Donald Davie: poetry as music and sculpture 51

6 7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14

15 16

17 18

19

Davie, ‘Dionysus in Lyrical Ballads’, op. cit., pp. 136, 137, and 139. Davie, inMy Cambridge, edited by R. Hayman, (Robson, London, 1979, p. 81. Pound, ‘A retrospect‘, in Literary E s q s of Ezra Pound, edited by T. S. Eliot (Faber, London, 1954), p. 3. Quoted by Davie, Pasternak: Modern lud emen ts, edited by Davie and A. Living- stone (Macmillan, London, 1969), p. &. Davie, The Poems of Doctor Zhivago (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 19651, p. 18. Hereafter cited as P.D.Z. Dodsworth, ’Poetry in the grass’, loc. cit., p. 27. This phrase, first applied to Yeats by Richard Ellmann, has been taken up by Geoffrey Hill in ‘ ”The conscious mind’s intelligible structure”: a debate’, Agenda, 9, Nos. 4-10, No. 1 (autumn-winter 1971-2), pp. 14-23. Langer, Feeling and Form (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1953), p. 107. Davie, ‘The relation between syntax and music in some modem poems in English’, in P.Z.M., p. 95. Quoted by Davie, ‘Mr Eliot‘, in P.Z.M., p. 119. Davie, ’ ”The deserted village”: poem as virtual history’, Twentiefh Century, 156 (Au Davie, ‘KO analogies for poetry’, P.Z.M., p. 111. C. P., p. 114. (This poem, and the one following, were published inDavie’s Nr7u and Selected Poems of 1961). C.P., p. 115.

st 1954), p. 166.

ELIZABETH BARTLETT

Government health warning Falling apart at the seams, like a cheap skirt, I walk round to the off-licence, treading small Africas of pools after the rain, spying on lit rooms at people playing happy families for lonely walkers like me. In the rag trade they’d class me as a second. I don’t keep up appearances the way I should. A perm would improve things a lot, my hair, my thick hair grown slack, like the rest of me.

52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 1

Clutching my cancer sticks, I feel some pride the gin doesn’t tempt me, makes me sick in fact. You won’t find bottles in my dustbin, sir, only tins of dog food which I feed my cats. Perhaps they think they’re dogs, retrieving scraps of lousy poems from the waste basket, growling when strangers come up the path, padding uneasily, shoulder to shoulder, to look like a herd, from room to room. You might say they don‘t care the lady’s fit for nothing, doesn’t even pleasure a man these days. I pleasure them, make no mistake, as one drapes himself like a feather boa round my neck, the other clawing my tights.

Something is very wrong here. Turning the comer I see their silhouettes at the window, remembering that once witches kept cats, having a quick drag before facing the humans, who notice disintegration like surveyors size up the cracks in old buildings. There is no one to collect my scattered shards, to see the graceful jar 1 once was, before the barbarians moved in and the animals circled round, waiting for scraps of food, or warmth, edging their way into the group, before things fell apart, and the rot set in.

Shagged out, I lay down in my cave, drawing the skins around me. The hunter has a new wife now, the off-licence lights are dimmed, a hand turns the notice to CLOSED, the soft paws creep nearer, the smoke lingers, not from burning bodies, but from cigarettes that shorten life.