The Complete Poems of George Whalley 9780773599703
The poems of a Canadian modernist best known for his investigations into poetic process.
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English Pages [361] Year 2016
Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Editorial Procedures
The Complete Poems of George Whalley
Ode to a College Sausage
Homer at Dawn
Louisburg
The Chase
Derelict
Dog Watch
Fragment
Transcendence
Hymn to the Moon
20th Century
Dedication
Testament of Youth (A Sonnet)
Vision
Desertion
Desire
In Examination
And so it will go on till time is dead
Darkness – and the wild, maniac rush
Of the hilly road’s adventurous bend
The Limitations of Academic Philosophy
Modelled upon a German Prayer
To Canada
A Smile and a Nod
Dove Cottage Unvisited
Battle Pattern
Behind the Victory
Domestic Manifesto
Wheat
By the River
Commandos Embarking
Initial Assault – Sicily
Aftermath, July 1943
Pilgrim Heart, Turn Homeward
The Sound of Bare Feet
One night in the darkness
Homecoming
London after Leave
Sitting the Night Out
The Messenger
The Moon
The Devils’ Day Out
English Winter
W.K.E.
Beech Wood
Minster Lovell
There was no way of telling
Portrait
You must have found within yourself
Das Lebewohl, die Abwesenheit, das Wiedersehen
For Elizabeth
Now we are both alone and isolate
Renunciation
Sleep
Christmas Eve
Winter North Atlantic
If Winter Comes
This Is Your Music
Returning to Sea
London, 1944
Q.A.M.
It was to be expected he would be young
World’s End
Metamorphosis
The Way Back
Storm
Seeing Ducks Asleep
On Rejoining an Old Ship
Strength and peace have come
After Santayana
Normandy Landing
St. James’s Park
Normandy 1944
Apple Orchard, Normandy 1944
Epithalamion
How the Time Passes
Prothalamion
The serene ring of the horizon
His love did not strike and blind me
When this southbound ship comes in
The great ship, reeling and rearing
With a Sapphire Ring
A Girl in Love
Peter
Emergency Operation
Fragment
Proud wings from a snow-swept pine forest
Canadian Spring
We Who Are Left
End of Foreign Service Leave
Victory in Europe
Ships’ sirens cry with ragged melancholy
All these I give you, the gentle cunning
For the Sweeties
April Shower
Poetics
Punctually to obey, unquestioning
Variation upon a Seventeenth Century Theme
Counterpoint
Pray Silence
This is how it was the first time
Gunboat Sortie
Candlelight works such a miracle
Alan Gateling
Dad
Covenant with Death
Five Years
Landscape with Rain: Schwarzwald
Music has two lives
Music goes out at the fingers
Four Freedoms
Dunster
Cabot Strait
It never seems to be summer in a ship
Pick-up
Morning Watch
Thalamion
Toro
J.W.
Anniversary
Rotterdam
Action Stations
Prayer for the Living
Sicilian Vignette
Take out of my heart
Discharged: Services No Longer Required
Rondo
Exegi Monumentum
One of your letters held the germ of a poem
Seascape
Letter from Lagos
Dieppe
Meditation on Tower Hill
To R.G.
Walker
After it’s all over, whatever the crisis
Adam
Lyric
In black, with a white
Chief
Undertow
Death by Drowning
Clerk in Underground
The Silver Cord
Priest among the Dandelions
Anima Poetae (after Coleridge)
Annapolis Nightfall
I wonder what it’s like
Night brings back the ships
Today, he thought, the office won’t be fun
Wedlock Is So Esy and So Clene
Beaky, aetat 77
Hooded Eagle
Those who have no love of life die
After Giordano Bruno
National Anathema
Alchemical Retort: Recipe for a National Flag
Ubi Thesaurus Ibi Cor
Her cheeks were plump and rosy
What was not said and never can now be said
Go littel boke, go littel my tragedy
Three Years After
There are other centres than cities and governments
Barrenness comes on my pen
The sea may pick my bones
Grim and sulky beauty
When what you wanted has not been had
Poem
Death of a Bird
The stark clarity of starlight
This is the self-created tragedy of the world
Christmas Eve
Hatasis
Super Flumina
Hodie tibi, cras mihi
The spear and thrust of bud and blossom
Biology Exhibitions
Utopia 1948
The high whirr of and wings and shadow
When the books are balanced
Penelope of the white hands and the bright eyes
How shall I break this chaotic shell of silence
Suddenly the veil of self-pity lifted and I felt
How pitifully transitory, small, imperfect seems
We must go
Dawn comes in inexorable beauty
The flower unfolds
Night Flight
Runaway
Me, driven through minefields, with a quartering
Elegy
If it must be an affair of drowning, let it be
This death was cruel certainly
Gyro
How shall I say, having come this far
Lazarus
Ploughed and harrowed with cries of drowning
Raising a hand to my forehead
Spindrift of spindle-shank children
Though inland, though far
The rest may rest as best they lost
Wheel dove, wheel eagle, gyre skylark
When we were younger and loving
I do not know these men
I would come to a point in timelessness
Myth, that ganglion of symbols
Veronica
There’s nothing for it but drop an anchor there
When we set out, there was little gear to muster
And this befell and that happened
You are here, auburn-headed and slender
Admonishment
Dionysiac
How very odd to miss the bus
Not at bidding nor commanding
O World, O Word
But where in all this world is Eden? Where is any garden?
Affair of Honour
Memorial
A Minor Poet Is Visited by the Muse
Calligrapher
Twenty years ago – on the bridge
The Sage
A House Divided
After a certain age all of us, good and bad, are grief-stricken
How shall I say I love thee
Pig
Saint Francis’ cloak praises
Flowering of an Ancient Reticence
I came into life and now am leaving it
Autumn Was Never So Late
I washed my hair
As a smiling 50-year old
Absence
Turn the key on this room
Cosmogony
Like an abandoned railway station when
A seagull in a lilac tree
Song
My heart is not here in the pages
O
All Shall Be Well
In winter sunlight on the open street
To Mr W.H. All Happiness
Woburn Square
Southampton Row
The full moon lost behind cloud
This silver turned yellow
The voice of the wind making snow
Thaw-water and thaw-wind
I wore a khaki shirt and red tie
There’s a wise woman who knows
Textual Notes
Explanatory Notes
Appendix 1: Contents of Poems 1939–1944
Appendix 2: Contents of No Man an Island
Appendix 3: Pages That End with the Last Line of a Stanza
Index of Titles and First Lines
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
