W.H. Auden Lullaby
e.e. cummings somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
W.D. Snodgrass April Inventory
A.E. Stallings The Doll House
Louis MacNeice The Sunlight on the Garden
E.A. Robinson Eros Turannos
Thomas Hood Silence
Alfred Lord Tennyson Vastness
D.H. Lawrence Piano
Peter Porter An Exequy
 
 
Lullaby
W.H. Auden
 
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
 
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstacy,
 
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
 
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
 
(From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House.
 Copyright (c) 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden.
 Used without the permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.)
 
 
 
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
e.e. cummings
 
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
 
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
 
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
 
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
 
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
 
(1931)
 
 
 
April Inventory
W. D. Snodgrass
 
The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.
 
The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
 
The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.
 
The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.
 
I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
 
And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.
 
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
 
I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.
 
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
 
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
 
(From Heart's Needle by W. D. Snodgrass, (c) 1957, 1959)
 
 
 
The Doll House
A.E. Stallings




 
 
There in the attic of forgotten shapes
(Old coats in plastic, hat boxes, fur capes
Amongst the smells of mothballs and cigars),
I saw the doll house of our early years,
With which my mother and my aunt had played,
And later where my sister and I made
The towering grown-up hours to smile and pass:
The little beds, the tin-foil looking glass,
Bookcases stamped in ink upon the walls,
Mismatched chairs where sat the jointed dolls,
The clock whose face, no larger than a dime,
Had, for all these years, kept the same time.
I remembered how we set the resin food
Atop a table of stained balsa wood,
The shiny turkey hollow to the tap,
The cherry pie baked in a bottle cap.
Now it is time to go to sleep, we spoke,
Parroting the talk of older folk, 
And laid the dolls out fully-clothed in bed
After their teeth were brushed, and prayers were said,
And flipped the switch on the low-wattage sun.
But in the night we'd have something break in,
Kidnap the baby or purloin the pie --
A tiger, maybe, or a passer by --
Just to make something happen, to move the story.
The dolls awoke, alarmed, took inventory.
If we made something happen every day,
Or night, it was the game we knew to play,
Not realizing then how lives accrue, 
With interest, the smallest things we do.
 
(from Poetry, February 2001)
 
 
 
The Sunlight on the Garden
Louis MacNeice
 
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
 
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
 
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.
 
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
 
(1938)
 
 
 
Eros Turannos
E.A. Robinson
 
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
 
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost. --
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.
 
A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed of what she knows of days --
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.
 
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.
 
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be, --
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen, --
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.
 
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
 
(1916)

 
Silence 
Thomas Hood 
 
There is a silence where hath been no sound, 
There is a silence where no sound may be, 
 In the cold grave - under the deep, deep sea, 
Or in wide desert where no life is found, 
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound; 
 No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently, 
 But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free, 
That never spoke, over the idle ground: 
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls 
 Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, 
Though the dun fox or wild hyÊna calls, 
 And owls, that flit continually between, 
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan- 
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. 
 
(1827)
 
 
 
Vastness
Alfred Lord Tennyson 

I.

Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs 

after many a vanishíd face,

Many a planet by many a sun may roll 

with the dust of a vanishíd race.

II.

Raving politics, never at restñas this poor 

earthís pale history runs,ñ

What is it all but a trouble of ants in the 

gleam of a million million of suns?

III.

Lies upon this side, lies upon that side, 

truthless violence mourníd by the Wise,

Thousands of voices drowning his own in a 

popular torrent of lies upon lies; 

IV.

Stately purposes, valour in battle, glorious 

annals of army and fleet,

Death for the right cause, death for the wrong cause, 

trumpets of victory, groans of defeat;

V.

Innocence seethed in her motherís milk, 

and Charity setting the martyr aflame;

Thraldom who walks with the banner of Freedom, 

and recks not to ruin a realm in her name.

VI.

Faith at her zenith, or all but lost in the 

gloom of doubts that darken the schools;

Craft with a bunch of all-heal in her hand, 

followíd up by her vassal legion of fools;

VII.

Trade flying over a thousand seas with her 

spice and her vintage, her silk and her corn;

Desolate offing, sailorless harbours, famishing 

populace, wharves forlorn;

VIII.

Star of the morning, Hope in the sunrise; 

gloom of the evening, Life at a close;

Pleasure who flaunts on her wide downway 

with her flying robe and her poisoníd rose;

IX.

Pain, that has crawlíd from the corpse of 

Pleasure, a worm which writhes all day, and at night

Stirs up again in the heart of the sleeper, 

and stings him back to the curse of the light;

X.

Wealth with his wines and his wedded harlots; 

honest Poverty, bare to the bone;

Opulent Avarice, lean as Poverty; Flattery 

gilding the rift in a throne;

XI.

