(for Carlo Izzo)
Out of a gothic North, the pallid children
Of a potato, beer-or-whisky
Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come
Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere
Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura,
To these feminine townships where men
Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless
Verbal in-fighting as it is taught
In Protestant rectories upon drizzling
Sunday afternoons-no more as unwashed
Barbarians out for gold, nor as profiteers
Hot for Old Masters, but for plunder
Nevertheless-some believing amore
Is better down South and much cheaper
(Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure
To strong sunlight is lethal to germs
(Which is patently false) and others, like me,
In middle-age hoping to twig from
What we are not what we might be next, a question
The South seems never to raise. Perhaps
A tongue in which Nestor and Apemantus,
Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni make
Equally beautiful sounds is unequipped
To frame it, or perhaps in this heat
It is nonsense: the Myth of an Open Road
Which runs past the orchard gate and beckons
Three brothers in turn to set out over the hills
And far away, is an invention
Of a climate where it is a pleasure to walk
And a landscape less populated
Than this one. Even so, to us it looks very odd
Never to see an only child engrossed
In a game it has made up, a pair of friends
Making fun in a private lingo,
Or a body sauntering by himself who is not
Wanting, even as it perplexes
Our ears when cats are called Cat and dogs either
Lupo, Nero or Bobby. Their dining
Puts us to shame: we can only envy a people
So frugal by nature it costs them
No effort not to guzzle and swill. Yet (if I
Read their faces rightly after ten years)
They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun
He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where
Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,
I can see what they meant: his unwinking
Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion
Of change or escape, and a silent
Ex-volcano, without a stream or a bird,
Echoes that laugh. This could be a reason
Why they take the silencers off their Vespas,
Turn their radios up to full volume,
And a minim saint can expect rockets-noise
As a counter-magic, a way of saying
Boo to the Three Sisters: "Mortal we may be,
But we are still here!" might cause them to hanker
After proximities-in streets packed solid
With human flesh, their souls feel immune
To all metaphysical threats. We are rather shocked,
But we need shocking: to accept space, to own
That surfaces need not be superficial
Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really
Be taught within earshot of running water
Or in sight of a cloud. As pupils
We are not bad, but hopeless as tutors:
Goethe, Tapping homeric hexameters
On the shoulder-blade of a Roman girl, is
(I wish it were someone else) the figure
Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,
But one would draw the line at calling
The Helena begotten on that occasion,
Queen of his Second Walpurgisnacht,
Her baby: between those who mean by a life a
Bildungsroman and those to whom living
Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf
Embraces cannot bridge. If we try
To "go southern", we spoil in no time, we grow
Flabby, dingily lecherous, and
Forget to pay bills: that no one has heard of them
Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga
Is a comforting thought-in that case, for all
The spiritual loot we tuck away,
We do them no harm-and entitles us, I think
To one little scream at A piacere,
Not two. Go I must, but I go grateful (even
To a certain Monte) and invoking
My sacred meridian names, Vito, Verga,
Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini,
To bless this region, its vendages, and those
Who call it home: though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.
September 1958
It's No Use Raising a Shout
It's no use raising a shout.
No, Honey, you can cut that right out.
I don't want any more hugs;
Make me some fresh tea, fetch me some rugs.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
A long time ago I told my mother
I was leaving home to find another:
I never answered her letter
But I never found a better.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
It wasn't always like this?
Perhaps it wasn't, but it is.
Put the car away; when life fails,
What the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
In my spine there was a base,
And I knew the general's face:
But they've severed all the wires,
And I can't tell what the general desires.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
In my veins there is a wish,
And a memory of fish:
When I lie crying on the floor,
It says, "You've often done this before."
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
A bird used to visit this shore:
It isn't going to come any more.
I've come a very long way to prove
No land, no water, and no love.
Here am I, here are you.
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
"Carry Her Over The Water"
Carry her over the water,
And set her down under the tree,
Where the culvers white all day and all night,
And the winds from every quarter,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
Put a gold ring on her finger,
And press her close to your heart,
While the fish in the lake snapshots take,
And the frog, that sanguine singer,
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
The streets shal flock to your marriage,
The houses turn round to look,
The tables and chairs say suitable prayers,
And the horses drawing your carriage
Sing agreeably, agreeably, agreeably of love.
1939?
THE TRAVELLER
No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply: that mill, though is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.
Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The Castle where his Greater Hallows are interned:
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.
Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where he learned to wash and lie'
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on the horizon of his sigh
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother's tongue.
"Out of it steps the future of the poor,"
Out of it steps the future of the poor,
Enigmas, executioners and rules,
Her Majesty in a bad temper or
The red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.
Great persons eye it in the twilight for
A past it might so carelessly let in,
A widow with a missionary grin,
The foaming inundation at a roar.
We pile our all against it when afraid,
And beat upon its panels when we die:
By happening to be open once, it made
Enormous Alice see a wonderland
That waited for her in the sunshine, and,
Simply by being tiny made her cry.
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass