Poems

by Harold Pinter

The first selection of poems by Harold Pinter has been made from work published in little magazines during the nineteen fifties and includes ten poems previously unpublished in any form together with an early fragment of dialogue, KULLUS, which is also unpublished and dates from 1949.

Genres: Poetry

43 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

New Year in the Midlands

Now here again she blows, landlady of lumping
Fellows between the boards,
Singing "O Celestial Light", while
Like a T-shirt on the
Flood swings her wooden leg.
This is the shine, the powder and blood, and here am I,
Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town,
Or such.
Where we went to the yellow pub, cramped in an alley bin,
A shoot from the market,
And found the thin Luke of a queer, whose pale
Deliberate eyes, raincoat, Victorian,
Sap the answer in the palm.
All the crush, camp, burble and beer
Of this New Year's Night; the psalm derided;
The black little crab women with the long
Eyes, lisp and slaw in a can of chockfull stuff.
I am rucked in the heat of treading; the well-rolled
Sailor boys soon rocked to sleep, whose ferret fig
So calms the coin of a day's fever.
Now in this quaver of a roisty bar, the wansome lady
I blust and stir,
Who pouts the bristle of a sprouting fag -
Sprinkled and diced in these Midland lights
Are Freda the whimpering glassy bawd, and your spluttered guide,
Blessed with ambrosial bitter weed. - Watch
How luminous hands
Unpin the town's genitals -
Young men and old
With the beetle glance,
The crawing brass whores, the clamping
Red shirted boy, ragefull, thudding his cage.


The Midget

I saw the midget in the ringing airs,
That night upon the crest.
The bowed trees, the silent beast,
Under the wind.

And saw the voyagers stand stiff,
Deathsure, stiff and coffined
In that still place,
Hands clasped, tall hats on.


Chandeliers and Shadows

The eyes of a queen germinate
In this brothel, in this room,
The kings are fled, the potentates
Shuffle kingdoms with the sweet fingers.
Mountains, kingdoms, valets erudite,
Muffling flaunts of deliberate ecstasy
Slips, shoves, the deluded whore,
The hectoring mice, the crabs of lemon,
Scrawled thick tails across the stateroom.
Masks gape in the floodlit emperies,
Where wax violins, donkey splendour falls,
The brocaded gown of servants and moths,
The horsefly, the palsied stomacher,
Worlds dying, suns in delirium,
Catch the sleek counsellor,
Hold the crystal elixir of muffs.

Enwrapped in this crust, this crumpled mosaic,
Camphor and rosefall stifle the years,
Yet I, lunatic from lunatic spheres,
Shall run crazy with lepers,
And bring God down the chimney,
A tardy locust,
To plunder and verminate man's pastures, entirely.
Sudden I stay blinded with Orion's menace,
The sky cut the ice-shell
With the strip and fall of darting star,
The split, the splintered palace.
Let them all burn together
In a trite December,
A necromantic cauldron of crosses,
And on Twelfth Night the long betrayed monster
Shall gobble their gilded gondolas.


I Shall Tear Off My Terrible Cap

I in my strait jacket swung in the sun,
In a hostile pause in a no man's time.
The spring his green anchor had flung.
Around me only the walking brains,
And the plack of their onelegged dreams
As I hung.

I tell them this -
Only the deaf can hear and the blind understand
The miles I gabble.
Through these my dances of dunce and devil,
It's only the dumb can speak through the rubble.
Time shall drop his spit in my cup,
With this vicious cut he shall close my trap
And gob me up in a drunkard's lap.
All spirits shall haunt me and all devils drink me;
O despite their dark drugs and the digs that they rib me,
I'll tear off my terrible cap.


Book of Mirrors

My book is crammed with the dead
Youths of years.

Fabulous in image I walked the Mayworlds,
Equal in favour the concubant winds,
Set by my triangle the sextant sounds,
Till crowned lips I kissed,
Supped with a blood of snapping birds,
In a doom and ring of belladonna to sleep.

Spruced, I welcomed their boneating smiles,
Till I grew bound and easy with ills,
Strewing for decorance a hundred grails.
And anger-rich with gallows and banks,
The world raped on her back,
From the shanks of my widowed kids
I played Adam's uncle's joke.

In the house of my heart spawned
The invited doves.
May springroot slum their hurt limbs,
That they chirp the early ladies
And prop the mad brideworld up.
May they breathe sweet; the shapes
That ounced my glad weight
With ripe and century figners,
That locked the skeleton years
With a gained grief.


The Islands of Aran Seen from the Mother Cliffs

The three whales of Aran
Humped in the sun's teeth,
Make tough bargain with the cuff
And statement of the sea.

I stand on Moher, the cliffs
Like coalvaults, see Aran
In mourning thumped to losses
By its season's neighbour.

Aran like three black whales
Humped on the water,
With a whale's barricade
Stares out the waves.

Aran with its bleak gates locked,
Its back to the traders,
Aran the widower,
Aran with no legs

Distended in distance
From the stone of Connermata's head,
Aran without gain, pebbled
In the fussing Atlantic.


