John Fuller

He went to the city and goosed all the girls With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally, One head in my chambers and one up your alley And I am as old as my master. I followed him further and lost all my friends, The grease still thick on his fistful of pens. I laced up his mutton and paddled his lake In the game of Get-off-me and Just-for-my-sake And I am as old as my master. I sang in his service a farewell to sorrow With rolled black stockings, the bone and the marrow. The Law was a devil to cheat as you pleased As we knelt on the backs of the city girls’ knees And I am as old as my master. So back to the country where birds are squawking, With possets for pensions and witless talking Of walloped starvelings and soldiers’ fortunes From his nodding bench in the smothered orchards And I am as old as my master. Age turns the cheek of a buried scandal In a nightmare of cheese and a quarter of candle. When the servant is privy he’s good as a guest, The first to be carved to and last to be pressed And I am as old as my master. Country or city, no pleasure can last: It’s farewell to the future and beckon the past. Though he that we drink with is sometimes a fool, A single grey tooth may furnish a smile And I am as old as my master.

The poet’s duties: no need to stress The subject’s dullness, nonetheless Here’s an incestuous address In Robert Burns’ style To one whom all the Muses bless At Great Turnstile. I’ve no excuses for this theme. Prescription is less popular than dream And little rhymes, God knows, can seem Much too laconic, Bollinger’s visionary gleam Turned gin-and-tonic. But ssch! you know and understand The way these verses have been planned: Gritty like little bits of sand Not shining quartz; No pulsing from a higher gland Just random thoughts. Let’s start by thinking of objectives. Poets hate to have directives: They’re on their own, not on collectives, Share and share about, And what inspires their best invectives Is what they care about. You,James, collapsed upon our sofa As though being driven by a chauffeur, Won’t fail to tell us what you go for: Managerial boobs And answers that you won’t take no for From Fine Tubes. Reporters never throw in towels. Their prose is written from the bowels. Ottava rima about owls Printed by Sycamore Is worlds away from Enoch Powell’s Plans for the blackamoor. But are you James Cameron or Flecker? Are you a maker or a trekker? What is the nature of your Mecca, Your verum pulchrum? I’m glad, of course, that you’re with Secker And not with Fulcrum. Poet and traveller have quarrelled And now you canter where you carolled. We’re waiting still for your Childe Harold, Though quests in Poland Find you fixated and apparelled More like Childe Roland. It is impressive, I agree, Although I know it’s not for me. I take the windfalls from the tree, I’m much too lazy, The prisons that I want to see By Piranesi. You say that Oxford has no marrow, Sucked dry by Trevor-Roper, Sparrow, And others of reaction’s farrow In their fat cloister, Though if my eye is just as narrow It may be moister. We never see our feelings through, And weeping only makes us blue. It may be beautiful and true But it’s not action, And nothing the bourgeoisie can do Gives satisfaction. How can we alter our behaviour? Should we deny our gravy’s gravier? Leave Cleopatra for Octavia? My life is inner, And someone I don’t think a saviour Is B. F. Skinner. Avoid that fashionable flock: To be refitted in their dock Your common-sense must take a knock As it took a course on The reflexes of frogs, and Locke, And P. F. Strawson. Much of the Left we can ignore (Sheer anarchy I don’t adore). The trendy educate the poor In greed and fear, While Labour’s entered on the war Of Jenkins’ ear. No. Righteous more than He who Hath, More reasonable than New Math, Momier than the Mome Rath In their outgrabing, Glossing the Variorum Plath From Krafft-Ebing, Apostles of determinism Whose hero’s Mao or Virgil Grissom Won’t interest your mind one rissom: You’re too empirical. What about Neo-Imagism? Impossibly lyrical. Such knowing brevity needs patience: As unfastidious Croatians Upon quite intimate occasions Shun body-talc, So leave your interpersonal relations To Colin Falck. For poetry to have some merit he Requires it to display sincerity, Each pronoun to convince posterity With deep emotion And an invigorating verity Like hair-lotion. Well, that’s unfair. I’m glad he lives. Just think of the alternatives! Those whose verse resembles sieves Or a diagram, And foul-mouthed transatlantic spivs Wooing Trigram. For they are all still with us,James, Fiddling among the flames, Brandishing the brittle fames They soon arrive at. It’s better not to mention names: They’ll wince in private. Orating offspring of Urania (No fault of yours that they’re not brainier) Have an immodest dogged mania For autobiography