Index of first lines

• A blackbird on the wire
• A child cartwheels by me on the sand
• A child standing in a wilderness of snow
• A dandelion examined
• A golden age, an Eden
• A jutting stone
• A long steep road to climB
• A plateful, nice
• A wild rose lifting
• A word, a gust
• Above the sea and the wide sand gulls fly calling
• Across a cold bright air the sun
• Aeschylus, Euphorion’s son
• After the others—struggle or charged stillness
• “After they caught me behind their desert lines”
• Age takes everything we hate to give
• Age’s bony knuckle
• All tasks done, spells are taken off
• All the girls get married, and likely lads they wed
• Almost before I can remember
• And on his right hand hung the face of Diaghilev
• And then
• As it rained all day
• Ask no surety of this flawless morning
• At work she smiled.  Resting she made
• Autumn is here and lovely
• Back to square one, or some square in
• Bare trees black against the south’s cold brightness
• Beauty and dreams of beauty flourish
• Beauty sleeps in the air
• Between Orion and the Bear
• Between two stations, two or three words and smiles
• Between two steps, between two thoughts, breaking
• Between waking and sleep
• Blind leads the blind
• Blood seeps from a womb
• Blossom and greening
• Brothers, men who breathe the air
• Bury my heart…  But the heart’s not one
• “… but if you’re in a hurry and can’t wait for me”
• Carly Gancher at four
• Cassandra screamed that Troy would fall
• Child I believed
• Children of the mines
• Children stone a swan
• Clouds roll off.  Summer is truly summer
• Consider this shrunk ball
• Considering our mortality
• Considers, musing at the sleeper’s side
• Cornered in the bewildering night
• Cows lounge among buttercups and dew
• Curled up you sleep, or stirring
• “Dear Adviser, can you help me to cope”
• Death is acceptable.  I belong to earth
• Death’s paradox dissolves our clear ‘to be’
• Deserts are somewhere else
• “Die should you now, what have you done?”
• Dirty old brutal bear
• Do you remember…?  Did you know…?
• Does time embrace existence or existence time?
• Dog-shit in London
• Don’t fret
• Don’t smile in the street
• Dreams of good
• Drink (your fill
• Easy to live in the lands above the sea
• England’s proud barque
• Everything we love
• Fall rainbows the forest-acred mountains
• Far down past melting drifts of cloud
• “Faster, faster” cries the manic queen “faster”
• Feelings of guilt, feelings of resentment
• Fish and chips under the pines at Manly
• Five terraced meres
• Fled are the open sky, the easy slumber
• Flute with no reed, violin
• “From each according to ability
• From every hedge lightly the rose
• From woods and valleys now the gathered night
• Frontiers break to barbary
• Galaxies, galleon-bold adventurers, pass
• George Jackson tried to break jail
• Glance lifts to a crucifix
• God, in whom I have no faith
• Golden, red, brown
• Gone are the ivory and gold
• Gorse and rock and bog lap the wall
• Great Hera, much ill-treated by your mate
• Green world outside the window, summer world
• “Half-way along life’s road…”
• Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl
• Happy those who filled
• Hatred’s well invested.  The capital
• Have always been too fond of sitting still
• He chose the symbol of the swan
• He had reached the ends of the earth
• He is tall, his hair is raven
• He ran like those who race for the cloth-of-green
• Heaven I don’t covet
• Her blistered fingers stumbling at their task
• Here in this rock lie stony semblances
• Here must the longing blood allay its heat
• High boughs arch over the half-dry creek
• Honour’s due to the bat
• Housman was old beyond his years
• How
• How could this traitor live a lie?
