George Barker : 15 poems

 

Heroes and worms
 
The dragons of the breast
Devour and drag down
Those seraphim a the mind
Trumpeting to attest
That Destiny is our own.
But what is not is best.
 
I, cowboy with a spear,
Transfix my own heart
To kill the worm down there
Tearing St. George apart -
But O the worm turns
Into my heart of hearts.
 

My dragonfly roaring your engines

My dragonfly roaring your engines
Through my five senses soar,
As, seeking for its origin,
The bird goes up through the shower.
 
And over all that distance can
Or time will put between us,
Rise  O my rainbow and make span
Over what intervenes.
 
On their cotillion axles spin
 The automatic stars
 And take our silver kisses in
 Like penny pianolas.
 
 But far from me as my home is
 You move, and do not rest,
 With on your lip my thousand mile kiss
 And the grief at the breast.

Summer Song

 
I looked into my heart to write
And found a desert there.
But when I looked again I heard
Howling and proud in every word
The hyena despair.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
All loss burns in trophies;
And in the cold sheet of the sky
Lifelong the fishlipped lovers lie
Kissing catastrophes.
 
O loving garden where I lay
When under the breasted tree
My son stood up behind my eyes
And groaned: Remember that the price
Is vinegar for me.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the designer:
I would not be the one to start
The breaking day and the breaking heart
For all the grief in China.
 
My one, my one, my only love,
Hide, hide your face in a leaf,
And let the hot tear falling burn
The stupid heart that will not learn
The everywhere of grief.
 
Great summer sun, great summer sun,
Turn back to the never-never
Cloud-cuckoo, happy, far-off land
Where all the love is true love, and
True love goes on for ever.

Turn on your side and bear the day to me

Turn on your side and bear the day to me
Beloved, sceptre-struck, immured
In the glass wall of sleep. Slowly
Uncloud the borealis of your eye
And show your iceberg secrets, your midnight prizes
To the green-eyed world and to me. Sin
Coils upward into thin air when you awaken
And again morning announces amnesty over
The serpent-kingdomed bed. Your mother
Watched with as dove an eye the unforgivable night
Sigh backward into innocence when you
Set a bright monument in her amorous sea.
Look down, Undine, on the trident that struck
Sons from the rock of vanity. Turn in the world
Sceptre-struck, spellbound, beloved,
Turn in the world and bear the day to me.

Ode Against St.Cecilia’s Day

 
Rise, underground sleepers, rise from the grave
Under a broken hearted sky
And hear the swansinging nightmare grieve
For this deserted anniversary
Where horned a hope sobs in the wilderness
By the thunderbolt of the day.
 
Footfall echo down the long ruin of midnight
Knock like a heart in a box
Through the aural house and the sybilline cave
Where once Cecilia shook her singing veils,
Echo and mourn. Footstepping word, attend her
Here, where, bird of answer, she prevails.
 
Sleep, wormeaten weepers.Silence is her altar.
To the drum of the skull, muffled
In a black time, the sigh is a hecatomb.
Tender Cecilia silence. Silence is tender
As never a word was. Now, dumb-
Struck she mourns in the catacombs of her grandeur.
 
O stop the calling killer in the skull
Like beasts we turn towards!
For was the night-riding siren beautiful
Caterwauling war until her bed was full
Of the uxorious dead?
Let the great moaners of the Seven Seas
And only heaven mourn
With the shipwracked harp of creation on their knees
Till Cecilia turns to a stone.

 

Flight 462

 
Dear love, that I should go
into an unsetting sun
with only the lift of a hand
to you still standing there
like a young rowan tree
enislanded in the cloud
of this parting, these
true words is what that hand
lifted out of the past
conveys. The heart is this.
When, twenty-nine angels high,
I look down upon those veils
and robes of glimmering mist
that mantle the Atlantic,
there, in every glittering
distillation
of diamond, sun and dew,
I see, no, not the with-held tear that never fell
from your spellbound vision,
but in each diamond drop
I see the oval icon
with a babe under the heart
of you whom distance only
brings me the nearer to:
for the rocking seas may slide
under the hunting moon
and the capsizing con-
stellations overhead
tum death and destiny
further away or toward
the flying instant I am
whispering over these seas,
nevertheless, my love,
leaving you, leaving you,
I travel still and still
faster than Pan American
my last love, to you.

