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Complete Poems Page 8

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  You sink a shaft below

  Despair and see the roots of death close-curled

  About the kernel of your world.

  Where is the invaluable star

  Whose beams enlacèd are

  The scaffolding of truth, whose stages drawn

  Aside unshutter an ideal dawn?

  It is well hid. You would not find

  It there, though far you mined

  Up through the golden seams that cram the night

  And walked those galleries of light.

  Above, below, the Flux tight-packed

  Stages its sexual act –

  An ignominious scuffling in the dark

  Where brute encounters brute baresark.

  Keep to the pithead, then, nor pry

  Beyond what meets the eye,

  Since household stuff, stone walls, mountains and trees

  Placard the day with certainties.

  For individual truth must lie11

  Within diversity;

  Under the skin all creatures are one race,

  Proved integers but by their face.

  So he, who learns to comprehend

  The form of things, will find

  They in his eye that purest star have sown

  And changed his mind to singular stone.

  26

  Chiefly to mind appears

  That hour on Silverhowe

  When evening’s lid hung low

  And the sky was about our ears.

  Buoyed between fear and love12

  We watched in eastward form

  The armadas of the storm

  And sail superbly above;

  So near, they’d split and founder

  On the least jag of sense,

  One false spark fire the immense

  Broadside the confounding thunder.

  They pass, give not a salvo,

  And in their rainy wash

  We hear the horizons crash

  With monitors of woe.

  Only at highest power

  Can love and fear become

  Their equilibrium,

  And in that eminent hour

  A virtue is made plain

  Of passionate cleavage

  Like the hills’ cutting edge

  When the sun sets to rain.

  This is the single mind,

  This the star-solved equation

  Of life with life’s negation.

  A deathless cell designed

  To demonstrate death’s act,

  Which, the more surely it moves

  To earth’s influence, but proves

  Itself the more intact.

  27

  With me, my lover makes

  The clock assert its chime:

  But when she goes, she takes

  The mainspring out of time.

  Yet this time-wrecking charm

  Were better than love dead

  And its hollow alarum

  Hammered out on lead.

  Why should I fear that Time

  Will superannuate

  These workmen of my rhyme –

  Love, despair and hate?

  Fleeing the herd, I came

  To a graveyard on a hill,

  And felt its mould proclaim

  The bone gregarious still.

  Boredoms and agonies

  Work out the rhythm of bone: –

  No peace till creature his

  Creator has outgrown.

  Passion dies from the heart

  But to infect the marrow;

  Holds dream and act apart

  Till the man discard his narrow

  Sapience and folly

  Here, where the graves slumber

  In a green melancholy

  Of overblown summer.

  Part IV

  ‘The hatches are let down13

  And the night meets the day

  The spirit comes to its own

  The beast to its play.’14

  W. H. AUDEN.

  28

  In the beginning was the Word.

  Under different skies now, I recall

  The childhood of the Word.

  Before the Fall,

  Was dancing on the green with sun and moon:

  And the Word was with God.

  Years pass, relaxed in a faun’s afternoon.

  And the Word was God.

  For him rise up the litanies of leaves

  From the tormented wood, and semi-breves

  Of birds accompany the simple dawn.

  Obsequious to his mood the valleys yawn,

  Nymphs scamper or succumb, waterfalls part

  The hill-face with vivacious smiles. The heart,

  Propped up against its paradise, records

  Each wave of godhead in a sea of words.

  He grows a wall of sunflower and moonflower blent

  To protest his solitude and to prevent

  Wolf or worm from trespassing on his rule.

  Observe how paradise can make a fool:

  They can’t get in; but he – for a god no doubt

  Is bound by his own laws – cannot get out.

  And the Word was made flesh,

  Under different skies now,

  Wrenching a stony song from a scant acre,

  The Word still justifies its Maker.

  Green fields were my slippers,

  Sky was my hat,

  But curiosity

  Killed the cat.

  For this did I burst

  My daisy band –

  To be clapped in irons

  By a strange hand?

  Nevertheless, you are well out of Eden:

  For there’s no wonder where all things are new;

  No dream where all is sleep; no vision where

  Seer and seen are one; nor prophecy

  Where only echo waits upon the tongue.

  Now he has come to a country of stone walls,

  Breathes a precarious air.

  Frontiers of adamant declare

  A cold autonomy. There echo starves;

  And the mountain ash bleeds stoically there

  Above the muscular stream.

  What cairn will show the way he went?

