("As I sit staring...")

STEPHEN SPENDER

How long I have been wrong, it seems,

And how I still only swallow the truth

-That I have lost for ever her I love-

For a shrieking instant, then turn back again

To a drug of bitter days and dreams.

Il

As I sit staring out of my window

Wasting time which the traffic does not waste,

Nor any of the passers by in the street

Who keep time with time as they go

Measuring the seconds with their feet,

In their minds riding the crested tide

On white horses of pursuant days

I think of you, James, at another window

With your stubby hands relaxed and your blue gaze

Invaded by a sense of emptiness,

Startled as if a gust of air,

Had blown through the interstices

Of your mind and hair,

Ruffling your forehead with a puzzled despair.

But I have learned lately that the spaces

And the timeless loneliness

Of the unfruitful waste places,

The desert, the untidy room, and the hour

Between waking and sleep,

Are windows opened onto power

'Where we become most what we are,

'When the conscious eye and ear

Are severed from what they see and hear

And in the hollow silent blackness deep,

Living tunes and images flower.

Stephen Spender

GREEN KEY

Extensions in the mind expand the green

Electric cord suspended in the light

Recalling all the eye has ever seen

Of greenness elsewhere variously bright,

And sight is fractured in the space beyond

As though was battered down some memoty's door

Revealing whole geographies of land

Forever green and sometime seen before.

One unremittant radiance compels

All light into the focus of the past

And memory ignites a lamp which quells

The actual cold brilliance roomward cast,

Till light transcendent and awakened thought