“Off and on, up and down, high and dry, man and boy, I’ve
been living now for fifteen years, or centuries, in this
timeless, beautiful, barmy (both spellings) town, in this far,
forgetful, important place of herons, cormorants (known
here as billyduckers), castle, churchyard, gulls, ghosts,
geese, feuds, scares, scandals, cherry-trees, mysteries,
jackdaws in the chimneys, bats in the belfry, skeletons in
the cupboards, pubs, mud, cockles, flatfish, curlews, rain.
and human, often all too human, beings; and, though still
very much a foreigner, I am hardly ever stoned in the
streets any more, and can claim to be able to call several
of the inhabitants, and a few of the herons, by their
Christian names.

Now, some people live in Laugharne because they were
born in Laugharne and saw no good reason to move; others
migrated here, for a number of curious reasons, from
places as distant and improbable as Tonypandy or even
England, and have now been absorbed by the natives;
some entered the town in the dark and immediately
disappeared, and can sometimes be heard, on hushed
black nights, making noises in ruined houses, or perhaps it
is the white owls breathing close together, like ghosts in
bed; others have almost cer-tainly come here to escape
the international police, or their wives; and there are those,
too, who still do not know, and will never know, why they
are here at all; you can see them, any day of the week,
slowly, dopily, wandering up and down the streets like
Welsh opium-eaters, half asleep in a heavy bewildered
daze. And some, like myself, just came, one day, for the day,
and never left; got off the bus, and forgot to get on again.
Whatever the reason, if any, for our being here, in this
timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town with its seven
public-houses, one chapel in action, one church, one factory,
two billiard tables, one St. Bernard (without brandy), one
policeman, three rivers, a visiting sea, one Rolls-Royce
selling fish and chips, one cannon (castiron), one chancellor
(flesh and blood), one port-reeve, one Danny Raye, and a
multitude of mixed birds, here we just are, and there is
nowhere like it anywhere at all.

But when you say, in a nearby village or town, that you
come from this unique, this waylaying, old, lost Laugharne,
where some people start to retire before they start to work
and where longish journeys, of a few hundred yards, are
often undertaken only on bicycles, then, oh! the wary
edging away, the whispers and whimpers, and nudges, the
swift removal of portable objects!

‘Let’s get away while the going is good.’ you hear.
‘Laugharne’s where they quarrel with boathooks.’
“All the women there’s got web feet.’
‘Mind out for the Evil Eye!’
‘Never go there at the full moon!’

They are only envious. They envy Laugharne its minding of
its own, strange, business; its sane disregard for haste: its
generous acceptance of the follies of others, having so
many, ripe and piping, of its own; its insular, featherbed air;
its philosophy of ‘It will all be the same in a hundred years’
time.’ They deplore its right to be, in their eyes, so wrong,
and to enjoy it so much as well. And, through envy and
indignation, they label and libel it a legendary lazy little
black-magical bedlam by the sea. And is it? Of course not,
I hope.”

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

To Caitlin

Note

The prologue in verse, written for this collected edition of my
poems, is intended as an address to my readers, the strangers.

This book contains most of the poems I have written, and all, up
to the present year, that I wish to preserve. Some of them I have
revised a little, but if I went on revising everything that I now do
not like in this book I should be so busy that I would have no time
to try to write new poems.

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from
within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his
flocks, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with
all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love
of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.

November 1952.

Author’s Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer’s end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood’s dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days’ night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world’s turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay’s dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spining man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage read, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms

To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooning the woods’ praise,
Who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship’s
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tounged puffball)
But animals thick as theives
On God’s rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they’ll move,
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer’s end
And the flood flowers now.

Contents

Author’s Prologue
I see the boys of summer
When once the twilight locks no longer
A process in the weather of the heart
Before I knocked
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
My hero bares his nerves
Where once the waters of your face
If I were tickled by the rub of love
Our eunuch dreams
Especially when the October wind
When, like a running grave
From love’s first fever to her plague
In the beginning
Light breaks where no sun shines
I fellowed sleep
I dreamed my genesis
My world is pyramid
All all and all the dry worlds lever
I, in my intricate image
This bread I break
Incarnate devil
To-day, this insect
The seed-at-zero
Shall gods be said to thump the clouds
Here in this spring
Do you not father me
Out of the sighs
Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month
Was there a time
Now
Why east wind chills
A grief ago
How soon the servant sun
Ears in the turrets hear
Foster the light
The hand that signed the paper
Should lanterns shine
I have longed to move away
Find meat on bones
Grief thief of time
And death shall have no dominion
Then was my neophyte
Altarwise by owl-light
Because the pleasure-bird whistles
I make this in a warring absence
When all my five and country senses see
We lying by seasand
It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell
O make me a mask
The spire cranes
After the funeral
Once it was the colour of saying
Not from this anger
How shall my animal
The tombstone told when she died
On no work of words
A saint about to fall
‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’
Twenty-four years
The Conversation of Prayer
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Poem in October
This Side of the Truth
To Others than You
Love in the Asylum
Unluckily for a Death
The Hunchback in the Park
Into her Lying Down Head
Do not go gentle into that good night
Deaths and Entrances
A Winter’s Tale
On a Wedding Anniversary
There was a Savior
On the Marriage of a Virgin
In my Craft or Sullen Art
Ceremony After a Fire Raid
Once below a time
When I Woke
Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred
Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed
Vision and Prayer
Ballad of the Long-legged Bait
Holy Spring
Fern Hill
In country sleep
Over Sir John’s hill
Poem on his birthday
Lament
In the white giant’s thigh

I see the boys of summer

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds’ iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

When once the twilight locks no longer

When once the twilight locks no longer
Locked in the long worm of my finger
Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
That globe itself of hair and bone
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses timed to charge his heart,
He blew like powder to the light
And held a little sabbath with the sun,
But when the stars, assuming shape,
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
He drowned his father’s magics in a dream.

All issue armoured, of the grave,
The redhaired cancer still alive,
The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
And bags of blood let out their flies;
He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

Sleep navigates the tides of time;
The dry Sargasso of the tomb
Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
And sleep rolls mute above the beds
Where fishes’ food is fed the shades
Who periscope through flowers to the sky.

When once the twilight screws were turned,
And mother milk was stiff as sand,
I sent my own ambassador to light;
By trick or chance he fell asleep
And conjured up a carcass shape
To rob me of my fluids in his heart.

Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,
A worker in the morning town,
And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
The fences of the light are down,
All but the briskest riders thrown
And worlds hang on the trees.

A process in the weather of the heart

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.

Before I knocked

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

My hero bares his nerves

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal ruler,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
Ache on the lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from this box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger’s emperor;
He pulls that chain, the cistern moves.

Where once the waters of your face

Where once the waters of your face
Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,
The dead turns up its eye;
Where once the mermen through your ice
Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers
Through salt and root and roe.

Where once your green knots sank their splice
Into the tided cord, there goes
The green unraveller,
His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose
To cut the channels at their source
And lay the wet fruits low.

Invisible, your clocking tides
Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;
The weed of love’s left dry;
There round about your stones the shades
Of children go who, from their voids,
Cry to the dolphined sea.

Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids
Shall not be latched while magic glides
Sage on the earth and sky;
There shall be corals in your beds,
There shall be serpents in your tides,
Till all our sea-faiths die.

If I were tickled by the rub of love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,
And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,
I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
Nor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingers
That chalk the walls with green girls and their men.
I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.

If I were tickled by the lovers’ rub
That wipes away not crow’s-foot nor the lock
Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies,
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
Dead on the sweethearts’ toes.

This world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
Wearing the quick away.

And that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.
The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist
Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,
Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
Feet in the rubbing dust.

And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?
Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?
The words of death are dryer than his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor.

Our eunuch dreams

I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boys’ limbs,
And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his moll,
Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,
Strange to our solid eye,
And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;
When cameras shut they hurry to their hole
down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
Impose their shots, showing the nights away;
We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill
Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which
Shall fall awake when cures and their itch
Raise up this red-eyed earth?
Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,
The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,
Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;
The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world: the lying likeness of
Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
Loving and being loth;
The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.
This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,
Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack
The image from the plates;
And we shall be fit fellows for a life,
And who remains shall flower as they love,
Praise to our faring hearts.

Especially when the October wind

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water’s speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow’s signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven’s sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

When, like a running grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force,
My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime,
Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar
Tells the stick, ‘fail.’

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer’s fashion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Not city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.

I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.
Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot
Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state,
Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
The actions’ end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind
With whistler’s cough contages, time on track
Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,
Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take
The kissproof world.

From love’s first fever to her plague

From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
The sun and mood shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
Hand, the breaking of the hair,
From the first secret of the heart, the warning ghost,
And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed
Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word’s warmth.
The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,
One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;
From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
A million minds gave suck to such a bud
As forks my eye;
Youth did condense; the tears of spring
Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

In the beginning

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
One smile of light across the empty face;
One bough of bone across the rooting air,
The substance forked that marrowed the first sun;
And, burning ciphers on the round of space,
Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,
Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
And after came the imprints on the water,
Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;
The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail
Touched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fire
That set alight the weathers from a spark,
A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower;
Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,
Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock
The secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void;
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.

Light breaks where no sun shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics die,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

I fellowed sleep

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’
‘This that we tread was, too, your father’s land.’
‘But this we tread bears the angelic gangs,
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.’
‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.

I dreamed my genesis

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking
Through the rotating shell, strong
As motor muscle on the drill, driving
Through vision and the girdered nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled
Off from the creasing flesh, filed
Through all the irons in the grass, metal
Of suns in the man-melting night.

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly
A creature in my bones I
Rounded my globe of heritage, journey
In bottom gear through night-geared man.

I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel
Rammed in the marching heart, hole
In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled
Death on the mouth that ate the gas.

Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest
Of hemlock and the blades, rust
My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing
My second struggling from the grass.

And power was contagious in my birth, second
Rise of the skeleton and
Rerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood
Spat up from the resuffered pain.

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen
Twice in the feeding sea, grown
Stale of Adam’s brine until, vision
Of new man strength, I seek the sun.

My world is pyramid

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow’s diver in her horny milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder’s bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg’s crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,
The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,
Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble
Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,
And stake the sleepers in the savage grave
That the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded
The wild pigs’ wood, and slime upon the trees,
Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,
And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,
Rotating halves are horning as they drill
The arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death’s feather? tremble
The halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air,
And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.
The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,
Screwing their bowels from a hill of bones,
Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.
The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,
Drip on my dead house garden.
Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth
The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn
Through the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
Bearding the unborn devil,
Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.
The tongue’s of heaven gossip as I glide
Binding my angel’s hood.

Who blows death’s feather? What glory is colour?
I blow the stammel feather in the vein.
The loin is glory in a working pallor.
My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,
The secret child, I sift about the sea
Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

All all and all the dry worlds lever

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse’s lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh’s lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raven.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people’s fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh’s vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.

I, in my intricate image

I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
Image of images, my metal phantom
Forcing forth through the harebell,
My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,
No death more natural;
Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,
In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance:
The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel,
No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire
Mount on man’s footfall,
I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,
In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,
Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,
Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,
Finding the water final,
On the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells,
Sail on the level, the departing adventure,
To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,
Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,
Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;
They see the squirrel stumble,
The haring snail go giddily round the flower,
A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles,
The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,
The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel
Turn the long sea arterial
Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy
Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,
Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,
Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,
The neck of the nostril,
Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody
The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,
Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,
The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,
A cock-on-a-dunghill
Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,
Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,
Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift
Rings out the Dead Sea scale;
And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,
Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft,
Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
Let the wax disk babble
Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,
Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,
The flight of the carnal skull
And the cell-stepped thimble;
Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel
Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,
Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly
Star-set at Jacob’s angle,
Smoke hill and hophead’s valley,
And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral,
Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,
Be by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored
The stoved bones’ voyage downward
In the shipwreck of muscle;
Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,
The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,
My great blood’s iron single
In the pouring town,
I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle,
No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,
Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,
Time in the hourless houses
Shaking the sea-hatched skull,
And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,
All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle,
Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,
My ghost in his metal neptune
Forged in man’s mineral.
This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,
And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.

This bread I break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Incarnate devil

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heavens’ hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,
A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;
And when the moon rose windily it was
Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
All heaven in the midnight of the sun,
A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

To-day, this insect

To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,
Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,
Time at the city spectacles, and half
The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,
In trust and tale I have divided sense,
Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double
Of head and tail made witnesses to this
Murder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story’s monster has a serpent caul,
Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,
Measures his own length on the garden wall
And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;
A crocodile before the chrysalis,
Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,
Winged like a sabbath ass this children’s piece
Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,
An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,
John’s beast, Job’s patience, and the fibs of vision,
Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:
‘Adam I love, my madmen’s love is endless,
No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,
All legends’ sweethearts on a tree of stories,
My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.’

The seed-at-zero

The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the trodden womb,
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely stumbling
Over the manwaging line.

The seed-at-zero shall not storm
That town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb
With her rampart to his tapping,
No god-in-hero tumble down
Like a tower on the town
Dumbly and divinely leaping
Over the warbearing line.

Through the rampart of the sky
Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,
Manna for the rumbling ground,
Quickening for the riddled sea;
Settled on a virgin stronghold
He shall grapple with the guard
And the keeper of the key.

Through the rampart of the sky
Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,
Manna for the guarded ground,
Quickening for the virgin sea;
Settling on a riddled stronghold
He shall grapple with the guard
And the loser of the key.

May a humble village labour
And a continent deny?
A hemisphere may scold him
And a green inch be his bearer;
Let the hero seed find harbour,
Seaports by a drunken shore
Have their thirsty sailors hide him.

May a humble planet labour
And a continent deny?
A village green may scold him
And a high sphere be his bearer;
Let the hero seed find harbour,
Seaports by a thirsty shore
Have their drunken sailors hide him.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,
From the foreign fields of space,
Shall not thunder on the town
With a star-flanked garrison,
Nor the cannons of his kingdom
Shall the hero-in-tomorrow
Range on the sky-scraping place.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,
From the star-flanked fields of space,
Thunders on the foreign town
With a sand-bagged garrison,
Nor the cannons of his kingdom
Shall the hero-in-to-morrow
Range from the grave-groping place.

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds
When clouds are cursed by thunder,
Be said to weep when weather howls?
Shall rainbows be their tunics’ colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?
Shall it be said they sprinkle water
From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,
An old god’s dugs are pressed and pricked,
The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.
Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground,
Flung gravel chime? Let the stones speak
With tongues that talk all tongues.

Here in this spring

Here in this spring, stars float along the void;
Here in this ornamental winter
Down pelts the naked weather;
This summer buries a spring bird.

Symbols are selected from the years’
Slow rounding of four seasons’ coasts,
In autumn teach three seasons’ fires
And four birds’ notes.

I should tell summer from the trees, the worms
Tell, if at all, the winter’s storms
Or the funeral of the sun;
I should learn spring by the cuckooing,
And the slug should teach me destruction.

A worm tells summer better than the clock,
The slug’s a living calendar of days;
What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
Says the world wears away?

Do you not father me

Do you not father me, nor the erected arm
For my tall tower’s sake cast in her stone?
Do you not mother me, nor, as I am,
The lovers’ house, lie suffering my stain?
Do you not sister me, nor the erected crime
For my tall turrets carry as your sin?
Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb,
Adore my windows for their summer scene?

Am I not father, too, and the ascending boy,
The boy of woman and the wanton starer
Marking the flesh and summer in the bay?
Am I not sister, too, who is my saviour?
Am I not all of you by the directed sea
Where bird and shell are babbling in my tower?
Am I not you who front the tidy shore,
Nor roof of sand, nor yet the towering tiler?

You are all these, said she who gave me the long suck,
All these, he said who sacked the children’s town,
Up rose the Abraham-man, mad for my sake,
They said, who hacked and humoured, they were mine.
I am, the tower told, felled by a timeless stroke,
Who razed my wooden folly stands aghast,
For man-begetters in the dry-as-paste,
The ringed-sea ghost, rise grimly from the wrack.

Do you not father me on the destroying sand?
You are your sisters’ sire, said seaweedy,
The salt sucked dam and darlings of the land
Who play the proper gentleman and lady.
Shall I still be love’s house on the widdershin earth,
Woe to the windy masons at my shelter?
Love’s house, they answer, and the tower death
Lie all unknowing of the grave sin-eater.

Out of the sighs

Out of the sighs a little comes,
But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
Before the agony; the spirit grows,
Forgets, and cries;
A little comes, is tasted and found good;
All could not disappoint;
There must, be praised, some certainty,
If not of loving well, then not,
And that is true after perpetual defeat.

After such fighting as the weakest know,
There’s more than dying;
Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
He’ll ache too long
Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
For her soldier stained with spilt words
That spill such acrid blood.

Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,
Feeling regret when this is wasted
That made me happy in the sun,
How much was happy while it lasted,
Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty,
The hollow words could bear all suffering
And cure me of ills.

Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,
The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,
Groping for matter under the dog’s plate,
Man should be cured of distemper.
For all there is to give I offer:
Crumbs, barn, and halter.

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly’s rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December’s pools
By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
Lie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;
Holy hard, my country children in the world of tales,
The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
The first and steepled season, to the summer’s game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,
Spill the lank folly’s hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
Stalking my children’s faces with a tail of blood,
Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

Was There A Time

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children’s circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What’s never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

Now

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel’s tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Why east wind chills

Why east wind chills and south wind cools
Shall not be known till windwell dries
And west’s no longer drowned
In winds that bring the fruit and rind
Of many a hundred falls;
Why silk is soft and the stone wounds
The child shall question all his days,
Why night-time rain and the breast’s blood
Both quench his thirst he’ll have a black reply.

When cometh Jack Frost? the children ask.
Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?
Not till, from high and low, their dust
Sprinkles in children’s eyes a long-last sleep
And dusk is crowded with the children’s ghosts,
Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.

All things are known: the stars’ advice
Calls some content to travel with the winds,
Though what the stars ask as they round
Time upon time the towers of the skies
Is heard but little till the stars go out.
I hear content, and ‘Be Content’
Ring like a handbell through the corridors,
And ‘Know no answer,’ and I know
No answer to the children’s cry
Of echo’s answer and the man of frost
And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

A grief ago

A grief ago,
She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,
Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
Hell wind and sea,
A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
Rose maid and male,
Or, master venus, through the paddler’s bowl
Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,
A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
Shot through the leaf,
Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
Road east to plague,
The horn and ball of water on the frog
Housed in the side.

And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going.

Who then is she,
She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,
Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
The dens of shape
Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
That she I have,
The country-handed grave boxed into love,
Rise before dark.

The night is near,
A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
I tell her this: before the suncock cast
Her bone to fire,
Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
Draw in their seas,
So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
And close her fist.

How soon the servant sun

How soon the servant sun,
(Sir morrow mark),
Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone,
(Fog has a bone
He’ll trumpet into meat),
Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown
And the naked egg stand straight,

Sir morrow at his sponge,
(The wound records),
The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,
(Fog by his spring
Soaks up the sewing tides),
Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange
Man morrow blows through food.

All nerves to serve the sun,
The rite of light,
A claw I question from the mouse’s bone,
The long-tailed stone
Trap I with coil and sheet,
Let the soil squeal I am the biting man
And the velvet dead inch out.

How soon my level, lord,
(Sir morrow stamps
Two heels of water on the floor of seed),
Shall raise a lamp
Or spirit up a cloud,
Erect a walking centre in the shroud,
Invisible on the stump

A leg as long as trees,
This inward sir,
Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,
The womb-eyed, cries,
And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour’s ear,
Blasts back the trumpet voice.

Ears in the turrets hear

Ears in the turrets hear
Hands grumble on the door,
Eyes in the gables see
The fingers at the locks.
Shall I unbolt or stay
Alone till the day I die
Unseen by stranger-eyes
In this white house?
Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

Beyond this island bound
By a thin sea of flesh
And a bone coast,
The land lies out of sound
And the hills out of mind.
No birds or flying fish
Disturbs this island’s rest.

Ears in this island hear
The wind pass like a fire,
Eyes in this island see
Ships anchor off the bay.
Shall I run to the ships
With the wind in my hair,
Or stay till the day I die
And welcome no sailor?
Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

Hands grumble on the door,
Ships anchor off the bay,
Rain beats the sand and slates.
Shall I let in the stranger,
Shall I welcome the sailor,
Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
Hold you poison or grapes?

Foster the light

Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,
Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,
But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;
Master the night nor serve the snowman’s brain
That shapes each bushy item of the air
Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.

Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel’s eggs,
Nor hammer back a season in the figs,
But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;
Farmer in time of frost the burning leagues,
By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,
In your young years the vegetable century.

And father all nor fail the fly-lord’s acre,
Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,
But rail with your wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet;
Of mortal voices to the ninnies’ choir,
High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,
And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.

Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,
O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift
From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;
Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift
Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds
Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.

Who gave these seas their colour in a shape,
Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark
In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;
O who is glory in the shapeless maps,
Now make the world of me as I have made
A merry manshape of your walking circle.

The hand that signed the paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

Should lanterns shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, and any boy of love
Look twice before he fell from grace.
The features in their private dark
Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come
And from her lips the faded pigments fall,
The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

I have been told to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace
Till field and roof lie level and the same
So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman
Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard many years of telling,
And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.

I have longed to move away

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather.
By these I would not care to die,
Half convention and half lie.

Find meat on bones

‘Find meat on bones that soon have none,
And drink in the two milked crags,
The merriest marrow and the dregs
Before the ladies’ breasts are hags
And the limbs are torn.
Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,
But when the ladies are cold as stone
Then hang a ram rose over the rags.

‘Rebel against the binding moon
And the parliament of sky,
The kingcrafts of the wicked sea,
Autocracy of night and day,
Dictatorship of sun.
Rebel against the flesh and bone,
The word of the blood, the wily skin,
And the maggot no man can slay.’

‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,
And my heart is cracked across;
My face is haggard in the glass,
My lips are withered with a kiss,
My breasts are thin.
A merry girl took me for man,
I laid her down and told her sin,
And put beside her a ram rose.

‘The maggot that no man can kill
And the man no rope can hang
Rebel against my father’s dream
That out of a bower of red swine
Howls the foul fiend to heel.
I cannot murder, like a fool,
Season and sunshine, grace and girl,
Nor can I smother the sweet waking.’

Black night still ministers the moon,
And the sky lays down her laws,
The sea speaks in a kingly voice,
Light and dark are no enemies
But one companion.
‘War on the spider and the wren!
War on the destiny of man!
Doom on the sun!’
Before death takes you, O take back this.

Grief thief of time

Grief thief of time crawls off,
The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,
The knave of pain steals off
The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,
The old forget the cries,
Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,
Call back the castaways
Riding the sea light on a sunken path,
The old forget the grief,
Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,
Cast back the bone of youth
And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies
Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories
And timelessly lies loving with the thief.

Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,
Death flashing from his sleeve,
With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack
Sneak down the stallion grave,
Bull’s-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack
And free the twin-boxed grief,
No silver whistles chase him down the weeks’
Dayed peaks to day to death,
These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes
And the undead eye-teeth,
No third eye probe into a rainbow’s sex
That bridged the human halves,
All shall remain and on the graveward gulf
Shape with my fathers’ thieves.

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Then was my neophyte

Then was my neophyte,
Child in white blood bent on its knees
Under the bell of rocks,
Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas
The winder of the water-clocks
Calls a green day and night.
My sea hermaphrodite,
Snail of man in His ship of fires
That burn the bitten decks,
Knew all His horrible desires
The climber of the water sex
Calls the green rock of light.

Who in these labyrinths,
This tidethread and the lane of scales,
Twine in a moon-blown shell,
Escapes to the flat cities’ sails
Furled on the fishes’ house and hell,
Nor falls to His green myths?
Stretch the salt photographs,
The landscape grief, love in His oils
Mirror from man to whale
That the green child see like a grail
Through veil and fin and fire and coil
Time on the canvas paths.

He films my vanity.
Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,
Over the water come
Children from homes and children’s parks
Who speak on a finger and thumb,
And the masked, headless boy.
His reels and mystery
The winder of the clockwise scene
Wound like a ball of lakes
Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen
Love’s image till my heartbone breaks
By a dramatic sea.

Who kills my history?
The year-hedged row is lame with flint,
Blunt scythe and water blade.
‘Who could snap off the shapeless print
From your to-morrow-treading shade
With oracle for eye?’
Time kills me terribly.
‘Time shall not murder you,’ He said,
‘Nor the green nought be hurt;
Who could hack out your unsucked heart,
O green and unborn and undead?’
I saw time murder me.

Altarwise by owl-light

I

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

II

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers
Over these groundworks thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

III

First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,
Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
On thunderous pavements in the garden time;
Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,
And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;
The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
Alone alive among his mutton fold,
We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

IV

What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?
(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper).
Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow).
What of a bamboo man among your acres?
Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.
Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,
Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

V

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle.
Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.
For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,
Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,
A climbing sea from Asia had me down
And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,
Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel
Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa
By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil
And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.

VI

Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,
He in a book of water tallow-eyed
By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels
And burned sea silence on a wick of words.
Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,
Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;
And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,
Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue
Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower
The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;
Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard
Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,
The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed
Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.

VII

Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,
A Bible-leaved of all the written woods
Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,
Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,
And one light’s language in the book of trees.
Doom on deniers at the wind-turned statement.
Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,
The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge
Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,
Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.
Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,
From bald pavilions and the house of bread
Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,
On rose and icicle the ringing handprint.

VIII

This was the crucifixion on the mountain,
Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave
As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;
The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,
Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,
With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.
This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,
Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,
And by this blowcock witness of the sun
Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.

IX

From the oracular archives and the parchment,
Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,
The lamped calligrapher, the queen in splints,
Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,
Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna
Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.
This was the resurrection in the desert,
Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars
Gold on such features, and the linen spirit
Weds my long gentleman to dusts and furies;
With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,
World in the sand, on the triangle landscape,
With stones of odyssey for ash and garland
And rivers of the dead around my neck.

X

Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage
Atlaswise hold half-way off the dummy bay
Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:
So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes
Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image
December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.
Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail
Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,
What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel
Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?
Green as beginning, let the garden diving
Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day
When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom
My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.

Because the pleasure-bird whistles

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer
The supper and knives of a mood.
In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year
That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,
An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,
Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,
Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair
In a wind that plucked a goose,
Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,
Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.
Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,
That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea
Secretly in statuary,
Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,
Not spin to stare at an old year
Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries
Like the mauled pictures of boys?
The salt person and blasted place
I furnish with the meat of a fable;
If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
An upright man in the antipodes
Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

I make this in a warring absence

I make this in a warring absence when
Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love’s season
Harbours my anchored tongue, slips the quaystone,
When, praise is blessed, her pride in mast and fountain
Sailed and set dazzling by the handshaped ocean,
In that proud sailing tree with branches driven
Through the last vault and vegetable groyne,
And this weak house to marrow-columned heaven,

Is corner-cast, breath’s rag, scrawled weed, a vain
And opium head, crow stalk, puffed, cut, and blown,
Or like the tide-looped breastknot reefed again
Or rent ancestrally the roped sea-hymen,
And, pride is last, is like a child alone
By magnet winds to her blind mother drawn,
Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

She makes for me a nettle’s innocence
And a silk pigeon’s guilt in her proud absence,
In the molested rocks the shell of virgins,
The frank, closed pearl, the sea-girls’ lineaments
Glint in the staved and siren-printed caverns,
Is maiden in the shameful oak, omens
Whalebed and bulldance, the gold bush of lions,
Proud as a sucked stone and huge as sandgrains.

These are her contraries: the beast who follows
With priest’s grave foot and hand of five assassins
Her molten flight up cinder-nesting columns,
Calls the starved fire herd, is cast in ice,
Lost in a limp-treed and uneating silence,
Who scales a hailing hill in her cold flintsteps
Falls on a ring of summers and locked noons.

I make a weapon of an ass’s skeleton
And walk the warring sands by the dead town.
Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,
Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins
Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.
Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone,

And, for that murder’s sake, dark with contagion
Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.
Ruin, the room of errors, one rood dropped
Down the stacked sea and water-pillared shade,
Weighed in rock shroud, is my proud pyramid;
Where, wound in emerald linen and sharp wind,
The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend,
Comes love’s anatomist with sun-gloved hand
Who picks the live heart on a diamond.

‘His mother’s womb had a tongue that lapped up mud,’
Cried the topless, inchtaped lips from hank and hood
In that bright anchorground where I lay linened,
‘A lizard darting with black venom’s thread
Doubled, to fork him back, through the lockjaw bed
And the breath-white, curtained mouth of seed.’
‘See,’ drummed the taut masks, ‘how the dead ascend:
In the groin’s endless coil a man is tangled.’

These once-blind eyes have breathed a wind of visions,
The cauldron’s root through this once-rindless hand
Fumed like a tree, and tossed a burning bird;
With loud, torn tooth and tail and cobweb drum
The crumpled packs fled past this ghost in bloom,
And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride,
The terrible world my brother bares his skin.

Now in the cloud’s big breast lie quiet countries,
Delivered seas my love from her proud place
Walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face,
A calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair
Once where the soft snow’s blood was turned to ice.
And though my love pulls the pale, nippled air,
Prides of to-morrow suckling in her eyes,
Yet this I make in a forgiving presence.

When all my five and country senses see

When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

My one and noble heart has witnesses
In all love’s countries, that will grope awake;
And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

We lying by seasand

We lying by seasand, watching yellow
And the grave sea, mock who deride
Who follow the red rivers, hollow
Alcove of words out of cicada shade,
For in this yellow grave of sand and sea
A calling for colour calls with the wind
That’s grave and gay as grave and sea
Sleeping on either hand.
The lunar silences, the silent tide
Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master
Ribbed between desert and water storm,
Should cure our ills of the water
With a one-coloured calm;
The heavenly music over the sand
Sounds with the grains as they hurry
Hiding the golden mountains and mansions
Of the grave, gay, seaside land.
Bound by a sovereign strip, we lie,
Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away
The strata of the shore and drown red rock;
But wishes breed not, neither
Can we fend off rock arrival,
Lie watching yellow until the golden weather
Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill.

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell claps me to churches
When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulpher priest,
His beast heel cleft in a sandal,
Time marks a black aisle kindle from the brand of ashes,
Grief with dishevelled hands tear out the altar ghost
And a firewind kill the candle.

Over the choir minute I hear the hour chant:
Time’s coral saint and the salt grief drown a foul sepulchre
And a whirlpool drives the prayerwheel;
Moonfall and sailing emperor, pale as their tide-print,
Hear by death’s accident the clocked and dashed-down spire
Strike the sea hour through bellmetal.

There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame,
Storm, snow, and fountain in the weather of fireworks,
Cathedral calm in the pulled house;
Grief with drenched book and candle christens the cherub time
From the emerald, still bell; and from the pacing weather-cock
The voice of bird on coral prays.

Forever it is a white child in the dark-skinned summer
Out of the font of bone and plants at that stone tocsin
Scales the blue wall of spirits;
From blank and leaking winter sails the child in colour,
Shakes, in crabbed burial shawl, by sorcerer’s insect woken,
Ding dong from the mute turrets.

I mean by time the cast and curfew rascal of our marriage,
At nightbreak born in the fat side, from an animal bed
In a holy room in a wave;
And all love’s sinners in sweet cloth kneel to a hyleg image,
Nutmeg, civet, and sea-parsley serve the plagued groom and bride
Who have brought forth the urchin grief.

O make me a mask

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,
Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies
The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,
The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,
Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce
To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,
And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes
To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

The spire cranes

The spire cranes. Its statue is an aviary.
From the stone nest it does not let the feathery
Carved birds blunt their striking throats on the salt gravel,
Pierce the spilt sky with diving wing in weed and heel
An inch in froth. Chimes cheat the prison spire, pelter
In time like outlaw rains on that priest, water,
Time for the swimmers’ hands, music for silver lock
And mouth. Both note and plume plunge from the spire’s hook.
Those craning birds are choice for you, songs that jump back
To the built voice, or fly with winter to the bells,
But do not travel down dumb wind like prodigals.

After the funeral

(In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,
After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,
I stand, for this memorial’s sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart’s fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).
But I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,
Storm me forever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

Once it was the colour of saying

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo
That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo
Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,
The shade of their trees was a word of many shades
And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;
Now my saying shall be my undoing,
And every stone I wind off like a reel.

Not from this anger

Not from this anger, anticlimax after
Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower
Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods
In a land strapped by hunger
Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds
And bear those tendril hands I touch across
The agonized, two seas.
Behind my head a square of sky sags over
The circular smile tossed from lover to lover
And the golden ball spins out of the skies;
Not from this anger after
Refusal struck like a bell under water
Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,
That burns along my eyes.

How shall my animal

How shall my animal
Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,
Endure burial under the spelling wall,
The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
Who should be furious,
Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
Roaring, crawling, quarrel
With the outside weathers,
The natural circle of the discovered skies
Draw down to its weird eyes?

How shall it magnetize,
Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze
That melts the lionhead’s heel and horseshoe of the heart,
A brute land in the cool top of the country days
To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,
Love and labour and kill
In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout out,
The black, burst sea rejoice,
The bowels turn turtle,
Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle
The parched and raging voice?

Fishermen of mermen
Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin
With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,
Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound
Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,
Trace out a tentacle,
Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed
To clasp my fury on ground
And clap its great blood down;
Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas
Or poise the day on a horn.

Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,
Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost
Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops
With carved bird, saint, and sun, the wrackspiked maiden mouth
Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,
Clips short the gesture of breath.
Die in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut,
And roll with the knocked earth:
Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.
You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,
And dug your grave in my breast.

