19540314-00068-Read.mp3

Introduction of Sir Herbert Read

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Manifesto of Poetic Beliefs

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War Poems and Imagist Technique

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Recent Poems and Imagist Examples

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Anti-Rhetorical Poetry and Poems of Action

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Poems of Meditation

00:18:49

Shorter Poems of Mood or Sentiment

00:29:00

Metaphysical Poems

00:44:03

Final Poem in Chinese Manner

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INTRODUCER

-- speaking world as a critic and scholar of art and literature, as a novelist and as a poet, Sir Herbert Read is an arbiter of taste not only by virtue of his own creative efforts, but also by the breadth of vision which has allowed him to explain to the public, and even to artists themselves, the widest implications of the works they produce. In an age of specialization, when so many faces of art seem to be exclusive worlds, no guidance is more necessary. No service is more valuable. Most important for us, Sir Herbert is a poet and has looked upon the world with a poet's eye from the time when, as a very young man, his experience of the First World War resulted in "War Poems," the force of which has seldom been equalled. Since then, his work, without following poetic fashion and without making any insistence but that of its own excellence, has continued to be a register of the thoughts and feelings of a man attuned to the whole meaning of his time. Since to list his many literary distinctions would only keep him from you, we should like to say that we are happy to have him in America, and that in his appearance here at the Poetry Center tonight, we are pleased to remind him and the public that his poems are singular among his achievements. It is a pleasure to introduce Sir Herbert Read. (applause)

00:01:46

HERBERT READ:

Exactly 40 years ago, a group of poets met in London and drew up a manifesto of their beliefs, as was the habit in those days. As a young poet of 20, I read that manifesto and accepted those principles, and as I still accept them and have continued to as far as possible to abide by them, I would like to read them as a preface to the poems. On, to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly exact, not the merely decorative word. Two, to create new rhythms as the expression of new moods, and not to copy old rhythms which merely echo old moods. We do not insist upon free verse as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea. Three, to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles, nor is it necessarily bad art to write about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so inspiring, nor so old fashioned, as an aeroplane of the year 1911. For to present an image, hence the name imagist, we are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art. Five, to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite. Six, finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

00:04:26

HERBERT READ:

Writing just before the World War, the outbreak of that war, I wrote a series of imagist poems of which this is a simple example. "The Pond." Shrill green weeds float on the black pond. A rising fish ripples the still water and disturbs my soul. Then came the war. And I tried to use the same technique for a very different kind of material. Here, for example, is "The Happy Warrior." His wild heart beats with painful sobs. His strained hands clench an ice cold rifle, his aching jaws grip a hot, parched tongue. His wide eyes search unconsciously. He cannot shriek. Bloody saliva dribbles down his shapeless jacket. I saw him stab and stab again a well killed Boche. This is the happy warrior. This is he. That imagist technique has, I think, persisted throughout my writing career. And I'll now read quite a recent poem called "Death of a Mercenary" in the service of Alexander. He made no history, no song. But seven times he reiterated as over fragrant bread the one word om. There was a golden avalanche in the air of honeysuckle and crumbling stone. The lizards ran invisibly over a wall that was gone. The startled goats left footprints pointed like the olive leaves. The dry leaves rustled over his broken greaves. He was not old, but grey webs of anguish hung in an immense visage, now growing cold. Another example of the imagist poem. "Tenement." Third block four up, the window shut, blank, uncurtained, other windows glint grin all sinister within. Reflect rainy clouds uncertain tracery of winter twigs. A wire sings, an insulator clings like a wren to the wall. (applause)

00:07:57

HERBERT READ:

The general characteristic of this poetry, and I think of all the poetry I have written, is that it is antirhetorical. It is the poetry of direct statement. Or as it was said in that manifesto, poetry written in the language of common speech. Here is a poem, a recent one, which does not appear in the collected poems, in this antirhetorical manner called "The Death of Kropotkin." Emma said there had been snow and a keen wind sighing in the withered branches. I imagined trivial details, sheepswool caught in the thorns, red berries, and a prophet's dead face on the pillow. She said he had died in peace, and the eternal intelligence on his brow had seemed like a light in the dark, unlit hut. I imagined his steel rimmed glasses on the side table and a book abandoned. She said there had been a great concourse of people walking out from Moscow or from the nearest station, poor, humble people -- Lenin had let them come to sidle lovingly past his silent form. Several hundred people, simple people, fur caps down to their ears, padded trousers crisscrossed with string, standing there on the obliterated road waiting for the cortege. Dimitrov was the name of the place. They took his body to Moscow and there formed a procession, perhaps a mile long. Old revolutionaries, young students, and children carrying wreaths of holly and laurel. They marched five miles, carrying the black and scarlet banners. The feathery snow was falling gently on his bier, gently on the bowed heads and the patient streets. But when they reached the burial place, the snow had ceased, and the winter sun sinking red disdained the level glittering plain. A river of glowing light poured into the open grave. All the light in the world sank with his coffin into the Russian earth. It was seven versts outside Moscow. On the steps of their museum. The Tolstoyans had gathered to play mournful music as the cortege passed. It was dark then, and silent. I remembered, said Emma, the cairn he had found on the last mountain ridge. A heap of stones and broken branches, with tokens attached of horsehair or rag. And the cry, the waters before us flow now to the amour. No mountains more to cross. No mountains more to cross, dear comrade and pioneer. You have crossed the Great Khingan traveling eastward into rich lands where many will follow you. (applause)

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HERBERT READ:

I will now read a group of four poems which might be called Poems of Action. They say they are inspired by public events or actions. The first is called "Herschel Grynsban." Herschel Grynszpan, you may remember, assassinated a German diplomat in Paris shortly before the war. This beautiful assassin is your friend. His action, the delivery of love with magnitude in the unblemished years when hate and scorn and lust are buried under the leaves of dread. He lifts his hand in calm despair. The gesture loses its solitary grace, and violence is answered by violence until the sluggish tinder of the world's indifference is consumed, consumed to the end. Anger is now action. The white flame of justice will dance wildly over Europe's dark marshes until the morning air is everywhere and clear, as on the hills of Hellas. This beautiful assassin is your friend walking and whispering in the night beside you. His voice is the voice that made you listen to secrets in the night around you. The light of worlds beyond your world beguiled you with hope of a harmony wider than the anguish of our broken lives. The wreckage of the day was hidden. This beautiful assassin is my friend because my heart is filled with the same fire. We are sheltered under the same portico listening to the silver voice of wisdom. Our feet faltered among the fallen stones where once the vandals passed and we found under a vivid screen of leaves, the blood still warm from a martyr's wound. (applause)

00:14:02

HERBERT READ:

"A Song for the Spanish Anarchists." The golden lemon is not made but grows on a green tree. A strong man and his crystal eyes is a man born free. The oxen pass under the yoke and the blind are led at will. But a man born free as a path of his own. And a house on the hill. The men are men who till the land. And women are women who weave. Fifty men own the lemon grove and no man is a slave. (applause) "Bombing Casualties in Spain." Dolls faces are rosier. But these were children, their eyes not glass, but gleaming gristle, dark lenses in whose quick, silvery glances the sunlight quivered. These blanched lips were warm once and bright with blood. But blood held in a moist bleb of flesh, not spilt and spattered in tousled hair. In these shadowy tresses, red petals did not always thus clot and blacken to a scar. These are dead faces. Wasps nests are not so wanly waxen, wood embers not so greyly ashen. They are laid out in ranks like paper lanterns that have fallen after a night of riot extinct in the dry morning air.

