Gaudete (4 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
Albeit ephemeral music goes on
Like a materialised demon
Vandalising the ponderous ill-illumined Victorian house,
Beating at the faded ochre prints of imperial battles,
Re-animating
The arsenals of extinguished tribesmen
That trophy the walls.
It grips the cellars, feeling for the earth beneath
As if to lift the whole ungainly pile and shake off the
chimneys.
It rushes up the servant’s stair
With a fiery icy elation
Like the ghost of an imbecile calculator
Into the long attic.
The attic is an aviary.
Bleak prison boughs, polished by bird’s feet, cage-wired
windows.
Jays, magpies, crows, pigeons
Sitting in depressed jury.
Two macaws, seething their spite and lunacy.
Everywhere finches twitch and jitter.
Estridge’s elder daughter, Janet,
Is examining her body,
Her swollen stomach, delicate glossed as the flank of a
minnow,
In a long pierglass
Foxed with age, propped back among attic lumber,
Streaked with bird’s droppings.
Her face, relaxed expressionless, as for a studio portrait,
Simply accepts the fate of being as it is.
She has made her decision
And is relieved not to be suffering any more.
No thought for the future falsifies these moments.
Her decision feels solid and good
Stronger than all the small appeals of tomorrow.
Like a final lying down into an immense weariness
It has relaxed her.
Now she can look at the birds,
Her father’s prisoners,
Her girlhood’s confidantes.
She sees just how squalid and miserable they are.
And they regard her too without any affection.
She rams out the frosted skylight with the back of a chair
And tells them to get back to their true friends
And true enemies.
She positions the chair.
She puts on her dressing gown, deliberately, feeling the
critical watchfulness of the birds.
She climbs onto the chair, balancing.
Arranges the hanging noose about her neck, lightly and
attentively
As if she adjusted the collar of a dress.
Then tightens the knot, under the chin.
She ignores the tears
Which have come out on to her cheeks in fear and dismay.
She steps into space.
The birds
Alerted
By the waft of a strange predator, are suddenly smaller,
tensed.
The chair topples, deciding a pigeon
To clap up through the window gap.
An opportunistic jay
Scrambles up the air and vanishes.
A magpie goes out like a bolt.
More and more rapidly follows the skulking departure of
the birds.
Only a crow, undecided, lingers.
While the music elbows nakedly in through the broken glass with the wet stirred freshness of the garden trees.
A middle distance farm has come close.
Three fields beyond the farm, two men are cutting up a
blown-over beech-tree.
Holroyd employs one man.
Sitting under the farm’s orchard wall, the minister’s blue
Austin van,
Blossoms littering it.
Opening on to the closed yard, a barn-doorway, black.
Estridge is pleased with his telescope
Which brings him a hen flattened under a cock in the
barn doorway.
Then the birds scatter, long-legged.
Mrs Holroyd emerges, with dazzled eyes,
Carrying a basket, and adjusting her skirt,
And dusting herself down.
The Reverend Nicholas Lumb
Materialises out of the darkness behind her.
Mrs Holroyd, at twenty-seven, is a fresh-faced abundant
woman
With an easy laugh.
Estridge treasures her among his collection of ideals –
She reminds him of the country love of his youth, who
never appeared.
Now he watches Lumb
Following her closely to the house-door.
Within the hallway, within the magnified circle,
Turning, she sets Lumb’s hands on her breasts and bites
his neck.
His hands gather up her skirts
As his foot closes the door
And Estridge’s brain wrings
To a needling pang, as if a wire might snap.
His bulging eye
Hammers the blunt limits of objects and light.
Till a scream
Amplifies over his head’s pain –
A repeated approaching scream, then a silence.
His younger daughter has left her piano.
She is running between the shrubs towards him.
He puts on his spectacles.
He quickly tries to think what could be the worst
possible.
He finds only helpless fear.
His daughter is screaming something at him
As if in perfect silence.
Is looking at the land.
This is the unalterably strange earth.
He is looking at the sky. He looks down at the soil,
between the grass.
He looks at the trees
Which clamber in a tangle up the slope towards him,
from the river, out of the swell of land beyond.
He listens to all this, and listens into the emptiness beyond it
And the emptiness within it.
And the soft hollow air noises among it.
It feels very like safety. If the trees were trees only, wood only, were simple roots and boles and boughs and leaves, and that only, as the stones should be stones. If the stones were simple stones. This would be safe. All this would be safety.
But he knows everything he looks at,
Even the substance of his fingers, and the near-wall of his
skin,
He knows it is vibrant with peril, like a blurred speed-
vibration.