The tombstone told when she died

The tombstone told when she died.
Her two surnames stopped me still.
A virgin married at rest.
She married in this pouring place,
That I struck one day by luck,
Before I heard in my mother’s side
Or saw in the looking-glass shell
The rain through her cold heart speak
And the sun killed in her face.
More the thick stone cannot tell.
Before she lay on a stranger’s bed
With a hand plunged through her hair,
Or that rainy tongue beat back
Through the devilish years and innocent deaths
To the room of a secret child,
Among men later I heard it said
She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare
And her red lips were kissed black,
She wept in her pain and made mouths,
Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.
I who saw in a hurried film
Death and this mad heroine
Meet once on a mortal wall
Heard her speak through the chipped beak
Of the stone bird guarding her:
I died before bedtime came
But my womb was bellowing
And I felt with my bare fall
A blazing red harsh head tear up
And the dear floods of his hair.

On no work of words

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody
Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death
That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
If I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.

A saint about to fall

A saint about to fall,
The stained flats of heaven hit and razed
To the kissed kite hems of his shawl,
On the last street wave praised
The unwinding, song by rock,
Of the woven wall
Of his father’s house in the sands,
The vanishing of the musical ship-work and the chucked bells,
The wound-down cough of the blood-counting clock
Behind a face of hands,
On the angelic etna of the last whirring featherlands,
Wind-heeled foot in the hole of a fireball,
Hymned his shrivelling flock,
On the last rick’s tip by spilled wine-wells
Sang heaven hungry and the quick
Cut Christbread spitting vinegar and all
The mazes of his praise and envious tongue were worked in flames and shells.

Glory cracked like a flea.
The sun-leaved holy candlewoods
Drivelled down to one singeing tree
With a stub of black buds,
The sweet, fish-gilled boats bringing blood
Lurched through a scuttled sea
With a hold of leeches and straws,
Heaven fell with his fall and one crocked bell beat the left air.
O wake in me in my house in the mud
Of the crotch of the squawking shores,
Flicked from the carbolic city puzzle in a bed of sores
The scudding base of the familiar sky,
The lofty roots of the clouds.
From an odd room in a split house stare,
Milk in your mouth, at the sour floods
That bury the sweet street slowly, see
The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.

Strike in the time-bomb town,
Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,
Throw your fear a parcel of stone
Through the dark asylum,
Lapped among herods wail
As their blade marches in
That the eyes are already murdered,
The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth to feed.
O wake to see, after a noble fall,
The old mud hatch again, the horrid
Woe drip from the dishrag hands and the pressed sponge of the forehead,
The breath draw back like a bolt through white oil
And a stranger enter like iron.
Cry joy that hits witchlike midwife second
Bullies into rough seas you so gentle
And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun
A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot’

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot
Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath
Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.
Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat
Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.

‘All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:
I’ll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,
Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time
Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,
Strike light, and bloody a loud room.

‘If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel
Rage me back to the making house. My hand unravel
When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.
Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make
A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.’

‘No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.

‘Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave
To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,
O my lost love bounced from a good home;
The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.

‘Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
At the breast stored with seas. No return
Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways.
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.’

Twenty-four years

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance for as long as forever is.

The Conversation of Prayer

The conversation of prayers about to be said
By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
And the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise
Into the answering skies from the green ground,
From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.
The sound about to be said in the two prayers
For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?
Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?
The conversation of prayers about to be said
Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stairs
To-night shall find no dying but alive and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.
And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer
Shall drown in a grief as deep as his true grave,
And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,
Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Poem in October

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

This Side of the Truth

(for Llewelyn)

This side of the truth,
You may not see, my son,
King of your blue eyes
In the blinding country of youth,
That all is undone,
Under the unminding skies,
Of innocence and guilt
Before you move to make
One gesture of the heart or head,
Is gathered and spilt
Into the winding dark
Like the dust of the dead.

Good and bad, two ways
Of moving about your death
By the grinding sea,
King of your heart in the blind days,
Blow away like breath,
Go crying through you and me
And the souls of all men
Into the innocent
Dark, and the guilty dark, and good
Death, and bad death, and then
In the last element
Fly like the stars’ blood

Like the sun’s tears,
Like the moon’s seed, rubbish
And fire, the flying rant
Of the sky, king of your six years.
And the wicked wish,
Down the beginning of plants
And animals and birds,
Water and light, the earth and sky,
Is cast before you move,
And all your deeds and words,
Each truth, each lie,
Die in unjudging love.

To Others than You

Friend by enemy I call you out.

You with a bad coin in your socket,
You my friend there with a winning air
Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
Brassily at my shyest secret,
Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
In the memory worked by mirrors,
With unforgettably smiling act,
Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
And my whole heart under your hammer,
Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
A desireless familiar
I never thought to utter or think
While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults
As much as for their good,
My friends were enemies on stilts
With their heads in a cunning cloud.

Love in the Asylum

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Unluckily for a Death

Unluckily for a death
Waiting with phoenix under
The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days,
And for the woman in shades
Saint carved and sensual among the scudding
Dead and gone, dedicate forever to my self
Though the brawl of the kiss has not occurred
On the clay cold mouth, on the fire
Branded forehead, that could bind
Her constant, nor the winds of love broken wide
To the wind the choir and cloister
Of the wintry nunnery of the order of lust
Beneath my life, that sighs for the seducer’s coming
In the sun strokes of summer,

Loving on this sea banged guilt
My holy lucky body
Under the cloud against love is caught and held and kissed
In the mill of the midst
Of the descending day, the dark our folly,
Cut to the still star in the order of the quick
But blessed by such heroic hosts in your every
Inch and glance that the wound
Is certain god, and the ceremony of souls
Is celebrated there, and communion between suns.
Never shall my self chant
About the saint in shades while the endless breviary
Turns of your prayed flesh, nor shall I shoo the bird below me:
The death biding two lie lonely.

I see the tigron in tears
In the androgynous dark,
His striped and noon maned tribe striding to holocaust,
The she mules bear their minotaurs,
The duck-billed platypus broody in a milk of birds.
I see the wanting nun saint carved in a garb
Of shades, symbol of desire beyond my hours
And guilts, great crotch and giant
Continence. I see the unfired phoenix, herald
And heaven crier, arrow now of aspiring
And the renouncing of islands.
All love but for the full assemblage in flower
Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,
And the grave its daughters.

Love, my fate got luckily,
Teaches with no telling
That the phoenix’ bid for heaven and the desire after
Death in the carved nunnery
Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing
Nor walk in the cool of your mortal garden
With immortality at my side like Christ the sky.
This I know from the native
Tongue of your translating eyes. The young stars told me,
Hurling into beginning like Christ the child.
Lucklessly she must lie patient
And the vaulting bird be still. O my true love, hold me.
In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,
And the living earth your sons.

The Hunchback in the Park

The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time
A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark.

Into her Lying Down Head

I

Into her lying down head
His enemies entered bed,
Under the encumbered eyelid,
Through the rippled drum of the hair-buried ear;
And Noah’s rekindled now unkind dove
Flew man-bearing there.
Last night in a raping wave
Whales unreined from the green grave
In fountains of origin gave up their love,
Along her innocence glided
Jaun aflame and savagely young King Lear,
Queen Catherine howling bare
And Samson drowned in his hair,
The colossal intimacies of silent
Once seen strangers or shades on a stair;
There the dark blade and wanton sighing her down
To a haycock couch and the scythes of his arms
Rode and whistled a hundred times
Before the crowing morning climbed;
Man was the burning England she was sleep-walking, and the enamouring island
Made her limbs blind by luminous charms,
Sleep to a newborn sleep in a swaddling loin-leaf stroked and sang
And his runaway beloved childlike laid in the acorned sand.

II

There where a numberless tongue
Wound their room with a male moan,
His faith around her flew undone
And darkness hung the walls with baskets of snakes,
A furnace-nostrilled column-membered
Super-or-near man
Resembling to her dulled sense
The thief of adolescence,
Early imaginary half remembered
Oceanic lover alone
Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes,
Made his bad bed in her good
Night, and enjoyed as he would.
Crying, white gowned, from the middle moonlit stages
Out to the tiered and hearing tide,
Close and far she announced the theft of the heart
In the taken body at many ages,
Trespasser and broken bride
Celebrating at her side
All blood-signed assailing and vanished marriages in which he had no lovely part
Nor could share, for his pride, to the least
Mutter and foul wingbeat of the solemnizing nightpriest
Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast.

III

Two sand grains together in bed,
Head to heaven-circling head,
Singly lie with the whole wide shore,
The covering sea their nightfall with no names;
And out of every domed and soil-based shell
One voice in chains declaims
The female, deadly, and male
Libidinous betrayal,
Golden dissolving under the water veil.
A she bird sleeping brittle by
Her lover’s wings that fold to-morrow’s flight,
Within the nested treefork
Sings to the treading hawk
Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk.
A blade of grass longs with the meadow,
A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill.
Open as to the air to the naked shadow
O she lies alone and still,
Innocent between two wars,
With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds to perpetuate the stars,
A man torn up mourns in the sole night.
And the second comers, the severers, the enemies from the deep
Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their dead in her faithless sleep.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Deaths and Entrances

On almost the incendiary eve
Of several near deaths,
When one at the great least of your best loved
And always known must leave
Lions and fires of his flying breath,
Of your immortal friends
Who’d raise the organs of the counted dust
To shoot and sing your praise,
One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
That cannot sink or cease
Endlessly to his wound
In many married London’s estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eve
When at your lips and keys,
Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,
One who is most unknown,
Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,
Will dive up to his tears.
He’ll bathe his raining blood in the male sea
Who strode for your own dead
And wind his globe out of your water thread
And load the throats of shells
With every cry since light
Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances,
When near and strange wounded on London’s waves
Have sought your single grave,
One enemy, of many, who knows well
Your heart is luminous
In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,
Will pull the thunderbolts
To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys
And sear just riders back,
Until that one loved least
Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

A Winter’s Tale

It is a winter’s tale
That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,
And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old
On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then
In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,
The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,
He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers
And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
His naked need struck him howling and bowed
Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung
Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,
And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
In the always desiring centre of the white
Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,
By losing him all in love, and cast his need
Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing
In the departed villages. The nightingale,
Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
And spells on the winds of the dead his winter’s tale.
The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened
Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings
On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound
In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
And there outside on the bread of the ground
A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move
On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved
Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock
Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old
Leaves is dancing. Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
And the harp shaped voice of the water’s dust plucks in a fold
Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised
Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,
By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year
When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-
Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,
The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.
On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes
On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn
Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither
Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather
That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded
In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

On a Wedding Anniversary

The sky is torn across
This ragged anniversary of two
Who moved for three years in tune
Down the long walks of their vows.

Now their love lies a loss
And Love and his patients roar on a chain;
From every tune or crater
Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

Too late in the wrong rain
They come together whom their love parted:
The windows pour into their heart
And the doors burn in their brain.

There was a Saviour

There was a saviour
Rarer than radium,
Commoner than water, crueller than truth;
Children kept from the sun
Assembled at his tongue
To hear the golden note turn in a groove,
Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes
In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.

The voice of children says
From a lost wilderness
There was calm to be done in his safe unrest,
When hindering man hurt
Man, animal, or bird
We hid our fears in that murdering breath,
Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,
In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

There was glory to hear
In the churches of his tears,
Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,
O you who could not cry
On to the ground when a man died
Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood
And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:
Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Two proud, blacked brothers cry,
Winter-locked side by side,
To this inhospitable hollow year,
O we who could not stir
One lean sigh when we heard
Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour
But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall
Now break a giant tear for the little known fall,

For the drooping of homes
That did not nurse our bones,
Brave deaths of only ones but never found,
Now see, alone in us,
Our own true strangers’ dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house.
Exiled in us we arouse the soft,
Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

On the Marriage of a Virgin

Waking alone in a multitude of loves when morning’s light
Surprised in the opening of her nightlong eyes
His golden yesterday asleep upon the iris
And this day’s sun leapt up the sky out of her thighs
Was miraculous virginity old as loaves and fishes,
Though the moment of a miracle is unending lightning
And the shipyards of Galilee’s footprints hide a navy of doves.

No longer will the vibrations of the sun desire on
Her deepsea pillow where once she married alone,
Her heart all ears and eyes, lips catching the avalanche
Of the golden ghost who ringed with his streams her mercury bone,
Who under the lids of her windows hoisted his golden luggage,
For a man sleeps where fire leapt down and she learns through his arm
That other sun, the jealous coursing of the unrivalled blood.

In my Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I

Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt,
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

II

I know not whether
Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock
Or the white ewe lamb
Or the chosen virgin
Laid in her snow
On the altar of London,
Was the first to die
In the cinder of the little skull,
O bride and bride groom
O Adam and Eve together
Lying in the lull
Under the sad breast of the head stone
White as the skeleton
Of the garden of Eden.

I know the legend
Of Adam and Eve is never for a second
Silent in my service
Over the dead infants
Over the one
Child who was priest and servants,
Word, singers, and tongue
In the cinder of the little skull,
Who was the serpent’s
Night fall and the fruit like a sun,
Man and woman undone,
Beginning crumbled back to darkness
Bare as nurseries
Of the garden of wilderness.

III

Into the organpipes and steeples
Of the luminous cathedrals,
Into the weathercocks’ molten mouths
Rippling in twelve-winded circles,
Into the dead clock burning the hour
Over the urn of sabbaths
Over the whirling ditch of daybreak
Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire
And the golden pavements laid in requiems,
Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames,
Into the wine burning like brandy,
The masses of the sea
The masses of the sea under
The masses of the infant-bearing sea
Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever
Glory glory glory
The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.

Once below a time

I

Once below a time,
When my pinned-around-the-spirit
Cut-to-measure flesh bit,
Suit for a serial sum
On the first of each hardship,
My paid-for slaved-for own too late
In love torn breeches and blistered jacket
On the snapping rims of the ashpit,
In grottoes I worked with birds,
Spiked with a mastiff collar,
Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop
Or decked on a cloud swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats
And out-of-perspective sailors,
In common clay clothes disguised as scales,
As a he-god’s paddling water skirts,
I astounded the sitting tailors,
I set back the clock faced tailors,
Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,
Hopping hot leaved and feathered
From the kangaroo foot of the earth,
From the chill, silent centre
Trailing the frost bitten cloth,
Up through the lubber crust of Wales
I rocketed to astonish
The flashing needle rock of squatters,
The criers of Shabby and Shorten,
The famous stitch droppers.

II

My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.
And the owl hood, the heel hider,
Claw fold and hole for the rotten
Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors’ master with nerves for cotton.
On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,
Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,
I was pierced by the idol tailor’s eyes,
Glared through shark mask and navigating head,
Cold Nansen’s beak on a boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,
The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy
With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.
It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water
With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed
Summoning a child’s voice from a webfoot stone,
Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.
Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
As quiet as a bone.

When I Woke

When I woke, the town spoke.
Birds and clocks and cross bells
Dinned aside the coiling crowd,
The reptile profligates in a flame,
Spoilers and pokers of sleep,
The next-door sea dispelled
Frogs and satans and woman-luck,
While a man outside with a billhook,
Up to his head in his blood,
Cutting the morning off,
The warm-veined double of Time
And his scarving beard from a book,
Slashed down the last snake as though
It were a wand or subtle bough,
Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.

Every morning I make,
God in bed, good and bad,
After a water-face walk,
The death-stagged scatter-breath
Mammoth and sparrowfall
Everybody’s earth.
Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks
I heard, this morning, waking,
Crossly out of the town noises
A voice in the erected air,
No prophet-progeny of mine,
Cry my sea town was breaking.
No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
I drew the white sheet over the islands
And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred

When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from the common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

Vision and Prayer

I

Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So  loud  to  my  own
That I can hear the womb
Opening  and  the  dark  run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?
In the birth  bloody  room unknown
To the  burn  and  turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows   no   baptism
But dark  alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child.

I
Must lie
Still as  stone
By  the  wren  bone
Wall hearing the moan
Of  the   mother   hidden
And the shadowed head of pain
Casting  to-morrow  like  a thorn
And  the  midwives  of  miracle  sing
Until  the  turbulent   new  born
Burns me his name and his flame
And the winged wall is torn
By  his torrid  crown
And the dark thrown
From  his  loin
To bright
Light.

When
The   wren
Bone writhes down
And the first dawn
Furied  by  his  stream
Swarms  on the  kingdom come
Of   the   dazzler   of   heaven
And  the  splashed  mothering  maiden
Who   bore  him   with  a   bonfire  in
His mouth and rocked him like a storm
I  shall   run  lost   in  sudden
Terror   and   shining  from
The  once  hooded  room
Crying   in   vain
In the  caldron
Of    his
Kiss

In
The spin
Of  the   sun
In   the  spuming
Cyclone   of  his  wing
For  I  was  lost   who  am
Crying at the man drenched throne
In  the first  fury  of his  stream
And   the   lightnings   of   adoration
Back to black silence melt and mourn
For  I was  lost  who  have  come
To    dumbfounding    haven
And  the   finding  one
And the high noon
Of his wound
Blinds my
Cry.

