Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Long dust, and forsaken cities.

  This song likewise He hid. And the flame-wrought casket,

  Unimaginably brimming

  With essence of all tears and laughter, ordained

  To Man for a soul inviolate.

  Rose-Pruner

  Meanders around the rose-beds, gnarled, clay-brown,

  Old Tom the pruner, snic-snac up and down.

  ‘Look, Tom, you’ve snipped a young shoot from the tree!’

  ‘Aye, so I have; but I bean’t ashamed,’ says he,

  ‘The Lord Hisself has made mistakes ere now.

  Come Lammastide ’twere twenty year ago

  He said, ‘Old Tom’s turn now,’ and upped His shears –

  My son He took, the young green sprig o’ the tree,

  The garden’s pride.

  Mebbee He’m gettin’ old and tired; mebbe

  His eyes be smudged like mine awhiles with tears

  For a strong son as died.’

  In a Wood

  I met an old man in a wood.

  He had a coat of bracken brown,

  And boughs hung round him like a hood.

  The winter sun was a red pomegranate

  To weigh the branches down.

  Pale lemon was the winter moon.

  Pointing gnarled finger and gnarled stick

  He said, ‘You think that is the moon?’

  He said,

  ‘Long time ago the moon fell sick –

  ’Twas all along o’ my white cheeses –

  And now the moon is dead.

  Yon is her ghost. She died of envy.’

  He pulled apart the branchy hood,

  And went a’bumbling through the wood –

  ‘’Twas all along o’ my white cheeses.’

  Songs of Sirens

  Look not too long upon the golden hours,

  Look not too long!

  Those sirens will unstring thy powers

  That made a minstrelsy of suns and showers,

  Of every stone a song.

  See how the wind’s bleak trumpet stuns each hill

  To colder immobility!

  Fool!

  And canst thou quick and wakeful be

  When all thy frail heart is one Philomel

  With music sweetly chill –

  Voices of siren echoing silverly?

  Look not again on that too golden land

  Or else delight

  Will curdle up thy soul; and thee, unmanned

  By beauty that is thy bane,

  Those barren nymphs will leave on the brink of night

  Forlorn, a pulseless stalactite.

  O, look not back upon the golden land,

  Look not again.

  Words

  Were I this forest pool

  And you the birch tree bending over,

  Your thoughts in shaken leaves could drop

  Upon my heart. And we would never

  So fret our happiness taming

  Rebellious words that sulk, run crazy

  And gibber like caged monkeys,

  Mocking their tamers.

  A Rune for Anthony John

  May the splendid earth renew

  Her first loveliness for you.

  May the flowers, red and blue,

  At your coming blithely strew

  Poecil carpets, and the dew

  Brightlier shine beneath your shoe.

  May the sad, sinister yew

  Smile again because of you.

  May each cow benignly moo

  When you run the meadows through.

  All outlandish creatures, too, –

  Quagga, chimpanzee and gnu,

  Platypus and kangaroo,

  Kneel and say a prayer for you.

  Leprechaun and fairy brew

  Spells to make you think and do.

  So will your life be every hue

  Of paroqueet and cockatoo.

  Fairy to Children

  It is I who touch with wonder

  Wrinkled brows and solemn eyes;

  I can make with powerful magic

  Sleeping loveliness to rise;

  Mistletoe bear pearls for berries,

  Rubies hang instead of cherries,

  Dust to build a diamond house.

  I can summon all adventure

  From a footstep in the snow.

  To the sound of one toy trumpet

  Unseen armies come and go.

  Children, when I pipe my ditties,

  March away to sack great cities

  With your wooden sword and bow!

  Stay quite still! Now can you hear me

  Pipe the dances from a strand

  Delicate as winter sunshine?

  Run and take the fairy’s hand!

  Just beyond the garden-paling

  There’s a sea, and ships are sailing

  Every hour for fairyland.

  Song of Fairies

  We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning,

  And therefore we dance the centuries through;

  Twilight ebbs on the tide of our singing,

  Our singing flows with the dawn’s first blue.

  Our white arms curve like waves of the ocean,

  Our white feet flutter like vanishing foam;

  Unwearied we of tempestuous motion

  Under the echoing forest dome.

  The fairy meadows were made for our pleasure,

  The meadows of earth for a hiding-place.

  The flowers spring up where we weave a measure,

  The flowers crouch down when we cover our face.

