MARGARET ATWOOD:
QUATTROCENTO
The snake enters your dreams through paintings:
this one, of a formal garden
in which there are always three:
the thin man with the green-white skin
that marks him vegetarian
and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts
that look stuck on
and the snake, vertical and with a head
that’s face-coloured and haired like a woman’s.
Everyone looks unhappy,
even the few zoo animals, stippled with sun,
even the angel who’s like a slab
of flaming laundry, hovering
up there with his sword of fire,
unable as yet to strike.
There’s no love here.
Maybe it’s the boredom.
and you are no longer the
idea of a body but a body,
you slide down into your body as into hot mud.
You feel the membranes of disease
close over your head, and history
occurs to you and space enfolds
you in its armies, in its nights, and you
must learn to see in darkness.
Here you can praise the light,
having so little of it:
it’s the death you carry in you
red and captured, that makes the world
shine for you
as it never did before.
This is how you learn prayer.
Love is choosing, the snake said.
The kingdom of god is within you
because you ate it.
And that’s no apple but a heart
torn out of someone
in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.
This is the possibility of death
the snake is offering:
death upon death squeezed together,
a blood snowball.
To devour it is to fall out
of the still unending noon
to a hard ground with a straight horizon
MARGARET ATWOOD: THE
SAINTS
between being with other people and being
alone: another good reason for becoming one.
They live in trees and eat air.
Staring past or through us, they see
things which we would call not there.
We on the contrary see them.
They smell of old fur coats
stored for a long time in the attic.
When they move they ripple.
Two of them passed here yesterday,
filled and vacated and filled
by the wind, like drained pillows
blowing across a derelict lot,
their twisted and scorched feet
not touching the ground,
their feathers catching in thistles.
What they touched emptied of colour.
Whether they are dead or not
is a moot point.
Shreds of they litter history,
a hand here, a bone there:
is it suffering or goodness
that makes them holy,
or can anyone tell the difference?
Though they pray, they do not pray
for us. Prayers peel off them
like burned skin healing.
Once they tried to save something,
others or their own souls.
Now they seem to have no use,
like the colours on blind fish.
Nevertheless they are sacred.
They drift through the atmosphere,
their blue eyes sucked dry
by the ordeal of seeing,
exuding gaps in the landscape as water
exudes mist. They blink
and reality shivers.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS:
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
W. H. AUDEN: THE SHIELD OF
ACHILLES
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
And ships upon untamed seas,
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
Moving their sweet limbs
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
The thin-lipped armorer,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot: