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Stephen Spender The Marginal Field

On the chalk cliff edge struggles the final field
Of barley smutted with tares and marbled
With veins of rusted poppy as though the plough had bled.
The sun is drowned in bird-wailing mist
The sea and sky meet outside distinction
The landscape glares and stares—white poverty
Of gaslight diffused through frosted glass.

This field was the farmer’s extremest thought
And its flinty heart became his heart
When he drove below the return it yields
The wage of the labourer sheeted in sweat.
Here the price and the cost cross on a chart
At a point fixed on the margin of profit
Which opens out in the golden fields

Waving their grasses and virile beards
On the laps of the dripping valleys and flushing
Their pulsing ears against negative skies.
Their roots clutch into the flesh of the soil,
As they fall to the scythe they whisper of excess
Heaped high above the flat wavering scale
Near the sea, beyond the wind-scarred hill

Where loss is exactly equalled by gain
And the roots and the sinews wrestle with stone
On the margin of what can just be done
To eat back from the land the man the land eats.
Starved outpost of wealth and final soldier,
Your stretched-out bones are the frontier of power
With your mouth wide open to drink in lead.

Stephen Spender Noticing

Often a crumb on my plate at the last
looks at me. On my tongue like a snowflake
it melts for awhile—and splendor discovers
itself in this world out of such quiet things.
Those times, anything breathed on or thought
about, even for an instant, is bread.

At the corner just below the streetlight
there’s a branch twisted by the wind. Surrounded
by darkness, hardly surviving, that branch
waits to wave in its yellow cone
when anyone passes and looks up. For years
it lives by such notice, eyes and sun.

Strange—things neglected begin to appeal
to a part inside us. It is called the soul.
These times, it lives on less and less.

Stephen Spender Dream no Dream

His dream surely no dream but his real future
Was this: his body lay stretched on his bed
Hovering above which his senses had worked loose.
Sight, without eyes, above him, looking down
Saw white and brittle shells lodged in his knees.
And touch, worked separate, without hands, could feel
Shell and bones together involuted.
Walking, he sought to trace that nightmare’s meaning
To some inverted willing. Incontrovertibly
The answer came through that, as the drowned past
Has cast cockles inland from days when this
Was once the ocean bed, there is a future
To which our bones already are the past.
And consciousness sways over shells and bones
Which are the last grave in the dreamer’s mind.