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Complete Poems Page 25

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  She was like a spoilt girl in ermine:

  She tipped a negligent wing to some

  And treated the rest as vermin.

  Now we have seen the way she goes on,

  Our self-possession wavers:

  We’d fear a hanging judge far less than

  That bitch’s casual favours.

  Airmen Broadcast

  Speak for the air, your element, you hunters

  Who range across the ribbed and shifting sky:

  Speak for whatever gives you mastery –

  Wings that bear out your purpose, quick-responsive

  Fingers, a fighting heart, a kestrel’s eye.

  Speak of the rough and tumble in the blue,

  The mast-high run, the flak, the battering gales:

  You that, until the life you love prevails,

  Must follow death’s impersonal vocation –

  Speak from the air, and tell your hunters’ tales.

  Lidice

  Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom.

  WALT WHITMAN

  Cry to us, murdered village. While your grave

  Aches raw on history, make us understand

  What freedom asks of us. Strengthen our hand

  Against the arrogant dogmas that deprave

  And have no proof but death at their command.

  Must the innocent bleed for ever to remedy

  These fanatic fits that tear mankind apart?

  The pangs we felt from your atrocious hurt

  Promise a time when even the killer shall see

  His sword is aimed at his own naked heart.

  Ode to Fear

  The lustre bowl of the sky

  Sounds and sustains

  A throbbing cello-drone of planes.

  Entombed beneath this caving liberty,

  We note how doom endorses

  Our devious fraud and folly where skeins

  Of wild geese flew direct on visionary courses.

  Now Fear has come again

  To live with us

  In poisoned intimacy like pus,

  Hourly extending the area of our pain,

  It seems I must make the most

  Of fever’s pulsing dreams and thus

  Live to allay this evil or dying lay its ghost.

  Fear has so many symptoms –

  Planes throbbing above

  Like headache, rumours that glibly move

  Along the bloodstream, sleep’s prophetic phantoms

  Condemning what we have built,

  Heartburn anxiety for those we love –

  And all, yes all, are proof of an endemic guilt.

  The bones, the stalwart spine,

  The legs like bastions,

  The nerves, the heart’s natural combustions,

  The head that hives our active thoughts – all pine,

  Are quenched or paralysed

  When Fear puts unexpected questions

  And makes the heroic body freeze like a beast surprised.

  The sap will rise anew in

  Both man and brute:

  Wild virtues even now can shoot

  From the reviled interstices of ruin.

  But oh, what drug, what knife

  Can wither up our guilt at the root,

  Cure our discoloured days and cleanse the blood of life?

  Today, I can but record

  In truth and patience

  This high delirium of nations

  And hold to it the reflecting, fragile word.

  Come to my heart then, Fear,

  With all your linked humiliations,

  As wild geese flight and settle on a submissive mere.

  The Dead

  They lie in the sunday street

  Like effigies thrown down after a fête

  Among the bare-faced houses frankly yawning revulsion,

  Fag-ends of fires, litter of rubble, stale

  Confetti-sprinkle of blood. Was it defeat

  With them, or triumph? Purification

  Or All Fools’ Day? On this they remain silent.

  Their eyes are closed to honour and hate.

  We cannot blame the great

  Alone – the mad, the calculating or effete

  Rulers. Whatever grotesque scuffle and piercing

  Indignant orgasm of pain took them,

  All that enforced activity of death

  Did answer and compensate

  Some voluntary inaction, soft option, dream retreat.

  Each man died for the sins of a whole world:

  For the ant’s self-abdication, the fat-stock’s patience

  Are sweet goodbye to human nations.

  Still, they have made us eat

  Our knowing words, who rose and paid

  The bill for the whole party with their uncounted courage.

  And if they chose the dearer consolations

  Of living – the bar, the dog race, the discreet

  Establishment – and let Karl Marx and Freud go hang,

  Now they are dead, who can dispute their choice?

  Not I, nor even Fate.

  Reconciliation

  All day beside the shattered tank he’d lain

  Like a limp creature hacked out of its shell,

  Now shrivelling on the desert’s grid,

  Now floating above a sharp-set ridge of pain.

  There came a roar, like water, in his ear.

  The mortal dust was laid. He seemed to be lying

  In a cool coffin of stone walls,

  While memory slid towards a plunging weir.

  The time that was, the time that might have been

  Find in this shell of stone a chance to kiss

  Before they part eternally:

  He feels a world without, a world within

  Wrestle like old antagonists, until each is

  Balancing each. Then, in a heavenly calm,

  The lock gates open, and beyond

  Appear the argent, swan-assemblied reaches.

  Will it be so again?

  Will it be so again

  That the brave, the gifted are lost from view,

  And empty, scheming men

  Are left in peace their lunatic age to renew?

  Will it be so again?

