Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

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(Funeral Blues)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

1938

TRINCULO'S SONG

Mechanic, merchant, king,

Are warmed by the cold clown

Whose head is in the clouds

And never can get down.

Into a solitude

Undreamed of by their fat

Quick dreams have lifted me;

The north wind steals my hat.

On clear days I can see

Green acres far below,

And the red roof where I

Was Little Trinculo.

There lies that solid world

These hands can never reach;

My history, my love,

Is but a choice of speech.

A terror shakes my tree,

A flock of words fly out,

Whereat a laughter shakes

The busy and devout.

Wild images, come down

Out of your freezing sky,

That I, like shorter men,

May get my joke and die.

From "Under Which Lyre"

In our morale must lie our strength:

So, that we may behold at length

Routed Apollo's

Battalions melt away like fog,

Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue,

Which runs as follows: —

Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases,

Thou shalt not write thy doctor' thesis

On education,

Thou shalt not worship projects nor

Shalt thou or thine bow down before

Administration.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,

Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

A social science.

Thou shalt not be on friendly terms

With guys in advertising firms,

Nor speak with such

As read the Bible for its prose,

Nor, above all, make love to those

Who wash too much.

Thou shalt not live within thy means

Nor on plain water and raw greens.

If thou must choose

Between the chances, choose the odd;

Read The New Yorker, trust in God;

1946

THE QUEST

The Door

Out of it steps the future of the poor,

Enigmas, executioners and rules,

Her Majesty in a bad temper or

The red-nosed Fool who makes a fool of fools.

Great person eye it in the twilight for

A past it might so carelessly let in,

A widow with a missionary grin,

The foaming inundation at a roar.

We pile our all against it when afraid,

And beat upon its panels when we die:

By happening to be open once, it made

Enormous Alice see a wonderland

That waited for her in sunshine, and,

Simply by being tiny, made her cry.

The Preparations

All had been ordered weeks before the start

From the best firms at such work; instruments

To take the measure of all queer events,

And drugs to move the bowels or the heart.

A watch, of course, to watch impatience fly

Lamps for the dark and shades against the sun;

Foreboding, too, insisted on a gun

And colored beads to soothe a savage eye.

In the theory they were sound on Expectation

Had there been situations to be in;

Unluckily they were their situation:

One should not give a poisoner medicine,

A conjurer fine apparatus, nor

A rifle to a melancholic bore.

The Crossroads

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,

Each to his own mistake; one flashes on

To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,

A village torpor holds the other one,

Some local wrong where it takes time to die:

The empty junction glitters in the sun.

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell,

O places of decision and farewell,

To what dishonor all adventure leads,

What parting gift could give that friend protection,

So orientated, his salvation needs

The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,

But none have ever thought, the legends say,

The time allowed made it impossible;

For even the most pessimistic set

The limit of their errors at a year.

What friends could there be left then to betray,

What joy take longer to atone for. Yet

Who would complete without extra day

The journey that should take no time at all?

The Pilgrim

No windows in his suburb lights that bedroom where

A little fever heard large afternoons at play:

His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there

Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.

Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found

The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;

For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round

Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.

Could he forget a child's ambition to be old

All institutions where it learned to wash and lie,

He'd tell the truth, for which he thinks himself too young,

That everywhere on the horizon of his sigh

Is now, as always, only waiting to be told

To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.

The City

In villages from which their childhood's came

Seeking Necessity, they had been taught

Necessity by nature is the same,

No matter how or by whom it be sought.

The city, though, assumed no such belief,

But welcomed each as if he came alone,

The nature of Necessity like grief

Exactly corresponding to his own.

And offered them so many, every one

Found some temptation fit to govern him;

And settled down to master the whole craft

Of being nobody; sat in the sun

During the lunch-hour round the fountain rim;

And watched the country kids arrive, and laughed.

The First Temptation

Ashamed to be the darling of his grief

He joined a gang of rowdy stories where

His gift for magic quickly made him chief

Of all these boyish powers of the air;

Who turned his hungers into Roman food,

The town's asymmetry into a park;

All hours took taxis; any solitude

Became his flattered duchess in the dark.

But if he wished for anything less grand,

The nights came padding after him like wild

Beasts that meant harm, and all the doors cried Thief;

And when Truth met him and put out her hand,

He clung in panic to his tall belief

And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

The Second Temptation

The library annoyed him with its look

Of calm belief in being really there;

He threw away a rival's silly book,

And clattered panting up the spiral stair.

Swaying upon the parapet he cried:

"O Uncreated Nothing, set me free

Now let Thy perfect be identified,

Unending passion of the Night, with Thee."

And his long suffering flesh, that all the time

Had felt the simple cravings of the stone

And hoped to be rewarded for her climb,

Took it to be a promise when he spoke

That now at last she would be left alone,

And plunged into the college quad, and broke.

