eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847779632 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1100 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Collected Poems
By Elizabeth Jennings, Emma Mason
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 The Estate of Elizabeth JenningAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-963-2
CHAPTER 1
The Elements
The elements surround us,
Earth, water, air and fire,
And O my love I bring you
Those thoughts that long since found us
And quickened our desire;
So this desire I sing you.
Earth with its rich enfolding
I lay before your feet:
I lay it for your waking
And for your body's moulding,
This earth, a golden sheet,
Smoothed sweetly for your taking.
Water I bring for lovers
To wash their golden hands,
Water that gently hovers
And falls on arid lands;
Take it, my love, this river
It will not flow for ever.
Air I bring with caresses
Fluttering on your breath,
And silver-thin my kisses
Laid on your lips beneath,
Laid on your lips beneath,
Laid between life and death.
The last gift that I give you,
My love, is quickening fire,
It curls in blood-red fingers
And in its flame I leave you:
O guard it while it lingers,
It keeps my whole desire.
Estrangement
Neither map nor compass tells the heart's decay,
No chisel cuts across the lines of love:
Night still is night and day remains but day,
Only our thoughts and not our bodies move.
No dial reasons why we fall apart,
The clock goes ticking on, we cannot see
The palest indication that the heart
Will not strike out the night's futurity.
The Lucky
Sailors and gamblers and all such,
These least expect and most deserve my praise
Who, not didactic, yet most ably teach
The tranquil taking of the splendid days.
For whom a spot of breeze, a turned-up penny
Bring golden lights into their lucky eyes –
These face the world and have no fear of any,
And strut the daily storms without disguise.
Modern Poet
This is no moment now for the fine phrases,
The inflated sentence, words cunningly spun,
For the floreate image or the relaxing pun
Or the sentimental answer that most pleases.
We must write down an age of reckless hunger,
Of iron girders, hearts like plumb-lines hung
And the poet's art is to speak and not to be sung
And sympathy must turn away to anger.
Time
Why should we think of ends, beginnings,
Who for a moment draw our pace
Through moons and sunsets, risings, wanings,
Who brush the moment, seek a place
More than a minute's hopes and winnings?
Why cannot we accept the hour,
The present, be observers and
Hold a full knowledge in our power,
Arrest the falling of the sand?
And keep the watchful moment, pour
Its meaning in the hurried hand?
The Clock
The old clock
With its tick reluctant, slow,
Makes me wish there were some clock within
More regular than heart, steady as rock,
That we might know
The time to end, begin,
The time for stopping love or war
Or hate,
And see the stiff hand turning O before
Before it is too late.
Deception
Children who find their strength in loneliness,
Discouraging the bright sun on the roofs
(The sun that nullifies their secret caves)
Are desperate before the lovers' kiss
Acknowledging defeat and laugh at love's
Cowardly despair in loneliness.
They swear that they will never love like this,
And boys in gangs harry the girls and run
In many lonelinesses, quick to shun
The female wrath, the pity of the sun.
They keep their separateness like a disease
Until the darkness can no longer hide
Their ebbing strength, their impotent despair,
And out they come at last and wear their need
Like conquerors. Their coming they declare
Is but to end the women's loneliness.
Warning
Child do not tell your images, we kill them
With argument and I would wish you deaf
Rather than hear the mad cries of our logic
Aiming at beauty, wounding it with grief.
Be silent now and do not tell your magic.
And when your children dream O never tell them
Those dreams were yours, for if they should believe
Such dreams belong to others it would fill them
With knowledge that displaces dreams and if
You argue truth for images you kill them.
John the Baptist
Growing from old age he was close to death,
When he was born carried the look of death.
The mouth sharp as a sword forbade the touch
Of softness. In the desert he found sand
And friendly thistles for his hardened hand.
He was a god a short time, camped within
A wilderness and found his childhood there,
Built sand castles, was tempted first to sin
But pleasure was repellent. With long hair
He frightened and baptised throughout Judea.
Ironic for him that was precursor
Of one who turned the water into wine
And multiplied the loaves, one who was wiser
In knowing peace. The tawny lion John
Hated the path that he had trodden on.
He had been careless of the power of women
But a voluptuous feast was his own death –
The head upon a plate, the sword-sharp mouth
Condemning dancing with a sad inhuman
Face that shook above Salome's hips.
Tuscany
His stopping here grows close to living as
He marks a landscape for his thoughts. Before
His mind inhabited itself and not
Outside itself could pass,
But here
Built ready for him, to be recognised
His thoughts confront him in the light, the trees.
And contemplation active as the sea,
Purposeful yet half drawing back will come
At last in single meeting up the shore.
