CHILDHOOD | I | The bitterness, the misery, the wretchedness of childhood
Put me out of love with God.
I can't believe in God's goodness;
I can believe
In many avenging gods.
Most of all I believe
In gods of bitter dullness,
Cruel local gods
Who seared my childhood. | | | II | I've seen people put
A chrysalis in a match-box,
"To see," they told me, "what sort of moth would come."
But when it broke its shell
It slipped and stumbled and fell about its prison
And tried to climb to the light
For space to dry its wings.
That's how I was.
Somebody found my chrysalis
And shut it in a match-box.
My shrivelled wings were beaten,
Shed their colours in dusty scales
Before the box was opened
For the moth to fly.
And then it was too late,
Because the beauty a child has,
And the beautiful things it learns before its birth,
Were shed, like moth-scales, from me. | | | III | I hate that town;
I hate the town I lived in when I was little;
I hate to think of it.
There were always clouds, smoke, rain
In that dingy little valley.
It rained; it always rained.
I think I never saw the sun until I was nine—
And then it was too late;
Everything's too late after the first seven years.
That long street we lived in
Was duller than a drain
And nearly as dingy.
There were the big College
And the pseudo-Gothic town-hall.
There were the sordid provincial shops—
The grocer's, and the shops for women,
The shop where I bought transfers,
And the piano and gramaphone shop
Where I used to stand
Staring at the huge shiny pianos and at the pictures
Of a white dog looking into a gramaphone.
How dull and greasy and grey and sordid it was!
On wet days—it was always wet—
I used to kneel on a chair
And look at it from the window.
The dirty yellow trams
Dragged noisily along
With a clatter of wheels and bells
And a humming of wires overhead.
They threw up the filthy rain-water from the hollow lines
And then the water ran back
Full of brownish foam bubbles.
There was nothing else to see—
It was all so dull—
Except a few grey legs under shiny black umbrellas
Running along the grey shiny pavements;
Sometimes there was a waggon
Whose horses made a strange loud hollow sound
With their hoofs
Through the silent rain.
And there was a grey museum
Full of dead birds and dead insects and dead animals
And a few relics of the Romans—dead also.
There was the sea-front,
A long asphalt walk with a bleak road beside it,
Three piers, a row of houses,
And a salt dirty smell from the little harbour.
I was like a moth—-
Like one of those grey Emperor moths
Which flutter through the vines at Capri.
And that damned little town was my match-box,
Against whose sides I beat and beat
Until my wings were torn and faded, and dingy
As that damned little town. | | | IV | At school it was just dull as that dull High Street.
They taught me pothooks—
I wanted to be alone, although I was so little,
Alone, away from the rain, the dingyness, the dullness,
Away somewhere else—
The town was dull;
The front was dull;
The High Street and the other street were dull—
And there was a public park, I remember,
And that was damned dull too,
With its beds of geraniums no one was allowed to pick,
And its clipped lawns you weren't allowed to walk on,
And the gold-fish pond you mustn't paddle in,
And the gate made out of a whale's jaw-bones,
And the swings, which were for "Board-School children,"
And its gravel paths.
And on Sundays they rang the bells,
From Baptist and Evangelical and Catholic churches.
They had the Salvation Army.
I was taken to a High Church;
The parson's name was Mowbray,
"Which is a good name but he thinks too much of it—"
That's what I heard people say.
I took a little black book
To that cold, grey, damp, smelling church,
And I had to sit on a hard bench,
Wriggle off it to kneel down when they sang psalms,
And wriggle off it to kneel down when they prayed—
And then there was nothing to do
Except to play trains with the hymn-books.
There was nothing to see,
Nothing to do,
Nothing to play with,
Except that in an empty room upstairs
There was a large tin box
Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta,
Of the Declaration of Independence
And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada.
There were also several packets of stamps,
Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots,
Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak,
Indians and Men-of-war
From the United States,
And the green and red portraits
Of King Francobollo
Of Italy. | | | V | I don't believe in God.
I do believe in avenging gods
Who plague us for sins we never sinned
But who avenge us.
That's why I'll never have a child,
Never shut up a chrysalis in a match-box
For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours,
Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall. |
THE POPLAR Why do you always stand there shivering
Between the white stream and the road?
The people pass through the dust
On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars;
The waggoners go by at dawn;
The lovers walk on the grass path at night.
Stir from your roots, walk, poplar!
You are more beautiful than they are.
I know that the white wind loves you,
Is always kissing you and turning up
The white lining of your green petticoat.
The sky darts through you like blue rain,
And the grey rain drips on your flanks
And loves you.
And I have seen the moon
Slip his silver penny into your pocket
As you straightened your hair;
And the white mist curling and hesitating
Like a bashful lover about your knees.
I know you, poplar;
I have watched you since I was ten.
But if you had a little real love,
A little strength,
You would leave your nonchalant idle lovers
And go walking down the white road
Behind the waggoners.
There are beautiful beeches down beyond the hill.
Will you always stand there shivering? |
ROUND-POND Water ruffled and speckled by galloping wind
Which puffs and spurts it into tiny pashing breakers
Dashed with lemon-yellow afternoon sunlight.
The shining of the sun upon the water
Is like a scattering of gold crocus-petals
In a long wavering irregular flight.
The water is cold to the eye
As the wind to the cheek.
In the budding chestnuts
Whose sticky buds glimmer and are half-burst open
The starlings make their clitter-clatter;
And the blackbirds in the grass
Are getting as fat as the pigeons.
Too-hoo, this is brave;
Even the cold wind is seeking a new mistress. |
DAISY "Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes,
Nunc..."
Catullus. | | You were my playmate by the sea.
We swam together.
Your girl's body had no breasts.
We found prawns among the rocks;
We liked to feel the sun and to do nothing;
In the evening we played games with the others.
It made me glad to be by you.
Sometimes I kissed you,
And you were always glad to kiss me;
But I was afraid—I was only fourteen.
And I had quite forgotten you,
You and your name.
To-day I pass through the streets.
She who touches my arm and talks with me
Is—who knows?—Helen of Sparta,
Dryope, Laodamia....
And there are you
A whore in Oxford Street. |
EPIGRAMS | a girl | You were that clear Sicilian fluting
That pains our thought even now.
You were the notes
Of cold fantastic grief
Some few found beautiful. | | | new love | She has new leaves
After her dead flowers,
Like the little almond-tree
Which the frost hurt. | | | october | The beech-leaves are silver
For lack of the tree's blood.
At your kiss my lips
Become like the autumn beech-leaves. |
THE FAUN SEES SNOW FOR THE FIRST TIME Zeus,
Brazen-thunder-hurler,
Cloud-whirler, son-of-Kronos,
Send vengeance on these Oreads
Who strew
White frozen flecks of mist and cloud
Over the brown trees and the tufted grass
Of the meadows, where the stream
Runs black through shining banks
Of bluish white.
Zeus,
Are the halls of heaven broken up
That you flake down upon me
Feather-strips of marble?
Dis and Styx!
When I stamp my hoof
The frozen-cloud-specks jam into the cleft
So that I reel upon two slippery points....
Fool, to stand here cursing
When I might be running! |
LEMURES In Nineveh
And beyond Nineveh
In the dusk
They were afraid.
In Thebes of Egypt
In the dusk
They chanted of them to the dead.
In my Lesbos and Achaia
Where the God dwelt
We knew them.
Now men say "They are not":
But in the dusk
Ere the white sun comes—
A gay child that bears a white candle—
I am afraid of their rustling,
Of their terrible silence,
The menace of their secrecy. |
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