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

FOR SPRING

(

from the French of Charles d’Orléans

)

The earth has cast her winter skin

Of warping wind and driving rain,

And garbed greenery again

With fretted sunlight woven in.

No bird or beast but does begin

In its own speech to swell the strain:

The earth has cast her winter skin

Of warping wind and driving rain.

The floods vast, the streams thin

Spin in the source or sweep the plain,

Flaunting a sun-bespeckled train

To swell the wild and waking din.

The earth has cast her winter skin.

WHEN IT IS ALL OVER

One can only deplore

The devastated fields,

And check the fire-spread,

And do no more.

And after it is all over,

And the voices fall in the hoarse

Throats, and rubber truncheons rot under glass covers,

And dream blows are struck without force.

There shall be ‘Nazi’ lipsticks,

‘Gestapo’ cigarettes

And children shall cuddle toy

S.A. men in their beds.

WIR DANKEN UNSREM FÜHRER

We thank our Führer for redeeming us

From the ignoble sluggish slough of peace;

For striking down the sleek, insidious

Serpents that choked us; working our release

From the semitic bondage of our race.

Sun symbol held aloft, we climb still nearer

To the pure sun, the one God-granted place;

We thank our Führer.

We thank our Führer as the reasoning head,

We the blind limbs to function and obey,

Content with that. God-like he harvested

Wheat from the chaff of his own Judgment Day.

God-like our shepherd feeding us aright

Not in the flesh, what to the soul is dearer,

Our everlasting arms, sheen of our might.

We thank our Führer.

We thank our Führer that he prophesied,

Yours is the kingdom. You shall inherit the earth.

Fulfilling that, men will have starved and died

Gladly with pride in death through pride in birth.

Shadowing space our fylfot will have told

History’s spring and end to the eager hearer,

Our earth’s first blood, our titles manifold.

We thank our Führer.

GIRL

She was all

Brittle crystal;

Her hands

Silver silk over steel;

Her hair harvested

Sheaves shed by summer;

Her grace in repose the flash

Of the flesh of a river swimmer.

That was not nature’s good;

She nothing understands.

Horrible now she should

Use to her own ends.

TO AMARYLLIS AFTER THE DANCE

Semitic violins, by the wailing wall

Weep their threnody

For the buried jungle, the tangled lianas;

Or say that was before, in the first flush,

And say that now

A handful of coins, image and milled edge worn,

Is spilled abroad, and determines

Our trade of emotions. Over this background are imposed

Urges, whose precise nature it is hard

To etch out, to define.

(Shells, shaped by forgotten surges).

One never gets to know anything really, having no word

To body forth a thought, no axe

To reach flagged soil, no drills

To pierce living wells. It would tax

My energies overmuch now to garner you

Cut of worn coins, worn shells.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Well, my Eurydice, that was pain enough

Having only your name to call on, day and night.

Both day and night were long enough;

Now I lead you laboriously to the light.

Hell played at forfeits. On a swivel of the head

Rested your return; as one might stab a pin

Idly at a fly for its irrelevant end.

The world was plunged into original sin.

That was not in the pattern of our lives,

Whose miraculous fabric has for every strand

Accounted. Wantonly the Destroyer unweaves,

Just as He hides time’s secret in His hand.

But it is true I would have been destined then,

Climbing alone back to the light, to have met

The deserved logical end. The tree that has been

Fruitful, only stays to be fruitful yet.

Life’s undergrowth of laws that see no light,

This I believe in, as much as anything.

He would have seen you no Proserpina

Nor sent you back to wither up the spring.

‘ALL THE ORE’

All the ore

that, waiting, lay

for the later working

I melted before

its time

to make you ornaments for a day.

And all else, too

I drew out, there is no more.

For between man and man at the last

there rests at least shame.

A HISTORY

Anyway, there emerged from his mind’s cellar

The forged stamp of the image of goddess,

And it fell upon her,

Almost, as it were, per accidens.

And with it a pitiful dual approach,

Half Shelley, half Flaubert.

He broached and broke the hymen of her lips

After three weeks’ work, and was pre-occupied

By the technique, art for art’s sake, of his kisses.

It was an attempt, having carved her pedestal,

To raise himself, almost by a metaphysical

Conceit, and to conduct love

On the level of Ideas, out of the clogs of time,

Seeing ethereal virtues in the bones

Of a paradigm.

O granted it was to become a grammar of love,

Yet who might construct the language, the vibrant speech

Sprung out of earth, from what had shed

All but archetypes, supposing the language dead?

Anyway, they reached complete intimacy,

And it was all on this level, carved out cleanly in time.

A fulfilling of all parts of the act, except

That it was playing from score, that a pattern was imposed,

That there was no growth out to become the pattern.

And he at least was amazed at the futility,

Thought the whole thing overrated; out of mind

Were the sweat and the labour to compass an ecstasy.

But with her an unpurposed external heat

Had achieved the loosening of the icefloes. A late spring

Became a wonder in her. Her body began

To flower in its own right.

He saw that its opening to man

Was what he had done, that that was the accomplished fact

That had to be greater to her than their personal history,

The released woman more than the melted she.

Stricken, he escapes to the war.

In absence her image reverts to that of the goddess crystallised

About his longings; not before

Might she impartially have watched his spasm worked out

In her the instrument. But to-day

He is outside his handiwork, the unpremeditated lord

Of creation, and that one connecting cord

Shrivelled away.

THE LOWDOWN ON ART

OR ÆSTHETICS FOR THE SCIENCE STUDENT

Art and Science have this in common: they both = man + nature.

They both imposed an ordered scheme on nature.

Science, in its applied state, for a useful end.

Pure science and pure art for a useless end.

(Oscar Wilde said, “All art is perfectly useless.”)

You can decorate a wall with a Da Vinci.

You can use part of a Haydn string quartet for national anthem.

That is making use of art, but that is not the essential purpose of art.

Pure science is seeking to discover and manifest Truth.

Art is seeking to discover and manifest Beauty.

These are called Values. Their discovery