Davie, Donald

Wild Boar Clough

1. I.
2. A poet’s lie!
3. The boarhound and the boar
4. Do not pursue their pattern as before.
5. What English eyes since Dryden’s thought to scan
6. Our spinneys for the Presbyterian,
7. The tusked, the native beast inflamed to find
8. And rend the spotted or the milk-white hind,
9. The true Church, or the half-true? Long ago
10. Where once were tusks, neat fangs began to grow;
11. Citizen of the World and Friend to Man,
12. The presbyter’s humanitarian.
13. The poor pig learned to flute: the brute was moved
14. By plaudits of a conscience self-approved;
15. “Self in benevolence absorb’d and lost”
16. Absorbed a ruinous Redemption’s cost.
17.  
18. This too a lie; a newer zealot’s, worse
19. Than any poet’s in or out of verse.
20. These were the hunting-calls, and this the hound,
21. Harried the last brave pig from English ground;
22. Now ermine, whited weasel, sinks his tooth
23. Deeper than wolf or boar into the Truth.
24. Extinct, the English boar; he leaves a lack.
25. Hearts of the disinherited grow black.
26.  
27. II.
28. When he grew up
29. in the England of silver
30. cigarette cases and
31. Baptist chapel on Sundays,
32.  
33. long white flannels were still
34. worn, and the Mission Fields
35. ripe for the scything Gospel
36. cost him a weekly penny.
37.  
38. The missionary box!
39. It rattled as he knocked it,
40. crouching near the wireless:
41. deuce, Fred Perry serving …
42.  
43. Doggedly he applies
44. himself to the exhumations:
45. these pre-war amateurs,
46. that missionary martyr.
47.  
48. As gone as Cincinnatus!
49. Still tongue-in-cheek revered, as
50. Republican virtue by
51. a silver-tongued florid Empire,
52.  
53. tired of that even, lately.
54.  
55. III.
56. To Loughwood Meeting House,
57. Redeemed since and re-faced,
58. Once persecuted Baptists
59. Came across sixty miles
60. Of Devon. Now we ask
61. Our own good wincing taste
62. To show the way to Heaven.
63.  
64. But if under clear-glassed windows,
65. The clear day looking in,
66. We should be always at worship
67. And trusting in His merits
68. Who saves us from the pathos
69. Of history, and our fears
70. Of natural disasters,
71.  
72. What antiquarian ferrets
73. We have been! As idle
74. An excrescence as Ionic
75. Pilasters would be, or
76. Surely the Puritan poet:
77. Burning, redundant candle,
78. Invisible at noon.
79.  
80. We are, in our way, at worship;
81. Though in the long-deflowered
82. Dissenting chapel that
83. England is, the slim
84. Flame of imagination,
85. Asymmetrical, wavers,
86. Starving for dim rose-windows.
87.  
88. IV.
89. And so he raged exceedingly,
90. excessively indeed, he raged excessively
91. and is said to have been drunk, as certainly
92. in some sense and as usual he was;
93. lacking as usual, and in some
94. exorbitant measure, charity,
95. candour in an old sense. How
96. a black heart learns white-heartedness, you tell me!
97.  
98. Raged, and beshrewed his audience of one
99. without much or at all
100. intending it, having his eyes not on
101. her but on the thing to be hunted down;
102. or so he will excuse himself, without
103. much confidence. The rapist’s plea:
104. not her but womankind. He has
105. the oddest wish for some way to disgrace himself.
106.  
107. How else can a pharisee clear the accounts, and live?
108.  
109. V.
110. Wild Boar Clough … known to his later boyhood
111. As the last gruelling stage before,
112. Feet and collar-bones raw, the tarmacadam
113. Past unbelievable spa-hotels
114. Burned to the train at Buxton. Julian Symons,
115. His poems, Confessions of X, reviewed
116. In Poetry London, bought on Buxton Station …
117.  
118. A nut-brown maid whom he cannot remember
119. Sold him herb beer, a farmhouse brew,
120. One day above Wild Boar Clough, whose peat-sieved brown
121. Waters were flecked below them. Legs
122. Were strong then, heart was light, was white, his swart
123. Limbs where the old glad Adam in him,
124. Lissom and slim, exulted, carried him.
125.  
126. Somewhere that boy still swings to the trudging rhythm,
127. In some brown pool that girl still reaches
128. A lazy arm. The harm that history does us
129. Is grievous but not final. As
130. The wild boar still in our imaginations
131. Snouts in the bracken, outward is
132. One steep direction gleefully always open.
133.  
134. So Lud’s Church hides in Cheshire thereabouts
135. Cleft in the moor. The slaughtered saints
136. Cut down of a Sunday morning by dragoons
137. Grounded the English Covenant
138. In ling and peat-moss. Sound of singing drifts
139. Tossed up like spume, persistently
140. Pulsing through history and out of it.