The Whitsun Weddings Read Free

Rather, they rise
    Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,
    Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes
    That stare beyond this world, where nothing’s made
    As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home
    All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
    Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
    And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
    Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
    A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes’ Tea
    To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
    Walking towards them through some dappled park
    As if on water that unfocused she
    No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
    Who now stands newly clear,
    Smiling, and recognising, and going dark.

Send No Money
    Standing under the fobbed
    Impendent belly of Time
    Tell me the truth , I said,
    Teach me the way things go .
    All the other lads there
    Were itching to have a bash
    But I thought wanting unfair:
    It and finding out clash.
    So he patted my head, booming Boy ,
    There’s no green in your eye:
    Sit here, and watch the hail
    Of occurrence clobber life out
    To a shape no one sees –
    Dare you look at that straight?
    Oh thank you, I said, Oh yes please ,
    And sat down to wait.
    Half life is over now,
    And I meet full face on dark mornings
    The bestial visor, bent in
    By the blows of what happened to happen.
    What does it prove? Sod all.
    In this way I spent youth,
    Tracing the trite untransferable
    Truss-advertisement, truth.

Afternoons
    Summer is fading:
    The leaves fall in ones and twos
    From trees bordering
    The new recreation ground.
    In the hollows of afternoons
    Young mothers assemble
    At swing and sandpit
    Setting free their children.
    Behind them, at intervals,
    Stand husbands in skilled trades,
    An estateful of washing,
    And the albums, lettered
    Our Wedding , lying
    Near the television:
    Before them, the wind
    Is ruining their courting-places
    That are still courting-places
    (But the lovers are all in school),
    And their children, so intent on
    Finding more unripe acorns,
    Expect to be taken home.
    Their beauty has thickened.
    Something is pushing them
    To the side of their own lives.

An Arundel Tomb
    Side by side, their faces blurred,
    The earl and countess lie in stone,
    Their proper habits vaguely shown
    As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
    And that faint hint of the absurd –
    The little dogs under their feet.
    Such plainness of the pre-baroque
    Hardly involves the eye, until
    It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
    Clasped empty in the other; and
    One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
    His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
    They would not think to lie so long.
    Such faithfulness in effigy
    Was just a detail friends would see:
    A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
    Thrown off in helping to prolong
    The Latin names around the base.
    They would not guess how early in
    Their supine stationary voyage
    The air would change to soundless damage,
    Turn the old tenantry away;
    How soon succeeding eyes begin
    To look, not read. Rigidly they

    Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
    Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
    Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
    Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
    Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
    The endless altered people came,
    Washing at their identity.
    Now, helpless in the hollow of
    An unarmorial age, a trough
    Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
    Above their scrap of history,
    Only an attitude remains:
    Time has transfigured them into
    Untruth. The stone fidelity
    They hardly meant has come to be
    Their final blazon, and to prove
    Our almost-instinct almost true:
    What will survive of us is love.

By the Same Author
    In the Poetry Firsts collection
     
    Simon Armitage – Kid
    Wendy Cope – Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
    Alice Oswald – Dart
    Don Paterson – Nil Nil
    Sylvia Plath – Ariel

Copyright
    First published in 1964
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2010
    All rights reserved
©