  A harrow rusting on defeated bones?

  Or will he leave a luckier testament –

  Rock deeply rent,

  Fountains of spring playing upon the air?

  29

  Those Himalayas of the mind

  Are not so easily possessed:

  There’s more than precipice and storm

  Between you and your Everest.

  You who declare the peak of peaks

  Alone will satisfy your want,

  Can you distil a grain of snow?

  Can you digest an adamant?

  Better by far the household cock

  Scratching the common yard for corn,

  Whose rainy voice all night at will

  Can signify a private dawn.

  Another bird, sagacious too,

  Circles in plain bewilderment

  Where shoulder to shoulder long waves march

  Towards a magnetic continent.

  ‘What are these rocks impede our pomp?’

  Gesticulating to the sun

  The waves part ranks, sidle and fume,

  Then close behind them and march on.

  The waves advance, the Absolute Cliffs

  Unaccountably repel:

  They linger grovelling; where assault

  Has failed, attrition may tell.

  The bird sees nothing to the point;

  Shrugs an indifferent wing; proceeds

  From rock to rock in the mid-ocean

  Peering for barnacles and weeds.

  30

  In the chaotic age

  This was enough for me –

  Her beauty walked the page

  And it was poetry.

  Now that the crust has cooled,

  The floods are kept in pen,

  Mountain
s have got their mould

  And air its regimen.

  Nothing of heat remains

  But where the sacred hill

  Conserves within her veins

  The fiery principle.

  Fire can no longer shake

  Stars from their sockets down;

  It burns now but to make

  Vain motions above the town.15

  This glum canal, has lain16

  Opaque night after night,

  One hour will entertain

  A jubilee of light,

  And show that beauty is

  A motion of the mind

  By its own dark caprice

  Directed or confined.

  31

  Where is the fool would want those days again

  Whose light was globed in pain

  And danced upon a point of wire?

  When the charged batteries of desire

  Had licence but to pass

  Into a narrow room of frosted glass?

  The globe was broken and the light made free

  Of a king’s territory.

  Artemis then, the huntress pale,

  Flung her black dogs upon the trail:

  So with one glance around

  The hunted lightning ran and went to ground.

  Safer perhaps within that cell to stay

  Which qualified its ray

  And gave it place and period,

  Than be at liberty where God

  Has put no firmament

  Of glass to prove dark and light different.

  But Artemis leaps down. At her thin back

  Wheel the shades in a pack.

  At once that old habit of fire

  Jumps out, not stopping to inquire

  Whether it follows or flies,

  Content to use the night for exercise.

  And I, when at the sporting queen’s halloo

  The light obedient flew

  Blazing its trail across the wild –

  Resigned now but not reconciled,

  That ancient Sphinx I saw17

  Put moon and shades like mice beneath its paw.

  32

  The red nor-easter is out:

  Trees in the covert strain

  Like dogs upon a leash

  And snuff the hurricane.

  Another wind and tree now

  Are constant to their west:

  The breath that scours the midday

  Unseen, is manifest

  In this embittered thorn –

  Forcing the stubborn frame

  To grow one way and point

  His constancy and aim.

  This wind that fills the hollow

  Sky, of a vacuum

  Was purely bred. The thorn once

  In modest seed lay mum

  That squats above the Atlantic

  Promontoried on pride.

  For my tenacious tree

  Requires not, to decide

  That he has roots somewhere,

  A tropic foliage;

  Since that the leaf recurs

  Is a sufficient gauge.

  Again, what of this glass

  Whereby the formulæ

  Of sense should all be solved?

  It cannot enlarge a flea

  Nor accurately define

  The features of a star.

  Gazing through it I saw

  Nothing particular

  Distant or close. A summer

  Accident it was

  Explained its property.

  It is a burning-glass

  Which interrupts the sun

  To make him more intense,

  And touch to a single flame

  The various heap of sense.

  33

  Seventeen months ago

  We came to the mine on the moor. A crow

  Sees more than meets the eye –

  What marrow in fleshless bones may lie.

  And now I passed by a forbidding coast

  Where ironworks rust

  On each headland: goats crop the salted grass:

  Steam oozes out of the mud. Earth has

  No promise for proprietors. I from far

  Came, and passing saw something oracular.

  Put down the tripod here.

  I stretched a line from pole to pole

  To hang my paper lanterns on. Poor soul,

  By such a metaphysical conceit

  Thinking to make ends meet!