The Third Temptation

He watched with all his organs of concern

How princes walk, what wives and children say;

Reopened old graves in his heart to learn

What laws the dead had died to disobey.

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:

"All the arm-chair philosophers are false;

To love another adds to the confusion;

The song of pity is the Devil's Waltz."

And bowed to fate and was successful so

That soon he was the king of all the creatures:

Yet, shaking in an autumn nightmare saw,

Approaching down a ruined corridor,

A figure with his own distorted features

That wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.

The Tower

This is architecture for the odd;

Thus heaven was attacked by the afraid,

So once, unconsciously, a virgin made

Her maiden head conspicuous to a god.

Here on dark nights while worlds of triumph sleep

Lost Love in abstract speculation burns,

And exiled Will to politics returns

In epic verse that lets its traitors weep.

Yet many come to wish their tower a well;

For those who dread to drown of thirst may die,

For those who see all become invisible:

Here great magicians caught in their own spell

Long for a natural climate as they sigh

"Beware of Magic" to the passer-by.

The Presumptuous

They noticed that virginity was needed

To trap the unicorn in every case,

But not that, of those virgins who succeeded,

A high percentage had an ugly face.

The hero was as daring as they thought him,

But his peculiar boyhood missed them all;

The angel of a broken leg had taught him

The right precautions to avoid a fall.

So in presumption they set forth alone

On what, for them, was not compulsory:

And stuck halfway to settle in some cave

With desert lions to domesticity;

Or turned aside to be absurdly brave,

And met the ogre and were turned to stone.

The Average

His peasant parents killed themselves with toil

To let their darling leave a stingy soil

For any of those smart professions which

Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.

The pressure of their fond ambition made

Their shy and country-loving child afraid

No sensible career was good enough,

Only a hero could deserve such love.

So here he was without maps or supplies,

A hundred miles from any decent town;

The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;

The silence roared displeasure: looking down,

He saw the shadow of an Average Man

Attempting the Exceptional, and ran.

Vocation

Incredulous, he stared at the amused

Official writing down his name among

Those whose request to suffer was refused.

The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late

To join the martyrs, there was still a place

Among the tempters for a caustic tongue

To test the resolution of the young

With tales of the small failings of the great,

And shame the eager with ironic praise

Though mirrors might be hateful for a while,

Women and books should teach his middle age

The fencing wit of an informal style

To keep the silences at bay and cage

His pacing manias in a worldly smile.

The Useful

The over-logical fell for the witch

Whose argument converted him to stone;

Thieves rapidly absorbed the over-rich;

The over-popular went mad alone,

And kisses brutalized the over-male.

As agents their effectiveness soon ceased;

Yet, in proportion as they seemed to fail,

Their instrumental value was increased

To those still able to obey their wish.

By standing stones the blind can feel their way,

Wild dogs compel the cowardly to fight,

Beggars assist the slow to travel light,

And even madmen manage to convey

Unwelcome truths in lonely gibberish.

The Way

Fresh addenda are published every day

To the encyclopedia of the Way.

Linguistic notes and scientific explanations

And texts for schools with modernized spelling and illustrations.

Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse,

Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse,

And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:

Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,

The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock

For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock

Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men

Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then

And how reliable can any truth be that is got

By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

The Lucky

Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee,

He would have only found where not to look;

Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed,

It would not have unearthed the buried city;

Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid,

The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

"It was not I," he cried as, healthy and astounded,

He stepped across a predecessor's skull;

"A nonsense jingle simply came into my head

And left the intellectual Sphinx dumbfounded;

I won the Queen because my hair was red;

The terrible adventure is a little dull."

Hence Failure's torment: "Was I doomed in any case,

Or would I not have failed had I believed in Grace?"

The Hero

Не parried every question that they hurled:

"What did the Emperor tell you?" "Not to push"

"What is the greatest wonder of the world?"

"The bare man Nothing in the Beggar's Bush."

Some muttered, "He is cagey for effect.

A hero owes a duty to his fame.

He looks too like a grocer for respect."

Soon they slipped back into his Christian name.

The only difference that could be seen

From those who'd never risked their lives at all

Was his delight in details and routine.

For he was always glad to mow the grass,

Pour liquids from large bottles into small,

Or look at clouds through bits of colored glass.

Adventure

Others had swerved off to the left before,

But only under protest from outside,

Embittered robbers outlawed by the Law,

Lepers in terror of the terrified.

Now no one else accused these of a crime;

They did not look ill: old friends, overcome,

Stared as they rolled away from talk and time

Like marbles out into the blank and dumb.

The crowd clung all the closer to convention

Sunshine and horses, for the sane know why

The even numbers should ignore the odd:

The Nameless is what no free people mention;

Successful men know better than to try

To see the face of their Absconded God.

