CASE HISTORIES

I
SUMMER IDYLL
The Arcadian Poets
Here on the dunes, where children's pumping feet press home
into the tawny breasts, and rattle
the fallen bones of cliffs (before, the gleam
of a great emerald-glass crawling petal;
behind, the bungalows as trim and bright with paint
as little yachts) I lie; and if I look,
the grass against them circles me, sharp and intent
and stiff as rigging; shadows of gulls wave back.

Here in the velvet lion's-paws of sun, the purr
of sleepy light, I rest; and hear the summer
wheel round me like my blood; and watch the fire
- garnet, black and gold - feel the murmur
of heat upon my lids: earth dances now; and heat,
reeling in the bruised pebbles round me, stares
like an audience through her shining garments, her light
melismata of lacy skirt of flowers.

In such a time, the heart erect with happiness,
what else to think but the cool apple-blossom
flush of an early love? - how else caress
myself upon the moment's lissom
its flesh-warmed silk; feel quivering beneath my hand
live articulations, commerce of skin,
a lover's body pleased and flowering out of sand?
And revisiting love haunted by the sun?

Love naked among boughs and garlands, among
the feather-growing cold of woods, and flushed
with coral under honey; love with a tongue
of birds and fountains, where birds and fountains flashed
like a bowl of jewels; love simple as a hand;
legend or pastoral: kinder than the sweet
aching of Amaryllis, than the sound
(through gilded groves and fields) of Daphnis' flute:

not only gods were sure of it.  For mortals,
bright from the running and the flower-throwing,
soft hands of air lascivious in their kirtles
- love on the tasselled grass where spring was strewing
the excellently shining pools of sheep,
stood round them strong and innocent as the sun:
bodies awake as burning eyes, all else asleep:
the love, the lovers, and the place, were one.

She, if immortal, dancing like a sunny field,
the grass of Paradise, and poets there;
a gentle house, unguarded as a child, 
wide as the splendour of the air.
Mortal, then rooted in what innocence, to be
the grace and perfume of a tree,
sweet as a lilac walking? - and her words
like jewels dropping into water, all her speech
delicate as an eyelash or her touch;
and fingers like the bones of little birds.

So, like a yacht's abandonment of all self
but the grace only, a strong and comely sail,
they leaned on loving.  Summer: the restless gulf, 
the walking in us of a masterless will:
veins running sunlight, the body one fierce hand
of agony of love.  And water beat,
drowning in brilliance, gently by us, to the sound
(through gilded groves and fields) of Daphnis' flute.

Tree after tree alive in leopard's clothing
swung into curtains, and bowed us into shade
under whose lace of leaves the softly breathing
grass beckoned round us; and smooth and free and wide
as doors, the wind was opened upon day.
Oh calmly rocking sky, and the sun a fall
of angels shouting over us; love, the land at play
- the reeling land where birds were bountiful
and love a star in the heart, and love in the mouth
like strawberries, and the amazed flesh sensitive as a moth.

For such an amorous Arcadian space of air,
of mother-kindly air more gently turning
than a warm infant's head, more smooth and near
than a wife's cheek; its huge blue burning
intimate as a bed - for such a cone and pulse
of spangled wind, the self unfolds as for
a bride; its memory trails fingers through her pearls;
the figment and the truth rise and mean war.

Tired of the tireless rocking in a million beds,
all birth behind her, careless now of praise,
like an old woman, the sea smiles and nods;
the sunlight aching in her eyes.
Lips that were once Cassandra's or the leap of wolves,
now ineffectual as eyelids, fall
and fold and writhe and fall and lisp over themselves
and their soft food, the shore's most glittering scroll.


II
AUTUMN PASTORAL
The Metaphysicals
Now as the declining sun
makes a wide autumn in the water that all day
lifted the glittering music of its leaves, and they
whisper their delicate frost upon
a shore grown old with its desertions; now
all that lives by season takes its noon
about it like a cloak - our hearts must know,
breaking upon their boundaries, their season too.

Oh love, love that comforts like a bed
but blindly, in the misted flesh, knows of its loss,
loving aware but not awake: the sad
wondering of the ape's and the dog's face - 
those blunted images of spring - is all its good.
Now, in the flush
of wincing red and gold that lies
lovely upon the fountains and the barren waves,
the mystery of branching flesh
- trees' tawny breasts, and coloured commerce of the leaves
beautifully awake as eyes:
in eyeless love, the touch and ecstacy of surfaces,
light in the lost water, in the tall
magniloquence of burning boughs, ended their will.

