break was once the oat,

This wine upon a foreign tree

Plunged in its fruit;

Man in the day or wine at night

Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood

Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,

Once in this bread

The oat was merry in the wind;

Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let

Make desolation in the vein,

Were oat and grape

Born of the sensual root and sap;

My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Incarnate devil

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,

The central plains of Asia in his garden,

In shaping-time the circle stung awake,

In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,

And God walked there who was a fiddling warden

And played down pardon from the heavens’ hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,

A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,

The wisemen tell me that the garden gods

Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;

And when the moon rose windily it was

Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian

In sacred waters that no frost could harden,

And in the mighty mornings of the earth;

Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,

All heaven in the midnight of the sun,

A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

To-day, this insect

To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,

Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,

Time at the city spectacles, and half

The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,

In trust and tale I have divided sense,

Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double

Of head and tail made witnesses to this

Murder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story’s monster has a serpent caul,

Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,

Measures his own length on the garden wall

And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;

A crocodile before the chrysalis,

Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,

Winged like a sabbath ass this children’s piece

Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,

An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,

John’s beast, Job’s patience, and the fibs of vision,

Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:

‘Adam I love, my madmen’s love is endless,

No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,

All legends’ sweethearts on a tree of stories,

My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.’

The seed-at-zero

The seed-at-zero shall not storm

That town of ghosts, the trodden womb,

With her rampart to his tapping,

No god-in-hero tumble down

Like a tower on the town

Dumbly and divinely stumbling

Over the manwaging line.

The seed-at-zero shall not storm

That town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb

With her rampart to his tapping,

No god-in-hero tumble down

Like a tower on the town

Dumbly and divinely leaping

Over the warbearing line.

Through the rampart of the sky

Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,

Manna for the rumbling ground,

Quickening for the riddled sea;

Settled on a virgin stronghold

He shall grapple with the guard

And the keeper of the key.

Through the rampart of the sky

Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,

Manna for the guarded ground,

Quickening for the virgin sea;

Settling on a riddled stronghold

He shall grapple with the guard

And the loser of the key.

May a humble village labour

And a continent deny?

A hemisphere may scold him

And a green inch be his bearer;

Let the hero seed find harbour,

Seaports by a drunken shore

Have their thirsty sailors hide him.

May a humble planet labour

And a continent deny?

A village green may scold him

And a high sphere be his bearer;

Let the hero seed find harbour,

Seaports by a thirsty shore

Have their drunken sailors hide him.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,

From the foreign fields of space,

Shall not thunder on the town

With a star-flanked garrison,

Nor the cannons of his kingdom

Shall the hero-in-tomorrow

Range on the sky-scraping place.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,

From the star-flanked fields of space,

Thunders on the foreign town

With a sand-bagged garrison,

Nor the cannons of his kingdom

Shall the hero-in-to-morrow

Range from the grave-groping place.

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

When clouds are cursed by thunder,

Be said to weep when weather howls?

Shall rainbows be their tunics’ colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?

Shall it be said they sprinkle water

From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,

An old god’s dugs are pressed and pricked,

The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.

Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground,

Flung gravel chime? Let the stones speak

With tongues that talk all tongues.

Here in this spring

Here in this spring, stars float along the void;

Here in this ornamental winter

Down pelts the naked weather;

This summer buries a spring bird.

Symbols are selected from the years’

Slow rounding of four seasons’ coasts,

In autumn teach three seasons’ fires

And four birds’ notes.

I should tell summer from the trees, the worms

Tell, if at all, the winter’s storms

Or the funeral of the sun;

I should learn spring by the cuckooing,

And the slug should teach me destruction.

A worm tells summer better than the clock,

The slug’s a living calendar of days;

What shall it tell me if a timeless insect

Says the world wears away?

Do you not father me

Do you not father me, nor the erected arm

For my tall tower’s sake cast in her stone?

Do you not mother me, nor, as I am,

The lovers’ house, lie suffering my stain?

Do you not sister me, nor the erected crime

For my tall turrets carry as your sin?

Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb,

Adore my windows for their summer scene?

Am I not father, too, and the ascending boy,

The boy of woman and the wanton starer

Marking the flesh and summer in the bay?

Am I not sister, too, who is my saviour?

Am I not all of you by the directed sea

Where bird and shell are babbling in my tower?

Am I not you who front the tidy shore,

Nor roof of sand, nor yet the towering tiler?

You are all these, said she who gave me the long suck,

All these, he said who sacked the children’s town,

Up rose the Abraham-man, mad for my sake,

They said, who hacked and humoured, they were mine.

I am, the tower told, felled by a timeless stroke,

Who razed my wooden folly stands aghast,

For man-begetters in the dry-as-paste,

The ringed-sea ghost, rise grimly from the wrack.

Do you not father me on the destroying sand?

You are your sisters’ sire, said seaweedy,

The salt sucked dam and darlings of the land

Who play the proper gentleman and lady.

Shall I still be love’s house on the widdershin earth,

Woe to the windy masons at my shelter?

Love’s house, they answer, and the tower death

Lie all unknowing of the grave sin-eater.

Out of the sighs

Out of the sighs a little comes,

But not of grief, for I have knocked down that

Before the agony; the spirit grows,

Forgets, and cries;

A little comes, is tasted and found good;

All could not disappoint;

There must, be praised, some certainty,

If not of loving well, then not,

And that is true after perpetual defeat.

After such fighting as the weakest know,

There’s more than dying;

Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,

He’ll ache too long

Through no regret of leaving woman waiting

For her soldier stained with spilt words

That spill such acrid blood.

Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,

Feeling regret when this is wasted

That made me happy in the sun,

How much was happy while it lasted,

Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty,

The hollow words could bear all suffering

And cure me of ills.

Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,

The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,

Groping for matter under the dog’s plate,

Man should be cured of distemper.

For all there is to give I offer:

Crumbs, barn, and halter.

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month,

Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill,

As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;

Time, in a folly’s rider, like a county man

Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,

Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December’s pools

By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees

Lie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;

Holy hard, my country children in the world of tales,

The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,

The first and steepled season, to the summer’s game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,

Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,

Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;

Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,

Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,

Spill the lank folly’s hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,

Stalking my children’s faces with a tail of blood,

Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;

Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,

Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.

Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

Was there a time

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles

In children’s circuses could stay their troubles?

There was a time they could cry over books,

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.

What’s never known is safest in this life.

Under the skysigns they who have no arms

Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost

Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

Now

Now

Say nay,

Man dry man,

Dry lover mine

The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,

Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,

Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now

Say nay,

Sir no say,

Death to the yes,

the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,

Should he who split his children with a cure

Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now

Say nay,

No say sir

Yea the dead stir,

And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,

He lying low with ruin in his ear,

The cockrel’s tide upcasting from the fire.

Now

Say nay,

So star fall,

So the ball fail,

So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,

The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,

The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now

Say nay

A fig for

The seal of fire,

Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,

We make me mystic as the arm of air,

The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Why east wind chills

Why east wind chills and south wind cools

Shall not be known till windwell dries

And west’s no longer drowned

In winds that bring the fruit and rind

Of many a hundred falls;

Why silk is soft and the stone wounds

The child shall question all his days,

Why night-time rain and the breast’s blood

Both quench his thirst he’ll have a black reply.

When cometh Jack Frost? the children ask.

Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?

Not till, from high and low, their dust

Sprinkles in children’s eyes a long-last sleep

And dusk is crowded with the children’s ghosts,

Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.

All things are known: the stars’ advice

Calls some content to travel with the winds,

Though what the stars ask as they round

Time upon time the towers of the skies

Is heard but little till the stars go out.

I hear content, and ‘Be Content’

Ring like a handbell through the corridors,

And ‘Know no answer,’ and I know

No answer to the children’s cry

Of echo’s answer and the man of frost

And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

A grief ago

A grief ago,

She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,

Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,

Hell wind and sea,

A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,

Rose maid and male,

Or, master venus, through the paddler’s bowl

Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,

A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,

Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud

Shot through the leaf,

Was who was folded on the rod the aaron

Road east to plague,

The horn and ball of water on the frog

Housed in the side.

