The Present Perennial
A constant dream of those who can no longer walk / is the running over level sands As distance were itself a state unknown / the roads keep to the body of the plain Denser than the shape / of the unknown town at nightfall / the tract of level road I travel on Threshold, entablature, / unnamed to named, / sun to shadow Growing fore-edge, / the roof of watery cities of swift-motioned flies; / the age is ours. Forget, for a time, the edifice above / the crypt in which we are The earth has a hollow sound / beneath the houses / and a dog barks in the mist. The Isle The childs metaphor, / a template to the later truths Half-dark morning / light without an origin / no horizon to the day Where is the weight / carried by a word? The look of effort / above the stillest time / of room and note Finer minds than mine / have wished the world were void / but for the thorn-tree on the heath Upon the apprehension / of a distant form / borrowed nature / falls away The ochre stream from the workings of the mines / still flows densely in the sough In meaner times a dispossession / of what in greater time / would be freely given /-every path a days digression, / unreturning rhyme / at a pace undriven Late unfolded hour / unknown before its opening, / and, at its opening, / no other time The light strikes only one side / and the rest is shadow Take the colour from the word / O mind in flight Things are what they seem, / thats not the point; / to grasp it is to own a fragmentary loss Speed is everything; / no-one leaves the highway / but in a wreck of blood and steel / and the vanishing-point goes on and on Each age is one syllable / in the pythias voice 1---- Looking down from where we are 2 ----No equation lacks an absence / to its poise 3 ----Control released / by an unknown hand / in the dead of night 4 ----Deep so deep within the frame of words / there is the silence of the hour 5 ----Reflex to the sight, the nude hill / from the flowing wood, the wren song / from the wall 6 ----Beneath this floor of beaten earth / there are floors of earth unnumbered 7 ----There is no certain memory / beyond dimensions of a day: / the way of distance is to resist sight / and turn it back upon the eye The past is not a foreign dwelling place You think you know emotion, / but you are surprised / by what is kept / behind the word The unnamed hunger hangs behind the use of names The roofs are rarely sighted, slate acres / of an institution No memory of yesterday; / the day is gone. It passed without remark I believe, but, in the acting of this truth, I have taken it / to be a play Something arraigned itself before the eye, / every open sense was vigilant May God help us, where we take entities / where there are none, and let the dark unspoken matter / move about us, and deform by weight our sight A presence, other, in the darkness, / not unfamiliar, no, not to be so made out Density of light, to speak of it / is to be upon the edge Enquiry, the only possession / through the daylight In the hiatus
of the night /
is the journey of the sleeping form
The sequence
Penrhos Garnedd and six other poems are presented here
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