True Love true love what have I done

 
True love, true love, what have I done
That I can find no rest?
Only the breaking of this bedrock
Nightlong in my breast.
 
True love, true love, what have I done
To drive such a scissoring wind
Over the seas of my sleep like
A harpy of the mind?
 
True love, true love, what have I done
That, wherever I go,
I walk upon that sobbing fossil—
Eros in the snow?
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
 —So violent a thing
That every word and wind a witness
Against my breath will bring?
 
True love, true love, what have I done
Save watch it sail away,
That gold haired shell with Aphrodite
Nailed to a prow of clay?
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
O never and never return!
I have seen the lightning whip the shrouds
And watched the mermaids bum.
 
True love, true love, what have I done
That I can find no rest—
The gilded head, the wormwood image
Sink weeping in the west.
 
True love, true love, what have I done?
In the assuaging sea
I drown, but still the fishes whisper
Love without end to me. 

 

Grandfather, Grandfather

 
Grandfather, Grandfather,
what do pandas say?
Grandfather, Grandfather,
as among the rocks they roll
and rather sadly play
a game that seems
to do with dreams
of places far away.
Grandfather, Grandfather,
what do pandas say?
 
Grand-daughter, Grand-daughter,
when the pandas play
rather sadly in the rocks
this is what they say
to one another as they seem
to remember in a dream
those places far away:
'Let us tell no one
the word that we say
softly to one another
as we roll and play.
For if they ever heard it,
the tall two-legged Understanders
who always want to know what pandas
like us love to say,
yes, if they ever heard it
they would take it away.'
 

 

To My Mother

 
Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her -
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.
 
She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.

 

Swansong of the Hyena

 
Where are those words that once
Alighted like swans upon
The silent deserts of sense
And gave us oases?
They have all turned into stone
Like Memnon's effigies.
 
The rat and the hyena
Nest in my innermost
And sacred tabernacle.
I and my soul have seen
A vision of that foul ghost
And heard its mad cackle.

Narcissus and the star

 
I will not look within
Where at the hot pit hisses
That diet of worms and a daimon
Adoring his mirror twin
More than any Narcissus
The issue of his semen.
 
But as the first and last
Dead suns rise and set
Over and hereafter
The sweet star and the past,
Glory without regret
All things ever after.

O Who Will Speak From a Womb or a Cloud?
 
 
Not less light shall the gold and the green lie
On the cyclonic curl and diamonded eye, than
Love lay yesterday on the breast like a beast.
Not less light shall God tread my maze of nerve
Than that great dread of tomorrow drove over
My maze of days. Not less terrible that tread
Stomping upon your grave than I shall tread there.
Who is a god to haunt the tomb but Love?
 
Therefore I shall be there at morning and midnight,
Not with a straw in my hair and a tear as Ophelia
Floating along my sorrow, but I shall come with
The cabala of things, the cipher of nature, so that
With the mere flounce of a bird's feather crest
I shall speak to you where you sit in all trees,
Where you conspire with all things that are dead.
Who is so far that Love cannot speak to him?
 
So that no corner can hide you, no autumn of leaves
So deeply close over you that I shall not find you,
To stretch down my hand and sting you with life
Like poison that resurrects. O remember
How once the Lyrae dazzled and how the Novembers
Smoked, so that blood burned, flashed its mica,
And that was life. Now if I dip my hand in your grave
Shall I find it bloody with autumn and bright with stars?
Who is to answer if you will not answer me?
 
But you are the not yet dead, so cannot answer.
Hung by a hair's breadth to the breath of a lung,
Nothing you know of the hole over which you hang
But that it's dark and deep as tomorrow midnight.
I ask, but you cannot answer except with words
Which show me the mere interior of your fear,
The reverse face of the world. But this,
This is not death, the standing on the head
So that a sky is seen. O who
Who but the not yet born can tell me of my bourne?
 