And she who lies,

Like exodus a chapter from the garden,

Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring,

Tugged through the days

Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,

On field and sand

The twelve triangles of the cherub wind

Engraving going.

Who then is she,

She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,

Drives out the father from the caesared camp;

The dens of shape

Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,

That she I have,

The country-handed grave boxed into love,

Rise before dark.

The night is near,

A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;

I tell her this: before the suncock cast

Her bone to fire,

Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid

Draw in their seas,

So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,

And close her fist.

How soon the servant sun

How soon the servant sun,

(Sir morrow mark),

Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone,

(Fog has a bone

He’ll trumpet into meat),

Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown

And the naked egg stand straight,

Sir morrow at his sponge,

(The wound records),

The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,

(Fog by his spring

Soaks up the sewing tides),

Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange

Man morrow blows through food.

All nerves to serve the sun,

The rite of light,

A claw I question from the mouse’s bone,

The long-tailed stone

Trap I with coil and sheet,

Let the soil squeal I am the biting man

And the velvet dead inch out.

How soon my level, lord,

(Sir morrow stamps

Two heels of water on the floor of seed),

Shall raise a lamp

Or spirit up a cloud,

Erect a walking centre in the shroud,

Invisible on the stump

A leg as long as trees,

This inward sir,

Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,

The womb-eyed, cries,

And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour’s ear,

Blasts back the trumpet voice.

Ears in the turrets hear

Ears in the turrets hear

Hands grumble on the door,

Eyes in the gables see

The fingers at the locks.

Shall I unbolt or stay

Alone till the day I die

Unseen by stranger-eyes

In this white house?

Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

Beyond this island bound

By a thin sea of flesh

And a bone coast,

The land lies out of sound

And the hills out of mind.

No birds or flying fish

Disturbs this island’s rest.

Ears in this island hear

The wind pass like a fire,

Eyes in this island see

Ships anchor off the bay.

Shall I run to the ships

With the wind in my hair,

Or stay till the day I die

And welcome no sailor?

Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

Hands grumble on the door,

Ships anchor off the bay,

Rain beats the sand and slates.

Shall I let in the stranger,

Shall I welcome the sailor,

Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,

Hold you poison or grapes?

Foster the light

Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,

Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,

But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;

Master the night nor serve the snowman’s brain

That shapes each bushy item of the air

Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.

Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel’s eggs,

Nor hammer back a season in the figs,

But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;

Farmer in time of frost the burning leagues,

By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,

In your young years the vegetable century.

And father all nor fail the fly-lord’s acre,

Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,

But rail with your wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet;

Of mortal voices to the ninnies’ choir,

High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,

And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.

Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,

O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift

From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;

Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift

Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds

Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.

Who gave these seas their colour in a shape,

Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark

In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;

O who is glory in the shapeless maps,

Now make the world of me as I have made

A merry manshape of your walking circle.

The hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder

That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor pat the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

Should lanterns shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, and any boy of love

Look twice before he fell from grace.

The features in their private dark

Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come

And from her lips the faded pigments fall,

The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

I have been told to reason by the heart,

But heart, like head, leads helplessly;

I have been told to reason by the pulse,

And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace

Till field and roof lie level and the same

So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman

Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard many years of telling,

And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

I have longed to move away

I have longed to move away

From the hissing of the spent lie

And the old terrors’ continual cry

Growing more terrible as the day

Goes over the hill into the deep sea;

I have longed to move away

From the repetition of salutes,

For there are ghosts in the air

And ghostly echoes on paper,

And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;

Some life, yet unspent, might explode

Out of the old lie burning on the ground,

And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.

Neither by night’s ancient fear,

The parting of hat from hair,

Pursed lips at the receiver,

Shall I fall to death’s feather.

By these I would not care to die,

Half convention and half lie.

Find meat on bones

‘Find meat on bones that soon have none,

And drink in the two milked crags,

The merriest marrow and the dregs

Before the ladies’ breasts are hags

And the limbs are torn.

Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,

But when the ladies are cold as stone

Then hang a ram rose over the rags.

‘Rebel against the binding moon

And the parliament of sky,

The kingcrafts of the wicked sea,

Autocracy of night and day,

Dictatorship of sun.

Rebel against the flesh and bone,

The word of the blood, the wily skin,

And the maggot no man can slay.’

‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,

And my heart is cracked across;

My face is haggard in the glass,

My lips are withered with a kiss,

My breasts are thin.

A merry girl took me for man,

I laid her down and told her sin,

And put beside her a ram rose.

‘The maggot that no man can kill

And the man no rope can hang

Rebel against my father’s dream

That out of a bower of red swine

Howls the foul fiend to heel.

I cannot murder, like a fool,

Season and sunshine, grace and girl,

Nor can I smother the sweet waking.’

Black night still ministers the moon,

And the sky lays down her laws,

The sea speaks in a kingly voice,

Light and dark are no enemies

But one companion.

‘War on the spider and the wren!

War on the destiny of man!

Doom on the sun!’

Before death takes you, O take back this.

Grief thief of time

Grief thief of time crawls off,

The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,

The knave of pain steals off

The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,

The old forget the cries,

Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,

Call back the castaways

Riding the sea light on a sunken path,

The old forget the grief,

Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,

Cast back the bone of youth

And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies

Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories

And timelessly lies loving with the thief.

Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,

Death flashing from his sleeve,

With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack

Sneak down the stallion grave,

Bull’s-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack

And free the twin-boxed grief,

No silver whistles chase him down the weeks’

Dayed peaks to day to death,

These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes

And the undead eye-teeth,

No third eye probe into a rainbow’s sex

That bridged the human halves,

All shall remain and on the graveward gulf

Shape with my fathers’ thieves.

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Then was my neophyte

Then was my neophyte,

Child in white blood bent on its knees

Under the bell of rocks,

Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas

The winder of the water-clocks

Calls a green day and night.

My sea hermaphrodite,

Snail of man in His ship of fires

That burn the bitten decks,

Knew all His horrible desires

The climber of the water sex

Calls the green rock of light.

Who in these labyrinths,

This tidethread and the lane of scales,

Twine in a moon-blown shell,

Escapes to the flat cities’ sails

Furled on the fishes’ house and hell,

Nor falls to His green myths?

Stretch the salt photographs,

The landscape grief, love in His oils

Mirror from man to whale

That the green child see like a grail

Through veil and fin and fire and coil

Time on the canvas paths.

He films my vanity.

Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,

Over the water come

Children from homes and children’s parks

Who speak on a finger and thumb,

And the masked, headless boy.

His reels and mystery

The winder of the clockwise scene

Wound like a ball of lakes

Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen

Love’s image till my heartbone breaks

By a dramatic sea.

Who kills my history?

The year-hedged row is lame with flint,

Blunt scythe and water blade.

‘Who could snap off the shapeless print

From your to-morrow-treading shade

With oracle for eye?’

Time kills me terribly.

‘Time shall not murder you,’ He said,

‘Nor the green nought be hurt;

Who could hack out your unsucked heart,

O green and unborn and undead?’

I saw time murder me.

Altarwise by owl-light

I

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;

Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,

And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,

Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.

Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,

Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,

With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,

Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,

Scraped at my cradle in a walking word

That night of time under the Christward shelter:

I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,

And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

II

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;

The child that sucketh long is shooting up,

The planet-ducted pelican of circles

Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;

Child of the short spark in a shapeless country

Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;

The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,

You by the cavern over the black stairs,

Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,

And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.

Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,

Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers

Over these groundworks thrusting through a pavement

And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

III

First there was the lamb on knocking knees

And three dead seasons on a climbing grave

That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,

Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,

Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes

On thunderous pavements in the garden time;

Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle

Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,

And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,

Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;

The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,

Alone alive among his mutton fold,

We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,

Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

IV

What is the metre of the dictionary?

The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?

Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?

(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).

Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?

(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).

What of a bamboo man among your acres?

Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?

Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,

My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.

Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,

Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,

Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,

Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

V

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,

From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,

The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;

Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,

Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.

Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.

For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,

Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,

A climbing sea from Asia had me down

And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,

Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel

Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa

By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil

And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.

VI

Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,

He in a book of water tallow-eyed

By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels

And burned sea silence on a wick of words.

Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,

Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;

And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,

Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue

Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower

The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;

Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard

Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,

The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed

Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.

VII

Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,

A Bible-leaved of all the written woods

Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,

Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,

And one light’s language in the book of trees.

Doom on deniers at the wind-turned statement.

Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,

The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge

Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,

Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.

Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,

From bald pavilions and the house of bread

Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,

On rose and icicle the ringing handprint.

VIII

This was the crucifixion on the mountain,

Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave

As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;

The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,

Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,

With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.

This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle

Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails

Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples

From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.

I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,

Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,

And by this blowcock witness of the sun

Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.

IX

From the oracular archives and the parchment,

Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,

The lamped calligrapher, the queen in splints,

Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,

Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna

Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.

This was the resurrection in the desert,

Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars

Gold on such features, and the linen spirit

Weds my long gentleman to dusts and furies;

With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,

World in the sand, on the triangle landscape,

With stones of odyssey for ash and garland

And rivers of the dead around my neck.

X

Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage

Atlaswise hold half-way off the dummy bay

Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:

So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes

Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image

December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.

Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail

Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,

What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel

Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?

Green as beginning, let the garden diving

Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day

When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom

My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.

Because the pleasure-bird whistles

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,

Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?

Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer

The supper and knives of a mood.

In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year

That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,

An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,

Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,

Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair

In a wind that plucked a goose,

Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,

Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.

Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,

That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea

Secretly in statuary,

Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,

Not spin to stare at an old year

Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries

Like the mauled pictures of boys?

The salt person and blasted place

I furnish with the meat of a fable;

If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble

An upright man in the antipodes

Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:

Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

I make this in a warring absence

I make this in a warring absence when

Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love’s season

Harbours my anchored tongue, slips the quaystone,

When, praise is blessed, her pride in mast and fountain

Sailed and set dazzling by the handshaped ocean,

In that proud sailing tree with branches driven

Through the last vault and vegetable groyne,

And this weak house to marrow-columned heaven,

Is corner-cast, breath’s rag, scrawled weed, a vain

And opium head, crow stalk, puffed, cut, and blown,

Or like the tide-looped breastknot reefed again

Or rent ancestrally the roped sea-hymen,

And, pride is last, is like a child alone

By magnet winds to her blind mother drawn,

Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

She makes for me a nettle’s innocence

And a silk pigeon’s guilt in her proud absence,

In the molested rocks the shell of virgins,

The frank, closed pearl, the sea-girls’ lineaments

Glint in the staved and siren-printed caverns,

Is maiden in the shameful oak, omens

Whalebed and bulldance, the gold bush of lions,

Proud as a sucked stone and huge as sandgrains.

These are her contraries: the beast who follows

With priest’s grave foot and hand of five assassins

Her molten flight up cinder-nesting columns,

Calls the starved fire herd, is cast in ice,

Lost in a limp-treed and uneating silence,

Who scales a hailing hill in her cold flintsteps

Falls on a ring of summers and locked noons.

I make a weapon of an ass’s skeleton

And walk the warring sands by the dead town.

Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,

Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins

Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.

Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone,

And, for that murder’s sake, dark with contagion

Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.

Ruin, the room of errors, one rood dropped

Down the stacked sea and water-pillared shade,

Weighed in rock shroud, is my proud pyramid;

Where, wound in emerald linen and sharp wind,

The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend,

Comes love’s anatomist with sun-gloved hand

Who picks the live heart on a diamond.

‘His mother’s womb had a tongue that lapped up mud,’

Cried the topless, inchtaped lips from hank and hood

In that bright anchorground where I lay linened,

‘A lizard darting with black venom’s thread

Doubled, to fork him back, through the lockjaw bed

And the breath-white, curtained mouth of seed.’

‘See,’ drummed the taut masks, ‘how the dead ascend:

In the groin’s endless coil a man is tangled.’

These once-blind eyes have breathed a wind of visions,

The cauldron’s root through this once-rindless hand

Fumed like a tree, and tossed a burning bird;

With loud, torn tooth and tail and cobweb drum

The crumpled packs fled past this ghost in bloom,

And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride,

The terrible world my brother bares his skin.

Now in the cloud’s big breast lie quiet countries,

Delivered seas my love from her proud place

Walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face,

A calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair

Once where the soft snow’s blood was turned to ice.

And though my love pulls the pale, nippled air,

Prides of to-morrow suckling in her eyes,

Yet this I make in a forgiving presence.

When all my five and country senses see

When all my five and country senses see,

The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark

How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,

Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,

Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,

The whispering ears will watch love drummed away

Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,

And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry

That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.

My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

My one and noble heart has witnesses

In all love’s countries, that will grope awake;

And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,

The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

We lying by seasand

We lying by seasand, watching yellow

And the grave sea, mock who deride

Who follow the red rivers, hollow

Alcove of words out of cicada shade,

For in this yellow grave of sand and sea

A calling for colour calls with the wind

That’s grave and gay as grave and sea

Sleeping on either hand.

The lunar silences, the silent tide

Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master

Ribbed between desert and water storm,

Should cure our ills of the water

With a one-coloured calm;

The heavenly music over the sand

Sounds with the grains as they hurry

Hiding the golden mountains and mansions

Of the grave, gay, seaside land.

Bound by a sovereign strip, we lie,

Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away

The strata of the shore and drown red rock;

But wishes breed not, neither

Can we fend off rock arrival,

Lie watching yellow until the golden weather

Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill.

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell claps me to churches

When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulpher priest,

His beast heel cleft in a sandal,

Time marks a black aisle kindle from the brand of ashes,

Grief with dishevelled hands tear out the altar ghost

And a firewind kill the candle.

Over the choir minute I hear the hour chant:

Time’s coral saint and the salt grief drown a foul sepulchre

And a whirlpool drives the prayerwheel;

Moonfall and sailing emperor, pale as their tide-print,

Hear by death’s accident the clocked and dashed-down spire

Strike the sea hour through bellmetal.

There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame,

Storm, snow, and fountain in the weather of fireworks,

Cathedral calm in the pulled house;

Grief with drenched book and candle christens the cherub time

From the emerald, still bell; and from the pacing weather-cock

The voice of bird on coral prays.

Forever it is a white child in the dark-skinned summer

Out of the font of bone and plants at that stone tocsin

Scales the blue wall of spirits;

From blank and leaking winter sails the child in colour,

Shakes, in crabbed burial shawl, by sorcerer’s insect woken,

Ding dong from the mute turrets.

I mean by time the cast and curfew rascal of our marriage,

At nightbreak born in the fat side, from an animal bed

In a holy room in a wave;

And all love’s sinners in sweet cloth kneel to a hyleg image,

Nutmeg, civet, and sea-parsley serve the plagued groom and bride

Who have brought forth the urchin grief.

O make me a mask

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies

Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws

Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,

Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies

The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,

The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,

Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce

To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,

And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes

To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive

Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses

By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

The spire cranes

The spire cranes. Its statue is an aviary.

From the stone nest it does not let the feathery

Carved birds blunt their striking throats on the salt gravel,

Pierce the spilt sky with diving wing in weed and heel

An inch in froth. Chimes cheat the prison spire, pelter

In time like outlaw rains on that priest, water,

Time for the swimmers’ hands, music for silver lock

And mouth. Both note and plume plunge from the spire’s hook.

Those craning birds are choice for you, songs that jump back

To the built voice, or fly with winter to the bells,

But do not travel down dumb wind like prodigals.

After the funeral

(In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,

Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap

Tap happily of one peg in the thick

Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,

The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,

Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,

Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat

In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,

That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,

After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles

In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,

I stand, for this memorial’s sake, alone

In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann

Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles

Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun

(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly

Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;

She would not have me sinking in the holy

Flood of her heart’s fame; she would lie dumb and deep

And need no druid of her broken body).

