William Empson (1906 – 1984)
Influential English literary critic and poet.
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All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.
The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.
An ambiguity,in ordinary speech,means something very pronounced,and as a rule witty or decetful....any verbal nuance,however slight,which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language. (From the Preface)
Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills.
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
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.
But as to risings, I can tell you why.
It is on contradiction that they grow.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
Up was the heartening and the strong reply
The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul.
Liberal hopefulness
Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet
Revere; do not presume to think her wasted.
Project her no projectile, plan nor man it;
Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted.
To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death
Making death their ideal basis for different ideals.
The Communists however disapprove of death
Except when practical.
Feign then what's by a decent tact believed
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.
Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;
Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;
Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.
Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations
And dissolve into our judgement all their codes.
Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation
(People are continually asking one the way out),
Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.
It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through.
Poise of my hands reminded me of yours.
Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?
Your rights reach down where all owners meet, in Hell's
Pointed exclusive conclave, at earth’s centre
(Your spun farm's root still on that axis dwells);
And up, through galaxies, a growing sector.
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