Night Piece

Three men came talking up the road
And still "tomorrow" was the word.

The night was clear with the lamps' glitter
The first man spoke and his voice was bitter,

"Tomorrow like another day
I draw the dole and rust away."

The second one said scared and low,
"Tomorrow I may have to go."

And the two spoke never another word
But drew together and looked at the third,

And the third man said, "If tomorrow exists,
It's a day of streets like rivers of fists,

It's the end of crawling, the end of doles,
And men are treated as human souls."

I stood in the doorway and heard these things
As the three came past with the step of kings.

The Sirens

Odysseus heard the sirens; they were singing
Music by Wolf and Weinberger and Morley
About a region where the swans go winging,
Vines are in color, girls are growing surely

Into nubility, and pylons bringing
Leisure and power to farms that live securely
Without a landlord. Still, his eyes were stinging
With salt and seablink, and the ropes hurt sorely.

Odysseus saw the sirens; they were charming
Blonde, with snub breasts, and little neat posteriors,
But could not take his mind off the alarming

Weather report, his mutineers in irons,
The radio failing; it was bloody serious.
In twenty minutes he forgot the sirens.

.."three things about a war.."

You can only do three things about a war - fight in it, protest against it, or ignore it. I'm not capable of ignoring it, as Yeats ignored the 1914-18 war. Pour moi, le monde exterieur existe. And, idiotic as it is, I don't protest against it, or rather not basically. Opposition is probably a better attitude for preserving one's "poetic integrity" in, but while people are being shot at I'd sooner be in the danger area. The process of fighting a war isn't very different from living in an alleged state of peace.

Not from the way I am living, anyhow. I'm still nomadic, exposed to rather more boredom and rather more danger, surrounded by fewer friends of fewer different nationalities, subject to the same alternative of inactivity and furious concentration. The war has confirmed more of my beliefs than it has destroyed. I still think that the human race is on the average rather likeable, that nationality is no more important than class or occuption in making people likeable or not, that authority is bad for the soul and responsiblity good for it, and that once a thing becomes official it's dead and damned.

The war has given me a lot of experience that I share with other people, which is one of the bases of poetry, and has considerably influenced my style and vocabulary, which is another. i like using precise words and phrases which have not had the meaning dulled out of them - "resertion", "defilade", "echelon", "revetment", for example, all good lively words fit for metaphors and exact images. But on the average I think I should still be writing as I do even if the war we spent our lives waiting for had not actually been declared.

(1945)