Oxford poetry, 1920

by Unknown

ALAN PORTER
(QUEEN’S)

LIFE AND LUXURY

I HELD imagination’s candle high
To thread the pitchy cavern, life. A whisper
Dazed all the dark with sweetness oversweet,
A lithe body languished around my neck.
“Do out this unavailing light;” she pleaded.
“Soother is darkness. How may candle strive
With topless, bleak, obdurate blanks of space?
It can but cold the darkness else were warm.
Leave, leave to search so bitter-toilfully
Unthroughgone silence, leave and follow me;
For I will lead where many riches lie,
Where rippling silks and snow-soft cushions, rare
Cool wines, and delicates unearthly sweet,
And all the comfort flesh of man craves more.
We two shall dallying uncurl the long
And fragrant hours.” She reached a slender arm
Slowly along mine to the light. I flung her
Off, down. My candle showed her cheeks raddled,
Her bindweed pressure made me sick and mad;
I flung her back to the gloom. Her further hand
Clanked; hidden gyves fell ringing to the rock.
Peering behind her barely I could discern
Outstretching bodies clamped along the floor,
Unmoving most and silent, some uneasy,
Stirring and moaning. Smothery clutches came
Of slothful scents and fingered at my throat;
But, brushing by them, unaccompanied
I held aloft my rushlight in the cave
And searched for beauty through the cleaner air.
Thus far in parable. Laugh loud, O world,
Laugh loud and hollow. There are those would spurn
Your joys unjoyous and your acid fruits.
They would not tread the corpsy paths of commerce
Nor juggle with men’s bones; they would not chaffer
Their souls for strumpet pleasure. Cast them out,
Deny what little they would ask of life,
Assail, starve, torture, murder them, and laugh.
Shall it be war between us? Better war
Than faint submission—better death. And yet
I would not, no, nor shall not die. How weaponed
Shall I go passionate against your host?
How, cautelous, elude your calm blockade?

Of older days heart-free the poet roved
Along the furrowed lanes, and watched the robin
Squat in a puddle, whir his stumpy wings,
And tweet amid the tempest he aroused;
A hare would hirple on ahead (keep back,
Let her get out of sight; quick, cross yourself),
Or taper weasel slink past over the road;
And, seeing native blossoms, breathing air
From English hills, what recked the wanderer
That barons threw no penny to his song?
Should he be hungered, he would seek some rill
And, scrambling down the hazel scarp, would walk
Wet-ankled up the stream until he found
A larger pool of cold, colourless water,
Full two-foot deep, scooped out of solid stone
By a chuckling trickle spated after rains.
There he would rest upon the bank, while slowly
His fingers crept along the crannied rock.
Poor starveling belly!—No, that lower fissure,
Straight, lipless grin like an unholy god’s,
Reach out for that. The water stings to his armpit,
He hangs above the pool from head to waist,
His legs push tautly back for body’s poise,
And careful, careful creep the sensitive fingers.

—Sudden touch of cold, wet silk.
Now flesh be one with brain! He lightly strokes
The slippery smoothness upward to the gills
And throws a twiring trout upon the grass.
Or where the rattle of the water slacks
To low leaf-whisper, there he gropes beneath
Root-knots that hug black, unctuous mould from toppling
To slutch the daylit stream. His wary nerves
Tell blunt teeth biting at his thumb. Stormswift
He snatches a heavy hand over his head.
A floundering eel flops wildly to the floor,
And glides for the water. Quick the hungry poet
Spins round, whips out his knife, and shears the neck
How firm soever gripped, the limber body
Long after wriggles headless out of hand.
But if he roam across foot-tangling heath
And bracken, where no burble glads the root
Of juicy grasses? If along his way
Never a kingcup lifted bowls of light,
Nor burly watermint with bludgeon scent,
Beat down the fair, mild, slumbering meadowsweet?
If no nearby forgetmenot looks up
With frank and modest eye, no yellow flag
Plays Harold crowned and girt by fearless pikes?
No more he fails of ample fare; nor famine
Drains out his blood and piecemeal drags his flesh
From outward-leaping bones, till wrathful death,
Grudging to lose a pebble from his cairn,
Bears off the pitiful orts. For, stepping soft,
He finds a rabbit gazing at the world
With eyes in which not many moons have gleamed;
And, raising a bawl of more expended breath
Than fritter your burghers in a year of gabbling,
He runs and hurls himself headlong on to it.
Stunned at the cry, the rabbit waits and dithers;
His muscles melt beneath him; “Pluck up strength,”
He calls to his legs; “oh, stiffen, stiffen!” and still
He waits and dithers. Now the trembling scale
Of timeless pain crashes suddenly down,
And life’s a puffed-out flame.

Thus the poet
Of bygone England (as an alchemist
After ill magics and long labours wrought
Seals in the flask his magisterium,
Lest volatile it waste among the winds,
And all men breathe a never-ageing youth)
Found way to pend within his body life
And what of pain or interwoven joy
Life brings to poets. Friend, I do not gulp
And weep with maudlin, sentimental tears,
Lacking a late lamented golden age.
The more of life was ever misery’s,
And Socrates won hemlock. Yet before
Was man so constant enemy to man?
Did earth grow bleak at all these purposeless,
Rotting and blotting, roaking, smoking chimneys?
Look, men are dying, women dying, children dying.
They sell their souls for bread, and poison-filths
Whiten their flesh, bow their bodies. Crippled,
Consumption-spotted, feeble-minded, sullen,
They seek, bewildered, out of black despair,
The star of life; so, dying a Christian death,
Lie seven a grave unheedful. “Bad as that?
Put down five hundred on the Lord Mayor’s list.
After the cost of organizing’s paid
There’ll still be something left. Besides, it looks well,
And charity brings the firm new customers.
Not that I hold with all this nonsense really.
When I was young I’d nothing more than they,
But I climbed, and trampled other people down.
Why shouldn’t they?” O murderers, look, look, look.
No man but tramples, tramples on his neighbour,
And these the lowest wrench and writhe and kick
And crush the desperate lives of whom they can.
I will not tread the corpsy path of commerce
Nor juggle with men’s bones. The world shall wend
Those murderous ways. Not I, no, never I.
You shall not gaol me round with city walls;
I will not waste among your houses; roads
That indiscriminate feel a thousand footings
Shall not for mine augment their insolence.
But, as of old the poet, poet now
Shall hold a near communion with earth,
Free from all traffic or truck with worldlihood:
As poet one time lived of natural bounty,
So now shall I. Yet differs even this.
Me no man wronging still the world shall hound
With interdict of food. Gamekeepers, bailiffs,
And all the manlings vail and bob to lords
Shall sturdy stand on decent English Law
And threat my famine with a worser fate,
The seasonless monotonies of walls
That straitlier cabin than the closest town.
So let them threat. War stands between us. I
Take peril comrade, knowing a hazel scarp
That breaks down ragged to a scampering brook;
Knowing a hill whose deep-slit, slanting sides
Brave out the wind and shoulder the rough clouds through.

A FAR COUNTRY

THIS wood is older born than other woods:
The trees are God’s imagining of trees,
Anemones
So pale as these
Have never laughed like children in far solitudes,
Shaking and breaking worldforweary moods
To pure and childish glees.

The dripple from the mossed and plashing beck
Has carven glassy walls of pallid stone,
Where ferns have thrown
Fine silks unsewn,
Faint clouds unskied, that, one enchanted moment, check
And chalice waterdrops. They, silver grown,
With moons the darkness fleck.