Jig

Seeing my potholed women
Fall on the murdered deck,
I rage in my iron cabin.

Faster my starboard women,
Spun by the metal breeze,
Dance to a cut-throat temper.

Seeing my men in armour
Brand the galley bark,
I skip to drydock.

Women and men together,
All in a seaquick temper,
Tick the cabin clock.


The Anaesthetist's Pin

The anaesthetist's pin
Bind up the bawl of pain.
The amputator's saw
Breaks the condition down.

In the division of blood
That stems the fractured bow,
The wrist-attacking hound
Snipes out the stair below.

At that incision sound
The lout is at the throat
And the dislocated word
Becomes articulate.


You in the Night

You in the night should hear
The thunder and the walking air.
You on that shore shall beat
Where mastering weathers are.

All that honoured hope
Shall fail upon the slate,
And break the winter down
That clamours at your feet.

Though the enamouring altars burn,
And the deliberate sun
Make the eagle bark,
You'll tread the tightrope.


The Second Visit

My childhood vampire wallows in those days,
Where panting sea threatened and surf was flint,
And consummate doves flanked the eyes.

Now an actor in the nocturnal sink,
The strip of lip is toothed away,
And flats and curtains canter down.

So grows in stream of planetary tides
The sun abundant in hanging sands.

And aquiline weapons barb and fanged
Conceive amid their holy jaws
An echoed Siberia in the mind,
Where the comet fist had crushed,
And sent back trees to a gulped barrenness.

Denebola and Alphard like countertenors
Sing, and their malicious minstrels of song
Silence the tongue's gush,
And the quick opus of thighs.

My childhood vampire unpacks a new stay,
But I defy and send him off to war,
On the credit of Leo and his gods,
Against the fallingdown parents
Devoured by children, and the toy Czars.


Stranger

That you did barter
And consort with her.
That you did ash
The fire at her departure.
That you did enter
Where I was unechoed.
That you did venture
Where I was a stranger.
That you did cajole
When the pendulum hung.
That you interposed
In her curious dream.
That you did instruct
From your alphabet home.
That you did confusion
Her eyelid to stone.
That you did render
The echo unheard
That you might divide
When the echo was gone.
That you did condition
Her widowhood on.
That you were the stranger
That strangered the calm.
That you did engender
The thunder to storm.
That yours was the practise -

No case.


A Walk by Waiting

A walk by listening.
A walk by waiting.

Wait under the listening
Winter, walk by the glass.

Rest by the glass of waiting.
Walk by the season of voices.

Number the winter of flowers.
Walk by the season of voices.

Wait by the voiceless glass.


Poem

I walked one morning with my only wife,
Out of sandhills to the summer fair,
To buy a window and a white shawl,
Over the boulders and the sunlit hill.
But a stranger told us the fair had passed,
And I turned back my only wife.

And I turned back and I led her home.
She followed me closely out of the summer,
Over the boulders and the moonlit hill,
Into sandhills in the early evening,
And went to our home without a window,
And the long year moved from the east.

My only wife sat by a candle.
The winter keened at the door.
A widow brought us a long black shawl.
I placed it on my true wife's shoulders.
The widow went from us into sandhills,
Away from our home without a window.

The year turned to an early sunrise.
I walked one morning with my only wife,
Out of sandhills to the summer fair,
To sell a candle and a black shawl.
We parted ways on the sunlit hill,
She silent, I to the farther west.


The Task

The last time Kullus seen,
Within a distant call,
Arrived at the house of bells,
The leaf obeyed the bud,
I closed the open night
And tailormade the room.

The last time Kullus, known,
Obeyed a distant call,
Within the house of night,
The leaf alarmed the bud,
I closed the open bell
And tailormade the room.

The last time Kullus saw
The sun upon the bough,
And in a distant call,
The bus about to break,
I set about my task
And tailormade the room.

The last time Kullus saw
The flower begin to fail,
He made a distant call,
The bud became a bell,
I disobeyed that cry
And pacified the room.


The Error of Alarm

A woman speaks:
A pulse in the dark
I could not arrest.
The error of alarm
I could not dismiss.
A witness to that bargain
I could not summon.

If his substance tautens
I am the loss of his blood.
If my thighs approve him
I am the sum of his dread.

If my eyes cajole him
That is the bargain made.
If my mouth allays him
I am his proper bride.

If my hands forestall him
He is deaf to my care.
If I own to enjoy him
The bargain's bare.

The fault of alarm
He does not share.
I die the dear ritual
And he is my bier.


Afternoon

Summer twisted from their grasp
After the first fever.
Daily brought the men.
And placed a wooden peg
Into the wound they had made,
And left the surgery of skin
To barbers and students.

Some burrowed for their loss
In the ironmonger's bin
Impatient to reclaim,
Before the journey start,
Their articles of faith.

Some nosed about in the dirt,
Deaf to the smell of heat
And the men at the rubber pit,
Who scattered the parts of a goat
For the excitement and doubt.