Disguised in concrete or the zanier Forms of typography. The wide-eyed audience they’re rooking Would secretly prefer a booking From a quartet like the backward-looking Rank Ailanthus They’d jump to hear what’s really cooking With the Black Panthers. Whatever props the poet uses, Whether he accepts, accuses Or gives up, he must know his Muse is A sensible girl. Even some antics of Ted Hughes’s Make her hair curl. And so you need a form to play About in but which will convey Something of what you want to say Without evasion, Adjusting like the Vicar of Bray To each occasion. The size you haven’t found as yet. What Nabokov calls the ‘triolet’ Is much too trim a maisonette To dawdle in, Unlike your shabby Cloisters set In Magdalen, Which made your poetry much dandier, Much like ottava rima, handier. You needed in its chilly grandeur To turn the fire on For times when you felt even randier Than Lord Byron. Still, you found sonnets quite inspiring Although some rhymes like ancient wiring Showed the circuits could prove tiring (Though not unduly, And no one could be more admiring Than Yours Truly). So carry on: your talents hum. No one will ever find you dumb While you avoid the slightly rum Like the White Goddess Or Black Mountain(and don’t become Roger Woddis). I’ll send a sub to the IS (Please let me know the right address) I shan’t turn up, but I confess I’m not a traitor. I just don’t want to think the less Of Teresa Hayter. Some day I’ll join you in the street Where suffering and truth must meet: It isn’t easy not to feel effete This side of anguish, When those who can’t choose what to eat Don’t speak our language. Meanwhile we have to try to bring Some order to that circus ring Where people think and feel and sing, For at its centre There’s no escape from anything, And we must enter.

The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees. The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions. He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant Of all banalities of village life, And yet is stupefied by loneliness. Continually he dreams of the company he craves for, But he challenges it and bores it to tears whenever It swims uncertainly into his narrow orbit. Meetings, however relished in their prospect, Seem only to be arrangements for departures. Exemplum: the spruce Captain and his vampire wife With her token fur hat and veil, like a bandage Extemporised by a bat. It seems that exercise Keeps the Captain’s horse in a permanent lather. The wife suffers from a disabling ennui. What more likely than a harmless liaison? At their first meeting the scenario is as obvious As a cheese. Her eyes, half-lidded, turn away, The cup lifted to her lips. The Captain has questions About the flooding of the water-meadow. A furious but undirected energy governs her soul, Listless as she seems on the surface. It is A libido on auto-destruct. Opportunities Occur, but the Doctor, in complacent rectitude, Bows himself off the stage of further meetings. He devotes himself to his patients. They, however, Begin to avoid him as if he has some dreadful disease. When the Captain is lost on the glacier, his horse Riderless, returning to graze on the bowling-green, The Doctor is suspected. It is most unfair. Meanwhile, his orphaned cousins go ahead With their threatened law-suit. At first he is amused. He meets their legal representative over A schnapps in the Bahnhof Buffet, and is compromised By the leather luggage of the absconding wife. He claims to have found a cure for the epidemic of goitres But only succeeds in killing two maids and a barley farmer. The Captain’s wife is staying at Interlaken With the Schoolmaster’s wastrel son. Her insane letters Are read out in court, evidence of the Doctor’s malpractice. Only his good old Nurse refuses to disbelieve him. On her death-bed she grips his fingers tightly And mutters inaudibly about the lost diaries. There is nothing now to prevent the red-haired cousins From taking complete control of his estate. The Doctor has lost everything and gained nothing. At the back of his mind there is still the slight hope That time will explain to him his crucial role. He becomes a cutter of peat, and realises That it is never quite easy enough to disappear.

You don’t listen to what I say. When I lean towards you in the car You simply smile and turn away. It’s been like this most of the day, sitting and sipping, bar after bar: You don’t listen to what I say. You squeeze a lemon from a tray, And if you guess how dear you are You simply smile and turn away. Beyond the hairline of the bay the steamers call that shore is far. You don’t listen to what I say: Surely there’s another way? The waiter brings a small guitar. You simply smile and turn away. Sometimes I think you are too gay, smiling and smiling, hour after hour. You don’t listen to what I say. You simply smile and turn away.

Bedfordshire A blue bird showing off its undercarriage En route between our oldest universities Was observed slightly off-course above Woburn In the leafy heart of our sleepiest county: Two cyclists in tandem looked up at the same moment, Like a busy footnote to its asterisk. Berkshire Once on the causeway outside Steventon I had a vision of living in willing exile, Of living the knowingly imperfect life But with a boundless and joyous energy Like Borodin played by the North Berkshire Youth Orchestra in its early days. Buckinghamshire A goose in the garden of the second-best pub In Marsh Gibbon was busy doing its dirty toothpaste And noisy, too, when a woman staggered out Of the lounge bar into the deserted car-park Saying: ‘I could never think of the child at my breast As anything other than a penis with a mouth.’ Cambridgeshire The bird arrived. Nothing so stately-exciting As Handel’s dusky queen that was unspooling Perhaps too loudly from a scribbling student cell, But looped between the trees, a flash of green: And only the having chanced to look just there Could tell you it had ever been away. Cheshire There was a young woman of Cheadle, who wore her heart Upon her sleeve, bright chevron! Oh, the keen-eyed Men of Cheadle, as in the jealous month When the registration numbers of new estate cars Change all over wealthy suburban Cheshire, And they picked out her heart with a needle. Cornwall The very last cat to speak Cornish had a glass eye And kept a corner shop, selling shoe-laces and bullseyes, Brasso and Reckitt’s Blue. My great-aunt remembers Buying postcards from him as a girl, When George’s profile sped them for a penny. Aching to talk, he died of pure loneliness. Cumberland They play bezique in Threlkeld and they play For keeps in Shap. And all the shapely clouds Roll through the streets like weeping chemistry Or cows escaped. And tea is served in the lounge Over a jig-saw puzzle of the Princess Elizabeth Beneath wet panes, wet mountains and wet sky. Derbyshire Once upon a time, in Derbyshire’s leaking basement Where you lie back in boats and quant by walking the ceiling, A strange girl in the dripping darkness attached Her damp lips to mine fast, like a snail’s adherence To cold stone in dusty nettles, and all unseeen The bluejohn slid by me: yellows, greys and purples. Devon You will never forget the fish market at Barnstaple: Wet gills, double bellies, gleaming scales, Shells like spilt treasure. And the cream there thicker Than a virgin’s dream, and Devon’s greatest poet Born Gay, on Joy Street, taught by Robert Luck: It is the paradise of all fat poets. Dorset When the old woman entered the sea at Charmouth And the great waves hung over her head like theatre curtains, I thought of the sibyl who charmed the rocks to yield Their grainy secrets till history bore down Upon her and the liquid world was fixed For ever in the era of the fossils. Durham At the end of your battered philosophical quest, The purity of Durham rises like an exhalation, Like the stench of sulphur in a barrel. Birds Build in the walls of the cloisters, disappearing into holes Like black-robed devotees. Inside it is quiet, The oatmeal crimping distant in grey air. Essex I had a vision in the dead of night Of all the kitchens of commuters’ Essex Alight like the heads of snakes; and down them slid The bored wives and daughters of the managers Who were at the identical time arriving On the ladders of their power and fatigue. Gloucestershire Armorial memorials reduced To leper stone, forests to hedges, hedges To sickled stumps where perch the songless birds Of Gloucestershire, and vans require the roads Before them in their headlights. No one speaks In the time it takes to cross the greenest county. Hampshire Driving at evening down the A 34 Like a ski-run, the sun a deiphany, The car-radio a percussive Russian insistence: Pure pleasure, pure escape! Past Winchester, Unseen its stalking scholars, past everything, Driving through Hampshire, driving for the boats! Herefordshire Alone between the Arrow and the Wye, Wales to the west, keeping its rain and secrets, I wandered in cider country, where the shade Beneath the trees is golden red and noisy With the jealous spite of wasps: Ariconium, The poet Philips, his long hair combed out! Hertfordshire Hertfordshire is full of schoolmasters, And archaeologists who are part-time poets. Together they apportion past, present And future among their imaginary admirers In the form of examination papers, foul Drafts, and labels of dubious information. Huntingdonshire