Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

and

manifestation are considered to be valuable or

worth while.

No that Truth or Beauty exist.

There are only true things and beautiful things.

So no one should think that Science is on the trail of Ultimate Truth.

Or Art on the trail of Ultimate Beauty.

Both these quests are the job or Religion.

* *

What is Beauty?

One says that the colour of a flower or the note of a

bird is beautiful. This, however, cannot be

the sense in which we are to take the beauty

that art creates.

Because this beauty is natural, not created by the artist.

It is beautiful in that it is pleasing to the senses.

A church father called St. Thomas Aquinas said

that those things are beautiful the appre-hension

of which is pleasing.

So the beauty that art creates is also pleasing, but not only to the senses.

This beauty is a beauty of form, not of texture.

The business of the artist is to create new forms.

The artist’s job is not purely a decorative one.

Wallpaper has a pattern,

But the pictorial art has form.

The pictorial art takes over the raw material, the forms found in nature,

And disposes them into a new and original form which is not found in nature.

Which is pleasing and significant.

(The artist does not copy nature. That is the photographer’s job.)

In what way significant?

* *

Our minds are full of images, sounds, thoughts, and

emotions which we never use.

Which are chaotic, undigested, unarticulated.

Art digests and articulates these.

Makes them have meaning by giving them a form,

Which has such balance and unity that the effect strikes us as beautiful.

* *

A poem takes over the emotions which we feel

Vaguely but cannot express complete.

It expresses those emotions in words completely,

using everything that speech can give to attain

that completeness.

It binds words and balances them to a unity to

Attain that completeness.

Then we feel that the emotion has been mastered

by being expressed,

Objectified, separated from ourselves.

* *

And music makes something organised, new and

original out of the chaotic rhythms and sound

intervals of nature.

* *

So that the more we know about art and the more

we learn to appreciate it, the more we feel

that we have mastered nature and enriched our

own experience through making something o

nature’s into something of ours.

* *

Now you may read Shakespeare,

Listen to Mozart,

Look at Michael Angelo.

DEAD LEAVES

Lonely as the last batch of swallows that swing

Desolate on the aerial, and taut

With unthought memories, we bring

Four figures only to the melody,

And leave the dead note dead.

We are not those whose life is blown away

By the omission, not those for whom

Normality is formal now, each day

An exercise in self-control, but yet

We feel regret for the abrupt

Manner of going, cannot quite forget

The lull when conversation for a moment stopped:

We turned, with a remark half-said,

To find a room grown suddenly dark,

And you – fled.

SONNET ON EXAMINATIONS

Hard thing it is to sweat and strive and aim

And feel the very task within consume

All that is best in us, as the blown bloom

Waits for full summer, but the blasts proclaim

(Being like weak old men, feeble and lame,

Yet envious and powerful) clouds to gloom

And darken long, till like the crash of doom

They burst, and these laugh loud and love their game.

So it has been with us (seems for an age)

And darken on us thoughts of high-born rage,

Avenging anger lest we sink i’ the scale,

It’s Judgment’s show and shadow: sot and sage,

We build a narrow home fast in this cage

And our on one song then ‘Is it pass or fail?’

SIXTH-FORM TRIOLETS

      I.

All agonies that torture us

Find fast their home in H. S. C.

The aching arm, the fevered fuss –

All agonies that torture us.

Words that won’t come and (what is wuss)

Though learn’d with labour, thought that flee,

All agonies that torture us

Find fast their home in H. S. C.

      II.

The strain of waiting for results

Is really more than man can stand,

It ages children to adults,

The strain of waiting for results.

‘Mention, or space that just insults?’

Turns in the mind on every hand; –

The strain of waiting for results

Is really more than man can stand.

      III.

Regrets, those spectres faint and pale

Were surely born in this exam.

They see the truth too late and wail –

Regrets, those spectres faint and pale.

They prompt us, when we fear a ‘fail’

To cry ‘what a – – I am!’

Regrets, those spectres faint and pale

Were surely born in this exam.

JACK’S STORY

Browning made haunches, Rupert Brooke made branches stir,

Both seeking rhymes for names of towns that rhyme,

Though Grantchester could not be less like Manchester,

Which city, in a rather distant time

My muse invokes. Stir, Muse! Come, stir! Why can she stir?

She’s bogged down, as a bird is bogged in lime,

At the sheer prospect of our setting forth

To engage the smoke and the vowels of the North.

‘PRUDENCE! PRUDENCE!’ THE PIGEONS CALL’

‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call.

Serpents lurk in the gilded meadow.

An eye is embossed on the island wall.

The running tap casts a static shadow.

‘Caution caution’ the rooks proclaim,

‘The dear departed, the weeping widow

Will meet in you in the core of flame.

The running tap casts a static shadow.’

‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice.

‘Enjoy the widow in the meadow.

Drain the sacrament of choice.

The running tap casts a static shadow.’

FISH AND HEROES

A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.

The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch;

The absolute was anybody’s pitch

For, when a note was struck, we knew its name;

That dark aborted any urge to tame

Waters that day might prove to be a ditch

But then were endless growling ocean, rich

In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.

Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock

Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;

A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,

But it was morning: birds could not be liars.

A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;

Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

‘NYMPHS AND SATYRS, COME AWAY’

Nymphs and satyrs, come away.

Faunus, laughing from the hill,

Rips the blanket of the day

From the paunch of dirty Will.

Each projector downs its snout,

Truffling the blackened scene,

Till the Wille’s lights gush out

Vorstellungen on the screen.

Doxies blanch to silverwhite;

All their trappings of the sport,

Lax and scattered, in this light

Merge and lock to smooth and taut.

See! The rockets shoot afar!

Ah! The screen was