What are you doing here, the road's your place'
- Between their bodies I could see my tarn -
What could I do but shift my feet awhile
Mutter and turn back to my road again
Watched out of sight by three tall angry hills.
His care-free swagger was a fine invention:
Life was to slow, too regular, too grave.
With horse and sword he drew the girls’ attention,
A conquering hero, bountiful and brave,
To whom teen-agers looked for liberation:
At his command they left behind their mothers,
Their wits were sharpened by the long migration,
His camp-fires taught them all the horde were brothers.
Till what he came to do was done: unwanted,
Grown seedy, paunchy, pouchy, disappointed,
He took to drink to screw his nerves to murder,
Or sat in offices and stole,
Boomed at his children about Law and Order,
And hated life with heart and soul
Or XIII:
Far from a cultural centre he was used:
Abandoned by his general and his lice,
Under a padded quilt he turned to ice
And vanished. He will never be perused
When this campaign is tidied into books:
No vital knowledge perished in that skull;
His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull;
His name is lost for ever like his looks.
Though runeless, to instructions from headquarters
He added meaning like a comma when
He joined the dust of China, that our daughters
Might keep their upright carriage, not again
Be shamed before the dogs, that, where are waters,
Mountains, and houses, may be also men.
It was true that the West’s very own ‘Pickled Poet’ in old age, according to him, had a face that looked like ‘a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain,’ or as his good friend Christopher Isherwood had said, “such a face belonged in the British Museum.’ The kind cracked face "a dried Greek riverbed in August." From the shared cigarette in Spain to the shot of liquor in On the Circuit:
Then worst of all, the anxious thought,
Each time my plane begins to sink
And the No Smoking sign comes on:
What will there be to drink?
Is this a milieu where I must
How grahamgreeneish! How infra dig!
Snatch from the bottle in my bag
An analeptic swig?
I shall hide it in the cold pantry hold.
I shall make my decisions only after the rulers have been polled.
Shall I spend my bullion? Do I dare eat a mango?
I crave to sell my assets but it is all contango.
I have seen the bankers do the tango and fandango.
I do not think they will dance for me.
I will drive to their depository in my Dodge Durango,
Shouting at my group, “Go, gang go!”
I have seen the daring bankers, robbing all my working kins,
For over seventy solar spins, as though there were no worse sins;
Back when the rulers allowed the banks to chance all our wins.
They laugh at our foolish toils, they rejoice in our roils.
I have seen them on their posterior, hording their evil spoils,
Till the shot awakes us and the pistol recoils.
E A St Amant (as a spoof of Prufrock).
I’ll tell you bluntly
One last time:
It’s only maddening cherry brandy,
Angel mine!
Where the Greeks saw just their raped
Beauty’s fame,
At me through black holes gaped
Only shame.
But the Greeks hauled Helen home
In their ships.
Here a smidgen of salty foam
Flecks my lips.
What rubs my lips and leaves no trace?
Vacancy.
What thrusts a finger in my face?
Vagrancy.
Quickly, wholly, or slowly as a snail,
All the same,
Mary angel, drink your cocktail,
Down your wine.
I’ll tell you bluntly
One last time:
It’s only maddening cherry brandy,
Angel mine!
(Translated by Bernard Meares)
This is the poem that led the way to Mandelstam's eventual doom at the hands of the Marxists: see also: "On my shoulders pounces the wolf-hound age".
We live, with no sense of the country beneath,
At ten paces, our speeches cannot be perceived,
But whenever we can, we whisper in terror
Of the kremlin mountain dweller.
His fingers are thick and fat like the worms,
And heavy like weights is the force of his words,
His cockroach mustache is sneering outright,
And his boot-tops are shimmering bright.
His skinny-necked leaders surround him, nervous,
He plays with these half-men, who stand at his service.
Whistling, crying or meowing, they linger,
But he alone bellows and points his finger,
Like horseshoes, he forges decrees line by line,
Which he casts at one’s groin, forehead and spine.
Every killing for him is a berry delight,
And the chest of the Osette is wide.
(November, 1933)
(Translated by Andrey Kneller)
The amazing, The Shield of Achilles, written in 1952 by Auden, the year that I was born:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Or the shockingly cold, Watershed, 1927:
Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to a wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living. A ramshackle engine
At Cashwell raises water; for ten years
It lay in flooded workings until this,
Its latter office, grudgingly performed.
And, further, here and there, though many dead
Lie under the poor soil, some acts are chosen,
Taken from recent winters; two there were
Cleaned out a damaged shaft by hand, clutching
The winch a gale would tear them from; one died
During a storm, the fells impassable,
Not at his village, but in wooden shape
Through long abandoned levels nosed his way
And in his final valley went to ground.
Go home, now, stranger, proud of your young stock,
Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:
This land, cut off, will not communicate,
Be no accessory content to one
Aimless for faces rather there than here.
Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,
They wake no sleeper; you may hear the wind
Arriving driven from the ignorant sea
To hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm
Where sap unbaffled rises, being spring;
But seldom this. Near you, taller than the grass,
Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.