'No one can say why hearts will break...'

 A balmy spring day, and I'm in a state of excitement – not because it's World Book Day, well intentioned though that initiative is – but because I've seen my first butterflies of the season: a lively Peacock, in good condition, taking an aerial tour of the front gardens on a busy road, and, a little later, I think a Red Admiral, glimpsed as it flew away from me, over a high wall and into the sun. The butterfly year has started! And I devoutly hope it is a much better one than the last. 
  Anyway, I reckon it's time for a poem, and maybe time to resume my one-man* campaign to keep the name of Peter Porter alive. Here is one of his finest, taken from the collection The Cost of Seriousness (1978), which he wrote after the death of his wife. This one is 'An Exequy', a beautifully controlled poem of grief... 

In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child, The stranded monster with the mild Appearance, whom small waves tease, (Andromeda upon her knees In orthodox deliverance) And you alone of pure substance, The unformed form of life, the earth Which Piero’s brushes brought to birth For all to greet as myth, a thing Out of the box of imagining. This introduction serves to sing Your mortal death as Bishop King Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme His young wife, lost before her time; Though he lived on for many years His poem each day fed new tears To that unreaching spot, her grave, His lines a baroque architrave The Sunday poor with bottled flowers Would by-pass in their morning hours, Esteeming ragged natural life (‘Most dear loved, most gentle wife’), Yet, looking back when at the gate And seeing grief in formal state Upon a sculpted angel group, Were glad that men of god could stoop To give the dead a public stance And freeze them in their mortal dance. The words and faces proper to My misery are private – you Would never share our heart with those Whose only talent’s to suppose, Nor from your final childish bed Raise a remote confessing head – The channels of our lives are blocked, The hand is stopped upon the clock, No one can say why hearts will break And marriages are all opaque: A map of loss, some posted cards, The living house reduced to shards, The abstract hell of memory, The pointlessness of poetry – These are the instances which tell Of something which I know full well, I owe a death to you – one day The time will come for me to pay When your slim shape from photographs Stands at my door and gently asks If I have any work to do Or will I come to bed with you. O scala enigmata, I’ll climb up to that attic where The curtain of your life was drawn Some time between despair and dawn – I’ll never know with what halt steps You mounted to this plain eclipse But each stair now will station me A black responsibility And point me to that shut-down room, ‘This be your due appointed tomb.’ I think of us in Italy: Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we Move in a trance through Paradise, Feeding at last our starving eyes, Two people of the English blindness Doing each masterpiece the kindness Of discovering it – from Baldovinetti To Venice’s most obscure jetty. A true unfortunate traveller, I Depend upon your nurse’s eye To pick the altars where no Grinner Puts us off our tourists’ dinner And in hotels to bandy words With Genevan girls and talking birds, To wear your feet out following me To night’s end and true amity, And call my rational fear of flying A paradigm of Holy Dying – And, oh my love, I wish you were Once more with me, at night somewhere In narrow streets applauding wines, The moon above the Apennines As large as logic and the stars, Most middle-aged of avatars, As bright as when they shone for truth Upon untried and avid youth. The rooms and days we wandered through Shrink in my mind to one – there you Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm Which life could not provide is balm In death. Unseen by me, you look Past bed and stairs and half-read book Eternally upon your home, The end of pain, the left alone. I have no friend, no intercessor, No psychopomp or true confessor But only you who know my heart In every cramped and devious part – Then take my hand and lead me out, The sky is overcast by doubt, The time has come, I listen for Your words of comfort at the door, O guide me through the shoals of fear – ‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.’

[The 'enigmatic scale' is a scale used by Verdi in his
'Ave Maria'. It has 4 whole steps followed by 3 half steps.
The last line means 'Be not afraid, I am with you.']

 Porter's poem explicitly echoes the Exequy written by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in memory of his wife, who died in 1624 at the age of just twenty-four. By adopting its regular rhymed couplets and tetrameter, Porter gives his poem extraordinary potency and an almost monumental quality.
Here is Bishop King's original... 

Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,

Instead of dirges this complaint;
And for sweet flowers to crown thy hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse
From thy grieved friend, whom thou mightst see
Quite melted into tears for thee. 

Dear loss! Since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee! Thou art the book,
The library, whereon I look
Though almost blind. For thee, loved clay,
I languish out, not live, the day,
Using no other exercise
But what I practise with mine eyes.
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
To one that mourns. This, only this,
My exercise and business is:
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolved into showers. 

Nor wonder if my time go thus
Backward and most preposterous:
Thou hast benighted me. Thy set
This eve of blackness did beget,
Who wast my day (though overcast
Before thou hadst thy noon-tide past)
And I remember must in tears
Thou scarce hadst seen so many years
As day tells hours. By thy clear sun
My love and fortune first did run;
But thou wilt never appear 
Folded within my hemisphere,
Since both thy light and motion,
Like a fled star, is fallen and gone, 
And 'twixt me and my soul's dear wish
The earth now interposed is,
Which such a strange eclipse doth make
As ne'er was read in almanac. 

I could allow thee for a time 
To darken me and my sad clime;
Were it a month, a year, or ten,
I would thy exile live till then;
And all that space my mirth adjourn,
So thou wouldst promise to return
And, putting off thy ashy shroud,
At length disperse this sorrow's cloud. 

But woe is me! The longest date
Too narrow is to calculate
These empty hopes. Never shall I
Be so much blest as to descry
A glimpse of thee, till that day come
Which shall the earth to cinders doom,
And a fierce fever must calcine
The body of this world, like mine, 
My little world! That fit of fire
Once off, our bodies shall aspire
To our souls' bliss: then we shall rise,
And view ourselves with clearer eyes
In that calm region where no night
Can hide us from each other's sight. 

Meantime thou hast her, Earth: much good
May my harm do thee. Since it stood 
With Heaven's will I might not call 
Her longer mine, I give thee all
My short-lived right and interest 
In her, whom living I loved best:
With a most free and bounteous grief,
I give thee what I could not keep.
Be kind to her, and prithee look 
Thou write into thy Doomsday book
Each parcel of this rarity,
Which in thy casket shrined doth lie.
See that thou make thy reckoning straight,
And yield her back again by weight;
For thou must audit on thy trust
Each grain and atom of this dust,
As thou wilt answer him that lent,
Not gave thee, my dear monument.


* Not quite one-man – Bryan Appleyard posted 'An Angel in Blythburgh Church' on Facebook the other day.