Missing Dates

I'm a big fan of William Empson, a marvellous paradox of a man. The foremost literary critic of his generation (Seven Types of Ambiguity being only the first of his output), and yet an inveterate boozer; a Buddhist and yet (apparently) a sex maniac who dined on both sides of the buffet; a man of the most heightened literary sensitivity, and yet who lived in personal squalor. And that beard!

Unusually for a critic, he also wrote poetry, and it is difficult and intellectual stuff for the most part. He drifted unbidden into my mind at about 3 am today, in the middle of my latest nuit blanche (the alternating day and night shifts are playing havoc with my body clock). And what drifted in was this poem, a villanelle of exquisite structure and chilling philosophy. Just right for those lonely and troubling hours before the dawn.

Missing Dates

Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is not your system or clear sight that mills
Down small to the consequence a life requires;
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

They bled an old dog dry yet the exchange rills
Of young dog blood gave but a month's desires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the Chinese tombs and the slag hills
Usurp the soil, and not the soil retires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.

Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
The complete fire is death. From partial fires
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

It is the poems you have lost, the ills
From missing dates, at which the heart expires.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.

I used to have a big thing about those curious and formal verse patterns so beloved of the Victorians - villanelles, triolets and the like - and this is my favourite villanelle. (Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle is second.)