Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Found symmetry:

  Seek the spring rather

  Whence thy true image well’d,

  Plumbing the heart from shallow

  Glances withheld.

  Stoop, stoop thou over

  Thy pool, a constant sun

  In pearls of dew updrawing

  Its benison:

  And like a sun so

  Let down the beams of thine

  Own love to stab the pool with

  Their leonine

  Radiance. O surely

  Of fire and water blent

  There’ll leap to lovely birth a

  New element.

  Retrospect: From a Street in Chelsea

  Here are the houses: this is the house. No smile

  Lingers on the staid countenance to mark

  It from its fellows, though beauty breathless and stark

  As a rout of maenads kept carnival here awhile.

  House, are the ghosts of our felicity

  Haunting together still in you, as linger

  Hands when the dance is done, finger to finger,

  Loth to forsake their strange complicity?

  Surely you harbour one poor frustrate ghost,

  The child of fancy erring unreproved,

  Conceived in the hour when she and I almost

  Forgot we were not lovers, and almost loved.

  (Her breath comes on the twilight here and brushes

  My face with music elfin and remote:

  I marvel once again that only the thrushes

  And she should have sweet April in their throat.)

  House, you are thridded with spectres. See, they press

  Around me – ghosts of her mouth, her breasts, her eyes,

  Her body’s lilt. Yet would I exorcise

  Them all, though it left us companionless.

  If the heart could, if the mind knew how, then I

  Would curse and scatter these lovely ghosts at random;

  For wheresoever they go follows the phantom

  Of love that died before its epiphany.

  The only Pretty Ring-Time

  See now, where Spring has put young leaves

  Fluttering like an emerald snow

  Round the beech-trunks, and lovers enacting

  Earth’s quaint mythologies below.

  Another Venus, another Mars,

  Before the Vulcan-net of crude

  Fact mews them up, believe Creation

  Was only built to frame their mood.

  And now the green goes out of the Spring:

  The lovers quarrel: one mind jolts

  Upon its mate. But still, it is Hera

  And Zeus playing at thunderbolts.

  Disgruntled fools, you would think yourselves

  Fortunate, did you guess how soon

  Love, its Olympian discords vanished,

  Becomes a barrel-organ tune.

  Under the Willow

  I

  The willows by the waterside

  Gather their green above their feet

  Like lissom, finicky ladies

  Before they cross over a wet street.

  We will anchor our boat under this willow,

  And under the willow ask of To-day

  No dearer thing than thus to be cradled

  With the stream’s indolent lullay.

  Dear, for one day let us yield to Fate,

  And so forget him; and so forget

  That our halcyon time is a dalliance

  Under the brow of Olivet.

  Come, let us turn our backs on the sword-flash

  Sentinelling a Paradise

  We have never known. Is your heart cold? – Then

  We’ll hew an Eden out of ice.

  II

  And now each common sight

  Assumes a diadem

  Of crystalline delight,

  And trails a purple hem.

  The meadows all are paven

  With gold the stream along;

  Dangles a lark from heaven

  On silver threads of song.

  Delight floats over us

  Awhile, ethereally

  As floats the nautilus –

  That rare wild-rose of the sea.

  Sure, we have found a glass

  To focus mind with matter

  In a microcosm of bliss

  The tiniest mote will shatter.

  Yet Beauty, that can bring

  Sense to this razor-edge,

  Is arrogant as a king

  Guarding his privilege:

  He lends your loveliness,

  So I but contemplate;

  ’Tis yearning to possess

  Hurls me from his estate.

  III

  It is late. The thrush drops few of his hoarded notes –

  Pinpricks through a pall of silence, epitome

  Of those rare times when from the desert we

  Sniff Love’s banquet, and know we are scapegoats.

  O that the noisy day was here again!

  For now, Earth’s minor keys predominant,

  Ripple on leaf and water, gnat’s whine and scant

  Starlight all come to orchestrate our pain.

  I’d brook no comfort watering down desire,

  Yet I cannot think my love a document

  That one handclasp will, when the paper is spent,

  Scrawl ‘finis’ to and toss upon the fire.

  Your throat bent back upon the cool half-light

  Is white as a moonbeam frozen into flesh:

  Small comfort, for lips throbbing with one wild wish,

  That kisses could not make it more lovely white.

  We must divine some cosmic cruelty

  When there’s no article of beauty but

  Renders the heart more vulnerable to regret

  With hints of a Beauty that can never be.

  Even prisoners on Pisgah may share some

  Austere delights; but O, how brief their span,

  When yearns the heart toward its Canaan!