• How does it come that here
• How, when the ground’s gone from under one’s feet
• Husk flakes from the seed
• I could not in my orchard sleep that day
• I don’t believe in God, and yet I pray
• I don’t know what to thank, but grateful I feel
• I don’t suppose out of the grave
• I find it difficult to forgive Tom Moore
• I find Orion the hunter here
• I fled by night and in the grey
• I have no belief in a personal god
• I have (what seemingly you do not see)
• I have you always in my mind
• I scorched my heart’s earth
• I stand on the balcony
• I stepped out of my thoughts
• I tripped and fell, heavy on knees and knuckles
• I walked down Piccadilly in the black-out
• I, who know my inner man
• I woke in the night and heard the rain falling
• Idling along, wondering whether I oughtn’t
• In front a black cloud masks the sky
• “In memoriam…”
• In this matter of innocence and guilt
• Industrious humanity
• Jesus, digesting the meal Martha served
• “Joy we denied,”
• Lancelot’s blood must run in Guinevere’s bed
• Language and landscape change
• Larch, gorse, rough grass
• Late in a winter night
• Late October hedges along this lane
• Lear storms
• Leaves on a felled tree
• Liberty
• Life narrows down between our closing arms
• Lightly blows
• Like Luther (whom I do not love)
• Like music heard in
• Look up into the night, but not to extend
• Love… no, for this that word won’t do
• Love you have.  May he stay
• Loved England
• Love’s eyes and hands and all his senses flower
• Low to the grass—tall, branching—massed together
• Man and woman constantly (are we not?)
• Man’s sex is a weapon, woman’s a wound
• Many things have to go
• Mary and Elizabeth
• May we assign a cause?
• Miranda to Ophelia
• Moonlight transfigures marble
• Morning’s first light, spring light, a clear-
• Most of us, somewhere along the road
• Music is landscape
• My bay-leaves, where are they?  Bring them here, Thestylis
• My grandchildren are stamping the ice-puddles
• My shield (not its fault) is making some tribesman’s day
• Nature is much to wreck, but man can do it
• No last year’s letter, nor
• No, not a prince.  The boy we’ll come to know
• No, there’s no substitute
• Noon.  But the sun is low
• Not so much the fear of dying or of being dead
• Not yet the necessary word awakes
• Now dogrose bushes star the hedges again
• Now May is here.  The wintered senses wake
• Now of threescore and ten
• O Time, whose hand about our childhood’s hand
• Oedipus laid the king his father dead
• Of eternity in Hell
• … of Hyacinth’s temperament.  Just such a child
• On a curve of the river
• On the high hill, in sun-bright scrub
• Once she held half the world in fee
• One by one winter puts out the torches
• One full half of the willow was riven away
• One hurt by one he loves hurts those that love him
• Only through patience peace.  Not always then
• Our idols fall.  Not that their feet are clay
• Our lives are in other hands.  So are the lives
• Out from the cliff birds wheel wild, a white
• Over beyond the river
• Pelops may rule his country, Croesus count out his money
• Planted along the old line of the railway
• “Play it by ear.”
• Quick to beauty more than is common
• Racked bones of the acacia stand
• Reactors burn
• Released from cloud the low sun at my back
• Restoration of innocence in a dream…
• Riding down to the ship of exile waiting
• Right we should leave in June
• “Ring out the old, ring in the new”
• Ripe they hang on the bough
• Riven temper runs along the table
• Roses in the hedge
• Sea; rocks and sea; rock and pine
• Sea, stone, cypress
• Seen from the hill the hazy plain
• She fought the hard sinews, the horribly
• She hung out of her window to watch the stars
• She waited for him, waited
• Shown through the shadow of action, word and look
• Snow under grey cloud
• “Soldiers, advance against the enemy.”
• Some exiles know
• “Some food, for pity.”