  All the children of beauty know us;

  Violets strew us a purple bed;

  Spiders are spinning their nets below us;

  Great clouds bend down to shelter our head.

  We are the light, the joy and the laughter;

  The hands that beckon and vanish away;

  The sweet content of a smoky rafter;

  The bird-like cries of children at play.

  To paint your dreams we have dipped our brushes

  In pools where the feet of the rainbow stand:

  They mingle and change like wavering rushes

  Caressed by the wind’s impetuous hand.

  Wherever a heart is brimming with beauty,

  And washed in the starry water of dreams;

  Wherever dim eyes are strained after beauty

  And fevered lips bend over her streams;

  There we frolic and dance together,

  Spinning a delicate, powerful spell

  With threads the moonlight hangs on the heather,

  And threads of mist from the fairy well.

  We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning,

  And therefore we dance the centuries through;

  Twilight ebbs on the tide of our singing,

  Our singing flows with the dawn’s first blue.

  Tapestries

  I lingered in that unfriended room

  Where wind in the keyhole croons forlornly

  As a woman barren of womb

  Over a dusty cradle.

  I lingered. Nothing was there

  But tapestries cobwebbed and threadbare,

  Stirred by the uneasy air.

  And, as I watched them, on the wall

  Hound and hunter and quarry, lake and garden

  And young girls playing at ball

  Shook off their trance: grew dimly aware,

  Remembering the delightful fingers

  That wove them into life.

  And soon to me

  Those figures, ghostly and fantastical,

  Seemed a forgotten madrigal

  Sung by dead lips at midnight merrily.

  Lost

  Whither is now that city vanished

  Where once I walked with innocence hand in hand?

  O, an insidious tide hath drowned

  Deeper than regret

  Cupola, minaret,

  And all the streets are sand.


  Surely the streets were emerald-paven

  When I walked there with innocence. Alas!

  Vainly, vainly I peer into

  The water’s riddling face,

  There is left no trace

  Of my lost Lyonesse.

  Lines from the French

  Give me your eyes, give me your hands,

  Give me your hands so fairy-fine.

  To lead me past the lonely lands

  Give me your eyes, give me your hands,

  Your childish hands in mine.

  Give me your eyes, give me your hands,

  Give me your hands stretched through the Veil.

  To lead where Life grown lovely stands

  Give me your eyes, give me your hands,

  Your hands rose-petal-frail.

  No Meaner Quest

  Had she lived in perilous days

  There had been many courtyards bright

  With lances pennoned for her praise.

  Now a solitary knight

  Rides upon no meaner quest.

  The sword her beauty made of fire

  Shall strike at many a fear unguessed;

  The sword that fighting may not tire

  Shall shine through many an unthought field.

  Should I tremble while her trust

  Is a flame upon my shield?

  Friends, when you see the impatient West

  Engulf me, say – ‘He was a knight

  In joy and fortitude not less

  Than they, the troubadour’s delight,

  Who sought a lady’s happiness.’

  Late Summer

  Sleepy the earth lies still at Edwinstowe;

  That brown and green slashed coverlet,

  Meadow and ploughland, hides the faces I knew

  When every primrose bent eyes wet

  With happiness, so graciously Spring did go.

  How many ages of winter have burdened me

  Since last I saw the buttercups

  Sprinkling their golden laughter over the lea,

  And poppies shaken like wine-drops

  On the corn’s hair in summer revelry!

  Dream-Maker

  A chance word, and you sat there at the table,

  Candlelight sharp against your hair’s rich cloud,

  And that voice speaking, like a queen of fable

  In rose-lamped gardens, passionate and proud.

  I marvelled to have forgotten how your throat

  Would curve so eagerly, and with what wonder

  Seeing your eyes I had seen lilies under

  Mysterious bridges slumbrously afloat.

  I had forgotten all, forgetting this –

  That all my dreams have flowed beneath those bridges,

  That my soul heard your voice from heaven’s ridges,

  Was shaken by its stormy loveliness.

  No one is there. Only the coals grow livid,

  Night-breath, and through the window starlight spills.

  But still your voice is echoing, cool and vivid,

  Like a horn blown at morning beyond the hills.

  Once in Arcady

  TO V. C. C. – B.

  Sometime we two have sat together,

  Brown, crisp-limbed shepherd boys,

  In meadows under the golden weather.

  Air would be shaking with noise

  Of bees and honey-sweet sheep bells,

  Dully, as from a gong

  Once smitten. Over there the hills

  Seaward would troop along

  Like white fawns to their drinking-pool.