Fame blowing out from her golden trumpet 

a jubilant challenge to Time and to Fate;

Slander, her shadow, sowing the nettle on 

all the laurelíd graves of the Great;

XII.

Love for the maiden, crowníd with marriage, 

no regrets for aught that has been,

Household happiness, gracious children, 

debtless competence, golden mean;

XIII.

National hatreds of whole generations, and 

pigmy spites of the village spire;

Vows that will last to the last death-ruckle, 

and vows that are snapt in a moment of fire;

XIV.

He that has lived for the lust of the minute, 

and died in the doing it, flesh without mind;

He that has nailíd all flesh to the Cross, till 

Self died out in the love of his kind;

XV.

Spring and Summer and Autumn and Winter, 

and all these old revolutions of earth;

All new-old revolutions of Empireñ 

change of the tideñwhat is all of it worth?

XVI.

What the philosophies, all the sciences, 

poesy, varying voices of prayer?

All that is noblest, all that is basest, all 

that is filthy with all that is fair?

XVII.

What is it all, if we all of us end but in 

being our own corpse-coffins at last,

Swallowíd in Vastness, lost in Silence, 

drowníd in the deeps of a meaningless Past?

XVIII.

What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, 

or a momentís anger of bees in their hive?ñ

.      .      .      .      .      .      .      .      .     

Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love 

him forever: the dead are not dead but alive.

 
(1885)

 
Piano
D.H. Lawrence
 
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
 
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
 
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
 
(1918)
 
 
 
An Exequy
Peter Porter
 
In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldnít visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep--
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guiltís iconography,
Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child,
The stranded monster with the mild
Appearance, whom small waves tease,
(Andromeda upon her knees
In orthodox deliverance)
And you alone of pure substance,
The unformed form of life, the earth
Which Pieroís brushes brought to birth
For all to greet as myth, a thing
Out of the box of imagining.
This introduction serves to sing
Your mortal death as Bishop King
Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme
His young wife, lost before her time;
Though he lived on for many years
His poem each day fed new tears
To that unreaching spot, her grave,
His lines a baroque architrave
The sunday poor with bottled flowers
Would by-pass in their mourning hours,
Esteeming ragged natural life
("most dearly loved, most gentle wife"),
Yet, looking back when at the gate
And seeing grief in formal state
Upon a sculpted angel group,
Were glad that men of god could stoop
To give the dead a public stance 
And freeze them in their mortal dance.
 
The words and faces proper to 
My misery are private--you
Would never share your heart with those
Whose only talentís to suppose,
Nor from your final childish bed
Raise a remote confessing head--
The channels of our lives are blocked,
The hand is stopped upon the clock,
No one can say why hearts will break
And marriages are all opaque:
A map of loss, some posted cards,
The living house reduced to shards,
The abstract hell of memory,
The pointlessness of poetry--
These are the instances which tell
Of something which I know full well,
I owe a death to you--one day
The time will come for me to pay
When your slim shape from photographs
Stands at my door and gently asks
If I have any work to do
Or will I come to bed with you.
O scala enigmatica,
Iíll climb up to that attic where
The curtain of your life was drawn
Some time between despair and dawn--
Iíll never know with what halt steps
You mounted to this plain eclipse
But each stair now will station me
A black responsibility
And point me to that shut-down room,
"This be your due appointed tomb."
 
I think of us in Italy:
Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we
Move in a trance through Paradise,
Feeding at last our starving eyes,
Two people of the English blindness
Doing each masterpiece the kindness
Of discovering it--from Baldovinetti
To Veniceís most obscure jetty.
A true unfortunate traveller, I
Depend upon your nurseís eye
To pick the altars where no Grinner
Puts us off our touristsí dinner
And in hotels to bandy words
With Genevan girls and talking birds,
To wear your feet out following me
To nightís end and true amity,
And call my rational fear of flying
A paradigm of Holy Dying--
And, oh my love, I wish you were
Once more with me, at night somewhere
In narrow streets applauding wines,
The moon above the Apennines 
As large as logic and the stars,
Most middle-aged of avatars,
As bright as when they shone for truth
Upon untried and avid youth.
 
The rooms and days we wandered through
Shrink in my mind to one--there you
Lie quite absorbed by peace--the calm
Which life could not provide is balm
In death. Unseen by me, you look
Past bed and stairs and half-read book
Eternally upon your home,
The end of pain, the left alone.
I have no friend, or intercessor,
No psychopomp or true confessor
But only you who know my heart
In every cramped and devious part--
Then take my hand and lead me out,
The sky is overcast by doubt,
The time has come, I listen for
Your words of comfort at the door,
O guide me through the shoals of fear--
"Furchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir."
 
(1978)
 
(the above works have been defiantly reprinted without permission)
 
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