Easily, my dear, you move, easily your head.
And easily as through leaves of a photograph album I’m led
Through the night s delights and the day s impressions, 2
Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood.
Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe
And the Danube flood.
Looking and loving our behaviours pass
The stones, the steels, and the polished glass;
Lucky to love the strategic railway.
The sterile farms where his looks are fed.
And in the policed unlucky city
Lucky his bed.
He from these lands of terrifying mottoes
Makes worlds as innocent as Beatrix Potter’s;
Through bankrupt countries where they mend the roads
Along the endless plains his will is,
Intent as a collector, to pursue
His greens and lilies
Easy for him to find in your face
The pool of silence and the tower of grace.
To conjure a camera into a wishing rose;
Simple to excite in the air from a glance
The horses, the fountains, the side-drum, the trombone.
And the dance, the dance.
Summoned by such a music from our time
Such images to audience come
As vanity cannnot dispel nor bless;
Hunger and love in their variations,
Grouped invalids watching the flight of the birds,
And single assassins.
Ten million of the desperate marching by,
Five feet, six feet, seven feet high,
Hider and Mussolini in their wooing poses,
Churchill acknowledging the voters* greeting,
Roosevelt at the microphone. Van der Lubbe laughing.
And our first meeting.
But love except at our proposal
Will do no trick at his disposal.
Without opinions of his own performs
The programme that we think of merit.
And through our private stuff must work
His public spirit.
Certain it became while we were still incomplete
There were certain prizes for which we would never compete;
A choice was killed by every childish illness.
The boiling tears amid the hot-house plants.
The rigid promise fractured in the garden
And the long aunts.
And every day there bolted from the field
Desires to which we could not yield;
Fewer and clearer grew the plans.
Schemes for a life and sketches for a hatred.
And early among my interesting scrawls
Appeared your portrait.
You stand now before me, flesh and bone
These ghosts would like to make their own.
Are they your choices? O he deaf
When hatred would proffer her immediate pleasure,
And glory swap her fascinating rubbish
For your one treasure.
Be deaf, too, standing uncertain now,
A pine-tree shadow across your brow,
To what I hear and wish I did not.
The voice of love saying lightly, brightly —
‘‘Be Lubbe, be Hitler, but be my good
Daily, nightly.”
The power that corrupts, that power to excess
The beautiful quite naturally possess;
To them the fathers and the children turn.
And all who long for their destruction,
The arrogant and self-insulted, wait
The looked instruction.
Shall idleness ring then your eyes like the pest,
O will you, unnoticed and mildly like the rest,
Will you join the lost in their sneering circles.
Forfeit the beautiful interest and fall
Where the engaging face is the face of the betrayer
And the pang is all?
Wind shakes the tree; the mountains darken;
But the heart repeats though we would not hearken:
“Yours is the choice to whom the gods awarded
The language of learning and the language of love,
Crooked to move as a moneybag or a cancer,
Or straight as a dove.”