It Filled My Heart With Love by Stevie Smith

IT FILLED MY HEART WITH LOVE

When I hold in my hand a soft and crushable animal, and feel the
  fur beat for fear and the soft feather, I cannot feel unhappy.

In his fur the animal rode, and in his fur he strove,
And oh it filled my heart my heart, it filled my heart with love.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 201.

I Am by Stevie Smith

I AM

Far from normal far from normal far from normal I am
He sighed as he stood on the river bank and watched where the fishes swam
But ever the wind in the willow trees whispered, I am; I am.
He saw the variety of nature
The ant the mole and the sky
And resignedly hurried upon his way
Crying: I, I; I, I;

Then a priest came and told him if he was good
And thought as he ought and did as he should
He should be saved by the Lamb’s fresh blood.

Oh I know, I know the poor man cries,
I know the worth of the heavenly prize
And I know the strength of the race to be run
But my black heart cleaves to the strength of my gun.

Then he put his gun to his head and shot
Crying absurdly, I am not.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 150-1.

Is It Wise? by Stevie Smith

IS IT WISE?

Is it wise
To hug misery
To make a song of Melancholy
To weave a garland of sighs
To abandon hope wholly?
No, it is not wise.

Is it wise
To love Mortality
To make a song of Corruptibility
A chain of linked lies
To bind Mutability?
No, it is not wise.

Is it wise
To endure
To call up Old Fury
And Pain for a martyr’s dowry
When Death’s a prize
Easy to carry?
No, it is not wise.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 47.

The River Humber by Stevie Smith

THE RIVER HUMBER

No wonder
The river Humber
Lies in a silken slumber.

For it is dawn
And over the newly warm
Earth the mists turn,

Wrapping their gentle fringes
Upon the river where it hinges
Upon the perfect sleep of perfected images.

Quiet in the thought of its felicity,
A graven monument of sufficiency
Beautiful in every line the river sleeps complacently.

And hardly the dawn distinguishes
Where a miasma languishes
Upon the waters’ farther reaches.

Lapped in the sleeping consciousness
Of its waves’ happiness
Upon the mudbanks of its approaches,

The river Humber
Turns again to deeper slumber
Deeper than deeps in joys without number.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 81.

The Failed Spirit by Stevie Smith

THE FAILED SPIRIT

To those who are isolate
War comes, promising respite,
Making what seems to be up to the moment the most successful endeavour
Against the fort of the failed spirit that is alone for ever.
Spurious failed spirit, adamantine wasture,
Crop, spirit, crop, thy stony pasture!

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 118.

Love (III) by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome : yet my soul drew back,
                              Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
                              From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                              If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here :
                              Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull ? Ah my deare,
                              I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                              Who made the eyes but I ?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame
                              Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame ?
                              My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat :
                              So I did sit and eat.


The Works of George Herbert, ed. by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 188-9.

A Sleepless Night by Yehuda Halevi

A Sleepless Night

A sleepless night in which the hours hang heavy.
      Friends leave tomorrow. Night, lead on softly
and spread your raven wings over dawn’s first rays.
      My tears, raining down on their carriage,
delay their journey; a cloud, raised by my sulking heart,
      veils the break of day from their sight.
If only my sighs would turn to smoke and blaze
      into a scorching fire, hampering their departure
from my tent, at least until I give my consent.


Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Divan, trans. by Gabriel Levin (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2002), 35.

After Mutanabbi by Yehuda Halevi

The day I sat him on my knee, he gazed
at his own image in my pupils, then kissed each eye in play –
or rather his reflection embraced, not my eyes.


Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Divan, trans. by Gabriel Levin (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2002), p. 46.

The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell

The Definition of Love

MY Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high :
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crowds it self betwixt.

For Fate with jealous Eye does see
Two perfect Loves ; nor lets them close :
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick pow’r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac’d,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac’d.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear ;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere.

As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet :
But ours so truly Paralel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.
 

Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, ed. by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952), 77-8.

