Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
F.T. Prince's Collected Poems 1935-1992 incorporates all the work that he wished to preserve, from his earliest published poems to late, uncollected pieces. Prince has become best known for his wartime poem Soldiers Bathing', a meditation on violence and redemption. Collected Poems reveals the riches of a lifetime's work. His poetry combines a deep affinity with European humanist traditions and a modernist rigour: here is one of the essential twentieth-century writers.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 225
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.
FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side
from ‘Thyrsis’
F.T. Prince
Title Page
Prefatory Note
POEMS (1938)
An Epistle to a Patron
To a Man on his Horse
In the Wood
The Tears of a Muse in America
The Wind in the Tree
On a Gold Night
The Intention
The Token
Words from Edmund Burke
To a Friend on his Marriage
To My Sister
The Letter
Keeper’s Wood
False Bay
The Babiaantje
The Moonflower
In a Province
Chapel-at-Ease
For the Deserted
For Fugitives
For Thieves and Beggars
Cefalù
Chaka
I The King Watches at Night
II He Compares Old Customs with Those of his Kingdom
III How Festivals were Celebrated
IV He Bathes in the Morning
V The People Rest after Conquests
SOLDIERS BATHING (1954)
I
Soldiers Bathing
The Inn
The Dice
The Diamond
The Book
The Question
II
Apollo and the Sybil
The Old Age of Michelangelo
THE DOORS OF STONE (1963)
Watching Song
Coeur de Lion
‘Moult sont Prud’hommes les Templiers’
Les Congés du Lépreux
The Stolen Heart
Mortimer
Strambotti
Gregory Nazianzen
Campanella
Strafford
Autumn Journey
Sea View
Handfast Point
At Beaulieu
MEMOIRS IN OXFORD (1970)
DRYPOINTS OF THE HASIDIM (1975)
AFTERWORD ON RUPERT BROOKE (1976)
A LAST ATTACHMENT (1979)
LATER ON (1983)
The Yüan Chên Variations
His Dog and Pilgrim
A Byron-Shelley Conversation
NOT A PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW (1986)
WALKS IN ROME (1987)
SENILIA
Family Mottoes
Youth and Age
To a Granddaughter on one of her Suggestions for a Christmas Present
On a Report that in Some Rest Homes Residents who are Depressed will be Charged at a Higher Rate
Ecumenical Exchange, 1989
The Two Beggars: A Reminiscence
Creation Myth
Renouncing an Epigram
Finis CoronatOpus
Vivat
Last Poem
Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines
About the Author
Copyright
This book adds to my Collected Poems of 1979, which ended with A Last Attachment, the poetry I have written since then. There are no significant changes in the 1979 text, though the misleading subtitle for the first section, Early Poems, now becomes Poems (1938).
Poems which I have dropped from earlier books, or never collected, are in my opinion not good enough. For other reasons I have not included Fragment Poetry, which was published by the English Association as a Presidential Address in 1986, the year in which I held that honour. The text was designed as a frame for poems ranging from Shelley to Frank O’Hara, which I quoted and discussed. To reprint it here would raise problems of both layout and copyright.
F.T.Prince1993
to my parents
My lord, hearing lately of your opulence in promises and your house
Busy with parasites, of your hands full of favours, your statutes
Admirable as music, and no fear of your arms not prospering, I have
Considered how to serve you and breed from my talents
These few secrets which I shall make plain
To your intelligent glory. You should understand that I have plotted,
Being in command of all the ordinary engines
Of defence and offence, a hundred and fifteen buildings
Less others less complete: complete, some are courts of serene stone,
Some the civil structures of a war-like elegance as bridges,
Sewers, aqueducts and citadels of brick, with which I declare the fact
That your nature is to vanquish. For these I have acquired a knowledge
Of the habits of numbers and of various tempers, and skill in setting
Firm sets of pure bare members which will rise, hanging together
Like an argument, with beams, ties and sistering pilasters:
The lintels and windows with mouldings as round as a girl’s chin; thresholds
To libraries; halls that cannot be entered without a sensation as of myrrh
By your vermilion officers, your sages and dancers. There will be chambers
Like the recovery of a sick man, your closet waiting not
Less suitably shadowed than the heart, and the coffers of a ceiling
To reflect your diplomatic taciturnities. You may commission
Hospitals, huge granaries that will smile to bear your filial plunders,
And stables washed with a silver lime in whose middle tower seated
In the slight acridity you may watch
The copper thunder kept in the sulky flanks of your horse, a rolling field
Of necks glad to be groomed, the strong crupper, the edged hoof
And the long back, seductive and rebellious to saddles.
And barracks, fortresses, in need of no vest save light, light
That to me is breath, food and drink, I live by effects of light, I live
To catch it, to break it, as an orator plays off
Against each other and his theme his casual gems, and so with light,
Twisted in strings, plucked, crossed or knotted or crumbled
As it may be allowed to be by leaves,
Or clanged back by lakes and rocks or otherwise beaten,
Or else spilt and spread like a feast of honey, dripping
Through delightful voids and creeping along long fractures, brimming
Carved canals, bowls and lachrymatories with pearls: all this the work
Of now advancing, now withdrawing faces, whose use I know.
I know what slabs thus will be soaked to a thumb’s depth by the sun,
And where to rob them, what colour stifles in your intact quarries, what
Sand silted in your river-gorges will well mix with the dust of flint; I know
What wood to cut by what moon in what weather
Of your sea-winds, your hill-wind: therefore tyrant, let me learn
Your high-ways, ways of sandstone, roads of the oakleaf, and your sea-ways.
Send me to dig dry graves, exposing what you want: I must
Attend your orgies and debates (let others apply for austerities), admit me
To your witty table, stuff me with urban levities, feed me, bind me
To a prudish luxury, free me thus, and with a workshop
From my household consisting
Of a pregnant wife, one female and one boy child and an elder bastard
With other properties; these let me regard, let me neglect, and let
What I begin be finished. Save me, noble sir, from the agony
Of starved and privy explorations such as those I stumble
From a hot bed to make, to follow lines to which the night-sky
Holds only faint contingencies. These flights with no end but failure,
And failure not to end them, these palliate or prevent.
I wish for liberty, let me then be tied: and seeing too much
I aspire to be constrained by your emblems of birth and triumph,
And between the obligations of your future and the checks of actual state
To flourish, adapt the stubs of an interminable descent, and place
The crested key to confident vaults; with a placid flurry of petals,
And bosom and lips, will stony functionaries support
The persuasion, so beyond proof, of your power. I will record
In peculiar scrolls your alien alliances,
Fit an apartment for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt
Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady;
And for your death which will be mine prepare
An encasement as if of solid blood. And so let me
Forget, let me remember, that this is stone, stick, metal, trash
Which I will pile and hack, my hands will stain and bend
(None better knowing how to gain from the slow pains of a marble
Bruised, breathing strange climates). Being pressed as I am, being broken
By wealth and poverty, torn between strength and weakness, take me, choose
To relieve me, to receive of me, and must you not agree
As you have been to some—a great giver of banquets, of respite from swords,
Who shook out figured cloths, who rained coin,
A donor of laurel and of grapes, a font of profuse intoxicants—and so,
To be so too for me? And none too soon, since the panting mind
Rather than barren will be prostitute, and once
I served a herd of merchants; but since I will be faithful
And my virtue is such, though far from home let what is yours be mine, and this be a match
As many have been proved, enduring exiles and blazed
Not without issue in returning shows: your miserly freaks
Your envies, racks and poisons not out of mind
Although not told, since often borne—indeed how should it be
That you employed them less than we? but now be flattered a little
To indulge the extravagant gist of this communication,
For my pride puts all in doubt and at present I have no patience,
I have simply hope, and I submit me
To your judgement which will be just.
Only the Arab stallion will I
Envy you. Along the water
You dance him with the morning on his flanks.
In the frosty morning that his motions flatter
He kindles, and where the winter’s in the wood,
I watch you dance him out on delicate shanks.
And lashes fall on a dark eye,
He sheds a silvery mane, he shapes
His thin nostrils like a fop’s.
And to do honour to his whiteness
In remembrance of his ancient blood,
I have wished to become his groom,
And so his smouldering body comb
In a simple and indecorous sweetness.
The afternoon fills the grey wood
With a faint milk of mists.
As we walk some cloud suggests
A pink soft sheaf. And I would
Suddenly I were dead,
So that all were out of your mind
That love is in hope to find
And so we seek: that freed
Of all but being, you stood
With a vacant glance,
Or might in the grey air dance
With cheeks that match the cloud:
That within the cold wood
Like a vast eye at gaze,
A miraculous life that strays
Through votive solitude,
You loitered: that fever over,
To which my passion lit
Dry sticks of unlucky wit,
And the silence were your lover.
Call out, celebrate the beam
Imprisoning and expressing him.
Fix the mature flash for the end, but in advance
Fix in the glow of that sense what shall pass.
Give him a pale skin, a long hand,
A grey eye with deep eyelids, with deep lids.
Complete with a dark mouth the head
Of Veronese’s equerry; though of too confident a grace
His gestures, less fine than his limbs. Allow him also to sleep much,
As with an effect of wantonness. Then he should swim and run,
Jump horses and touch music, laugh willingly and grow
Among plain manners and legalities, and yet,
Say where Monongahela and Alleghany
Have woven preparatives, glistening fall, or where
New York assembles brittle towers. And let him,
Pleased to accomplish purposes,
Alight in loose dress from a car.
He arrives thus with the ray of his intelligence
With what may cluster about it, dispositions
Recollections and curiosity, the state
Of reason and vision, the deceits of passion,
Play of reserves, reflections, admirations
I am luminously possessed of. And all of which am anxious
To acknowledge makes him another of the many-minded, another
Exposed and assaulted, active and passive mind,
Engaged in an adventure, and interesting and interested
In itself by so being. But here solutions bristle,
For the case seems to shine out at me from the moment
I grant him all the mind I can; when I in short
Impute to him an intemperate spirit, a proud wit
And in a springing innocence that still cannot undo itself
The pallid fire I cannot if I wish, withhold. He shall
As he does, overpraise and underprize
And outvalue and contemn all those purities and powers
Of sight and speech, the so true so rich fleece
Covertly and attentively, and often too
Fastidiously and rashly to neglect.
Here the position, action on his part, his going
In a still preserved uncertainty of light
Waits only for my touch: and there I have him
Amid the impunities of the polluted city,
I see him in the stale glare of those follies,
Illiterate illuminations run to seed,
Irreconcilables and abominables
Of all kinds swallowed, neither good nor bad
Either remembered or forgotten. In the dusk
There appears the full pallor of his looks,
Desiring and desiring to desire.
And in fine he proceeds, fanned by this dubious flush
In the way I know. It comes to me afresh,
There glimmers out of it upon me that I want
Nothing to come of it at once. It glimmers,
It glimmers from the question, of how, how shall it fall
The moment of the simple sight? and where
In what green land the simple sorrow? and
Under what boughs beneath whose hand wherever,
As in a fog upon the perfumed Cape,
A falling together of many gleams
Neither remembered nor forgotten, and neither
Undesiring nor desiring, the moment of despair?
Only say it should fall, as it will fall, as it fell
Or will have fallen, hanging back but to take place
All at once in the tacit air and on the ground
Of this period: the process
Of confrontation, reflection, resolution
That follows, it is this that will ascend
To the last point of fitted and related clarity.
Caught in that leisurely and transparent train
Of the soft ostensibility of story,
His motions and his thoughts are their own net,
And while the beam folds on itself, I’ll not
Deny it is indefensibly too fine.
For as in smooth seas under dawn, whatever
He does, he cannot do amiss
Being in these eyes seen aright
As he questionlessly is
In the white air under dawn
If he lives, if he dies
He but plays at all escapes
As a dolphin or salmon leaps,
And exquisite heresies
But leave the musing surface with a gleam.
So if all else be but conceivable, yet
Of a lucidity that lives, himself
Mirrored may be the same,
Antecedents and foils will palliate. For
How idly miraculous
Or of what tortuous glory,
In fact this creature was
How should my mere ingenuity relate?
In the great sweetness of which light
I ask if maybe I have made
Though in an ecstasy of loss,
At the last too little of it? But at least
Since I have seen him clear,
Whether he fondle a golden mare
Which he has ridden through wet woods,
Or in the sunlight by the water
Stand silent as a tree, this verse no longer weeps.
She has decided that she no longer loves me.
There is nothing to be done. I long ago
As a child thought the tree sighed ‘Do I know
whether my motion makes the wind that moves me?’
What mind lying open to my mind,
At a brazier crouching do I watch
A winter’s night? Is it to find
Under the long night out of which
A full moon sallies and floats on,
If the wind knows what voyage it fails,
When the wind finds that she is gone?