But I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all

The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue

Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,

Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods

That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,

Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.

Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue

With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull

Is carved from her in a room with a wet window

In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands

Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare

Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,

Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;

And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.

These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental

Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,

Storm me forever over her grave until

The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love

And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

Once it was the colour of saying

Once it was the colour of saying

Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill

With a capsized field where a school sat still

And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;

The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo

That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.

When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park

Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo

Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,

The shade of their trees was a word of many shades

And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;

Now my saying shall be my undoing,

And every stone I wind off like a reel.

Not from this anger

Not from this anger, anticlimax after

Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower

Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods

In a land strapped by hunger

Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds

And bear those tendril hands I touch across

The agonized, two seas.

Behind my head a square of sky sags over

The circular smile tossed from lover to lover

And the golden ball spins out of the skies;

Not from this anger after

Refusal struck like a bell under water

Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,

That burns along my eyes.

How shall my animal

How shall my animal

Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,

Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,

Endure burial under the spelling wall,

The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,

Who should be furious,

Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,

Roaring, crawling, quarrel

With the outside weathers,

The natural circle of the discovered skies

Draw down to its weird eyes?

How shall it magnetize,

Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze

That melts the lionhead’s heel and horseshoe of the heart,

A brute land in the cool top of the country days

To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,

Love and labour and kill

In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout out,

The black, burst sea rejoice,

The bowels turn turtle,

Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle

The parched and raging voice?

Fishermen of mermen

Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin

With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,

Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound

Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,

Trace out a tentacle,

Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed

To clasp my fury on ground

And clap its great blood down;

Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas

Or poise the day on a horn.

Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,

Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost

Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops

With carved bird, saint, and sun, the wrackspiked maiden mouth

Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,

Clips short the gesture of breath.

Die in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut,

And roll with the knocked earth:

Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.

You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,

And dug your grave in my breast.

The tombstone told when she died

The tombstone told when she died.

Her two surnames stopped me still.

A virgin married at rest.

She married in this pouring place,

That I struck one day by luck,

Before I heard in my mother’s side

Or saw in the looking-glass shell

The rain through her cold heart speak

And the sun killed in her face.

More the thick stone cannot tell.

Before she lay on a stranger’s bed

With a hand plunged through her hair,

Or that rainy tongue beat back

Through the devilish years and innocent deaths

To the room of a secret child,

Among men later I heard it said

She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare

And her red lips were kissed black,

She wept in her pain and made mouths,

Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.

I who saw in a hurried film

Death and this mad heroine

Meet once on a mortal wall

Heard her speak through the chipped beak

Of the stone bird guarding her:

I died before bedtime came

But my womb was bellowing

And I felt with my bare fall

A blazing red harsh head tear up

And the dear floods of his hair.

On no work of words

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody

Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body

I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given

Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,

The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death

That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath

And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.

Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas

If I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.

A saint about to fall

A saint about to fall,

The stained flats of heaven hit and razed

To the kissed kite hems of his shawl,

On the last street wave praised

The unwinding, song by rock,

Of the woven wall

Of his father’s house in the sands,

The vanishing of the musical ship-work and the chucked bells,

The wound-down cough of the blood-counting clock

Behind a face of hands,

On the angelic etna of the last whirring featherlands,

Wind-heeled foot in the hole of a fireball,

Hymned his shrivelling flock,

On the last rick’s tip by spilled wine-wells

Sang heaven hungry and the quick

Cut Christbread spitting vinegar and all

The mazes of his praise and envious tongue were worked in flames and shells.

Glory cracked like a flea.

The sun-leaved holy candlewoods

Drivelled down to one singeing tree

With a stub of black buds,

The sweet, fish-gilled boats bringing blood

Lurched through a scuttled sea

With a hold of leeches and straws,

Heaven fell with his fall and one crocked bell beat the left air.

O wake in me in my house in the mud

Of the crotch of the squawking shores,

Flicked from the carbolic city puzzle in a bed of sores

The scudding base of the familiar sky,

The lofty roots of the clouds.

From an odd room in a split house stare,

Milk in your mouth, at the sour floods

That bury the sweet street slowly, see

The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.

Strike in the time-bomb town,

Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,

Throw your fear a parcel of stone

Through the dark asylum,

Lapped among herods wail

As their blade marches in

That the eyes are already murdered,

The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth to feed.

O wake to see, after a noble fall,

The old mud hatch again, the horrid

Woe drip from the dishrag hands and the pressed sponge of the forehead,

The breath draw back like a bolt through white oil

And a stranger enter like iron.

Cry joy that hits witchlike midwife second

Bullies into rough seas you so gentle

And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun

A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot

Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath

Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.

Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat

Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.

‘All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:

I’ll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,

Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time

Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,

Strike light, and bloody a loud room.

‘If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house. My hand unravel

When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.

Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make

A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.’

‘No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed

Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms

My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.

Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,

Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.

‘Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave

To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,

O my lost love bounced from a good home;

The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave

Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.

‘Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,

At the breast stored with seas. No return

Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways.

The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,

And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.’

Twenty-four years

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.

(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)

In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor

Sewing a shroud for a journey

By the light of the meat-eating sun.

Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

With my red veins full of money,

In the final direction of the elementary town

I advance for as long as forever is.

The Conversation of Prayer

The conversation of prayers about to be said

By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs

Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,

The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move

And the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise

Into the answering skies from the green ground,

From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.

The sound about to be said in the two prayers

For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?

Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?

The conversation of prayers about to be said

Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stairs

To-night shall find no dying but alive and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.

And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer

Shall drown in a grief as deep as his true grave,

And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,

Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

And the still hour

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round

Zion of the water bead

And the synagogue of the ear of corn

Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound

Or sow my salt seed

In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.

I shall not murder

The mankind of her going with a grave truth

Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath

With any further

Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

Poem in October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.

These were the woods the river and sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

This Side of the Truth

(for Llewelyn)

This side of the truth,

You may not see, my son,

King of your blue eyes

In the blinding country of youth,

That all is undone,

Under the unminding skies,

Of innocence and guilt

Before you move to make

One gesture of the heart or head,

Is gathered and spilt

Into the winding dark

Like the dust of the dead.

Good and bad, two ways

Of moving about your death

By the grinding sea,

King of your heart in the blind days,

Blow away like breath,

Go crying through you and me

And the souls of all men

Into the innocent

Dark, and the guilty dark, and good

Death, and bad death, and then

In the last element

Fly like the stars’ blood

Like the sun’s tears,

Like the moon’s seed, rubbish

And fire, the flying rant

Of the sky, king of your six years.

And the wicked wish,

Down the beginning of plants

And animals and birds,

Water and light, the earth and sky,

Is cast before you move,

And all your deeds and words,

Each truth, each lie,

Die in unjudging love.

To Others than You

Friend by enemy I call you out.

You with a bad coin in your socket,

You my friend there with a winning air

Who palmed the lie on me when you looked

Brassily at my shyest secret,

Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye

Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,

Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,

Whom now I conjure to stand as thief

In the memory worked by mirrors,

With unforgettably smiling act,

Quickness of hand in the velvet glove

And my whole heart under your hammer,

Were once such a creature, so gay and frank

A desireless familiar

I never thought to utter or think

While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults

As much as for their good,

My friends were enemies on stilts

With their heads in a cunning cloud.

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed

She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,

At large as the dead,

Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed

Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,

Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust

Yet raves at her will

On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last

I may without fail

Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Unluckily for a Death

Unluckily for a death

Waiting with phoenix under

The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days,

And for the woman in shades

Saint carved and sensual among the scudding

Dead and gone, dedicate forever to my self

Though the brawl of the kiss has not occurred

On the clay cold mouth, on the fire

Branded forehead, that could bind

Her constant, nor the winds of love broken wide

To the wind the choir and cloister

Of the wintry nunnery of the order of lust

Beneath my life, that sighs for the seducer’s coming

In the sun strokes of summer,

Loving on this sea banged guilt

My holy lucky body

Under the cloud against love is caught and held and kissed

In the mill of the midst

Of the descending day, the dark our folly,

Cut to the still star in the order of the quick

But blessed by such heroic hosts in your every

Inch and glance that the wound

Is certain god, and the ceremony of souls

Is celebrated there, and communion between suns.

