Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Straddle a chaos and beget a world.

  Peals of the New Year once for me came tumbling

  Out of the narrow night like clusters of humming-

  Birds loosed from a black bag, and rose again

  Irresponsibly to silence: but now I strain

  To follow them and see for miles around

  Men square or shrug their shoulders at the sound.

  Then I remember the pure and granite hills

  Where first I caught an ideal tone that stills,

  Like the beloved’s breath asleep, all din

  Of earth at traffic: silence’s first-born,

  Carrying over each sensual ravine

  To inform the seer and uniform the seen.

  So from this ark, this closet of the brain,

  The dove emerges and flies back again

  With a Messiah sprig of certitude –

  Promise of ground below the sprawling flood.

  15

  Desire is a witch

  And runs against the clock.

  It can unstitch

  The decent hem

  Where space tacks on to time:

  It can unlock

  Pandora’s privacies.

  It puffs in these

  Top-gallants of the mind,

  And away I stand

  On the elemental gale

  Into an ocean

  That the liar Lucian

  Had never dared retail.

  When my love leans with all

  Her shining breast and shoulder,

  I know she is older

  Than Ararat the hill,

  And yet more young

  Than the first daffodil

  That ever shews a spring.

  When her eyes delay

  On me, so deep are they

  Tunnelled by love, although

  You poured Atlantic

  In this one and Pacific

  In the other, I know

  They would not overflow.

  Desire clicks back

  Like cuckoo into clock;

  Leaves me to explain

  Eyes that a tear will drown

  And a body where youth

  Nor age will long remain

  To implicate the truth.

  It seems that we must call

  Anything truth whose well

  Is deep enough;

  For the essential

  Philosopher-stone, desire,

  Needs no other proof

  Than its own fire.

  16

  Remembering how between

  Embrace and ultimate bone

  Always have interposed

  Strata undiagnosed

  In Love’s geology;

  And even memory

  Is bullied by the flesh

  Out of its usual dish;

  I railed upon desire,

  The silly self-betrayer

  Whose Cronic appetite6

  Gobbles up all his brood;

  And I found, in body’s despite,

  A moral to clinch the mood.

  They say that a mathematician

  Once fell to such a passion

  For x and y, he locked

  His door to keep outside

  Whatever might distract

  Him from his heavenly bride:

  And presently died

  In the keenest of blisses

  With a dozen untasted dishes

  Outside his door.

  O man,

  Feed Cronos with a stone.

  He’s easily decoyed

  Who, perched on any throne,

  Happily gnaws the void.

  From this theoric tower

  Corn-land and city seem7

  A lovely skiagram:

  You could not guess what sour8

  Contagion has outworn

  Those streets of men and corn.

  Let body doubt: the pure

  Shadow will reassure,

  For shadow gives a free

  Licence to lunacy. –

  And yet fools say it is

  The heart that’s credulous …

  For once, O sceptic heart,

  Will you not play your part?

  17

  When nature plays hedge-schoolmaster,

  Shakes out the gaudy map of summer

  And shows me charabanc, rose, barley-ear

  And every bright-winged hummer,

  He only would require of me

  To be the sponge of natural laws

  And learn no more of that cosmography

  Than passes through the pores.

  Why must I then unleash my brain

  To sweat after some revelation

  Behind the rose, heedless if truth maintain

  On the rose-bloom her station?

  When bullying April bruised mine eyes

  With sleet-bound appetites and crude

  Experiments of green, I still was wise

  And kissed the blossoming rod.

  Now summer brings what April took,

  Riding with fanfares from the south,

  And I should be no Solomon to look

  My Sheba in the mouth.

  Charabancs shout along the lane

  And summer gales bay in the wood

  No less superbly because I can’t explain

  What I have understood.

  Let logic analyse the hive,

  Wisdom’s content to have the honey:

  So I’ll go bite the crust of things and thrive

  While hedgerows still are sunny.

  Part III

  ‘But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still centrally disport in mute calm.’

  HERMAN MELVILLE.

  18

  On my right are trees and a lank stream sliding

  Impervious as Anaconda to the suns

  Of autumn; and the boughs are vipers writhing

  To slough the summer from their brittle bones.

  Here is the Trojan meadow, here Scamander;

  And I, the counterfeit Achilles, feel

  A river-god surge up to tear me asunder,

  A serpent melancholy bruise my heel.