A great gaiety filled our sails
For the adventure we were in;
The mercurial whisper fanned
Vainglory and discipline.
That mind lies open to my mind
And to the moon’s eye. We decayed,
We decayed. And who now knows
Whether her laugh says what it said,
What she wears and where she goes,
Or at the midnight of this night
And in the cold bed she will have,
Whether she weeps, having taken fright
At the thought that it is her grave?
That at last the illustrious child
You, I would have said, would yield
Your locks of a light silk that’s frayed
And eyes that had not yet betrayed.
And all the world would have known why,
Believe me, a day when the warm sky
Were colour of an oyster shell:
You and the world had seen as well
As I, when I reflected you
As looking on a dim clean view,
Or buttoned in a coat of grey.
And our abundance would obey,
I’d have said, what these eyes brought it,
Thought so, and you too would have thought it.
More beautiful than any gift you gave
You were, a child so beautiful as to seem
To promise ruin what no child can have,
Or woman give. And so a Roman gem
I choose to be your token: here a laurel
Springs to its young height, hangs a broken limb;
And here a group of women wanly quarrel
At a sale of Cupids. A hawk looks at them.
To the vigilance of my exertions a lax pause,
Offering in the vehicle and wavering colour of evening
My weakness to my judgement, whether it may be a fault
Of defect or excess in me, or whether most
Not from a sort of habit of having what I say go for nothing?
For although I had allowed (I hardly shall allow)
That fable of persuasion, should I have no title to surprise
Upon felicitations of failure? And yet it is the time,
And I own as I ought to do, I have failed, I shall fail
Failing with the aid of all the images you may choose
For the proprieties of sentiment and the canons
Of a liquid eloquence; of links
Of favouring lights, of medals, of hinges, my grammar
My logic, vocables like faggots, triple cords, gongs, florets
A whole chivalry of leaves: I mean
An inordinate number of decorated reflections branching
Into how many more I have hinted at, as well as joints
Fans and ligaments and horns. I am an artisan of fire.
Far as this our business bearing me, thus far am I led to set
My ripe steps on a way I see before me, a soft pace
That tests it as to the use I may be of in the sorrows we
Have seen too much of. But since the times
Will come to worse: and neither the senate nor the soldier, not seeing
As I do, great London like a fuscous rose, her door-ways
Warm with the flux of quality, her shops bundles of muslin sown with rubies,
Her frigates tilted above the mud at low tide, and the town
Like a heap of fresh wet stars; and neither
The mushrooms of her markets, nor her polity nor her pravity
Will observe the secreted city of the speaker: let then this
Be to the other a sepulchre. Advanced I have my city,
And under the glimmering decadence of heaven, deepened, Displayed the broad and dividing streets, the close columns
Of a sea-stone, the straitened palaces, the shallow quadrants
Vacated theatres, full graves and the temple trembling
To the least word. And I have watched it,
And in vain. And in vain before it I have turned
Too completely the religious animal. My thought, sight,
And what I saw a song; my instruments must intricately
Simulate an involuntary ascension, melt in flight.
And that austere insolence of tune was (nowhere near
The loud grudge of levellers) a manner of grovelling
To some tyranny of snow at morning. And all
To be connected it may be with the fact
That I came once from abroad, bred
In a transmarine province, whence
The more my eyes, my tongue the more might
Cling to the forms I have laboured to obtain; and so,
All the constructions put upon what I would be at, in that I would
Drink with my own looks, touch with my own hands, were
Eminently subject, being of a soft rash love
To the defamations of boyish fates, and the rudeness of those who would glory
In a revolution of things. I hope I
Am as little awed out of my wits by the fear
Of vulgar shrewdness, as most of those I esteem. I have neglected
To follow, to bow to fortune. Yet if I love, I may lie:
And if I shine, obloquy will have it as a serpent
Who’s in love with how he shines. And of a truth there is
This of wonderful in it that I should then
Prove no stronger than my passion: the machinery
Is itself well enough to answer all ends,
Were the matter but as sound; but what will serve
The arrangement of rottenness? Why should I build
With pain, were it with honour, and besieged by much foul gold,
On such frail stuff as the state? Why for an art
The lowest choose, choose also to revive
What other men no longer would believe? But so I must:
The fire that’s born of peace returns to peace,
No phoenixhood resides in a transparence;
I should have died into the death I saw. And so I choose,
And to undertake the odious office of a priest
Among a diseased and desperate people, prosperous urchins
With the condescension of a conscious victim visit. Suffer,
Restore the flown thing. Sorrow with palms
Would ‘fallen fallen light renew’. So I rejoice
To resign the lustres of a true success,
Myself to be what I pursued or praised, and so delight
To proclaim that cunning agony of rectitude, that my actions
Shifts and equivocations, all were and will be answers
To an immense mass of dark dealings. The system stretching now
To tracts that will be rank in future ruins, in both worlds
There is now this fistulous sore that runs
Into a thousand sinuosities; and the wound now
Opens the red west, gains new ground.
