The secret candour

(In Memoriam – June 1941, R. R.)

Friend, whose unnatural early death

In this year’s cold, chaotic Spring

Is like a clumsy wound that will not heal:

What can I say to you, now that your ears

Ae stoppered-up with distant soil?

Perhaps to speak at all is false; more true

Simply to sit at times alone and dumb

And with most pure intensity of thought

And concentrated inmost feeleng, reach

Towards your shadow on the years’ crumbling wall

I’ll say not any word in praise or blame

Of what you ended with the mere turn of a tap;

Nor to explain, deplore nor yet exploit

The latent pathos of your living years –

Hurried, confused and unfulfilled, -

That were the shiftless years of both our youths

Spent in the monstrous mountain-shadow of

Catastrophe that chilled you to the bone:

The certain imminence of which always pursued

You from your heritage of fields and sun...

I see your face in hostile sunlight, eyes

Wrinkled against its glare, behind the glass

Of a car’s windscreen, while you seek to lose

Yourself in swift devouring of white roads

Unwinding across Europe or America;

Taciturn at the wheel, wrapped in a blaze

Of restlessness that no fresh scene can quench;

In cities of brief sojourn that you pass

Through in your quest for respite, heavy drink

Alone enabling you to bear each hotel night,

Sex, Art and Politics: those poor

Expedients! You tried them each in turn,

With a wry secret smile of one resigned

To join in every complicated game

Adults affect to play. Yet girls you found

So prone to sentiment’s corruptions; and the joy

Of sensual satisfaction seemed so brief, and left

Only new need. It proved hard to remain

Convinced of the Word’s efficacity; or even quite

Certain of World-Salvation through ‘the Party Line’...

Cased in the careful armour that you wore

Of wit and nonchalance, through which

Few quizzed the concealed countenance of fear,

You waited daily for the sky to fall;

At moments wholly panic-stricken by

A sense of stifling in your brittle shell;

Seeing the world’s damnation week by week

Grow more and more inevitable; till

The conflagration broke out with a roar,

And from those flames you fled through whirling smoke,

To end at last in bankrupt exile in

That sordid city, scene of Ulysses; and there,

While War sowed all the lands with violent graves,

You finally succumbed to a black, wild

Incomprehensibility of fate that none could share...

Yet even in your obscure death I see

The secret candour of that lonely child

Who, lost in the storm-shaken castle-park,

Astride his crippled mastiff’s back was borne

Slowly away into the utmost dark.

David Gascoyne  

Adresatem tej elegii jest Roger Roughton, angielski poeta, zaliczany do surrealistów, wydawca (własnym sumptem) pisma literackiego Contemporary Poetry and Prose. Jemu też poświęcił Francis Scarfe swój zbiór esejów krytycznych Auden and After, o którym miałam pisać, ale zatrzymałam się na stronie z dedykacją. RR musiał mieć talent do przyjaźni. Do niego też, po części, jest adresowany Dedycatory Poem ze wspomnianego zbioru Scarfe'a:

To you, my friends

By my lamp in the evenings,

Whose words refresh

My nights, my mornings;

A doomed generation

Seized between wars,

Whose boyhood language 

Was hunger and loss:

Thanks for you verses

That enrich memory

Like smiling faces

Of women and children.

All I can say

Will do you less good

Than a peaceful day

In a summer wood:

All I can give

Is a prose love,

Locked in a book

My kindest look.

F. S.

Te wiersze oddają to, co jest piękne i żywe i pociągające w latach trzydziestych dla mnie.