The Adventurers

Spinning upon their central thirst like tops,

They went the Negative Way toward the Dry;

Be empty caves beneath an empty sky

They emptied out their memories like a slop

Which made a foul marsh as they dried to death,

Where monsters bred who forced them to forget

The lovelies their consent avoided; yet

Still praising the Absurd with their last breath.

They seeded out into their miracles:

The images of each grotesque temptation

Became some painter's happiest inspiration;

And barren wives and burning virgins came

To drink the pure cold water of their wells,

And wish for beaux and children in their name.

The Waters

Poet, oracle and wit

Like unsuccessful anglers by

The ponds of apperception sit,

Baiting with the wrong request

The vectors of their interest;

At nightfall tell the angler's lie.

With time in tempest everywhere,

To rafts of frail assumption cling

The saintly and the insincere;

Enraged phenomena bear down

In overwhelming waves to drown

Both sufferer and suffering.

The waters long to hear our question put

Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

The Garden

Within these gates all opening begins:

White shouts and flickers through its green and red,

Where children play at seven earnest sins

And dogs believe their tall conditions dead.

Here adolescence into number breaks

The perfect circle time can draw on stone,

And flesh forgives division as it makes

Another's moment of consent its own.

All journeys die here; wish and weight are lifted:

Where often round some old maid's desolation

Roses have flung their glory like a cloak,

The gaunt and great the famed for conversation

Blushed in the stare of evening as they spoke,

And felt their center of volition shifted.

Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno

(for Carlo Izzo)

Out of a gothic North, the pallid children

Of a potato, beer-or-whisky

Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come

Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere

Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura,

To these feminine townships where men

Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless

Verbal in-fighting as it is taught

In Protestant rectories upon drizzling

Sunday afternoons-no more as unwashed

Barbarians out for gold, nor as profiteers

Hot for Old Masters, but for plunder

Nevertheless-some believing amore

Is better down South and much cheaper

(Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure

To strong sunlight is lethal to germs

(Which is patently false) and others, like me,

In middle-age hoping to twig from

What we are not what we might be next, a question

The South seems never to raise. Perhaps

A tongue in which Nestor and Apemantus,

Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni make

Equally beautiful sounds is unequipped

To frame it, or perhaps in this heat

It is nonsense: the Myth of an Open Road

Which runs past the orchard gate and beckons

Three brothers in turn to set out over the hills

And far away, is an invention

Of a climate where it is a pleasure to walk

And a landscape less populated

Than this one. Even so, to us it looks very odd

Never to see an only child engrossed

In a game it has made up, a pair of friends

Making fun in a private lingo,

Or a body sauntering by himself who is not

Wanting, even as it perplexes

Our ears when cats are called Cat and dogs either

Lupo, Nero or Bobby. Their dining

Puts us to shame: we can only envy a people

So frugal by nature it costs them

No effort not to guzzle and swill. Yet (if I

Read their faces rightly after ten years)

They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun

He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where

Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,

I can see what they meant: his unwinking

Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion

Of change or escape, and a silent

Ex-volcano, without a stream or a bird,

Echoes that laugh. This could be a reason

Why they take the silencers off their Vespas,

Turn their radios up to full volume,

And a minim saint can expect rockets-noise

As a counter-magic, a way of saying

Boo to the Three Sisters: "Mortal we may be,

But we are still here!" might cause them to hanker

After proximities-in streets packed solid

With human flesh, their souls feel immune

To all metaphysical threats. We are rather shocked,

But we need shocking: to accept space, to own

That surfaces need not be superficial

Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really

Be taught within earshot of running water

Or in sight of a cloud. As pupils

We are not bad, but hopeless as tutors:

Goethe, Tapping homeric hexameters

On the shoulder-blade of a Roman girl, is

(I wish it were someone else) the figure

Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,

But one would draw the line at calling

The Helena begotten on that occasion,

Queen of his Second Walpurgisnacht,

Her baby: between those who mean by a life a

Bildungsroman and those to whom living

Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf

Embraces cannot bridge. If we try

To "go southern", we spoil in no time, we grow

Flabby, dingily lecherous, and

Forget to pay bills: that no one has heard of them

Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga

Is a comforting thought-in that case, for all

The spiritual loot we tuck away,

We do them no harm-and entitles us, I think

To one little scream at A piacere,

Not two. Go I must, but I go grateful (even

To a certain Monte) and invoking

My sacred meridian names, Vito, Verga,

Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini,

To bless this region, its vendages, and those

Who call it home: though one cannot always

Remember exactly why one has been happy,

There is no forgetting that one was.

September 1958

It's No Use Raising a Shout

It's no use raising a shout.

No, Honey, you can cut that right out.

I don't want any more hugs;

Make me some fresh tea, fetch me some rugs.

Here am I, here are you: