At Longford, October 1939

Another day begins: the rehearsed monotonies
Swing again into movement, the meaningless recurrence
Of standing, moving, halting—the infinite boredom
Of waiting between one dreary scene and another.
My starving mind cries out and frets from its forced inaction—
As the athlete, drudging in office or prisoned in sickroom,
Longs for the quick intake of the air, the track spurned from sprinting toes,
The elastic jar on the bat as the ball is met at the wicket,
The swerve and dash down the field past the strident crowds on the touchline—
So I pine for my desk, for the book-lined walls of my study,
For the card-indexes, the note-books, the drawings and typewritten pages.
Symbols of quiet research, the steady accumulation
And ordered arraying of facts, the sudden excitement
As the jig-saw puzzle begins to form itself in a new picture,
The checking and verifying that fills up the pattern—
Making the possible probable, probability into conclusions.
A tiny act of creation, my brain for a moment a sharer
In something timeless, has for an instant lurked in the test-tube,
Directing electrons, driving atoms to form new partnerships.
For measureless epochs has patterned the genes and the germ-cells,
Making a humming-bird from a myriad ponderous saurians.

But I can escape a little, now I am nearly automaton,
Performing mechanical acts with well-conditioned reflexes;
Now I can steal away, leaving my body for guardian
The merest trace of a mind, obedient and unthinking.
From a distance I view myself, moving stiffly as under hypnosis
Like a well-trained corpse reanimated by Voodoo magic,
Strutting in curious postures among my fellow-corpses.

Once free, my mind flies off on a butterfly progress,
Flutters from flower to flower of image and memory,
Revisits the libraries, hearing the muted clanking
Of slow footsteps on the grids between iron bookstacks,
Smelling the acrid book-dust and feeling the grain of the binding,
Or sees the moth-holes in the faded red baize
Of the book-piled table in the alcove by the window.
Town-visions come—
Cambridge cold and clear on an autumn morning,
Cheltenham, decorous, yet sparkling in sun after showers,
Paris, the chestnuts in flower by the Luxembourg,
Athens, with Lycabettus fantastic at a street's end.
Now I see the fenland, black peat-fields under wintry sunsets,
Or the far Welsh mountains, blue and pink on summer afternoons,
Pewter sea and creeks winding through olive-green salterns
Where the great towered churches guard the Norfolk villages.

And now, refreshed and healed by its expedition,
My mind creeps back and glances guiltily round.
Was its departure seen, has the body stumbled or faltered?
No. All is well. The adventure has been successful—
My mind and I have broken the bars and outwitted the gaolers.

⋜1939

NOTES

Before SP was moved to photo-reconnaissance (through archaeological friends' contacts) and commissioned as an officer he was conscripted for war service in the Army in the 'Other Ranks'. This poem refers to that time with humdrum military training in progress, the poet very much 'out of his element'.