(snippets)
Note
Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets - a final verdict or a balanced judgement. It is the nature of the poem to be neither final nor balanced. I have certain beliefs whiich I hope emerge in the cause of it but which I have refused to abstract from their context. For this reason I shall probably be called a trimmer by some and a sentimental extremist bij others. ut poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be "objective" or clear-cut at the cost of honesty
i
And I am in the train too now and summer is going
South as I go north
Bound for the dead leaves falling, the burning bonfire,
The dying that brings forth
The harder life, revealing the trees' girders,
The frost that kills the germs of laissez-faire
ii
Only the spider spinning out his reams
Of colourless thread says Only there are always
Interlopers, dreams,
Who let no dead dog lie nor death be final
Suggesting, while he spins, that to-morrow will outweigh
To-night, that Becoming is a match for Being,
That To-morrow is also a day,
iv
September has come and I wake
So I am glad
That life contains her with her moods and moments
More shifting and more transient than I had
Yet thought of as being integral to beauty;
ix
October comes with rain whipping around the ankles
in waves of white at night
xiii
So blow the bugles over the metaphysicians,
Let the pure mind return to the Pure Mind;
I must be content to remain in the world of Appearance
And sit on the mere appearance of a behind.
But in case you should think my education was wasted
I hasten to explain
That having once been to the University of Oxford
You can never really again
Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset
In a world like ours;
One should not gulp one's port but as it isn't
Port, I'll gulp it if I want to gulp
But probably I'll just enjoy the colour
And pour it down the sink
Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel,
The shop is closing down;
They don't want any philosopher-kings in England,
There ain't no universals in this man's town
