Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Sir, I’d not make so bold as to lack all

  Respect for one whose prowess in the bed and the battlefield

  Have excited (and justly) universal comment.

  Nor could I, if I wished –

  Who, in the small hours and the talkative

  Reception, have felt you ticking within my belly –

  Pretend there’s any worse ordeal to come.

  You and I, my friend, are antagonists

  And the fight’s framed: for this I blame not you

  But the absentee promoter. If I seem to treat

  Your titles, stamina, skill with levity,

  Call it the rat’s bad-loser snarl, the madman

  Humouring the two doctors, the point declaring

  War on the calm circumference. …

  You have appeared to us in many guises –

  Pale priest, black camel, the bemedalled sergeant

  Of general conscription, a bugbear to affright

  Second childhood, or the curtain drawn so deftly

  To show that diamond-tiered tree

  Evergreen with bliss for all good boys and girls.

  You have been called the Leveller: but little

  That meant to the aristos you transferred

  Straight from one rotten borough to another;

  Nor can our state, hollow and cold as theirs,

  Much envy the drab democrats of the grave.

  Happiest, in our nervous time, who name you

  Peace. You are the peace that millions die for.

  If there’s a moment’s solace, laid like the bloom

  Of dew upon our meadows; if honeysuckle

  Clings to its sweetened hour, and the appealing

  Beauty of flesh makes time falter in his stride;

  If anywhere love-lips, flower-flaunt, crimson of cloud-crest

  With flames impassioned hold off the pacing shadows –

  You can rest indulgent: soon enough

  They shall be all, all of your complexion.

  I grant you the last word. But what of these –

  The criminal agents of a dying will

  Who, frantic with defeat, conspire to force your

  Earlier intervention?

  It is they, your damned auxiliaries, must answer

  For the self-slain in the foodless, fireless room,

  For stunted hearts that droop by our olive-green

  Canals, the blossom of children untimely shattered

  By their crazed, random fire, and the fear like a black frost

  Foreshortening our prospect, metallic on our tongues.

  If I am too familiar with you, sir,

  It is that these have brought you into contempt.

  You are in nature. These are most unnatural.

  We shall desire your peace in our own time:

  But with those, your free-lance and officious gunmen,

  Our war is life itself and shall not fail.

  4

  Forgive us, that we ever thought

  You could with innocence be bought,

  Or, puffed with queasy power, have tried

  Your register to override.

  Such diamond-faced and equal laws

  Allow no chink or saving clause:

  Besotted may-fly, bobbish wren

  Count in your books as much as men.

  No North-West Passage can be found

  To sail those freezing capes around,

  Nor no smooth by-pass ever laid

  Shall that metropolis evade.

  The tampering hand, the jealous eye

  That overlooked our infancy –

  Forgiven soon, they sank their trust

  And our reproach into the dust.

  We also, whom a bawdy spring

  Tempted to order everything,

  Shall shrink beneath your first caress

  Into a modest nothingness.

  The meshes of the imperious blood,

  The wind-flown tower, the poet’s word

  Can catch no more than a weak sigh

  And ghost of immortality.

  O lord of leisure, since we know

  Your image we shall ne’er outgrow,

  Teach us the value of our stay

  Lest we insult the living clay.

  This clay that binds the roots of man

  And firmly foots his flying span –

  Only this clay can voice, invest,

  Measure and frame our mortal best.

  O lord of night, bid us beware

  The wistful ghost that speaks us fair:

  Once let him in – he clots the veins

  And makes a still-birth of our pains.

  Now we at last have crossed the line

  Where’s earth’s exuberant fields begin,

  That green illusion in the sky

  Born of our desert years can die.

  No longer let predestined need

  Cramp our design, or hunger breed

  Its windy dreams, or life distil

  Rare personal good from common ill.

  Lord of us all, now it is true

  That we are lords of all but you,

  Teach us the order of our day

  Lest we deface the honoured clay.

  5

  The sun came out in April,

  The hawthorn in May:

  We thought the year, like other years,

  Would go the Christmas way.

  In June we picked the clover,

  And sea-shells in July:

  There was no silence at the door,

  No word from the sky.

  A hand came out of August

  And flicked his life away:

  We had not time to bargain, mope,

  Moralize, or pray.

  Where he had been, was only

  An effigy on a bed

  To ask us searching questions or

  Hear what we’d left unsaid.

  Only that stained parchment

  Set out what he had been –

  A face we might have learned better,

  But now must read unseen.

  Thus he resigned his interest

  And claims, all in a breath,

  Leaving us the long office work

  And winding-up of death:

  The ordinary anguish,

  The stairs, the awkward turn,

  The bearers’ hats like black mushrooms

  Placed upon the lawn.

  As a migrant remembers

  The sting and warmth of home,

  As the fruit bears out the blossom’s word,

  We remember him.

  He loved the sun in April,

  The hawthorn in May:

  Our tree will not light up for him

  Another Christmas Day.

  6

  It is not you I fear, but the humiliations

  You mercifully use to deaden grief –

  The downward graph of natural joys,

  Imagination’s slump, the blunted ear.

  I hate this cold and politic self-defence

  Of hardening arteries and nerves

  Grown dull with time-serving. I see that the heart lives

  By self-betrayal, by circumspection is killed.

  That boy, whose glance makes heaven open and edges

  Each dawning pain with gold, must learn to disbelieve:

  The wildfire lust of the eyes will gutter down

  To age’s dim recalcitrance.

  Have we not seen how quick this young girl’s thoughts,

  Wayward and burning as a charm of goldfinches

  Alarmed from thistle-tops, turn into

  Spite or a cupboard love or clipped routine?

  Nearing the watershed and the difficult passes,

  Man wraps up closer against the chill

  In his familiar habits; and at the top

  Pauses, seeing your kingdom like a net beneath him spread.

  Some climbed to this momentous peak of the world

  And facing the horizon – th
at notorious pure woman

  Who lures to cheat the last embrace

  Hurled themselves down upon an easier doom.

  One the rare air made dizzy renounced

  Earth, and the avalanche took him at his word:

  One wooed perfection – he’s bedded deep in the glacier, perfect

  And null, the prince and image of despair.

  The best, neither hoarding nor squandering

  The radiant flesh and the receptive

  Spirit, stepped on together in the rhythm of comrades who

  Have found a route on earth’s true reckoning based.

  They have not known the false humility,

  The shamming-dead of the senses beneath your hunter’s hand;

  But life’s green standards they’ve advanced

  To the limit of your salt unyielding zone.

  7

  For us, born into a still

  Unsweetened world, of sparse

  Breathing-room, alleys brackish as hell’s pit

  And heaven-accusing spires,

  You were never far nor fable,

  Judgement nor happy end:

  We have come to think of you, mister, as

  Almost the family friend.

  Our kiddies play tag with you often

  Among the tornado wheels;

  Through fevered nights you sit up with them,

  You serve their little meals.

  You lean with us at street-corners,

  We have met you in the mine;

  Your eyes are the foundry’s glare, you beckon

  From the snake-tooth, sly machine.

  Low in the flooded engine room,

  High on the yawing steeple –

  Wherever we are, we begin to fancy

  That we’re your chosen people.

  They came to us with charity,

  They came to us with whips,

  They came with chains behind their back

  And freedom on their lips:

  Castle and field and city –

  Ours is a noble land,

  Let us work for its fame together, they said;

  But we don’t quite understand.

  For they took the land and the credit,

  Took virtue and double-crossed her;

  They left us the scrag-end of the luck

  And the brunt of their disaster.

  And now like horses they fidget

  Smelling death in the air:

  But we are your chosen people, and

  We’ve little to lose or fear.

  When the time comes for a clearance,

  When light brims over the hill,

  Mister, you can rely on us

  To execute your will.

  When they have Lost

  When they have lost the little that they looked for,

  The poor allotment of ease, custom, fame:

  When the consuming star their fathers worked for

  Has guttered into death, a fatuous flame:

  When love’s a cripple, faith a bed-time story,

  Hope eats her heart out and peace walks on knives,

  And suffering men cry an end to this sorry

  World of whose children want alone still thrives:

  Then shall the mounting stages of oppression

  Like mazed and makeshift scaffolding torn down

  Reveal his unexampled, best creation –

  The shape of man’s necessity full-grown.

  Built from their bone, I see a power-house stand

  To warm men’s hearts again and light the land.

  In the Heart of Contemplation

  In the heart of contemplation –

  Admiring, say, the frost-flowers of the white lilac,

  Or lark’s song busily sifting like sand-crystals

  Through the pleased hourglass an afternoon of summer,

  Or your beauty, dearer to me than these –

  Discreetly a whisper in the ear,

  The glance of one passing my window recall me

  From lark, lilac, you, grown suddenly strangers.

