Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bretaillière – The money he received as a soldier.
 
 
27
Franz Hals.
 
 
29–30
As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
 
 
31–35
His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
 
 
37–40
Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
 
 
41
The heart of Henri IV was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student there.
 
 
45–53
His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
 
 
56–65
His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation.
             
 
68
Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes.
 
 
73–76
Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
 
 
77–83
He proves God by exhaustion.
 
 
91–93
Christina, Queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o’clock in the morning.
 
 
94
Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.

Gnome
    Spend the years of learning squandering
    Courage for the years of wandering
    Through a world politely turning
    From the loutishness of learning.

The Vulture
    dragging his hunger through the sky
    of my skull shell of sky and earth
    stooping to the prone who must
    soon take up their life and walk
    mocked by a tissue that may not serve
    till hunger earth and sky be offal

Enueg I
    Exeo in a spasm
    tired of my darling’s red sputum
    from the Portobello Private Nursing Home
    its secret things
    and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge
    and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding
    round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding
    into a black west
    throttled with clouds.
    Above the mansions the algum-trees
    the mountains
    my skull sullenly
    clot of anger
    skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind
    bites like a dog against its chastisement.
    I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet
    flush with the livid canal;
    at Parnell Bridge a dying barge
    carrying a cargo of nails and timber
    rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock;
    on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam.
    Then for miles only wind
    and the weals creeping alongside on the water
    and the world opening up to the south
    across a travesty of champaign to the mountains
    and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green
    manuring the night fungus
    and the mind annulled
    wrecked in wind.
    I splashed past a little wearish old man,
    Democritus,
    scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,
    his stump caught up horribly, like a claw, under his breech, smoking.
    Then because a field on the left went up in a sudden blaze
    of shouting and urgent whistling and scarlet and blue ganzies
    I stopped and climbed the bank to see the game.
    A child fidgeting at the gate called up:
    â€˜Would we be let in Mister?’
    â€˜Certainly’ I said ‘you would.’
    But, afraid, he set off down the road.
    â€˜Well’ I called after him ‘why wouldn’t you go on in?’
    â€˜Oh’ he said, knowingly,
    â€˜I was in that field before and I got put out.’
    So on,
    derelict,
    as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark,
    or in Sumatra the jungle hymen,
    the still flagrant rafflesia.
    Next:
    a lamentable family of grey verminous hens,
    perishing out in the sunk field,
    trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed,
    with no means of roosting.
    The great mushy toadstool,
    green-black,
    oozing up after me,
    soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence,
    in my skull the wind going fetid,
    the water