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

meat and drink to us.

A boy reads Hamlet and is justified

In consummating family homicide.

And so let muted Hamlet join the banned.

The eye that reads King Lear directs the hand

That pulls a pair of streaming jellies out.

That books are instigators we must doubt,

Along with visual versions of the same,

Since they but copy life. Life is to blame.

The question I postponed I now present:

Does writing have an ethical intent

Even while taking Wilde’s prescript to heart –

That art’s created for the sake of art?

All right – we know that Pater said it first.

Dear Oscar was remiss enough to burst

The shackles of Paterian constraint,

Making repentant Dorian slash the paint.

He would not shatter, even if he could,

The bond that bolts pure beauty to the good.

For art proclaims nobility at best,

At worst a sick desire of being blest.

If its implied morality is not

The one that Church and State alike allot,

This is because it claims a wider scope

And stresses love much more than faith and hope.

No novel ever written praised the bad,

Diminished sanity and raised the mad

Except for some ironical effect.

Creators of necessity elect

{Creation not destruction as their theme,

{Fulfilment of a larger moral dream

{Than waking life is able to esteem.

And this condition is not blemished if

Out of the woodwork should exude a whiff

Of pure diablerie. Our William Blake

Sought to exalt hell just for heaven’s sake,

Finding in fire an energy to heat

Cold bottoms stuck to heaven’s judgment seat,

Or, if you will, a passion that might thaw

Enmarbled reason frozen into law.

The law must trust the artist: only he

Or she proclaims the human. And if we

Shudder at evil steaming from a page,

Then we must damp our moralistic rage,

Remembering that evil must be shown

Only that good may be the better known.

The battle is engaged. The winning side

Is not foreknown, but victory is implied

Even for the victim, should the victim be

Symbolic of a large humanity.

Art may imply, but not directly speak,

Scorning the straight path, prizing the oblique,

Hinting in elegance, loathing to shove

Us bodily into the lake of love.

Love. Now religion. A much graver theme

Confronts us. To begin, let us blaspheme.

Jesus, the bastard of a drunken brute,

Was gotten on the village prostitute.

His followers were active sodomites

Who dragged in Judas to their dark delights.

The heavenly kingdom was not for the just

But just the devotees of lawless lust.

{Read this, and then re-read it. Having read,

{Do not heap hot damnation on my head,

{But add inverted commas and ‘he said’.

I may have written this, but on behalf

Of some fictitious sneerer whose foul laugh

A fictional believer counters thus:

‘Your fiction is so vilely blasphemous

You damn yourself to darkness.’ The reply?

‘Christ was a liar and he taught a lie,

A bastard brat, son of a fucking whore,

His words a drunkard’s belch and nothing more.’

Our world is built of opposites. Not strange

That one mind can engender this exchange,

And it’s unjust to fasten on to me

The fouler voice of the antiphony.

Imagine death and take the blame for death?

Macbeth is bad, but Shakespeare’s not Macbeth.

Turn to a later giver of God’s laws

And you may libel him with greater cause.

Mohamed claimed no heavenly origin,

And to defame his essence is no sin.

‘This shoveller of camel-droppings who

Craftily married and pretended to

Broadcast the Word from Gabriel’s microphone

– We have his word for it, but that alone –

Raped virgins under age and robbed the poor,

Corrupted Arab, Persian, Turk and Moor,

And left a bloody legacy of hate

To doubter, heretic and apostate,

A stinking rubbish dump made white with paint,

A shaitan masquerading as a saint.’

These words are mine, their import otherwise.

The gravamen of uttering them lies

With some dim personage who does not exist

Save in the fancy of the fantasist.

{We have this right – to voice the darker side;

{The devil’s sneer is there to be denied,

{To hear it lying and to say it lied.

Fanatics live by absolutist laws.

They, at this time of writing, are the cause

Of a free writer’s cowering in some den

Out of the reach, he hopes, of murderous men

Ordered to hate, but know not what they hate,

Assassins fed on hashish by a State

That re-instils the wretched image of

A God who raves for blood and not for love,

Who’re promised paradise but, better far,

Shekels for one swish of the scimitar.

For a new breed of Censor now arrives,

Equating human speech with human lives.

‘Follow our law,’ he thunders, ‘burn or ban

Whatever terrifies Islamic man,

{Even if he’s a tolerated guest

{Of polities where no faith is oppressed.

{He has the privilege of knowing best.

There is no God but Allah. Elohim,

God or Jehovah is a shadowy dim

Dull sketch of our invisibly bright One

Who tells us human revelation’s done.

For Nabi Musa, Nabi Isa fall

Before the greatest Nabi of them all.

Mohamed saw the last effulgence. Bow,

You rational future, to the Muslim now.

We hold our paynim hostages and slay

Should you oppose our word and disobey.’

Here’s the new foe of liberated speech,

Whose insolent arm presumes to stretch and reach

Beyond the confines of Islamic soil.

Allah alone, whose bounty flows in oil,

Will reign inviolate, unopposed, serene

In lands whose present God is the machine,

And churchbells yield to the muezzin’s wail

Should oil-rich Islam strike and then prevail.

Here is a slogan sanity must clutch:

‘Belief is dangerous. Don’t believe too much.’

When I was young, rocked on a papist knee,

Dense with the dogmas hammered into me,

On Rome’s authority I used to dub

The Church of England a mere cricket club,

A genteel congeries of vague belief,

Of veal-consumers scared of bloody beef,

With boyish bishops arguing unvexed

At contrary glossings of a text,

Unsure of heaven, unconvinced of hell:

‘He’s a good fellow, and ’twill all be well.’

Pragmatic England, working underground,

Contrived a creed doctrinally unsound

But geared to toleration’s mental sleep,

A creed of ‘Gently dip, but not too deep.’

Sick at the rantings of the Moloch-mouth

Of Muslim East and Baptist-bigot South,

I learn to look at faith with the mild eyes

Of tolerance and tepid compromise.

The mariner learned love of the albatross

And, we assume, the man upon the cross,

With passion bubbling from the self-same spring,

But how could anyone sincerely bring

The loving torrent of a human heart

To enigmatic God, who sits apart,

Permits his bigots to show pledges of

A dire vindictiveness, but not of love?

{That God’s removed, that God remains unknown,

{Exacts a lesser love than can be shown

{To larks, to lizards sunning on