Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online

Authors: Lawrence Durrell

Collected Poems 1931-74

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Collected Poems 1931–1974
Contents

Title Page

Author's Preface
page

To the Reader

The Gift

Pioneer

Inconstancy

Happy Vagabond

Sonnet Astray

The Beginning

Highwayman

Crisis

Dark Grecian

Echoes: I

Futility

Largesse

Echoes: II

Candle-Light

Christ A Modern

A Dedication

Finis

Treasure

Discovery of Love

Plea

Lost

Question

Love's Inability

Cueillez dès Aujourd'huy les Roses de la Vie

Return

Je Deviens Immortel dans tes Bras

Retreat

Ballade of Slow Decay

Tulliola

Lyric

Wheat-Field

Faces

Love Poems

Mass for the Old Year

The Death of General Uncebunke: A Biography in Little

Fourteen Carols

Five Soliloquies upon the Tomb of Uncebunke

Egyptian Poem

Carol on Corfu

Lines to Music

Themes Heraldic

Logos

The Hanged Man

Father Nicholas His Death: Corfu

Adam

Paris Journal

The Poet

The Egg

A Small Scripture

‘A Soliloquy of Hamlet'

The Sermon

The Prayer-Wheel

Green Man

In Crisis

At Corinth

Nemea

In Arcadia

A Noctuary in Athens

Daphnis and Chloe

Fangbrand: A Biography

At Epidaurus

Letter to Seferis the Greek

For a Nursery Mirror

To Ping-Kû, Asleep

To Argos

‘Je est un Autre'