00:15:52

HERBERT READ:

(applause) "To a Conscript of 1940." A soldier passed me in the freshly fallen snow, his footsteps muffled, his face unearthly grey, and my heart gave a sudden leap as I gazed on a ghost of five-and twenty-years ago. I shouted, Halt! And my voice had the old accustomed ring. And he obeyed it as it was obeyed in the shrouded days when I, too, was one of an army of young men marching into the unknown. He turned towards me, and I said, I am one of those who went before you five-and-twenty years ago. One of the many who never returned, of the many who returned and yet were dead. We went where you are going into the rain and the mud. We fought as you will fight with death and darkness and despair. We gave what you will give our brains and our blood. We think we gave in vain. The world was not renewed. There was hope in the homestead and anger in the streets. But the old world was restored, and we returned to the dreary field and workshop and the immemorial feud of rich and poor. Our victory was our defeat. Power was retained where power had been misused, and youth was left to sweep away the ashes that the fires had strewn beneath our feet. But one thing we learned: there is no glory in the deed. Until the soldier wears a badge of tarnished braid; there are heroes who have heard the rally and have seen the glitter of a garland around their head. Theirs is the hollow victory. They are deceived. But you, my brother and my ghost. If you can go knowing there is no reward, no certain use in all your sacrifice, then honour is reprieved. To fight without hope is to fight with grace. The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired. Then I turned with a smile, and he answered my salute as he stood against the fretted hedge, which was like white lace. (applause)

00:18:49

HERBERT READ:

And arising out of the wars are certain poems of meditation, mostly long poems, which I propose to read you on, a poem in five sections, or movements of different rhythmical structure called "A World Within a War." Sixteen years ago I built this house by an oak tree on an acre of wide land, its walls white against the beechwood, its roof of Norfolk reed and sedge. The mossy turf I levelled for a lawn, but for the most part let the acre wild, knowing I could never live from its stony soil. My work is within. Between three stacks of books, my window looks out on a long line of elms, a secular and insecure retreat. The alien world is never far away. Over the ridge beyond the elms the railway runs. Passing trains sends a faint tremor through the ground, enough to sever a rotted picture cord or rattle the teaspoon against my cup. A dozen times a day, a red bus trundles down the lane. There is the screech and scuttle of minor traffic. Voices rise suddenly from silent wheels, but such dusty veins drain the land and leave an interstitial stillness. The hedgehog and the grass snake still haunt my wood. Winter brings the starved wildlings nearer. Once we woke to find a fox's tracks printed on the crisp film of snow. It was the first year of my second war, when every night a maddened yaffle thrummed on the icicle thatch. Another day a reckless kestrel dashed against a gable and fell dead at my feet. The children watched its dying flutter and the fiery eye slowly eclipse under a dim gray lid. For years the city, like a stream of lava, crept towards us. Now its flow is frozen in fear. To the seer earth, the ancient ritual returns the months of their heraldic labors once again. A tractor chugs through the frozen clods and gold buds bead the gorse. In Coppices, where besom heads are cut, hedges are trimmed again, and primroses bunch in splendour on the open banks. The sparring rooks pick twigs from foreshock head nests built high in the dark tracery of the elms. April and the nightingales will come from an alien world. The squirrels chatter in the green hazel trees. The nuthatch inspects the oak's ribbed bark while the robin jumps round his own domain. The hays moan in June. With summer comes all ripeness rusty red and gold to die in September. The reaper spirals round the blanched fields, the corn diminishing until at last the expected moment comes and rabbits zigzag across the glistening stubble, pursued by yelping dogs and sudden guns. In