There
Crouched bare
In   the  shrine
Of   his   blazing
Breast  I   shall  waken
To  the  judge  blown  bedlam
Of   the   uncaged   sea   bottom
The cloud  climb of the exhaling tomb
And  the  bidden  dust  upsailing
With his flame in every grain.
O  spiral  of  ascension
From the vultured urn
Of   the   morning
Of  man  when
The  land
And

The
Born sea
Praised the sun
The  finding   one
And    upright    Adam
Sang      upon     origin!
O the  wings  of  the children!
The woundward flight of the ancient
Young  from  the  canyons  of oblivion!
The sky stride  of the always slain
In   battle!    the   happening
Of saints to  their vision!
The world winding home!
And the whole pain
Flows     open
And I
Die.

II

In the name  of the  lost who glory in
The  swinish  plains   of  carrion
Under    the    burial    song
Of  the  birds  of  burden
Heavy with the drowned
And the green dust
And   bearing
The  ghost
From
The ground
Like  pollen
On the black plume
And the beak  of slime
I  pray  though  I  belong
Not wholly  to that  lamenting
Brethren for joy  has moved within
The inmost  marrow of  my  heart  bone

That he who learns now the sun and moon
Of  his  mother’s  milk  may return
Before the lips blaze and bloom
To the  birth bloody room
Behind the wall’s wren
Bone and be dumb
And the womb
That bore
For
All men
The  adored
Infant light or
The  dazzling  prison
Yawn  to   his  upcoming.
In  the  name  of  the  wanton
Lost on  the unchristened  mountain
In  the  centre  of  dark  I  pray  him

That he let the dead lie though they moan
For his briared hands  to hoist them
To the shrine of his world’s wound
And the blood drop’s garden
Endure   the    stone
Blind host to sleep
In  the  dark
And deep
Rock
Awake
No heart bone
But  let  it  break
On the mountain crown
Unbidden    by    the   sun
And  the  beating  dust be  blown
Down  to  the  river  rooting plain
Under   the   night   forever   falling.

Forever   falling    night   is   a  known
Star   and   country   to  the  legion
Of sleepers  whose  tongue I  toll
To    mourn    his    deluging
Light through sea and soil
And  we  have  come
To know all
Places
Ways
Mazes
Passages
Quarters and graves
Of   the   endless   fall.
Now       common       lazarus
Of  the  charting  sleepers  prays
Never    to     awake     and    arise
For the country of death is the heart’s size

And the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.
In     the    name   of   the  fatherless
In   the   name    of   the   unborn
And       the       undesirers
Of   midwiving   morning’s
Hands  or  instruments
O  in  the  name
Of no  one
Now or
No
One to
Be I pray
May the crimson
Sun spin a grave grey
And  the  colour  of  clay
Stream  upon   his   martyrdom
In     the     interpreted   evening
And  the  known  dark  of  the  earth  amen.

I turn the  corner of prayer and  burn
In  a  blessing   of  the   sudden
Sun. In the name of the damned
I  would  turn back and  run
To   the   hidden   land
But  the  loud  sun
Christens down
The sky.
I
Am found.
O   let   him
Scald me and drown
Me in his world’s wound.
His  lightning  answers  my
Cry. My voice burns in his hand.
Now  I  am  lost  in the  blinding
One. The sun roars at the prayer’s end.

Ballad of the Long-legged Bait

The bows glided down, and the coast
Blackened with birds took a last look
At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Then good-bye to the fishermanned
Boat with its anchor free and fast
As a bird hooking over the sea,
High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sand
And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.
For my sake sail, and never look back,
Said the looking land.

Sails drank the wind, and white as milk
He sped into the drinking dark;
The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
And the moon swam out of its hulk.

Funnels and masts went by in a whirl.
Good-bye to the man on the sea-legged deck
To the gold gut that sings on his reel
To the bait that stalked out of the sack,

For we saw him throw to the swift flood
A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;
All the fishes were rayed in blood,
Said the dwindling ships.

Good-bye to chimneys and funnels,
Old wives that spin in the smoke,
He was blind to the eyes of candles
In the praying windows of waves

But heard his bait buck in the wake
And tussle in a shoal of loves.
Now cast down your rod, for the whole
Of the sea is hilly with whales,

She longs among horses and angels,
The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,
Floated the lost cathedral
Chimes of the rocked buoys.

Where the anchor rode like a gull
Miles over the moonstruck boat
A squall of birds bellowed and fell,
A cloud blew the rain from its throat;

He saw the storm smoke out to kill
With fuming bows and ram of ice,
Fire on starlight, rake Jesu’s stream;
And nothing shone on the water’s face

But the oil and bubble of the moon,
Plunging and piercing in his course
The lured fish under the foam
Witnessed with a kiss.

Whales in the wake like capes and Alps
Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep,
Deep the great bushed bait with raining lips
Slipped the fins of those humpbacked tons

And fled their love in a weaving dip.
Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!
She nipped and dived in the nick of love,
Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball

Till every beast blared down in a swerve
Till every turtle crushed from his shell
Till every bone in the rushing grave
Rose and crowed and fell!

Good luck to the hand on the rod,
There is thunder under its thumbs;
Gold gut is a lightning thread,
His fiery reel sings off its flames,

The whirled boat in the burn of his blood
Is crying from nets to knives,
Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood
Oh the bulls of Biscay and their calves

Are making under the green, laid veil
The long-legged beautiful bait their wives.
Break the black news and paint on a sail
Huge weddings in the waves,

Over the wakeward-flashing spray
Over the gardens of the floor
Clash out the mounting dolphin’s day,
My mast is a bell-spire,

Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,
Sing through the water-spoken prow
The octopus walking into her limbs
The polar eagle with his tread of snow.

From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern
Sing how the seal has kissed her dead!
The long, laid minute’s bride drifts on
Old in her cruel bed.

Over the graveyard in the water
Mountains and galleries beneath
Nightingale and hyena
Rejoicing for that drifting death

Sing and howl through sand and anemone
Valley and sahara in a shell,
Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy
Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl

Is old as water and plain as an eel;
Always good-bye to the long-legged bread
Scattered in the paths of his heels
For the salty birds fluttered and fed

And the tall grains foamed in their bills;
Always good-bye to the fires of the face,
For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose
And scuttled over her eyes,

The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.
The tempter under the eyelid
Who shows to the selves asleep
Mast-high moon-white women naked

Walking in wishes and lovely for shame
Is dumb and gone with his flame of brides.
Sussanah’s drowned in the bearded stream
And no-one stirs at Sheba’s side

But the hungry kings of the tides;
Sin who had a woman’s shape
Sleeps till Silence blows on a cloud
And all the lifted waters walk and leap.

Lucifer that bird’s dropping
Out of the sides of the north
Has melted away and is lost
Is always lost in her vaulted breath,

Venus lies star-struck in her wound
And the sensual ruins make
Seasons over the liquid world,
White springs in the dark.

Always good-bye, cried the voices through the shell,
Good-bye always, for the flesh is cast
And the fisherman winds his reel
With no more desire than a ghost.

Always good luck, praised the finned in the feather
Bird after dark and the laughing fish
As the sails drank up the hail of thunder
And the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.

The boat swims into the six-year weather,
A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.
See what the gold gut drags from under
Mountains and galleries to the crest!

See what clings to hair and skull
As the boat skims on with drinking wings!
The statues of great rain stand still,
And the flakes fall like hills.

Sing and strike his heavy haul
Toppling up the boatside in a snow of light!
His decks are drenched with miracles.
Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!

Out of the urn a size of a man
Out of the room the weight of his trouble
Out of the house that holds a town
In the continent of a fossil

One by one in dust and shawl,
Dry as echoes and insect-faced,
His fathers cling to the hand of the girl
And the dead hand leads the past,

Leads them as children and as air
On to the blindly tossing tops;
The centuries throw back their hair
And the old men sing from newborn lips:

_Time is bearing another son.
Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
The oak is felled in the acorn
And the hawk in the egg kills the wren._

He who blew the great fire in
And died on a hiss of flames
Or walked the earth in the evening
Counting the denials of the grains

Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs;
And he who taught their lips to sing
Weeps like the risen sun among
The liquid choirs of his tribes.

The rod bends low, divining land,
And through the sundered water crawls
A garden holding to her hand
With birds and animals

With men and women and waterfalls
Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships
And stunned and still on the green, laid veil
Sand with legends in its virgin laps

And prophets loud on the burned dunes;
Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,
Times and places grip her breast bone,
She is breaking with seasons and clouds;

Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,
with moving fish and rounded stones
Up and down the greater waves
A separate river breathes and runs;

Strike and sing his catch of fields
For the surge is sown with barley,
The cattle graze on the covered foam,
The hills have footed the waves away,

With wild sea fillies and soaking bridles
With salty colts and gales in their limbs
All the horses of his haul of miracles
Gallop through the arched, green farms,

Trot and gallop with gulls upon them
And thunderbolts in their manes.
O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London
The country tide is cobbled with towns

And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder
And the streets that the fisherman combed
When his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire
And his loin was a hunting flame

Coil from the thoroughfares of her hair
And terribly lead him home alive
Lead her prodigal home to his terror,
The furious ox-killing house of love.

Down, down, down, under the ground,
Under the floating villages,
Turns the moon-chained and water-wound
Metropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,
Under the earth the loud sea walks,
In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down
And the bait is drowned among hayricks,

Land, land, land, nothing remains
Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,
And into its talkative seven tombs
The anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
To the fisherman lost on the land.
He stands alone in the door of his home,
With his long-legged heart in his hand.

Holy Spring

O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe
The cureless counted body,
And ruin and his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun.

No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodigal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
Alone in the husk of man’s home
And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

In country sleep

I

Never and never, my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
My dear, my dear,
Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise,
My girl ranging the night in the rose and shire
Of the hobnail tales: no gooseherd or swine will turn
Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire
And prince of ice
To court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise
In a spinney of ringed boys and ganders, spike and burn,

Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed
And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.
From the broomed witch’s spume you are shielded by fern
And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.
Lie fast and soothed,
Safe be and smooth from the bellows of the rushy brood.
Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern

Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell
Shall harrow and snow the blood while you ride wide and near,
For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves
Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear
From the starred well?
A hill touches an angel. Out of a saint’s cell
The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves

Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays.
_Sanctum sanctorum_ the animal eye of the wood
In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
The owl at its knelling. Fox and holt kneel before blood.
Now the tales praise
The star rise at pasture and nightlong the fables graze
On the lord’s-table of the bowing grass. Fear most

For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood
Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind
And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.
The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you

Lie in grace. Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house
In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch
And star: held and blessed, though you scour the high four
Winds, from the dousing shade and the roarer at the latch,
Cool in your vows.
Yet out of the beaked, web dark and the pouncing boughs
Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure

And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,
This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks
In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls
Of the hearthstone tales my own, lost love; and the soul walks
The waters shorn.
This night and each night since the falling star you were born,
Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,

As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides
Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind-
Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands
Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged
Apple seed glides,
And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides,
As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.

II

Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks
And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair!
The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-
Heeled winds the rooks
Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books
Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox

Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist
Of the wood! Pastoral beat of blood through the laced leaves!
The stream from the priest black wristed spinney and sleeves
Of thistling frost
Of the nightingale’s din and tale! The upgiven ghost
Of the dingle torn to singing and the surpliced

Hill of cypresses! The din and tale in the skimmed
Yard of the buttermilk rain on the pail! The sermon
Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen
To seraphim
Leaping! The gospel rooks! All tell, this night, of him
Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.

Illumination of music! the lulled black-backed
Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves
Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,
In the winds’ wakes.
Music of elements, that a miracle makes!
Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,

The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue
Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly
High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly
Lying the sky
Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,
The Thief fall on the dead like the willy nilly dew,

Only for the turning of the earth in her holy
Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go
Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,
And truly he
Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew’s ruly sea,
And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds. Oh he

Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,
But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer
He comes to take
Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake
He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking

Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.
Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear
My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear
Since you were born:
And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,
Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

Over Sir John’s hill

Over Sir John’s hill,
The hawk on fire hangs still;
In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws
And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay
And the shrill child’s play
Wars
Of the sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges.
And blithely they squawk
To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until
The flash the noosed hawk
Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron
In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.

Flash, and the plumes crack,
And a black cap of jack-
Daws Sir John’s just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare
To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy’s fins,
In a whack of wind.
There
Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles
In the pebbly dab-filled
Shallow and sedge, and ‘dilly dilly,’ calls the loft hawk,
‘Come and be killed,’
I open the leaves of the water at a passage
Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing

And read, in a shell
Death clear as a bouy’s bell:
All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,
When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand
Wing, and blest shall
Young
Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, ‘dilly dilly,
Come let us die.’
We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,
The heron and I,
I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle
Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant

Crystal harbour vale
Where the sea cobbles sail,
And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.
It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John’s elmed
Hill, tell-tale the knelled
Guilt
Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,
Have Mercy on,
God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,
For their souls’ song.
Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge. Through windows
Of dusk and water I see the tilting whispering

Heron, mirrored, go,
As the snapt feathers snow,
Fishing in the tear of the Towy. Only a hoot owl
Hollows, a grassblade blown in cupped hands, in the looted elms
And no green cocks or hens
Shout
Now on Sir John’s hill. The heron, ankling the scaly
Lowlands of the waves,
Makes all the music; and I who hear the tune of the slow,
Wear-willow river, grave,
Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken
Stone for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.

Poem on his birthday

In the mustardseed sun,
By full tilt river and switchback sea
Where the cormorants scud,
In his house on stilts high among beaks
And palavers of birds
This sandgrain day in the bent bay’s grave
He celebrates and spurns
His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him go
Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
Doing what they are told,
Curlews aloud in the congered waves
Work at their ways to death,
And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
Who tolls his birthday bell,
Toils towards the ambush of his wounds;
Herons, steeple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,
He sings towards anguish; finches fly
In the claw tracks of hawks
On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
Through wynds and shells of drowned
Ship towns to pastures of otters. He
In his slant, racking house
And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
Herons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river’s robe
Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
And far at sea he knows,
Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
Under a serpent cloud,
Dolphins dive in their turnturtle dust,
The rippled seals streak down
To kill and their own tide daubing blood
Slides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swung
Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.
Thirty-five bells sing struck
On skull and scar where his loves lie wrecked,
Steered by the falling stars.
And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
Terror will rage apart
Before chains break to a hammer flame
And love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bare
With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
Or the stars’ seashore dead,
Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
And wishbones of wild geese,
With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
And every soul His priest,
Gulled and chanter in young Heaven’s fold
Be at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.
He, on the earth of the night, alone
With all the living, prays,
Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
The bones out of the hills,
And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
Rage shattered waters kick
Masts and fishes to the still quick stars,
Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of old
And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
As horses in the foam:
Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
And druid herons’ vows
The voyage to ruin I must run,
Dawn ships clouted aground,
Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and five
Senses, and man a spirit in love
Tangling through this spun slime
To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
And the lost, moonshine domes,
And the sea that hides his secret selves
Deep in its black, base bones,
Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
And this last blessing most,

That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
With more triumphant faith
Than ever was since the world was said,
Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angles ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.

Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a telltale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Ninepin down on donkey’s common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings’ wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles’ pews,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling beds of the town cried, Quick!–
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood creeps cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers’ life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman’s soul for a wife.

Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw–
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

In the white giant’s thigh

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.

Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush
Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round–

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)–

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds’ boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters’ trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, although there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slide and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.
The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows—eternal, ever since Wednesday—that we never heard Mrs. Prothero’s first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor’s polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder. “Fire!” cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, towards the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, “A fine Christmas!” and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

“Call the fire brigade,” cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong. “They won’t be here,” said Mr. Prothero, “it’s Christmas.”

There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.

“Do something,” he said.

And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke—I think we missed Mr. Prothero—and ran out of the house to the telephone box.

“Let’s call the police as well,” Jim said.

“And the ambulance.”

“And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.”

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: “Would you like anything to read?”

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

“Were there postmen then, too?”

“With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells.”

“You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?”

“I mean that the bells that the children could hear were inside them.”

“I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells.”

“There were church bells, too.”

“Inside them?”

“No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence.”

“Get back to the postmen.”

“They were just ordinary postmen, fond of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles….”

“Ours has got a black knocker….”

“And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out.”

“And then the presents?”

“And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger’s slabs.

“He wagged his bag like a frozen camel’s hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone.”

“Get back to the Presents.”

“There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o’-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o’-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’s pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”

“Go on to the Useless Presents.”

“Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons.”

“Were there Uncles like in our house?”

“There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas mornings, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swathed town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wading, scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddled their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers. Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms’ length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.”

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two curling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheek bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Aunt Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, then when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled. In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o’-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.

Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge deep footprints on the hidden pavements.

