Affair of Honour (1966)

The date of the year grafted in the turf

With crossed swords

Eloquent between the formal hedges

Calls back across three centuries

To this pastoral place above the sweet river

The carnal liturgy mortal in the dawn.

The principals, forthright in disaster and

Foreshortened to stone,

Gaze each other pale in the truculent light

Under the bright eyes of the hooded girlchild.

She at least is present, golden

Withdrawn a little to the company of stalking shadows,

Flattered to tears by the lion pride,

Enchanted by the horror dawning

Over the reticent formalities of the hedges.

 

For love’s sake a virtuoso thrust

Asserts crabbed as a syllogism

The scrupulous logic of honour.

The casual enemy clenches his plea on a gasp of silence

And gives no more evidence before the chief witness.

The agile figures

Sealed in the long stride of their companion shadows

Are startled to stone;

I see the drops of blood humbled by the girl’s gaze

Blessing the grass.

 

Can seed and rain mingle aloud and flower

For pity at her frock’s hem? or the eloquent blood

Spring into birdsong crying to plead stay of execution

In strictest confidence of the formal hedges?

 

The shadows are long as snails, the dew astonishes the spiders,

The light shivers and falters, the thin pulse ebbs into silence;

And she and the man,

Braggart in their opening of the unstaunched vein,

Complacent as vultures, sardonic as astronauts,

Cut the date of the year for joy with crossed swords

In the blessed and dishonoured earth,

Laughing to think how it turns its face to the sky for good to celebrate

A brave encounter here on the grass where the blood dropped down

Between the formal hedges

Reticent these three centuries.