December, the corn is thrashed. In the frosty evening, the engines smoke trails slowly above the buried twigs and meets the rising mist. Sedate within this palisade, which, unforethinking I had made of brittle leaves, would emulate the Lombard school Christmas medals, bright but cool. Talk mainly of the human passion that made us, in a conscious fashion, strive to control our human fate, but in the margins interpolate apes and angels playing tunes on harpsichords or saxophones. Throughout the story, thus maintained under a sacred melody, the bass profane. My saints were often silly men, fond of wine and loose with women. When they rose to holy stature they kept the whims of human nature. Where mystics in their London gardens or wore instead of hair shirts burdens of a mild domestic sort. But so devout that suddenly they would go out and die for freedom in the street, or fall like partridges before a butt of ambush, tyranny and hate. Other legends will relate the tale of men whose only love was simple work, whose usual lives were formed in mirth and music, or in words whose golden echoes are wild rewards for all our suffering unto death. On the last page a colophon would conclude the liberal plan, showing man within a frame of trophies stolen from a dream. The busy routine kills the flowers that blossom only on the casual path. The gift is sacrificed to gain. The gain is plowed into the hungry ground. The best of life is sparely spent in contemplation of those laws, illustrious in leaves, in tiny webs spun by the ground spider, in snail shells and mushroom gills, in acorns and gourds, the design everywhere evident, the purpose still obscure. In a free hour I walk through the woods with God when the air is calm and the midges hover in the netted sun and stillness. Deep, then I sink in reverie. There is rest above the beating heart. The body settles round its axis. Mind simulates the crystal in the cooling rock. The theorem in the beetle's eye, after the day's mutations, finds the silver node of sleep. In that piece, mind looks into a mirror poised above body sees in perspective, guts, bones and glands. The make of a man. Out of that labyrinth, the man emerges. Becomes what he is. By no grace can become other, can only seize the pattern in the bone, in branching veins, in clever vesicles and valves, and imitate in acts that beauty. His nature is God's nature, but torn, how torn and fretted by vain energies, the darting images of eye and ear veiled in the web of memory, drifts of words that deaden the subtle manuals of sense. But the pattern once perceived and held is then viable in good gait and going in fine song and singular sign in all God's festival of perfect form. Here is my cell. Here my housings gentle in love, excelling hate, extending tokens of friendship to free hearts. It well we know there is a world without of alarm and horror and extreme distress, where pity is a bond of fear and only the still heart has grace. An ancient road winds through the wood. The wood is dark. A chancel where the mind sways in terror of the formal foe. The ancient road winds through the wood, a path obscure and frail. The martyr takes it and the man who makes the martyr by his deed. Death waits on evil and on holiness. Death waits in the leafy labyrinth. There is a grace to still the blood of those who take the daring path. There is a grace that fills the dying eye with pity for the wielder of the axe. There is a grace that nulls the pain of martyrs in their hour of death. Death is no pain to desperate men. Vision itself is desperate. The act is born of the ideal. The hand must seize the hovering grail. The sense of glory stirs the heart out of its stillness. The white light is in the hills and the thin cry of a hunter's horn. We shall act. We shall build a crystal city in the age of peace, setting out from an island of calm a limpid source of love. The branches break. The beaters are moving in. Lie still, my love, like deer. Let the links glide through the dappled underwoods. Lie still. He cannot hear. He may not see. Should the ravening death descend, we will be calm. Die like the mouse, terrified but tender. The claw will meet no satisfaction in our sweet flesh. And we shall have known peace in a house beneath a beech wood. In an acre of wild land.