Never shall my self chant

About the saint in shades while the endless breviary

Turns of your prayed flesh, nor shall I shoo the bird below me:

The death biding two lie lonely.

I see the tigron in tears

In the androgynous dark,

His striped and noon maned tribe striding to holocaust,

The she mules bear their minotaurs,

The duck-billed platypus broody in a milk of birds.

I see the wanting nun saint carved in a garb

Of shades, symbol of desire beyond my hours

And guilts, great crotch and giant

Continence. I see the unfired phoenix, herald

And heaven crier, arrow now of aspiring

And the renouncing of islands.

All love but for the full assemblage in flower

Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,

And the grave its daughters.

Love, my fate got luckily,

Teaches with no telling

That the phoenix’ bid for heaven and the desire after

Death in the carved nunnery

Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing

Nor walk in the cool of your mortal garden

With immortality at my side like Christ the sky.

This I know from the native

Tongue of your translating eyes. The young stars told me,

Hurling into beginning like Christ the child.

Lucklessly she must lie patient

And the vaulting bird be still. O my true love, hold me.

In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,

And the living earth your sons.

The Hunchback in the Park

The hunchback in the park

A solitary mister

Propped between trees and water

From the opening of the garden lock

That lets the trees and water enter

Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper

Drinking water from the chained cup

That the children filled with gravel

In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Slept at night in a dog kennel

But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early

Like the water he sat down

And Mister they called Hey mister

The truant boys from the town

Running when he had heard them clearly

On out of sound

Past lake and rockery

Laughing when he shook his paper

Hunchbacked in mockery

Through the loud zoo of the willow groves

Dodging the park keeper

With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper

Alone between nurses and swans

While the boys among willows

Made the tigers jump out of their eyes

To roar on the rockery stones

And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time

A woman figure without fault

Straight as a young elm

Straight and tall from his crooked bones

That she might stand in the night

After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park

After the railings and shrubberies

The birds the grass the trees the lake

And the wild boys innocent as strawberries

Had followed the hunchback

To his kennel in the dark.

Into her Lying Down Head

I

Into her lying down head

His enemies entered bed,

Under the encumbered eyelid,

Through the rippled drum of the hair-buried ear;

And Noah’s rekindled now unkind dove

Flew man-bearing there.

Last night in a raping wave

Whales unreined from the green grave

In fountains of origin gave up their love,

Along her innocence glided

Jaun aflame and savagely young King Lear,

Queen Catherine howling bare

And Samson drowned in his hair,

The colossal intimacies of silent

Once seen strangers or shades on a stair;

There the dark blade and wanton sighing her down

To a haycock couch and the scythes of his arms

Rode and whistled a hundred times

Before the crowing morning climbed;

Man was the burning England she was sleep-walking, and the enamouring island

Made her limbs blind by luminous charms,

Sleep to a newborn sleep in a swaddling loin-leaf stroked and sang

And his runaway beloved childlike laid in the acorned sand.

II

There where a numberless tongue

Wound their room with a male moan,

His faith around her flew undone

And darkness hung the walls with baskets of snakes,

A furnace-nostrilled column-membered

Super-or-near man

Resembling to her dulled sense

The thief of adolescence,

Early imaginary half remembered

Oceanic lover alone

Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes,

Made his bad bed in her good

Night, and enjoyed as he would.

Crying, white gowned, from the middle moonlit stages

Out to the tiered and hearing tide,

Close and far she announced the theft of the heart

In the taken body at many ages,

Trespasser and broken bride

Celebrating at her side

All blood-signed assailing and vanished marriages in which he had no lovely part

Nor could share, for his pride, to the least

Mutter and foul wingbeat of the solemnizing nightpriest

Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast.

III

Two sand grains together in bed,

Head to heaven-circling head,

Singly lie with the whole wide shore,

The covering sea their nightfall with no names;

And out of every domed and soil-based shell

One voice in chains declaims

The female, deadly, and male

Libidinous betrayal,

Golden dissolving under the water veil.

A she bird sleeping brittle by

Her lover’s wings that fold to-morrow’s flight,

Within the nested treefork

Sings to the treading hawk

Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk.

A blade of grass longs with the meadow,

A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill.

Open as to the air to the naked shadow

O she lies alone and still,

Innocent between two wars,

With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds to perpetuate the stars,

A man torn up mourns in the sole night.

And the second comers, the severers, the enemies from the deep

Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their dead in her faithless sleep.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Deaths and Entrances

On almost the incendiary eve

Of several near deaths,

When one at the great least of your best loved

And always known must leave

Lions and fires of his flying breath,

Of your immortal friends

Who’d raise the organs of the counted dust

To shoot and sing your praise,

One who called deepest down shall hold his peace

That cannot sink or cease

Endlessly to his wound

In many married London’s estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eve

When at your lips and keys,

Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,

One who is most unknown,

Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,

Will dive up to his tears.

He’ll bathe his raining blood in the male sea

Who strode for your own dead

And wind his globe out of your water thread

And load the throats of shells

With every cry since light

Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eve

Of deaths and entrances,

When near and strange wounded on London’s waves

Have sought your single grave,

One enemy, of many, who knows well

Your heart is luminous

In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,

Will pull the thunderbolts

To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys

And sear just riders back,

Until that one loved least

Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

A Winter’s Tale

It is a winter’s tale

That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes

And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,

Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,

The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,

And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl

Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold

Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl

In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old

On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,

As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled

The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,

Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then

In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow

And the dung hills white as wool and the hen

Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow

Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,

The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,

The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids

Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,

And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light

And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,

In the muffled house, in the quick of night,

At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,

He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky

May his hunger go howling on bare white bones

Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties

And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers

And fires where he should prowl down the cloud

Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.

His naked need struck him howling and bowed

Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung

Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed

In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,

And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught

In the always desiring centre of the white

Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought

By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,

By losing him all in love, and cast his need

Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,

Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed

Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing

In the departed villages. The nightingale,

Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings

And spells on the winds of the dead his winter’s tale.

The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened

Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings

On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening

Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.

Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound

In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide

And there outside on the bread of the ground

A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.

A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move

On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light

As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved

Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white

Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock

Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old

Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.

And the harp shaped voice of the water’s dust plucks in a fold

Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised

Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice

Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised

And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced

That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.

And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed

Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight

Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year

When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row

And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,

Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow

And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-

Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,

All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-

Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.

Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,

The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond

The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,

The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.

In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.

On a bread white hill over the cupped farm

And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended

Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm

And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes

On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,

The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes

That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread

And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn

Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither

Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.

Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather

That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded

In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,

And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,

And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,

The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,

Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-

Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds

Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.

And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

On a Wedding Anniversary

The sky is torn across

This ragged anniversary of two

Who moved for three years in tune

Down the long walks of their vows.

Now their love lies a loss

And Love and his patients roar on a chain;

From every tune or crater

Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

Too late in the wrong rain

They come together whom their love parted:

The windows pour into their heart

And the doors burn in their brain.

There was a Saviour

There was a saviour

Rarer than radium,

Commoner than water, crueller than truth;

Children kept from the sun

Assembled at his tongue

To hear the golden note turn in a groove,

Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes

In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.

The voice of children says

From a lost wilderness

There was calm to be done in his safe unrest,

When hindering man hurt

Man, animal, or bird

We hid our fears in that murdering breath,

Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

There was glory to hear

In the churches of his tears,

Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,

O you who could not cry

On to the ground when a man died

Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood

And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:

Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Two proud, blacked brothers cry,

Winter-locked side by side,

To this inhospitable hollow year,

O we who could not stir

One lean sigh when we heard

Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour

But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall

Now break a giant tear for the little known fall,

For the drooping of homes

That did not nurse our bones,

Brave deaths of only ones but never found,

Now see, alone in us,

Our own true strangers’ dust

Ride through the doors of our unentered house.

