COMPLETE POEMS
Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) and The Finishing School (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her Collected Poems I appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13 April 2006, at the age of eighty-eight.
COMPLETE POEMS
MURIEL SPARK
with an afterword by
MICHAEL SCHMIDT
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
A Note on This Edition
Foreword to the 2004 Edition (Muriel Spark)
A Tour of London
(c. 1950–51)
The Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi
(2000)
The Yellow Book
(c. 1951)
What?
(2002)
Verlaine Villanelle
(c. 1950)
Edinburgh Villanelle
(c. 1950)
Holy Water Rondel
(c. 1951)
The Creative Writing Class
(2003)
Authors’ Ghosts
(2003)
That Bad Cold
(2003)
Leaning Over an Old Wall
(c. 1947)
Flower into Animal
(1949/1950)
Abroad
(1984)
Going Up to Sotheby’s
(1982)
On the Lack of Sleep
(c. 1963)
The Grave that Time Dug
(c. 1951)
The Pearl-Miners
(c. 1952)
Omen
(c. 1949)
My Kingdom for a Horse
(c. 1956)
Intermittence
(c. 1956)
Letters
(2003)
Holidays 30
(2002)
Facts
(2003)
Complaint in a Wash-out Season
(c. 1959)
Litany of Time Past
(c. 1959)
The Fall
(c. 1943)
Faith and Works
(c. 1957)
Conundrum
(c. 1952)
The Messengers
(c. 1967)
Fruitless Fable
(c. 1948)
Note by the Wayside
(c. 1965)
Mungo Bays the Moon
(1996)
Panickings
(2003)
The Hospital
(2003)
The Empty Space
(2002)
Hats
(2003)
Anger in the Works
(1995)
Dimmed-Up
(2002)
While Flicking Over the Pages
(1995)
Standing in the Field
(1994)
To the Gods of My Right Hand
(c. 1954)
That Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road
(1993)
The Victoria Falls
(c. 1948)
Conversation Piece
(c. 1954)
Elementary
(c. 1951)
Against the Transcendentalists
(c. 1952)
Shipton-under-Wychwood
(c. 1950)
Conversations
(c. 1965)
The Card Party
(c. 1951–52)
Chrysalis
(c. 1951)
Elegy in a Kensington Churchyard
(c. 1949)
Evelyn Cavallo
(c. 1952)
The Rout
(c. 1951)
Four People in a Neglected Garden
(c. 1951)
Like Africa
(c. 1948)
We Were Not Expecting the Prince To-day
(c. 1947)
Communication
(c. 1955)
Created and Abandoned
(c. 1979)
The Goose
(c. 1960)
A Visit
(c. 1950)
Bluebell among the Sables
(c. 1958)
Industriad
(c. 1951)
Canaan
(c. 1952)
The Nativity
(c. 1950)
The Three Kings
(c. 1953)
Sisera
(c. 1953)
Report on an Interrogation
(2006)
Family Rose
(1948)
Nothing to Do
(2004)
Is This the Place?
(2004)
So near to Home
(2005)
Oh, So So
(2004)
The Man Who Came to Dinner
(2004)
Everything plus the Kitchen Sink
(2004)
The Ballad of the Fanfarlo
(c. 1951)
From the Latin
Persicos Odi
(c. 1949)
To Lucius Sestius in the Spring
(c. 1949)
Winter Poem
(c. 1949)
Prologue and Epilogue
(c. 1949)
Afterword by Michael Schmidt
Index of Titles and First Lines
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful acknowledgements are made to the editors and publishers of the magazines and newspapers in which these poems first appeared.
The following poems first appeared in The New Yorker: ‘Conversation Piece’, ‘The Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi’, ‘Edinburgh Villanelle’, ‘The Messengers’, ‘Canaan’, ‘The Card Party’, ‘Created and Abandoned’, ‘The Empty Space’, ‘Holidays’, ‘Mungo Bays the Moon’, ‘That Bad Cold’ and ‘The Lonely Shoe Lying in the Road’. Others appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Penguin New Writing No. 15, Poetry Quarterly, Scotland on Sunday, The Scotsman, Tatler, and World Literature Today. ‘Report on an Interrogation’ was first published in the UK in the Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 2006; ‘Family Rose’ was first published in the UK in Tatler, January 2007; ‘Nothing to Do’ and ‘Is This the Place?’ were first published in the UK in the Spectator, December 2004; ‘So near to Home’ was first published in the UK in the Spectator, December 2005. ‘Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink’ was first published in the UK in 2004 by Rees & O’Neill. ‘Oh, So So’ and ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’ are previously unpublished.