Oh need, the echo in the trembling grove;
the Greensleeves habit wherein lovers tired;
the virgin like a mirror watching love
too soon possessed: for what Elizabethan lord,
whose mated passion held in check by tears
was but a queen in pawn to be advanced, 
was chastity worn? were there no other gears
to dress the fallen?  Bodies that glanced
like fever and October through the heart
laid hands of medicine on the season's hurt.

What would they have then?  Love as bed and sacrifice,
the beast in angel air, and the sun stalking
guilty in the fields: convent of thought
and incest of emotions - to forget
in having all that urges to possess
and shame in breaking.
What loneliness came down upon them, shut
like autumn and a door, their dying light?

Rich in the bearded field the ripe
and panic-fluttering wheat is gathered: what can it gather
beyond the shudder of the act, strength torn together,
the now of children? or the shape
of bodies wise in bodies, sickle-flash
repeated to a mist, a death in motion, deep
glamour of silver on the rustling flesh?

They rose from a boy's dreaming, from a faceless act
anonymous and inhuman as the armoured sky:
a ceremony of disguise, a locked
and glassy gallery that watched them die
strong and pathetic as the animal
- rock under flinty sunlight, or the cast
on athletes' limbs of blonde imperious oil:
shallow appeasement of the artesian beast.

Else a great Prince in prison lies: oh Christ
were he alone; oh sharp intensity of bars.
Feeling the close and clamour of the doors,
pain like a runner's breast,
and vain hands upon them, and the floors
that did not echo to her feet (for dust,
dropping like evening from the deciduous room,
will settle everywhere softly at last),
I fed on portraits in the empty portraits' home.

I ate the stubble of love, echo of grain:
bleak interlunar interseason of male thought,
with a rod of blood between us.  Sometimes when
the windy curtains like a landscape shut
our separate rising into pain,
remembering that rod of blood, we knew
ourselves left naked in the rut of passion
to watch the feeble writhing wave that grew
(till we became each other's superstition)
in thundery space the desolation of wind,
dark mansions of unfaithfulness.
The love that grew among the foreign leaves,
the spoiled thing, is powerful: it lives:
and we were stained and parted by its guilty glass.

Error by burning; grief of the wave too weak
for the dry pebble; debt of the running bird:
and every error, every falling-back,
hurt like the sound of doors, was hard
as peaches bitten to the naked bone,
or the axe in the oak.
For through the lovely clothing of their myth
danger wore outward, was revolt or death,
was loving better what they chose to lack.

The shining flocks darkened upon the field;
legend or pastoral slept like jewels in
a world of ceremony unfulfilled:
love being torn and vexed by sin
by insufficiency by thought, being laid
a barrier like sad music played
between desire and will: between the hunger
and the quivering plenty: lion or light of anger,
but always lonely as an eye, always afraid,
the false intangible fencing of a love's convention:
dark forest, and dark mansion.

Here is the spacious pity of
the evening, grey medicinal-smelling woods grow cold
about me; black with sunset the adored boughs hold 
their thin bright hands above
landscape and sky, the fire and echo of bronze.
The air is like a bather's flesh: and grave
with odour of dying; with the sound of bones
dropped underfoot in drifts, frailer - and dry - than veins.

Sadness like orphans: but I choose
the waste uncertainty and splendour of this calm:
not the autumnal organ-throat, imperial time
flushed thick with velvet suns that bruise
the orchards under sweetness; not the torn
virginity of woman-scented corn,
the honeyed pearl and languor of her loosened thighs.

There in the drumming rush and weight,
the lechery, the sweet-juice-ecstatic hours
that swarmed with the cathedral majesty of emperors
drunk under swinging ponderous light,
our blood was hurled within us like a ball
poised one perpetual second after flight:
shudder of drowning in the thirsty pool,
moment of birds that fall
unalterably through the printed gale of wheat.

I chose what love became, this troubled season.
Only our bodies being separate remember
fields in their summer of quick early amber
or, through the spare and breathy glass of this horizon,
themselves a cornucopia.  Between
the sun and this our sunless lilac-pouring green,
the tremor and the reaping have grown cold as prison;
a lack in love with pain.

In cages of dark air the rooks,
wrestling their palisades like the shadows of gulls,
feel the year tremble: heart of enormous dying bells:
the wind where all the landscape shakes
to a leashed yacht: feel the year tremble.  The eye
knows that whenever year comes back or makes
this absence whole, it must be hard and shy - 
winter, a watching, and like tolerance of a lie.
Only the sun, the season, the heart, know,
breaking upon their boundaries, their season too.


III
WINTER ELEGY
The Shakespearian Tragic Heroes
The room is cold: night moves in it
like hands, the commerce of dead flesh; I stand alone
and feel the season's lips, silence of star and moon,
the mineral bitter silence, eat
as rat or pox eats, round me - diamond
of cold, gnashed naked facet of the bone.
From this dark lantern I look out, on wind
leaping with huge paws horribly its dancing-ground.

