I have compiled this book so that you can get it printed. Its available in PDF form and you can download it, i will leave the option open. Its an anthology taught in NUML and students often have difficulty finding poems.

1. MODERN POETRY
BS ENGLISH (6th Semester)
COMPOSED BY
ZIA UR REHMAN

2. 1
Among School Children
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I
I walk through the long schoolroom
questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way—the children's
eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to
tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures
blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age—
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage—
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats into the mind—
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the
wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old
scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her
lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to
escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that
shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that
plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses
heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts—O
Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise—
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

3. 2
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Sailing to Byzantium
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded
seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer
long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder
sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and
come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths
make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

4. 3
Byzantium
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers'
song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a
shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no
breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement
flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has
lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of
flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a
sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the
flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented
sea.

5. 4
The Tower
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I
What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this
caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible —
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben
Bulben's back
And had the livelong summer day to
spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
II
I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the
earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day's declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and
once
When every silver candlestick or sconce
Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,
A serving-man, that could divine
That most respected lady's every wish,
Ran and with the garden shears
Clipped an insolent farmer's ears
And brought them in a little covered dish.
Some few remembered still when I was
young
A peasant girl commended by a song,
Who'd lived somewhere upon that rocky
place,
And praised the colour of her face,
And had the greater joy in praising her,
Remembering that, if walked she there,
Farmers jostled at the fair
So great a glory did the song confer.
And certain men, being maddened by those
rhymes,
Or else by toasting her a score of times,
Rose from the table and declared it right
To test their fancy by their sight;
But they mistook the brightness of the
moon
For the prosaic light of day –
Music had driven their wits astray –
And one was drowned in the great bog of
Cloone.
Strange, but the man who made the song
was blind;
Yet, now I have considered it, I find
That nothing strange; the tragedy began
With Homer that was a blind man,
And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.
O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
For if I triumph I must make men mad.
And I myself created Hanrahan
And drove him drunk or sober through the
dawn
From somewhere in the neighbouring
cottages.
Caught by an old man's juggleries

6. 5
He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro
And had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire;
I thought it all out twenty years ago:
Good fellows shuffled cards in an old
bawn;
And when that ancient ruffian's turn was
on
He so bewitched the cards under his thumb
That all but the one card became
A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,
And that he changed into a hare.
Hanrahan rose in frenzy there
And followed up those baying creatures
towards —
O towards I have forgotten what —
enough!
I must recall a man that neither love
Nor music nor an enemy's clipped ear
Could, he was so harried, cheer;
A figure that has grown so fabulous
There's not a neighbour left to say
When he finished his dog's day:
An ancient bankrupt master of this house.
Before that ruin came, for centuries,
Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the
knees
Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,
And certain men-at-arms there were
Whose images, in the Great Memory
stored,
Come with loud cry and panting breast
To break upon a sleeper's rest
While their great wooden dice beat on the
board.
As I would question all, come all who can;
Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;
And bring beauty's blind rambling
celebrant;
The red man the juggler sent
Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs.
French,
Gifted with so fine an ear;
The man drowned in a bog's mire,
When mocking muses chose the country
wench.
Did all old men and women, rich and poor,
Who trod upon these rocks or passed this
door,
Whether in public or in secret rage
As I do now against old age?
But I have found an answer in those eyes
That are impatient to be gone;
Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,
For I need all his mighty memories.
Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another's being;
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
If on the lost, admit you turned aside
From a great labyrinth out of pride,
Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun's
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.
III
It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State,
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that spat,

7. 6
The people of Burke and of Grattan
That gave, though free to refuse –
Pride, like that of the morn,
When the headlong light is loose,
Or that of the fabulous horn,
Or that of the sudden shower
When all streams are dry,
Or that of the hour
When the swan must fix his eye
Upon a fading gleam,
Float out upon a long
Last reach of glittering stream
And there sing his last song.
And I declare my faith:
I mock Plotinus' thought
And cry in Plato's teeth,
Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul,
Aye, sun and moon and star, all,
And further add to that
That, being dead, we rise,
Dream and so create
Translunar Paradise.
I have prepared my peace
With learned Italian things
And the proud stones of Greece,
Poet's imaginings
And memories of love,
Memories of the words of women,
All those things whereof
Man makes a superhuman
Mirror-resembling dream.
As at the loophole there
The daws chatter and scream,
And drop twigs layer upon layer.
When they have mounted up,
The mother bird will rest
On their hollow top,
And so warm her wild nest.
I leave both faith and pride
To young upstanding men
Climbing the mountain side,
That under bursting dawn
They may drop a fly;
Being of that metal made
Till it was broken by
This sedentary trade.
Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come –
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath –
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird's sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.

