The storm

(In memoriam Ronald Balfour, killed March 1945)

THROUGH the Lion Gate the sky was suddenly darkened
as the first drops flecked the grey slabs of Mycenae
and the wind spoke in the stones, a hoarse faint ghosting,
presage of storm:
while the cold shadow flooded across the warm
pink-brown hillside and over the ruined town,
till the sky was black and the snakes of hissing rain
swept on the Argive plain
and on us, hurrying down past the hooded shepherds
seeking the inn with its welcome of comfort and shelter.

Laughing and talking then we sat and drank wine there;
while on the hill the rain slashed the circled grave-ground
to the thin lament of a goatherd's piping, bewailing
the old dead things—
archaic, gold-masked, amber-decked fabulous kings
dowered by poets with sorrow and tragic disaster.
And so we laughed, very near the kingdom of death
nor felt the chilling breath
in the wind that restlessly prophesied in the ruins
of the coming storm from which there would be no escaping.

Now all the world is battered beneath hell's tempest
and Agamemnon's sorrow is small and forgotten:
now go the victims, herded to godless altars
and you are one
who, at the sinister throw of the dice, have gone,
nor will there be more talk or laughing together.
Yet you have left the storm and can now begin
your sojourn at that inn
where, outside, all earth's heartbreak and tortured crying
is no more than wind and rain and a plaintive pan-pipe.

6 April 1945

NOTES

• RE Balfour, medieval historian (1904-1945); Captain during WWII, first of the 'Monuments Men' killed while rescuing antiquities in Cleve, Germany 3-iii-1945. The dedication to this poem, altered in MS from 'REB' to 'Ronald Balfour' suggests he was known to SP but no contacts between them have come to light [Eds.]