Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell

Chance—the hawk’s eye or the pilot’s
    Round and shining on the open sky,
    Reflecting back the innocent world in it.
    1946/ 1945

THE PARTHENON
    For T. S. Eliot
Σ τερɩὲς και vησιὰ 
    Put it more simply: say the city
    Swam up here swan-like to the shallows,
    Or whiteness from an overflowing jar
    Settled into this grassy violet space,
    Theorem for three hills,
    Went soft with brickdust, clay and whitewash,
    On a plastered porch one morning wrote
    Human names, think of it, men became the roads.
    The academy was given over
    To the investigation of shade an idle boy
    Invented, tearing out the heart
    Of a new loaf, put up these slender columns.
    Later the Parthenon’s small catafalque
    Simple and congruent as a wish grew up,
    Snow-blind, the marbles built upon a pause
    Made smoke seem less surprising, being white.
    Now syntax settled round the orderless,
    Joining action and reflection in the arch,
    Then adding desire and will: four walls:
    Four walls, a house. ‘How simple’ people said.
    Man entered it and woman was the roof.
    A vexing history, Geros, that becomes
    More and more simple as it ends, not less;
    And nothing has redeemed it: art
    Moved back from pleasure-giver to a humour
    As with us … I see you smile …
    Footloose on the inclining earth
    The long ships moved through cities
    Made of loaf-sugar, tamed by gardens,
    Lying hanging by the hair within the waters
    And quickened by self-knowledge
    Men of linen sat on marble chairs
    In self-indulgence murmuring ‘I am, I am’.
    Chapters of clay and whitewash. Others here
    Find only a jar of red clay, a Pan
    The superstitious whipped and overturned.
    Yet nothing of ourselves can equal it
    Though grown from causes we still share,
    The natural lovely order, as where water
    Touches earth, a tree grows up,
    A needle touching wax, a human voice.
    But for us the brush, the cone, the candle,
    The spinning-wheel and clay are only
    Amendments to an original joy.
    Lost even the flawless finishing strokes,
    White bones among the almonds prophesying
    A death itself that seemed a coming-of-age.
    Lastly the capes and islands hold us,
    Tame as a handclasp,
    Causes locked within effects, the land—
    This vexed clitoris of the continental body,
    Pumice and clay and whitewash
    Only the darkness ever compromises
    Or an eagle softly mowing on the blue …
    And yet, Geros, who knows? Within the space
    Of our own seed might some day rise,
    Shriek truth, punish the blue with statues.
    1948/ 1945 / 6  

IN EUROPE
    Recitative for a Radio Play
To Elie
    Three Voices to the accompaniment of a drum and bells, and the faint grunt and thud of a dancing bear.
    MAN
    The frontiers at last, I am feeling so tired.
    We are getting the refugee habit,
    WOMEN
    Moving from island to island,
    Where the boundaries are clouds,
    Where the frontiers of the land are water.
    OLD MAN
    We are getting the refugee habit,
    WOMAN
    We are only anonymous feet moving,
    Without friends any more, without books
    Or companionship any more. We are getting—
    MAN
    The refugee habit. There’s no end
    To the forest and no end to the moors:
    Between the just and the unjust
    There is little distinction.
    OLD MAN
    Bodies like houses, without windows and doors:
    WOMAN
    The children have become so brown,
    Their skins have become dark with sunlight,
    MAN
    They have learned to eat standing.
    OLD MAN
    When we come upon men crucified,
    Or women hanging downward from the trees,
    They no longer understand.
    WOMAN
    How merciful is memory with its fantasies.
    They are getting the refugee habit …
    OLD MAN
    How weary are the roads of the blood.
    Walking forwards towards death in my mind
    I am walking backwards again into my youth;
    A mother, a father, and a house.
    One street, a certain town, a particular place:
    And the feeling of belonging somewhere,
    Of being appropriate to certain fields and trees.
    WOMAN
    Now our address is the world.