Poems

Carla Lanyon Lanyon, 1906-1970

Born in Comber, Northern Ireland, Carla Lanyon Lanyon published her first book of poems, The Wanderer (London: Sidgwich & Jackson (1926), at the age of twenty. It was followed by The Second Voyage (1933), The Crag (1935), Full Circle (1938),Salt Harvest (a narrative poem, 1947), Selected Poems (1954), Flow and Ebb(1956), Unfamiliar Mountain (1958), Trusty Tree (1963), and Uncompromising Gladness (1968). She also published a novel, Penelope (1942, 1948).

Contents

1950s and 1960s

Early Works

Narrative Poems

Biography

Selections from the poetry books are given below.

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1950s and 1960s

Poems from Unfamiliar Mountain

THE WHITE MOTH

Far into the thundery summer night, 

With up-flung windows wide to the hot garden 

And, by the open door, one lamp alight, 

We talked, a group of friends, young men and women 

Who turned the world with talk to set it right, 

And all the heavens too, because the burden 

Of our argument obliterated God.

A white moth, with wings like a yacht at sea 

Came in out of the dark, spiralled a little,

Lamp drawn, then on the ceiling close to me,

By some strange law of suction, chose to settle.

Four lines on its greater wings joined perfectly

Rigging of lower sails; sensitive, brittle

As stamens were the feet on which it trod.

I saw its furred face, the exact design

Of three black circles set in a triangle, 

The pure eurhythmy of all curve and line;

A white moth, antenae just a-tingle,

Poised like a spirit, consummate, divine.

And I forgot our heady talk and wrangle,

Forgot we had obliterated God.

THE EDGE OF THE RIVER 

I brought him down to the edge of the river

And laid him, as gently as human hands could,

On the matted reeds by the bank.

We knew that the journey was over,

Slow two years of his unapproachable courage,

Patiently battering through the blind forest

Whose last trees darkened the river's brink.

I brought him down to the edge of the river

In an iridescent hour before sunset,

And there together we gazed at the further bank.

Oh, smooth sweep of a peaceful valley,

Oh, bronzed light on alizarin azalea,

Primula in all congruous colours

And a distance moulded to haze-purple hills

With promise of far beauty.

We fell asleep on the edge of the river

At night-fall, as only the tired sleep

Who have come through the blind forest;

So I did not hear the oars of the ferryman

Nor a boat pull out from the reeds

To take my companion to his primula valley.

And when I woke, seeing there was no more to do,

I turned back into the blind forest.

OCTOBER 

I am as much a part of this October night

As the corpuscle in my blood is part of me,

As one star is a portion of all starlight;

Each individual and each necessary

To the integrated whole. Leaves are a pungent pyre,

The fallen essence of a walnut tree;

And smoke sieves through the branches where a bonfire

Re-kindles of itself. I am no more alone;

I am the stars, the season and the moon,

I am all dying, birth and all desire.

Poems from Flow and Ebb

GRADUATE

Remember now the greening days that are over

In time, yet part of you forever.

They will be about you through the light and laughter

Of full summer, as a bud shapes the leaf;

They shall not desert you on a night of grief

Nor in the numbed healing days that follow after.

From them come the songs which are careful mother

Shall sing to her children in some remote land,

The sweet secret knowledge they will understand

Without learning, and tell to one another.

Down the difficult years shall flow these young years

Like a slow feeding river of smooth water,

Whispering of emotions that no longer matter,

Benign lovers’ echoes that once were wild with tears.

And into the greying end flows the greening;

Sea wind shakes the pane, shrills through the empty town,

And you are back again in blowing scarlet gown

By a great arc of the ocean with gulls keening;

You are running to the hall, sea wind behind you,

A friend shouts a greeting but his words are fled

Yours the lithe body and the golden head;

In the crooked firelit dusk his call shall find you.

Remember now the greening days that are over

In time, yet part of you forever.

TWO ON A MOOR

He must have come to this forsaken place

Driven by desperate need to be alone

That young man with all sorrows in his face;

Gently moor water murmured over stone

In shallows, quiet as a compline prayer,

While a June sunset burned out in the sky.

He would not think to find another there

Under the lonely rowan, nor know why

I too had come, so wearily, so far.

We did not speak; with a half shy respect

Looking from him, I saw the evening star

Serene above a dark cloud, purple flecked;

And so I turned, as one who understands,

And left him with his head between his hands.

 Poems from Selected Poems

THE BEGINNING

I leave you the world, God said to the child

Touch and taste it, make much of it;

There are blue-green mosses on the hillside,

Against a wren's nest hides the white violet.

The pattern of stars is yours and the wind's chorus,

They need not stale with age, the singing sea

Is edged with surprising lands of convolvulus

That you may have life and have it abundantly.

Cherish my world, child. Create, I created. 

Scar not, trample not. Fashion with words if you can.

Sleep by a mountain cataract unsatiated

To the last heart beat, and make your peace with man.

THE END

I came inland in the lupined June

And God knows the way was green,

The grass succulent, the river sweet

With trampled nettle and pungent mint.

       There was warmth

       And too much hawthorn.

I hid my oar among the reeds

Where the grebe nests and the green snake glides;

Beside a placid tributary 

I hid my oar from the open sea.

       And there was too much quiet

       In the night.

I saw the pole star over the hill

But nothing swayed, the woods stood still,

And the church spire on the horizon

Could not be smaller and be gone

So here we lie,

        My oar and I.

Poems from Uncompromising Gladness

FURTHER SHORE

Ten times away

A child on green cliff-slope lay

Looking across enchanted water,

(When time was all to waste watching the water)

At the end of a summer’s day.

Ten lives away, 

(When lives were all before and safe and slow)

Sunset had made a road of rippling scales 

So that almost St Peter 

Could have walked on that water

Out of Somerset and into Wales.

Ten fives ago

A child dreamed of the further shore and did not know

That in the hurry heart of this bright beauty

(Where time was all for work) stood Cardiff City.

Ten miles away
A child on a green cliff-slope lay

Looking across enchanted water 

(When miles were measureless across the water) 

To Tiger Bay.

DISTANCE 

Those whom I love hold me in thrall,

Though three of them are stars away

And two are continents and seas away

And one, the furthest of them all,

Is and arm's length way.

 THE ROAD MOST TRAVELLED BY

The low and gentle Chilterns lie

Supine against a summer sky

And I must take the road I know

Between my sorrow and my sorrow.

Every field is familiar ground,

The willowed ditch, the weedy pond;

There on a blue and windy Spring

We went for willow gathering.

Now February lambs have grown

To slow-foot sheep, sedately shorn,

And young green wheat is ripened wheat

Where the scarlet harvesters are out,

And apple boughs are bowed with fruit.

I pass three beech trees in the sun --

Parent, child and little one,

Could they be blasted suddenly,

Three generations, three all three?

Storms over this full wooden hill

Know not which lovely trees they kill,

Their lightning veins across the sky

And three must die and three must die.

Thus long hot summer flares and fades

By fifty miles of long hot roads

Where still I travel to and fro

Scarce knowing which way I should go

Between my sorrow and my sorrow.

Poems from Trusty Tree 

TRUSTY TREE

If the protecting oak

Had not been struck

By a freak storm in the night,

I would not have gone out

From under its shattered boughs into the dark

To look for light.

If the protecting oak

In-ringed with age's multi-diadem,

Could have known

Its little acorns grown

To full trees with their saplings beside them,

I would not have searched alone.

To look for light

Through a void of years and a waste of grief,

Holding at the heart

A shrivelled leaf

That once was part

Of an immensity of shade ---

In so good, so safe  ground, 

Would I have ever sought and found

Those leaves that never fall or fade?

THE HAVEN

Far past the outer edge of tears,

Alone, in a land beyond grief,

Whose only port is pain, he hears

Distantly, from the guardian reef

Moaning of more fortunate men

For little quaint anxieties;

Their daily cares their vexed concerns

Troubling the surface of dark seas

Through which he battled to these hills

Of peace, where all alarms are dim.

From the whine of lesser ills

His mighty sorrow shelters him.

IN PRAISE OF FREEDOM

I rifleman Pat McGowan

Of Newtownwards, County Down,

Prisoner of war in Korea

For 2 days, 1 month and a year,

Write this hymn to liberty

On a night of captivity,

"Pity my simplicity."

Freedom, I praise you on this night

When the long questioning is quiet

And I can see, through hutment bars,

Moon mountains made of marble, stars

Swing in the dark like sparks at play

Upon eternal holiday; 

And these no man can take away.

I, Rifleman Pat McGowan

Thought this thought, wrote it down

As best I could, that men may know

Though wars and tyrants come and go,

Freedom's wing along the sky

Touches prisoners; so I

Praise Freedom now, before I die.

GRANARY

Pick up the grain from the barn floor,

Let it run through the hands.

Your thought is mine in the moment of renunciation.

This time of the letting go of many years

And all their long love, with no more than a gesture,

Not the word said.

Oh sensitive grain, that could grow and golden to harvest,

Falling through fingers onto stone,

The No in life, the right and sterile rejection.

Let us go now; we shall not die.