Lie you there, lie you there, my never, never,
Never to be delivered daughter, so wise in ways
Where you perch like a bird beyond the horizon,
Seeing but not being seen, above our being?
Then tell me, shall the meeting ever be,
When the corpse dives back through the womb
To clasp his child before it ever was?
Who but the dead can kiss the not yet born?
 
Sad is space between a start and a finish,
Like the rough roads of stars, fiery and mad.
I go between birth and the urn, a bright ash
Soon blazed to blank, like a fire-ball. But
Nothing I bring from the before, no message,
No clue, no key, no answer. I hear no echo,
Only the sheep's blood dripping from the gun,
The serpent's tear like fire along the branch.
O who will speak from a womb or a cloud?

 

O Child beside the Waterfall

O Child beside the Waterfall
what songs without a word
rise from those waters like the call
only a heart has heard-
the Joy, the Joy in all things
rise whistling like a bird.
 
O Child beside the Waterfall
I hear them too, the brief
heavenly notes, the harp of dawn,
the nightingale on the leaf,
all, all dispel the darkness and
the silence of our grief.
 
O Child beside the Waterfall
I see you standing there
with waterdrops and fireflies
and hummingbirds in the air,
all singing praise of paradise,
paradise everywhere.
 
 

On A Friend's Escape From Drowning Off The Norfolk Coast

 
Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave
Beside him as he struck
Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave
Crossed him and swung him back,
And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.
Then the farewell rock
Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out
A pawing gag of the sea
Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout
Like a dying airman. Then she
Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand
Was awakened by whom
Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:
And opened her eyes
On the death of her son's begetter. Up she flies
Into the hydra-headed
Grave as he closes his life upon her who for
Life has so richly bedded him.
But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore
Back by his hair
Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son
Stood laughing where
He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down
On that cold sand
Each holding the other by a living hand.

 

Song for the Countess of Pemroke

 
When I was walking
Down by that green gate
I had the butterfly in my guts
And the harp in my throat;
The wheel in my left hand
And in my right
The perpetual candle
That the wind can tremble
Or the least touch light.
 
When I was sleeping
The cold bird overhead
Came down to my bed
For comfort and I said:
O the gold-tufted, feather-crested,
Blue-eyed, passion-breasted,
Paradise bird has nested
So near my head.
 
When I was abject under
The gaudy summer tree
Out of the branches sprang a hand
With a sprig of misery and
All the blossoms of understanding
And gave them to me.
The foliage of the tree was golden and came down
Entirely over me
And covered me entirely with splendour
Like the laburnum tree. 

About 10 minutes' walk from my home in Loughton, Essex, a blue plaque on a modest semi-detached house announces the birthplace of "George Granville Barker, poet, 1913-1991". It is not a place of pilgrimage. Barker is one of those poets you struggle to remember. Today, hardly anyone reads him, most of his work is out of print, and he is barely mentioned in literary histories.

 Yet this was no minor poet. His work was passionate, intellectually challenging and highly original, his language incantatory and often hypnotic. There are echoes of Blake, Housman, Verlaine and Barker's contemporary, Dylan Thomas. At 22, Barker was a literary phenomenon. TS Eliot declared him a genius, accepted his first work for the magazine Criterion, commissioned him to write a volume for Faber (where Eliot was then poetry editor) and persuaded wealthy friends to set up a support fund. Yeats thought him the finest poet of his generation - better than Auden (whom Eliot initially rejected) and comparable in "rhythmic invention" to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

 Most critics thought the young Barker a better poet than the young Thomas, and the latter, who called his rival's poems "masturbatory monologues", seems to have been madly jealous. Nor did Barker's output ever flag. He regarded poetry as a full-time occupation and, save for a few visiting university lectureships, never had anything resembling a full-time job. He composed poetry until the day he died. If anything, it improved as he got older.

