Song - Stephen Spender

(This is the 3rd poem by Spender here - do read the earlier ones, especially "Daybreak", which is one of the most beautiful and gentle and loving poems I know.  Link to his bio is there.)   As befitting one of the leading 20th century English poets, one comes to expect a masterful command of language, like a lion-tamer putting very independent and willful beasts into their places and paces.  The imagery, the word-choices, the airiness of the tone in contrast to the heaviness of the subject is brilliant.  He captures the conflicting emotional states so well: the anger, the sense of betrayal (actual or supposed) the pain in having to imagine how/why it occurred.... Yet.. yet all of it ending with a lonely resignation/bewilderment which is not angry because he loves her still.  And she is a fool for not knowing it.  If you haven't been there yet, I hope it's a place you never visit....
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 Song

Stranger, you who hide my love

         In the curved cheek of a smile

And sleep with her upon a tongue

         Of soft lies that beguile,

                  Your paradisal ecstasy

         Is justified is justified

By hunger of all beasts beneath

         The overhanging cloud

                  Who to snatch quick pleasures run

                  Before their momentary sun

Be eclipsed by death.

Lightly, lightly, from my sleep

         She stole, our vows of dew to break

Upon a day of melting rain

         Another love to take:

                  Her happy happy perfidy

         Was justified was justified

Since compulsive needs of sense

         Clamour to be satisfied

                  And she was never one to miss

                  Plausible happiness

Of a new experience.

I, who stand beneath a bitter

         Blasted tree, with the green life

Of summer joy cut from my side

         By that self-justifying knife,

                  In my exiled misery

         Were justified were justified

If upon two lives I preyed

         Or punished with my suicide,

                  Or murdered pity in my heart

                  Or two other lives did part

To make the world pay what I paid.

Oh, but supposing that I climb

         Alone to a high room of clouds

Up a ladder of the time

And lie upon a bed alone

         And tear a feather from a wing

And listen to the world below

And write round my high paper walls

         Anything and everything

Which I know and do not know!

                                                                     Stephen Spender - English