What disarray of an irresistible weather damps the fag-end
Of our day? And I bear it like a girl.
I am afire with its tears, my words have the asperity of tears,
I am it would seem an acceptable tube; and therefore
While time is, let me be used.
And therefore not the miserable managements,
It is not the infringements on dusty plains
Of a corrupted oriental cavalry, it is not
The caballing of the monied men, and not
The refuse and rejected offal of strolling players, nor the hazards
Of a den of outlaws upon a doubtful frontier nor even
My own colloquies at dawn with deploring fields,
Will seduce me (I hope) or silence me. I hope my unhappy blood
And its favourite fever may be given the grace
To give the truth my voice, truth to my voice, and may
The rich web so establish, while words are, while time is.
A beautiful girl said something in your praise.
And either because in a hundred ways
I had heard of her great worth and had no doubt
To find her lovelier than I thought
And found her also cleverer, or because
Although she had known you well it was
For her too as it had once been for me
Thinking of her: I thought that she
Had spoken of you as rare and legendary.
Now again, hearing that you marry,
My insatiable sense of glory and
My passion for the gay and grand
Deliver you up to fiction. A beautiful
Girl might once have played the fool
If you had called the tune, and I would too,
If anything that I might do
Could ruffle up your rose or flush your glass.
Because you are all things, and because
You show the world the glitter in the face
Of that all-but-extinguished race
Of creatures who delight in and desire
Much less the fuel than the fire;
I wish that when you call for supper, when
You sit down, guests and serving-men
May seem light-bearers planted on the stair,
Lights in the roof, lights everywhere:
So that as if you were a salamander,
Your sensuality may wander
In a community of flames, and breathe
Contentment, savouring wine and wreath.
I said that you should stint your wit,
But you were right to answer
That seldom could a beauty sit
When born to be a dancer.
You are richest when you scatter pearls,
When with an eagerness
More like a sea-gull’s than a girl’s,
You make your voyages.
Go on, and with your wealth amaze
And still the watcher. No man
When she’d be so, as Balzac says,
Should interrupt a woman.
Coming across a letter
That a year ago
I had laid aside to show,
When cloud and flame should scatter,
That what the writer’s pain
At the loss of love
Had accused me of
Should prove to have been vain;
What am I now to do
When staring without tears
On those characters,
I find that it is true?
Within these dusky woods
The blackthorn hides.
The violets in the rides
On a grey day
Among pale primrose-buds
Crouch, hidden away.
A loud jay curses all.
A gust goes by
Under the cloud-cold sky,
And as you walk,
In the fields the lambs call,
And the rooks talk.
How pale it is, the sky
That sheds its peace
On the violets like a fleece,
And yellow buds,
While the lambs feebly cry
Outside the woods!
She I love leaves me, and I leave my friends
In the dusky capital where I spent two years
In the cultivation of divinity.
Sitting beside my window above the sea
In this unvisited land I feel once more
How little ingenious I am. The winter ends,
The seaward slopes are covered to the shore
With a press of lilies that have silver ears.
And although I am perplexed and sad, I say
‘Now indulge in no dateless lamentations;
Watch only across the water the lapsed nations
And the fisherman twitch a boat across the bay.’
Hither, where tangled thickets of the acacia
Wreathed with a golden powder sigh,
And when the boughs grow dark, the hoopoe
Doubles his bell-like cry,
Spreading his bright striped wings and brown crest
Under a softening spring sky,
I have returned because I cannot rest,
And would not die.
Here it was as a boy that, I remember,
I wandered ceaselessly, and knew
Sweetness of spring was in the bird’s cry,
And in the hidden dew
The unbelievably keen perfume
Of the Babiaantje, a pale blue
Wild hyacinth that between narrow grey leaves
On the ground grew.