A NOTE ON THIS EDITION
The order of poems in the 2004 edition, All the Poems, has been preserved, and eight poems added: ‘Report on an Interrogation’, ‘Family Rose’, ‘Nothing to Do’, ‘Is This the Place?’, ‘So near to Home’, ‘Oh, So So’, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’, and ‘Everything plus the Kitchen Sink’.
FOREWORD TO THE 2004 EDITION
The poems in this book were composed throughout my literary life, from the late 1940s to the present day.
My editor, Barbara Epler (who, for wisdom, charm, humour and intuition, must be the envy of every author), has here rearranged my poems in an order which, I think, gives more coherence and novelty to a work than would a chronological arrangement. I feel that my poems, like some of my memories, come together in a manner entirely involuntary and unforeseen.
As fa
r as chronology is concerned, I have no exact records and dates. In my early days I often had to wait years for the eventual publication of a piece of creative work. Some of these poems were written from the late-forties onward, although not published until later. In the list of contents I have tried to indicate by the useful ‘c.’ the year to which I think the poems belong.
Once, when I went to visit a beloved friend, the poet W. H. Auden, I found him ‘touching up’ his earlier poetry. He told me that he had been unfavourably criticized for this habit, but he felt justified in making the changes because he understood, now in his mature years, what he had really meant but failed to express precisely, when he was young.
I thought of this when I looked through my poems. In some cases I was not even sure what I meant at the time. Fifty years ago, in some senses, I was a different person. And yet, I can’t disapprove of those poems whose significance and origins I forget. Edinburgh Villanelle for instance: what did I mean by ‘Heart of Midlothian, never mine.’? There is a spot outside St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, my native city, which marks the ‘Heart of Midlothian’. I have fond memories of Edinburgh. My pivotal book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was a novel about Edinburgh. I have no idea what I meant by the words in the poem, ‘never mine’, and yet I meant them at the time. And I have let them rest as they are, along with other unfathomable lines.
Although most of my life has been devoted to fiction, I have always thought of myself as a poet. I do not write ‘poetic’ prose, but feel that my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet. Whether in prose or verse, all creative writing is mysteriously connected with music and I always hope this factor is apparent throughout my work.
Long ago, I studied verse-forms in detail, and attempted to practise them. Not all were in my view successful enough to be offered in the present volume. But I can state my conviction that, for creative writing of any sort, an early apprenticeship as a poet is a wonderful stimulant and start.
Muriel Spark
Tuscany, 2003
COMPLETE POEMS
A Tour of London
I. DAYBREAK COMPOSITION
Anyone in this top-floor flat
This morning, might look out upon
An oblong canvas of Kensington
Almost ready for looking at.
Houses lean sideways to the light;
At foreground left, a crowd of trees
Is blue, is a footman, his gloves are white.
The sky’s a pair of legs, top-right,
The colour of threadbare dungarees.
All the discrepant churches grind
Four, and in the window frame is
Picasso at least, his scene; its name is
Morning; authentic, but never signed.
II. KENSINGTON GARDENS
Old ladies and tulips, model boats,
Compact babies, mobile mothers,
Distant buses like parakeets,
Lonely men with mackintoshes
Over their arms—where do they go?
Where come from? now that summer’s
Paraphernalia and splash is
Out, as if planted a year ago.
III. WHAT THE STRANGER WONDERED
Where does she come from
Sipping coffee alone in London?
The shoes, the hair—I do not think
She has anything in the bank.
Has she a man, where is he then,
Why is she sitting at half-past ten
Reading a book alone in London?
Where does the money come from
That lets her be alone and sipping
Not with a man, not in a job, not with a dog
to the grocer tripping?
IV. DAY OF REST
The clock knocked off at quarter to three
And sat there yawning with arms stretched wide,
And it was set going again by nobody,
It being Sunday and we being occupied.
Therefore the day happened and disappeared,
But whether the time we kept was appropriate
To rend, to sew, to love, to hate,
No one could say for certain; all that occurred
Was Sunday, London, bells, talk, fate.
V. SUBURB
It is the market clock that moonish glows.
