"Outside, a Blunt Wind Shatters..."

I was puzzled by this sonnet until analysis revealed what I had forgotten - it is written in syllabics.

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Outside, a blunt wind shatters the September
Garden. Generals in a forest clearing
Shake hands on a truce, agree to dismember
A province. Bribed and fed, their troops start cheering.

Pulling the curtains on such loud-mouthed weather

A Head of Department must once have settled
To his work, sampling speeches bound in leather,
The province rich, the borders firm, roads metalled.

The world decays. What purpose now the marbled

Halls, booming with the counter-claims of lawyers?
Men are slaughtered; mercenaries in garbled
Lingo chatter at the killing like voyeurs.

And what is left of joy but lovers vainly

Flesh to flesh, hot in their love-clasp, ungainly?

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© September 1983

"Descartes at Dinner Darkly Said"

Descartes at dinner darkly said,
“The pain that rattles in my head
Has turned the ages out of bed.
   I think, therefore I am.”

And Berkeley in his study thought,

“God does not sleep and was not taught,
Without His Being all is nought.
   He thinks, therefore we are.”

But Russell raised a sudden hand

And said, “You do not understand,
A person is as driven sand.
   There are, I fear, just thoughts.”

Spinoza smiled a secret smile

And scanned the heavens mile by mile;
The starlight walked upon the Nile
   And lit the ancient courts.

------

Addenda

Descartes ignored the social round

And kept his ear upon the ground
To listen for the slightest sound
   And what it might unfold.

God sat on high and put a hand

Upon the tiny pineal gland;
He did not really understand
   But did as He was told.

The ancient systems fell away

And Galen had no more to say,
Poor Paracelsus left the fray
   And could not be consoled.

Now from my window all I see

Is mechanicians nervously
Rush to and fro like men set free:
   They shiver in the cold.

------

When Berkeley voyaged to the West

He doubted that Descartes knew best,
Instead he thought the world was blessed –
   The object of God’s thought.

The stones which threatened to depart,

And all the sticks which lay apart,
Now braced themselves for a new start –
   A vehicle for the ‘ought’.

Indeed, each time he closed his eyes

He did so trusting that the skies
Would not become a pack of lies
   And set the world at nought.

George Berkeley on his deathbed lay

And used his final strength to pray
That soon the night might yield to day
   And show the God he sought.

------

Lord Russell settled down to tea

To mix again agreeably
His sex-life and philosophy –
   The thesis and the bun.

The atoms that composed this lord

Grew restless and extremely bored
If by the time his tea was poured
   The talk had not begun.

He pointed out that none can say

Just why it is that night and day
Should alternate in such a way
   One by one by one.

But Russell on the North Wales coast

Inclined to pocket every boast
And understand what man needs most
   Beneath the setting sun.

------

Spinoza ground his lenses for

The pittance due to all the poor,
And loved God truly all the more
   No matter what might chance.

He honed his self-taught intellect

On metaphysics’ dialect
And made a Dutchman’s analect
   To answer that of France.

He thought this massive, starry frame –

A process which remains the same –
Worthy to be addressed by name,
   The apple of his glance.

And in the interstellar deep,

Where quarks are quick and do not keep,
The light years and the quasars leap
   In self-expressive dance.

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© February 1980

 

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes thought of death with something like disgust
And argued fiercely with that strict “you must”;
   The long debate from day to day
   Wound slowly on its pointless way
Though now the consequences are but dust.

I think of him struck speechless late at night

As every nerve and limb rebelled in fright;
   His brooding on the charnel worm,
   As active as a common germ,
Was like a tooth which hurt him at each bite.

But worse was fury at the blank unbeing

Which stalked his spirit on the point of fleeing:
   How could the creature muse upon
   The moment when it was undone,
When all the world would turn without his seeing?

Some had proposed that death – unbroken sleep –

Was not an ogre over which to weep;
   But Hobbes could not avoid the thought
   That all such thinkers had been bought,
That theirs were promises they could not keep.

And yet, the decades pass above his grave,

As lazy and as gentle as a wave;
   His dust, grown humble in the soil,
   Rests from its relentless toil,
Where marigolds and alyssum behave.

Death may be life ingathered in the Lord,

A timeless pulse within the timeless hoard;
   But in the air above his mound
   The celebrating jays go round –
Their cry a comment on the sheathèd sword.

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© June 1980

"Plato in His Twilit Cave"

The "peripatetic Stagyrite" is Aristotle.

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Plato in his twilit cave
Spoke loudly to the people there;
The hypnotising bonfire roared
And flung their shadows on the wall.
They watched entranced despite his call
And cheered their shadows as they soared;
He turned towards the open air
And sought the truth the sunlight gave.