00:28:43

HERBERT READ:

(applause) I will now read a series of poems, of shorter poems of mood or sentiment. Lyrics they might be called. "In Between Times." Between the winter and the spring. Between day and night. A no man's time, a mean light with cold mist creeping along the alleys. And the sun like a world withdrawn. The shrill voices of surplus children shake up the frosty dust. Lamps are lit and bleak shadows like bruises rise under their golden eyes. Through these cavernous streets between a winter and a spring between night and day we wander our hearts lifted above the shadows and the dust secure in an alien light.

00:30:09

HERBERT READ:

(applause) An unpublished poem, "Sappho and Attis." We lay upon the cairn isle the dark hours through and heard the impatient waters beat upon the broken shore. The storm that in its brutal grasp a dare go clutched and compressed our stricken hearts has left no sign of wrath. I watched the light seep through the clouds and sun establish day. The hills across the bay drink in the liquid edge of night. The fishers come in from the sea and now unfold their nets. I wish that their hands could unravel our intricate mesh.

00:31:13

HERBERT READ:

(applause) "Day's Affirmation." Emerging at midnight to cool my aching eyes with the sight of stars I hear the nightingale throbbing in the thicket by my garden gate and I think the poet in the old days would have made a song of your song and the starlit night, the scent of wallflowers clinging to the ground. But now it is different. You sing but we are silent. Our hearts too sadly patient all these years. Sing on. The night is cool. Morning and the world will be lit with white beam candle shining. And oh, the frail and tender daring splendor of wild cherry trees. "Northern Legion." Bugle calls coiling through the rocky valley. A sound echoes in the eagle's cries. An outrages down on anguished men. Now men die and death is no deedful glory. Eleven days this legion forced the ruined fields, the burnt homesteads and empty garths, the broken arches of bridges, desolation moving like a shadow before them a rain of ashes. Endless their anxiety, marching into a northern darkness approaching a narrow defile, the waters falling fearfully. The clotting menace of shadows and all the simple instruments of death in ambush against them. The last of the vanguard sounds his doleful note. The legion now is lost. None will follow.

00:33:25

HERBERT READ:

(applause) Two poems inspired by the North of England, from where I come. "The Ivy and The Ash." The ivy and the ash cast a dark arm across the beck. In this rocky gill, I sit and watch the iris water move like mussels over stones smoothed by this ageless action. The water brings from the high fell an icy current of air. There is no sun to splinter the grey visionary quartz. The heart is cool and adamant among the rocks mottled with wet moss. Descend into the valley explore the plain even the salt sea. But keep the heart cool in the memory of ivy, ash and the glistening beck running swiftly through the black rocks.

00:34:31

HERBERT READ:

(applause) "Kirkdale." I, Orm, the son of Gamal found these fractured stones starting out of the fragrant thicket. The riverbed was dry, the roof trees naked and bleached nettles in the nave and aisleways, on the altar stone and owls cast, and a feather from a wild dove's wing. There was peace in the valley, far into the eastern sea the foe had gone, leaving death and ruin and a longing for the priest's solace . Fast the feather lay like a sulky jewel in my head. Till I knew it had fallen in a holy place. Therefore I raise these grey stones up again.

00:35:32

HERBERT READ:

(applause) "Summer Rain." Against the window pane against the temple of my brain beat the muffled taps of rain, upon the scorched and mottled leaves, upon the blanched and painted sheaves, the land receives the liquid flood, water like a blush of blood, returns to the parched rood. The fox has left his fetid hovel to lick the drenched blades of sorrow. Odors rise from thyme and fennel. The worm in his retreat deep under the earth's insipid crust hearing a distant drumming thunder, blindly renews his upward undulation. The soil respires as if in emulation of living things. All elements their maculation desire and achieve. A warm breath issues from the nostrils beneath the mask of death. (applause) "Felix Transitus." The valley and the crest the heavy lid of night the arch of bone the head which on the breast has fallen like a kite wind driven down. The darkness of the earth the sense of sinking deep. The blatant heart. This stillness might be death. It is not sleep. It does not hurt. An intercepted edge of lace has printed on his brow its faultless mesh. And blood hath left a trace where lips unconscious now once bruised the flesh.

00:37:44

HERBERT READ:

A new poem, "Calamus and Cassandra." Calamus was a Greek sculptor, Cassandra, a beautiful model, of whom he made a statue which was on the Acropolis. Above the lake the swallows dive and fishes mock their flight. Who is this goddess gave you birth on some starlit night? Who cut the secret knot of life and left a hollow where the lion with the wounded paw impressed a seal of air, invisible yet viable the seed of my despair that soon will sprout and climb and cling your ivy in my silver hair. I do not wish another thing but that you wear no new disguise. You have the wisdom of the young and I, the false youth of the wise. You hold a stylus in your hand, you have placed me on a pedestal. You have carved the torso and the head. Your gaze is on the genital. A warm breeze blows across the lake. It is the season of the grape. The god, the lion and the man, they have a single shape.