So all his questions answered outside him
Enrich his prayer,
Expose this different landscape as his home,
All to restore him perfect inwardly.
Cave Dwellers
Outside the cave the animals roar and whine,
Inside they move upon the walls and stride
Only within the pattern that the men
Who worked in careful patience have allowed.
So rich they are it seems they're painted in
The creatures' blood, the blood that burns outside.
Caves are our minds. How to relaxing peace
Our animals withdrawn there! They are tamed
To tapestries and dance on musicless
Obedient only to what we have named
Their laws, yet pacify our own distress.
But still outside the ravenous creatures rove
And set us burning, willing to be consumed
And to consume even the painted cave.
Their claws become our hands which seized and
stormed
The peaceful animals who speak of love
And which possessed by power we say we dreamed.
COLLECTIONS 1953–2001
POEMS (1953)
Delay
The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.
Winter Love
Let us have Winter loving that the heart
May be in peace and ready to partake
Of the slow pleasure Spring would wish to hurry
Or that in Summer harshly would awake,
And let us fall apart, O gladly weary,
The white skin shaken like a white snowflake.
Woman in Love
All familiar thoughts grow strange to her,
One thought insists on opening each door,
Each window on to love, the others stir
And creep as strangers, skulking on the edge
To find an entry by some subterfuge.
But she dismisses them and grows one thought
Whatever hands obey, whatever voice
Speaks of indifference. She is tamed, self-taught.
Peace in a high room now defines the noise
As meaningless and she, beyond the range
Of conversation, finds no dreaming strange.
Yet when he comes will then unlearn it all,
Find thought within her mind and fact in him
At variance, almost inimical,
And as peacemaker will exile the dream,
Escape her own mind and acknowledging
This love as strange enact a truer pledging.
Weathercock
A hard tin bird was my lover
Fluttering with every breeze
To north and west would hover
In fierce extremities
But I would never find
Him quietly in the south
Or in the warmest east
And never near my mouth
And never on my breast.
A hard bird swinging high
Glinting with gold and sun
Aloft swung in the sky
Ready to run
O would I were that sun
He swings to with desire
Could see my love's gold eye
And feel his fire.
The Substitute
He rehearsed then with an understudy
(Love he had cast not ready to play the part
Nor knowing yet disturbance in the heart).
Nearly indifferent he explored the body
Of one untutored, ready to be hurt,
Absolute, being unpractised in the role.
She took the lesson wholly in the school
Of his rehearsal, learnt it thoroughly,
Played it entire while his mind still was full
Of the other with whom he could not be,
Who played a passion quite away from him.
If she his waking love and she his dream
Used cruelly should meet, his love would stir
A sympathy and union in them,
The loved and loving have a common theme,
And he the instigator be in neither
But as the cause they recognised each other.
The Meeting
This meeting now blurs all we have become
Though not quite back to then,
And asks that here we build ourselves not dream
Each other out as when love had begun,
For now each one must fashion himself of
No other but himself and not of love.
So only can we greet and meet in calm
And watch the once mixed love divide and go
To where the other cannot know
And not to you or me as home.
So we construct
Pure meeting of pure self we think and yet
Envy those others moving into love
Strange and oblique where we are now direct.
The Infatuation
She looks in mood of dream to take his meaning
And loves what she is thinking that she sees
And gathers it so close about her ways
She cannot see he has a true beginning
Within her only, imaged there to dress
All her own passion in a deep distress.
But knows him still away and what she holds
No flesh held deep to love, so wills her passion
Close in a child to argue in a child's
Absolute power, as object of compassion
To prove her love not inward. But she folds,
As their child moves away, the true negation
Of love; it is a lover that she builds
And this real child no child of such relation.
The Three
Between them came
Not pleasure from their love
But always, past their senses, her own dream
Of what she made him for herself would move
And each grew helpless wondering at that life.
And making love was not between these two
But her own making this, this image of
What he was not, would never grow,
So in their gestures each grew less to know
Where their minds met and what each had to love.
Two Voices
'You are more than your thoughts' he said
Watching her wandering away from him
In a landscape her own where she denied
Entry to any, kept a private dream
Where all love met rebuff, remained outside,
'You are more than your love' she replied
Watching him searching, how his eyes
And hands demanded to include
Her landscape where his loving was
Yet when he entered it it died.
And she beyond her thoughts he thought to hold
Made absolute in love. And he withdrawing
Behind his hope of love, she wished to build –
The seeker and the sought each one pursuing
Where each was, not in love, not in thought, held.
The Exchange
'I will unlearn myself for you' he says
Gazing away from him into her eyes
And drowning some old notion of himself
Within that gaze,
Relinquishing his meaning to her will.
And she discards the self she once would call
Her only self, seems gone entire and all
Given in patience, given in peace to love.