8. 7
The Waste Land
BY T. S. ELIOT
FOR EZRA POUND IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the
Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the
colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the
Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen,
echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the
arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in
the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what
branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know
only
A heap of broken images, where the sun
beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the
cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red
rock),
And I will show you something different
from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind
you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet
you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the
Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could
not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in
Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said
she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician
Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the
Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here
the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and
this card,

9. 8
Which is blank, is something he carries on
his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a
ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,
I had not thought death had undone so
many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his
feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William
Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the
hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of
nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him,
crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at
Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your
garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this
year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend
to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon
semblable,—mon frère!”
II. A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished
throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited
vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched
candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic
perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled,
confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred
by the air
That freshened from the window, these
ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the
coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan
scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous
king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world
pursues,
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room
enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her
hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be
savagely still.

10. 9
“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak.
Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What
thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking.
Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind
doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing?
Do you remember
“Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in
your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the
street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do
tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water
at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a
knock upon the door.
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I
said—
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her
myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself
a bit smart.
He’ll want to know what you done with
that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was
there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice
set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at
you.
And no more can’t I, I said, and think of
poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants
a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s others
will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I
said.
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and
give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I
said.
Others can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for
lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look
so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long
face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she
said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of
young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but
I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone,
there it is, I said,

11. 10
What you get married for if you don’t want
children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they
had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the
beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight
May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet
ladies, good night, good night.
III. The Fire Sermon
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers
of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The
wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The
nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my
song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich
papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes,
cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The
nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city
directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and
wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my
song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not
loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread
from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the
gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before
him.
White bodies naked on the low damp
ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which
shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la
coupole!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the
human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between
two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can
see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that
strives

12. 11
Homeward, and brings the sailor home
from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her
breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the
sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the
rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold
stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the
dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit
. . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought
to pass:
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s
over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic
hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
“This music crept by me upon the waters”
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria
Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames
Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the
walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and
gold.
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy
spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
“Trams and dusty trees.

13. 12
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my
knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”
“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’
I made no comment. What should I
resent?”
“On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.”
la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea
swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose
and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to
windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once
handsome and tall as you.
V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant
mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the
mountains
Which are mountains of rock without
water
If there were water we should stop and
drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that
cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the
mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine
trees

14. 13
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside
you?
When I count, there are only you and I
together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking
beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of
you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked
earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet
air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out
tight
And fiddled whisper music on those
strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet
light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a
blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the
hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns
and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s
home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never
retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent
spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a
prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have
responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

15. 14
London Bridge is falling down falling
down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow
swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my
ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad
againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
September 1, 1939
W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

16. 15
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

17. 16
The Unknown Citizen
W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

18. 17
That Morning
BY TED HUGES
We came where the salmon were so many
So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed
On their inner map, England could add
Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire
Hung with the drumming drift of
Lancasters
Till the world had seemed capsizing
slowly.
Solemn to stand there in the pollen light
Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying
massed
As from the hand of God. There the body
Separated, golden and imperishable,
From its doubting thought – a spirit-
beacon
Lit by the power of the salmon
That came on, came on, and kept on
coming
As if we flew slowly, their formations
Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing
One wrong thought might darken. As if the
fallen
World and salmon were over. As if these
Were the imperishable fish
That had let the world pass away –
There, in a mauve light of drifted lupins,
They hung in the cupped hands of
mountains
Made of tingling atoms. It had happened.
Then for a sign that we were where we
were
Two gold bears came down and swam like
men
Beside us. And dived like children.
And stood in deep water as on a throne
Eating pierced salmon off their talons.
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of
light.
Hawk Roosting
BY TED HUGES
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes
closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my
inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

19. 18
Full Moon and Little Frieda
BY TED HUGES
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
Mr Bleaney (1955)
By Philip Larkin
‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin
and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building
land,
Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.’
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no
hook
Behind the door, no room for books or
bags —
‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to
drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits — what time he came
down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways —
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton
folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister’s house in
Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid
wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and
grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the
dread
That how we live measures our own
nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him
pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know

20. 19
Church Going
By Philip Larkin
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers,
cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass
and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I
take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the
font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost
new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would
know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and
pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd
meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the
door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping
for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering,
too,
When churches will fall completely out of
use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall
keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked
cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular
stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has
gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles,
buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts
were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and
myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly
silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of
ground
Through suburb scrub because it held
unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for
which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea

21. 20
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions
meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow
wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Ambulances
By Philip Larkin
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.