“I bet people will think there’ve been hippos.”

“What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?”

“I’d go like this, bang! I’d throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I’d tickle him under the ear and he’d wag his tail.”

“What would you do if you saw two hippos?”

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow towards us as we passed Mr. Daniel’s house.

“Let’s post Mr. Daniel a snowball through his letter box.”

“Let’s write things in the snow.”

“Let’s write, ‘Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel’ all over his lawn.”

Or we walked on the white shore. “Can the fishes see it’s snowing?”

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying “Excelsior.” We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn’t the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.

“What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?”

“No,” Jack said, “Good King Wencelas. I’ll count three.”

One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

Good King Wencelas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen…

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

“Perhaps it was a ghost,” Jim said.

“Perhaps it was trolls,” Dan said, who was always reading.

“Let’s go in and see if there’s any jelly left,” Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

First published 1954

UNDER MILK WOOD

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE (Very softly)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,
courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the
sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.
The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night
in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat
there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock,
the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds.
And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are
sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers,
the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher,
postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman,
drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot
cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft
or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux,
bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the
bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And
the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,
and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed
yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly,
streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the
invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed
stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the
Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover,
the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional
salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row,
it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, starfall,
the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in
bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and
bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes,
fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a
domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves;
in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night
in Donkey Street, trotting silent, With seaweed on its
hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot,
text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours
done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night
neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the
Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of
Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed;
tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the
slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you
can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats
over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth,
Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching
pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the
eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes
and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes
and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Captain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his
bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best
cabin of Schooner House dreams of

SECOND VOICE

never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S.S.
Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery
sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish
come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and
the long drowned nuzzle up to him.

FIRST DROWNED

Remember me, Captain?

CAPTAIN CAT

You’re Dancing Williams!

FIRST DROWNED

I lost my step in Nantucket.

SECOND DROWNED

Do you see me, Captain? the white bone talking? I’m Tom-Fred
the donkeyman…we shared the same girl once…her name was
Mrs Probert…

WOMAN’S VOICE

Rosie Probert, thirty three Duck Lane. Come on up, boys,
I’m dead.

THIRD DROWNED

Hold me, Captain, I’m Jonah Jarvis, come to a bad end, very
enjoyable.

FOURTH DROWNED

Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea-lawyer, born in Mumbles, sung
like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattooed with
mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.

FIRST DROWNED

This skull at your earhole is

FIFTH DROWNED

Curly Bevan. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned he ormolu
clock.

CAPTAIN CAT

Aye, aye, Curly.

SECOND DROWNED

Tell my missus no I never

THIRD DROWNED

I never done what she said I never.

FOURTH DROWNED

Yes they did.

FIFTH DROWNED

And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to my
Gwen now?

FIRST DROWNED

How’s it above?

SECOND DROWNED

Is there rum and laverbread?

THIRD DROWNED

Bosoms and robins?

FOURTH DROWNED

Concertinas?

FIFTH DROWNED

Ebenezer’s bell?

FIRST DROWNED

Fighting and onions?

SECOND DROWNED

And sparrows and daisies?

THIRD DROWNED

Tiddlers in a jamjar?

FOURTH DROWNED

Buttermilk and whippets?

FIFTH DROWNED

Rock-a-bye baby?

FIRST DROWNED

Washing on the line?

SECOND DROWNED

And old girls in the snug?

THIRD DROWNED

How’s the tenors in Dowlais?

FOURTH DROWNED

Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?

FIFTH DROWNED

When she smiles, is there dimples?

FIRST DROWNED

What’s the smell of parsley?

CAPTAIN CAT

Oh, my dead dears!

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring,
moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,
dream of

SECOND VOICE
her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned,
whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and
barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes
like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving
hotwaterbottled body.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy Price!

MISS PRICE

Mr Mog Edwards!

MR EDWARDS

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the
flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,
tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill
in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take
you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums
on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh
wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

MISS PRICE

I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the
money, to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so
that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is
closed.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer
will you say

MISS PRICE

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

MR EDWARDS

And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for
our wedding.

[Noise of money-tills and chapel bells

FIRST VOICE

Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark
street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea, to the
bible-black airless attic over Jack Black the cobbler’s
shop where alone and savagely Jack Black sleeps in a
nightshirt tied to his ankles with elastic and dreams of

SECOND VOICE

chasing the naughty couples down the grassgreen gooseberried
double bed of the wood, flogging the tosspots in the
spit-and-sawdust, driving out the bare bold girls from the
sixpenny hops of his nightmares.

JACK BLACK (Loudly)

Ach y fi!
Ach y fi!

FIRST VOICE

Evans the Death, the undertaker,

SECOND VOICE

laughs high and aloud in his sleep and curls up his toes as
he sees, upon waking fifty years ago, snow lie deep on the
goosefield behind the sleeping house ; and he runs out into
the field where his mother is making welsh-cakes in the
snow, and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and
climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the
warm, white clothes while his mother dances in the snow
kitchen crying out for her lost currants.

FIRST VOICE

And in the little pink-eyed cottage next to the undertaker’s,
lie, alone, the seventeen snoring gentle stone of Mister
Waldo, rabbitcatcher, barber, herbalist, catdoctor, quack,
his fat pink hands, palms up, over the edge of the patchwork
quilt, his black boots neat and tidy in the washing-basin,
his bowler on a nail above the bed, a milk stout and a slice
of cold bread pudding under the pillow; and, dripping in
the dark, he dreams of

MOTHER

This little piggy went to market
This little piggy stayed at home
This little piggy had roast beef
This little piggy had none
And this little piggy went

LITTLE BOY

wee wee wee wee wee

MOTHER

all the way home to

WIFE (Screaming)

Waldo! Wal-do!

MR WALDO

Yes, Blodwen love?

WIFE

Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Poor Mrs Waldo

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

What she puts up with

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Never should of married

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

If she didn’t had to

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Same as her mother

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

There’s a husband for you

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Bad as his father

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

And you know where he ended

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Up in the asylum

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Crying for his ma

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Every Saturday

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

He hasn’t got a log

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

And carrying on

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

With that Mrs Beattie Morris

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Up in the quarry

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

And seen her baby

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

It’s got his nose

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Oh it makes my heart bleed

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

What he’ll do for drink

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

He sold the pianola to

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

And her sewing machine

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Falling in the gutter

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Talking to the lamp-post

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Using language

FIRST NEIGHBOUR

Singing in the w

SECOND NEIGHBOUR

Poor Mrs Waldo

WIFE (Tearfully)

…Oh, Waldo, Waldo!

MR WALDO

Hush, love, hush. I’m widower Waldo now.

MOTHER (Screaming)

Waldo, Wal-do!

LITTLE BOY

Yes, our mum?

MOTHER

Oh, what’ll the neighbours say, what’ll the neighbours…

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Black as a chimbley

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Ringing doorbells

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Breaking windows

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Making mudpies

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Stealing currants

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Chalking words

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Saw him in the bushes

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Playing mwchins

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Send him to bed without any supper

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Give him sennapods and lock him in the dark

THIRD NEIGHBOUR

Off to the reformatory

FOURTH NEIGHBOUR

Off to the reformatory

TOGETHER

Learn him with a slipper on his b.t.m.

ANOTHER MOTHER (Screaming)

Waldo, Wal-do! what you doing with our Matti?

LITTLE BOY

Give us a kiss, Matti Richards.

LITTLE GIRL

Give us a penny then.

MR WALDO

I only got a halfpenny.

FIRST WOMAN

Lips is a penny.

PREACHER

Will you take this woman Matti Richards

SECOND WOMAN

Dulcie Prothero

THIRD WOMAN

Effie Bevan

FOURTH WOMAN

Lil the Gluepot

FIFTH WOMAN

Mrs Flusher

WIFE

Blodwen Bowen

PREACHER

To be your awful wedded wife

LITTLE BOY (Screaming)

No, no, no!

FIRST VOICE

Now, in her iceberg-white, holily laundered crinoline
nightgown, under virtuous polar sheets, in her spruced and
scoured dust-defying bedroom in trig and trim Bay View, a
house for paying guests, at the top of the town, Mrs
Ogmore-Pritchard widow, twice, of Mr Ogmore, linoleum,
retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed bookmaker, who maddened
by besoming, swabbing and scrubbing, the voice of the
vacuum-cleaner and the fume of polish, ironically swallowed
disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a
dream, and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr
Pritchard, ghostly on either side.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Mr Ogmore!

Mr Pritchard!

It is time to inhale your balsam.

MR OGMORE

Oh, Mrs Ogmore!

MR PRITCHARD

Oh, Mrs Pritchard!

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Soon it will be time to get up.

Tell me your tasks, in order.

MR OGMORE

I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.

MR PRITCHARD

I must take my cold bath which is good for me.

MR OGMORE

I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.

MR PRITCHARD

I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.

MR OGMORE

I must blow my nose.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

In the garden, if you please.

MR OGMORE

In a piece of tissue-paper which I afterwards burn.

MR PRITCHARD

I must take my salts which are nature’s friend.

MR OGMORE

I must boil the drinking water because of germs.

MR PRITCHARD

I must make my herb tea which is free from tannin.

MR OGMORE

And have a charcoal biscuit which is good for me.

MR PRITCHARD

I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

In the woodshed, if you please.

MR PRITCHARD

And dust the parlour and spray the canary. IS

MR OGMORE

I must put on rubber gloves and search the peke for fleas.

MR PRITCHARD

I must dust the blinds and then I must raise them.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.

FIRST VOICE

In Butcher Beynon’s, Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher,
dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock
of chicken’s feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz
curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise,
a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper
carrier.

GOSSAMER BEYNON

At last, my love,

FIRST VOICE

sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

ORGAN MORGAN

Help,

SECOND VOICE

cries Organ Morgan, the organist, in his dream,

ORGAN MORGAN

There is perturbation and music in Coronation Street! All
the spouses are honking like geese and the babies singing
opera. P.C. Attila Rees has got his truncheon out and is
playing cadenzas by the pump, the cows from Sunday Meadow
ring like reindeer, and on the roof of Handel Villa see the
Women’s Welfare hoofing, bloomered, in the moon.

FIRST VOICE

At the sea-end of town, Mr and Mrs Floyd, the cocklers, are
sleeping as quiet as death, side by wrinkled side, toothless,
salt and brown, like two old kippers In a box.

And high above, in Salt Lake Farm, Mr Utah Watkins counts,
all night, the wife-faced sheep as they leap the knees on
the hill, smiling and knitting and bleating just like Mrs
Utah Watkins.

UTAH WATKINS (Yawning)

Thirty – four, thirty – five, thirty – six, forty – eight,
eighty-nine…

MRS UTAH WATKINS (Bleating)

Knit one slip one
Knit two together
Pass the slipstitch over…

FIRST VOICE

Ocky Milkman, drowned asleep in Cockle Street, is emptying
his churns into the Dewi River,

OCKY MILKMAN (Whispering)

regardless of expense,

FIRST VOICE

and weeping like a funeral.

SECOND VOICE

Cherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his but nothing
flows out of it. He shakes the tankar ‘ It turns into a
fish. He drinks the fish.

FIRST VOICE

P.C. Attila Rees lumps out of bed, dead to the dar and still
foghorning, and drags out his helmet from under the bed;
but deep in the backyard lock-up of his slee a mean voice
murmurs

A VOICE (Murmuring)

You’ll be sorry for this in the morning,

FIRST VOICE

and he heave-ho’s back to bed. His helmet swashes in the dark.

SECOND VOICE

Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen miles
to deliver the post as he does every day of the night, and
rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.

MRS WILLY NILLY

Don’t spank me, please, teacher,

SECOND VOICE

whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her married
life she has been late for school.

FIRST VOICE

Sinbad Sailors, over the taproom of the Sailors Arms, hugs
his damp pillow whose secret name is Gossamer Beynon.

A mogul catches Lily Smalls in the wash-house.

LILY SMALLS

Ooh, you old mogul!

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Rose Cottage’s eldest, Mae, peals off her pink-and-white
skin in a furnace in a tower in a cave in a waterfall in a
wood and waits there raw as an onion for Mister Right to
leap up the burning tall hollow splashes of leaves like a
brilliantined trout.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE (Very close and softly, drawing
out the words)

Call me Dolores
Like they do in the stories.

FIRST VOICE

Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in
the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and
gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and
picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave
of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she
wasn’t looking and never kissed her again although she was
looking all the time.

And the Inspectors of Cruelty fly down into Mrs Butcher
Brynon’s dream to persecute Mr Beynon for selling

BUTCHER BEYNON

owlmeat, dogs’ eyes, manchop.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Beynon, in butcher’s bloodied apron, spring-heels down
Coronation Street, a finger, not his own, in his mouth.
Straightfaced in his cunning sleep he pulls the legs of
his dreams and

BUTCHER BEYNON

hunting on pigback shoots down the wild giblets.

ORGAN MORGAN (High and softly)

Help!

GOSSAMER BEYNON (Softly)

My foxy darling.

FIRST VOICE

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the
streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the

SECOND VOICE

titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and
bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva
and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks
and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine
and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

FIRST VOICE

The owls are hunting. Look, over Bethesda gravestones one
hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved
Wife. And in Coronation Street, which you alone can see it
is so dark under the chapel in the skies, the Reverend Eli
Jenkins, poet, preacher, turns in his deep towards-dawn
sleep and dreams of

REV. ELI JENKINS

Eisteddfodau.

SECOND VOICE

He intricately rhymes, to the music of crwth and pibgorn,
all night long in his druid’s seedy nightie in a beer-tent
black with parchs.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh, schoolmaster, fathoms asleep, pretends to be sleeping,
spies foxy round the droop of his nightcap and pssst! whistles up

MR PUGH

Murder.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Organ Morgan, groceress, coiled grey like a dormouse,
her paws to her ears, conjures

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Silence.

SECOND VOICE

She sleeps very dulcet in a cove of wool, and trumpeting
Organ Morgan at her side snores no louder than a
spider.

FIRST VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors dreams of

MARY ANN SAILORS

The Garden of Eden.

FIRST VOICE

She comes in her smock-frock and clogs

MARY ANN SAILORS

away from the cool scrubbed cobbled kitchen with the
Sunday-school pictures on the whitewashed wall and the
farmers’ almanac hung above the settle and the sides of
bacon on the ceiling hooks, and goes down the cockleshelled
paths of that applepie kitchen garden, ducking under the
gippo’s clothespegs, catching her apron on the blackcurrant
bushes, past beanrows and onion-bed and tomatoes ripening
on the wall towards the old man playing the harmonium in
the orchard, and sits down on the grass at his side and
shells the green peas that grow up through the lap of her
frock that brushes the dew.

FIRST VOICE

In Donkey Street, so furred with sleep, Dai Bread, Polly
Garter, Nogood Boyo, and Lord Cut-Glass sigh before the
dawn that is about to be and dream of

DAI BREAD

Harems.

POLLY GARTER

Babies.

NOGOOD BOYO

Nothing.

LORD CUT-GLASS

Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.

FIRST VOICE

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. An owl flies I home past
Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak. And the dawn inches up.

[One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating

FIRST VOICE

Stand on this hill. This is Llaregyb Hill, old as the hills,
high, cool, and green, and from this small circle, of stones,
made not by druids but by Mrs Beynon’s Billy, you can see all
the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.

You can hear the love-sick woodpigeons mooning in bed. A dog
barks in his sleep, farmyards away. The town ripples like a
lake in the waking haze.

VOICE OF A GUIDE-BOOK

Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets
and the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that
constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may,
indeed, be called a ‘backwater of life’ without disrespect
to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality
of their own. The main street, Coronation Street, consists,
for the most part, of humble, two-storied houses many of which
attempt to achieve some measure of gaiety by prinking
themselves out in crude colours and by the liberal use of
pinkwash, though there are remaining a few eighteenth-century
houses of more pretension, if, on the whole, in a sad state
of disrepair. Though there is little to attract the hillclimber,
the healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist,
the contemplative may, if sufficiently attracted to spare
it some leisurely hours, find, in its cobbled streets and
its little fishing harbour, in its several curious customs,
and in the conversation of its local ‘characters,’ some of
that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in
towns and villages which have kept more abreast of the times.
The River Dewi is said to abound in trout, but is much poached.
The one place of worship, with its neglected graveyard, is of
no architectural interest.

[A cock crows

FIRST VOICE

The principality of the sky lightens now, over our green
hill, into spring morning larked and crowed and belling.

[Slow bell notes

FIRST VOICE

Who pulls the townhall bellrope but blind Captain Cat? One
by one, the sleepers are rung out of sleep this one morning
as every morning. And soon you shall see the chimneys’ slow
upflying snow as Captain Cat, in sailor’s cap and seaboots,
announces to-day with his loud get-out-of-bed bell.

