"Were I a farmer I would call you vermin
Because you‘d be the villain of my crops
And gnaw my wealth, but I am not a farmer,
But only one that walks the farmers‘ fields,
And so when I came on your stiffen‘d body
Lying alone and flowered with frost, your eyeballs
Glazed and your little front paws so beseeching
Crossed on your breast and pink like human fingers,
And when I saw your deadness in the frozen
Light of the winter morning, I, unmanly,
⬇️
"I am too rich already, for my eyes
Mint gold, while my heart cries
'O cease!
Is there no rest from richness, and no peace
For me again?'
For gold is pain,
And the edged coins can smart,
And beauty's metal weighs upon the heart."
"This is the darkness: I have known great storms
Scourge the long day - but this is motionless
And sterile: this is something featureless
The blind brain turning upon drugs and worms."
#depression
"Before man's bravery I bow my head:
More so when valour is unnatural
And fear, a bat between the shoulder-blades
Flaps its cold webs - but I am ill at ease
With propaganda glory, and the lies
Of statesmen and the lords of slippery trades."
- Mervyn Peake, May 1941.
I sometimes think about old tombs and weeds
That interwreathe among the bones of kings
With cold and poisonous berry and black flower:
Or ruminate upon the skulls of steeds
Frailer than shells and on those luminous wings -
The shoulder blades of Princes of fled power,
Which now the unrecorded sandstorms grind
Into so wraith-like a translucency
Of tissue-thin and aqueous bone
- "A Reverie of Bone”
Each day we live is a glass room
Until we break it with the thrusting
Of the spirit and pass through
The splintered walls to the green pastures
Where the birds and buds are breaking
Into fabulous song and hue
By the still waters.
- "Each Day We Live is a Glass Room”
pickPeake is one of my absolute favourite authors and illustrators. While this collection shows Peake to have been a war poet of incredible power, that's only a part of his genius. There are poems about nature and art, people in streets and factories, childhood and parenthood, poems of aching melancholy and rapturous joy. And love. Several of the love poems are dedicated to Peake's wife, Maeve, but it's a fair bet that they're nearly all about her.
Collected Poems | 
Unfarmerly, and most impractically
Felt that rats even have a right to live
And knew that there was beauty in your body
Dusted with starry marvels of bright frost,
And beauty in the little hands you crossed
Upon your breast before you died this morning." 13mo