He knows the blood in his veins
Is like heated petrol, as if it were stirring closer and
closer to explosion,
As if his whole body were a hot engine, growing hotter
Connected to the world, which is out of control,
And to the grass under his feet, the trees whose shadows
reach for him.
He breathes deeply and strongly to confirm his solidity,
To cool his outline and his solidity
To fill his strength
Against the power that beats up against him, beating at
the soles of his feet,
Beating through his thoughts
And the obscure convulsions and blunderings of a music
that lurches through him
With brightenings and darkenings, and rendings and
caressings,
With tiny crowded farness and near sudden hugeness
And hot twisting roughness, and vast cantileverings of
star-balance.
He looks out across the quilt and embroidery of the
landscape,
The hazings of distance, and the watery horizons folded
like fingers,
And tries to imagine simple freedom –
His possible freedoms, his other lives, hypothetical and
foregone, his lost freedoms.
As each person carries the whole world, like a halo,
Albeit a dim and mostly provisional world, but with a
brightly focused centre, under the sun,
Considering their millions
All mutually exclusive, all conjunct and co-extensive,
He sees in among them,
In among all the tiny millions of worlds of this world
Millions of yet other, alternative worlds, uninhabited,
unnoticed, still empty,
Each open at every point to every other and yet distinct,
Each waiting for him to escape into it, to explore it and
possess it,
Each with a bed at the centre. A name. A pair of shoes.
And a door.
And surrounded by still-empty, never-used limitless freedom.
He yields to his favourite meditation.
Forlorn, desperate meditation.
Between the root in immovable earth
And the coming and going leaf
Stands the tree
Of what he cannot alter.
As his heart surges after his reverie, with lofty cries and
lifting wingbeats
Suddenly he comes against the old trees
And feels the branches in his throat, and the leaves at his
lips.
He sees the grass
And feels the wind pulse over his skin.
He feels the hill he stands on, hunched, swelling,
Piling through him, complete and permanent with stone,
Filling his skull, squeezing his thoughts out from his eyes
To fritter away across surfaces.
Till the one presence of world crushes him from himself,
and sits on him like an iron crown on a stone pillar,
Studded with baleful stones,
As if he were a child king, hoisted on to a granite throne,
surrounded by eyes of sharpened metal.
For a half hour he stands, alert
Imprisoned in the globe’s stoniness
And the thin skin, the thin painting of mother-soil,
And the hair-fine umbilicus of life in the stalk of grass.
His life returns as a fly. It lands on his eyelid and trickles
down to his mouth-corner.
He moves to free himself.
Some animal is pushing noisily below in the wood.
A squirrel flees up through a beech, like a lashing rocket,
and rips into the outermost leaf-net with a crash.
Voices recede, snatch back their words and meanings,
Become bramble stem, leaf hollows, reticulation of twigs.
He is clearly aware of himself, on the hill in clear light, from the eye of a soaring, reconnoitring and downsliding far crow.
He prays
To be guided. He feels his prayer claw at the air, as at
glass
Like a beetle in a bottle.
He tries to pray with the sun –
Feeling it break off, dry in his mouth
He tries to find in himself the muscle-root of prayer.
He takes a few brisk steps
To tear free of his fear, to shake his limbs
Out of their crawling horror, their fly-tiny helplessness.
He makes an effort
To feel his plans steady. He fixes, hard and firm, phrasing
it clearly,
His decision to escape before night.
This very day. To carry his body, with all its belongings,
Right to the end of its decision. Surely that is simple
enough.
What is wrong with this idea? He only has to do it.
Surely it is all he wants to do.
He is afraid
As if he were asleep and dreaming the first warnings of
smoke-smell
In a burning room, where everything is already spluttering and banging into flames, cores of fury drumming flames,
The flames swarming up, leaping like rats,
A torrent of devils twisting upwards above the tops of
everything,
As if everything –
The whole world and day where he stands, trying to
awake,
Were a giant aircraft out of control, shaking itself to pieces, already losing height, spinning slowly down in space
Scattering burning chunks,
The air sprayed with blazing fuel, full of an inaudible
screaming, sprayed with fine blood –
He leans his forehead to an ash tree, clasping his hands
over his skull.
He presses his brow to the ridged bark.
He closes his eyes, searching.
He tries to make this ash-tree his prayer.
He searches upward and downward with his prayer,
reaching upwards and downwards through the capillaries,
Groping to feel the sure return grasp
The sure embrace and return gaze of a listener –
He sinks his prayer into the strong tree and the tree
stands as his prayer.