Selected Poems
from
MODERN POEMS
An Introduction to Poetry
edited by
Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Clair
-----
Icarus1
He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye
Or pitifully;
Nor on those eagles that so feared him, now
Will strain his brow;
Weapons men use, stone, sling and strong-thewed
bow
5
He will not know.
This
aristocrat, superb of all instinct,
With death close linked
Had paced the enormous cloud, almost had won
War on the
sun;
10
Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned,
Hands, wings, are found.
1933
1. Icarus
flew on wings of feathers and wax made by his father Daedalus; when he
recklessly climbed too near the sun, the wax melted and he plunged into
the sea.
__________
The
Express
After the first powerful, plain manifesto
The black statement of pistons, without more fuss
But gliding like a queen, she leaves the station.
Without bowing and with restrained unconcern
She passes the houses which humbly crowd
outside,
5
The gasworks,2 and at last the heavy page
Of death, printed by gravestones in the cemetery.
Beyond the town, there lies the open country
Where, gathering speed, she acquires mystery,
The luminous self-possession of ships on
ocean.
10
It is now she begins to sing --- at first quite low
Then loud, and at last with a jazzy madness ---
The song of her whistle screaming at curves,
Of deafening tunnels, brakes, innumerable bolts.
And always light, aerial,
underneath,
15
Retreats the elate metre of her wheels.
Streaming through metal landscapes on her lines,
She plunges new eras of white happiness,
Where speed throws up strange shapes, broad curves
And parallels clean like trajectories from
guns.
20
At last, further than Edinburgh or Rome,
Beyond the crest of the world, she reaches night
Where only a low stream-line brightness
Of phosphorus on the tossing hills is light.
Ah, like a comet through flame, she moves
entranced,
25
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.
1933
2. The
incorporation of the gasworks and other aspects of the urban landscape
into poetry was a point which Spender learned from Auden.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to
Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973,
pp. 302-304.
-----
--- All material is copyright protected ---
