82. All Now Making Sense at Last, Alas!

these relics or fragments now
– abrade into dust
  mix w/ yr spittle
  build up
           then breathe
                miswrite their names

 
reborn w/
flaming red hair
                 – scarlet
                   why not?
 

appearance is all
only the shine
– when that’s gone
                   burst

 
Verwandlungzauber zu einem Tapir
eterocliti, tapiri e preoccupazione rendono un paio
sulla strada vanno sulle gambe tozze
camminare con gli zoccoli troppo sensibili
 

significant ceremonies
news of Sheffield1
delicious laughter
let’s wait
for carnival together

 
what is more use here?
   – the world and all its people
     the poem and all its words
     what has been
     or what will come
     remains here now
huge in an eyeblink astart
 

meadowsweet across the Rhine
– what can it epitomise?
what familiar perversity
threatens now our waterfowl?
 

maybe no real worry
    – let’s learn German
      get a job
      decide which warband
      might protect us best2
 

1.(a) At top of steps, some half-mile from the sea3
      Sat——in the morning and out of the sea up to him
      Came——seeking favour and on left and right
      Stood——quick as trees, then said——
      These are ours and therein all that is
      And the living creatures of the field and fen
      Made echo sound upon the day’s platface.

p 318

(b)   The Towers came nearer over the mist.4
      I heard my kind pattering all about
      The shafts, the upward and the downward shafts,
      And rolling silent out in silent daylight
      Innumerous pellicules.
                             Passed the X
      And cliff of many windows, slept along
      Crossed by the Pass of two Towers
      And so ad infinitum to the stars.

p 319

(c)   It is today, when silence falls,5
      And all the people standing on the quay
      To watch the big ships sail away
      Stop waving to their friends
                                   and say
      The answer to the sun is death

Charles Madge, “The Hours of the Planets”, p 324

2    You above all who have come to the far end, victims
      Of a run-down machine, who can bear it no longer;
      Whether in easy chairs chafing at impotence
      Or against hunger, bullies and spies preserving
      The nerve for action, the spark of indignation——
      Need fight in the dark no more, you know your enemies.
      You shall be leaders when zero hour is signalled,
      Wielders of power and welders of a new world.

C. Day Lewis, “‘You that love England’”, in edited by Michael Roberts, The Faber Book of Modern Verse (Faber & Faber, 1936), p 265

 
what’s offered
by little creatures
                    all inside
won’t redeem
             just carry on
             dappled in the shade

all our disordered selves

 

 

1 drips of water, drips of steel

 

 

2 The future is feudal; the past was progress; the present no longer

 

 

3 “The rise of the bourgeoisie”

 

 

4 “Glimpses of reality”

 

 

5