Read Collected Poems 1931-74 Online
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
âNous
arrivons
tout
nouveaux
aux
divers
âges
de
la
vie'
âA penny for your thoughts. I wasn't joking.'
Most of it I learned from serving-girls,
Looking into eyes mindless as birds, taking
The pure for subject or the unaware.
When empty mouths so soon betray their fear
Kisses can be probes. Mine always were.
Yes, everywhere I sorted the betraying
Motive, point by point designed
This first detective-story of the heart,
Judge, jury, victim, all were in my aspect,
Pinned on the clear notation of the mindâ
I primed them like an actor in a part.
I was my own motiveâI see you smile:
The one part of me I
never
used or wrote,
Every comma paused there, hungry
To confess me, to reveal the famished note.
Yet in reason I mastered appetite,
And taught myself at last the tragic sense;
Then through appetite and its many ambushes
I uncovered the politics of feeling, dense
Groves for the flocks of sin to feed in.
Yet in the end the portrait always seemed
Somehow faked, or somehow still in need
Of gender, form and present tense.
I could not get beyond this wall.
No. The bait of feeling was left untasted:
Deep inside like ruins lay the desires
To give, to trust, to be my subjects' equal,
All wasted, wasted.
Though love is not the word I want
Yet it will have to do. There is no other.
So the great Lack grew and grew.
Of the Real Darkness not one grain I lifted.
Yet the whole story is here like the part
Of some great man's body,
Veins, organs, nerves,
Unhappily illustrating neither death nor art.
1946/
1944
Now mark, the Lady one fine day
To refresh her pearls she comes
And buries them in the sand here,
Letting the sea feed on them,
To lick back by salt
The lustre of them and the prize.
Ten summers, lazy as fishes follow.
Ten winters, nude as thimbles
Bear on their gradual curves
The drinkers of the darkness.
The pearls drink and recover
But their lovely Neck
Becomes one day the target for an Axe,
Bows swan-like down
Its unrepenting lovely stump.
Something is incomplete here,
Something in the story is unfinished,
A tale with no beginning,
The fragment of a voice that interrupts,
Like this unbroken coast,
Like this half-drawn landscape,
Like this broken torso of a poem.
1946/
1945
Heloise and Abelard
Nature's great hermaphrodites,
Arists in the human way,
Turned their sad endearing eyes,
Passionate and tiger-bright,
Closed the animal.
Yet in deprivation found
By a guess
Love unseal its loveliness.
Patents of their time and sex,
Body's rude containers
With their humours up like wicks,
Passionate and tiger-bright,
Made them foreigners
To themselves while still awake.
Yet with this he lights the stake
Feeds like faggots tied
Innocence and pride,
Bits of what had died.
Tombs may lie by two and two
On the Jordan's bends;
Death's unshrinking little noun
Marks them for his own,
The passionate and tiger-bright
Couples in their shadows lie
Till the action ends.
Death by lovelessness for these
Was unsealed in mysteries
By the enduring Friend.
Lucky who can sort out
The barren and the sown,
Whose punishments are given joy,
Who their own bodies own.
Who can discriminate,
Under reason's cruel rod
Between the friend in them
And enemy of God.
1946/
1945
Ash-heap of four cultures,
Bounded by Mareotis, a salt lake,
On which the winter rain rings and whitens,
In the waters, stiffens like eyes.
I have been four years bound here:
A time for sentences by the tripod:
Prophecies by those who were born dead,
Or who lost their character but kept their taste.
A solitary presumed quite happy,
Writing those interminable whining letters,
On the long beaches dimpled by the rain,
Tasting the island wind
Blown against wet lips and shutters out of Rhodes.
I say âpresumed', but would not have it otherwise.
* * *
Steps go down to the port
Beyond the Pharos. O my friends,
Surely these nightly visitations
Of islands in one's sleep must soon be over?
I have watched beside the others,
But always the more attentive, the more exacting:
The familiar papers on a table by the bed,
The plate of olives and the glass of wine.
You would think that thoughts so long rehearsed
Like the dry friction of ropes in the mind
Would cease to lead me where in Greece
The almond-candles and the statues burn.
The moon's cold seething fires over this white city,
Through four Februaries have not forgotten.
* * *
Tonight the stars press idly on the nerves
As in a cobweb, heavy with dispersal:
Points of dew in a universe too large
Too formal to be more than terrible.
âThere are sides of the self
One can seldom show. They live on and on
In an emergency of anguish always,
Waiting for parents in another.'
Would you say that later, reading
Such simple propositions, the historian
Might be found to say: âThe critic
In him made a humour of this passion.
The equations of a mind too conscious of ideas,
Fictions, not kisses, crossed the water between them'?