 If you like your poets to live wildly, irresponsibly and dangerously, Barker fitted the bill perfectly. He was a prodigious drinker, and an habitual user of Methedrine and Benzedrine. He never owned a home - his sole attempt at property purchase ended when a fraudulent estate agent absconded with his entire savings - and scarcely had a fixed address. As a young man, he accidentally stabbed his brother's eye out while they were fencing, an episode that haunted him all his life ("I see my hand / Passing over the palace of his face"). He was, for years, at the heart of the bohemian crowd in London's Soho. He fathered 15 children by four different women. One of them, the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, determined to marry him and bear his children when she discovered his poetry in a London bookshop, long before she met him. He was to be the unnamed lover in Smart's masterpiece of prose poetry, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

 He quarrelled bitterly and sometimes violently with friends as well as lovers and once threw one of his works on the fire - because, he said, his then partner had read it with a sneer. When a visitor tried to rescue it, he hit him over the head with a shovel. The same partner threw an ashtray at him and broke his teeth. Another bit his upper lip so firmly he required 40 stitches. A third partner, who left him for his nephew, was so terrified of the consequences that she settled and married in Birmingham, believing (rightly, as it turned out) that it was the last place he would think of looking for them.

 In America he wrote pornography with Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller. His poems, read on the BBC Third Programme, were excoriated for obscenity, and he never lost the capacity to cause outrage. "It's a woman's duty to be beautiful," he told the Sunday Times in 1983. "When we have a civilised society, they will put down ugly and stupid women." Brought up a Catholic by his Irish mother, he took confession, not long before he died, for the first time in 30 years. He had broken every commandment, he told the priest, except the sixth, "thou shalt not kill".

 So why did he fall so out of fashion that, despite settling for the last 24 years of his life just 20 miles from Norwich, the fledgling University of East Anglia, pioneer of creative writing courses, never invited him to take a single class? His second wife Elspeth - still living in the 17th-century farmhouse she rented with Barker, with his desk and chair still exactly where he wrote - says "he never did anything to promote himself, never went to literary parties, and was too difficult and argumentative to belong to anything like a literary school". He was, she said, "a very perverse poet who would often bugger up a perfectly good poem with a pun in the last line".

 By the mid-1950s, he was out of tune with the age. "It was rather like what happened to DH Lawrence," suggested Barker's friend, the poet and anthologist Tony Astbury. "There was a change in sensibility. Not a levelling down exactly, but a levelling out." Though his poetry became somewhat more colloquial, his extravagant language, overwrought style and inflation of reality continued to jar when the fashion was for detached, cool, ironic understatement.

 "He was mystical and mythical; the new mood stressed common sense," wrote his biographer, Robert Fraser. Despite his neglect of church attendance, and frequent assertions that he didn't believe in God, he feared hellfire and damnation ("a very superstitious Catholic," observed Elspeth) and his lifelong engagement with the moral drama of Catholic theology, wrote Fraser, made him "a religious poet in a secular age". Perhaps most important of all, he failed to die young in Manhattan, as Dylan Thomas did.

 Barker didn't stay long in Loughton, though he wrote often of nearby Epping Forest. When he was six months old, his family decamped to Fulham. At the age of nine, inspired by Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, he resolved to be a poet: "While other urchins were blowing up toads / With pipes of straw stuck in the arse, / So was I, but I also wrote odes."

 His father was variously a soldier, a temporary policeman, an insurance agent and a butler at Gray's Inn. Barker was conscious that "I had been cast a little low / In the social register." He left school at 15 and was never very comfortable with better-educated writers, writing of Auden that "behind . . . the poetry I discern a clumsy interrogatory finger questioning me about my matriculation certificate, my antecedents and my annual income". Discovering his girlfriend Jessica was pregnant, he married at 20. Since she, too, was from a Catholic family, the child was born in secret and given up for adoption, another source of lifelong guilt. Though they lived apart from the mid-1940s, she and Barker never divorced. Only when Jessica died, two years before Barker's own death, did he marry Elspeth, his last love.

 Though instinctively on the left, he had little time for politics and was apparently only dimly aware that Japan was allied with the fascist powers when he agreed to take a university lectureship there, starting in March 1940. He found the cadet force playing German martial music outside the campus house where he lived with Jessica. His lectures were attended by only three students. Receiving fan mail from the affluent and well-connected Smart, Barker appealed for financial help in escaping to America. She readily agreed.

