TURNING to sleep, to new strange drowned blue gleams,
I bless the space of solitude clean for dreams.
I bless the straining curtains where they hold
The deep recessive night, and the old
Rough turning tree, and window-squares, and cones
Of hidden lamps . . . The lampshade slightly swings
With flies perched sure and blind. Its shadow-rings
Travel about the ceiling like a thought
Whose calm centricity can with madness sport.
My limbs are simple-tired and my mind
Matches their Adam weariness and is kind
To chance’s every trivial touch and taste.
Time is a plenitude easy to waste.
In this fine rarity and spiritual bliss
I cast aside with ease what comes amiss.
A mathematic saintliness of truth
Seizes each tiny tasking for its growth.
My tired limbs emerge like Titan-limbs
From the soul’s choked Sargasso and are hymns
To tidal certainties of the world’s rims . . .
I conquer all variety by my joy
But lose no subtlest savour poised to annoy,
Yet hairsbreadth this side Heaven. I find Death,
My daily fiend and neighbour, with spicy breath
Fresh-come from Paradise . . . Could I praise
With the true accent, as a Christ can raise
A Lazarus from the dead, I ’d have witness nigh, —
My wife I scan now with the inward eye:
My friend whose shoulder I can lean upon
When pride and petty tyranny are gone.
I ’d show them furious miracles, how the soul
Can spin from skin and flesh an aureole
To burn upon the forehead of a dream.
Their dust would dance like motes within a beam.
Caught in the breath of my imagination
Their limbs would shine in death’s illumination.
They’d clap their hands before me and the night’s
Green exhalation mingled with the lights
Would be the savorous dew and dawn of Eden.
They’d shed the lust for furthest immortality.
They’d find God’s cipher in the spirit hidden
To read in ease God’s own calligraphy
And find th’ immortal spelling in the mood
That worked a measure out of solitude.
Seeing me lonely they’d cry about my head:
“Look Lazarus! arisen from the dead!
Look Lazarus remote with fire of death.”
And she my wife, before the spiritual breath
Would love the loneliness of love’s salvation
And he, my friend, would prove imagination.
A MERCHANT prince, a monarch of finance,
Great in the Bull-ring, great at baiting Bears,
One day was victim of a slight mischance,
For too elastic were some rubber shares.
His Chiltern Hundreds fifteen thousand cost —
Such men’s well-being is the public weal —
His party lost him, and his party lost:
It was a deal, they thought. It was a deal.
An Old Song Re-Sung
SHE was neither poor nor honest,
She was victim of no crimes,
And when she died they gave her
Half-a-column in the Times.
Mors Et Vita
FROM the immense inane to the inane immense
The soul flies forth upon the wings of sense,
And after a short while flies back again
From the inane immense to the immense inane.
The Right Hon.
WHERE lovely Paestum fronts the sea
And roses ’mid the temples rise,
The Right Hon. walks in ecstacy,
With rapture in his dreaming eyes.
His lips are moving as in prayer
To see the beauty of the bay,
To breathe the scented southern air,
And you might hear him softly say:
“Ships, Mr. Speaker, ships and guns —
Cold steel — concessions — Soviet —
Oil — Flanders fields — accursed Huns —
Lest we forget! Lest we forget!”