Yet both will fail
To see their old self copied in the full
Glance of the other, an exchange of life.
Sequence from Childhood
I
Children ponder our possessions with
Minds that are free, they play with curious fears
Adept at suffering second-hand, their legends
Are dire with cruelty. As overseers
They watch with fascination from the path.
Their truth being other than the facts, their brigands,
Pirates and thieves can be shut up at night,
But move like mice within their dreams beneath
The floor of sleep and with the morning light
Appear, unlike ours, fabulous as death.
II
A looking-glass is not where they indulge
Self-scrutiny, it is a country that
Opens before them in a lucky journey
Where animals are waiting to divulge
Important secrets, where the children meet
And threadbare rulers begging for a penny.
The sudden likeness seen is not their will,
The sudden likeness seen is not their will,
They look beyond it curious to spy out
New topsy-turvy landscapes without any
Images of themselves. They would wipe out
Their own reflections clearly to reveal
The tempting country ever in retreat.
III
Children ask that stories be repeated
And if we change a word they catch us out;
Wanting no ends they trace the well-known route
As if it is new land they have created.
Their history is of animals who live
Lives within lives, are always on the move,
Of kings who fall but to be reinstated.
Their detailed countries live by being told
Over and over, they unwrap new meaning
From stories, learnt by heart, when we repeat them,
A dream made verbal is for them no dream
And boring narratives are where they build
A power of love, a world without beginning.
Adopted Child
'This' they say 'Is what we could not have.
How strange for other lovers to impart
A meeting thus. And separate from the love
Barren between us, this child grows to move
Almost against the turning of our heart.'
'Our failure thus shall walk about our son,
Learn to speak dutifully to his parents
Who know him their escape, whose love moves on
To gesture at so tender a pretence
And make a home in others' innocence.'
But love is inward still, however they
Walk in the child and make him weather all
The tenderness that neither could fulfil,
And never 'This is you' will either say
Passing a passion to the child to seal
Their lack, but watch a stranger ignorantly.
The Alteration
He argued with his thoughts, they would not stir
To go out ceremoniously, wear
The other side of passion. In strict hate
They would not be sent strutting proudly out
But dressed up quietly for no inspection
And tiptoed round and called themselves affection.
And all the tenderness he willed before
Came then unwanted and with much to spare.
Love could be held a little dressed as hate
But turned to fondness must be quite cast out.
Reminiscence
When I was happy alone, too young for love
Or to be loved in any but a way
Cloudless and gentle, I would find the day
Long as I wished its length or web to weave.
I did not know or could not know enough
To fret at thought or even try to whittle
A pattern from the shapeless stony stuff
That now confuses since I've grown too subtle.
I used the senses, did not seek to find
Something they could not touch, made numb with fear;
I felt the glittering landscape in the mind
And O was happy not to have it clear.
Fantasy
Tree without a leaf I stand
Bird unfeathered cannot fly
I a beggar weep and cry
Not for coins but for a hand
To beg with. All my leaves are down
Feathers flown and hand wrenched off
Bird and tree and beggar grown
Nothing on account of love.
Jealousy
She spoke the word at last and gave him cause
To fatten on the treachery and grow jealous,
To see the underside of his own love
And find a new power, to be worshipped with
As much care as the love which bound them both,
To tame to tricks or burn incense before.
But when the fever by her malice stirred
Be changed to health before a gentle word,
He will be helpless in his love and wish
The absolute jealousy to touch him further
That he may hold his failure as a mother
Cherishes most the misbegotten one.
Italian Light
It is not quite a house without the sun
And sun is what we notice, wonder at
As if stone left its hard and quarried state
To be reciprocal to light and let
The falling beams bound and rebound upon
Shutter and wall, each with assurance thrown.
So on descending from the snow we meet
Not warmth of south but houses which contrive
To be designed of sun. The builders have
Instructed hands to know where shadows fall
And made of buildings an obedient stone
Linked to the sun as waters to the moon.
A View of Positano
He builds the town, puts houses random down
Though they have stood there long. But this is new,
He brings the angles narrow on the view,
Cracked plaster peels, breaks under sun, its rind
Composing then and white within his mind.
The maps, sunglasses and binoculars
Are to detach the place from what he makes it,
To hold it off there in a clear perspective
And out of reach, placed apt in all particulars.
This needful to the town for staring fakes it
And leaves too personal a spirit there.
Afterwards, from the sea, it will grow dim
But rich in promises and seem to air
Its meaning publicly. Be as before
White houses fallen down the cliff
But rooted there as in no traveller's dream.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Collected Poems by Elizabeth Jennings, Emma Mason. Copyright © 2012 The Estate of Elizabeth Jenning. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.