  On my left is the city famed for talk

  And tolerance. Its old men run about

  Chasing reality, chasing the Auk

  With butterfly-nets. Its young men swell the rout

  Gaping at Helen in the restaurant,

  Mocking at Helen from monastic towers.

  Boy Achilles, who has known Helen too long

  To scold or worship, stands outside and glowers.

  Between the stream and city a rubbish heap

  Proclaims the pleasant norm with smouldering stenches.

  See! the pathetic pyre where Trojans keep

  Well out of sight the prey of time’s revenges;

  Old butterfly-nets, couches where lovers lay –

  All furniture out of fashion. So the fire

  Guts the proud champions of the real: so Troy

  Cremates her dead selves and ascends to higher.

  Grecians awake, salute the happy norm!

  Now may Achilles find employment still;

  And once again the blood-lust will grow warm,

  Gloating on champions he could never kill.

  And if Scamander rears up and pursues,

  This ring of rubbish fire will baffle all

  His rage. Hero, you’re safe, in the purlieus

  Of God’s infernal acre king and thrall.

  19

  When April comes alive

  Out of the small bird’s throat,

  Achilles in the sunshine

  Kept on his overcoat.

  Trojan and Greek at battle,

  Helen wantoning –

  None but heroic metal

  Could ignore the spring.

  When honeysuckle and summer

  Suffocate the lane,

  That sulky boil was broken

  And I at last a man.

  I’d have str
ipped off my skin to

  The impacts of hate and love –

  Rebel alone because I

  Could not be slave enough.

  Bodies now, not shadows,

  Intercept the sun:

  It takes no rod to tell me

  That discipline’s begun.

  Seeking the fabled fusion

  From love’s last chemical,

  I found the experiment

  Makes monads of us all;

  For love still keeps apart,

  And all its vanities

  But emphasise higher heaven,

  As February trees

  When rooks begin their noisy

  Coronation of the wood

  Are turreted with folly

  Yet grow toward some good.

  I thought, since love can harness

  Pole with contrary pole,

  It must be earthed in darkness

  Deeper than mine or mole.

  Now that I have loved

  A while and not gone blind,

  I think love’s terminals

  Are fixed in fire and wind.

  20

  How often, watching the windy boughs

  Juggle with the moon, or leaning

  My body against a wind

  That sets all earth careening;

  Or when I have seen flames browsing

  On the prairie of night and tossing

  Their muzzles up at Orion;

  Or the sun’s hot arsenal spent

  On a cloud salient

  Till the air explodes with light;

  How often have I perceived a delight

  Which parallels the racing mind,

  But never rides it off the course.

  Another fire, another wind

  Now take the air, and I

  Am matched with a stricter ecstasy.

  For he whom love and fear enlist

  To comb his universe

  For what Protagoras missed,

  Needs be reborn hermaphrodite

  And put himself out to nurse

  With a syren and a sybil.

  So the spider gradually,

  Drawing fine systems from his belly,

  Includes creation with a thread

  And squats on the navel of his world.

  Yet even that arch-fakir must feed

  Austerity on warm blood.

  The tracks of love and fear

  Lead back till I disappear

  Into that ample terminus

  From which all trains draw out

  Snorting towards an Ultima Thule.

  Nothing is altered about

  The place, except its gloom is newly

  Lacquered by an unaccustomed eye,

  Yet cannot blunt mine eyes now

  To the clear finality

  Of all beginnings.

  Outside

  In the diamond air of day

  The engines simmer with delay,

  Desiring a steely discipline

  No less, though now quite satisfied

  They travel a loop-line.

  21

  My lover is so happy, you well might say

  One of the Hellene summers had lost its way

  And taken shelter underneath her breast.

  None but its proper fear can now arrest

  Our meteoric love: but still we grieve

  That curves of mind and body should outlive

  All expectation, and the heart become

  A blunt habitual arc, a pendulum

  Wagged by the ghost of its first impetus.

  Love keeps the bogey slave to admonish us

  Of vanity, yet through this fear we scrawl

  Our sky with love’s vain comets ere it fall.

  And then, up on High Stoy standing alone,

  We saw the excellence of the serious down

  That shakes the seasons from its back, and bears

  No obligation but to wind and stars.

  What paroxysm of green can crack those huge

  Ribs grown from Chaos, stamped by the Deluge?