There are other friends, other lands,

Company without companionship, laughter without heart's-ease,

The scent of grain which never more can please.

All things run through the hands.

ONE STRIP OF COAST

I have come to take my leave, simply and alone,

Of the pale empty coast I have loved with a passion

Stronger than the love of human and human.

When I found it as a child, how could I tell

That time would crack and break to bring the final farewell,

Sadder than the severing of mortal and mortal.

Memory may paint it on the slide of the mind,

Poetry imprint it, yet here is an end,

Bitterer than the breaking of friend and friend.

Twined wrack at tide-line, twin gull to another,

My soul and the coast's soul slowly grown together,

Nearer than the kinship of brother and brother.

Wild garlic, sea-poppy, spume-salted clover --

Affined coast, release me, our marriage is over,

Longer than the hold of lover and lover.

EARLY WORKS

Poems from The Wanderer

WANDER-LUST

These are the poignant things that still remain

To stab the dull soul with a sudden pain,

And turn the feet to wandering again:

                       . . .

Gaunt many-masted ships that seem to be

Left in old harbours to rot peacefully,

The menace in the murmur of the sea.

The sound of distant bugles and the sight

Of a long train, whose carriages alight

All gold and red go hurtling through the night.

Deep pink upon an almond tree, where Spring

Has put her flnger-tips, the chirruping

Of birds at dawn, and birds at evening.
                       . . .
These are the poignant things that still remain

To stab the dull soul with a sudden pain

And turn the feet to wandering again.

 MOUNTAIN SIDE

As no one knows at all, no one knows

With what mysterious hope a river flows

Or what the mountains think adown the years

And whom the lightning meets across the sky; 

Perhaps they too have passions and have tears

And plans, and dreams, and love of years gone by;

And theirs pure souls kept sacred and apart?

Who knows? That cloud may hide a broken heart. 

 Poems from The Second Voyage 

HERITAGE

If you would take the soul of me

The hidden soul so weak and strange,

Then you must share eternally 

The wrongs I cannot change.

If you would take the heart of me

And hold it till the journey's end,

Then you must bear eternally

The hurts I cannot mend.

And down the roads with you and me,

And mingling in our joy and tears,

Must go an unseen Company

Out of the buried years.

FALSEHOOD 

They told me, oh they told me, long ago,

That God would guide me through my length of days

And show me wondrous rivers and strange ways

Wherein His goodness and His mercies flow;

I learnt this was not so.

They say that love is like a meadow, flat

And green, whose simple Spring can never cease,

Where one may find the little flowers of peace, 

And deep earth, left untilled, just wondered at;

We found far more than that.

And still they say, they say that when we die

God waits to weigh the good against the sin,

When dear life ends and better days begin,

And all things will be better by and by;

You know, I know, they lie.

THE CHILD 

She will not play again, she will not dream again,

She will not dance hereafter in the rain,

She will not seek the bird's nest in the tree,

For I am growing up, and I was she.

WE MADE A TRUCE WITH LIFE

We made a truce with life, in the bluebell harvest,

The time of great beginnings,

The time of yellow oaks and purposeful wings,

Embattled days and nights without rest,

When the moon throws yellow shadows on the hillside

And the red earth warms to the strife                                              ,

As if no man had ever lived and loved and died.

In the Spring of the year, we made a truce with life.

Poems from Far Country

NOW LIES MY LIFE AS STILL AS SUMMER SEAS

Now lies my life as still as summer seas

That no dark storms possess.

All its divine majestic tragedies

Are soothed to happiness.

Yet often, from my safe and cheerful door,

I watch the passers by,

The lonely and the aged and the poor,

And none so blest as I.

Had they, like me, a spring with stars afloat

On fairy-charmed air,

And if they had, what after sorrows wrote

Those many lines of care?

Dawn brings a youngster bird to pipe away

The hours that crowd so fast.

Let us be thankful now from day to day

For fear this might not last.

Poems from The Crag

I KNOW A HILL

I know a hill with a hollow in it

Dark with the arches of yew,

Yet all earth's wandering shall not win it

Nor discover the way thereto.

There was a verse that was warm and fluent

Which a young child put aside,

Held in a song, but the notes play truant

And the magical words have died.

And yet the scent of a wet November

Can bring the fear of the yew;

In the depth of symphony I remember

And the feel of the song breaks through.

THE IRISH CHILD

One hour of life, on which you make no mark,

Out of the dark you came -- into the dark.

For all the time of waiting, hope and pain,

Out of the dark, into the dark again

Oh, that the white heat of a summer's night

Should come at last to this, so cold and white.

Sorrow be on this house, and silence, lest

The saints should swoop to snatch a fairies' guest.

WE