Notebook Poems 1930-34

Juvenilia from Manuscripts:

• The Mishap
• The Maniac
• Song to a Child at Night-Time
• You hold the ilex by its stem

Verse from Swansea Grammar School Magazine:

• A Ballad of Salad
• Request to an Obliging Poet
• In Borrowed Plumes
• The Sincerest Form of Flattery
• The Callous Stars
• Two Decorations

Poems from the story, ‘The Fight’

• Frivolous is my hate
• Warp
• The Grass Blade’s Psalm
• One has found a delicate power
• The shepherd blew upon his reed
• The Shepherd to his Lass
• The rod can lift its twining head

1930 Notebook:

• Osiris, Come to Isis
• The lion-fruit goes from my thumb
• Poem Written on the Death of a Very Dear Illusion
• You shall not despair
• My vitality overwhelms you
• And so the New Love Came
• On Watching Goldfish
• The lion, lapping the water
• I Am Aware
• My river, even though it lifts
• The corn blows from side to side lightly
• We will be conscious of our sanctity
• I have come to catch your voice
• My love is deep night
• When your furious motion is steadied,
• No thought can trouble my unwholesome pose
• The hill or sea and sky is carried
• So I sink myself in the moment
• No, pigeon, I’m too wise
• The cavern shelters me from harm
• Woman on Tapestry
• Pillar breaks, and mask is cleft
• It’s light that makes the intervals
• Let me escape
• Oh, dear, angelic time – go on
• And the ghost rose up to interrogate
• When I allow myself to fly
• Admit the Sun
• A Section of a Poem called ‘Hassan’s Journey into the World’
• I know this vicious minute’s hour
• Claudetta, You, and Me
• Come, black-tressed Claudetta, home
• Cool, oh no cool
• They brought you mandolins
• The air you breathe encroaches
• When all your tunes have caused
• Written in a classroom
• Hand in hand Orpheus
• I, poor romantic, held her heel
• Oh! the children run towards the door
• Tether the first thought, if you will
• How shall the animal

1930-32 Notebook

• This love – perhaps I overrate it
• Today, this hour I breathe
• Sometimes the sky’s too bright
• Here is the bright green sea,
• My golden bird, the sun
• Live in my living
• Rain cuts the place we tread
• The morning, space for Leda
• The spire cranes; its statue
• Cool may she find the day
• Yesterday, the cherry sun
• Time enough to rot
• Conceive these images in air
• You be my hermaphrodite in logic
• Until the light is less
• The neophyte, baptized in smiles
• To be encompassed by the brilliant earth
• Who is to mar
• The natural day and night
• Although through my bewildered way
• High on a hill
• Refract the lady, drown the profiteer
• Into be home from home
• If the lady from the casino
• Through sober to the truth when
• It is the wrong, the hurt, the mineral
• Even the voice will not last
• True love’s inflated; from a truthful shape
• Since, on a quiet night, I heard them talk
• They are the only dead who did not love
• Have hold on my heart utterly
• The caterpillar is with child
• Foot, head, or traces
• Or be my paramour or die
• The womb and the woman’s grave
• Let Sheba bear a love for Solomon
• There was one world and there is another
• For us there cannot be a welcome
• An end to substance in decay’s a sequence
• Why is the blood red and the grass green
• Have cheated constancy
• There’s plenty in the world that doth not die
• This time took has much
• Which of you put out his rising
• Written for a Personal Epitaph
• When you have ground such beauty down to dust
• Sever from what I trust
• Never to reach the oblivious dark
• Introductory poem
• Take up this seed, it is most beautiful
• There in her tears were laughter and tears again
• How can the knotted root
• Children of darkness got no wings
• It’s not in misery but in oblivion
• What lunatic’s whored after shadow
• Here is a fact for my teeth
• Any matter move it to conclusion
• Too long, skeleton, death’s risen
• No man knows loveliness at all
• Do thou heed me, cinnamon smelling
• They said, tired of trafficking
• Be silent let who will
• Being but men, we walked into the trees
• The hunchback in the park
• Out of the sighs a love comes
• At last, in hail and rain
• Upon your held-out hand
• Nearly summer, and the devil
• Pome
• Were that enough, enough to ease the pain