Conon in Exile

On First Looking into Loeb's Horace

On Ithaca Standing

Exile in Athens

A Ballad of the Good Lord Nelson

Coptic Poem

Mythology

Matapan

Echo

This Unimportant Morning

Byron

La Rochefoucauld

Pearls

Heloise and Abelard

Conon in Alexandria

Mareotis

Conon the Critic on the Six Landscape Painters of Greece

Water Music

Delos

The Pilot

The Parthenon

In Europe

Pressmarked Urgent
 

Two Poems in Basic English

Ships. Islands. Trees

Near El Alamein

Levant

Greek Church: Alexandria

Notebook

Eight Aspects of Melissa
 

By the Lake

Cairo

The Adepts

The Encounter

Petron, the Desert Father

The Rising Sun

Visitations

A Prospect of Children

Possible Worlds

Alexandria

Poggio

Blind Homer

Fabre

Cities, Plains and People

Rodini
 

In the Garden: Villa Cleobolus

Eternal Contemporaries: Six Portraits

Manoli of Cos

Mark of Patmos

Basil the Hermit

Dmitri of Carpathos

Panagiotis of Lindos

A Rhodian Captain

Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels

Pomona de Maillol

Anniversary

The Critics

Phileremo

Song for Zarathustra

Politics

The Daily Mirror

Song

Penelope

Swans

Bere Regis

On Seeming to Presume

Self to Not-Self

Patmos

The Lost Cities

Funchal

High Sierra

Green Coconuts: Rio

Christ in Brazil

The Anecdotes

In Cairo

In Cairo

At Rhodes

At Rhodes

In Athens

At Alexandria

At Alexandria

In Patmos

In Patmos

In Britain

In Britain

In Rhodes

In Paris

In Beirut

In Rhodes

In Rio

A Water-Colour of Venice

Deus Loci

Epitaph

Education of a Cloud

The Sirens

Chanel

Cradle Song

Clouds of Glory

River Water

Sarajevo

A Bowl of Roses

Lesbos

Letters in Darkness

On Mirrors

Orpheus

Mneiae

Niki

The Dying Fall

Poem

At Strati's

The Tree of Idleness

Bitter Lemons

Near Kyrenia

Episode

The Meeting

John Donne

Ballad of Psychoanalysis: Extracts from a Case-Book

At the Long Bar

Style

Thasos

A Portrait of Theodora

Asphodels: Chalcidice

Freedom

Near Paphos

The Octagon Room

Eva Braun's Dream

The Cottager

Night Express

Mythology

Cavafy

Ballad of Kretschmer's Types

Ballad of the Oedipus Complex

Aphrodite

Eleusis

A Persian Lady

Pursewarden's Incorrigibilia

Frankie and Johnny: New Style

Byzance

Ode to a Lukewarm Eyebrow

Olives

Scaffoldings: Plaka

Stone Honey

Congenies

Piccadilly

Strip-Tease

In the Margin

Poemandres

Portfolio

Prix Blondel

Summer

Delphi

Salamis

Troy

Io

One Grey Greek Stone

Leeches

Geishas

The Ikons

Apteros

Keepsake

Cape Drasti

North West

The Initiation

Acropolis

Persuasions

Moonlight

Blood-Count

Kasyapa

Vidourle

Paullus to Cornelia

Press Interview

Confederate

Owed to America

The Outer Limits

Solange

The Reckoning

Nobody

Rain, Rain, Go to Spain

Aphros Meaning Spume

A Winter of Vampires

Faustus

Pistol Weather

Lake Music

Stoic

?

Sixties

Avis

One Place

Revenants

The Land

Joss

Avignon

Incognito

Swimmers

Blue

Mistral

Envoi

Last Heard Of

Seferis

Vega

Poem for Katharine Falley Bennett's Birthday

Vaumort

Spring Song

Hey, Mister, There's a Bulge in Your Computer

On the Suchness of the Old Boy

The Ophite

Alphabeta

A Farewell

Mandrake Root

Apesong

Want to Live Don't You?

The Grey Penitents

Dublin

Sages

By the Sea

Cicada

The Muses

Certain Landfalls

A Patch of Dust

Postmark

In Deep Grass

Index of First Lines

About the Author

Copyright

An invitation to make this edition of my Collected Poems (the third) definitive and comprehensive could not have been accepted had chance not put in my way a Canadian scholar, Dr James Brigham, who, in the pursuit of his own studies, had collected and indexed the whole of my published work. He was kind enough to let me profit from his toil, and the editing and arranging of this edition is entirely his work, which has been aided and shaped by the bibliography of Alan G. Thomas. My warm thanks go to both men for this exemplary edition which I would not have been able to assemble unaided.

 

LAWRENCE DURRELL

1980

This third collection of Lawrence Durrell's poems makes generally available for the first time all of the poems published between 1931 and 1974. The earliest items are now all quite scarce:
Quaint
Fragment:
Poems
Written
between
the
Ages
of
Sixteen
and
Nineteen
(1931);
Ten
Poems
(1932);
Ballade
of
Slow
Decay
(Christmas, 1932);
Transition:
Poems
(1934);
Mass
for
the
Old
Year
(1935). Durrell's first real volume of verse, in terms of availability to the public, was
A
Private
Country
(1943), and it was followed by
Cities,
Plains
and
People
(1946) and
On
Seeming
to
Presume
(1948).
Deus
Loci
(1950) and
Private
Drafts
(1955) marked a brief return to private, limited editions, but Durrell has
remained
a truly public poet since
The
Tree
of
Idleness
(also 1955). That volume was followed by
Selected
Poems
(1956); the first
Collected
Poems
(1960);
Selected
Poems,
1935–1963
(1964);
The
Ikons
and
Other
Poems
(1966); the second
Collected
Poems
(1968);
Vega
and
Other
Poems
(1973), which included the poems published in
The
Red
Limbo
Lingo
(1971); and
Selected
Poems
(1977). All the poems published in these volumes are collected here, as are those poems which were published in little magazines but which were never collected. However, poems published as integral parts of plays or novels are not included, nor are poems which exist only in manuscript form.

My two goals in compiling this edition have been to give the reader a sense of the publishing history of Durrell's poems, and to retain the sense of intimacy which the arrangement of poems in earlier editions has given.

The poems have been arranged chronologically by year of first publication. Two dates are given beneath each poem: the date on the left is the year in which the poem was first gathered by its author as part of a volume of verse; the italicized date on the right is the year of first publication. Poems which were originally dated by the poet retain those dates, in parentheses, beneath their titles.

Over the years, and for various reasons, many of the original
dedications
to the poems had been removed; they have been restored in this edition. Similarly, original author's or prefatory notes which had been either pared down or completely excised have here been reinstated. Finally, epigrams from Georges Blin and Mila Repa which appeared
in first editions as ‘keys to a mood' but have not appeared in collected editions have been slipped into this edition in their original
chronological
settings.

JAMES A. BRIGHAM
 
Okanagan
College

1980

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