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

On the Marriage of a Virgin

Waking alone in a multitude of loves when morning’s light

Surprised in the opening of her nightlong eyes

His golden yesterday asleep upon the iris

And this day’s sun leapt up the sky out of her thighs

Was miraculous virginity old as loaves and fishes,

Though the moment of a miracle is unending lightning

And the shipyards of Galilee’s footprints hide a navy of doves.

No longer will the vibrations of the sun desire on

Her deepsea pillow where once she married alone,

Her heart all ears and eyes, lips catching the avalanche

Of the golden ghost who ringed with his streams her mercury bone,

Who under the lids of her windows hoisted his golden luggage,

For a man sleeps where fire leapt down and she learns through his arm

That other sun, the jealous coursing of the unrivalled blood.

In my Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I

Myselves

The grievers

Grieve

Among the street burned to tireless death

A child of a few hours

With its kneading mouth

Charred on the black breast of the grave

The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin

With singing

Sing

Darkness kindled back into beginning

When the caught tongue nodded blind,

A star was broken

Into the centuries of the child

Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive

Us forgive

Us your death that myselves the believers

May hold it in a great flood

Till the blood shall spurt,

And the dust shall sing like a bird

As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying

Your dying

Cry,

Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed

Street we chant the flying sea

In the body bereft.

Love is the last light spoken. Oh

Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

II

I know not whether

Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock

Or the white ewe lamb

Or the chosen virgin

Laid in her snow

On the altar of London,

Was the first to die

In the cinder of the little skull,

O bride and bride groom

O Adam and Eve together

Lying in the lull

Under the sad breast of the head stone

White as the skeleton

Of the garden of Eden.

I know the legend

Of Adam and Eve is never for a second

Silent in my service

Over the dead infants

Over the one

Child who was priest and servants,

Word, singers, and tongue

In the cinder of the little skull,

Who was the serpent’s

Night fall and the fruit like a sun,

Man and woman undone,

Beginning crumbled back to darkness

Bare as nurseries

Of the garden of wilderness.

III

Into the organpipes and steeples

Of the luminous cathedrals,

Into the weathercocks’ molten mouths

Rippling in twelve-winded circles,

Into the dead clock burning the hour

Over the urn of sabbaths

Over the whirling ditch of daybreak

Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire

And the golden pavements laid in requiems,

Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames,

Into the wine burning like brandy,

The masses of the sea

The masses of the sea under

The masses of the infant-bearing sea

Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever

Glory glory glory

The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.

Once below a time

I

Once below a time,

When my pinned-around-the-spirit

Cut-to-measure flesh bit,

Suit for a serial sum

On the first of each hardship,

My paid-for slaved-for own too late

In love torn breeches and blistered jacket

On the snapping rims of the ashpit,

In grottoes I worked with birds,

Spiked with a mastiff collar,

Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop

Or decked on a cloud swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats

And out-of-perspective sailors,

In common clay clothes disguised as scales,

As a he-god’s paddling water skirts,

I astounded the sitting tailors,

I set back the clock faced tailors,

Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,

Hopping hot leaved and feathered

From the kangaroo foot of the earth,

From the chill, silent centre

Trailing the frost bitten cloth,

Up through the lubber crust of Wales

I rocketed to astonish

The flashing needle rock of squatters,

The criers of Shabby and Shorten,

The famous stitch droppers.

II

My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,

Around some coffin carrying

Birdman or told ghost I hung.

And the owl hood, the heel hider,

Claw fold and hole for the rotten

Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors’ master with nerves for cotton.

On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,

Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,

I was pierced by the idol tailor’s eyes,

Glared through shark mask and navigating head,

Cold Nansen’s beak on a boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,

The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy

With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.

It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water

With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed

Summoning a child’s voice from a webfoot stone,

Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore

On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.

Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,

Lie down, lie down and live

As quiet as a bone.

When I Woke

When I woke, the town spoke.

Birds and clocks and cross bells

Dinned aside the coiling crowd,

The reptile profligates in a flame,

Spoilers and pokers of sleep,

The next-door sea dispelled

Frogs and satans and woman-luck,

While a man outside with a billhook,

Up to his head in his blood,

Cutting the morning off,

The warm-veined double of Time

And his scarving beard from a book,

Slashed down the last snake as though

It were a wand or subtle bough,

Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.

Every morning I make,

God in bed, good and bad,

After a water-face walk,

The death-stagged scatter-breath

Mammoth and sparrowfall

Everybody’s earth.

Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks

I heard, this morning, waking,

Crossly out of the town noises

A voice in the erected air,

No prophet-progeny of mine,

Cry my sea town was breaking.

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,

I drew the white sheet over the islands

And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred

When the morning was waking over the war

He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,

The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,

He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone

And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.

Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun

And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire

When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.

Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.

The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound

Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.

O keep his bones away from the common cart,

The morning is flying on the wings of his age

And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound

In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat

On the silent sea we have heard the sound

That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening

To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound

And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing

The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,

Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat

For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,

We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.

Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,

Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

Vision and Prayer

I

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child.

I

Must lie

Still as stone

By the wren bone

Wall hearing the moan

Of the mother hidden

And the shadowed head of pain

Casting to-morrow like a thorn

And the midwives of miracle sing

Until the turbulent new born

Burns me his name and his flame

And the winged wall is torn

By his torrid crown

And the dark thrown

From his loin

To bright

Light.

When

The wren

Bone writhes down

And the first dawn

Furied by his stream

Swarms on the kingdom come

Of the dazzler of heaven

And the splashed mothering maiden

Who bore him with a bonfire in

His mouth and rocked him like a storm

I shall run lost in sudden

Terror and shining from

The once hooded room

Crying in vain

In the caldron

Of his

Kiss

In

The spin

Of the sun

In the spuming

Cyclone of his wing

For I was lost who am

Crying at the man drenched throne

In the first fury of his stream

And the lightnings of adoration

Back to black silence melt and mourn

For I was lost who have come

To dumbfounding haven

And the finding one

And the high noon

Of his wound

Blinds my

Cry.

There

Crouched bare

In the shrine

Of his blazing

Breast I shall waken

To the judge blown bedlam

Of the uncaged sea bottom

The cloud climb of the exhaling tomb

And the bidden dust upsailing

With his flame in every grain.

O spiral of ascension

From the vultured urn

Of the morning

Of man when

The land

And

The

Born sea

Praised the sun

The finding one

And upright Adam

Sang upon origin!

O the wings of the children!

The woundward flight of the ancient

Young from the canyons of oblivion!

The sky stride of the always slain

In battle! the happening

Of saints to their vision!

The world winding home!

And the whole pain

Flows open

And I

Die.

II

In the name of the lost who glory in

The swinish plains of carrion

Under the burial song

Of the birds of burden

Heavy with the drowned

And the green dust

And bearing

The ghost

From

The ground

Like pollen

On the black plume

And the beak of slime

I pray though I belong

Not wholly to that lamenting

Brethren for joy has moved within

The inmost marrow of my heart bone

That he who learns now the sun and moon

Of his mother’s milk may return

Before the lips blaze and bloom

To the birth bloody room

Behind the wall’s wren

Bone and be dumb

And the womb

That bore

For

All men

The adored

Infant light or

The dazzling prison

Yawn to his upcoming.

In the name of the wanton

Lost on the unchristened mountain

In the centre of dark I pray him

That he let the dead lie though they moan

For his briared hands to hoist them

To the shrine of his world’s wound

And the blood drop’s garden

Endure the stone

Blind host to sleep

In the dark

And deep

Rock

Awake

No heart bone

But let it break

On the mountain crown

Unbidden by the sun

And the beating dust be blown

Down to the river rooting plain

Under the night forever falling.

