Collected Poems 1931-74 Read Free

and let them pass.
    1980/ 1932

QUESTION
    You have so dressed your eyes with love for me
    That all my mind’s entangled in a flame,
    Crying the old despair for all to see,
    The wonder of your name.
    I must believe the passion of your mouth
    And all its living treasure has no dearth,
    But lives, exultant, through the season’s drouth
    In the old hiding places of the earth.
    How can the anguished world remain the same;
    The crowds still pass on unreturning feet
    When we have cupped our hands about a flame?
    1980/ 1932

LOVE’S INABILITY
    In all the sad seduction of your ways
    I wander as a player tries a part,
    Seeking a perfect gesture all his days,
    Roving the widest margins of his art.
    I would drink this perfection as a wine,
    Leash the wild thirst that bids me more than taste:
    Hoard up the great possession that is mine,
    Not squander as a drunkard makes his waste.
    I will be patient if the world be wise,
    And you be bountiful as you are curt,
    Until a song awakes those distant eyes,
    And all your weary gestures cease to hurt.
    1980/ 1932

Cueillez dès Aujourd’huy les Roses de la Vie
    RONSARD , Sonnets
    You will have no more beauty in that day
    When all the slow destruction of the mind,
    Encompassed in a single clot of clay,
    Is dust on dust, with flower-roots entwined.
    No use to say ‘She was both cruel and kind.
    Though all her limbs have crumbled to decay,
    Yet we, remembering, gather up and bind
    The harvest that was all her yesterday.’
    No use to shake that dear, unhappy head,
    And pray for fresh beginnings, time makes one
    Of all the prayers of Syria’s sleeping dead,
    All the choked dust of fallen Babylon.
    There is no lamentation but the hours
    Mourning the silent watches of the grave.
    Always the gaunt reflection of the stars
    Whispers ‘Mad lovers, these you may not save.’
    1980/ 1932  

RETURN
    There is some corner of a lover’s brain
    That holds this famous treasure, some dim room
    That love has not forgotten, where the sane
    Plant of this magic burgeons in the gloom,
    And pushes out its roots into the mind,
    Grown rich on the turned soil of days that pass.
    I know there is enchantment yet to find:
    April and whip-showers and the heavy grass
    Leaning to the lance-points of the rain …
    Oh we will turn someday, and find again
    The pageant of the lilies as they pass
    In slow procession by the lonely lake,
    Down by the crying waters of the plain.
    Always, to the end, these will remain,
    A thirst that all our passions may not slake
    April and whip-showers and the crying rain.
    1980/ 1932

Je Deviens Immortel dans tes Bras
    OVIDE , Les Amours
    We have no more of time nor growing old,
    Nor memory of lovers that are dead
    While blood is on our lips; and while you hold
    Those frail and tenebrous hands about my head.
    Time is snuffed out as candles in a church,
    And all the fume in darkness is your hair;
    Licence these burning lips and let them search
    For passion that lies nearest to despair.
    Let us set up a gravestone in the dark,
    We who are laughing sinners, let us hold
    One moment as a monument to mark
    The hour from which God ceased to make us old.
    1980/ 1932  

RETREAT
    I would be rid of you who bind me so,
    Thoughtless to the stars: I would refrain and turn
    Along the unforgotten paths I used to know
    Before these eyes were governed to discern
    All beauty and all transcience in love.
    I would return, hungry, inviolate,
    To the sequestered woodland, arched above
    With the unchanging skies that graciously await
    My sure return from such inconstant love.
    I would return … yet would there ever be
    The same clear current at the root of things?
    The same resistless tides born of the sea?
    The old slurred whisper of the swallow’s wings?
    1980/ 1932

BALLADE OF SLOW DECAY
    This business grows more dreary year by year,
    The season with its seasonable joys,
    When there is so much extra now on beer,
    And therefore so much less to spend on toys:
    And now