  Come, dear, your hand in mine. We’d best go home.

  Photograph of a Bacchante

  When for long weeks this mind,

  This bladder of ambition and inhibition,

  Had sulked, swollen, bravadoed, whined

  After its pigmy fashion;

  One day I took up the photograph of you

  Dancing the dance Bacchante

  With all your body, from eager head to toe,

  Vibrant and beautiful as a line from Dante.

  And I felt the pangs of one distressed

  In mortal sickness who, starting from his pillow,

  Sees trenchant upon the West

  The mountains, and a halo

  Of saffron empassioned light behind –

  The mountains he will never now be treading,

  Nor take one waft of their myrtle-scented wind

  Where he is speeding.

  At Greenlanes

  (An Epistle)

  Do you remember, Margaret, how we came

  Out on the heath our first evening

  Together? How the pines rose like a name

  Cried once by a dying man; and whirriting

  Nearby the nightjar’s bell

  Rang down reluctant curtain on the day?

  Do you remember the brute smell

  Of bracken that heaved at the darkness where we lay?

  I could hear my heart like a lupin pod

  Rattle its wizened dreams. (What now could rally

  Hope grown dead pale feeding on its own blood?)

  And then I heard your voice say ‘Tell me!’

  It was the dew that falls on the castaway –

  Honest and small as the dew but far more tender –

  A sweetness drugging his dismay,

  Though yet no rescuer sail flares up from under

  The parched horizon.

  So I was happier

  Than I had been since loneliness began,

  Secure with you, my
wise and witty dear,

  And Douglas the rabelaisian keen man.

  Honeysuckle tuned our world

  To roundelays that made the stiff sun nod;

  All the summers of Arcady were revealed

  In a blackbird’s period.

  This hollow, where noon lay down to drowse and blink,

  Every night became a bowl

  Brimmed by the moon with nectar for me to drink

  Rapt in the clear refectory of your soul.

  I felt your thought reach out sure fingers

  For mine, that had groped so long, so emptily,

  Finding no flame but a touch turned it to cinders.

  Your hands on mine, we worked the key

  (How rustily it stammered!) of this dark mind,

  This cupboard crammed with sour forgotten

  Live skeletons yammering underground –

  Fantastic fears in strait-jackets, all sodden

  With solitude.

  We turned the key. We let

  The brave, bird-echoing sunlight in.

  No monster showed: there was only Margaret,

  And love, and a dead most laughable mannequin.

  My Love came to Me

  I

  In a windless garden

  At the time of plum-gathering

  When the hedge is plumy

  With Traveller’s Joy,

  Beautiful gay candid

  My love came to me.

  Autumn closed around her,

  But her breath was all daffodils

  And her face all springtime:

  And now she has laid

  On my heart perennial

  Spring to renew me.

  In a windless garden

  At the time of plum-gathering

  My love came to me.

  II

  So long Love cramped in the chrysalis

  And hopeless of the sun had lain,

  He could not dream there how one kiss

  Cancels a century of pain.

  How could he guess, then, that the first

  Encounter of the flesh but quells

  One thirst with another thirst

  And builds, beneath new heavens, new hells.

  Love’s eye is grown too clear, too clear:

  He sees in play of mouth or wrist

  Enough to split a hemisphere;

  And then, turning anatomist,

  Pins happiness upon the table

  With scalpels to lay bare its law: –

  He’d better try to stick a label

  On the flash of a meteor.

  They are all gone into the past,

  The sands we lay and laughed upon,

  The heathery mountains where we kissed,

  And the stars round your head are gone.

  From their ebb I have saved but this –

  How on the stroke of love you drew

  Breath swift and sweet and laborious

  As the sweeps of a racing crew.

  Yet if Love’s spring-tide left no more

  Than this brief flurry of pulses, thrown

  Like driftwood high upon the shore,

  Residue of one hurricane;

  I think it would take root, and where

  Was wrack a tree would be upspringing,

  Surprising all the vacuous air

  With salvoes of green and with bird-singing.

  III

  My love, she is gone.

  But this low whitewashed house,

  Ringed round with fuchsia and the drone

  Of bees continually,

  Bears witness that in each one

  Of all our dumb tremendous kisses

  The dayspring was, the sun

  That rides above eclipse.

  My love is a fine house

  Wherein are flowers and kettles,

  Buccaneers holding carouse,

  Cradles, and persons of quality

  Dancing a minuet sedately:

  I will so ring her round

  With coloured love, singing love,

  She will not notice even the sound

  Death makes upon the casement.

