Christopher Isherwood

 

W. H. Auden

 

O Where Are You Going?

    "O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
    "That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
    Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
    That gap is the grave where the tall return."

    "O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
    "That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
    Your diligent looking discover the lacking,
    Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

    "O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
    "Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
    Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
    The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

    "Out of this house"---said rider to reader,
    "Yours never will"---said farer to fearer
    "They're looking for you"---said hearer to horror,
    As he left them there, as he left them there.

If I Could Tell You

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

W. H. Auden

 

 Photograph by Richard Avedon

 

At Last the Secret is Out

At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,
behind the ghost on the links,
behind the lady who dances
and the man who madly drinks,
under the look of fatigue
the attack of migraine and the sigh
there is always another story,
there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing,
high up in the convent wall,
the scent of the elder bushes,
the sporting prints in the hall,
the croquet matches in summer,
the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
there is always a wicked secret,
a private reason for this.

W. H. Auden

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

                                                            December 1940

Cecil Day-Lewis

 

                With son Daniel

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

Stephen Spender

A stopwatch and an ordnance map. 

At five a man fell to the ground 
And the watch flew off his wrist 
Like a moon struck from the earth 
Marking a blank time that stares 
On the tides of change beneath. 
All under the olive trees. 
A stopwatch and an ordnance map. 
He stayed faithfully in that place 
From his living comrade split 
By dividers of the bullet 
Opening wide the distances 
Of his final loneliness. 

All under the olive trees. 
A stopwatch and an ordnance map. 
And the bones are fixed at five 
Under the moon's timelessness; 
But another who lives on 
Wears within his heart forever 
Space split open by the bullet. 
All under the olive trees. 

Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender

 

The Pylons

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Spender

 Thursday, April 22, 2010

Stephen Spender

 

        Photograph by Irving Penn, 1947

An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. 
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor. 
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- 
seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir 
Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease, 
His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class 
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream, 
Of squirrel's game, in the tree room, other than this. 

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head, 
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. 
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map 
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these 
Children, these windows, not this world, are world, 
Where all their future's painted with a fog, 
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky, 
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. 

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, and the map a bad example 
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal-- 
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes 
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children 
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel 
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. 
All of their time and space are foggy slum. 
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom. 

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor, 
This map becomes their window and these windows 
That shut upon their lives like catacombs, 
Break O break open 'till they break the town 
And show the children green fields and make their world 
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues 
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open 
History is theirs whose language is the sun. 

Louis MacNeice

 

“The British Museum Reading Room”

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge--
    Honey and wax, the accumulation of years--

Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
    The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
    And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
    This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out of the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
    A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles--the ancient terror--
Between the enormous fluted lonic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
    The guttural sorrow of the refugees.

Louis MacNiece

The House on the Cliff

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors
The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,
While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors
The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors
The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.
Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross
Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.