  The cave – I see it all –

  Stagnant with green silence, and cool;

  Grapes sunnily on the wall

  Asleep; and we two sprawling outside,

  Slim pipes a-trill, or gazing

  Where shadows fall and hide

  The slow flock grazing.

  There, when night hushed the whispering poplars,

  Silence would blossom into a green tree:

  Beauty would lean her whiteness against the branches

  And sing for us most marvellously

  Those songs for which all poets have wept,

  Waking to find them dream. But we should awaken,

  Dawn fragrant still with Beauty’s footfall

  Lingering by the cave where we had slept.

  A Forest Piece

  Only in the forest

  Walks Silence for men to see.

  At one breathless moment

  Tree huddles closer to tree,

  Mosses more greenly burn,

  Curls up in an ecstasy

  Each delicate-fingered fern.

  No rabbit stirs. The jay

  Has left her querulous chatter,

  Subdued by death of day.

  Perching among the branches

  Wind pauses upon tip-toe.

  Now from blue mist-pavilion

  You may see King Silence go

  Royally through the forest –

  Slips on a bough wind’s foot;

  Sudden a berry patters.

  Look! Silence shivers, is not.

  Only in the forest

  Walks Silence for men to see.

  Lines from Catullus

  I

  My lady said that she could love no other,

  Though God should come from heaven to be her suitor.

  She said – but woman’s words to eager lover

  Are writ on wind and the unstable water.

  II

  O heart distraught by her so splendid shame,

  Thus hath love mazed thee. Now, if she became

  Without a flaw thou could’st not wish her well,

  Not cease to love, if she were queen in Hell.

  III

  I hate and love.

  How may this be,

  You ask. I do not know.

  I only feel ’tis so,

  And it is agony.

  Sanctuary

  Swung in this hammock between hills

  we have dreamed a nobler quietude

  than the breathless after-hush when bells

  tire of their silver tumbling.

  Our mood

  is crystal, bright as primrose laughter

  rippling beneath the bracken, clear

  as rain’s metallic plash from a rafter.

  How are we grown into this hour!

  Drunk with the strong sun-vintage

  we have seen the larchwood spire –

  emerald sparks for leafage –

  upwards in urgent fire …

  Time lolls here, a laburnum slanting

  its languid tongues.

  Now do you seem

  all pagan loveliness, enchanting

  to witch Time’s eyelids into dream.

  Lie so. Be beautiful.

  Once Time rested,

  kept for such beauty long eclipse;

  so Deidre lay and Naisi tasted

  an age of morning upon her lips.

  An April Mood

  Now you have gone, I remember only your smile,

  Flame-like and vivid as first green in March hedgerows,

  Telling the wayfarers that every mile

  Is bringing them nearer to sunshine and the dog-rose.

  I only remember now a beauty alien

  Hanging on chair and table, cypresses

  Hung with a night’s snowfall. Never Pygmalion

  So quickened delight from dead stone with kisses.

  Beneath your hands, so magical to sain

  Fevered unreason, I found cool certitude.

  Deep in my being flowers an April mood;

  Strangely the sunlit hedgerows blossom again.

  Eve

  Dancing and revelling shouted the earth

  Delirious with morning

  And the turbulent splendour of birth.

  Under the singing leaf

  Laid her white innocence

  Eve.

  Lion and butterfly – all of her naming
/>   Went from their gaming

  To gaze at the beauty of Princess Eve.

  Cooing-ly, mellow-ly, like honeyed lute

  In a moon-rich garden,

  The delightsome and terrible fruit

  Called her and called … Elate

  Up to the Tree she crept;

  Ate.

  Snapped every lute string with cackle of laughter;

  Panic thereafter

  Came agate-eyed, gibbering, past the gate.

  Guiltily, craftily, slunk to his lair

  The lion, and dreamed of

  Torn bodies, and out of the air

  Storm hurled the butterfly.

  Faint hear the falling leaves

  Cry,

  ‘We whose life shaded Eve from the sun’s gladness

  Perish. Our deadness

  Dumbly shall cover her cold body.’

  He Thanks Earth for his Beloved

  I

  All day the spirit have we breathed

  Of ferny hills and valleys and clouds hill-steep,

  Knowing not how nor whence bequeathed

  Joy was arisen

  Lovelier than fountains seen in sleep.

  Whence should have come this strange rebirth,

  This rose in abandoned gardens blossoming,