The Explorers

Tell me now the scud is flying,
Now the trees are bent in pain,
Is there any point in dying?
Is there meaning in the rain?

We who stumble on the mountain,

Climbing through a darkened wood,
Search to find the hidden fountain
Singing gaily of the good.

In the trees on either side

Laughing creatures glibly call:
“Nothing, nothing,” something cried,
“Nothing, never, not at all.”

Distant on a troubled plain

Many people go their way;
“Nothing,” comes the voice again,
“Leave us,” other people say.

On the snowline stop and pause,

Think of what we leave behind:
Feather beds and human laws,
Braggarts talking to the blind.

Turn your face to where the sky

Leaps out of the snow and rock;
Abstract concepts rushing by
Denounce the hands upon the clock.

Somewhere after many miles,

Where the fountain washes sand,
Hides the valley of the smiles,
Simple as a waving hand.

Search on fellow to the end,

Quests like this are never done;
Freezing hail must be our friend,
Hope, the hidden, paltry sun.

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© July 1980

On the Death-Mask of Samuel Johnson

Silent in the toils of death
Sweet pugnacious Johnson lies,
No disturbance of a breath
Mars the thinking in his eyes.
Hard at work and hard at thought
Somewhere he makes headway with
Problems how a soul should live –
Once the teacher, now the taught.

Through the window in the street

Sooty sparrows feed and fight,
Citizens on business meet
To gull each other day and night.
Johnson and his commonsense,
Treating with the tragic muse,
Goes unnoticed by the queues
Wailing for their rightful pence.

Forms decay and mobs go out

Roaring that the streets are theirs,
Protest stumbles into rout,
Looters grab their fairer shares.
Ugly prophets, lithe of voice,
Put their callous point of view:
“Beat your neighbour – when you do
Make it plain you had no choice.”

Yet for all this public noise

Nothing is so altered that
Miseries give way to joys:
Every beggar has his hat,
Every child a bite of food,
But before a cheer can rise
Someone finds with angry cries
A violation of the good.

Johnson, Savage and the rest,

Walking London streets at night,
Talked till dawn about the best,
Argued Tory points of right;
Wary of what pundits bring
They agreed to drink a toast
When they might afford the cost,
“Gentlemen, God bless the King!”

From this death-mask learn who can

What it is to cleave to sense,
What it is to trust in man
Always in the present tense.
Underneath the soul there lies,
Sudden as a gloomy pit,
Chaos where no lamps are lit
And Deviation ever cries.

There the lost are self-condemned,

Driven on their violent way,
On a journey without end
From the simple light of day;
They who with their Judas’ pence
Rattling in their cartridge case
Jeered at Reason to its face
And scorned to kick the stone of Sense.

Teach me, Johnson, that I might,

Standing in the market square,
Shun the false alarms of night
And the gibes of people there;
Go bareheaded to the truth
Whilst the storms of daily news
Harden into misplaced views,
Unafraid to ask for proof.

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© June 1981

"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.

====================

© 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