  Later, within the wood sweetly reclining

  On bluebell and primrose, we loved; whose shining

  Made a poor fiction of the royal skies,

  But were to love alone repositories

  Of what by-product wonder it could spare

  From lips and eyes. Yet nothing had such power

  As prattle of small flowers within the brake

  To mount the panic heart and rein it back

  From the world’s edge. For they, whose virtue lies

  In a brief act of beauty, summarize

  Earth’s annual passion and leave the naked earth

  Still dearer by their death than by their birth.

  So we, who are love’s hemispheres hiding

  Beneath the coloured ordeal of our spring,

  Shall be disclosed, and I shall see your face

  An autumn evening certain of its peace.

  22

  It is an easier thing

  To give up great possessions

  Than to forego one farthing

  Of the rare unpossessed.

  But I’ve been satellite

  Long enough to this moon,

  The pharisee of night

  Shining by tradition

  There’s no star in the sky

  But gazing makes it double

  And the infatuate eye

  Can breed dilemmas on it.

  Wiser it were to sheath

  My burning heart in clay

  Than by this double breath

  To magnify the tomb.

  I’d live like grass and trees,

  Familiar of the earth,

  Proving its basalt peace

  Till I was unperturbed

  By synod of the suns

  Or a moon’s insolence

  As the ant when he runs

  Beneath sky-scraping grass.

  23

  You’ve trafficked with no beast but unicorn

  Who dare hold me in scorn

  For my dilemmas. Nor have you perceived

  The compass-point suggest

  An east by pointing to the west,

  Or you’d not call me thus deceived

  For fixing my desire

  On this magnetic north to gyre

  Under the sheer authority of ice.

  I have seen what impertinence

  Stokes up the dingy rhetoric of sense:

  I’ve seen your subaltern ambitions rise

  Yellow and parallel

  As smoke from garden cities that soon fades

  In air it cannot even defile. Poor shades,9

  Not black enough for hell,

  Learn of this poplar which beyond its height

  Aspires not, and will bend beneath the thumb

  Of every wind; yet when the stars come

  It is an omen darker than the night.

  The rest may go. No satisfaction lies

  In such. And you alone shall hear

  My pride, whose love’s the accurate frontier

  Of all my enterprise.

  While your beauties’ succession

  Holds my adventure in a flowery chain

  As the spring hedgerows hold the lane,

  How can I care whether it ends upon

  Marsh or metropolis?

  But look within my heart, see there

  The tough stoic ghost of a pride was too severe

  To risk an armistice

  With lesser powers than death; but rather died

  Welcoming that iron in the soul

  Which keeps the spirit whole,

  Since none but ghosts are satisfied

  To see a glory passing and let it pass.

  For I had been a modern moth and hurled

  Myself on many a flaming world,

  To find its globe was glass.

  In you alone

  I met the naked light, by you became

  Veteran of a flame

  That burns away all bu
t the warrior bone.

  And I shall know, if time should falsify

  This star the company of my night,

  Mine is the heron’s flight

  Which makes a solitude of any sky.

  24

  Farewell again to this adolescent moon;

  I say it is a bottle

  For papless poets to feed their fancy on.

  Once mine sucked there, and I dreamed

  The heart a record for the gramophone –

  One scratch upon the surface,

  And the best music of that sphere is gone.

  So I put passion away

  In a cold storage and took its tune on trust,

  While proper men with church-bells

  Signal a practised or a dreamt-of lust …

  No fear could sublimate

  The ennui of a tomb where music slept

  In artificial frost,

  Nor could it long persuade me to accept

  Rigidity for peace,

  Moon-stricken I worked out a solitude

  Of sand and sun, believing

  No other soil could bear the genuine rood.

  But nothing grew except

  The shadow at my heels. Now I confess10

  There’s no virtue in sand:

  It is the rose that makes the wilderness.

  I thought integrity

  Needed a desert air; I saw it plain,

  A chimney of stone at evening,

  A monolith on the skyline after rain.

  Instead, the witless sun

  Fertilised that old succubus and bred

  A skeleton in a shadow.

  Let cactus spring where hermits go to bed

  With those they come to kill.

  Three-legged I ran with that importunate curse,

  Till I guessed (in the sexual trance

  Or playing darts with drunken schoolmasters)

  The integrity that’s laid bare

  Upon the edge of common furniture.

  Now to the town returning

  I accept the blind collisions that ensure

  Soul’s ektogenesis.

  25

  Where is the true, the central stone

  That clay and vapour zone,

  That earthquakes budge nor vinegar bites away,

  That rivets man against Doomsday?

  You will not find it there, although