Free Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell Page B

consoling winter rooms
    Where, facing south, began the great prayer,
    With his reed laid upon the margins
    Of the dead, his stainless authors,
    Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.
    Here, where your clear hand marked up
    â€˜The hated cypress’ I added ‘Because it grew
    On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns’,
    Depicting a solitary at an upper window
    Revising metaphors for the winter sea: ‘O
    Dark head of storm-tossed curls’; or silently
    Watching the North Star which like a fever burns
    Away the envy and neglect of the common,
    Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation
    The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only
    As a metaphor for the self and its perfection—
    A burning heart quite constant in its station.
    Easy to be patient in the summer,
    The light running like fishes among the leaves,
    Easy in August with its cones of blue
    Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter
    With its bareness pared his words to points
    Like stars, leaving them pure but very few.
    He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding
    The pose of sufficiency, the landed man,
    Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree
    Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we
    Use, yet based in him, his mason’s tongue;
    Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary,
    With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation,
    Disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young,
    Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery
    Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome;
    Who studiously developed his sense of death
    Till it was all around him, walking at the circus,
    At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop—
    The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic
    Imperatives: Seek, suffer, endure. The Roman
    In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.
    So perfect a disguise for one who had
    Exhausted death in art—yet who could guess
    You would discern the liar by a line,
    The suffering hidden under gentleness
    And add upon the flyleaf in your tall
    Clear hand: ‘Fat, human and unloved,
    And held from loving by a sort of wall,
    Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
    Indifference and success had crowned them all.’
    1946/ 1943  

ON ITHACA STANDING
    (1937)
    Tread softly, for here you stand
    On miracle ground, boy.
    A breath would cloud this water of glass,
    Honey, bush, berry and swallow.
    This rock, then, is more pastoral, than
    Arcadia is, Illyria was.
    Here the cold spring lilts on sand.
    The temperature of the toad
    Swallowing under a stone whispers: ‘Diamonds,
    Boy, diamonds, and juice of minerals!’
    Be a saint here, dig for foxes, and water,
    Mere water springs in the bones of the hands.
    Turn from the hearth of the hero. Think:
    Other men have their emblems, I this:
    The heart’s dark anvil and the crucifix
    Are one, have hammered and shall hammer
    A nail of flesh, me to an island cross,
    Where the kestrel’s arrow falls only,
    The green sea licks.
    1943/ 1943

EXILE IN ATHENS
    (1940)
    To be a king of islands,
    Share a boundary with eagles,
    Be a subject of sails.
    Here, on these white rocks,
    In cold palaces all winter,
    Under the salt blanket,
    Forget not yet the tried intent,
    Pale hands before the face: face
    Before the sea’s blue negative,
    Washing against the night,
    Pushing against the doors,
    Earth’s dark metaphors.
    Here alone in a stone city
    I sing the rock, the sea-squill,
    Over Greece the one punctual star.
    To be king of the clock—
    I know, I know—to share
    Boundaries with the bird,
    With the ant her lodge:
    But they betray, betray.
    To be the owner of stones,
    To be a king of islands,
    Share a bed with a star,
    Be a subject of sails.
    1943/ 1 943

A BALLAD OF THE GOOD LORD NELSON
    The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,
    Little of the scripture did he understand
    Till a woman led him to the promised land
    Â Â Â Â Â  Aboard the Victory, Victory O.
    Adam and Evil and a bushel of figs
    Meant nothing to Nelson