Herds of deer are moving through the trees Of Huntingdonshire noisily and rather Slowly. An idle hand sweeping the lyre Brings tears to the eyes of the moderately rich. They will dip their hands in their pockets, gently dip But not too deep. You’ve got to keep money moving. Kent Old men coming up to bowl remember Other old men who in their turn remembered Things that were hardly worth remembering Through long still nights in Ashford, Faversham, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells and Westerham Where even now the fields still smell of beer. Lancashire All the oven doors of Lancashire Swing open on the hour, revealing vast Puddings. After tea, the lovers stroll, Their hands in each other’s back trouser pockets, Feeling the strange swell of the flexing buttock. The sun sinks, and the Ribble runs to the sea. Leicestershire Cheeks of angels, lips compressed, donate To brass invisible impulsions of Purely material breath: a county’s children Gather to create an overture, While brothers and fathers leaping over hedges Wind horns to their alternative conclusion. Lincolnshire M1, M18, M180: the roads With their bright and bowline intersections sweep North to Scunthorpe. Go further if you will To where the Trent meets the Humber and Lincolnshire ends. There, at Alkborough, you may draw breath And if Nicky’s at home she will give you a cup of something. Middlesex Middlesex is mostly roundabouts, the bright Voice of five p.m., insistent infotainment: Fingers gallop irritably on the steering-wheel; The nails make little clicks. Down the line Of fuming stationary Volvos boys bully with headlines That tell the drivers all about the place they have come from. Norfolk Norfolk is somehow inverted: it’s all sky With clouds as bulky as castrati or lines of Dryden Sailing out above you, tinged with sunset. Get as far as you can, but not too far, Say to the Tuesday Market Place at King’s Lynn Where all the conveyancing is done in verse. Northamptonshire Once half-lost here, when only a map of sounds Or smells could lead us from a wood, we came At evening to horse-brass and low-timbered beams Where the world had evolved to its great public state And the men and women of Northampton, being counted And with amber drinks, found themselves to be happy. Northumberland Traitors’ county: from one end to the other You can walk bright-eyed with never a second glance From a stocky frowning people who move slowly And mind their own business. For they have seen it all: When the mist clears over Northumberland It leaves squat towers, valleys scarred with lead. Nottinghamshire There is one red door in one slightly curved Street in one nameless market town That contains behind it for a moment an image Of the planet’s destiny: a girl stooping To a hallway mirror, making her lips move Into a theatrical kiss, a self kiss. Oxfordshire The kingfisher has long flown. Along the Cherwell The biscuit of bridge and college wall is blank Of its image, but with a passing presence Like a photograph taken with an open shutter. This, we reflect, is just the sense of our life, Aware of something the very moment that we miss it. Rutland Rutland is large enough for you and me To stumble into as into a wood without being seen, To tread its moss-starred carpet, enchanted By the chipped china of the russulas, Pink, grey, grey and green-grey, and red, Peeping beneath the oaks, not far from Oakham. Shropshire Shropshire Blue, still made, the Lord be praised, Tart veins that kept the Romans here and Housman From the rope. The iron bridges lead you to it, Farms knee-deep in cow. And if you stop off In red-earthed Bridgnorth, that vigilant town, Be sure your pint is not ungraced with cheese. Somerset A thousand airy harps! We hardly dare To let out breath, for our imagination Responds to these full-throated sounds as though To the ranks of the ever-delighting dead, our wise Visionaries, and this is the county of dreams And of the moon’s occult praesidium. Staffordshire Staffordshire is where you almost came from, Darkened beneath burnt clay, perpetual dusk. It is the housewife’s dream, twinkling hearths Bright with Zebo, scrubbed pumice steps And, in the bathroom, a finger on the nozzle And little lavender farts to begin the day. Suffolk I’ve had Leigh and buried St Edmunds, Stowed Felix and Market and Upland, I’ve been shut up in Boxton, found it painful in Akenham And felt totally stupid in Assingham: Carrying around one’s valuable despair like a fleece, To live in Suffolk is to suffocate. Surrey Flying in perfect formation above the sleeping Cul-de-sacs of Surrey, you observe The blocked pairing of houses, each with a garage, Like epaulettes. What whisperings behind The party walls! What eavesdropping, and what Bad timing! Well done! Sorry, partner! Boom! Sussex Chalk pie, a quality of sun like laughter, Distance predicted in hoof-beats: everywhere here Is vigilance as well as cruel amusement, That tempered island quality called sardonic. From Rye to Selsey Bill, something is on offer, A glittering spread, the bottom drawer pulled out. Warwickshire Driving to Wales I crossed a corner of Warwickshire That seemed to be hardly space at all, the home Of Dr Hall and his famous father-in-law Or of magic woods where lovers were lost and found, But simply the minutes that it took to tell An unimportant story, now forgotten. Westmorland Once again the skies are open over the whole county: From Clifton to Burton, from Grasmere to Brough, The pubtalk steaming with anoraks and orange parkas. But I can remember one solitary eye Raging in silence in the dripping marsh, Its dewy lashes spooning aphids from the air. Wiltshire In Wiltshire they are sending extra-terrestrial Signals: what will the Venusians think of us? Four-footed creatures who like to move in circles? Let’s hope they never noisily discover That we are only half the men they thought us, Stumbling at tangents from our glimpsed perfection. Worcestershire Oh darling, come to Broadway: there we’ll take Tea and scones and jam made from the plums Of Pershore, perfect, pitless, palate-pleasing. A stroll in the model street, a browse at Gavina’s. Then it’s right foot down in the Volvo, plenty of Scotch And the largest bed we can find at the Bull in Worcester. Yorkshire The brown teapot is always warming here For there will be a time when you must come home Though you be unknown except to the flowered dead. On the moors the diagonal smoke rises Like a bitter smile, tight but welcoming: Cousin country, extra places for tea.

I should like to live in a sunny town like this Where every afternoon is half-day closing And I would wait at the terminal for the one train Of the day, pacing the platform, and no one arriving. At the far end of the platform is a tunnel, and the train Slows out of it like a tear from a single eye. You couldn’t get further than this, the doors all opened And the porter with rolled sleeves wielding a mop. Even if one restless traveller were to arrive With leather grip, racquets under the arm, A belted raincoat folded over the shoulder, A fishing hat, and a pipe stuck in his mouth, There would be nowhere for him to move on to And he would settle down to tea in the lounge Of the Goat Hotel, doing yesterday’s crossword, And would emerge later, after a nap, for a drink. You meet them in the bar, glassy-eyed, all the time. They never quite unpack, and expect letters From one particular friend who doesn’t write. If you buy them a drink they will tell you their life history: ‘I should have liked to live in a sunny town like this, Strolling down to the harbour in the early evening, Looking at the catch. Nothing happens here. You could forget the ill-luck dogging you. ‘I could join the Fancy Rat Society and train Sweet peas over the trellised porch Of my little slice of stuccoed terrace. I could Be in time for the morning service at Tesco’s. ‘I expect death’s like this, letters never arriving And the last remembered failure at once abandoned And insistent, like a card on a mantelpiece. What might it be? You can take your choice. ‘ “I shook her by the shoulders in a rage of frustration.” “I smiled, and left the room without saying a word.” “I was afraid to touch her, and never explained.” “I touched her once, and that was my greatest mistake.” ’ You meet them before dinner. You meet them after dinner, The unbelieved, the uncaressed, the terrified. Their conversation is perfectly decent but usually It slows to a halt and they start to stare into space. You would like it here. Life is quite ordinary And the self-pity oozes into the glass like bitters. What’s your poison? Do you have a desire to drown? We’re all in the same boat. Join us. Feel free. And when the bar closes we can say goodbye And make our way to the terminal where the last (Or is it the first?) train of the day is clean and waiting To take us slowly back to where we came from. But will we ever return? Who needs us now? It’s the town that requires us, though the streets are empty. It’s become a habit and a retreat. Or a form of justice. Living in a sunny town like this.

