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The moral life, who cares for it one jot?
The folk of this benighted town do not!
From fops dissolved in giggles that they be
A part of Islington society
Where politics and fashion daily mix
And make acceptable the Dance of Dicks,
And beefy women crammed inside their jeans
Discuss what “Deconstruction” really means,
To sharks and youthful spivs who hang about
And play the coward or, when safe, the lout,
Lifting a wallet, swilling cans of Coke,
Daring the knife-edge between Threat and Joke –
All, all agree that someone is to blame
For that Dissatisfaction with no name
Which, on their shoulders, urges them to act
By throttling Reason and destroying Fact.
The rich and handsome, bopping in the street,
Fling down a vicious gauntlet at your feet,
The gays in Piccadilly and its halls
Descend to darkness and the grope for balls,
The wasted winos, loose in Leicester Square,
Demand your charity with half a glare,
The politicians, mad at County Hall,
Make one decision and begin to brawl,
And lo! the clergy in a final cod
Embrace The Issues and denounce their God!
A
change of scene – what finer remedy
For
stark disgust with man and accidie –Takes you to purlieus where the skies are blue,
Where life is different and decisions few.
But what is this beside a bubbling beck?
A trailer park and gaudy discothèque!
And squatting loathsomely beyond your arm
Battery units have engulfed the farm.
Out in the fields a tractor roars its way
Across a monoculture all the day,
Grubbing up hedges, charging at the wood
Where fifty of the finest oak once stood.
A countryman, by wisdom deeply scored,
Allows you access to his hidden hoard
And taps his nose across the public bar
To let you know he knows just what you are.
He leers and shows his teeth and pulls an ear
And taps his nose again and drinks his beer,
And with an air mysteriously-wise
Makes up false maxims and then tells you lies;
And later, all goodnights devoutly bidden,
Strolls off to wisely contemplate his midden.
My
friend, we live beneath a fading star
When
every form at last begins to mar:The frontiers tremble, Order cannot cope,
And hounds of Dogma rape the child of Hope.
But through all this the moral life survives
In some few unregarded personal lives,
Survives to proffer a redeeming kiss
To those who, hearing of a thing called Bliss,
Went searching through the provinces to find
The truth of Being and the proof of Mind.
Where, after all, when all this Crash is done –
When men have died, and Rulers one by one,
Corrupt, unjust, ungenerous, unwise,
The tired light of madness in their eyes –
Will knowledge of the finer life revive
Except through those who kept their thoughts alive,
Passed on their knowledge to the waiting few
And urged them to stand firm by what they knew,
Sure that the old, the spat-upon-with-mirth,
Would one day play the midwife at a birth?
So guard your books and guard your thoughts and guard
The stranger who takes refuge in your yard;
Give not an inch up of your single mind,
Be careful, be alert, be chaste, be kind,
But when the howling mob is in its rage
Be like a bulwark and refuse the age.
But
how might any honest man set out
To
find the glory behind honest doubt?He will have felt the horror and the fear
Which all men feel as statesmen, year by year,
By overbearing, mighty powers forced,
Strive to avoid a nuclear holocaust,
But gained from this an urgency of soul
Refining his idea of his goal.
In meditation, puzzlement and thought
He will begin to dwell upon an “Ought”,
Such that, regardless of the public din,
He’ll start to live a private discipline.
And then a small thing – say a change of air –
Will force him to observe how everywhere
The thoughts and lives of men are such as need
Redemption by a sacramental deed,
In hope of which the speculating soul
Adventures daily, seeking the true pole.
Dear friend, you have that change, a chance to see
The gap between what is and ought to be,
Will you reject the life that seeks to find
Beyond the partial borders of the mind
A Sign, a Message, an Amending Claim,
That offers knowledge and bestows a Name?
And will you, once returned, join in the fight
Where greedy vassals by a fading light
Denounce each other and despoil the state
Whilst on the frontier moves a sudden fate,
Urging a fruitless orthodoxy of
Triumphant factions and a hateful love?
What
is the moral life? It lies in those
Three
categories which Sam Johnson chose –In Reason, Nature, Truth. In Reason for
Without a basic tool with which to score
The surface of phenomena and see
What’s there, we would not know that we were free,
Nor could we synthesize our senses five
Into a meaning for our being alive,
And from that difficult simplicity
Learn Moderation and Humility
As saving aims for organisms which
Sprang from the jumbled plankton in a ditch.
And Nature, which is bonded as the ground
On which we stand to raise a hopeful sound
Of praise as creatures with a thinking part,
A yen for goodness and a twisted heart.
Nature discovers an harmonious Whole
To stagger and to then chastise the soul.
It shows itself as simple but as vast –
As grass upon a hillside or as fast
Reactions at the sub-atomic stage
Where particles in micro-seconds age:
It is our primal source of Holy Awe
And gave us our first inkling of the Law.
And Truth, which is a perfect chaste precision
Discovered in the cenacle of vision,
Which still remains the Truth, whether or no
A person stumbles and does not think it so.
The Priest lays claim, the Scientist says it’s his
For it gives meaning to, and is, What Is,
But none can house it in the one abode –
Truth is the sky above a winding road.
To worship Truth a wise man throws away
All that distracts the brief and urgent day;
He puts his life in balance and when hauled
Before a People’s Court and lies are bawled
He scorns submission by the merest sign
And will not pander to a party line,
Sure that salvation comes not from a sect
But from the proper use of Intellect.
Truth is demanding, wields a sturdy rod,
But in the noonday sunshine winks the eye of God.
My
friend, as you about the fields and lanes
Go
seeking pleasure and avoiding rainsWhat will you tell yourself when, quite alone,
You hear the echo of an age-long groan
And see a population in your mind
Of people killing and their leaders blind?
For crafty and inconsequential man
Has always broken faith if he but can
And when his tears have flowed in short remorse
Has robbed the bodies as a thing of course,
And only you, against whatever trend,
Can make yourself believe that this might end.
Here, now, whilst punks renege and madmen howl,
Whilst someone screams and many people scowl,
Embrace the moral life and make your mark
Though Thrones and Dominations tumble through the dark.
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© September-October 1981