Stephen Spender: Likeness

“A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.”

Stephen Spender

Foreword
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.

“Ah, like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no bird song, no, nor bough
Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal.”

Stephen Spender

"The Express" (l. 25–27) in Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1988) edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair

“Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.”

Stephen Spender

"Fall of a City"
Selected Poems (1941)
Context: All the lessons learned, unlearned;
The young, who learned to read, now blind
Their eyes with an archaic film;
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey`s bray;
These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses
On the high door of a skull and in some corner
Of an irrefrangible eye
Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

Memory

“Our dreams
Poured into each other's arms, like streams.”

Stephen Spender

"Daybreak"
Context: Then, in a flush of rose, she woke and her eyes that opened
Swam in blue through her rose flesh that dawned.
From her dew of lips, the drop of one word
Fell like the first of fountains: murmured
'Darling', upon my ears the song of the first bird.
'My dream becomes my dream,' she said, 'come true.
I waken from you to my dream of you.'
Oh, my own wakened dream then dared assume
The audacity of her sleep. Our dreams
Poured into each other's arms, like streams.

Dreams

“In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock.”

Stephen Spender

"In Railway Halls, on Pavements Near the Traffic"
Context: In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic,
They beg, their eyes made big by empty staring
And only measuring Time, like the blank clock. No, I shall weave no tracery of pen-ornament
To make them birds upon my singing tree:
Time merely drives these lives which do not live
As tides push rotten stuff along the shore.

Time

“One, a poet, went babbling like a fountain
Through parks. All were jokes to children.
All had the pale unshaven stare of shuttered plants
Exposed to a too violent sun.”

Stephen Spender

"Exiles From Their Land, History Their Domicile"
The Still Centre (1939)

Children , Sun

“Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”

Stephen Spender

"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum"
Ruins and Visions (1942)

Love , Children , Time , Sun

“Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.
Like rootless weeds the torn hair round their paleness.”

Stephen Spender

"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum" in Modern British Poetry (1962) edited by Louis Untermeyer (1962) variant : Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
Ruins and Visions (1942)

Children

“In the last sweep of love, they pass over fields
Behind the aerodrome, where boys play all day
Hacking dead grass: whose cries, like wild birds
Settle upon the nearest roofs
But soon are hid under the loud city.”

Stephen Spender

"The Landscape near an Aerodrome"
Poems (1933)

Love , Boy , Bird , Grass

“There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife — a tyrannical midwife.”

Stephen Spender

Lecture at Brooklyn College, as quoted in The New York Times (20 November 1984)

Justice

“Your heart was loaded with its fate like lead
Pressing against the net of flesh: and those
Countries that crept back across the boundaries
Where you had forced open the arena
Of limelit France with your star at the centre,
Closed in on you, terrified no longer
At the diamond in your head
Which cut their lands and killed their men.”

Stephen Spender

"Napoleon In 1814"
The Still Centre (1939)