  This line, spun from the blind heart –

  What could it do but prove the poles apart?

  More expert now, I twist the dials, catch

  Electric hints, curt omens such

  As may be heard by one tapping the air

  That belts an ambiguous sphere.

  Put down the tripod here.

  This is the interregnum of my year;

  All spring except the leaf is here,

  All winter but the cold.

  Bandage of snow for the first time unrolled

  Lays bare the wounds given when any fate

  And most men’s company could humiliate:

  Sterilized now; yet still they prick

  And pulse beneath the skin, moving me like

  An engine driven on

  By sparks of its own combustion.

  There are going to be some changes made to-day.18

  Then add to this that I

  Have known, and shall again, the greedy thigh;

  Browned by that sun, but not betrayed,

  Which puts the Dog-Star in the shade:

  For though my world at one Equator meet,

  These Arctic zones are still complete.

  Baring my skin to every bruise

  Love gives, I’ll love the more; since they’re but dues

  That flesh must pay to bone

  Till each is overthrown.

  There are going to be some changes made to-day.

  34

  The hawk comes down from the air.19

  Sharpening his eye upon

  A wheeling horizon

  Turned scrutiny to prayer.

  He guessed the prey that cowers

  Below, and learnt to keep

  The distance which can strip

  Earth to its blank contours.20

  Then trod the air, content

  With contemplation till

  The truth of valley and hill

  Should be self-evident.

  Or as the little lark

  Who veins the sky with song,

  Asking from dawn to dark

  No revenues of spring:

  But with the night descends

  Into his chosen tree,

  And the famed singer ends

  In anonymity.

  So from a summer’s height

  I come into my peace;

  The wings have earned their night,

  And the song may cease.

  NOTES

  The central theme of this poem is the single mind. The poem is divided into four parts, which essentially represent four phases of personal experience in the pursuit of single-mindedness: it will be seen that a transition is intended from one part to the next such as implies a certain spiritual progress and a consequent shifting of aspect. As far as any definitions can be attached to these aspects, they may be termed (1) metaphysical, (2) ethical, (3) psychological; while (4) is an attempt to relate the poetic impulse with the experience as a whole. Formally, the parts fall with fair accuracy into the divisions of a theorem in geometry, i.e. general enunciation, particular enunciation, proof, corollaries. The following notes may be of assistance to the diligent; they are intended simply for the elucidation of the text, and do not necessarily imply assent to any proposition that may be advanced in them.

  C. D. L.

  January 1929.

  1 cf. Spinoza, Letters. ‘I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused
.’

  2 cf. Spinoza, De intell. emend. ‘But above all a method must be thought out of healing the understanding and purifying it at the beginning. …’

  3 cf. Exodus x, 21 and 27.

  4 cf. Deuteronomy ix, 2; also i, 28.

  5 sqq., cf. page 91, line 10.

  6 Cronos is here used as a symbol for desire.

  7 sqq., contrast Donne:

  ‘But up into the watch-tower get,

  And see all things despoiled of fallacies.’

  8 ‘skiagram’ – a drawing in shadow, not strictly the Greek sense.

  9 cf. Dante, Inferno:

  ‘Ed egli a me: Questo misero modo

  Tengon l’anime triste di coloro,

  Che visser senza infamia e senza lodo.’

  10 cf. Isaiah xxxv, 1.

  11 cf. Wyndham Lewis, Art of Being Ruled, Part 12, Chapter VII.

  12 ‘Fear and love’ throughout this poem represent the general principles of attraction and repulsion.

  13 ‘the Word’ in this poem stands for the individual poetic impulse, as a part of the Logos in the theologian’s sense of ‘mind expressing God in the world.’

  14 cf. ‘The Ballad of the Twa Brothers’:

  “O when will you come hame again?

  Dear Willie, tell to me!’

  ‘When the sun and moon dance on yon green;

  And that will never be.”

  15 cf. Henry James, The Ambassadors: ‘Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact – for anyone else – explained. One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.’

  16 cf. note on page 59, lines 3–8.

  17 cf. page 61, line 16.

  18 the refrain of a song sung by Miss Sophie Tucker.

  19 cf. page 59, line 15.

  20 cf. Spinoza, De intell. emend. ‘Finally, perception is that wherein a thing is perceived through its essence alone. … A thing is said to be perceived through its essence alone when from the fact that I know something, I know what it is to know anything. …’

  1929

  FROM FEATHERS TO IRON

  TO THE MOTHER

 

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