Forever falling night is a known

Star and country to the legion

Of sleepers whose tongue I toll

To mourn his deluging

Light through sea and soil

And we have come

To know all

Places

Ways

Mazes

Passages

Quarters and graves

Of the endless fall.

Now common lazarus

Of the charting sleepers prays

Never to awake and arise

For the country of death is the heart’s size

And the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.

In the name of the fatherless

In the name of the unborn

And the undesirers

Of midwiving morning’s

Hands or instruments

O in the name

Of no one

Now or

No

One to

Be I pray

May the crimson

Sun spin a grave grey

And the colour of clay

Stream upon his martyrdom

In the interpreted evening

And the known dark of the earth amen.

I turn the corner of prayer and burn

In a blessing of the sudden

Sun. In the name of the damned

I would turn back and run

To the hidden land

But the loud sun

Christens down

The sky.

I

Am found.

O let him

Scald me and drown

Me in his world’s wound.

His lightning answers my

Cry. My voice burns in his hand.

Now I am lost in the blinding

One. The sun roars at the prayer’s end.

Ballad of the Long-legged Bait

The bows glided down, and the coast

Blackened with birds took a last look

At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;

The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Then good-bye to the fishermanned

Boat with its anchor free and fast

As a bird hooking over the sea,

High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sand

And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.

For my sake sail, and never look back,

Said the looking land.

Sails drank the wind, and white as milk

He sped into the drinking dark;

The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl

And the moon swam out of its hulk.

Funnels and masts went by in a whirl.

Good-bye to the man on the sea-legged deck

To the gold gut that sings on his reel

To the bait that stalked out of the sack,

For we saw him throw to the swift flood

A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;

All the fishes were rayed in blood,

Said the dwindling ships.

Good-bye to chimneys and funnels,

Old wives that spin in the smoke,

He was blind to the eyes of candles

In the praying windows of waves

But heard his bait buck in the wake

And tussle in a shoal of loves.

Now cast down your rod, for the whole

Of the sea is hilly with whales,

She longs among horses and angels,

The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,

Floated the lost cathedral

Chimes of the rocked buoys.

Where the anchor rode like a gull

Miles over the moonstruck boat

A squall of birds bellowed and fell,

A cloud blew the rain from its throat;

He saw the storm smoke out to kill

With fuming bows and ram of ice,

Fire on starlight, rake Jesu’s stream;

And nothing shone on the water’s face

But the oil and bubble of the moon,

Plunging and piercing in his course

The lured fish under the foam

Witnessed with a kiss.

Whales in the wake like capes and Alps

Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep,

Deep the great bushed bait with raining lips

Slipped the fins of those humpbacked tons

And fled their love in a weaving dip.

Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!

She nipped and dived in the nick of love,

Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball

Till every beast blared down in a swerve

Till every turtle crushed from his shell

Till every bone in the rushing grave

Rose and crowed and fell!

Good luck to the hand on the rod,

There is thunder under its thumbs;

Gold gut is a lightning thread,

His fiery reel sings off its flames,

The whirled boat in the burn of his blood

Is crying from nets to knives,

Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood

Oh the bulls of Biscay and their calves

Are making under the green, laid veil

The long-legged beautiful bait their wives.

Break the black news and paint on a sail

Huge weddings in the waves,

Over the wakeward-flashing spray

Over the gardens of the floor

Clash out the mounting dolphin’s day,

My mast is a bell-spire,

Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,

Sing through the water-spoken prow

The octopus walking into her limbs

The polar eagle with his tread of snow.

From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern

Sing how the seal has kissed her dead!

The long, laid minute’s bride drifts on

Old in her cruel bed.

Over the graveyard in the water

Mountains and galleries beneath

Nightingale and hyena

Rejoicing for that drifting death

Sing and howl through sand and anemone

Valley and sahara in a shell,

Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy

Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl

Is old as water and plain as an eel;

Always good-bye to the long-legged bread

Scattered in the paths of his heels

For the salty birds fluttered and fed

And the tall grains foamed in their bills;

Always good-bye to the fires of the face,

For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose

And scuttled over her eyes,

The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.

The tempter under the eyelid

Who shows to the selves asleep

Mast-high moon-white women naked

Walking in wishes and lovely for shame

Is dumb and gone with his flame of brides.

Sussanah’s drowned in the bearded stream

And no-one stirs at Sheba’s side

But the hungry kings of the tides;

Sin who had a woman’s shape

Sleeps till Silence blows on a cloud

And all the lifted waters walk and leap.

Lucifer that bird’s dropping

Out of the sides of the north

Has melted away and is lost

Is always lost in her vaulted breath,

Venus lies star-struck in her wound

And the sensual ruins make

Seasons over the liquid world,

White springs in the dark.

Always good-bye, cried the voices through the shell,

Good-bye always, for the flesh is cast

And the fisherman winds his reel

With no more desire than a ghost.

Always good luck, praised the finned in the feather

Bird after dark and the laughing fish

As the sails drank up the hail of thunder

And the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.

The boat swims into the six-year weather,

A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.

See what the gold gut drags from under

Mountains and galleries to the crest!

See what clings to hair and skull

As the boat skims on with drinking wings!

The statues of great rain stand still,

And the flakes fall like hills.

Sing and strike his heavy haul

Toppling up the boatside in a snow of light!

His decks are drenched with miracles.

Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!

Out of the urn a size of a man

Out of the room the weight of his trouble

Out of the house that holds a town

In the continent of a fossil

One by one in dust and shawl,

Dry as echoes and insect-faced,

His fathers cling to the hand of the girl

And the dead hand leads the past,

Leads them as children and as air

On to the blindly tossing tops;

The centuries throw back their hair

And the old men sing from newborn lips:

Time is bearing another son.

Kill Time! She turns in her pain!

The oak is felled in the acorn

And the hawk in the egg kills the wren.

He who blew the great fire in

And died on a hiss of flames

Or walked the earth in the evening

Counting the denials of the grains

Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs;

And he who taught their lips to sing

Weeps like the risen sun among

The liquid choirs of his tribes.

The rod bends low, divining land,

And through the sundered water crawls

A garden holding to her hand

With birds and animals

With men and women and waterfalls

Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships

And stunned and still on the green, laid veil

Sand with legends in its virgin laps

And prophets loud on the burned dunes;

Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,

Times and places grip her breast bone,

She is breaking with seasons and clouds;

Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,

with moving fish and rounded stones

Up and down the greater waves

A separate river breathes and runs;

Strike and sing his catch of fields

For the surge is sown with barley,

The cattle graze on the covered foam,

The hills have footed the waves away,

With wild sea fillies and soaking bridles

With salty colts and gales in their limbs

All the horses of his haul of miracles

Gallop through the arched, green farms,

Trot and gallop with gulls upon them

And thunderbolts in their manes.

O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London

The country tide is cobbled with towns

And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder

And the streets that the fisherman combed

When his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire

And his loin was a hunting flame

Coil from the thoroughfares of her hair

And terribly lead him home alive

Lead her prodigal home to his terror,

The furious ox-killing house of love.

Down, down, down, under the ground,

Under the floating villages,

Turns the moon-chained and water-wound

Metropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,

Under the earth the loud sea walks,

In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down

And the bait is drowned among hayricks,

Land, land, land, nothing remains

Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,

And into its talkative seven tombs

The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,

To the fisherman lost on the land.

He stands alone in the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

Holy Spring

O

Out of a bed of love

When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe

The cureless counted body,

And ruin and his causes

Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army

And swept into our wounds and houses,

I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only

That one dark I owe my light,

Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none

To glow after the god stoning night

And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun.

No

Praise that the spring time is all

Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful

Out of the woebegone pyre

And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,

My arising prodigal

Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,

But blessed be hail and upheaval

That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing

Alone in the husk of man’s home

And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,

If only for a last time.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

And playing, lovely and watery

And fire green as grass.