00:39:08

HERBERT READ:

(applause) "Night Ride." Along the black leather strap of the night deserted road swiftly rolls the freighted bus. Huddled together, two lovers doze, their hands linked across their laps, their bodies loosely interlocked, their heads resting two heavy fruits on the plaited basket of their limbs. Slowly, the bus slides into light. Here are hills detached from dark. The road uncoils a white ribbon the lovers with the hills unfold. Wake cold to face the fate of those who love despite the world. (applause) Another unpublished poem, "The Stag." Seven are the forests where he ranges browsing the scant Orioles of herbage. If he has a haste, he has no fear. There is no panther to ravage the mystical solitude of the oaks. [Maug?] are the antlers that impede his flight. He in there advances with in diffident step. Hoary perspectives meet and dissolve in his punctual eye. He will rest where the waters break into a moist cascade. Frail are the blossoms there in that perpetual shade. "The Third." We two that lived together and love each other have no wandering thoughts beyond the present measure. We love and work and subtly weave habitual chains. We wheel like birds above our focal hearth, our fear-fringed nest that always breaking through the screen of silence comes the warning note. The world is not within us. We in part are in some way without. Peeping into our private room, we feel not see a third. The hollyhocks are parted and a face presses to the window and is gone. Fine fingers I have felt like icy bands about my arms just when the impulse had been born to demonstrate my tenderness. The person or the thing has age but is indefinite. I would not care if I could force its sullen hand and see an instrument of hate fall clattering to the ground, or know that all it held was death. The third to which we both are bound. With death one day I shall pledge faith and faithless be to you. But who is this that treads between the last bed and our own? Is it the wind in the hollyhocks? A trick of cloud and glass? A nerve discordant round the bone? A simple weariness? Dear, do not let us hesitate to shun the unbidden guest. Resolved that all is distortion save life and love and death. (applause) "Epitaph." Yes, yes. And ever it will come to this life holds like a fan with a click. The hand that lately beat the air with an arch of painted silk falls listless in the lap. The air, the agitation, and the flush close and collapse. A rigid frame restricts the limbs that once ran free across the hearth, across the fields, over the threatening hills.

00:44:03

HERBERT READ:

I have two more metaphysical poems. "The Contrary Experience." You cry as the gull cries, dipping low where the tide has ebbed over the vapid reaches. Your impulse died in the second summer of the war. The years dip their boughs brokenly over the uncovered springs. Hands wasted for love and poetry finger the hostile gunmetal. Call to meaningless action you hesitate meditating faith to a conscience more patently noble. But even as you wait, like Arjuna in his chariot, the ancient wisdom whispers, live in action. I do not forget the oath taken one frosty dawn when the shadows stretched from horizon to horizon. Not to repeat the false act. Not to inflict pain. To suffer. To hope. To build. To analyze the indulgent heart. Wounds dried like sealing wax upon that bond. But time has broken the proud mind. No resolve can defeat suffering. No desire establish joy beyond joy and suffering is the equable heart not indifferent to glory if it lead to death. Seeking death if it lead to the only life. Libya, Egypt, Hellas. The same tide ebbing. The same gull crying. Desolate shores and rocky deserts. Hunger, thirst, death. The storm threatening and the air still. But other wings librating in the ominous hush. And the ethereal voice thrilling and clear buffeted against the storm's sullen breath, the lark rises over the grey dried grasses arises and sings.

00:46:17

HERBERT READ:

(applause) And then the third part of a very long poem called "The End of the War," which is really a summary of my philosophy of life, such as if I have one such as it is. The first part of the poem was the meditation of the dying German officer and the expression of a very different philosophy. The second part was a dialogue between the body and the soul of a murdered girl, expressing still another philosophy. And here, finally, is the meditation of the English officer waking on the morning of November the 11th, 1918, in a house on the front after a night of horror. I awake. I am alive. There is a bell sounding with the dream's retreating surf. Oh, catch the lacy hem dissolved in light that creeps along the healing tendrils of a mind still drugged with sleep. Why must my day kill my dreams? Days of hate. But yes, a bell beats really on this air, a mad bell. The peasants stir behind that screen. Listen, they mutter, now. They sing in their old cracked voices intone a litany. There are no guns. Only these voices of thanksgiving. Can it be? Yes, yes, yes it is peace. Peace. The world is very still. And I am alive, alive, alive, alive. Oh, limbs your white radiance no longer to stand against bloody shot. This heart secure to live and worship to go God's way to grow in faith, to fight with and not against the will. That day has come at last. Suspended life renews its rhythmic beat. I live. Now, can I love and strive as I have dreamt. Lie still and let this litany of simple voices and the jubilant bell ease rebirth. First there are the dead to bury. Oh, God, the dead. How can God's bell ring out from that unholy ambush, that tower of death? In excess of horror war died. The nerve was broken. Frayed men fraught. Frayed men fought obscenely then. There was no fair joy, no glory in the strife. No blessed wrath. Man's mind cannot excel mechanic might except in savage sin. Our broken bodies oiled the engines. Mind was grit. Shall I regret my pact? Envy that friend who risked ignominy, insult, jail rather than stain his hands with human blood and left his fellow men? Such lonely pride was never mine. I answered no call. There was no call to answer. I felt no hate, only the anguish of an unknown fate. A shot, a cry, then armies on the move. The sudden lull in daily life. All eyes wide with wonder past surprise. Our felt dependence on a ruling few. The world madness. The wild plunge, the avalanche and I myself a twig torn from its mother soil and to the chaos, surrendered. Listless, I felt the storm about me, its force too strong to beat against. In its swirl. I spread my sapling arms. Tossed on its swell I rose, I ran, I down the dark world sped till death fell round me like a rain of steel. And hope and faith and love coiled in my inmost cell. Often in the weariness of watching, warding weary men pitched against the unmeaning blackness of the night, the wet fog, the enemy blanketed in mystery. Often I have questioned my life's inconstant drift. God not real, hate not real, the hearts of men in sentient engines pumping blood into a spongy mess that cannot move above the indignity of inflicted death. The only answer this the infinite is all. And I, a finite speck, no essence even of the life that falls like dew from the spirit breathed on the fined edge of matter. Perhaps only that edge a ridge between eternal death and life eternal a moment of time temporal, the universe swaying between nothing and being and life faltering like a clock tick between a pendulum's coming and going. The individual lost 70 years, 70 minutes have no meaning. Let death, I cried, come from the forward guns. Let death come this moment swift and crackling, moments that pass not reckoned in the infinite. Then I have said all is that must be. There is no volition. Even prayer dies on lips compressed in fear. Where all must be there is no God. For God can only be the God of prayer, an infinitely kind Father whose will can mould the world, who can, in answer to my prayer, mould me. And whilst I cannot pray, I can't believe. But in this frame of machine necessity must renounce not only God, but self. And what is the self without God? A moment not reckoned in the infinite. My soul is less than nothing, lost and less in this life it can build a bridge to life eternal. In a warm room lit by the flickering fire in friendly debate, in some remote, sheltered existence, even in the hermit's cell, easy it is to believe in God. Extend the self to communion with the infinite, the eternal. But haggard in the face of death, deprived of all earthly comfort, all hope of life, the soul a distilled essence held in a shaking cup, spilt by a spit of lead, saved by chance alone, very real in its silky bag of skin, its bond of bone. So little and so limited. There's no extenuation then. Fate is in fact, the only hope, an unknown chance. So I have won through. What now? Will faith rise triumphant from the wreck? Despair once more evaded in a bold assertion of the self? Self to God related self in God attained, self a segment of the eternal circle, the wheel of heaven, which through the dust of days and stagnant darkness steadily revolves. The bells of hell ring-ting-a-ling for you, but not for me. For you whose gentian eyes stared from the cold, impassive alp of death. You betrayed us in the last hour of the last day, playing the game to the end. Your smile the only comment on the well done deed. What mind of you carried over the confines? Your fair face was noble of its kind. Some visionary purpose cut the lines clearly on that countenance. But you are defeated. Once again the meek inherit the kingdom of God. No might can win against this wandering, wavering grace of humble men. You die in all your power and pride. I live in my meekness justified. When first this fury caught us, then I vowed devotion to the rights of men would fight for peace once it came again from this unwilled war passed gallantly to wars of will and justice. That was before I had faced death, day in, day out, before hope had sunk to a little pool of bitterness. Now I see either the world is mechanic force and this the last tragic act portending endless hate and blind reversion back to the tents and healthy lusts of animal men. Or we act God's purpose in an obscure way. Evil can only to the reason stand in scheme or scope beyond the human mind. God seeks the perfect man. Planned to love him as a friend. Our savage fate a fire to burn our dross to temper us to finer stock. Many merging in some inconceived span as something more than remnant of a dream. To that end, worship God. Join the voices heard by these waking years. God is love. In his will the meek heart rejoices. Doubting till the final grace a dove from heaven descends and wakes the mind, in light above the light of human kind. In light celestial, infinite and still eternal, bright.