SECOND VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, in Bethesda House, gropes out of
bed into his preacher’s black, combs back his bard’s white
hair, forgets to wash, pads barefoot downstairs, opens the
front door, stands in the doorway and, looking out at the
day and up at the eternal hill, and hearing the sea break
and the gab of birds, remembers his own verses and tells
them softly to empty Coronation Street that is rising and
raising its blinds.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Dear Gwalia! I know there are
Towns lovelier than ours,
And fairer hills and loftier far,
And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring
And bright with birds’ adorning,
And sweeter bards than I to sing
Their praise this beauteous morning.

By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,
Or Moel yr Wyddfa’s glory,
Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,
Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,
By Penmaenmawr defiant,
Llaregyb Hill a molehill seems,
A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,
Edw, Eden, Aled, all,
Taff and Towy broad and free,
Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,
Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,
Small is our River Dewi, Lord,
A baby on a rushy bed.

By Carreg Cennen, King of time,
Our Heron Head is only
A bit of stone with seaweed spread
Where gulls come to be lonely.

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood
By Golden Grove ‘neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.

SECOND VOICE

The Reverend Jenkins closes the front door. His morning
service is over.

[Slow bell notes

FIRST VOICE

Now, woken at last by the out-of-bed-sleepy-head-Polly-put-
the-kettle-on townhall bell, Lily Smalls, Mrs Beynon’s
treasure, comes downstairs from a dream of royalty who all
night long went larking with her full of sauce in the Milk
Wood dark, and puts the kettle on the primus ring in Mrs
Beynon’s kitchen, and looks at herself in Mr Beynon’s
shaving-glass over the sink, and sees:

LILY SMALLS

Oh there’s a face!
Where you get that hair from?
Got it from a old tom cat.
Give it back then, love.
Oh there’s a perm!

Where you get that nose from, Lily?
Got it from my father, silly.
You’ve got it on upside down!
Oh there’s a conk!

Look at your complexion!
Oh no, you look.
Needs a bit of make-up.
Needs a veil.
Oh there’s glamour!

Where you get that smile,
Lil? Never you mind, girl.
Nobody loves you.
That’s what you think.

Who is it loves you?
Shan’t tell.
Come on, Lily.
Cross your heart then?
Cross my heart.

FIRST VOICE

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,
she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass.

MRS BEYNON (Loudly, from above)

Lily!

LILY SMALLS (Loudly)

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Where’s my tea, girl?

LILY SMALLS

(Softly) Where d’you think? In the cat-box?

(Loudly) Coming up, mum.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh, in the School House opposite, takes up the morning
tea to Mrs Pugh, and whispers on the stairs

MR. PUGH

Here’s your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit.
I’ve throttled your parakeet.
I’ve spat in the vases.
I’ve put cheese in the mouseholes.
Here’s your…                    [Door creaks open
…nice tea, dear.

MRS PUGH

Too much sugar.

MR PUGH

You haven’t tasted it yet, dear.

MRS PUGH

Too much milk, then. Has Mr Jenkins said his poetry?

MR PUGH

Yes, dear.

MRS PUGH

Then it’s time to get up. Give me my glasses.

No, not my reading glasses, I want to look out.
I want to see

SECOND VOICE

Lily Smalls the treasure down on her red knees washing the
front step.

MRS PUGH

She’s tucked her dress in her bloomers–oh, the baggage!

SECOND VOICE

P.C. Attila Rees, ox-broad, barge-booted, stamping out of
Handcuff House in a heavy beef-red huff, black browed under
his damp helmet…

MRS PUGH

He’s going to arrest Polly Garter, mark my words,

MR PUGH

What for, dear?

MRS PUGH

For having babies.

SECOND VOICE

…and lumbering down towards the strand to see that the
sea is still there.

FIRST VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors, opening her bedroom window above the
taproom and calling out to the heavens

MARY ANN SAILORS

I’m eighty-five years three months and a day!

MRS PUGH

I will say this for her, she never makes a mistake.

FIRST VOICE

Organ Morgan at his bedroom window playing chords on the
sill to the morning fishwife gulls who, heckling over Donkey
Street, observe

DAI BREAD

Me, Dai Bread, hurrying to the bakery, pushing in my
shirt-tails, buttoning my waistcoat, ping goes a button,
why can’t they sew them, no time for breakfast, nothing for
breakfast, there’s wives for you.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE
Me, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset,
nice to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles
to stir up a neighbour. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf,
love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. There’s a lovely morning!
How’s your boils this morning? Isn’t that good news now,
it’s a change to sit down. Ta, Mrs Sarah.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

Me, Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet
petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body
through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with
one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black
slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling
gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves,
scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.

LORD CUT-GLASS

Me, Lord Cut-Glass, in an old frock-coat belonged to Eli
Jenkins and a pair of postman’s trousers from Bethesda
Jumble, running out of doors to empty slops–mind there,
Rover!–and then running in again, tick tock.

NOGOOD BO YO

Me, Nogood Boyo, up to no good in the wash-house

MISS PRICE

Me, Miss Price, in my pretty print housecoat, deft at the
clothesline, natty as a jenny-wren, then pit-pat back to my
egg in its cosy, my crisp toast-fingers, my home-made plum
and butterpat.

POLLY GARTER

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast
in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our
garden, only washing. And babies. And where’s their fathers
live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You’re looking
up at me now. I know what you’re thinking, you poor little
milky creature. You’re thinking, you’re no better than you
should be, Polly, and that’s good enough for me. Oh, isn’t
life a terrible thing, thank God?

[Single long high chord on strings
FIRST VOICE

Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchen.
The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down
from Bay View, where Mrs OgmorePritchard, in smock and turban,
big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread
and sips lemon-rind tea, to Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo,
in bowler and bib, gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers
and swigs from the saucebottle. Mary Ann Sailors

MARY ANN SAILORS

praises the Lord who made porridge.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh

MR PUGH

remembers ground glass as he juggles his omelet.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Pugh

MRS PUGH

nags the salt-cellar.

FIRST VOICE

Willy Nilly postman

WILLY NILLY

downs his last bucket of black brackish tea and rumbles out
bandy to the clucking back where the hens twitch and grieve
for their tea-soaked sops.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Willy Nilly

MRS WILLY NILLY

full of tea to her double-chinned brim broods and bubbles
over her coven of kettles on the hissing hot range always
ready to steam open the mail.

FIRST VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins

REV. ELI JENKINS

finds a rhyme and dips his pen in his cocoa.

FIRST VOICE

Lord Cut-Glass in his ticking kitchen

LORD CUT-GLASS

scampers from clock to clock, a bunch of clock-keys in one
hand, a fish-head in the other.

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat in his galley

CAPTAIN CAT

blind and fine-fingered savours his sea-fry.

FIRST VOICE

Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen, in their Donkey Street room that is
bedroom, parlour, kitchen, and scullery, sit down to last
night’s supper of onions boiled in their overcoats and broth
of spuds and baconrind and leeks and bones.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

See that smudge on the wall by the picture of Auntie Blossom?
That’s where you threw the sago.

[Cherry Owen laughs with delight

MRS CHERRY OWEN

You only missed me by a inch.

CHERRY OWEN

I always miss Auntie Blossom too.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Remember last night? In you reeled, my boy, as drunk as a
deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout
and you looked at me and you said, ‘God has come home!’ you
said, and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and
bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels.

CHERRY OWEN

Was I wounded?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you took off your trousers and you said, ‘Does
anybody want a fight!’ Oh, you old baboon.

CHERRY OWEN

Give me a kiss.

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you sang ‘Bread of Heaven,’ tenor and bass.

CHERRY OWEN

I always sing ‘Bread of Heaven.’

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then you did a little dance on the table.

CHERRY OWEN

I did?
MRS CHERRY OWEN

Drop dead!

CHERRY OWEN

And then what did I do?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Then you cried like a baby and said you were a poor drunk
orphan with nowhere to go but the grave.

CHERRY OWEN

And what did I do next, my dear?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

Then you danced on the table all over again and said you
were King Solomon Owen and I was your Mrs Sheba.

CHERRY OWEN (Softy)

And then?

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And then I got you into bed and you snored all night like
a brewery.

[Mr and Mrs Cherry Owen laugh delightedly together

FIRST VOICE

From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of
fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath. And listen!
In the dark breakfast-room behind the shop, Mr and Mrs Beynon,
waited upon by their treasure, enjoy, between bites, their
everymorning hullabaloo, and Mrs Beynon slips the gristly
bits under the tasselled tablecloth to her fat cat.

[Cat purrs

MRS BEYNON

She likes the liver, Ben.

MR BEYNON

She ought to do, Bess. It’s her brother’s.

MRS BEYNON (Screaming)

Oh, d’you hear that, Lily?

LILY SMALLS

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

We’re eating pusscat.

LILY SMALLS

Yes, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, you cat-butcher!

MR BEYNON

It was doctored, mind.

MRS BEYNON (Hysterical)

What’s that got to do with it?

MR BEYNON

Yesterday we had mole.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, Lily, Lily!

MR BEYNON

Monday, otter. Tuesday, shrews.

[Mrs Beynon screams

LILY SMALLS

Go on, Mrs Beynon. He’s the biggest liar in town.

MRS BEYNON

Don’t you dare say that about Mr Beynon.

LILY SMALLS

Everybody knows it, mum.

MRS BEYNON

Mr Beynon never tells a lie. Do you, Ben?

MR BEYNON

No, Bess. And now I am going out after the corgies, with my
little cleaver.

MRS BEYNON

Oh, Lily, Lily!

FIRST VOICE

Up the street, in the Sailors Arms, Sinbad Sailors, grandson
of Mary Ann Sailors, draws a pint in the sunlit bar. The
ship’s clock in the bar says half past eleven. Half past
eleven is opening time. The hands of the clock have stayed
still at half past eleven for fifty years. It is always
opening time in the Sailors Arms.

SINBAD

Here’s to me, Sinbad.

FIRST VOICE

All over the town, babies and old men are cleaned and put into
their broken prams and wheeled on to the sunlit cockled cobbles
or out into the backyards under the dancing underclothes, and
left. A baby cries.

OLD MAN

I want my pipe and he wants his bottle.

[School bell rings

FIRST VOICE

Noses are wiped, heads picked, hair combed, paws scrubbed,
ears boxed, and the children shrilled off to school.

SECOND VOICE

Fishermen grumble to their nets. Nogood Boyo goes out in
the dinghy Zanzibar, ships the oars, drifts slowly in the
dab-filled bay, and, lying on his back in the unbaled water,
among crabs’ legs and tangled lines, looks up at the
spring sky.

NOGOOD BOYO (Softly, lazily)

I don’t know who’s up there and I don’t care.

FIRST VOICE

He turns his head and looks up at Llaregyb Hill, and sees,
among green lathered trees, the white houses of the strewn
away farms, where farmboys whistle, dogs shout, cows low,
but all too far away for him, or you, to hear. And in the
town, the shops squeak open. Mr Edwards, in butterfly-collar
and straw-hat at the doorway of Manchester House, measures
with his eye the dawdlers-by for striped flannel shirts and
shrouds and flowery blouses, and bellows to himself in the
darkness behind his eye

MR EDWARDS (Whispers)

I love Miss Price.

FIRST VOICE

Syrup is sold in the post-office. A car drives to market,
full of fowls and a farmer. Milk-churns stand at Coronation
Corner like short silver policemen. And, sitting at the
open window of Schooner House, blind Captain Cat hears all
the morning of the town.

[School bell in background.
Children’s voices. The noise of
children’s feet on the cobbles

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly, to himself)

Maggie Richards, Ricky Rhys, Tommy Powell, our Sal, little
Gerwain, Billy Swansea with the dog’s voice, one of Mr
Waldo’s, nasty Humphrey, Jackie with the sniff….Where’s
Dicky’s Albie? and the boys from Ty-pant? Perhaps they got
the rash again.

[A sudden cry among the children’s voices

CAPTAIN CAT

Somebody’s hit Maggie Richards. Two to one it’s Billy Swansea.
Never trust a boy who barks.

[A burst of yelping crying

Right again! It’s Billy.

FIRST VOICE

And the children’s voices cry away.

[Postman’s rat-a-tat on door, distant

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly, to himself)

That’s Willy Nilly knocking at Bay View. Rat-a-tat, very
soft. The knocker’s got a kid glove on. Who’s sent a letter
to Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard?

[Rat-a-tat, distant again

CAPTAIN CAT

Careful now, she swabs the front glassy. Every step’s like
a bar of soap. Mind your size twelveses. That old Bessie
would beeswax the lawn to make the birds slip.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE -PRITCHARD

Good morning, postman.

WILLY NILLY

Here’s a letter for you with stamped and addressed envelope
enclosed, all the way from Builth Wells. A gentleman wants
to study birds and can he have accommodation for two weeks
and a bath vegetarian.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

No.
WILLY NILLY (Persuasively)

You wouldn’t know he was in the house, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard.
He’d be out in the mornings at the bang of dawn with his bag
of breadcrumbs and his little telescope…

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

And come home at all hours covered with feathers. I don’t
want persons in my nice clean rooms breathing all over the
chairs…

WILLY NILLY

Cross my heart, he won’t breathe.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

…and putting their feet on my carpets and sneezing on my
china and sleeping in my sheets…

WILLY NILLY

He only wants a single bed, Mrs Ogmore. Pritchard.

[Door slams

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly)

And back she goes to the kitchen to polish the potatoes.

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat hears Willy Nilly’s feet heavy on the distant
cobbles.

CAPTAIN CAT

One, two, three, four, five…That’s Mrs Rose Cottage.
What’s to-day? To-day she gets the letter from her sister
in Gorslas. How’s the twins’ teeth?

He’s stopping at School House.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mrs Pugh. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard won’t have a
gentleman in from Builth Wells because he’ll sleep in her
sheets, Mrs Rose Cottage’s sister in Gorslas’s twins have
got to have them out…

MRS PUGH

Give me the parcel.

WILLY NILLY

It’s for Mr Pugh, Mrs Pugh.

MRS PUGH

Never you mind. What’s inside it?

WILLY NILLY

A book called Lives of the Great Poisoners.

CAPTAIN CAT

That’s Manchester House.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mr Edwards. Very small news. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard
won’t have birds in the house, and Mr Pugh’s bought a book
now on how to do in Mrs Pugh.

MR EDWARDS

Have you got a letter from her?

WILLY NILLY

Miss Price loves you with all her heart. Smelling of lavender
to-day. She’s down to the last of the elderflower wine but
the quince jam’s bearing up and she’s knitting roses on the
doilies. Last week she sold three jars of boiled sweets,
pound of humbugs, half a box of jellybabies and six coloured
photos of Llaregyb. Yours for ever. Then twenty-one X’s.

MR EDWARDS

Oh, Willy Nilly, she’s a ruby! Here’s my letter. Put it
into her hands now.

[Slow feet on cobbles, quicker feet approaching

CAPTAIN CAT

Mr Waldo hurrying to the Sailors Arms. Pint of stout with
a egg in it.                 [Footsteps stop

(Softly) There’s a letter for him.

WILLY NILLY

It’s another paternity summons, Mr Waldo.

FIRST VOICE

The quick footsteps hurry on along the cobbles and up
three steps to the Sailors Arms.

MR WALDO (Calling out)

Quick, Sinbad. Pint of stout. And no egg in.

FIRST VOICE

People are moving now up and down the cobbled street.

CAPTAIN CAT

All the women are out this morning, in the sun. You can
tell it’s Spring. There goes Mrs Cherry, you can tell her
by her trotters, off she trots new as a daisy. Who’s that
talking by the pump? Mrs Floyd and Boyo, talking flatfish.
What can you talk about flatfish? That’s Mrs Dai Bread
One, waltzing up the street like a jelly, every time she
shakes it’s slap slap slap. Who’s that? Mrs Butcher Beynon
with her pet black cat, it follows her everywhere, miaow
and all. There goes Mrs Twenty-Three, important, the sun
gets up and goes down in her dewlap, when she shuts her
eyes, it’s night. High heels now, in the morning too, Mrs
Rose Cottage’s eldest Mae, seventeen and never been kissed
ho ho, going young and milking under my window to the
field with the nannygoats, she reminds me all the way.
Can’t hear what the women are gabbing round the pump. Same
as ever. Who’s having a baby, who blacked whose eye, seen
Polly Garter giving her belly an airing, there should be
a law, seen Mrs Beynon’s new mauve jumper, it’s her old
grey jumper dyed, who’s dead, who’s dying, there’s a
lovely day, oh the cost of soapflakes!

[Organ music, distant

CAPTAIN CAT

Organ Morgan’s at it early. You can tell it’s Spring.

FIRST VOICE

And he hears the noise of milk-cans.

