Add MS 88931/2/3

Contains revised poems in autograph and typescript. Many leaves pasted in. Peake also lists categories for his poems: love, war-time, dejection, ego, objective poems, nature, abstract. There are numerous drawings of heads, figures (including sketches of his children and wife Maeve Gilmore), animals and dust-jacket designs. Towards the end of the manuscript there is a page of reflections on the process of writing an unspecified work [Titus Groan]. This notebook [referred to as the 'red book' in Add MS 88931/2/2] is a dummy copy [from publishers Eyre and Spottiswoode]. Begun May 1940 (but some poems date from the late 1930s). Covering dates suggested by R W Maslen in his introduction to Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), pp.1-2.

With the notebook there are three supplementary loose leaves comprising:

• revised autograph poem entitled ‘Snow on Sark’;
• revised autograph poem, ‘Hail Tommy-two-legs gobler that you are...’;
• revised autograph fragment about Titus evading two pursuants, including a drawing of Titus wearing helmet and armour [draft material for Titus Alone?].

Poems contained in the notebook are:

• ‘April gone by and the next faint fable-month’;
• ‘In the fabric of this love’;
• ‘The Three’;
• ‘Each day I live is a glass room’;
• ‘As a great town draws the eccentrics in’;
• ‘There are no quiet and smoothed sheets of death’ [later titled ‘Victims’];
• ‘Grottoed beneath your ribs no longer’;
• ‘The Restaurant’;
• ‘Before mans [man’s] bravery I bow my head:’;
• ‘If Trees Gushed Blood’;
• ‘When the heart cries in love’;
• ‘What is that noise in the shaking trees behind’;
• ‘Neither to captain nor be captained’ [later revised as ‘Neither to captain nor captained be’];
• ‘Crumbles the crested scroll’;
• ‘Wayward O world and unpredictable’;
• ‘O love, the world’s solution and the fever’;
• ‘I Was Not There’;
• ‘Maeve. If when I married you I was in love’;
• ‘This field is dim with sheaves’;
• ‘Brave Lies Conspiring in the Three-Hued Flag’;
• ‘Sing I The Fickle, Fit-For-Nothing Fellows’;
• ‘London Buses’;
• ‘Are We Not The Richer?’;
• ‘Jobs’ eagle skids the thin sky still’;
• ‘El Greco’;
• ‘The Metal Bird’;
• ‘The pit-boys lung is black’;
• ‘His head is moulded out of English weather’;
• ‘Be rapid to perceive the signet flame’;
• ‘The Crystal’;
• ‘Fort Darland’;
• ‘The Boy’;
• ‘Crisis’;
• ‘Dead Rat’;
• ‘May 1940’;
• ‘September 1939’;
• ‘It is the Malady’;
• ‘How foreign to the spirits [illeg] [‘early’ supplemented above line] beauty’;
• ‘At my inmost heart is fear’;
• ‘Absent [‘Estranged’ supplemented above line] from you where is there corn and wine?’;
• ‘This is the darkness: I have known great storms’;
• ‘I cannot find it in me to be gay’;
• ‘There is no difference between night and day’;
• ‘This German pinewood swam’;
• ‘When Beauty rides into the empty eyes’;
• ‘As though for sanctuary [‘anchorage’ supplemented on line above]’;
• ‘Somehow not part of anything: apart’;
• ‘Lug out your spirit from its [‘cave’ crossed out] cage of clay!’;
• ‘There is an aristocracy of love’;
• ‘How dangerous a thing to fill mans [man’s] inches of earth with life’;
• ‘Into the sky all men must turn their eyes’;
• ‘And I thought you beside me’;
• ‘Which is more bleak and cold’;
• ‘I watched where the tall trees shook’;
• ‘Into the teeming [‘dusky’ supplemented above line] well’;
• ‘Satan’;
• ‘I am the slung stone that no target has’;
• ‘The world is broken without love’;
• ‘Features forgoe [forgo] their power’;
• ‘Love poem’;
• ‘Leave train’;
• ‘The April radiance of the green light dances’;
• ‘Let dreams be definate [definite] [‘absolute’ supplemented above line]’;
• ‘Conscript’;
• ‘The Birch Saplings’;
• ‘This is the year of Our Lord’;
• ‘His[?] head, and hands were built for sin’;
• ‘I have become less clay than hazel-rod’;
• ‘Cold Island!’;
• ‘Rembrandt’;
• ‘In this, the still absorption burns the angel’;
• ‘Victoria Station 6.58pm’;
• ‘Half-Light’;
• ‘How shall I find me’;
• ‘Let the result be what it may’;
• ‘Sark; evening.’;
• ‘Roll Them Down’;
• ‘With People So With Trees’;
• ‘That Phoenix Hour’;
• ‘Robert Frost’;
• ‘Tides’;
• ‘The Wings’;
• ‘The Consumptive (Belsen, 1945)’;
• ‘The palmerworm’;
• ‘Epstein’s Adam’;
• ‘The Women of the World Inhabit Her’;
• ‘The lit mosaic of the wood’;
• ‘This is my world!’;
• ‘As battle closes in my body stoops’;
• ‘When all is said and done’;
• ‘Their agony slides through me’;
• ‘Possesionless [Possessionless], O leveret!’;
• ‘No, not in Truth, but in Belief is passion’.