  Wreck near Ballinacarig

  Your voyaging past,

  Lie you forsaken,

  Repining like an

  Ariadne cast

  Away on the dune

  By a false sea-lover,

  All but the fervour

  Of freedom gone.

  Two buccaneering

  Children laugh

  On your deck, far off

  To a Blessed Isle steering:

  Their first fond breath

  Wrecked them on life, no less

  Than you the apprentices

  Of Master Death.

  Now your rudder

  Is ruled by the sand

  Whose fluent hand

  Very soon will smother

  The last spar, standing

  Lorn as a prayer

  That whimpers on air,

  And no God heeding.

  Time silting over

  The brave, the merry,

  Dune-deep doth bury

  Every sweet rover –

  Keel, cabin, spars;

  Leaving but shore and sea

  To keep stern colloquy

  Under the stars.

  Arcadian

  We will buy an old house

  When we are richer;

  One to arouse

  The pen of an etcher:

  Seeming – so mellow –

  To have grown from the ground,

  Sown in a hollow

  With birches around.

  Under an oaken

  Quiet of beams

  By the years unshaken

  We’ll dream our dreams.

  Beyond the lintel

  We’ll see a mere

  Keeping its crystal

  Silences near;

  Whence for our drink

  Will flow a freshet

  With primrosed brink,

  And coo like a cushat.

  And since at ten-forty

  Each clock will be set,

  Time must report by

  The twinkling bat,

  By thrushes’ orison,

  Birch-leaf’s fall,

  And the plumpening of cherries on

  Lichened wall.

  Not that we’d bother

  With seasons or clocks,

  While our hearts shone together

  In love’s equinox.

  Our youth, poised finely

  Thus, would believe

  That age can be only

  Midsummer eve.

  To his Mistress

  (With a ring of jade and silver)

  Winter oak with boughs akimbo,

  Beech of autumn, summer willow,

  Star-light, dew-light gave this stone:

  Tell her, ring, that while our seasons

  Fit each to each – mirths, dreams and passions –

  Love at heyday will remain.

  Glutton Time, be not so greedy

  For my slim and subtle lady,

  Forget your appetite until

  I have learnt with mouth and finger

  Each mortal inch of her my hunger

  Made heroic as the Grail.

  The Perverse

  Love being denied, he turned in his despair

  And couched with the Absolute a summer through;

  He got small joy of the skimpy bedfellow –

  Formulas gave no body to lay bare.

  His pretty came among the primroses

  With open breast for him. No more denied

  Seemed no more ideal. He was unsatisfied

  Till he strained her flesh to thin philosophies.

  Love being remote, dreams at the midnight gave

  A chill enchanted image of her flesh;

  Such phantoms but inflamed his waking wish

  For the quick beauty no dream-chisels grave.

  Now she was won. But our Pygmalion –

  If so he
could have graven like a kiss

  On Time’s blank shoulder that hour of loveliness

  – He would have changed her body into stone.

  Apologue

  Here is nothing singular.

  Night has Orion –

  Needs she the lesser star?

  Ravish divinity

  If you can, Actaeon:

  Never just play the spy.

  Here are no estimable riches:

  A mind, now hot now cold,

  Turning all it touches

  Into quicksilver;

  The heart that looked for gold

  Has found a garden of myrrh.

  On Artemis pondering,

  That inaccessible sprite,

  I gazed at a slumbering

  World from the lattice of my despairs:

  The night was large enough, the night

  Pastured a million stars.

  ‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse;

  quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.’

  DANTE: Inferno.

  1928

  TRANSITIONAL POEM

  TO

  R. E. WARNER

  Part I

  ‘Ira brevis, longa est pietas, recidiva voluptas;

  Et cum posse perit, mens tamen una manet.’

  MAXIMIAN.

  1

  Now I have come to reason

  And cast my schoolboy clout,

  Disorder I see is without,1

  And the mind must sweat a poison2

  Keener than Thessaly’s brew;

  A pus that, discharged not thence,

  Gangrenes the vital sense

  And makes disorder true.

  It is certain we shall attain

  No life till we stamp on all

  Life the tetragonal

  Pure symmetry of brain.

  I felt, in my scorning

  Of common poet’s talk,

  As arrogant as the hawk

  When he mounts above the morning.

  ‘Behold man’s droll appearance,

  Faith wriggling upon his hooks,

  Chin-deep in Eternal Flux

  Angling for reassurance!’

  I care not if he retorts –

  ‘Of all that labour and wive

  And worship, who would give

  A fiddlestick for these thoughts

  That sluggishly yaw and bend,

  Fat strings of barges drawn

  By a tug they have never seen