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

the stone,

{Our co-inheritors of blood and bone,

{The greater love reserved to man alone.

With humour, modesty, and some good will

Also much tolerance, our life can still

Invite a certain measure of content,

Provided we don’t wreck the tenement.

Give praise for pleasure, and to pain submit,

But, for God’s sake, let’s keep God out of it.

Easier said than done, you will reply,

For Blake’s old Nobodaddy in the sky,

Grown tired of spinning his self-spinning globes,

Is all too ready to endue the robes

Of the almighty State (he surely knows

His Hegel, and perhaps inspired his prose).

As ultimate authority is God,

Even the atheist sees nothing odd

In man-made structures growing numinous.

This throws our primal missile back to us –

The leader coughs; the myrmidons cry: ‘Hark,

He speaks, Lord Oracle. Let no dog bark.’

The writer’s the most canine of the lot,

Though doggedly he digs away at ‘What

True logic can exist when party’s so

Identified with State, we wish to know.

For party is, by definition, part.

A portion of the total beating heart

Which is the social whole. Through its intent

To be the polity’s embodiment,

It naturally lies and, more, denies

The right of speech to those who say it lies.’

And so the final glacial music grips

Each island that forgets its dream of ships,

With censorship the one ship in the bay,

Lies and half-lies unladed every day.

We, in a freer State, may pity those

Who wear an iron muzzle on the nose,

But, seeing man is never satisfied,

The happy censorless revolve inside

A vague nostalgia for the unhappy time

When free expression was a social crime.

In the great age of Queen Elizabeth,

Before rebellious Essex met his death,

His sad revolt was signalled by a play –

Richard the Second. ‘Now no playwright may,’

The Council thundered, ‘borrow for his plot

A phase of English history.’ So what

The cunning artists did was turn to Rome,

To Greece, and shun the chronicles of home,

Able, in fancy clothing, to display

All the preoccupations of their day.

The ingenuity the Russians showed

When Czarist hellhounds blocked the freer road

Let them say more in allegory than

Was audible to forcers of the ban.

In Britain, where a milder writ once ran,

Swift could excoriate his fellow-man

Through the bland gestures of a fairy tale,

And Orwell, his successor, could assail

A monstrous revolution with a tongue

Tuned to the blameless accents of the young.

Loss of plain speaking that decorum cut

Bred cunning. But the door of cunning shut

When the permissive portals opened wide,

And periphrastic skills were set aside.

It is not censorship we deprecate,

Only the axe and scissors of the State.

No artist is compelled to strip things bare

Because the moral right to nakedness is there.

The moral and aesthetic merge to one

In certain areas, and their union

Is given a new name – fastidiousness.

This moans a near-articulate distress

But scorns to call the policeman or the priest

To chain or else to exorcise the beast

Which bears no fangs, only a gamy stink,

A snout for the stopped privy or clogged sink

And, for the voyeur’s cash, a hungry maw.

Discretion is a virtue which no law

Enforces. An unforced consensus can

Alone sustain the dignity of man,

A dignity that artists must deride

At times lest he become too dignified.

For men in general do not spend their lives

In copulating with each other’s wives,

Crawling in crapulous vomit, plotting rape,

All mindlessly unable to escape

The engine rhythm of the dog and bitch

Or else the tumid thrill of growing rich.

The prosperous low fiction of our time

Stands charged with one unpardonable crime –

That of presenting man all shorn of his

Irreconcilable complexities,

Reduced to simple structure – a machine,

Homo politicus or sexualis, clean

Or filthy but not both. We may deplore,

May even weep, but can do nothing more.

Let indiscretion be the major sin.

The state our hidden novelist is in

He can ascribe to indiscretion, to

Not fully weighing what he had to do.

The murder of the faceless who cried out

On something they were ill-informed about,

The raving of a theocratic state

Which cried ‘Assassinate the apostate’

Were all, we think, foreseeable by a man

Raised on the Prophet, fed with the Koran,

Quick to revile the Prophet though, if so,

Sequestered, he could watch his profit grow.

Braving the threatened bomb, the ready knife,

We guard his profits, as we guard his life.

For, deaf to the incendiary sect,

It’s hard-won liberty that we protect,

Mindful of Milton and his thunderous plea

That truth and falsehood must alike be free,

For only in the war between the two

Can we learn what is false, and what is true.

‘Protect the faith,’ the furious Muslims cry,

‘Extend the law of blasphemy.’ But why?

For Christ’s divinity offends the Jew

And this explains the split between the two

Creeds bother propounded once in Palestine,

But where’s the British Jew who will malign

The tepid or the fervid faith of those

With whom his wanderings have found repose?

‘I vomit out the lukewarm,’ Jesus cried,

Yet heat is but a mode of homicide.

Let be, let be – you tepid souls, advance

And please the tepid cause of tolerance.

I write in Twickenham, with little hope

Of inspiration from the ghost of Pope.

His willows yet survive, but not his art.

Our literature is barbarous at heart,

Our palate’s coarse, our cooks are all unskilled.

The neat heroic cutlets that he grilled

And seasoned sharply with a seasoned hand

Do not appeal to votaries of the canned,

The frozen, the exotic takeaway.

Untempted to confront an April day,

I skulk beneath a duvet, and I eye

Parabolas of aircraft in the sky

Descending at ten-second intervals

To seek their nests in western terminals,

And wonder which will blossom into fire

To gratify the terrorist’s desire.

A book is perilous, a book can slay:

That is the text I ponder on each day,

And, smoking, restless, wonder why I chose

To sell my soul for thirty years of prose.

Banned in Malaysia, burned in Arkansas,

Offensive to the Afrikaaner’s law,

Padrino of the punk, a swine who gave

A dialect to the nitwit and the knave,

‘Whom did I kill? Whom did I hurt?’ I ask,

Reflecting that the writer’s only task

Is not to preach or prophecy but please.

But pleasure’s fraught with ambiguities,

And who am I to plead pure innocence?

Still, I can mildly murmur in defence,

Surveying gloomily my loaded shelf,

At least I played the censor in myself.

Custodiet costodes quis? We know:

We guard the guardian in our souls, although,

Accepting shame and blame, we also call

To vague account the father of our fall,

For books are Adam’s children, after all.

April 10, 1989

BELLI’S