00:56:32

HERBERT READ:

(applause) A section from the poem called "Mutations of the Phoenix." Phoenix, bird of terrible pride ruddy eye and iron beak. Come, leave the incinerary nest, spread your red wings. And soaring in the golden light, survey the world. Hover against the high sky. Menace men with your strange phenomena. For a haunt seek a coin in a rocky land where the night is black settle on the bleak headlands. Utter shrill warnings in the cold dawn sky. Let them descend into the shuttered mines below you. Inhabit our withered nerves.

00:57:41

HERBERT READ:

"Beata L'alma." Time ends when vision sees its lapse in liberty. The seven sleepers quit their den and wild lamentations fill our voiceless bodies, echoes only are. You will never understand the mind's misanthropy nor see that all is foul and fit to screeching. It is an eye's anarchy, Men are ghoulish stumps and the air a river of opaque filth. God, I cannot see to design these stark reaches, these bulging contours pressed against me in the maddening dark. A blind man's buff and no distilling of song for the woeful scenes of agony. Never will rest the mind an instant in its birdlike flutterings. Could I impress my voice on the plastic darkness, or lift an inviolate lantern from a ship in the storm, I might have ease. But why? No fellows would answer my hullallo, and my lanthorn would lurch on the mast till it dipped under the wet waves and the hissing darkness healed the wide wound of light. A cynical race to bleak ecstasies we are driven by our sombre destiny. Men's shouts are not glad enough to echo in our groined hearts. We know war and its dead and famine's bleached bones, black rot overreaching the silent pressure of life in fronds of green ferns and in the fragile shell of white flesh. New children must be born of gods in a deathless land where the uneroded rocks bound clear from cool glassy tarns and no flaw is in mind or flesh. Sense and image they must refashion. They will not recreate love. Love ends in hate. They will not use words. Words lie. The structure of events alone is comprehensible. And to single perceptions communication is not essential. Art ends. The individual world alone is valid and that gives ease. The water is still. The rocks are hard and veined metalliferous yielding an ore of high worth. In the sky, the unsullied sun lake.

01:00:18

HERBERT READ:

(applause) And finally, this poem, which I call "Lu Yun's Lament," is a poem in the Chinese manner. And Lu Yun was the younger brother of the famous fourth century Chinese poet Lu Kai. To be born in the shadow of a mighty oak such was my fate. I ran as far as my feet would carry me but the black patterns of its branches covered my tracks. I grew in stature, but high above me was the feathery crown of this tree. The acorns fell about me. Wild boars fed at my feet. I had a bright cutlass but the sun never shone upon it. Its flash was never seen. I walked to the north with a bow stretched out before me covered with snow. I walked to the south and was grateful for the shade. When I came to the west, the leaves were already falling on my head. I turned to the east and found the sun caught in a cage of twigs. One day the oak will fall but whether towards me to bury me, or away from me to expose me, is still unknown. Meanwhile, I have learned to play my flute softly as I lean against the bowl of this mighty oak. Or when my fingers are listless, to listen to the nightingales that sing somewhere in the tangled darkness above me. (applause)