This is the weather of the wolf's fur; this
is ikon-weather; pale cathedral cold
in frozen images.  There where no room is,
no bed except the old
unsearching earth - oh flood,
oh organ-throat of the great modal wind, roaring 
like summer suns, the black whips whistling, the devouring
saltsea moonlight fingering the blood!
And the sad shining of the armour, bearing 
my father, bearing my years away, bearing my God.

Cold like a gnat's voice, a taut wire;
cold singing like an edge: and in it, anger
shudder and bugle, clangour
of power in fabric, strangling of strength, sleet
hissing like hatred at the mothering fires;
and fire of darkness burning on the winter's feet
in a fierce wide-open falling of kingdoms - where
only the ghost moves, or the enemy stars.

We walk tonight: and ikon-armour shines,
rags gutter, in the candles of the snow;
ravaged boughs and curtains beat their chains
on madness rising like a menacing bird:
oh let me not be mad... what evil now
flowers out of memory to the drumming word
remember? - and foreboding being all I know?
What beast roars to this landscape that I read
for the earth's answer: "This is room, and bed, and you'?

I know I have grown old: this evil place
so old the former lineaments of land
rise through it: it is thus my loosening face
wears down to bear my ancestors: to end.
Storm: and I hear within me chattering ghosts
of No and Then and Now: and they are I
returning, many as a wood, to die.
I have become my history, my many pasts.

And surely after me no future?  Surely
the bodies I had learnt like music, the desires
of kind and form, deeper than root or blood, the fears
- all we exchanged so tenderly and early,
like rings - die with me?  And what in age,
beyond the blizzard of my years, oh still
I turn: the child's face, the for-ever-blemished page
never to turn, weeping, never to change and all be well?

Oh inaccessible as time (haunter
of your betrayals the usurped heart) waif of my horror,
crier at windows, never to grow or live or enter,
white face like a wave: oh mirror:
am I not Love as you were? so
love to Love, the flashing gust to crow
and seven-fiery crystal in the candelabrum air,
over their pain's uncovered page, the eyes laid bare;
over the moonlit violet-shining foam of snow.

For what have I to see but, rack and wheel,
still time?  And time grown inward like a tooth - lust
and a simian rage, cut grinning throat of disgust
and pity?  In their own devouring gale,
lost haters and lost lovers - fire on icy fire,
around them blazes the last ache of ill,
the fierce wide-open falling of angels; where
passionless as altars burn the cold of hell
and - for we walk tonight - an enemy star.

For what have I to see but lovers bearing
one thick-whispering image a hot hand on the eyes?
The sleeplessness of hurt when the flesh lies
drowned as a drugged man: image image image staring
like a wild drumming burning under unturning skies:
the image: heavier than statues, sick
as dark blood, cut veins' transfusion of the dark:
image of alien lust.  Have they not felt
(lost lovers and lost haters) the vertigo-printed
hollow in sweet grass or in sand, the scented
oil of love's handling on the breast, the spilt
light of love patterned over act and limb?
And love like slime
in the mouth, a second mouthing of the cold spat meat
of strangers; like a crumpled garment come
hot from a hated body - and its shape and sweat
pulling the skin like leeches?  It
is the cause, my soul ... the writhe and clutch and hurt
and image image image of the cause, and noise
of the coiled cause loud as the suckling of the seas.

And yet it was not Love that made
an aching season round them, echo and path
of one wide autumn poured into the bed:
but that oh sharp oh that irrevocable death
when two can never be alone again, but vainly
masked in conspiring silence, masked and lonely.
Therefore not Love, but field and aftermath
- the trembling company of mown waves - that never
can be alone and flowering for a waking lover:
straws that sleep strangled under the madman's breath.

Out of the knife and prison of embracing
slip the pale captives; from that loosening womb
a bastard envy, treachery's unloosing.
That mated passion should beget this flame!
All they could not be, desired, nor may,
the dagger's oily tooth, the inward scream
of the live bolt thrust home:
there is the stranger crouching to his play;
death in the shadow of the crown;
and the great wind shouting my kingdom down.

Oh tightening springes, snow upon fire of blood,
the world's wind naked on the skeleton, the white
ruin of stars behind betrayed eyes; red
image image image roaring in its horrible bed.
Oh sprung cogs' intolerable fire,
turned with the turning motion of the heart,
crookedly wrenching, spoiling, weaving fear:
still in the beauty of all this burning height
I see the appalling legend of desire,
and the hurt creature twisting in the night.

