The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 Read online

  Through attenuated tones of violins

  Mingled with remote cornets

  And begins.

  ‘You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

  And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

  In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,

  (For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind!

  How keen you are!)

  To find a friend who has these qualities,

  Who has, and gives

  Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

  How much it means that I say this to you —

  Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!’

  Among the windings of the violins

  And the ariettes

  Of cracked cornets

  Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

  Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

  Capricious monotone

  That is at least one definite ‘false note.’

  — Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

  Admire the monuments,

  Discuss the late events,

  Correct our watches by the public clocks.

  Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

  II

  Now that lilacs are in bloom

  She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

  And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

  ‘Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

  What life is, you who hold it in your hands’;

  (Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

  ‘You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

  And youth is cruel, and has no more remorse

  And smiles at situations which it cannot see.’

  I smile, of course,

  And go on drinking tea.

  ‘Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

  My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

  I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

  To be wonderful and youthful, after all.’

  The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

  Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

  ‘I am always sure that you understand

  My feelings, always sure that you feel,

  Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

  You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.

  You will go on, and when you have prevailed

  You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

  But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

  To give you, what can you receive from me?

  Only the friendship and the sympathy

  Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

  I shall sit here, serving tea to friends….’

  I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

  For what she has said to me?

  You will see me any morning in the park

  Reading the comics and the sporting page.

  Particularly I remark

  An English countess goes upon the stage.

  A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

  Another bank defaulter has confessed.

  I keep my countenance,

  I remain self-possessed

  Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

  Reiterates some worn-out common song

  With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

  Recalling things that other people have desired.

  Are these ideas right or wrong?

  III

  The October night comes down; returning as before

  Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease

  I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door

  And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

  ‘And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?

  But that’s a useless question.

  You hardly know when you are coming back,

  You will find so much to learn.’

  My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

  ‘Perhaps you can write to me.’

  My self-possession flares up for a second;

  This is as I had reckoned.

  ‘I have been wondering frequently of late

  (But our beginnings never know our ends!)

  Why we have not developed into friends.’

  I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark

  Suddenly, his expression in a glass.

  My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

  ‘For everybody said so, all our friends,

  They all were sure our feelings would relate

  So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

  We must leave it now to fate.

  You will write, at any rate.

  Perhaps it is not too late.

  I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.’

  And I must borrow every changing shape

  To find expression … dance, dance

  Like a dancing bear,

  Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

  Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance —

  Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

  Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

  Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

  With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

  Doubtful, for a while

  Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

  Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon …

  Would she not have the advantage, after all?

  This music is successful with a ‘dying fall’

  Now that we talk of dying —

  And should I have the right to smile?

  Preludes

  I

  The winter evening settles down

  With smell of steaks in passageways.

  Six o’clock.

  The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

  And now a gusty shower wraps

  The grimy scraps

  Of withered leaves about your feet

  And newspapers from vacant lots;

  The showers beat

  On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

  And at the corner of the street

  A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

  And then the lighting of the lamps.

  II

  The morning comes to consciousness

  Of faint stale smells of beer

  From the sawdust-trampled street

  With all its muddy feet that press

  To early coffee-stands.

  With the other masquerades

  That time resumes,

  One thinks of all the hands

  That are raising dingy shades

  In a thousand furnished rooms.

  III

  You tossed a blanket from the bed,

  You lay upon your back, and waited;

  You dozed, and watched the night revealing

  The thousand sordid images

  Of which your soul was constituted;

  They flickered against the ceiling.

  And when all the world came back

  And the light crept up between the shutters

  And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,

  You had such a vision of the street

  As the street hardly understands;

  Sitting along the bed’s edge, where

  You curled the papers from your hair,

  Or clasped the yellow soles of feet

  In the palms of both soiled hands.

  IV

  His soul stretched tight across the skies

  That fade behind a city block,

  Or trampled by insistent feet

  At four and five and six o’clock;

  And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

  And evening newspapers, and eyes

  Assured of certain certainties,

  The conscience of a blackened
street

  Impatient to assume the world.

  I am moved by fancies that are curled

  Around these images, and cling:

  The notion of some infinitely gentle

  Infinitely suffering thing.

  Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

  The worlds revolve like ancient women

  Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

  Rhapsody on a Windy Night

  Twelve o’clock.

  Along the reaches of the street

  Held in a lunar synthesis.

  Whispering lunar incantations

  Dissolve the floors of memory

  And all its clear relations,

  Its divisions and precisions.

  Every street lamp that I pass

  Beats like a fatalistic drum,

  And through the spaces of the dark

  Midnight shakes the memory

  As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

  Half-past one,

  The street-lamp sputtered,

  The street-lamp muttered,

  The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman

  Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door

  Which opens on her like a grin.

  You see the border of her dress

  Is torn and stained with sand,

  And you see the corner of her eye

  Twists like a crooked pin.’

  The memory throws up high and dry

  A crowd of twisted things;

  A twisted branch upon the beach

  Eaten smooth, and polished

  As if the world gave up

  The secret of its skeleton,

  Stiff and white.

  A broken spring in a factory yard,

  Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left

  Hard and curled and ready to snap.

  Half-past two,

  The street-lamp said,

  ‘Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,

  Slips out its tongue

  And devours a morsel of rancid butter.’

  So the hand of the child, automatic,

  Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay,

  I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.

  I have seen eyes in the street

  Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

  And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

  An old crab with barnacles on his back,

  Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

  Half-past three,

  The lamp sputtered,

  The lamp muttered in the dark.

  The lamp hummed:

  ‘Regard the moon,

  La lune ne garde aucune rancune,

  She winks a feeble eye,

  She smiles into corners.

  She smooths the hair of the grass.

  The moon has lost her memory.

  A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,

  Her hand twists a paper rose,

  That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,

  She is alone

  With all the old nocturnal smells

  That cross and cross across her brain.’

  The reminiscence comes

  Of sunless dry geraniums

  And dust in crevices,

  Smells of chestnuts in the streets,

  And female smells in shuttered rooms,

  And cigarettes in corridors

  And cocktail smells in bars.

  The lamp said,

  ‘Four o’clock,

  Here is the number on the door.

  Memory!

  You have the key,

  The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.

  Mount.

  The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,

  Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.’

  The last twist of the knife.

  Morning at the Window

  They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,

  And along the trampled edges of the street

  I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids

  Sprouting despondently at area gates.

  The brown waves of fog toss up to me

  Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,

  And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts

  An aimless smile that hovers in the air

  And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

  The Boston Evening Transcript

  The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript

  Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

  When evening quickens faintly in the street,

  Wakening the appetites of life in some

  And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,

  I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning

  Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld,

  If the street were time and he at the end of the street,

  And I say, ‘Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.’

  Aunt Helen

  Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,

  And lived in a small house near a fashionable square

  Cared for by servants to the number of four.

  Now when she died there was silence in heaven

  And silence at her end of the street.

  The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet —

  He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.

  The dogs were handsomely provided for,

  But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.

  The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,

  And the footman sat upon the dining-table

  Holding the second housemaid on his knees —

  Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

  Cousin Nancy

  Miss Nancy Ellicott

  Strode across the hills and broke them,

  Rode across the hills and broke them —

  The barren New England hills —