Collected Poems 1935-1992 - F.T. Prince - E-Book

Collected Poems 1935-1992 E-Book

F.T. Prince

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Beschreibung

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.

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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

Collected Poems 1935–1992

Contents

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

Prefatory Note

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

Poems (1938)

to my parents

An Epistle to a Patron

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.

To a Man on his Horse

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.

In the Wood

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.

The Tears of a Muse in America

I

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.

II

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.

III

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.

IV

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.

The Wind in the Tree

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?’

On a Cold Night

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?

The Intention

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.

The Token

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.

Words from Edmund Burke

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.

To a Friend on his Marriage

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.

To My Sister

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.

The Letter

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?

Keeper’s Wood

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!

False Bay

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.’

The Babiaantje

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.