Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  And never will comprehend?’

  I sit in a wood and stare

  Up at untroubled branches

  Locked together and staunch as

  Though girders of the air:

  And think, the first wind rising

  Will crack that intricate crown

  And let the daylight down.

  But there is naught surprising

  Can explode the single mind: –

  Let figs from thistles fall

  Or stars from their pedestal,

  This architecture will stand.

  2

  Come, soul, let us not fight

  Like cynical Chinee

  Beneath umbrella, nor wish to trade

  Upon neutrality.

  For the mind must cope with

  All elements or none –

  Bask in dust along with weevils,

  Or criticise the sun.

  Look, where cloud squadrons are

  Stampeded by the wind,

  A boy’s kite sits as calm as Minos

  If the string be sound:

  But if there are no hands

  To keep the cable tense

  And no eyes to mark a flaw in it,

  What use the difference

  Between a gust that twitters

  Along the wainscot at dawn

  And a burly wind playing the zany

  In fields of barleycorn?

  The time has gone when we

  Could sprawl at ease between

  Light and darkness, and deduce

  Omnipotence from our Mean.

  For us the Gregorian

  Example of those eyes

  That risked hell’s blight and heaven’s blinding

  But dared not compromise.

  3

  That afternoon we lay on Lillington Common

  The land wallowed around us in the sunlight;

  But finding all things my strenuous sense included

  Ciphers new-copied by the indefinite sunlight,

  I fell once more under the shadow of my Sphinx.

  The aimlessness of buttercup and beetle

  So pestered me, I would have cried surrender

  To the fossil certitudes of Tom, Dick, and Harry,

  Had I known how or believed that such a surrender

  Could fashion aught but a dead Sphinx from the live Sphinx.

  Later we lit a fire, and the hedge of darkness –

  Garnished with not a nightingale nor a glow-worm –

  Sprang up like the beanstalk by which our Jack aspired

  once.

  Then, though each star seemed little as a glow-worm

  Perched on Leviathan’s flank, and equally terrible

  My tenure of this plateau that sloped on all sides

  Into annihilation – yet was I lord of

  Something: for, seeing the fall of a burnt-out faggot

  Make all the night sag down, I became lord of

  Light’s interplay – stoker of an old parable.

  4

  Come up, Methuselah,

  You doddering superman!

  Give me an instant realized

  And I’ll outdo your span.

  In that one moment of evening

  When roses are most red

  I can fold back the firmament,

  I can put time to bed.

  Abraham, stint your tally

  Of concubines and cattle!

  Give place to me – capitalist

  In more intrinsic metal.

  I have a lover of flesh

  And a lover that is a sprite:

  To-day I lie down with finite,

  To-morrow with infinite.

  That one is a constant

  And suffers no eclipse,

  Though I feel sun and moon burning

  Together on her lips.

  This one is a constant,

  But she’s not kind at all;

  She raddles her gown with my despairs

  And paints her lip with gall.

  My lover of flesh is wild,

  And willing to kiss again;

  She is the potency of earth

  When woods exhale the rain.

  My lover of air, like Artemis

  Spectrally embraced,

  Shuns the daylight that twists her smile

  To mineral distaste.

  Twin poles energic, they

  Stand fast and generate

  This spark that crackles in the void

  As between fate and fate.

  5

  My love is a tower.

  Standing up in her

  I parley with planets

  And the casual wind.

  Arcturus may grind

  Against our wall: – he whets

  A tropic appetite,

  And decorates our night.

  ‘What happier place

  For Johnny Head-in-Air,

  Who never would hear

  Time mumbling at the base?’

  I will not hear, for she’s

  My real Antipodes,

  And our ingrowing loves

  Shall meet below earth’s spine

  And there shall intertwine,

  Though Babel falls above.

  Time, we allow, destroys

  All aërial toys:

  But to assail love’s heart

  He has no strategy,

  Unless he suck up the sea

  And pull the earth apart.

  6

  Dismayed by the monstrous credibility

  Of all antinomies, I climbed the fells

  To Easedale Tarn. Could I be child again

  And grip those skirts of cloud the matriarch sky

  Draggled on mere and hillside?… (‘So the dog

  Returns to his vomit,’ you protest. Well only

  The dog can tell what virtue lies in his vomit.)

  Sleep on, you fells and profound dales: there’s no

  Material wind or rain can insulate

  The mind against its own forked speculation,

  When once that storm sets in: and then the flash

  That bleakly enlightens a few sour acres leaves but

  A more Egyptian darkness whence it came.3

  Mountains are the musicians; they despise

  Their audience: but the wind is a popular preacher

  And takes more from his audience than he gives them.