CAPTAIN CAT

Ocky Milkman on his round. I will say this, his milk’s as
fresh as the dew. Half dew it is. Snuffle on, Ocky,
watering the town…Somebody’s coming. Now the voices
round the pump can see somebody coming. Hush, there’s a
hush! You can tell by the noise of the hush, it’s Polly
Garter. (Louder) Hullo, Polly, who’s there?

POLLY GARTER (Off)

Me, love.

CAPTAIN CAT

That’s Polly Garter. (Softly) Hullo, Polly my love, can
you hear the dumb goose-hiss of the wives as they huddle
and peck or flounce at a waddle away? Who cuddled you
when? Which of their pandering hubbies moaned in Milk Wood
for your naughty mothering arms and body like a wardrobe,
love? Scrub the floors of the Welfare Hall for the
Mothers’ Union Social Dance, you’re one mother won’t
wriggle her roly poly bum or pat her fat little buttery
feet in that wedding-ringed holy to-night though the
waltzing breadwinners snatched from the cosy smoke of the
Sailors Arms will grizzle and mope.

[A cock crows

CAPTAIN CAT

Too late, cock, too late

SECOND VOICE

for the town’s half over with its morning. The morning’s
busy as bees.

[Organ music fades into silence

FIRST VOICE

There’s the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles
of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble
quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced
boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are
grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills
ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring
whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the
gulls’ gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea
and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of
sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock
strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the
beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs
Organ Morgan’s general shop where everything is sold:
custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar,
stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.

FIRST WOMAN

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard

SECOND WOMAN

la di da

FIRST WOMAN

got a man in Builth Wells

THIRD WOMAN

and he got a little telescope to look at birds

SECOND WOMAN

Willy Nilly said

THIRD WOMAN

Remember her first husband? He didn’t need a telescope

FIRST WOMAN

he looked at them undressing through the keyhole

THIRD WOMAN

and he used to shout Tallyho

SECOND WOMAN

but Mr Ogmore was a proper gentleman

FIRST WOMAN

even though he hanged his collie.

THIRD WOMAN

Seen Mrs Butcher Beynon?

SECOND WOMAN

she said Butcher Beynon put dogs in the mincer

FIRST WOMAN

go on, he’s pulling her leg

THIRD WOMAN

now don’t you dare tell her that, there’s a dear

SECOND WOMAN

or she’ll think he’s trying to pull it off and eat it,

FOURTH WOMAN

There’s a nasty lot live here when you come to think.

FIRST WOMAN

Look at that Nogood Boyo now

SECOND WOMAN

too lazy to wipe his snout

THIRD WOMAN

and going out fishing every day and all he ever brought
back was a Mrs Samuels

FIRST WOMAN

been in the water a week.

SECOND WOMAN

And look at Ocky Milkman’s wife that nobody’s ever seen

FIRST WOMAN

he keeps her in the cupboard with the empties

THIRD WOMAN

and think of Dai Bread with two wives

SECONE WOMAN

one for the daytime one for the night.

FOURTH WOMAN

Men are brutes on the quiet.

THIRD WOMAN

And how’s Organ Morgan, Mrs Morgan?

FIRST WOMAN

you look dead beat

SECOND WOMAN

it’s organ organ all the time with him

THIRD WOMAN

up every night until midnight playing the organ.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Oh, I’m a martyr to music.

FIRST VOICE

Outside, the sun springs down on the rough and tumbling
town. It runs through the hedges of Goosegog Lane, cuffing
the birds to sing. Spring whips green down Cockle Row, and
the shells ring out. Llaregyb this snip of a morning is
wildfruit and warm, the streets, fields, sands and waters
springing in the young sun.

SECOND VOICE

Evans the Death presses hard with black gloves on the
coffin of his breast in case his hearts jumps out,

EVANS THE DEATH (Harshly)

Where’s your dignity. Lie down.

SECOND VOICE

Spring stirs Gossamer Beynon schoolmistress like spoon.

GOSSAMER BEYNON (Tearfully)

Oh, what can I do? I’ll never be refined if I twitch.

SECOND VOICE

Spring this strong morning foams in a flame in Jack Black
as he cobbles a high-heeled shoe for Mrs Dai Bread Two the
gypsy, but he hammers it sternly out.

JACK BLACK (To a hammer rhythm)

There is no leg belonging to the foot that belongs to this
shoe.

SECOND VOICE

The sun and the green breeze ship Captain Cat sea-memory
again.

CAPTAIN CAT

No, I’ll take the mulatto, by God, who’s captain here?
Parlez-vous jig jig, Madam?

SECOND VOICE

Mary Ann Sailors says very softly to herself as she looks
out at Llaregyb Hill from the bedroom where she was born

MARY ANN SAILORS (Loudly)

It is Spring in Llaregyb in the sun in my old age, and
this is the Chosen Land.

[A choir of children’s voices suddenly cries out on one,
high, glad, long, sighing note

FIRST VOICE

And in Willy Nilly the Postman’s dark and sizzling damp
tea-coated misty pygmy kitchen where the spittingcat
kettles throb and hop on the range, Mrs Willy Nilly steams
open Mr Mog Edwards’ letter to Miss Myfanwy Price and
reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring
sun through the one sealed window running with tears,
while the drugged, bedraggled hens at the back door
whimper and snivel for the lickerish bog-black tea.

MRS WILLY NILLY

From Manchester House, Llaregyb. Sole Prop: Mr Mog Edwards
(late of Twll), Linendraper, Haberdasher, Master Tailor,
Costumier. For West End Negligee, Lingerie, Teagowns,
Evening Dress, Trousseaux, Layettes. Also Ready to Wear
for All Occasions. Economical Outfitting for Agricultural
Employment Our Speciality, Wardrobes Bought. Among Our
Satisfied Customers Ministers of Religion and J .P ‘s.
Fittings by Appointment. Advertising Weekly in the Twll
Bugle. Beloved Myfanwy Price my Bride in Heaven,

MOG EDWARDS

I love you until Death do us part and then we shall be
together for ever and ever. A new parcel of ribbons has
come from Carmarthen to-day, all the colours in the
rainbow. I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair a white
one but it cannot be. I dreamed last night you were all
dripping wet and you sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins
went down the street. I see you got a mermaid in your lap
he said and he lifted his hat. He is a proper Christian.
Not like Cherry Owen who said you should have thrown her
back he said. Business is very poorly. Polly Garter bought
two garters with roses but she never got stockings so what
is the use I say. Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman’s
nightie outsize he said he found it and we know where. I
sold a packet of pins to Tom the Sailors to pick his
teeth. If this goes on I shall be in the workhouse. My
heart is in your bosom and yours is in mine. God be with
you always Myfanwy Price and keep you lovely for me in His
Heavenly Mansion. I must stop now and remain, Your Eternal,
Mog Edwards.

MRS WILLY NILLY

And then a little message with a rubber stamp. Shop at
Mog’s!!!

FIRST VOICE.

And Willy Nilly, rumbling, jockeys out again to the
three-seated shack called the House of Commons in the back
where the hens weep, and sees, in sudden Springshine,

SECOND VOICE

herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the
fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy
sea smooth to the sea’s end as it lulls in blue. Green and
gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers,
pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and
leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of
fishes through the cold sea-streets. But with blue lazy
eyes the fishermen gaze at that milkmaid whispering water
with no nick or ripple as though it blew great guns and
serpents and typhooned the town.

FISHERMAN

Too rough for fishing to-day.

SECOND VOICE

And they thank God, and gob at a gull for luck, and
moss-slow and silent make their way uphill, from the still
still sea, towards the Sailors Arms as the children

[School bell

FIRST VOICE

spank and scamper rough and singing out of school into the
draggletail yard. And Captain Cat at his window says soft
to himself the words of their song.

CAPTAIN CAT (To the beat of the singing)

Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Kept their baby in a
milking pail Flossie
Snail and Johnnie Crack
One would pull it out and one would put it back

O it’s my turn now said Flossie Snail
To take the baby from the milking pail
And it’s my turn now said Johnnie Crack
To smack it on the head and put it back

Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Kept their baby in a milking pail
One would put it back and one would pull it out
And all it had to drink was ale and stout
For Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
Always used to say that stout and ale
Was good for a baby in a milking pail.

[Long pause

FIRST VOICE

The music of the spheres is heard distinctly over Milk
Wood. It is ‘The Rustle of Spring.’

SECOND VOICE

A glee-party sings in Bethesda Graveyard, gay but muffled.

FIRST VOICE

Vegetables make love above the tenors

SECOND VOICE

and dogs bark blue in the face.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard belches in a teeny hanky and chases
the sunlight with a flywhisk, but even she cannot drive
out the Spring: from one of the finger-bowls a primrose
grows.

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Dai Bread One and Mrs Dai Bread Two are sitting
outside their house in Donkey Lane, one darkly one plumply
blooming in the quick, dewy sun. Mrs Dai Bread Two is
looking into a crystal ball which she holds in the lap of
her dirty yellow petticoat, hard against her hard dark
thighs.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

Cross my palm with silver. Out of our housekeeping money.
Aah!

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

What d’you see, lovie?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

I see a featherbed. With three pillows on it. And a text
above the bed. I can’t read what it says, there’s great
clouds blowing. Now they have blown away. God is Love, the
text says.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE (Delighted)

That’s our bed.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

And now it’s vanished. The sun’s spinning like a top.
Who’s this coming out of the sun? It’s a hairy little man
with big pink lips. He got a wall eye.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

It’s Dai, it’s Dai Bread!

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

Ssh! The featherbed’s floating back. The little man’s
taking his boots off. He’s pulling his shirt over his
head. He’s beating his chest with his fists. I le’s
climbing into bed.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Go on, go on.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

There’s two women in bed. He looks at them both, with his
head cocked on one side. He’s whistling through his teeth.
Now he grips his little arms round one of the women.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Which one, which one?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

I can’t see any more. There’s great clouds blowing again.

MRS DAI BREAD ONE

Ach, the mean old clouds!

[Pause. The children’s singing fades

FIRST VOICE

The morning is all singing. The Reverend Eli Jenkins, busy
on his morning calls, stops outside the Welfare Hall to
hear Polly Garter as she scrubs the floors for the
Mothers’ Union Dance to-night.

POLLY GARTER (Singing)

I loved a man whose name was Tom
He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry
But the one I loved best awake or asleep
Was little Willy Wee and he’s six feet deep.

O Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I’ll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Wee was the man for me.

Now men from every parish round
Run after me and roll me on the ground
But whenever I love another man back
Johnnie from the Hill or Sailing Jack
I always think as they do what they please
Of Tom Dick and Harry who were tall as trees
And most I think when I’m by their side
Of little Willy Wee who downed and died.

O Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I’ll never have such loving again
But little Willy Wee who took me on his knee
Little Willy Weazel is, the man for me.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Praise the Lord! We are a musical nation.

SECOND VOICE

And the Reverend Jenkins hurries on through the town to
visit the sick with jelly and poems.

FIRST VOICE

The town’s as full as a lovebird’s egg.

MR WALDO

There goes the Reverend,

FIRST VOICE

says Mr Waldo at the smoked herring brown window of the
unwashed Sailors Arms,

MR WALDO

with his brolly and his odes. Fill ‘em up, Sinbad, I’m on
the treacle to-day.

SECOND VOICE

The silent fishermen flush down their pints.

SINBAD

Oh, Mr Waldo,

FIRST VOICE

sighs Sinbad Sailors,

SINBAD

I dote on that Gossamer Beynon. She’s a lady all over.

FIRST VOICE

And Mr Waldo, who is thinking of a woman soft as Eve and
sharp as sciatica to share his bread-pudding bed, answers

MR WALDO

No lady that I know is

SINBAD

And if only grandma’d die, cross my heart I’d go down on
my knees Mr Waldo and I’d say Miss Gossamer I’d say

CHILDREN’S VOICES

When birds do sing hey ding a ding a ding
Sweet lovers love the Spring…

SECOND VOICE

Polly Garter sings, still on her knees,

POLLY GARTER

Tom Dick and Harry were three fine men
And I’ll never have such

CHILDREN

ding a ding

POLLY GARTER

again.

FIRST VOICE

And the morning school is over, and Captain Cat at his
curtained schooner’s porthole open to the Spring sun tides
hears the naughty forfeiting children tumble and rhyme on
the cobbles.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Gwennie call the boys
They make such a noise.

GIRL

Boys boys boys
Come along to me’.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me in Goosegog Lane
Or give me a penny.
What’s your name?

FIRST BOY

Billy.

GIRL

Kiss me in Goosegog Lane Billy
Or give me a penny silly.

FIRST BO Y

Gwennie Gwennie
I kiss you in Goosegog Lane.
Now I haven’t got to give you a penny.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill
Or give me a penny.
What’s your name?

SECOND BOY

Johnnie Cristo.

GIRL

Kiss me on Llaregyb Hill Johnnie Cristo
Or give me a penny mister.

SECOND BOY

Gwennie Gwennie
I kiss you on Llaregyb Hill.
Now I haven’t got to give you a penny.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Boys boys boys
Kiss Gwennie where she says
Or give her a penny.
Go on, Gwennie.

GIRL

Kiss me in Milk Wood
Or give me a penny.
What’s your name?

THIRD BOY

Dicky.

GIRL

Kiss me in Milk Wood Dicky
Or give me a penny quickly.

THIRD BOY

Gwennie Gwennie
I can’t kiss you in Milk Wood.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Gwennie ask him why.

GIRL

Why?

THIRD BOY

Because my mother says I mustn’t.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Cowardy cowardy custard
Give Gwennie a penny.

GIRL

Give me a penny.

THIRD BOY

I haven’t got any.

GIRLS’ VOICES

Put him in the river
Up to his liver
Quick quick Dirty Dick
Beat him on the bum
With a rhubarb stick.
Aiee!
Hush!

FIRST VOICE

And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and
squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away
downhill with his patched pants falling, and his
tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant
bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and
the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and
his mother’s shame and his father’s wickedness with the
loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It
all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum,
for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and welshcakes
and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her
arms, he’ll never forget as he paddles blind home through
the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle
and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies
sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is
cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round
buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that
rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, winegums, hundreds and
thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nougat to tug and
ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue
in girls’ curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood,
ice-cream comets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and
cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.

SECOND VOICE

Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school The sun hums down
through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of
her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and
kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast.
Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street,
steaming ‘Gossamer,’ and strip her to the nipples and the
bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms, the only
woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on
her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing
cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.

GOSSAMER BEYNON

I don’t care if he is common,

SECOND VOICE

she whispers to her salad-day deep self,

GOSSAMER BEYNON

I want to gobble him up. I don’t care if he does drop his
aitches,

SECOND VOICE

she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world big-beamed
and Eve-hipped spring of her self,

GOSSAMER BEYNON

so long as he’s all cucumber and hooves.

SECOND VOICE

Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and
schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat,
with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher’s
unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled for ever from the
hungry hug of his eyes.

SINBAD SAILORS

Oh, Gossamer Beynon, why are you so proud?

SECOND VOICE

he grieves to his guinness,

SINBAD SAILORS

Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B, I wish I wish that you
were for me. I wish you were not so educated.

SECOND VOICE

She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the
world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror
of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration,
and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high with
chips and the kidneys of lambs.

FIRST VOICE

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty
and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh
are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as
he forks the shroud meat in, from Lives of the Great
Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round
the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up
at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on
reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in
secret.

MRS PUGH

Persons with manners do not read at table,

FIRST VOICE

says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a
horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.

[Pause

MRS PUGH

Some persons were brought up in pigsties.

MR PUGH

Pigs don’t read at table, dear.

FIRST VOICE

Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles
on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.

MR PUGH

Pigs can’t read, my dear.

MRS PUGH

I know one who can.

FIRST VOICE

Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh
minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through
spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his
crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous
porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and
viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her
toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes
screaming out of her navel.

MR PUGH

You know best, dear,

FIRST VOICE

says Mr Pugh, and quick as a flash he ducks her in rat
soup.

MRS PUGH

What’s that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?

MR PUGH

It’s a theological work, my dear. Lives of the Great
Saints.

FIRST VOICE

Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the
dining-vault.

MRS PUGH

I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly
Garter. She was martyred again last night. Mrs Organ
Morgan saw her with Mr Waldo.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

And when they saw me they pretended they were looking for
nests,

SECOND VOICE

said Mrs Organ Morgan to her husband, with her mouth full
of fish as a pelican’s.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

But you don’t go nesting in long combinations, I said to
myself, like Mr Waldo was wearing, and your dress nearly
over your head like Polly Garter’s. Oh, they didn’t fool me.

SECOND VOICE

One big bird gulp, and the flounder’s gone. She licks her
lips and goes stabbing again.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

And when you think of all those babies she’s got, then all
I can say is she’d better give up bird nesting that’s all
I can say, it isn’t the right kind of hobby at all for a
woman that can’t say No even to midgets. Remember Bob
Spit? He wasn’t any bigger than a baby and he gave her
two. But they’re two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit
and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I
like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?