 And so came about their first meeting, which forms the celebrated opening passage of By Grand Central Station, a fictional re-creation of their turbulent and passionate affair. She had only recently learnt that the long-awaited love of her life was already married. "I am standing on a corner in Monterey, waiting for the bus to come in, and all the muscles of my will are holding my terror to face the moment I most desire . . . But then it is her eyes that come forward . . . her Madonna eyes, soft as the newly born, trusting as the un-tempted. And, for a moment, at that gaze, I am happy to forgo my future, and postpone indefinitely the miracle hanging fire." Barker's account was less nuanced: "I stepped down into your lap, just as truly as I stepped down from my mother, and I have loved you completely and perfectly from that moment."

 Cynics would say Barker really fell in love with the freedom of classless America and that Smart was an infatuated groupie. But their on-off affair ranged over four countries and 18 years, and produced four children. Barker didn't formally leave most of his women. Rather, he drifted off, seeming to believe they should wait patiently in the kitchen while his absences grew longer. He became estranged from his children by Jessica, moving in and out of the lives of the others with unpredictability and frequently the charm and warmth of an English spring. "Poets are terrifying people to live with," wrote one daughter, then 15. "They rush off at odd moments and are neither seen nor heard of for months. Then . . . they suddenly appear on the threshold as if nothing had ever happened."

 From 1959, he lived in Italy with Dede Farrelly, estranged wife of his friend John Farrelly. Inspired by an ancient civilisation and by the Italian landscape ("Over the Campagna / As far as I can see / The farms flourish like flowers / And the confident olive / Whispers how civilised / Man and landscape can be"), he produced what many critics thought his finest poetry. He met Elspeth Langlands, a 22-year-old from the Scottish Highlands, on a visit to London in 1963. "He asked me what I thought of his most recent volume," she recalled, "and I said I hadn't enjoyed it as much as some of his earlier ones. He flew into a rage." But his relationship with Dede was deteriorating and, when Elspeth arrived in Italy with a young painter called Tony Kingsmill, he prised her away. Kingsmill fled to Greece, leaving a note of defeat on the kitchen table - "like Van Gogh's ear," Barker observed.

From 1967 he settled with Elspeth at the farmhouse (helped financially by his long-time admirer Graham Greene). They had five children and, for the first time, Barker lived with a family more or less uninterruptedly. According to Elspeth he became disciplined enough to stay off drink and rise at six to start work. She flushed the drugs down the lavatory. Only on Saturday nights, when it was open house for friends and relatives, did he indulge and fight as of old. "People wanted to sit next to him," Elspeth recalled. "Then they knew they wouldn't have anything thrown at them."

 "He may have been outrageous," said Astbury, "but he was a kind and loving man. There was great laughter in his life. He never wanted to be part of a canon. He prided himself on being an outsider." On his grave in Itteringham, Norfolk, a stone book - erected by a young bank robber whom Barker had befriended - states: "No Compromise". It was a phrase Barker often used, and it is a good epitaph, not only for his extraordinary life, but for his attitude to poetry. "I believe the responsibility or onus of the poet," he once wrote, "is to assert and affirm the human principle of perversity . . . I believe the nature of the poet to be at heart anarchic so that, in the inconceivable eventuality of . . . a society . . . possessing no faults to which one could rationally object, it would still be the job of a poet to object."

 Truly, madly, deeply.  By Peter Wilby. The Guardian, April 19, 2008.

Also of interest :
 
Rhymes of passion.  His father was a feted figure of the Thirties poetry scene, with a raging appetite for wine, women and words. His mother was a Canadian heiress and writer who crossed the ocean in search of love. Here, Christopher Barker recounts the tortured and tempestuous relationship between his parents, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. The Guardian, August 20, 2006. 

 A Glimpse at an Irresponsible Poet! Norfolk Tales, Myths & More! , June 14, 2018. 

The “genius” George Barker – a “very peculiar fellow” in rural Norfolk’s earth.  Recently Retired Man,
December 11, 2018.