Where two hands point, two poplars interlock.
Night’s verities knock
Normal perspectives comatose,
Proving the moon a market clock,
The trees, time’s laughing-stock.
VI. THE HOUSE
Their last look round was happening when
The bus pulled up outside.
Nothing burning? Windows tried?
The lights go on and off again
And they are satisfied,
And we already starting off—
But see the house, how curious,
The lights again! and sure enough,
Feeling the catch behind the curtain
A hand—just to make certain.
VII. MAN IN THE STREET
Last thing at night and only one
Man in the street,
And even he was gone complete
Into an absence as he stood
Beside the lamplight longitude.
He stood so long and still, it would
Take men in longer streets to find
What this was chewing in his mind.
The Dark Music of the Rue du Cherche-Midi
If you should ask me, is there a street of Europe,
and where, and what, is that ultimate street?
I would answer: the one-time Roman road
in Paris, on the left bank of the river,
the long, long Rue du Cherche-Midi,
street of my thoughts and afterthoughts
and curiosity never to be satisfied entirely, and
premonitions, inconceivably shaped, and memories.
Suppose that I looked for the street of my life, where I always
could find an analogy. There in the
shop-front windows and in the courtyards,
the alleys, the great doorways, old convents, baronial properties:
those of the past. And new
hotels of the present, junk shops, bead shops,
pastry cooks, subtle chocolate-makers, florists of intricate
wonder, and merchants of exceptional fabrics.
Suppose that I looked, I would choose to
find that long, long Rue, of Paris, du Cherche-Midi, its buildings,
they say, so tall they block out the
sun. I have always thought it worth
the chase and the search to find some sort of meridian.
From 1662 to the Revolution:
No. 7, owned in 1661 by
Jérémie Derval, financier, counsellor,
and master of the king’s household.
All along the street:
Marquises, dukes, duchesses,
financiers, mathematicians, magistrates,
philosophers, bibliophiles, prioresses,
abbesses, princes and, after them,
their widows, generals, ambassadors,
politicians. Some
were beheaded and others took over. In essence
none has departed. No. 38:
there was the military prison where Dreyfus
first stood trial, in December, 1894.
At No. 40 resided the Comte de Rochambeau until
he was sent to help George Washington;
he forced the English to surrender at Yorktown and took
twenty-two flags from them. What a street, the Rue du Cherche-Midi!
Here, Nos. 23–31, was a convent where a famous abbess reigned,
disgusted in girlhood by her father, a lecher,
she imposed a puritan rule and was admired,
especially when, great lady that she was,
she humbled herself to wash the dishes.
Beads and je
wels of long ago look out
from their dark shopwindows
like blackberries in a wayside bramble bush
holding out their arms:
Take me, pick me, I am dark and sweet,
ripe and moist with life.
The haggard young girl in charge of the boutique
reaches for the beads, she fondles them, sad, sad,
to part with such a small but
undeniable treasure. Rose quartz:
she sells it with eager reluctance.
Listen to my music. Hear it.
Raindrops, each dark note.
She has not slept well. Her little
black dress was hastily donned, and the half-
circles are drooping under her eyes.
They say the Rue du Cherche-Midi,
with its tall houses set at shadowy angles,
never catches the sun.
Still, in the shop, that
raddled, dignified young girl—
frugal, stylish,
experienced—will, with bony fingers,
pick out a pile of necklaces:
the very one that you want, those
opals, those moonstones.
Dark boutiques, concerns; their shadow falls
over the bright appointments of the day.
It is a long, long past that haunts the street of Europe,
a spirit of vast endurance,
a certain music, Rue du Cherche-Midi.
The Yellow Book
They did not intend to distinguish between the essence
Of wit and wallpaper trellis. What they cared
Was how the appointments of the age appeared
Under the citron gaslight incandescence.
Virtue was vulgar, sin a floral passion
And death a hansom at the door, while they
Kept faith with a pomaded sense of history
In their fashion.
Behind the domino, those fringed and fanned
Exclusive girls, prinked with the peacock’s eye
Noted, they believed, the trickle of a century
Like a thin umbrella in a black-gloved hand.
What?
A black velvet embroidered handbag full of medium-size carrots
All of which said ‘Good morning’ in one voice.
What does the dream mean?
The black velvet is death; and the embroidery?
Oh, I daresay, a fancy funeral.
The carrots are sex, plenty of them.