Since her first collection of poems published in 1943, Kathleen Raine has been writing a kind of mystical nature poetry all her own, a poetry immersed in the quiet air of solitude and imagination. Vita Sackville-West, writing in the Observer, spoke of her "curious purity": "Her poems are like drops of water, clear, self-contained, and sometimes iridescent with the elusive colors of mysticism". Collected Poems is the lifework of a visionary, a celebration of the miracles of nature and man's place among them. Now in her ninety-second year she has chosen this work from eleven published collections and from other uncollected and unpublished sources. The earliest poems were written in the mid-thirties, the latest in the late nineties.

Kathleen Raine was the author of twelve books of poetry, four of autobiography, and much scholarly work, particularly on Blake and Yeats. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1992 and, in 2000, was made both a CBE and a Commandeur de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Chapter One

LYRIC

A bird sings on a matin tree

`Once such a bird was I.'

The sky's gaze says

`Remember your mother.'

Seas, trees and voices cry

`Nature is your nature.'

I reply

`I am what is not what it was.'

Seas, trees, and bird, alas!

Sea, tree, and bird was I.

'SEE, SEE CHRIST'S BLOOD STREAMS

          IN THE FIRMAMENT'

This planetary blood

Streams crucifixion

In the space of bounded life's

Attraction and repulsion

Widening on the rude

Improvisation that the senses build

Staking extremities

To mark the victories

             Whose

The streaming blood-bright

Iron-torrent of the wounds

             surpasses

As the cloudy mansions

Melt into clouds themselves

             extensions

Beyond the fought-on

Woman-wept victory-vaunted

             dimensions.

INVOCATION

There is a poem on the way,

There is a poem all round me,

The poem is in the near future,

The poem is in the upper air

Above the foggy atmosphere

It hovers, a spirit

That I would make incarnate.

Let my body sweat

Let snakes torment my breast

My eyes be blind, ears deaf, hands distraught

Mouth parched, uterus cut out,

Belly slashed, back lashed,

Tongue slivered into thongs of leather

Rain stones inserted in my breasts,

Head severed,

If only the lips may speak,

If only the god will come.

PASSION

Full of desire I lay, the sky wounding me,

Each cloud a ship without me sailing, each tree

Possessing what my soul lacked, tranquillity.

Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak

Through the mute telephone, my body grew weak

With the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.

The language I knew best, my human speech

Forsook my fingers, and out of reach

Were Homer's ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear,

Familiar as the heart, than love more near.

The sky said to my soul, `You have what you desire.

`Know now that you are born along with these

Clouds, winds, and stars, and ever-moving seas

And forest dwellers. This your nature is.

Lift up your heart again without fear,

Sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air,

This world you with the flower and with the tiger share.'

Then I saw every visible substance turn

Into immortal, every cell new born

Burned with the holy fire of passion.

This world I saw as on her judgment day

When the war ends, and the sky rolls away,

And all is light, love and eternity.

FAR-DARTING APOLLO

I saw the sun step like a gentleman

Dressed in black and proud as sin.

I saw the sun walk across London

Like a young M.P. risen to the occasion.

His step was light, his tread was dancing,

His lips were smiling, his eyes glancing.

Over the Cenotaph in Whitehall

The sun took the wicket with my skull.

The sun plays tennis in the court of Geneva

With the guts of a Finn and the head of an Emperor,

The sun plays squash in a tomb of marble,

The horses of Apocalypse are in his stable.

The sun plays a game of darts in Spain,

Three by three in flight formation,

The invincible wheels of his yellow car

Are the discs that kindle the Chinese war.

The sun shows the world to the world,

Turns its own ghost on the terrified crowd,

Then plunges all images into the ocean

Of the nightly mass emotion.

Games of chance, and games of skill,

All his sports are games to kill.

I saw the murderer at evening lie

Bleeding on the deathbed sky.

His hyacinth breath, his laurel hair,

His blinding sight, his moving air,

My love, my grief, my weariness, my fears

Hid from me in a night of tears.

NOCTURN

FOR going out by night there is no place.

The sun upon the dark no region casts,

The rose beyond the evening cannot pass.

The flying sun withdraws colour and place,

Time, and all material attributes --

The rose beyond the angel cannot pass.

First of all flowers the crimson are in shade

With the unborn, the sleeping and the dead --

There is no place for going out by night.

And creatures all make room within the heart --

The heart no region and no sun requires,

Nor measuring time nor space for its desires.

The heart no region and no light requires,

The cannibal heart, that swallows up itself

Past the angelic sun, returns to life.

And errant night upon the table finds

That bread and wine upon the holy stone,

The body of the dead, and the unborn.

Since for going out by night there is no place

For the unborn, the sleeping, and the dead,

What sun, what sin, decrees the grail to fade?

THE RED LIGHT

The women burn throughout the dead of night,

Their red signs through the curtained windows peep.

What sacrilegious hand puts out the light,

And for what fallen body do they weep?

Christ, as I die, I own it is for thee,

Love, human nature, origin and shame.

The same light in the shrine and brothel see,

Wherever human passion lights its flame.

For of that red star are we virgins all,

And the red heart is stilled by the red fire

That moves the spirit more than its desire

Towards unmoving love, the point of will.

Copyright © 2001 Kathleen Raine. All rights reserved.