Stephen Spender
FROM MY DIARY
'She was,' my father said (in an aside),
'A great beauty, forty years ago.'
Out of my crude childhood, I stared at
Our tottering hostess, tremulous
In her armchair, pouring tea from silver–
Her gray silk dress, her violet gaze.
I only saw her being seventy,
I could not see the girl my father saw.
Now that I'm older than my father then was
I go with life-long friends to the same parties
Which we have gone to always .
We seem the same age always
Although the parties sometimes change to funerals
That sometimes used to change to christenings .
Faces we've once loved
Fit into their seven ages as Russian dolls
Into one another. My memory
Penetrates through successive layers
Back to the face which I first saw. So when the last
Exterior image is laid under its lid,
Your face first-seen will shine through all.
A GIRL WHO HAS DROWNED HERSELF SPEAKS
If
only they hadn't shown that cruel mercy
Of dredging my drowned body from the river
That locked me in its peace, up to their surface
Of autopsy, and burial, and forms-
This, which was my last wish, might have come true–
That when the waves had finally washed away
The remnants of my flesh, the skull would stay-
But change to crystal. Things outside
Which it had looked at once, would swim into
Eye-sockets that looked at them: through
The scooped-out caverns of the skull, would dart
Solid phosphorescent fish, where there had been
Their simulacra only in the mind.