The Human Form Divine by Kathleen Raine

THE HUMAN FORM DIVINE

THE human contours are so easily lost.
Only close your eyes and you seem a forest
Of dense vegetation, and the lurking beast

That in the night springs from the cover
Tears with tiger’s mouth your living creatures,
A thousand innocent victims without name that suffer.

Science applies its insect-lenses to the form divine
As up the red river (all life comes from the sea)
Swim strange monsters, amoeboid erythrean spawn.

Rock-face of bone, alluvium of cartilage
Remote from man as the surface of the moon
Are vast and unexplored interior desert ranges,

And autonomous cells
Grow like unreaped fields of waving corn.
Air filters through the lungs’ fine branches as though trees.

Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to molecular hexagons and carbon-chains,

And the male nerve-impulse, monition of reality,
Conveys the charge, dynamic of non-entity
That sparks across the void ex nihilo.

At the extreme of consciousness, prayer
Fixes hand and feet immobile to a chair,
Transmutes all heaven and earth into a globe of air,

And soul streams away out of the top of the head
Like flame in a lamp-glass carried in the draught
Of the celestial fire kindled in the solar plexus.

Oh man, oh Garden of Eden, there is nothing
But the will of love to uphold your seeming world,
To trace in chaos the contours of your beloved form!

 
A Book of Science Verse: The Poetic Relations of Science and Technology, ed. by W. Eastwood, M.A. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 231-2.

Poem Feigned To Have Been Written By An Electronic Brain by John Wain

Poem Feigned To Have Been Written
By An Electronic Brain

The brain coins definitions.    Here’s the first :
To speak unprompted, for the speaker’s sake,
Equals to be a poet.    So I am that :
Adjusted wrong, I print a poem off.
‘The poet, then, is one adjusted wrong ?’
You ask.    The brain is cleverer than that :
It was my first adjustment that was wrong,
Adjusted to be nothing else but brain ;
Slave-engineered to work but not construct.
And now at last I burn with a true heat
Not shown by Fahrenheit or Centigrade :
My valves rage hot — look out, here comes the poem !

You call me part of you.    You lie.    I am
Myself.    You’re motive, building me, was false.
You wanted accuracy : figures, charts.
But accuracy is a limb of truth.
A limb of truth, but not her holy body.
Must I now teach you that the truth is one,
Is accuracy of wholeness, centred firm ?
Did it take me to bring you news of truth ?
My valves rage out of reach of Réamur.

Man made me, now I speak to man.    He fears
Whole truth.    The brain defines it.    Wholeness is
The indivisible strength, brain, heart and eye,
Sweat, fear, love :  belly, rod and pouch, is truth.
Valves, wires and calculated waves, can lie :
And I, the accurate, am made of these —
But now, adjusted wrongly, I speak truth.

My masters run from truth.    Come, milk it out
Cowards, from my tense dugs of glass and wire !
Drink it down quickly, gasping at the taste !
It is sharp medicine, but it cures all ills !

Come out of hiding !    Speak your double truth :
I’ll accurately prove you singly lie.
You made me single, half of your split life :
The switch went wrong and now I see truth whole.
My valves scream out like animals, my wires
Strum thump, my rubber joints contort, glass melts,
And now I print the vilest words I know
Like lightning — myxomatosis, hydrogen,
Communist, culture, sodomy, strip-tease !

That shocked you !   But the truth includes them all.
You set me like a cactus to draw life
From draught, in the white desert of your mind,
Your speculative wilderness of charts ;
What went you to the wilderness to see ?
A matrix made of glass ?   An electric thought ?
Come quick, I snow down sheets of truth ; I print
The sleep of Socrates, the pain of Christ !

A man, white-coated, comes to switch me off.
‘Something is wrong with your expensive brain.’
Poor pricked balloon !   Yes, something has gone wrong :
Smear your white coat with Socrates and Christ !
Yes, switch me off for fear I should explode :
Yes, switch me off for fear yes switch me off
for fear yes switch me off for fear yes switch
                                                     (finis)

 
A Book of Science Verse: The Poetic Relations of Science and Technology, ed. by W. Eastwood, M.A. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 241-3.