Even If You Weren T My Father

Even If You Weren’t My Father The Possibility

Camillo Sbarbaro James Fenton (1888-1967) (b. 1949)

Father, even if you weren’t my father, The lizard on the wall, engrossed, were you an utter stranger, The sudden silence from the wood for your own self I’d love you. Are telling me that I have lost Remembering how you saw, one winter morning, The possibility of good. the first violet on the wall across the way, and with what joy you shared the revelation; I know this flower is beautiful then, hoisting the ladder to your shoulder, And yesterday it seemed to be. out you went and propped it to the wall. It opened like a crimson hand. We, your children, stood watching at the window. It was not beautiful to me.

And I remember how, another time, I know that work is beautiful. you chased my little sister through the house It is a boon. It is a good. (pigheadedly, she’d done I know not what). Unless my working were a way But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear, Of squandering my solitude. your heart misgave you, for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child. And solitude was beautiful Relenting then, you took her in your arms When I was sure that I was strong. in all her terror: caressing her, enclosed in your I thought it was a medium embrace as in some shelter from the brute In which to grow, but I was wrong. who’d been, one moment since, yourself. The jays are swearing in the wood. Father, even were you not my father, The lizard moves with ugly speed. were you some utter stranger, The flower closes like a fist. for your innocence, your artless tender heart, The possibility recedes. I would love above all other men so love you. A Study of Reading Habits

Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock Philip Larkin (1919-1985) Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school, The houses are haunted It was worth ruining my eyes By white night-gowns. To know I could still keep cool, None are green. And deal out the old right hook Or purple with green rings, To dirty dogs twice my size. Or green with yellow rings, Or yellow with blue rings, Later, with inch-thick specs, None of them are strange Evil was just my lark: With socks of lace Me and my cloak and fangs And beaded ceintures. Had ripping times in the dark People are not going The women I clubbed with sex! To dream of baboons and periwinkles. I broke them up like meringues. Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Don’t read much now: the dude Catches tigers Who lets the girl down before In red weather. The hero arrives, the chap Who’s yellow and keeps the store, Seem far too familiar. Get stewed: Books are a load of crap. Human Condition Thom Gunn (b. 1929) A Noiseless Patient Spider Walt Whitman Now it is fog. I walk (1819-1892) Contained within my coat; A noiseless patient spider, No castle more cut off I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, By reason of its moat: It launched forth filament, filament, filament, filament, Only the sentry’s cough, out of itself The mercenaries’ talk. Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you O my soul where you stand, The street lamps, visible, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Drop no light on the ground, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the But press beams painfully spheres to connect to In a yard of fog around. Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold, I am condemned to be Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O An individual. my soul.

In the established border There balances a mere The Secret Pinpoint of consciousness. I stay, or start from, here: Denise Levertov No fog makes more or less (b. 1923) Two girls discover The neighbouring disorder. the secret of life in a sudden line of Particular, I must poetry. Find out the limitation I who don’t know the Of mind and universe, secret wrote To pick thought and sensation the line. They And turn to my own use told me Disordered hate or lust. (through a third person) they had found it I seek, to break, my span. but not what it was, I am my one touchstone. not even This is a test more hard what line it was. No doubt Than any ever known. by now, more than a week And thus I keep my guard later, they have forgotten On that which makes me man. the secret, the line, the name of Much is unknowable. the poem. I love them No problem shall be faced for finding what Until the problem is; I can’t find, I, born to fog, to waste, and for loving me Walk through hypothesis, for the line I wrote, An individual. and for forgetting it so that

a thousand times, till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines,

in other happenings. And for wanting to know it, for

assuming there is such a secret, yes, for that most of all.