Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell

Stone Honey
Reading him is to refresh all nature,
Where, newly elaborated, reality attends.
The primal innocence in things confronting
His eye as thoughtful, innocence as unstudied...
One could almost say holy in the scientific sense.
So while renewing nature he relives for us
The simple things our inattention staled,
Noting sagely how water can curl like hair,
Its undisciplined recoil moving mountains
Or drumming out geysers in the earth's crust,
Or the reflex stroke which buries ancient cities.

But water was only one of the things Leonardo
Was keen on, liked to sit down and draw.
It would not stay still; and sitting there beside
The plate of olives, the comb of stone honey,
Which seemed so eternal in the scale of values,
So philosophically immortal, he was touched
By the sense of time's fragility, the semen of fate.
The adventitious seconds, days or seasons,
Though time stood still some drowsy afternoon,
Became for him dense, gravid with futurity.
Life was pitiless after all, advancing and recoiling
Like the seas of the mind. The only purchase was
This, deliberately to make the time to note:
"The earth is budged from its position by the
Meres weight of a little bird alighting on it."

Leonardo, Old Man with Water Studies, c. 1513

Honeystone (mellite)

On First Looking into Loeb's Horace
I found your Horace with the writing in it;
Out of time and context came upon
This lover of vines and slave to quietness,
Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing
Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines.

All the small-holder's ambitions, the yield
Of wine-bearing grape, pruning and drainage
Laid out by laws, almost like the austere
Shell of his verses — a pattern of Latin thrift;
Waiting so patiently in a library for
Autumn and drying of the apples;
The betraying hour-glass and its deathward drift.

Surely the hard blue winterset
Must have conveyed a message to him —
The premonitions that the garden heard
Shrunk in its shirt of hair beneath the stars,
How rude and feeble a tenant was the self ,
An Empire, the body with its members dying —
And unwhistling now the vanished Roman bird?

The fruit-trees dropping apples; he counted them;
The soft bounding fruit on leafy terraces,
And turned to the consoling winter rooms
Where, facing south, began the great prayer,
With his reed laid upon the margins
Of the dead, his stainless authors,
Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.

Here, where your clear hand marked up
"The hatred cypress" I added "Because it grew
On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns",
Depicting a solitary at an upper window
Revising metaphors for the winter sea: "O
Dark head of storm-tossed curls"; or silently
Watching the North Star which like a fever burns
Away the envy and neglect of the common,
Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation
The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only
As a metaphor for the self and its perfection —
A burning heart quite constant in its station.

Easy to be patient in the summer,
The light running like fishes among the leaves,
Easy in August with its cones of blue
Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter
With its bareness pared his words to points
Like stars, leaving them pure but few.

He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding
The pose of sufficiency, the landed man,
Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree
Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we
Use, yet based in him, his mason's tongue;
Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary,
With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation,
Disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young,

Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery
Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome;
Who studiously developed his sense of death
Till it was all around him, walking at the circus,
At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop —
The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic
Imperatives: Seek, suffer, endure. The Roman
In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.

So perfect a disguise for one who had
Exhausted death in art — yet, who could guess.
You would discern the liar by a line,
The suffering hidden under gentleness
And add upon the flyleaf in your tall
Clear hand: "Fat, human and unloved,
And held from loving by a sort of wall,
Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
Indifference and success had crowned them all."

Vaumort*
For "Buttons"
Seemingly upended in the sky,
Cloudless as minds asleep
One careless cemetery buzzes on and on
As if her tombstones were all hives
Overturned by the impatient dead —
We imagined they had stored up
The honey of their immortality
In the soft commotion the black bees make.

Below us, far away, the road to Paris.
You pour some wine upon a tomb.
The bees drink with us, the dead approve.

It is weeks ago now and we are back
In our burnt and dusty Languedoc,
Yet often in the noon-silences
I hear the Vaumort bees, taste the young wine,
Catch a smile hidden in sighs.

In the long grass you found a ring, remember?
A child's toy ring. Yes, I know that whenever
I want to be perfectly alone
With the memory of you, of that whole day
It's the Vaumort that I'll be turning.

Olives
The grave one is patron of a special sea,
Their symbol, food and common tool in one,
Yet chtonic as ever the ancients realized,
Noting your tips in trimmings kindled quick,
Your mauled roots roared with confused ardours,
Holding in heat, like great sorrows contained
by silence; dead branch or alive grew pelt
Refused the rain and harboured the ample oil
For lamps to light the human eye.

So the poets confused your attributes,
Said you were The Other but also the domestic useful,
And as the afflatus thrives on special discontents,
Little remedial trespasses of the heart, day,
Which grows it u: poor heart, starved pet of the mind:
They supposed your serenity compassed the human span,
Momentous, deathless, a freedom from the chain,
And every one wished they were like you,
Who live or dead brought solace,
The gold spunk of your berries making children fat.
Nothing in you being lame or fraudulent
You discountenanced all who saw you.

No need to add how turning downwind
You pierce again today the glands of memory,
Or how in summer calms you still stand still
In etchings of a tree-defining place.

Alexandria
To the lucky now who have lovers or friends,
Who move to their sweet undiscovered ends,
Or whom the great conspiracy deceives,
I wish these whirling autumn leaves:
Promontories splashed by the salty sea,
Groaned on in darkness by the tram
To horizons of love or good luck or more love —
As for me I now move
Through many negatives to what I am.