• Something withheld him from lifting the spade to strike
• Sorrow I have known
• Speeds gather as lives hurtle down
• Spring, cold and wet
• St. Januarius’s blood
• Still morning.  Milky sea
• Still the spiralling seasons draw me on
• Still young that unknown face; yet not quite young
• Suffer the little
• Summer recurs
• Sweetness spreads about
• Tell the King: the intricate fane is fallen
• Tender and merry.  Other things of course too
• That corner where the road
• That dream, like many another dream
• That ghosts come home…  Things I don’t believe
• That time we started drinking
• The bare, beautiful borders, cruel borders
• The bare trunks of the beech-trees
• The blind girl’s face, which never was
• The cedar’s sunny terraces
• The chrysalis age of waiting is not wasted
• The church is very still
• The clouds that pressed the air
• The cordon drawn
• The doctor, after the examination
• ‘The enemy’
• The field of cloth of gold shines as it shone
• The gate groans to behind
• The girl came into the church
• The girl in the train looks out with brown eyes
• The grass in the next field
• The half-moon on Orion’s shoulder
• The hawk is beautiful
• The heron manoeuvres its slow galleon-sails
• The huge reflector of the hanging light
• The Judge was very kind.  He called her up
• The lady of the house
• The lamp in the translucent pane
• The land stoops to the sea
• The light falls equally on all; it glances
• The lines recur, the poem closes
• The living spirit, as beautiful and strong
• The maddened father, fed
• The Mother sat, her dead Son on her knees
• The municipal building stood square in my dream
• The music parts and joins, parts
• The objects in this case
• The old familiar faces
• The path across the quaking bog
• The pool of love standing in
• The quarried rock drops to the slums
• The river to the sea
• The scar-lips of the wounded wood
• The seasons come, the seasons pass
• The shutter flicks; the fleeting moment stays
• The sky is a firm dome bounding earth’s plain
• The spear is my rough wine, as it is my bread
• The stars are faint on the pale sky above
• The sun is soft, soft the blue horizon
• The tilted earth pauses, prepares to lean
• The track up the wild stream
• The universe is not a whole
• The war was over and the world was all
• The waste, the loss we said
• The waves move on uncharted courses
• The year wheels on into the same seasons
• There but for the grace of God go I
• There is no last rose
• These fields and trees
• These posts which stud
• They bear no company
• They burned drowned Shelley
• They dance in rings, dancing, a ring of women
• They think as they take breath, bearing no trace
• Things aren’t what they were
• This afternoon lying in the long grass
• This child was thrashed to death for thieving, lying
• ‘This clumsy creature conceals
• This demon that has come
• This woman, this child, this man
• Threescore and ten or so
• Through untimed fields of childhood the shadows and light
• Timbers driven deep through summer-slack
• Time is a child
• Time is enough.  Death
• ‘Time is the fourth dimension’?  Isn’t it more
• Time threw the columned temples down
• “To God” He answered “those things which are God’s,”
• To make a world all kinds aspire
• Today we feel behind us
• Together, love spreads bright under the clear
• Towards the hill would Alice go
• Traverse the beach, from your feet always
• Treasure in heaven?  Rather, the fleeting kind
• Two tall beautiful girls
• Under the grey cold
• Under the grey sky
• Under the light fresh day
• Under the spring sun moves the innocent band
• Up through the opaque water another year
• Uproot the rich hedges that roads may be wider
• Uxorious the Duke.  While Angelo
• Walking I heard the train
• Walking in the darkening dusk
• Warm summer cycle
• Watching the children shouting in the pool
• We all go under earth
• We are here for many things
• We are part of nature.  At least, we issue from
• We are the passing contacts of two worlds
• We can’t tell what mistake
• We lived and sang, my brother
• We must, if we would have our children live
• Were all his wounds in front?
• We’ve fared so long on the aimless ordered way
• What did he want her told?  Why indeed
• What did the flame force from the flesh?
• What do they feel, two old people who part
• What words are there for Spring?
• When first ghosts of our own begetting
• When I was a child I shall come to you
• When shall we meet again?  We do not know
• When the moment comes to forget
• Where are they gone, where?
• White foam sweeps along the grey-brown shore
• Who so firmly set in time and place
• Why do I dream this pause
• “Why hast though forsaken me?”
• Wind is chilly on shoulders.  Buses pass
• Winter morning
• Woods, beech and fir.  Water—always
• Words from a dream ‘For ever
• Worse than out of joint
• Wrist locked over wrist
• Yellow daisies in sheets over the green grass
• Yes,/living alone is lonely
• Yes, you’re right.  Misunderstandings may
• “You!  Hi!  You over there!”
• You who are manifest in reason and faith
• You wonder what the sirens sang?
• Young, I thought
• Your freedom, which our fathers stole