In 1929

I

Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender

I

A whim of time, the general arbiter,

Proclaims the love, instead of death, of friends.

Under the domed sky and athletic sun

Three stand naked: the new, bronzed German

The communist clerk, and myself, being english.

Yet to unwind the travelled sphere twelve years

Then two take arms, spring to a soldier's posture:

Or else roll on the thing a further ten,

The third - this clerk with world-offended eyes—

Builds with red hands his heaven: makes our bones

The necessary scaffolding to peace.

II

Now, I suppose, the once-envious dead

Have learned a strict philosophy of clay

After long centuries, to haunt us no longer

In the churchyard or at the end of the lane

Or howling at the edge of the city

Beyond the last bean rows, near the new factory.

Our fathers killed. And yet there lives no feud

Like Hamlet's, prompted on the castle stair:

There falls no shadow on our blank of peace,

We three together, struck across our path,

No warning finger threatening each alone.

III

Our fathers' misery, their spirits' mystery,

The cynic's cruelty, weave this philosophy:

That the history of man, traced purely from dust,

Is lipping skulls on the revolving rim

Or war, us three each other's murderers -

Lives, risen a moment, joined or separate,

Fall heavily, then are ever separate,

Sod lifted, turned, slapped back again with spade.

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