Donald Davie

“stooped to truth and moralized his song” Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps. Time to demoralize my song, high time. Vernal a little. Primavera. First Green, first truth and last. High time, high time. A high old time we had of it last summer? I overstate. But getting out the maps… Look! Up the valley of the Brenne, Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses. High time for that, high time. To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay Or so the song says, an amoral song Like Ronsard’s where we go today Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well! Philip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt Or some word as ridiculous, the whole Diction kit begins to fall apart. High time it did, high time. High time and a long time yet, my love! Get out that blessed map. Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it. Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire. High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then. The seasonable or more rabid heats Of love and summer in some other cities Unseal the all too human: not in his. When it is cold it stinks, but not before; Smells to high heaven then most creaturely When it is cold. It stinks, but not before His freezing eye has done its best to maim, To amputate limbs, livelihood and name, Abstracting life beyond all likelihood. When it is cold it stinks, and not till then Can it be fragrant. On canal and street, Colder and colder, Murphy to Molloy, The weather hardens round the Idiot Boy, The gleeful hero of the long retreat. When he is cold he stinks, but not before, This living corpse. The existential weather Smells out in these abortive minims, men Who barely living therefore altogether Live till they die; and sweetly smell till then.

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket Known to me wherever the flattened cat Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving. Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome, No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse. Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks, Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday. Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some Think that I enter them, those centuries Of monkish superstition, here I leave them With their true garlands, and their honest masks, Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden, Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday. Goodbye to all the centuries. There is No home in them, much as the dip and turn Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us. And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.

X, whom society’s most mild command, For instance evening dress, infuriates, In art is seen confusingly to stand For disciplined conformity, with Yeats. Taxed to explain what this resentment is He feels for small proprieties, it comes, He likes to think, from old enormities And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms. Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes His fathers suffered rankle in his blood, That he find least excusable the times When they acceded, not when they withstood. How else explain this bloody-minded bent To kick against the prickings of the norm; When to conform is easy, to dissent; And when it is most difficult, conform?

No moss nor mottle stains My parents’ unmarked grave; My word on them remains Stouter than stone, you told me. “Martyred to words”, you have thought, Should be your epitaph; At other times you fought My self-reproaches down. Though bitterly once or twice You have reproached me with how Everything ended in words, We both know better now: You understand, I shall not If I survive you care To raise a headstone for You I have carved on air.

Chemicals ripen the citrus; There are rattlesnakes in the mountains, And on the shoreline Hygiene, inhuman caution. Beef in cellophane Tall as giraffes, The orange-rancher’s daughters Crop their own groves, mistrustful. Perpetual summer seems Precarious on the littoral. We drive Inland to prove The risk we sense. At once Winter claps-to like a shutter High over the Ojai valley, and discloses A double crisis, Winter and Drought. Ranges on mountain-ranges, Empty, unwatered, crumbling, Hot colours come at the eye. It is too cold For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit Yellow burns on the distance. The phantom walks Everywhere, of intolerable heat. At Ventucopa, elevation Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen, Deserted or broken settlements, Gasoline stations closed and boarded. By nightfall, to the snows; And over the mile on tilted Mile of the mountain park The bright cars hazarded.

A queer thing about those waters: there are no Birds there, or hardly any. I did not miss them, I do not remember Missing them, or thinking it uncanny. The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone, A quarry outraged by hulls. We took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness Of the light, the silence, and the water’s stillness. But this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes. This hurt, and goes on hurting: The venomous soft jelly, the undersides. We could stand the world if it were hard all over.