* * *
And later, Spring, which compels these separations
Will but define you further as she dies
In flowers downless and pure as Portia's cheek,
Interrupting perhaps the conversations of friends
On terraces where the fountains plane at time,
To leave this small acid precipitate to memory,
Of something small, screwed-up, and thrown aside.
â
Partings
like
these
are
lucky.
At
least
they
wound
.'
And later by the hearthstone of a philosophy
You might have added: âThe desert, yes, for exiles.
But its immensity only confines one further.
Its end seems always in oneself.'
A gown stained at the arm-pits by a woman's body.
A letter unfinished because the ink gave out.
* * *
The lovers you describe as â
separating
each
other
Further
with
every
kiss
': and your portrait
Of a man
âengaged
in
bitterly
waiting
For
the
day
when
art
should
become
unnecessary
',
Were in the style and order, as when you say
âFreedom
alone
confines
'; but do they show a love,
Fragmented everywhere by conscience and deceit,
Ending on this coast of torn-out lighthouses?
Or that neglected and unmerited Habit,
The structure that so long informed our growth?
Questions for a nursery wall! But are they true to these?
I have passed all this day in what they would call patience.
Not writing, alone in my window, with my flute,
Having read in a letter that last immortal February
That â
Music
is
only
love,
looking
for
words
'.
1946/
1945
For
Diana
Gould
Now everywhere Spring opens
Like an eyelid still unfocused,
Unsharpened in expression yet or depth,
But smiling and entire, stirring from sleep.
Birds begin, swindlers of the morning.
Flowers and the wild ways begin:
And the body's navigation in its love
Through wings, messages, telegrams
Loose and unbodied roam the world.
Only we are held here on the
Rationed loveâa landscape like an eye,
Where the wind gnashes by Mareotis,
Stiffens the reeds and glistening salt,
And in the ancient roads the wind,
Not subtle, not confiding, touches once again
The melancholy elbow cheek and paper.
1946/
1945
âThis landscape is not original in its own mode. First smells were bornâof resin and pine. Then someone got drunk on arbutus berries. Finally as an explanatory text someone added this red staunch clay and roots. You cannot smell one without tasting the otherâas with fish and red sauce.'
âAfter a lifetime of writing acrostics he took up a brush and everything became twice as attentive. Trees had been trees before. Distinctions had been in ideas. Now the old man went mad, for everything undressed and ran laughing into his arms.'
âArcadia is original in a particular sense. There is no feeling of “Therefore” in it. Origin, reason, meaning it has none in the sense of
recognizable
past. In this, both Arcadia and all good poems are original.'
âYou look at this landscape for five years. You see little but something attentive watching you. Another five and you remark a shape that is barely a shape; a shadow like the moon's penumbra. Look a lifetime and you will see that the mountains lie like the covers of a bed; and you discern the form lying under them.'
âStyle is the cut of the mind. Hero was not much interested in his landscape, but by a perpetual self-confession in art removed both himself and his subject out of the reach of the people. Thus one day there remained only a picture-frame, an empty studio, and an idea of Hero the painter.'
âAlexander was in love with Athens. He was a glutton and exhausted both himself and his subject in his art. Thus when he had smelt a flower it was quite used up, and when he painted a mountain it felt that living on could only be a useless competition against Alexander's painting of it. Thus with him Athens ceased to exist, and we have been walking about inside his canvases ever since looking for a way back from art into life.'
Â
1946/
1945
Wrap your sulky beauty up,
From sea-fever, from winterfall
Out of the swing of the
Swing of the sea.
Keep safe from noonfall,
Starlight and smokefall where
Waves roll, waves toll but feel
None of our roving fever.
From dayfever and nightsadness
Keep, bless, hold: from cold
Wrap your sulky beauty into sleep
Out of the swing of the
Swing of sea.
1946/
1945
For
Diana
Gould
On charts they fall like lace,
Islands consuming in a sea
Born dense with its own blue:
And like repairing mirrors holding up
Small towns and trees and rivers
To the still air, the lovely air:
From the clear side of springing Time,
In clement places where the windmills ride,
Turning over grey springs in Mykonos,
In shadows with a gesture of content.
The statues of the dead here
Embark on sunlight, sealed
Each in her model with the sightless eyes:
The modest stones of Greeks,
Who gravely interrupted death by pleasure.
And in harbours softly fallen
The liver-coloured sailsâ
Sharp-featured brigantines with eyesâ
Ride in reception so like women:
The pathetic faculty of girls
To register and utter a desire
In the arms of men upon the new-mown waters,
Follow the wind, with their long shining keels
Aimed across Delos at a star.
1946/
1945