Collected Poems 1931-74 by Lawrence Durrell Page B

them in the scale
    Of the material and the beautiful;
    Are not less complex but less delicate
    And less important than these living
    Instruments of space,
    Whose quiet communication is
    With older trees in ships on the grey waves:
    An order and a music
    Like a writing on the skies
    Too private for the reason or the pen;
    Too simple even for the heart’s surprise.
II
N EAR E L A LAMEIN
    This rough field of sudden war—
    This sand going down to the sea, going down,
    Was made without the approval of love,
    By a general death in the desire for living.
    Time got the range of impulse here:
    On old houses with no thought of armies,
    Burnt guns, maps and firing:
    All the apparatus of man’s behaviour
    Put by in memories for books on history:
    A growth like these bitter
    Green bulbs in the hollow sand here.
    But ideas and language do not go.
    The rate of the simple things—
    Men walking here, thinking of houses,
    Gardens, or green mountains or beliefs:
    Units of the dead in these living armies,
    Making comparison of this bitter heat,
    And the living sea, giving up its bodies,
    Level and dirty in the mist,
    Heavy with sponges and the common error.
    1946/ 1946

LEVANT
    Gum, oats and syrup
    The Arabians bore.
    Evoking nothing from the sea but more
    And more employ to christen them
    With whips of salt and glittering spray,
    Their wooden homes rocked on the chastening salt.
    Lamps on altars, breath of children;
    So coming and going with their talk of bales,
    Lading and enterprises marked out
    And fell on this rusty harbour
    Where tills grew fat with cash
    And the quills of Jews invented credit,
    And in margins folded up
    Bales, gum-arabic, and syrup;
    Syrian barley in biffed coracles
    Hugging the burking gulf or blown
    As cargoes from the viny breath
    Of mariners, the English or the Dutch.
    In manners taught them nothing much
    Beyond the endurance in the vile.
    Left in history words like
    Portuguese or Greek
    Whose bastards can still speak and smile.
    After this, lamps
    Confused the foreigners;
    Boys, women and drugs
    Built this ant-hill for grammarians
    Who fed upon the fathers fat with cash,
    Turned oats and syrup here
    To ribbons and wands and rash
    Patents for sex and feathers,
    Sweets for festivals and deaths.
    Nothing changes. The indifferent
    Or the merely good died off, but fixed
    Here once the human type ‘Levant’.
    Something fine of tooth and with the soft
    Hanging lashes to the eye,
    Given once by Spain and kept
    In a mad friendship here and sadness
    By the promiscuous sea upon this spit of sand.
    Something money or promises can buy.
    1946/ 1946

GREEK CHURCH: ALEXANDRIA
    The evil and the good seem undistinguished,
    Indeed all half asleep; their coming was
    No eloquent proposition of natures
    Too dense for material ends, quartered in pain.
    But a propitiation by dreams of belief
    A relief from the chafing ropes of thought.
    Piled high in Byzance like a treasure-ship
    The church heels over, sinking in sound
    And yellow lamplight while the arks and trolleys
    And blazing crockery of the orthodox God
    Make it a fearful pomp for peasants,
    A sorcery to the black-coated rational,
    To the town-girl an adventure, an adventure.
    Now however all hums and softly spins
    Like a great top, the many-headed black
    Majority merged in a single sea-shell.
    Idle thoughts press in, amazing one—
    How the theologians with beards of fire
    Divided us upon the boiling grid of thought,
    Or with dividers spun for us a fine
    Conniving cobweb—traps for the soul.
    Three sailors stand like brooms.
    The altar has opened like a honeycomb;
    An erect and flashing deacon like a despot howls.
    Surely we might ourselves exhale
    Our faults like rainbows on this incense?
    If souls did fire the old Greek barber
    Who cut my hair this morning would go flying,
    Not stand, a hopeless, window-bound and awkward
    Child at this sill of pomp,
    Moved by a hunger money could not sate,
    Smelling the miracle and softly sighing.
    1946/