And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

Flying with the ricks, and the horses

Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways,

My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

In country sleep

I

Never and never, my girl riding far and near

In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,

Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood

Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,

My dear, my dear,

Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year

To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise,

My girl ranging the night in the rose and shire

Of the hobnail tales: no gooseherd or swine will turn

Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire

And prince of ice

To court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise

In a spinney of ringed boys and ganders, spike and burn,

Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed

And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.

From the broomed witch’s spume you are shielded by fern

And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.

Lie fast and soothed,

Safe be and smooth from the bellows of the rushy brood.

Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern

Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell

Shall harrow and snow the blood while you ride wide and near,

For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves

Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear

From the starred well?

A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint’s cell

The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays.

Sanctum sanctorum  the animal eye of the wood

In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost

The owl at its knelling. Fox and holt kneel before blood.

Now the tales praise

The star rise at pasture and nightlong the fables graze

On the lord’s-table of the bowing grass. Fear most

For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood

Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind

And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.

The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,

Know the green good,

Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood

Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace. Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house

In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch

And star: held and blessed, though you scour the high four

Winds, from the dousing shade and the roarer at the latch,

Cool in your vows.

Yet out of the beaked, web dark and the pouncing boughs

Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure

And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,

This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks

In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls

Of the hearthstone tales my own, lost love; and the soul walks

The waters shorn.

This night and each night since the falling star you were born,

Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,

As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides

Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind-

Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands

Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged

Apple seed glides,

And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides,

As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.

II

Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks

And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair!

The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-

Heeled winds the rooks

Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books

Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox

Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist

Of the wood! Pastoral beat of blood through the laced leaves!

The stream from the priest black wristed spinney and sleeves

Of thistling frost

Of the nightingale’s din and tale! The upgiven ghost

Of the dingle torn to singing and the surpliced

Hill of cypresses! The din and tale in the skimmed

Yard of the buttermilk rain on the pail! The sermon

Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen

To seraphim

Leaping! The gospel rooks! All tell, this night, of him

Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

Illumination of music! the lulled black-backed

Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves

Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,

In the winds’ wakes.

Music of elements, that a miracle makes!

Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,

The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue

Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly

High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly

Lying the sky

Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,

The Thief fall on the dead like the willy nilly dew,

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy

Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go

Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,

And truly he

Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew’s ruly sea,

And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking

Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,

But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer

He comes to take

Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake

He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.

Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear

My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear

Since you were born:

And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,

Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

Over Sir John’s hill

Over Sir John’s hill,

The hawk on fire hangs still;

In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws

And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay

And the shrill child’s play

Wars

Of the sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges.

And blithely they squawk

To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until

The flash the noosed hawk

Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron

In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

Flash, and the plumes crack,

And a black cap of jack-

Daws Sir John’s just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare

To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy’s fins,

In a whack of wind.

There

Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles

In the pebbly dab-filled

Shallow and sedge, and ‘dilly dilly,’ calls the loft hawk,

‘Come and be killed,’

I open the leaves of the water at a passage

Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing

And read, in a shell

Death clear as a bouy’s bell:

All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,

When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand

Wing, and blest shall

Young

Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, ‘dilly dilly,

Come let us die.’

We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,

The heron and I,

I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle

Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant

Crystal harbour vale

Where the sea cobbles sail,

And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.

It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John’s elmed

Hill, tell-tale the knelled

Guilt

Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,

Have Mercy on,

God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,

For their souls’ song.

Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge. Through windows

Of dusk and water I see the tilting whispering

Heron, mirrored, go,

As the snapt feathers snow,

Fishing in the tear of the Towy. Only a hoot owl

Hollows, a grassblade blown in cupped hands, in the looted elms

And no green cocks or hens

Shout

Now on Sir John’s hill. The heron, ankling the scaly

Lowlands of the waves,

Makes all the music; and I who hear the tune of the slow,

Wear-willow river, grave,

Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken

Stone for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.

Poem on his birthday

In the mustardseed sun,

By full tilt river and switchback sea

Where the cormorants scud,

In his house on stilts high among beaks

And palavers of birds

This sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave

He celebrates and spurns

His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;

Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go

Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,

Doing what they are told,

Curlews aloud in the congered waves

Work at their ways to death,

And the rhymer in the long tongued room,

Who tolls his birthday bell,

Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;

Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,

He sings towards anguish; finches fly

In the claw tracks of hawks

On a seizing sky; small fishes glide

Through wynds and shells of drowned

Ship towns to pastures of otters. He

In his slant, racking house

And the hewn coils of his trade perceives

Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river’s robe

Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;

And far at sea he knows,

Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end

Under a serpent cloud,

Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,

The rippled seals streak down

To kill and their own tide daubing blood

Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung

Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.

Thirty-five bells sing struck

On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,

Steered by the falling stars.

And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage

Terror will rage apart

Before chains break to a hammer flame

And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost

In the unknown, famous light of great

And fabulous, dear God.

Dark is a way and light is a place,

Heaven that never was

Nor will be ever is always true,

And, in that brambled void,

Plenty as blackberries in the woods

The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare

With the spirits of the horseshoe bay

Or the stars’ seashore dead,

Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales

And wishbones of wild geese,

With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,

And every soul His priest,

Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold

Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.

He, on the earth of the night, alone

With all the living, prays,

Who knows the rocketing wind will blow

The bones out of the hills,

And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last

Rage shattered waters kick

Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,

Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old

And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild

As horses in the foam:

Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined

And druid herons’ vows

The voyage to ruin I must run,

Dawn ships clouted aground,

Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,

Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five

Senses, and man a spirit in love

Tangling through this spun slime

To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come

And the lost, moonshine domes,

And the sea that hides his secret selves

Deep in its black, base bones,

Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,

And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move

To death, one man through his sundered hulks,

The louder the sun blooms

And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;

And every wave of the way

And gale I tackle, the whole world then,

With more triumphant faith

Than ever was since the world was said,

Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills

Grow larked and greener at berry brown

Fall and the dew larks sing

Taller this thunderclap spring, and how

More spanned with angles ride

The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,

Holier then their eyes,

And my shining men no more alone

As I sail out to die.

Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit

And the black spit of the chapel fold,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),

I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,

The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,

I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled

Ninepin down on donkey’s common,

And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed

Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,

The whole of the moon I could love and leave

All the green leaved little weddings’ wives

In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half

And the black beast of the beetles’ pews,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),

Not a boy and a bit in the wick-

Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,

I whistled all night in the twisted flues,

Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,

And the sizzling beds of the town cried, Quick!—

Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,

Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,

Whatsoever I did in the coal-

Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man

And the black cross of the holy house,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),

Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,

No springtailed tom in the red hot town

With every simmering woman his mouse

But a hillocky bull in the swelter

Of summer come in his great good time

To the sultry, biding herds, I said,

Oh, time enough when the blood creeps cold,

And I lie down but to sleep in bed,

For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was

And serve me right as the preachers warn,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),

No flailing calf or cat in a flame

Or hickory bull in milky grass

But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,

At last the soul from its foul mousehole

Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;

And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,

Gristle and rind, and a roarers’ life,

And I shoved it into the coal black sky

To find a woman’s soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more

And a black reward for a roaring life,

(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),

Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room

I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw—

For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife

In the coal black sky and she bore angels!

Harpies around me out of her womb!

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,

Innocence sweetens my last black breath,

Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,

And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

In the white giant’s thigh

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,

Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,

And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh

Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,

Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow

Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act

They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived

And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved

In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun

In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay

Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one

Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade

Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,

Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,

Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush

Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,

Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush

Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk

Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk

And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house

And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,

The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse

Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb

Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,

All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,

Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,

Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king

Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead

And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,

And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round—

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives

Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground

They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)—

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro

Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust

As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low

And cut the birds’ boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.

They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,

Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead

And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,

Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved

Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed

Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved

Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed

Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these

Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill

Love for ever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

[Ebook producer’s note:

At this point, most editions of Collected Poems, 1934-1952 include a posthumously published poem titled “Elegy.” It has been omitted here because of its uncertain copyright status.]

The End

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19/01/2008