  How can I wear the clouds, who feel each mountain

  Yearn from its flinty marrow to abdicate

  Sublimity and globe-trot with the wind?

  By Easedale Tarn, where I sought a comforter,

  I found a gospel sterner than repentance.

  Prophetic earth, you need no lumber of logic

  Who point your arguments alike with a primrose

  And a sick sheep coughing among the stones:

  And I have only words; yet must they both

  Outsoar the mountain and lap up the wind.

  7

  Few things can more inflame

  This far too combative heart

  Than the intellectual Quixotes of the age

  Prattling of abstract art.

  No one would deny it –

  But for a blind man’s passion

  Cassandra had been no more than a draggle-skirt,

  Helen a ten-year fashion.

  Yet had there not been one hostess

  Ever whose arms waylaid

  Like the tough bramble a princeling’s journey, or

  At the least no peasant maid

  Redressing with rude heat

  Nature’s primeval wrong,

  Epic had slumbered on beneath his blindness

  And Helen lacked her song.

  (So the antique balloon

  Wobbles with no defence

  Against the void but a grapnel that hops and ploughs

  Through the landscape of sense.)

  Phrase-making, dress-making –

  Distinction’s hard to find;

  For thought
must play the mannequin, strut in phrase,

  Or gape with the ruck: and mind,

  Like body, from covering gets

  Most adequate display.

  Yet time trundles this one to the rag-and-bone man,

  While that other may

  Reverberate all along

  Man’s craggy circumstance –

  Naked enough to keep its dignity

  Though it eye God askance.

  Part II

  ‘Do I contradict myself?

  Very well then, I contradict myself;

  I am large, I contain multitudes.’

  W. WHITMAN.

  8

  It is becoming now to declare my allegiance,

  To dig some reservoir for my springtime’s pain,

  Bewilderment and pride, before their insurgence

  Is all sopped up in this dry regimen.

  Laughable dwarfs, you may twirl and tweak my heart, –

  Have I not fought with Anakim at the crossways?

  Once I was Cicero, though pedant fate4

  Now bids me learn the grammar of my days.

  These, then, have my allegiance; they whose shining

  Convicted my false dawn of flagrant night,

  Yet ushered up the sun, as poets leaning

  Upon a straw surmise the infinite.

  You, first, who ground my lust to love upon

  Your gritty humorous virginity,

  Then yielding to its temper suddenly

  Proved what a Danube can be struck from stone:

  With you I ran the gauntlet for my prime,

  Then living in the moment lived for all time.

  Next the hawk-faced man, who could praise an apple

  In terms of peach and win the argument. Quick

  Was he to trip the shambling rhetoric

  Of laws and lions: yet abstract turned the tables

  And his mind, almost, with a whiff of air

  Clothed first in a woman and after in a nightmare.

  She next, sorrow’s familiar, who turned

  Her darkness to our light; that ‘brazen leech’

  Alleviating the vain cosmic itch

  With fact coated in formulæ lest it burned

  Our tongue. She shall have portion in my praise,

  And live in me, not memory, for always.

  Last the tow-haired poet, never done

  With cutting and planing some new gnomic prop

  To jack his all too stable universe up: –

  Conduct’s Old Dobbin, thought’s chameleon.

  Single mind copes with split intelligence,

  Breeding a piebald strain of truth and nonsense.

  These have I loved and chosen, once being sure

  Some spacious vision waved upon their eyes

  That troubles not the common register;

  And love them still, knowing it otherwise.

  Knowing they held no mastership in wisdom

  Or wit save by certificate of my love,

  I have found out a better way to praise them –

  Nestor shall die and let Patroclus live.

  So I declare it. These are they who built

  My house and never a stone of it laid agley.

  So cheat I memory that works in gilt

  And stucco to restore a fallen day.

  9

  I thought to have had some fame

  As the village idiot

  Condemned at birth to sit

  Oracle of blind alleys:

  Shanghaied aboard the galleys

  I got reprieve and shame.

  Tugging at his oar

  This idiot who, for lack

  Of the striped Zodiac,

  Swore that every planet

  Was truck, soon found some merit

  In his own abject star.

  Then there came disgust

  Of the former loon who could

  Elbow a bridge and brood

  From Chaos to last Trump

  Over the imbecile pomp

  Of waters dribbling past.

