Autumn 1940

Returning each morning from a timeless world,
The senses open upon a world of time;
After so many years the light is
Novel still and immensely ambitious.

But, translated from her own informal world,
The ego is bewildered and does not want
A shining novelty this morning,
And does not like the noise or the people.

For behind the doors of this ambitious day
Stand shadows with enormous grudges, outside
Its chartered ocean of perception
Misshapen coastguards drunk with foreboding;

And whispering websters stealing through this world
Discredit so much literature and praise:
Summer was worse than we expected,
And now cold autumn comes on the water.

The lesser lives retire on their savings, their
Small deposits of starches and nuts, and soon
Will be asleep or travelling or
Dead; but this year the towns of our childhood

Are changing complexion along with the woods,
And many who have shared our conduct will add
Their pinches of detritus to the
Nutritive chain of determined being,

And even the uneliminated decline
To a vita minima, huddling for warmth
The hard- and the soft-mouthed together
In a coma of waiting, just breathing

In a darkness of tribulation and death,
While blizzards havoc the gardens, and the old
Folly becomes unsafe, the mill-wheels
Rust and the weirs fall slowly to pieces.

Will the inflamed ego attempt as before
To migrate again to her family place,
To the hanging gardens of Eros
And the moons of his magical summer?

But the local train does not run any more,
The heretical roses have lost their scent,
And her Cornish Hollow of tryst is
Swarming now with discourteous villains

Whom father’s battered hat cannot wish away,
And the fancy-governed sequence leads us all
Back to that labyrinth where either
We are found or lose ourselves for ever.

Oh what sign can we make to be found? How can
We will the knowledge that we must know to will?
The waste is a suburb of prophets,
But few have seen Jesus and so many

Judas the Abyss. The rocks are big and bad,
And death so substantial in the thinning air;
Learning screams in the narrow gate where
Events are traded with time, but who can

Tell what logic must and must not leave to fate,
Or what laws we are permitted to obey?
There are no birds; the predatory
Glaciers glitter in the chilly evening;

And death is probable. Nevertheless,
Whatever the situation and the blame,
Let the lips do formal contrition
For whatever is going to happen;

Time remembered bear witness to time required,
The positive and negative ways through time
Embrace and encourage each other
In a brief moment of intersection;

That the orgulous spirit may while it can
Conform to its temporal focus with praise,
Acknowledging the attributes of
One immortal one infinite Substance,

And the shabby structure of indolent flesh
Give a resonant echo to the Word which was
From the beginning, and the shining
Light be comprehended by the darkness.