  In the plump and pastoral valley

  Of a leisure time, among the trees like seabirds

  Asleep on a glass calm, one shadow moves –

  The sly reminder of the forgotten appointment.

  All the shining pleasures, born to be innocent,

  Grow dark with a truant’s guilt:

  The day’s high heart falls flat, the oaks tremble,

  And the shadow sliding over your face divides us.

  In the act of decision only,

  In the hearts cleared for action like lovers naked

  For love, this shadow vanishes: there alone

  There is nothing between our lives for it to thrive on.

  You and I with lilac, lark and oak-leafed

  Valley are bound together

  As in the astounded clarity before death.

  Nothing is innocent now but to act for life’s sake.

  Sonnet for a Political Worker

  Is this what wears you out – having to weigh

  One mote against another, the time spent

  Fitting each thumbed and jig-saw argument

  Into a pattern clear to you as day?

  Boredom, the dull repetitive delay,

  Opponents’ tricky call, the discontent

  Of friends, seem to deny what history meant

  When first she showed her hand for you to play.

  Do you not see that history’s high tension

  Must so be broken down to each man’s need

  And his frail filaments, that it may feed

  Not blast all patience, love and warm invention?

  On lines beyond your single comprehension

  The circuit and full day of power proceed.

  Questions

  How long will you keep this pose of self-confessed

  And aspen hesitation

  Dithering on the brink, obsessed

  Immobilized by the feminine fascination

  Of an image all your own,

  Or doubting which is shadow, which is bone?

  Will you wait womanish, while the flattering stream

  Glosses your faults away?

  Or would you find within that dream

  Courage to break the dream, wisdom to say

  That wisdom is not there?

  Or is it simply the first shock you fear?

  Do you need the horn in your ear, the hounds at your heel,

  Gadflies to sting you sore,

  The lightning’s angry feint, and all

  The horizon clouds boiling like lead, before

  You’ll risk your javelin dive

  And pierce reflection’s heart, and come alive?

  The Volunteer

  Tell them in England, if they ask

  What brought us to these wars,

  To this plateau beneath the night’s

  Grave manifold of stars –

  It was not fraud or foolishness,

  Glory, revenge, or pay:

  We came because our open eyes

  Could see no other way.

  There was no other way to keep

  Man’s flickering truth alight:

  These stars will witness that our course

  Burned briefer, not less bright.

  Beyond the wasted olive-groves,

  The furthest lift of land,

  There calls a country that was ours

  And here shall be regained.

  Shine to us, memoried and real,

  Green-water-silken meads:

  Rivers of home, refresh our path

  Whom here your influence leads.

  Here in a parched and stranger place

  We fight for England free,

  The good our fathers won for her,

  The land they hoped to see.

  The Nabara1

  They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender.2

  PHASE ONE

  Freedom is more
than a word, more than the base coinage

  Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad

  Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made

  In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage

  But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

  Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:

  She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird

  To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:

  Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes

  The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

  I see man’s heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.

  As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone

  Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one –

  So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation

  To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.

  Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting

  For those I tell of – men used to the tolerable joy and hurt

  Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;

  But history’s hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting

  Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.

  The year, Nineteen-thirty-seven: month, March: the men, descendants

  Of those Iberian fathers, the inquiring ones who would go

  Wherever the sea-ways led: a pacific people, slow

  To feel ambition, loving their laws and their independence –

  Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.

  Fishermen, with no guile outside their craft, they had weathered

  Often the sierra-ranked Biscayan surges, the wet

  Fog of the Newfoundland Banks: they were fond of pelota: they met

  No game beyond their skill as they swept the sea together,

  Until the morning they found the leviathan in their net.

  Government trawlers Nabara, Guipuzkoa, Bizkaya,

  Donostia, escorting across blockaded seas

  Galdames with her cargo of nickel and refugees

  From Bayonne to Bilbao, while the crest of war curled higher

  Inland over the glacial valleys, the ancient ease.

  On the morning of March the fifth, a chill North-Wester fanned them,

  Fogging the glassy waves: what uncharted doom lay low

  There in the fog athwart their course, they could not know:

  Stout were the armed trawlers, redoubtable those who manned them –

  Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.