  For what can water be

  But so much less or more

  Gravamen to the oar? –

  (Reasons our reformed dunce)

  It is high time to renounce

  This village idiocy.

  10

  How they would jeer at us –

  Ulysses, Herodotus,

  The hard-headed Phœnicians

  Or, of later nations,

  Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers

  And a thousand others

  Who laboured only to find

  Some pittance of new ground,

  Merchandise or women.

  Those rude and bourgeois seamen

  Got glory thrown in

  As it were with every ton

  Of wave that swept their boat,

  And would have preferred a coat

  For keeping off the spray.

  Since the heroes lie

  Entombed with the recipe

  Of epic in their heart,

  And have buried – it seems – that art

  Of minding one’s own business

  Magnanimously, for us

  There’s nothing but to recant

  Ambition, and be content

  Like the poor child at play

  To find a holiday

  In the sticks and mud

  Of a familiar road.

  11

  If I bricked up ambition and gave no air

  To the ancestral curse that gabbles there,

  I could leave wonder on the latch

  And with a whole heart watch

  The calm declension of an English year.

  I would be pædagogue – hear poplar, lime

  And oak recite the seasons’ paradigm.

  Each year a dynasty would fall

  Within my orchard wall –

  I’d be their Tacitus, and they my time.

  Among those pippin princes I could ease

  A heart long sick for some Hesperides:

  Plainsong of thrushes in the soul

  Would drown that rigmarole

  Of Eldorados, Auks, and Perilous Seas.

  (The God they cannot see sages define

  In a slow-motion. If I discipline

  My flux into a background still

  And sure as a waterfall

  Will not a rainbow come of that routine?)

  So circumscribe the vampire and he’ll die soon –

  Lunacy and anæmia take their own.

  Grounded in temperate soil I’ll stay,

  An orchard god, and say

  My glow-worms hold a candle to the moon.

  12

  Enough. There is no magic

  Circle nor prophylactic

  Sorcery of garlic

  Will keep the vampire in.

  See! – that authentic

  Original of sin

  Slides from his cabin

  Up to my sober trees

  And spits disease.

  Thus infected, they

  Start a sylvan rivalry,

  Poplar and oak surpass

  Their natural green, and race

  Each other to the stars.

  Since my material

  Has chosen to rebel,

  It were most politic –5

  Ere I also fall sick –

  To escape this Eden.

  Indeed there has been no peace

  For any garden

  Or for any trees

  Since Priapus died,

  And lust can no more ride

  Over self-love and pride.

  Leave Eden to the brutes:

  For he who lets his sap

  Run downward to the roots

  Will wither at the top

  And wear fool’s-cap.

  I am no English lawn

  To build a smooth tradition

  Out of Time’s recession

  And centuries of dew …

  Adam must subdue

  The indestructible serpen
t,

  Outstaring it: content

  If he can transplant

  One slip from paradise

  Into his own eyes.

  13

  Can the mole take

  A census of the stars?

  Our firmament will never

  Give him headache.

  The man who nuzzles

  In a woman’s lap

  Burrows toward a night

  Too deep for puzzles:

  While he, whose prayer

  Holds up the starry system

  In a God’s train, sees nothing

  Difficult there.

  So I, perhaps,

  Am neither mole nor mantis;

  I see the constellations,

  But by their gaps.

  14

  In heaven, I suppose, lie down together

  Agonised Pilate and the boa-constrictor

  That swallows anything: but we must seize

  One horn or the other of our antitheses.

  When I consider each independent star

  Wearing its world of darkness like a fur

  And rubbing shoulders with infinity,

  I am content experience should be

  More discontinuous than the points pricked

  Out by the mazy course of a derelict,

  Iceberg, or Flying Dutchman, and the heart

  Stationary and passive as a chart.

  In such star-frenzy I could boast, betwixt

  My yester and my morrow self are fixed

  All the birds carolling and all the seas

  Groaning from Greenwich to the Antipodes.

  But an eccentric hour may come, when systems

  Not stars divide the dark; and then life’s pistons

  Pounding into their secret cylinder

  Begin to tickle the most anchorite ear

  With hints of mechanisms that include

  The man. And once that rhythm arrests the blood,

  Who would be satisfied his mind is no

  Continent but an archipelago?

  They are preposterous paladins and prance

  From myth to myth, who take an Agag stance

  Upon the needle points of here and now,

  Where only angels ought to tread. Allow

  One jointure feasible to man, one state

  Squared with another – then he can integrate

  A million selves and where disorder ruled