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

The Double Shame - Stephen Spender

Contrast Spender's earlier poem here with this one and it's hard to believe it comes from the same person.  "Daybreak" has such an airy and romantic tone, the words so lightly-seeming and spontaneous, like lines Fredrich March or Ronald Colman could have whispered to Jean Arthur in a 1930's film, while this one is so tightly (and beautifully) written, precise, and harshly true.  The closing lines are an accusation cast even as the last spadeful is thrown over the dead relationship.  It leaves no room for any self-deception about what transpired, which is what has always made this a powerful poem: how many of us have had the courage and honesty to face the truth in those lines?  (This is another that requires reading the lines as though they were long sentences, i.e. follow the punctuation marks and not the line breaks the first time.)
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The Double Shame

You must live though the time when everything hurts
When the space of the ripe, loaded afternoon
Expands to a landscape of white heat frozen
And trees are weighed down with hearts of stone
And green stares back where you stare alone,
And the walking eyes throw flinty comments,
And the words which carry most knives are the blind
Phrases searching to be kind.

Solid and usual objects are ghosts
The furniture carries cargoes of memory,
The staircase has corners which remember
As fire blows reddest in gusty embers,
And each empty dress cuts out an image
In fur and evening and summer and spring
of her who was different in each.

Pull down the blind and lie on the bed
And clasp the hour in the glass of one room
Against your mouth like a crystal doom.
Take up the book and stare at the letters
Hieroglyphs on sand and as meaningless –
Here birds crossed once and a foot once trod
In a mist where sight and sound are blurred.

The story of others who made their mistakes
And of one whose happiness pierced like a star
Eludes and evades between sentences
And the letters break into eyes which read
The story life writes now in your head
As though the characters sought for some clue
To their being transcendently living and dead
In your history, worse than theirs, but true.

Set in the mind of their poet, they compare
Their tragic sublime with your tawdry despair
And they have fingers which accuse
You of the double way of shame.
At first you did not love enough
And afterwards you loved too much
And you lacked the confidence to choose
And you have only yourself to blame.

Stephen Spender

Daybreak - S. Spender

My introduction to Spender occurred in my early 20s through this poem.  He wrote it in his mid-30s.  Spender is as well-regarded for his autobiographical works as his poetry.  I find him more accessible - and less academic - than W.H. Auden (THE English poet of the 20th century), who was a contemporary at Oxford in the 1930s.  Spender, to me, has more warmth, more "dream", lyricism, and sensitivity when the subject is the heart.  

This poem is the loveliest expression of that awakening which, once experienced, is never forgotten, and which, once lost, is ever sought after again.
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Daybreak

At dawn she lay with her profile at that angle

Which, when she sleeps, seems the carved face of an angel.
Her hair a harp, the hand of a breeze follows
And plays, against the white cloud of the pillows.
Then, in a flush of rose, she woke, and her eyes that opened
Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.
From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
Fell like the first of fountains: murmured
‘Darling,’ upon my ears the song of the first bird.
‘My dream becomes my dream,’ she said, ‘come true.
I waken from you to my dream of you.’
Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume
The audacity of her sleep.  Our dreams
Poured into each other’s arms, like streams.
                                                                                      
Stephen Spender - English