From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles, The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last Riot of the senses, is only a short pass. Earth to be forked over is more patient, Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner. But if not grasped grows quickly, silently. We are restless, not remembering much. The pain is slow, original as laughter, Reaching for all of it, hardly aware, Beginning again and feeling for its terrain. We were often told and still we would not listen, And closing fingers, those accomplices, Took comfort from a lie. From lap to grass Whining, motionless on the lowest branch Above the pine needles, climbing the heather: We did not listen. It hid there still to find. Much since was hard to get, later displeased, Nursing an ordinary complaint or waiting For a reiterated brilliance, Growing in ignorance, too near to see. Now in the suburbs windows are on fire, Pale globes quiver on their dusty strings And afternoons disperse with mirth of gnome, The rigid stabbed flamingo pink in the trees, Split to the touch and walking by the pool. Now life jerking in its sustained coda Constricts its furniture and its events. The frowning bus disappears down the hill Or slides before the window with its bored Passengers staring unashamedly in. Now above the trees the ice-cream’s bare Electric tongue stammers its recitation. Children run out in the dumb-bell cul-de-sac To their cold delight, skipping between the turds Of long-dead dogs, coiled thickly on the stone. The children learn so quickly. The house stirs. Swallows leave earlier, apples to be pressed. Half the sky burns: the other half is dark. Hair pushing slowly out, generations Surrounding us with wonder, theirs and ours. Nothing to give, nothing has been learnt. The past simply denies the urge for a truce, Creeping into the egg. When it is time We can appoint a committee for the feasts, And for next year’s feasts, and the year after. Locks stick, glass metamorphosed In leafy caryatids of summer where Heat packs the panes and fingers tremble in Tobacco pockets, a tomato sniffed, Its greenish acid bloom and tiny hairs. The pain stirs again like a new life To be unravelled. It had to come to this. The body is nothing, the body thinks nothing, The short senses grubbing on their sticks Feel nothing, the forgotten carioca. A line moves to the finger end, and curls, Head fallen in helplessness. The wails Of children break behind the woven fences, Those minted faces tar beyond our sight. The gates shut: a parade of Japanese flags. And alive on the porch the councillor lowers his pipe, Comes down from the dunes a bathroom Arab Firing off caps, or crouched over shells Gathered in sodden pumps, the soprano waitress Bringing hot tea across the evening sand. The nights come in slowly. Behind a half-curtain The impossible is completed. A single lamp Weighs down its ornaments in pools of light. Shadows crawl over the crater, roped To the terrain’s recoil, roped to the pit.

Wondered Knob-Cracker at Stout-Heart: ‘Are you timed by your will, does your pulse List credit, ready to slam like a till? Can you keep it up?’ Growled Beard Splitter to Smug: ‘Your forces delay, bibbing at Northern walls While snow drives rifts between, barring the way. I am sufficient.’ Pleaded Knob-Cracker with Fail-Safe: ‘You’ve boarded at last, your hands in your pockets, Hat on the back of your head and flags up the mast. Can’t I come with you?’ Nodded Beard-Splitter to Sorrowful: ‘The islands are prisons and no one returns, No power or possessions where my rule is. I will make you mine.’

In cities there are tangerine briefcases on the down-platform and jet parkas on the up-platform; in the mother of cities there is equal anxiety at all terminals. West a business breast, North a morose jig, East a false escape, South steam in milk. The centres of cities move westwards; the centre of the mother of cities has disappeared. North the great cat, East the great water, South the great fire, West the great arrow. In cities the sons of women become fathers; in the mother of cities the daughters of men have failed to become mothers. East the uneager fingers, South the damp cave, West the chained ankle, North the rehearsed cry. Cities are built for trade, where women and men may freely through knowing each other become more like themselves; the mother of cities is built for government, where women and men through fearing each other become more like each other than they care to be. South the short, West the soap, North the sheets, East the shivers. In cities the church fund is forever stuck below blood heat; in the mother of cities the church is a community arts centre. West the Why-not, North the Now-then, East the End- product, South the Same-again. In cities nobody can afford the price; in the mother of cities nobody dares to ask the price. North the telephone smile, East the early appointment, South the second reminder, West the hanging button. In cities the jealous man is jealous because he is himself in his imagination unfaithful; in the mother of cities the jealous man is jealous because he reads the magazines. East the endless arrival, South the astounding statistic, West the wasted words, North the night of nights. In cities we dream about our desires; in the mother of cities we dream about our dreams.

Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut. Your life was ours, which is with you. Go on your journey. We go too. The bat is flying round the house Like an umbrella turned into a mouse. The moon is astonished and so are the sheep: Their bells have come to send you to sleep. Oh be our rest, our hopeful start. Turn your head to my beating heart. Sleep little baby, clean as a nut, Your fingers uncurl and your eyes are shut.