One blind man they gave
A demented dog to sniff,
A bitch that had eaten the loot.
The dog, bare to his thought,
Became his mastiff at night,
His guardian the thief of his blood.


A View of the Party

The thought that Goldberg was
A man she might have known
Never crossed Meg's words
That morning in the room.

The thought that Goldberg was
A man another knew
Never crossed her eyes
When, glad, she welcomed him.

The thought that Goldberg was
A man to dread and know
Jarred Stanley in the blood
When, still, he heard his name.

While Petey knew, not then,
But later, when the light
Full up upon their scene,
He looked into the room.

And by morning Petey saw
The light began to dim
(That daylight full of sun)
Though nothing could be done.

ii
Nat Goldberg, who arrived
With a smile on every face,
Accompanied by McCann,
Set a change upon the place.

The thought that Goldberg
Sat in the centre of the room,
A man of weight and time,
To supervise the game.

The thought that was McCann
Walked in upon this feast,
A man of skin and bone,
With a green stain on his chest.

Allied in their theme,
They impose upon the room
A dislocation and doom,
Though Meg saw nothing done.

The party they began,
To hail the birthday in,
Was generous and affable,
Though Stanley sat alone.

The toasts were said and sung,
All spoke of other years,
Lulu, on Goldberg's breast,
Looked up into his eyes.

And Stanley sat - alone,
A man he might have known,
Triumphant on his hearth,
Which never was his own.

For Stanley had no home.
Only where Goldberg was,
And his bloodhound McCann,
Did Stanley remember his name.

They played at blind man's buff,
Blindfold the game was run,
McCann tracked Stanley down,
The darkness down and gone

Found the game lost and won,
Meh, all memory gone,
Lulu's lovenight spent,
Petey impotent;

A man they never knew
In the centre of the room,
And Stanley's final eyes
Broken by McCann.


The Table

I dine the longest
All this time

My feet I hear
Fall on the fat

On cheese and eggs
On weekend bones

The sound of light
Has left my nose.

Tattooed with all
I could not see

I whisper in
My deafest ear

My name erased
Was something here

Or total bluff
Preserved its care.

To this enchained
With this in love

I moved on fours
Without a word

And stuffed with tributes
Hog the scraps

Breathless,
Under this enormous table.


Kullus

I let him in by the back door.
There was a brisk moon
- Come in.
He stepped inside, slapping his hands, into the room.
- Go on Kullus. Go to the fire.
He stooped to the grate and stretched his fingers.
- You do not welcome warmth,
said Kullus.
- I?
- There is not meeting. There is separation.
- I have no bias.
- You have a bias,
replied Kullus.
- You are baised towards cold. But you shut out cold and do not acknowledge warmth. This can on no account be named a fire. It is merely another aspect of light and shade in this room. It is not committed to its ordained activity. It does not move from itself, for want of an attention and discernment necessary to its growth. You live an avoidance of both elements.
- Sit down Kullus. Take a seat.
- I am not alone.
- Oh?
- I am to call, should you permit it.
I sat down on my stool.
- Call.
At the door, Kullus called. Soon a girl was in the room, shawled. I nodded. She nodded. She bent at the grate, remained, rose, looked at Kullus.
- Here, said Kullus
She went to him. They climbed into my bed. I placed a coat over the lamp, and watched the ceiling hustle to the floor. Then the room moved to the flame in the grate.

ii
Kullus took a room. The window was closed, if it was warm, and open, if it was cold. The curtains were open, if it was night, and closed, if it was day.
Why closed? Why open?
- I have my night,
said Kullus.
- I have my day.
- Do you live far from here?
asked the girl.
Kullus then opened the curtains. For the curtains were open, if it was cold, and closed, if it was warm.
I stretched my fingers to the grate.
Why open? Why closed
- I know cold,
said Kullus
- I know its neighbour. Sit down. You are alone.
And so I say down on the stool, which he placed for me.
- You have no fire here,
I said.
Kullus moved away.
I looked at the girl. She spoke to me alone.
- Why don't you move in here?
she asked.
- Is it possible?
- Can you move in here?
said the girl.
- But now it is night.
- I cannot close them alone.
- It is Kullus's night.
- Which is your room?
said the girl.

iii
The curtains were open. I crouched far from the fire.
- What has happened to Kullus?
I asked.
- He has changed.
In her room I crouched far from the fire.
- What has happened to Kullus?
She remained close to the grate.
- You did not move in here,
she said.
- No.
- Which is your room?
she said.
- I am no longer in my room.
The cold turned to the corner.
- Why are you shawled?
asked the girl, and opened the curtain.
The brisk moon and the cold turned to the corner.
- What has happened to you?
asked the girl
- You have changed.
The ceiling hustled to the floor.
- You have not shifted the coat from the lamp,
I said.

[yamunin · Rating 4 out of 5]

non ho molto da dire.

nè da spiegare, non sono in grado.

lo sto leggendo, sussurando.

sto leggendo e rileggendo i versi a bassa voce e il 'senso' arriva sull'onda del suono.

ascolto i suoni,

il silenzio fra i suoni,

e ne vale la pena.