It needs no ghost... tomorrow and tomorrow... and
from war and stabbing arras, oh what birth
so long remembered under armour breaks upon 
the steely ringing bitten impotence of earth?
Or ripens from the blue reverberant stone
of our torn seasons, a live and amorous fruit,
a double body pleased and flowering from the death
of king and chaos, withering sun and root?
A bitter heaven like a scattered hearth,
mad in the age and anger of sceptres, lies
empty: the turning of their scornful eyes,
the living mineral net of stars;
the gods forsaking us behind
betrayal, the vulcanic ambush of adulteries
where Venus melts the visored lip of Mars
and the fierce mesh of wind
circles with huge coils horribly their dancing-ground.

Lying alone, inhabited with all my past,
the world a closed and singing claw of steel, 
I hear the voices of the imagined dead,
they who were born for winter.  Room and bed
ring the armour and the cry of the ghost,
the full ripe circling of the wheel.
This to my bitten pillow... This is my school;
this to the fingers of the cold and broadening waste.

Case Histories
IV: SPRING CEREMONIES
(Tristam and Iseult)

i: Invocation at Evening
Suave white flame in the anguish of all beauty,
flower from your garments like a martyr from smoke:
now let shine, through the vase of the ravished city,
the high intangible beacon that our love awoke.

Altar of my love, but alive and oh more pale,
and smoother, than wood fresh-planed, ungrained
					more tender
than poppies under noon: let now your breath avail
unvestal to my fire, and to what both surrender.

Lithe as fire, lithe as the tongues of the blown trees;
delicate as the lilacs the feather-boned-and-breasted:
loosen as they do, unbound in the soft of the breeze,
nets for its ghostly flesh, and their sweet cups tasted.

Flesh that will whisper upon mine, fluttered shield
of blood from the molten rose of the blood, and the
				beleaguered
tower of blood unrelieved and not to yield:
be calyx and be cradle to me, shadow tigered.

And now lie still my love among the wild-beast shadows,
white flame casting the unlasting shade that is I:
how brief the bridal is, but long the nights that will be
				widows:
peace only is to remember, this to remember-by.


ii: Epithalamion
Through the soft pole of quiet of this bed
slant the transfinite cones: cages of time,
eerie unmeanings of all space, those dread
and overbearing multitudes that rhyme
and unrhymed round the single point; and we,
to enact their meaning, hub of all that moves,
at peace before and after proving, see
	escape itself sleeps mute, and loves.

Mute and asleep; yet all the power is there:
stark as the day's tree, vehement as the night's
fire-winded rage of stars, proud scroll of air - 
the dragon soar and scroll of amorous lights - 
we mimed in flesh: the whole is there, although
the fury and the strangeness of the season may
divine false weather, and we do not know
	the monsters in our future way.

Question the clock, or the blood's calendar;
but you have learnt by now they do not shift:
still as basalt astonishment they are,
and answer like known poems, a gone gift.
No measure, then, for these upshining hours, 
these male and warlock solstices; no chart
for the ourlandish coast this flood devours,
	nor the presentimental heart.

Since, bared Andromedae, the lamp and you
stretch helpless arms against a mystery
and a wild season, let the wild be true.
Beyond our window, gale-borne seagulls cry
one clamouring message: quia the gulls call,
the gulls call quia, quia, yet they know
how we shall answer, and the missing fall
	upon amore langueo.


iii: The Elements
No, let the lamp shine still what use have we
for darkness on our white and fervent sea,
oh dolphin pale warm dolphin oh my love?
Visibly play, be jewelled in this light,
shiver and lapse upon our silent wave:
while, through the curtained acres of the night,
	forlorn wings dip and slue;
and, rocking like a mother (oh my care 
under the seagulls of all-rain-belled-air)
the cold lace of the harbour hushes you.

Day and the sowing of those coloured ships
upon the new-turned water; sunlashed lips
that mousled quay of headland; the strait fingers
gilding you sleep through nets: what ran or shone,
or held its burning peace, now beats and lingers
in the unfolded flesh of girl and man.
	But we have more to do
than breathe remembered air and leash the will:
pasture and lamb, be lamb and pasture, till
the cold lace of the harbour hushes you.

Deep as the built of meadowed hillsides, long
as the low-footing pines' consent and song 
in the wind's arms, the stillness of the lover
the love being sealed: on these inverted skies
culver and hawk (oh dove and kestrel) hover,
twinned like a kiss, gentler than sleeping eyes:
	such quiet have we two,
such waking quiet, skin to naked skin,
that even past the lips which lock you in,
the cold lace of the harbour hushes you

Unalterable inward flame, that sings
like the last breath of strings,
light our tired ships to harbour, burning through
darkness at last: where, blown by opiate wings,
the cold lace of the harbour hushes you.