Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

blood thickens.

The heart’s strings start to throb like Paganini.

I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.

A brandy glow irradiates the face,

The air grows soft, an aria from Puccini,

The stolid London streets attain the grace

Of a prolonged crescendo in Rossini.

The holly berries cluster, sharp and sheeny,

And Scrooge, whose heart is smaller than a chicken’s

Learns what to do with money, the old meanie.

I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.

Nutmeg’s a spice and so, once more, is mace,

And Christmas cake goes well with capuccini.

With luck, frost will festoon like Brussels lace,

And circuses please all, just not Fellini.

The Ulster troubles, hymned by Seamus Heaney,

Will briefly ebb, like everything that sickens

(Take etiolated Eliot’s Apeneck Sweeney).

I wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.

           ENVOY

Principe, Principessa, Principini –

You’ll be abroad when the green season thickens,

But in Long Island’s opulent confini

We wish you all a Christmas out of Dickens.

JANUARY 1

      1.

Last night, before the death of the old year,

I got the catalogue of my year’s sins,

Chronic sins really, hurled at me, mere pins

To this habituated cushion, mere

Eveish swipes at the old Adam, sheer

Archetypal wifedom that begins

And ends with ego, ego. Still my shins

Winced at the barking. It was not nice to hear.

You’ll have to change. I’ve head such words before.

Next month, with luck, I score my 68,

And do not think to knock on a new door.

Change, at that age, is easy to translate,

And so I’ll spill my egos on to the floor

And water them and watch them germinate.

      2.

The four French télé channels were all smiles,

Like grand pianos waiting to be struck

At midnight. Mitterand wished us good luck

And looked as though he’d found a cure for piles.

Cartesian digitals displacing dials,

We waited for Debussy harps to pluck

Nouvelle Année, for even time is stuck

On the French culture cake, like cats on tiles.

New Year in England was a whole hour later

And, naturally, seemed more genuine.

Big Ben throbbed twelve and drowned the Russians’ data

On the same waveband. Noon: I ovened in

A steak and kidney pie. Would that act rate a

Slight remission of at least one sin?

SONNET À L’HÔTEL LE CLOS VOLTAIRE

Leman’s for lovers, still, though Thomas Stearns

Eliot wept a Waste Land out, alone.

Careers (flotations foreign on) the Rhone,

Lapping a thousand banks. Servetus burns,

Or Calvin. Under bald Alps, a city learns

Salvation may be palpable as stone.

Leman’s for lovers, still, though Thomas Stearns

Eliot wept a Waste Land out, alone.

Lapping its banks, the incremental Rhone

Out-ticks all purely temporal returns.

Swiss skills from Alpine skulls; Alps carve dead bone.

Virtue’s in tolerance, not vaults or clocks

Or Institutes. Voltaire, your surgeon’s quill

Lanced Europe’s boil. Your knife-eyes rayed their will

To tyrants there. We yet feel these made shocks

And here you went to earth, old friend, old fox.

I seemed last night to hear you breathing still,

Reposeless. Rise, take up your trumpet shrill,

Excoriate our wolves, our bleating flocks!

‘THE VERSES OF E. LUCIE-SMITH’

The verses of E. Lucie-Smith

Must not be dealt sneeringly with.

They’re not just belle-lettric

I wander on any road under my moon,

Careless of glory, indifferent to the boon

Or stuffed up with rhetoric;

They’re full not of wind but of pith.

‘YOU WERE THERE, AND NOTHING SAID’

You were there, and nothing said,

For words were dead and dust in the air.

But I was suddenly aware, in the split instant

Of the constant, in a sort of passionless frenzy –

Trees, table, the war, in a fixed relation

Of your calculation, their primum mobile,

But that you were there really was all I knew.

What the blood purposed you to be.

Among the things that I bequeath

That safety razor. Stock up with

Blades, particularly the brand

The name of a notable swordsmith.

CATULLUS 1

Who shall I give this pretty new

Dry-pumice-polished booklet to?

To you Cornelius, for you

Used to declare: By God, there is I think

Merit in these nugacities.

When you alone of Italy’s

Historians had the guts to write

The world up in three volumes, quite

A job, weighty, and erudite.

So take this book for what it’s worth.

Hecate, help its birth,

Grant it a hundred years on earth.

CATULLUS 2

Sparrow, my lady’s pet,

In play upon her lap,

Her fingertip you get

To peck or sharply snap.

When she my shiny one

Bids sharper pain grow weak.

And pain is only fun

Delivered from your beak.

Sicker in love than she

I wish you’d play with me

Pecking my pain like crumbs

Till the heart’s numbness comes.

‘HEROES ARE DEAD TO US’

Heroes are dead to us,

We worship filmstars.

Deep drinking and thinking

Give place to milkbars.

‘MY FATHER, HIS WIFE’

My father, his wife,

Too old to make decisions,

Yet plotted their revisions

Of their life.

Nor could this hope be

More vain for

It was left to me

To open the oven door.

She at least, the mother.

He in his apprehension

Cut the knot of tension.

She thought of other

Uses, seeking a flame

Stronger in her

The instinct came

To start the Sunday dinner.

THAT THE EARTH ROSE OUT OF A VAST BASIN OF ELECTRIC SEA

Rolled, rolled, rolled,

And all being fills in it,

Where fire flies, sparks gay with gold,

Wash the lot, the tide swills, spills in it.

Tying all, oh with what strings

It binds, binds earth and air to all

It shews and knoes, meets all, leaps and sings

Its way through the spray of it, the misty caul.

Womb of all, tomb of all, the mass

Where mighty fingers beat now, kneed and mould,

With a curling of tongues, a laugh and a mocking to pass:

It ceases note, rolling in wash and glint of gold.

SONNET IN ALEXANDRINES

Whether windowed a greycold welkin or a dawn that mounts and breaks

In a roseflush wave each day arises the working man,

Heavy maybe but never for a thwarted life’s plan

Seen shaped to the pounding day:- for the day’s round he awakes.

He shakes sleep away. Day warms. He leaves and takes

A snap of sullen cheese, hunked bread, a brew for his can,

And thrives in the air, strives, spits, swears. His breastcares span

But Saturday’s care or bet; naught deeper rankles or aches.

When the violet air blooms about him, then at last he can wipe

His hands sheerfree of swink, monarch of hours ahead;

Hearty he eats and, full, he sits to pull at his pipe,

Warm at the kitchen glow. The courts and sports-news read,

He argues, sups in the Lion vault; to a plate of tripe

Or crisp chips home returns, then climbs to a dreamless bed.

A RONDEL