Letter from India (for CMP)

DUSK, and a sudden wind, and smell of rain,
the twilight stained with cloud to premature night
and all the trees uneasy and disturbed
with foreknowledge of storm.

Against the sky,

still faintly luminous, the squat black dome
crouches on old Sikander Lodi’s tomb
among the unkempt bushes and long grass—
(Sikander who, travestied in his name
kept that forgotten memory of the youth
who fought with Poros and his elephants).
Out there by the half-ruined pavilions
where the stained plaster flakes and drops away,
leaving the mouldered arabesques to look
like Batty Langley follies in a park
the peacocks call the rain.

Now comes despair,

and sudden gloom: is this some deep-plunged fear,
hesperian depression, atavism,
vague twilight-terrors of the anthropoids
disquieted in their tree-tops?

Or am I

obligingly displaying reflexes
labelled ‘nightfall’ and ‘rain’, as the Malls schoolmaster
saw himself an instinctive demonstration
to angel-anatomists, watching his twitching brain
impulsed to make a sunset by a god!
Whatever reason, still the mood persists—
my mind’s distressed, like the storm-conscious trees,
(is Housman’s arbor vitae never still!)
and now the aching thoughts, that all the day
were dazzled in the brightness of the sun,
and brushed aside by crowding trivialities,
and buried under intellect and reason,
find their release: I think of home, and you,
and all the hackneyed home-thoughts from abroad
(thrushes and melon-flowers, dry river-beds
and dew at Chevron)—each antithesis
takes a new value as it’s newly felt,
gives an old pain each time that it’s re-lived.

I trace my melancholy’s anatomy
(not morbidly reckoning each diagnostic
but just comparing notes): with what keen friendship
over the space of two long centuries
I read that cynic prig and erudite fop
forced to waste time in the militia mess
(not yet historian of an Empire’s fall
and of another decadence than ours).
But he’d a mental exile only, he
complained in Blandford, languished in despair
at Winchester: now, in an alien land
I feel the dull recurrent mental pain
with half the earth, and all a maniac war
to separate me from you.

How we two

shared in our love of England! Whether the creeks and flats
by Orford or by Cley, or whether the land
where England ends, and Wales begins in hills,
and Craswall Abbey never will be found.
And how we knew, and, God! how well we loved
the downland; from the Purbecks to the Thames,
from Frome to Chichester—the western wind
that ever sweeps Blewburton, the menacing calm
in Kingley Vale, the evening light aslant
on Alton Priors below the Knap Hill steeps:
sun on the sea and bright on Upwey Down,
and then the Knoll from Toyd, and our own valley!
I see it now; at once the distant whole,
and each important triviality
so dear to us, so pictured in my mind
that it becomes tremendous—the moulded stone
down on the stream’s edge by the water-gate
we claimed was like a Cotman: the magnolia
the smithy boasted; the broken-down cob wall
above the rectory; and our great walnut tree
so late to put its leaves out—each of these
I recollect, and, recollecting, know
how the same images are loved by you.
For you know all the wonders of Spring Pond
with its strange bottomless waters, and have felt
the twisted terrors in the silent copse
where the long barrow lies: you still can see
all Wiltshire stretching northwards from Combe Hill
and half of Dorset southwards, still can hear
the lapwing;s crying in their sorrowful flight
above the ploughlands out by Vanity.
While I—but why rehearse the dreary tale
so often told? A brute omnipotent sun
makes here the sickening lushness of the jungle
and there burns all the earth to stones and dust
impartially, and everywhere there rule
poverty, dirt, disease, and superstition.
Precarious and squalid, unrelenting,
the primitive life of tilth and herd goes on
and in the stinking slums the shopkeeper
grows fat, but the old usurer fatter still,
and everywhere is faction and distrust
and private hate is more than public weal
and every man’s his own minority.
But yet how real (over Iranian hills,
across the blood-soaked Russian plain and all
the starving land of Europe) still how firm
the bonds that tie us; treasured intimacies
as holding hands at waking, shared delights
as the sixth Brandenburg, or talk with friends—
logs flaring, and a litter of books and drawings,
when time stood still, and half eternity
seemed ours.

And will be ours again we know;

our hope is like the scholar-gipsy’s aim,
unwavering and fixed—again a symbol
as once for Arnold on the Hinksey ridge
so now for us, both lonely prisoners
but confident of ultimate release.

20 September 1944

NOTES

CMP: Cecily Margaret Piggott, m. 1936