ORGAN MORGAN

Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.

MRS ORGAN MORGAN

Organ Morgan, you haven’t been listening to a word 1 said.
It’s organ organ all the time with you..

FIRST VOICE

And she bursts into tears, and, in the middle of her salty
howling, nimbly spears a small flatfish and pelicans it
whole.

ORGAN MORGAN

And then Palestrina,

SECOND VOICE

says Organ Morgan.

FIRST VOICE

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down
alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps
and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for
each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their
black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth
away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks,
china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like
Noah’s whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships,
clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers,
tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius
clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that
cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony
beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six
singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass
lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark
day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill,
but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different
times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime,
and tock.

SECOND VOICE

The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and
crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its
breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lordly
fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the
tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and
pillage down Armageddon Hill to his double-locked
rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the
bottom of the town that has fallen head over bells in love.

POLLY GARTER

And I’ll never have such loving again,

SECOND VOICE

pretty Polly hums and longs.

POLLY GARTER (Sings)

Now when farmers’ boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms
For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms,

But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead…

[A silence

FIRST VOICE

The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through
the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with
fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday,
the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-anddaisy dingles,
nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag
and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet
wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream
of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for
pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal
and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They
mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails
curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug,
after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey
Down.

MRS PUGH

Persons with manners,

SECOND VOICE

snaps Mrs cold Pugh,

MRS PUGH

do not nod at table.

FIRST VOICE

Mr Pugh cringes awake. He puts on a soft-soaping smile: it
is sad and grey under his nicotine-eggyellow weeping
walrus Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory
of Doctor Crippen.

MRS PUGH

You should wait until you retire to your sty,

SECOND VOICE

says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor. His fawning measly
quarter-smile freezes. Sly and silent, he foxes into his
chemist’s den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle
of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black
Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade,
nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling
stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker
wife.

MR PUGH

I beg your pardon, my dear,

SECOND VOICE

he murmurs with a wheedle.

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun and the
clippered seas he sailed long ago when his eyes were blue
and bright, slumbers and voyages; ear-ringed and rolling,
I Love You Rosie Probert tattooed on his belly, he brawls
with broken bottles in the fug and babel of the dark dock
bars, roves with a herd of short and good time cows in
every naughty port and twines and souses with the drowned
and blowzy-breasted dead. He weeps as he sleeps and sails.

SECOND VOICE

One voice of all he remembers most dearly as his dream
buckets down. Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch,
whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many
another seaman, clearly and near to him speaks from the
bedroom of her dust. In that gulf and haven, fleets by the
dozen have anchored for the little heaven of the night;
but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone. Mrs Probert…

ROSIE PROBERT

from Duck Lane, Jack. Quack twice and ask for Rosie

SECOND VOICE

…is the one love of his sea-life that was sardined with
women.

ROSIE PROBERT (Softly)

What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT

I’ll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like
seals, Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?

CAPTAIN CAT

As true as I’m here
Dear you Tom Cat’s tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.

ROSIE PROBERT

What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor.
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?

CAPTAIN CAT

I’ll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.

ROSIE PROBERT,

Knock twice, Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.

CAPTAIN CAT

Rosie Probert.

ROSIE PROBERT

Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.

CHILD

Look,

FIRST VOICE

says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of
Schooner House,

CHILD

Captain Cat is crying

FIRST VOICE

Captain Cat is crying

CAPTAIN CAT

Come back, come back,

FIRST VOICE

up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal
night.

CHILD

He’s crying all over his nose,

FIRST VOICE

says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.

CHILD

He’s got a nose like strawberries,

FIRST VOICE

the child says ; and then she forgets him too. She sees in
the still middle of the bluebagged bay Nogood Boyo fishing
from the Zanzibar.

CHILD

Nogood Boyo gave me three pennies yesterday but I wouldn’t,

FIRST VOICE

the child tells her mother.

SECOND VOICE

Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught
all day.

NOGOOD BOYO

Bloody funny fish!

SECOND VOICE

Mrs Dai Bread Two gypsies up his mind’s slow eye, dressed
only in a bangle.

NOGOOD BOYO

She’s wearing her nightgown. (Pleadingly) Would you like
this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?

MRS DAI BREAD TWO

No, I won’t!

NOGOOD BO YO

And a bite of my little apple?

SECOND VOICE

he offers with no hope.

FIRST VOICE

She shakes her brass nightgown, and he chases her out of
his mind; and when he comes gusting back, there in the
bloodshot centre of his eye a geisha girl grins and bows
in a kimono of ricepaper.

NOGOOD BO YO

I want to be good Boyo, but nobody’ll let me,

FIRST VOICE

he sighs as she writhes politely. The land fades, the sea
flocks silently away; and through the warm white cloud
where he lies, silky, tingling, uneasy Eastern music
undoes him in a Japanese minute.

SECOND VOICE

The afternoon buzzes like lazy bees round the flowers
round Mae Rose Cottage. Nearly asleep in the field of
nannygoats who hum and gently butt the sun, she blows love
on a puffball.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE (Lazily)

He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me!–the dirty old fool.

SECOND VOICE

Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet-grass, seventeen
and never been sweet in the grass ho ho.

FIRST VOICE

The Reverend Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or
poem-room tells only the truth in his Lifework–the
Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography,
Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in–the White Book
of Llaregyb. Portraits of famous bards and preachers, all
fur and wool from the squint to the kneecaps, hang over
him heavy as sheep, next to faint lady watercolours of
pale green Milk Wood like a lettuce salad dying. His
mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her
wedding-ring waist and bust like a black-clothed
dining-table suffers in her stays.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Oh angels be careful there with your knives and forks,

FIRST VOICE

he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau,
who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was
scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping
with his weakness in the corn. He lost all ambition and
died, with one leg.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Poor Dad,

SECOND VOICE

grieves the Reverend Eli,

REV. ELI JENKINS

to die of drink and agriculture.

SECOND VOICE

Farmer Watkins in Salt Lake Farm hates his cattle on the
hill as he ho’s them in to milking.

UTAH WATKINS (In a fury)

Damn you, you damned dairies!

SECOND VOICE

A cow kisses him.

UTAH WATKINS

Bite her to death!

SECOND VOICE

he shouts to his deaf dog who smiles and licks his hands.

UTAH WATKINS

Gore him, sit on him, Daisy!

SECOND VOICE

he bawls to the cow who barbed him with her tongue, and
she moos gentle words as he raves and dances among his
summerbreathed slaves walking delicately to the farm. The
coming of the end of the Spring day is already reflected
in the lakes of their great eyes. Bessie Bighead greets
them by the names she gave them when they were maidens.

BESSIE BIGHEAD

Peg, Meg, Buttercup, Moll,
Fan from the Castle,
Theodosia and Daisy.

SECOND VOICE

They bow their heads.

FIRST VOICE

Look up Bessie Bighead in the White Book of Llaregyb and
you will find the few haggard rags and the one poor
glittering thread of her history laid out in pages there
with as much love and care as the lock of hair of a first
lost love. Conceived in Milk Wood, born in a barn, wrapped
in paper, left on a doorstep, bigheaded and bass-voiced
she grew in the dark until long-dead Gomer Owen kissed her
when she wasn’t looking because he was dared. Now in the
light she’ll work, sing, milk, say the cows’ sweet names
and sleep until the night sucks out her soul and spits it
into the sky. In her life-long low light, holily Bessie
milks the fond lake-eyed cows as dusk showers slowly down
over byre, sea and town.

Utah Watkins curses through the farmyard on a carthorse.

UTAH WATKINS

Gallop, you bleeding cripple!

FIRST VOICE

and the huge horse neighs softly as though he had given it
a lump of sugar.

Now the town is disk. Each cobble, donkey, goose and
gooseberry street is a thoroughfare of dusk; and dusk and
ceremonial dust, and- night’s first darkening snow, and
the sleep of birds, drift under and through the live dusk
of this place of love. Llaregyb is the capital of dusk.

Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, at the first drop of the
dusk-shower, seals all her sea-view doors, draws the
germ-free blinds, sits, erect as a dry dream on a
high-backed hygienic chair and wills herself to cold,
quick sleep. At once, at twice, Mr Ogmore and Mr
Pritchard, who all dead day long have been gossiping like
ghosts in the woodshed, planning the loveless destruction
of their glass widow, reluctantly sigh and sidle into her
clean house.

MR PRITCHARD You first, Mr Ogmore.

MR OGMORE

After you, Mr Pritchard.

MR PRITCHARD

No, no, Mr Ogmore. You widowed her first.

FIRST VOICE

And in through the keyhole, with tears where their eyes
once were, they ooze and grumble.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Husbands,

FIRST VOICE

she says in her sleep. There is acid love in her voice for
one of the two shambling phantoms. Mr Ogmore hopes that it
is not for him. So does Mr Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

I love you both.

MR OGMORE (With terror)

Oh, Mrs Ogmore.

MR PRITCHARD (With horror)

Oh, Mrs Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD

Soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your tasks in
order.

MR OGMORE AND MR PRITCHARD

We must take our pyjamas from the drawer marked pyjamas.

MRS OGMORE-PRITCHARD (Coldly)

And then you must take them off.

SECOND VOICE

Down in the dusking town, Mae Rose Cottage, still lying in
clover, listens to the nannygoats chew, draws circles of
lipstick round her nipples.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE

I’m fast. I’m a bad lot. God will strike me dead. I’m
seventeen. I’ll go to hell,

SECOND VOICE

she tells the goats.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE

You just wait. I’ll sin till I blow up!

SECOND VOICE

She lies deep, waiting for the worst to happen; the goats
champ and sneer.

FIRST VOICE

And at the doorway of Bethesda House, the Reverend Jenkins
recites to Llaregyb Hill his sunset poem.

REV. ELI JENKINS

Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I’m sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us all this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye–but just for now!

FIRST VOICE

Jack Black prepares once more to meet his Satan in the
Wood. He grinds his night-teeth, closes his eyes, climbs
into his religious trousers, their flies sewn up with
cobbler’s thread, and pads out, torched and bibled,
grimly, joyfully, into the already sinning dusk.

JACK BLACK

Off to Gomorrah!

SECOND VOICE

And Lily Smalls is up to Nogood Boyo in the wash-house.

FIRST VOICE

And Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the
week, goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon
as he does every night.

CHERRY OWEN

I always say she’s got two husbands,

FIRST VOICE

says Cherry Owen,

CHERRY OWEN

one drunk and one sober.

FIRST VOICE

And Mrs Cherry simply says

MRS CHERRY OWEN

And aren’t I a lucky woman? Because I love them both.

SINBAD

Evening, Cherry.

CHERRY OWEN

Evening, Sinbad.

SINBAD

What’ll you have?

CHERRY OWEN

Too much.

SINBAD

The Sailors Arms is always open…

FIRST VOICE

Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,

SINBAD

…oh, Gossamer, open yours!

FIRST VOICE

Dusk is drowned for ever until to-morrow, It is all at
once night now, The windy town is a hill of windows, and
from the larrupped waves the lights of the lamps in the
windows call back the day and the dead that have run away
to sea. All over the calling dark, babies and old men are
bribed and lullabied to sleep.

FIRST WOMAN’S VOICE

Hushabye, baby, the sandman is coming…

SECOND WOMAN’S VOICE (Singing)

Rockabye, grandpa, in the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come grandpa, whiskers and all.

FIRST VOICE

Or their daughters cover up the old unwinking men like
parrots, and in their little dark in the lit and bustling
young kitchen corners, all night long they watch,
beady-eyed, the long night through in case death catches
them asleep.

SECOND VOICE

Unmarried girls, alone in their privately bridal bedrooms,
powder and curl for the Dance of the World.

[Accordion music: dim

They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or
come-hithering faces for the young men in the street
outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the
all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.

[Accordion music louder, then fading under

FIRST VOICE

The drinkers in the Sailors Arms drink to the failure of
the dance.

A DRINKER

Down with the waltzing and the skipping.

CHERRY OWEN

Dancing isn’t natural,

FIRST VOICE

righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed seventeen
pints of flat, warm, thin, Welsh, bitter beer.

SECOND VOICE

A farmer’s lantern glimmers, a spark on Llaregyb hillside.

[Accordion music fades into silence

VOICE FIRST

Llaregyb Hill, writes the Reverend Jenkins in his poem-room,

REV. ELI JENKINS

Llaregyb Hill, that mystic tumulus, the memorial of
peoples that dwelt in the region of Llaregyb before the
Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards
made themselves a wife out of flowers.

SECOND VOICE

Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:

MR WALDO

In Pembroke City when I was young
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley-sweep.
Six cold pennies he
gave me Not a farthing more or less
And all the fare I could afford
Was parsnip gin and watercress.
I did not need a knife and fork
Or a bib up to my chin
To dine on a dish of watercress
And a jug of parsnip gin.
Did you ever hear a growing boy
To live so cruel cheap
On grub that has no flesh and bones
And liquor that makes you weep?
Sweep sweep chimbley sweep,
I wept through Pembroke City
Poor and barefoot in the snow
Till a kind young woman took pity.
Poor little chimbley sweep she said
Black as the ace of spades
O nobody’s swept my chimbley
Since my husband went his ways
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
She sighed to me with a blush
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
Bring along your chimbley brush!

FIRST VOICE

Blind Captain Cat climbs into his bunk. Like a cat, he
sees in the dark. Through the voyages of his tears he
sails to see the dead.

CAPTAIN CAT

Dancing Williams!

FIRST DROWNED

Still dancing.

CAPTAIN CAT

Jonah Jarvis

THIRD DROWNED

Still.

FIRST DROWNED

Curly Bevan’s skull.

ROSIE PROBERT

Rosie, with God. She has forgotten dying.

FIRST VOICE

The dead come out in their Sunday best.

SECOND VOICE

Listen to the night breaking.

FIRST VOICE

Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees
Bach lying on a tombstone.

ORGAN MORGAN

Johann Sebastian!

CHERRY OWEN (Drunkenly)

Who?

ORGAN MORGAN

Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach fach

CHERRY OWEN

To hell with you,

FIRST VOICE

says Cherry Owen who is resting on the tombstone on his
way home.

Mr Mog Edwards and Miss Myfanwy Price happily apart from
one another at the top and the sea end of the town write
their everynight letters of love and desire. In the warm
White Book of Llaregyb you will find the little maps of
the islands of their contentment.

MYFANWY PRICE

Oh, my Mog, I am yours for ever.

FIRST VOICE

And she looks around with pleasure at her own neat
neverdull room which Mr Mog Edwards will never enter.

MOG EDWARDS

Come to my arms, Myfanwy.

FIRST VOICE

And he hugs his lovely money to his own heart.

And Mr Waldo drunk in the dusky wood hugs his lovely Polly
Garter under the eyes and rattling tongues of the
neighbours and the birds, and he does not care. He smacks
his live red lips.

But it is not his name that Polly Garter whispers as she
lies under the oak and loves him back. Six feet deep that
name sings in the cold earth.

POLLY GARTER (Sings)

But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.

FIRST VOICE

The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water
sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The Wood,
whose every tree-foot’s cloven in the black glad sight of
the hunters of lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary
Ann Sailors who knows there is Heaven on earth and the
chosen people of His kind fire in Llaregyb’s land, that is
the fairday farmhands’ wantoning ignorant chapel of
bridesbeds, and, to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a greenleaved
sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly wind-shaken
wood springs awake for the second dark time this one
Spring day.

THE END

• 18 Poems. London: Sunday Referee and the Parton Bookshop, 1934.
• Twenty-five Poems. London: Dent, 1936.
• The Map of Love. London: Dent, 1939.
• The World I Breathe. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1939.
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. London: Dent, 1940.
• New Poems. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1943.
• Deaths and Entrances. London: Dent, 1946.
• Selected Writings. Intro. John L. Sweeney. New York: New Directions, 1946.
• Collected Poems, 1934-1952. London: Dent, 1952.
• In Country Sleep and Other Poems. New York: New Directions, 1952.
• The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1953.
• Quite Early One Morning. London: Dent, 1954.
• Under Milk Wood. Preface by Daniel Jones. 1954. London: Dent/Everyman, 1992.
• A Prospect of the Sea. Ed. Daniel Jones. London: Dent, 1955.
• Adventures in the Skin Trade. Aldine paperback ed., 1955. London: Dent, 1965.
• Letters to Vemon Watkins. Ed. Vemon Watkins. London: Dent and Faber & Faber,1957.
• The Beach of Falesá. 1964. New York: Stein and Day, 1983.
• Twenty Years A-Growing. London: Dent, 1964.
• Me and My Bike. London: Triton, 1965.
• Rebecca’s Daughters. 1965. London: Grafton, 1992.
• The Doctor and the Devils, and Other Scripts. New York: New Directions, 1966.