Read Online Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lawrence Durrell
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doctrine; Fangbrand
Died with his art like a vase.
The grave in the rock,
Sweetened by saffron, bubbles water
Like a smile, an animal truth.
Death interrupted nothing.
Like guarded towns against alarms,
Our sentries in the nerves
Never sleep; but his one night
Slept on their arms, Hesperus shining,
And the unknowns entered.
So the riders of the darkness pass
On their circuit: the luminous island
Of the self trembles and waits,
Waits for us all, my friends,
Where the seaâs big brush recolours
The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.
1943/ 1941
AT EPIDAURUS
The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
Washed all winter by the surviving stars
Are here hardly recalled: or only as
Stone choirs for the sea-bird,
Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.
This civilized valley was dedicated to
The cult of the circle, the contemplation
And correction of famous maladies
Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also
By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.
The only disorder is in what we bring here:
Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,
The penetration of clocks striking in London.
The composure of dolls and fanatics,
Financed migrations to the oldest sources:
A theatre where redemption was enacted,
Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.
The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,
And the swallowâs cot in the ruin seems how
Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!
Here we can carry our own small deaths
With the resignation of place and identity;
A temple set severely like a dice
In the valeâs Vergilian shade; once apparently
Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:
A formula for marble when the clouds
Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke
Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.
Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,
The dying leaves and the reports of love.
The landâs lie, held safe from the sea,
Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,
Provides a context understandably natural
For men who could divulge the forms of gods.
Here the mathematician entered his own problem,
A house built round his identity,
Round the fond yet mysterious seasons
Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.
Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,
And the hum of the chorus enchanted.
We, like the winter, are only visitors,
To prosper here the breathing grass,
Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing
Nothing, enduring the sun like girls
In a town window. The earthâs flowers
Blow here original with every spring,
Shines in the rising of a manâs age
Into cold texts and precedents for time.
Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order
Of old captains who sleep in the hill.
Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,
Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,
Unlocking this world which is not our world.
The somnambulists walk again in the north
With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.
Useless a morality for slaves: useless
The shouting at echoes to silence them.
Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,
Four ragged travellers in Homer.
All causes end within the great Because.
1943/ 1941
LETTER TO SEFERIS THE GREEK
âEgo dormio sed cor meum vigilatâ
(1941)
No milestones marked the invaders,
But ragged harps like mountains here:
A text for Proserpine in tears: worlds
With no doors for heroes and no walls with ears:
Yet snow, the anniversary of death.
How did they get here? How enact
This clear severe repentance on a rock,
Where only death converts and the hills
Into a pastoral silence by a lake,
By the blue Fact of the sky forever?
âEnter the dark crystal if you dare
And gaze on Greece.â They came
Smiling, like long reflections of themselves
Upon a sky of fancy. The red shoes
Waited among the thickets and the springs,
In fields of unexploded asphodels,
Neither patient nor impatient, merely
Waited, the born hunter on his ground,
The magnificent and
Died with his art like a vase.
The grave in the rock,
Sweetened by saffron, bubbles water
Like a smile, an animal truth.
Death interrupted nothing.
Like guarded towns against alarms,
Our sentries in the nerves
Never sleep; but his one night
Slept on their arms, Hesperus shining,
And the unknowns entered.
So the riders of the darkness pass
On their circuit: the luminous island
Of the self trembles and waits,
Waits for us all, my friends,
Where the seaâs big brush recolours
The dying lives, and the unborn smiles.
1943/ 1941
AT EPIDAURUS
The islands which whisper to the ambitious,
Washed all winter by the surviving stars
Are here hardly recalled: or only as
Stone choirs for the sea-bird,
Stone chairs for the statues of fishermen.
This civilized valley was dedicated to
The cult of the circle, the contemplation
And correction of famous maladies
Which the repeating flesh has bred in us also
By a continuous babyhood, like the worm in meat.
The only disorder is in what we bring here:
Cars drifting like leaves over the glades,
The penetration of clocks striking in London.
The composure of dolls and fanatics,
Financed migrations to the oldest sources:
A theatre where redemption was enacted,
Repentance won, the stones heavy with dew.
The olive signs the hill, signifying revival,
And the swallowâs cot in the ruin seems how
Small yet defiant an exaggeration of love!
Here we can carry our own small deaths
With the resignation of place and identity;
A temple set severely like a dice
In the valeâs Vergilian shade; once apparently
Ruled from the whitest light of the summer:
A formula for marble when the clouds
Troubled the architect, and the hill spoke
Volumes of thunder, the sibyllic god wept.
Here we are safe from everything but ourselves,
The dying leaves and the reports of love.
The landâs lie, held safe from the sea,
Encourages the austerity of the grass chambers,
Provides a context understandably natural
For men who could divulge the forms of gods.
Here the mathematician entered his own problem,
A house built round his identity,
Round the fond yet mysterious seasons
Of green grass, the teaching of summer-astronomy.
Here the lover made his calculations by ferns,
And the hum of the chorus enchanted.
We, like the winter, are only visitors,
To prosper here the breathing grass,
Encouraging petals on a terrace, disturbing
Nothing, enduring the sun like girls
In a town window. The earthâs flowers
Blow here original with every spring,
Shines in the rising of a manâs age
Into cold texts and precedents for time.
Everything is a slave to the ancestor, the order
Of old captains who sleep in the hill.
Then smile, my dear, above the holy wands,
Make the indefinite gesture of the hands,
Unlocking this world which is not our world.
The somnambulists walk again in the north
With the long black rifles, to bring us answers.
Useless a morality for slaves: useless
The shouting at echoes to silence them.
Most useless inhabitants of the kind blue air,
Four ragged travellers in Homer.
All causes end within the great Because.
1943/ 1941
LETTER TO SEFERIS THE GREEK
âEgo dormio sed cor meum vigilatâ
(1941)
No milestones marked the invaders,
But ragged harps like mountains here:
A text for Proserpine in tears: worlds
With no doors for heroes and no walls with ears:
Yet snow, the anniversary of death.
How did they get here? How enact
This clear severe repentance on a rock,
Where only death converts and the hills
Into a pastoral silence by a lake,
By the blue Fact of the sky forever?
âEnter the dark crystal if you dare
And gaze on Greece.â They came
Smiling, like long reflections of themselves
Upon a sky of fancy. The red shoes
Waited among the thickets and the springs,
In fields of unexploded asphodels,
Neither patient nor impatient, merely
Waited, the born hunter on his ground,
The magnificent and
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