Typescript poems:

• Walking in gardens by the sides
• Now the thirst parches lip and tongue
• Lift up your face, light
• Let it be known that little live but lies
• The midnight road, though young man tread unknowing
• With windmills turning wrong directions
• The gossipers have lowered their voices
• Especially when the November wind

February 1933 Notebook:

• Sweet as the comets’ kiss night sealed
• It is death though I have died
• Had she not loved me at the beginning
• Before the gas fades with a harsh last bubble
• Hold on, whatever slips beyond the edge
• After the funeral, mule praises, brays
• We who were young are old. It is the oldest cry
• To take to give is all, return what given
• No faith to fix the teeth on carries
• Out of a war of wits, when folly of words
• In wasting one drop from the heart’s honey cells
• With all the fever of the August months
• Their faces shone under some radiance
• See, on gravel paths under the harpstrung trees
• Make me a mask to shut from razor glances
• To follow the fox at the hounds’ tails
• The ploughman’s gone, the hansom driver
• Light, I know, treads the ten million stars
• My body knows it wants that, often high
• And death shall have no dominion
• Within his head revolved a little world
• Not from this anger, anticlimax after
• The first ten years in school and park
• Pass through twelve stages, reach the fifth
• First there was the lamb on knocking knees
• We lying by seasand watching yellow
• Before We Sinned
• Now understand a state of being, heaven
• Interrogating smile has spoken death
• No man believes, when a star falls shot
• When I lie in my bed and the moon lies in hers
• The tombstone tells how she died
• Why east wind chills and south wind cools
• This is remembered when the hairs drop out
• In me ten paradoxes make one truth
• A woman wails her dead among the trees
• Praise to the architects
• Here in this spring, stars float along the void
• A praise of acid or a chemist’s lotion
• Too many times my same sick cry
• We have the fairy tales by heart
• Find meat on bones that soon have none
• Ears in the turrets hear
• The woman speaks:
• Let the brain bear the hammering
• The minute is a prisoner in the hour
• Shall gods be said to thump the cloud
• Matthias spat upon the lord
• August 1933 Notebook
• The hand that signed the paper felled a city
• Let for one moment a faith statement
• You are the ruler of this realm of flesh
• That the sum saintly might add to nought
• Grief, thief of time, crawls off
• Shiloh’s seed shall not be sown
• Before I knocked and flesh let enter
• We see rise the secret wind behind the brain
• Take the needles and the knives
• Not forever shall the lord of the red hail
• Before we mothernaked fall
• The sun burns the morning, a bush in the brain
• My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
• In the beginning was the three-pointed star
• Love me, not as the dreamy nurses
• For loss of blood I fell where stony hills
• Jack, my father, let the knaves
• The girl, unlacing, trusts her breast
• Through these lashed rings set deep inside their hollows
• Ape and ass both spit me forth
• The eye of sleep turned on me like a moon
• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
• From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
• The almanac of time hangs in the brain
• And from the first declension of the flesh
• All that I owe the fellows of the grave
• Here lie the beasts of man and here I feast
• When once the twilight locks no longer
• Light breaks where no sun shines
• I fellowed sleep who kissed between the brains
• See, says the lime, my wicked milks
• This bread I break was once the oak
• Your pain shall be music in your string
• A process in the weather of the heart
• Foster the light, nor veil the bushy sun
• The shades of girls all flavoured from their shrouds
• In this our age the gunman and his moll
• Which is the world? Of my two sleepings, which
• Where once the waters of your face
• I see the boys of summer in their ruin
• In the beginning was the three-pointed star
• If I was tickled by the rub of love

Collateral Poems

• I have not moulded this marble
• Calling temerity to see
• You too have seen the sun a bird of fire
• That sanity be kept
• That the sum sanity might add to nought
• Do you not father me, nor the erected arm
• Foster the light, nor veil the feeling moon
• First I knew the lamb on knocking knees
• You breath was shed