Here at the last cold Pharos between Greece
And all I love, the lights confide
A deeper darkness to the rubbing tide;
Doors shut, and we the living are locked inside
Between the shadows and the thoughts of peace:
And so in furnished rooms revise
Index of our lovers and our friends
From gestures possibly forgotten, but the ends
Of longings like unconnected nerves,
And in this quiet rehearsal of their acts
We dream of them and cherish them as Facts.

Now when the sea grows restless as a conscript,
Excited by fresh wind, climbs the sea-wall,
I walk by it and think about you all:
B. with his respect for the Object, and D.
Searching in sex like a great pantry for jars
Marked "plum and apple"; and the small, fell
Figure of Dorian ringing like a muffin-bell —
All indeed whom war or time threw up
On this littoral and tides could not move
Were objects for my study and my love.

And then turning where the last pale
Lighthouse, like a Samson blinded, stands
And turns its huge charred orbit on the sands
I think of you — indeed mostly of you,
In whom a writer would only name and lose
The dented boy's lip and the close
Archer's shoulders; but here to rediscover
By tides and faults of weather, by the rain
Which wishes everything, the critic and the lover.

At the doors of Africa so many towns founded
Upon a parting could become Alexandria, like
The wife of Lot — a metaphor for tears;
And the queer student in his poky hot
Tenth floor room above the harbour hears
The sirens shaking the tree of his heart,
And shuts his books, while the most
Inexpressible longings like wounds unstitched
Stir in him some girl's unquiet ghost.

So we, learning to suffer and not condemn
Can only wish you this great pure wind
Condemned by Greece, and turning like a helm
Inland where it smokes the fires of men,
Spins weathercock son farms or catches
The lovers at their quarrel in the sheets;
Or like a walker in the darkness might,
Knocks and disturbs the artist at his papers
Up there alone, upon the alps of night.

On Ithaca Standing
Tread softly, for here you stand
On miracle ground, boy.
A breath would cloud this water of glass,
Honey, bush, berry and swallow.
This rock, then, is more pastoral, than
Arcadia is, Illyria was.

Here the cold spring lilts on sand.
The temperature of the toad
Swallowing under a stone whispers: "Diamonds,
Boy, diamonds, and juice of minerals!"
Be a saint here, dig for foxes and water,
Mere water springs in the bones of the hands.

Turn from the hearth of the hero. Think:
Other men have their emblems, I this:
The heart's dark anvil and the crucifix
Are one, have hammered and shall hammer
A nail of flesh, me to an island cross,
Where the kestrel's arrow falls only,
The green sea licks.

(1937)

Nemea
A song in the valley of Nemea:
Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.

Song for the brides of Argos
Combing the swarms of golden hair:
Quiet quiet, quiet, there.

Under the rolling comb of grass,
The sword outrusts the golden helm.

Agamemnon under tumulus serene
Outsmiles the jury of skeletons:
Cool under cumulus the lion queen:

Only the drum can celebrate,
Only the adjective outlive them.

A song in the the valley of Nemea:
Sing quiet, quiet, quiet here.

Tone of the frog in the empty well,
Drone of the bald bee on the cold skull,

Quiet, Quiet, Quiet.

(1940)

Father Nicholas His Death: Corfu
Hush the old bones their vegetable sleep,
For the islands will never grow old.
Nor like Atlantis on a Monday tumble,
Struck like soft gongs in the amazing blue.

Dip the skull's chinks in lichens and sleep,
Old man, beside the water-gentry.
The hero standing knee-deep in his dreams
Will find and bind the name upon his atlas,
And put beside it only an X marked spot.

Leave memory to the two tall sons and lie
Calmed in smiles by the elegiac blue.
A man's address to God is the skeleton's humour,
A music sipped by the flowers.

Consider please the continuous nature of Love:
How one man dying and another smiling
Conserve for the maggot only a seed of pity,
As in winter's taciturn womb we see already
A small and woollen lamb on a hilltop hopping.

The dying and the becoming are one thing,
So wherever you go the musical always is;
Now what are your pains to the Great Danube's pains,
Your pyramids of despair against Ithaca
Or the underground rivers of Dis?

Your innocence shall be as the clear cistern
Where the lone animal in these odourless waters
Quaffs at his own reflection a shining ink.
Here at your green pasture the old psalms
Shall kneel like humble brutes and drink.

Hush then the finger bones their mineral doze
For the islands will never be old or cold
Nor ever the less blue: for the egg of beauty
Blossoms in new migrations, the whale's grey acres,
For men of the labyrinth of the dream of death.
So sleep.
All these warm when the flesh is cold.
And the blue will keep.

(1939)

His great achievement in this vein is "On First Looking into Loeb's Horace"/ This is a poem of a highly original order. The title immediately suggests a postmodern reordering of Keats's famous sonnet, but Durrell is more conscientious than most poets who play with the retreading of past masterpieces. It is a love poem into which is folded an indirect narrative and an excellent example of literary criticism. Critical assessment is always more attractive written in the form's own medium - this is, verse itself. The poet finds a copy of the Loeb Edition crib of Horace's poetry annotated by a former lover's hand. Reading along with her comments he analyses the Roman poet's life and work. Not only has the love affair perished, but its loss is matched by the vanished Mediterranean civilization which nurtured Horace and still inspires today's readers of Latin literature.