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.
...
Chemicals ripen the citrus;
There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,
And on the shoreline
Hygiene, inhuman caution.
...
No moss nor mottle stains
My parents' unmarked grave;
My word on them remains
Stouter than stone, you told me.
...
X, whom society's most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates,
In art is seen confusingly to stand
For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.
...
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
...
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.
...
"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
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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?
...
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.
...
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.
...
"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
...
Time passing, and the memories of love
Coming back to me, carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before; time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.
How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love
As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.
What will become of us? Time
Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?
...
Hearing one saga, we enact the next.
We please our elders when we sit enthralled;
But then they're puzzled; and at last they're vexed
To have their youth so avidly recalled.
It dawns upon the veterans after all
That what for them were agonies, for us
Are high-brow thrillers, though historical;
And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.
This novel written fifteen years ago,
Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home,
These poems about ''abandoned workings'', show
Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.
The Anschluss, Guernica ? all the names
At which those poets thrilled or were afraid
For me mean schools and headmasters and games;
And in the process someone is betrayed.
Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke
Might carve his own initials on our desk,
And yet we'd miss the point because he spoke
An idiom too dated, Audenesque.
Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son.
A pretty pickle if we came to see
The tallest story really packed a gun,
The Telemachiad an Odyssey.
2
Even to them the tales were not so true
As not to be ridiculous as well;
The ironmaster met his Waterloo,
But Rider Haggard rode along the fell.
'Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!'' They lounged away
On Fleming's trek or Isherwood's ascent.
England expected every man that day
To show his motives were ambivalent.
They played the fool, not to appear as fools
In time's long glass. A deprecating air
Disarmed, they thought, the jeers of later schools;
Yet irony itself is doctrinaire,
And, curiously, nothing now betrays
Their type to time's derision like this coy
Insistence on the quizzical, their craze
For showing Hector was a mother's boy.
A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.
And yet it may be better, if we must,
To praise a stance impressive and absurd
Than not to see the hero for the dust.
For courage is the vegetable king,
The sprig of all ontologies, the weed
That beards the slag-heap with his hectoring,
Whose green adventure is to run to seed.
...
Donald Alfred Davie (17 July 1922 – 18 September 1995) was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes. Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England, a son of Baptist parents. He began his education at Barnsley Hogate Grammar School, and he later attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His studies there were interrupted by service during the war in the Royal Navy in Arctic Russia, where he taught himself the language. In the last year of the war, in Devon, he married Doreen John. After returning to Cambridge, he continued his studies and received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. He returned to Cambridge in 1958, and in 1964 was made the first Professor of English at the new University of Essex. He taught English at the University of Essex from 1964 until 1968, when he moved to Stanford University, where he succeeded Yvor Winters. In 1978, he relocated to Vanderbilt University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. He often wrote on the technique of poetry, both in books such as Purity of Diction in English Verse, and in smaller articles such as 'Some Notes on Rhythm in Verse'. Davie's criticism and poetry are both characterized by his interest in modernist and pre-modernist techniques. 'Davie claimed ‘there is no necessary connection between the poetic vocation on the one hand, and on the other exhibitionism, egoism, and licence'. He writes eloquently and sympathetically about British modernist poetry in Under Briggflatts, while in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry he defends a pre-modernist verse tradition. Much of Davie's poetry has been compared to that of the traditionalist Philip Larkin, but other works are more influenced by Ezra Pound. He is featured in the Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse (1980). Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue described Davie's poetry as "an enforced choice between masturbation and happily wedded love" bereft of drama. Writer Calvin Bedient discusses Davie's style in his book Eight Contemporary Poets. He informs readers of Davie's specific thoughts by including quotes. According to Bedient, Davie said that 'To make poetry out of moral commonplace, a poet has to make it clear that he speaks not in his own voice (that would be impertinent) but as the spokesman of a social tradition.' It follows that Davie's voice is unique compared to the modern movement that was happening during his life. His work does not epitomize contemporary poetry like that of many of his counterparts, but rather it calls upon a certain nostalgia for the past. Davie's work is distinctly "English" sounding, as he uses English phrases and traditional language. In particular, his work often reminds readers of the late Augustan poets, whose work is sophisticated and polished. His writes in a similar style to Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, who were both alive during Davie's lifetime. In addition, Davie writes without fear of criticism. He uses a strong and confident voice to assert his thoughts and musings.)
Across the Bay
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.