Stephen Spender

What I expected, was Thunder, fighting, Long struggles with men And climbing. After continual straining I should grow strong; Then the rocks would shake And I rest long. What I had not foreseen Was the gradual day Weakening the will Leaking the brightness away, The lack of good to touch, The fading of body and soul Smoke before wind, Corrupt, unsubstantial. The wearing of Time, And the watching of cripples pass With limbs shaped like questions In their odd twist, The pulverous grief Melting the bones with pity, The sick falling from earth - These, I could not foresee. Expecting always Some brightness to hold in trust Some final innocence Exempt from dust, That, hanging solid, Would dangle through all Like the created poem, Or the faceted crystal.

(Double Portrait in a Mirror) I To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity. When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse With a headache. In spirit follow The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot. For the uncreating chaos Claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride. Ever among the supple surface of summer-brown muscle The fountaining evening chatter under the stars, The student who chucks back his forelock in front of a glass, You only longed for your longing to last. The engine in you, anxiety, Is a grave lecher, a globe-trotter, one With moods of straw, the winds that blow him, aeroplanes. 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.' II I am so close to you I will confess to you I am all that you do. In thoughts where pity is the same as cruelty Your life is mine. Whether What fears and falters is myself Or yourself — all The apprehension of this time, We are both one. At night I'm flooded by the future Incoming tide of the unharnessed war. Beyond the blacked-out windows of our nightmare Facts race their hundred miles an hour In iron circles on an iron plain. The riders of those race-cars lose All sense of where they are. Ridden by their speed, the men Are their machines. III All I can foresee now — more I shall learn — Is that our fear creates its opposite. Our peace is war. When you choose a mirror for a lover It shows you your own image as a gunman. You are a ghost amid the flares of shellfire Less living than The last war dead whose veins of mineral We mine for here. IV Shall I ever reach The field enclosed by stones In the high mountains Where the scytheless wind Flushes the swayed grasses? Where clouds without rain Add to the sun Their mirroring shine? The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. Meanwhile, where nothing's sacred And love no longer willed Nor our true purpose conscious, Holy is lucidity And the mind that dare explain.

I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns, Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song. And who hoarded from the Spring branches The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms. What is precious, is never to forget The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth. Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love. Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are fêted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Stranger, you who hide my love In the curved cheek of a smile And sleep with her upon a tongue Of soft lies that beguile, Your paradisal ecstasy Is justified is justified By hunger of the beasts beneath The overhanging cloud Who to snatch quick pleasures run Before their momentary sun Be eclipsed by death. Lightly, lightly from my sleep She stole, our vows of dew to break Upon a day of melting rain Another love to take: Her happy happy perfidy Was justified was justified Since compulsive needs of sense Clamour to be satisfied And she was never one to miss Plausible happiness Of a new experience. I, who stand beneath a bitter Blasted tree, with the green life Of summer joy cut from my side By that self-justifying knife, In my exiled misery Were justified were justified If upon two lives I preyed Or punished with my suicide, Or murdered pity in my heart Or two other lives did part To make the world pay what I paid. Oh, but supposing that I climb Alone to a high room of clouds Up a ladder of the time And lie upon a bed alone And tear a feather from a wing And listen to the world below And write round my high paper walls Anything and everything Which I know and do not know!

The great pulsation passed. Glass lay around me Resurrected from the end. I walked Along streets of slate-jabbering houses, Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject Prayer, my prayer as well: 'Oh God, Spare me the lot that is my neighbour's.' Then, in the upper sky, indifferent to our Sulphurous nether hell, I saw The dead of the bombed graveyard, a calm tide Under the foam of stars above the town. And on the roof-tops there stood London prophets Saints of Covent Garden, Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead, Hyde Park Corner, Saint John's Wood, Crying aloud in cockney fanatic voices: 'In the midst of Life is Death!' They kneeled And prayed against the misery manufactured In mines and ships and mills, against The greed of merchants, vanity of priests. They sang: 'We souls from the abyss To whom the stars are fields of flowers, Tell you: Rejoice in the abyss! For hollow is the skull, the vacuum In the gold ball, St Paul's gold cross. Unless you will accept the emptiness Within the bells of foxgloves and cathedrals, Each life must feed upon the deaths of others, The shamelessly entreating prayer Of every house will be that it is spared Calamity that strikes its neighbour.'

My parents kept me from children who were rough Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams. I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys Who copied my lisp behind me on the road. They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud While I looked the other way, pretending to smile. I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

I A whim of Time, the general arbiter, Proclaims the love, instead of death, of friends. Under the domed sky and athletic sun Three stand naked: the new, bronzed German The communist clerk, and myself, being English. Yet to unwind the travelled sphere twelve years Then two take arms, spring to a soldier's posture: Or else roll on the thing a further ten, The third - this clerk with world-offended eyes— Builds with red hands his heaven: makes our bones The necessary scaffolding to peace. II Now, I suppose, the once-envious dead Have learned a strict philosophy of clay After long centuries, to haunt us no longer In the churchyard or at the end of the lane Or howling at the edge of the city Beyond the last bean rows, near the new factory. Our fathers killed. And yet there lives no feud Like Hamlet's, prompted on the castle stair: There falls no shadow on our blank of peace, We three together, struck across our path, No warning finger threatening each alone. III Our fathers' misery, their spirits' mystery, The cynic's cruelty, weave this philosophy: That the history of man, traced purely from dust, Is lipping skulls on the revolving rim Or war, us three each other's murderers - Lives, risen a moment, joined or separate, Fall heavily, then are ever separate, Sod lifted, turned, slapped back again with spade.

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round 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 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 map, their 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, 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, 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 to 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 theirs whose language is the sun.

I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground. Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting And on the mouth a grin: triumph of one Who has escaped from life-long colleagues roaring For him to join their throng. He's still half with us Conniving slyly, yet he knows he's gone Into that cellar where they'll never find him, Happy to be alone, his last work done, Word freed from world, into a different wood. II But we, with feet on grass, feeling the wind Whip blood up in our cheeks, walk back along The hillside road we earlier climbed today Following the hearse and tinkling village band. The white October sun circles Kirchstetten With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens, And bronze and golden under wiry boughs, A few last apples gleam like jewels. Back in the village inn, we sit on benches For the last toast to you, the honoured ghost Whose absence now becomes incarnate in us. Tasting the meats, we imitate your voice Speaking in flat benign objective tones The night before you died. In the packed hall You are your words. Your listeners see Written on your face the poems they hear Like letters carved in a tree's bark The sight and sound of solitudes endured. And looking down on them, you see Your image echoed in their eyes Enchanted by your language to be theirs. And then, your last word said, halloing hands Hold up above their heads your farewell bow. Then many stomp the platform, entreating Each for his horde, your still warm signing hand. But you have hidden away in your hotel And locked the door and lain down on the bed And fallen from their praise, dead on the floor. III (Ghost of a ghost, of you when young, you waken In me my ghost when young, us both at Oxford. You, the tow-haired undergraduate With jaunty liftings of the head. Angular forward stride, cross-questioning glance, A Buster Keaton-faced pale gravitas. Saying aloud your poems whose letters bit Ink-deep into my fingers when I set Them up upon my five-pound printing press: 'An evening like a coloured photograph A music stultified across the water The heel upon the finishing blade of grass.')