UCD B6

The scene is a country lane
With massed banks of primroses and violets
A thick thorn hedge behind,
White and red butterflies in the air
And midges filling the mouth of a low culvert.

I was in the town of Mallow
And in Charleville
And now I name these names
Hoping for a miracle
By incantation to recover
The serenity of a successful lover

Scattered ideas organising
Themselves once more
To fight their way out of the chaos
We went through Tramore
And from the top of the hill
Still no miracle

I talked to men who lived
By a satisfactory creed
But there was no answer in their answer
To my need
And in Waterford
I was crying Lord Lord

On the Rock of Cashel I looked
Through the ruined roof
Of a splendid cathedral
For some inkling of
The order that brings fruit
Up from the darkened root

I went through Tipperary 
To Thurles and Clonmel
Seeking the enchanted moment
Where I again might dwell
In sonorous repose
Beyond the power of those

Enemies of the heart
What are they?

As I walked in the Valley of Sensation,
A place not definable with precision,
I saw The Fantasy as a Blake-like vision - 
The feast of sultry Sloth was the occassion.

If any says that his view was limited to landscape
Tell them they're fools
Above all it was women as the luxuriant
Rotting of souls
Coming down to ruin him as he needed for growth
O stinking life that has no use for a bath

In twos and threes for such was their necessity
For the holy orgy
God pity him for what he could look back at
Last word in torture
All to be present with each and other at a deflowering
O rapturous love O holy holy whoring

I made a new world last summer
A well equipped world where everything was fresh
New beasts that only performed for one rhymer
And waters living with exclusive fish
Everything.

In the Duke of Wellington as the evenings grew darker
In nineteen fifty four I met George Barker;
Smug he was and confident of his latest Vision - 
Greatest English poet since Auden went on the Foreign Mission.

There was a man who had a clock, his name was Matthew Meers
He counted every tick and tock for eight and eighty years
And then one day he found the seconds turned to things
That you could work like puppets with imagination's strings
And he who had been eighty eight switched back to twenty nine
About to be joined in wedlock to a woman half divine.

He said: "Art thou the Son of God? expecting
"Thou has said it -" or some such words
From a humble man ashamed to admit
That he too would shoot down Pleasure's singing birds.

Having read Spenser who could stop the Thames
To hear his Prothalamion - and no wonder!

The world seeks to destroy 
That serenity
The moralising sphinx
That is never softened by drinks
That seems so near and yet
Far away as a sunset
That seems as sweetly kind
As a loving woman's mind
Exciting the lust of power
Break the neck and remove the flower
And claws reach out - then voices
Scream helpless prejudices
At the monstrous chaste unchaste
In a veil of mystery cased.