Poems by Stephen Spender

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O Night O Trembling Night

O night O trembling night O night of sighs

O night when my body was a rod O night

When my mouth was a vague animal cry

Pasturing on her flesh O night

When the close darkness was a nest

Made of her hair and filled with my eyes

(O stars impenetrable above

The fragile tent poled with our thighs

Stephen Spender

The Labourer In The Vineyard

Here are the ragged towers of vines

Stepped down the slope in terraces.

Through torn spaces between spearing leaves

The lake glows with waters combed sideways,

And climbing up to reach the vine-spire vanes

The mountain crests beyond the far shore

Paint their sky of glass with rocks and snow.

Lake below, mountains above, between

Stephen Spender

On The Pilots Who Destroyed Germany In The Spring Of 1945

I stood on a roof top and they wove their cage

Their murmuring throbbing cage, in the air of blue crystal.

I saw them gleam above the town like diamond bolts

Conjoining invisible struts of wire,

Carrying through the sky their geometric cage

Woven by senses delicate as a shoal of flashing fish.

They went. They left a silence in our streets below

Which boys gone to schoolroom leave in their playground.

Stephen Spender

The Landscape near an Aerodrome

More beautiful and soft than any moth

With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path

Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines

Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall

To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls,

Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

Lulled by descent, the travellers across sea

And across feminine land indulging its easy limbs

Stephen Spender

On The Third Day

On the first summer day I lay in the valley.

Above rocks the sky sealed my eyes with a leaf

The grass licked my skin. The flowers bound my nostrils

With scented cotton threads. The soil invited

My hands and feet to grow down and have roots.

Bees and grass-hoppers drummed over

Crepitations of thirst rising from dry stones,

And the ants rearranged my ceaseless thoughts

Stephen Spender

A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map

A stopwatch and an ordnance map.

At five a man fell to the ground

And the watch flew off his wrist

Like a moon struck from the earth

Marking a blank time that stares

On the tides of change beneath.

All under the olive trees.

A stopwatch and an ordnance map.

Stephen Spender

He will Watch the Hawk

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

He will not know.

This aristocrat, superb of all instinct,

With death close linked,

Stephen Spender

The Trance

Sometimes, apart in sleep, by chance,

You fall out of my arms, alone,

Into the chaos of your separate trance.

My eyes gaze through your forehead, through the bone,

And see where in your sleep distress has torn

Its path, which on your lips is shown

And on your hands and in your dream forlorn.

Restless, you turn to me and press

Stephen Spender

A Childhood

I am glad I met you on the edge

Of your barbarous childhood

In what purity of pleasure

You danced alone like a peasant

For the stamping joy's own sake!

How, set in their sandy sockets,

Your clear, truthful, transparent eyes

Shone out of the black frozen landscape

Stephen Spender

The Room Above the Square

The light in the window seemed perpetual

When you stayed in the high room for me;

It glowed above the trees through leaves

Like my certainty.

The light is fallen and you are hidden

In sunbright peninsulas of the sword:

Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace

That through us flowed.

Stephen Spender

The Shapes of Death

Shapes of death haunt life,

Neurosis eclipsing each in special shadow:

Unrequited love not solving

One’s need to become another’s body

Wears black invisibility:

The greed for property

Heaps a skyscraper over the breathing ribs:

The speedlines of dictators

Stephen Spender

Ultima Ratio Regum

The guns spell money's ultimate reason

In letters of lead on the spring hillside.

But the boy lying dead under the olive trees

Was too young and too silly

To have been notable to their important eye.

He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.

Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.

Stephen Spender