Covent Garden in the Sixties

Here where bridges to the past

may be trodden by a team of cheating gods

or carry the companionable dead

back to life from their long overcast

empyrean, we sat, not quite at odds

with one another, staring ahead

at the usual muddle on the stage.

Maestro Solti's dome, tympanum

of a Straussian downbeat, bobbed

above the pit. Two ladies of uncertain age,

tiara’d, satin’d, shifted bum to bum

through three long acts, happily hob-nobbed

with their kind in intervals

and made our evening comic at the end –

one asked, ‘What did you make of it?’

‘Too long, too loud.’ That memory annuls

for me the real pain the music sends

straight to my slow conscience: I admit

that marriage and the seed of life need Strauss

to fill them with appropriate harmony.

Human creatures worsen in the light

and cannot make a temple of a house;

the birds which clamour in the family tree

are vultures and not falcons; every night

the court of dreams must pass its sentence

while scores and books and pictures rush

to judgment on their makers – why else

come where the trials of gods commence,

where Neo-Babylonian tiers of plush

pretend they wait on pleasure and our hells

and heavens are strictest shuntings of the air.

I know we courted love and couldn't believe

that it had come and then that it had gone –

years later in a park I saw a pair

of birds like us – she streamed, he had to weave,

hopalong goose who thought himself a swan.

PETER PORTER

Serenade

It was after the Somme, our line was quieter,

Wires mended, neither side daring attacker

Or aggressor to be – the guns equal, the wires a thick hedge,

When there sounded, (O past days for ever confounded!)

The tune of Schubert which belonged to days mathematical,

Effort of spirit bearing fruit worthy, actual.

The gramophone for an hour was my quiet's mocker,

Until I cried, ‘Give us Heldenleben, Heldenleben.’

The Gloucesters cried out ‘Strauss is our favourite wir haben

Sich geliebt’. So silence fell, Aubers front slept,

And the sentries an unsentimental silence kept.