Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

'It is the true star, rising in the hush
Of a heaven that is wholly in the mind,
But passes out beyond it, as the thrush,
Perfectly singing, leaves all thought behind.'
                                                     Humbert Wolfe.

I will remember this night. So long as mind
Endures to captain against the vandal Doom
Her forlorn hopes—nerve blood and bone designed
After death's image, let me remember this night.
     There were daffodils at one corner of my room
Poised in a golden trance, and the four white-
Panelled walls made cosmos in miniature
Serene as a dew-drop or a Chinese poem,
And I its essence and demiurge. So pure
A oneness (I thought) is every man. No stir
From the street breaks on his Self, a play without proem
Or epilogue, dreamed in the theatre
He calls his life: being actor and audience
To the last posture of decay he claps
Hisses yawns at himself.
                                       But then, what sense
Have they the pioneer-minded, the rebel-hearted,
If man's fulfilment rest on no 'perhaps'
Outside him? They are bell-buoys adrift from their charted
Safe shallows, sagging inanely through a sea
That yerks them up to meaningless stars, clanging,
Clanging for Eldorado, dementedly.
Monad or Nomad? What difference, since either state
Binds us with a law, each soul from each estranging,
To be thus terribly masters of our fate.
     And I was sickened by this philosophy
That would benight each man in a six-foot cell,
Proud Playboy of his own complacency;
So I opened the window and put out my head,
Thought's fog, portentous pachyderm, to dispel.
('The monad has no windows,' Leibnitz said.)
     Firm stood the moon, and all the sky marched on
Rank after rank of cloud in ragged battalions
Before its face: as though Napoleon,
The squat dynamic man, straddling the snow
Watched while his glorious tatterdemalions
Trailed home and left his hope-blood at Moscow.
Then, lapped in that magnificence, I knew
Suddenly how all creatures from one source
Take breath and purpose, and again renew
It with their greatness. How the very star
That held Columbus to his homeric course
Waned on the waters around St Helena.
     'This star that constant is for our possession,
Find we its gleam amid whatever skies—
In valour's day-spring, or the dry noon-tide passion
To probe beneath life's semblances, or drowned
In the deep-sea midnight of a woman's eyes—
This star, whose mere reflection will astound
Us out of false content, by its possessing
Mates every true possessor; and so fills
Each creature with Creation, itself amassing
From men the stuff of Godhead.' . . .
                                                         As I spoke
Quietly like a clump of daffodils
Out of the night grew dawn, and sparrows awoke.