The peripatetic Stagyrite

Stood doubled up in shallow pools
Thinking upon the little fish
And the power which all the heavens moves.
But what is it that thinking proves?
Truth is like wine within a dish
Which riots in the heads of fools
Who sit beside the road to write.

Plotinus on his deathbed lay

And struggled for his final breath.
A snake which slithered from a hole
Sang sweetly of the joy of life
And glistened like an unsheathed knife.
The dying man unloosed his soul
And shook the curtain of his death
Disproving what the snake might say.

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© Prob. Late 1980

"Try to Bring Back the God in You to the Divine in the All"

(Plotinus)

It is always unavailing, that final glance,
His eyes gone large with pain,
His body hung between the sticks of itself:
Death, the companion of many days,
Has shaken his head at us all.

But there are those who understand this matter

More fully than I,
Who have outstared that unwelcome visitor,
The false thrills and fears he occasions,
And who watch the light simply through an open window.

I have seen a friend depart through a sudden door,

In one moment to become memory
And an unfilled space;
But so, also, Plotinus departed in an empty room,
Muttering his credo as he became the light.

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© October 1980

Plotinus and the Snake

   A snake as dazzling as the sky
   Crept softly from its lowly hole.
         “Death’s in your eye,
         Cold’s in your hand,
   What is there left to understand?
   I have watched you through your final days,
      Your cleaving to your goal,
   And marvelled at your stubborn fight
   To prove the old philosophers right.
         Unlatch your gaze
         At this last gasp,
      Turn to my worldly ways
   And die with sunlight in your clasp,
Your breath become a slow surcease of soul.”

   The dying grand philosopher,

   His limbs assaulted by his sores,
         Would not concur,
         He shook his head
   And kept the centre of his bed.
   “The holy light is from the sun
      Which in its goodness pours
   Its metaphor upon the whole,
   Its light is that of living soul
         And from the One;
         And soul is such,
      Its journey once begun,
   It will not worry overmuch
At what is lost behind the slamming doors.”

   “Come look,” the snake in anger sighed,

   “At what the world once offered you;
         No flower lied
         Nor turned its back,
   The sea wind strummed the floating wrack
   And on a sandy foreshore gave
      A vision shown to few –
   Of beauty in a fish’s bone,
   And in a mewling seagull’s moan.
         O shun the grave,
         That place of tears,
      And think upon the wave
   Which riding roughshod on our fears
Dips its salt head and is forever new.”

   “And yet we die,” Plotinus said,

   “Though dying we should bless this earth.
         The quick and dead
         Are simply sides
   Of coins tossed up by many tides,
   And though I know a rose is sweet,
      Its bloom a painless birth,
   Yet life is in intelligence
   Which goes beyond this world of sense,
         Which must defeat
         The old desire
      To hug an honoured seat
   And doze in stupor by the fire
Become as dull as ashes in the hearth.”

   Plotinus coughed and breathed his last

   And was not where he once had been;
         The snake aghast
         At what it found
   To be so serious hugged the ground
   And wished it never had been born.
      It knew what it had seen,
   And as it lay there in the dust
   Wondering what was safe to trust
         It tried to mourn
         The passing of
      The great man in the dawn
   But though it knew the word for love
It could not understand what it might mean.

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© December 1980

The Hedgehog in the Garden

The old man in his velvet gown
   At work upon his ‘Life’
Denies the writing in the dust,
   The sorrow and the strife;
But though he challenge with a frown
The pricking of his pointless lust,
The misplaced love, the misused trust,
   The truth begins to harden,
The moon behind a cloud to pall:
   The hedgehog in the garden
   Comes late or not at all.

The politician late at night,

   His aides long gone to bed,
Prepares his speech to vilify
   The actions of the dead.
He moves his chair towards the light,
His ears still burning with the cry
Of one he banished with a lie
   But will not ask for pardon;
Somewhere a night-owl makes his call:
   The hedgehog in the garden
   Comes late or not at all.

The subtle seeker after truth

   At windows after dark
Exhorts the stars as wise men do
   And listens to their talk.
A fakir in a fairground booth
Had told him truths which were not true;
He left Plotinus and the few
   Beneath their fleshly burden
And lodged within the mage’s hall:
   The hedgehog in the garden
   Comes late or not at all.

The savage cat in self-amaze

   Patrols his night-domain,
His lordly eyes ignited in
   The succulence of pain;
The creatures cry within his gaze;
He does not care where things begin
Nor ponders on the fact of sin,
   His actions and their guerdon;
The lonely stone sings of its fall:
   The hedgehog in the garden
   Comes late or not at all.

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© July 1980