  Must it be always so

  That the best are chosen to fall and sleep

  Like seeds, and we too slow

  In claiming the earth they quicken, and the old usurpers reap

  What they could not sow?

  Will it be so again –

  The jungle code and the hypocrite gesture?

  A poppy wreath for the slain

  And a cut-throat world for the living? that stale imposture

  Played on us once again?

  Will it be as before –

  Peace, with no heart or mind to ensue it,

  Guttering down to war

  Like a libertine to his grave? We should not be surprised: we knew it

  Happen before.

  Shall it be so again?

  Call not upon the glorious dead

  To be your witnesses then.

  The living alone can nail to their promise the ones who said

  It shall not be so again.

  PART THREE

  The Innocent

  A forward child, a sullen boy,

  My living image in the pool,

  The glass that made me look a fool –

  He was my judgement and my joy.

  The bells that chimed above the lake,

  The swans asleep in evening’s eye,

  Bright transfers pressed on memory

  From him their gloss and anguish take.

  When I was desolate, he came

  A wizard way to charm my toys:

  But when he heard a stranger’s voice

  He broke the toys, I bore the shame.

  I built a house of crystal tears

  Amid the myrtles for my friend:

  He said, no man has ever f
eigned

  Or kept the lustre of my years.

  Later, a girl and I descried

  His shadow on the fern-flecked hill,

  His double near our bed: and still

  The more I lived, the more he died.

  Now a revenant slips between

  The fine-meshed minutes of the clock

  To weep the time we lost and mock

  All that my desperate ditties mean.

  One and One

  I remember, as if it were yesterday,

  Watching that girl from the village lay

  The fire in a room where sunlight poured,

  And seeing, in the annexe beyond, M. play

  A prelude of Bach on his harpischord.

  I can see his face now, heavy and numb

  With resignation to the powers that come

  At his touch meticulous, smooth as satin,

  Firm as hammers: I can hear the air thrum

  With notes like sun-motes in a twinkling pattern.

  Her task there fetched from a girl the innate

  Tingling response of glass to a note:

  She fitted the moment, too, like a glove,

  Who deft and submissive knelt by the grate

  Bowed as if in the labour of love.

  Their orbits touched not: but the pure submission

  Of each gave value and definition

  To a snapshot printed in that morning’s sun.

  From any odd corner we may start a vision

  Proving that one and one make One.

  Windy Day in August

  Over the vale, the sunburnt fields

  A wind from the sea like as streamer unreels:

  Dust leaps up, apples thud down,

  The river’s caught between a smile and a frown.

  An inn-sign swinging, swinging to the wind,

  Whines and whinges like a dog confined,

  Round his paddock gallops the colt,

  Dinghies at moorings curvet and jolt.

  Sunlight and shadow in the copse play tig,

  While the wallowing clouds talk big

  About their travels, and thistledown blows

  Ghosting above the rank hedgerows.

  Cornfield, orchard and fernland hail

  Each other, waving from hill to hill:

  They change their colours from morn to night

  In play with the lissom, engaging light.

  The wind roars endlessly past my ears,

  Racing my heart as in earlier years.

  Here and everywhere, then and now

  Earth moves like a wanton, breathes like a vow.

  After the Storm

  Have you seen clouds drifting across a night sky

  After storm’s blown out, when the wind that urged them

  Lies asleep elsewhere and the earth is buoyed in

  Moon-locked oblivion?

  Slow the clouds march: only the moon is wakeful,

  Watching them trail past in their brown battalions

  Spent as storm-troops after defeat or triumph

  Deeply indifferent.

  No, not storm-troops now, but as crowds that wander

  Vague and sluggish down the disordered boulevardes

  After a football match or a coronation,

  Riot or lynching.

  Done the act which tied them together, all its

  Ebbing excitement leaves the heart a quicksand:

  So betrayed by passion they move, remembering

  Each his aloneness.

  Clouds are not men. Yet, if I saw men move like

  Clouds the wind inspires and abandons, I should

  Feel that wakeful sympathy, feel the moon’s wild

  Ache for oblivion.

  Fame

  Spurred towards horizons

  Beyond the common round,

  Trained in ambition’s cruellest ring,

  Their powers grew muscle-bound

  Like those equestrian public statues

  Pawing the sky, that rear

  And snort with furious nostrils

  Nobly, and get nowhere:

  A target for birds, a suntrap

  For the elderly or infirm,

  Children bowl hoops around them, a plaque

  Nails them to their fame,

  Whose strenuous flanks the sunlight grooms

  While sculptured hyacinths

  Breathe an odour of worship

  Bedded below their plinths.

  Fine for the public statues amid

  Those noonday crowds: but when

  Nights falls and the park is emptied,

  What do they think of then?

  Does expectation still cast

  Its overweening shadow

  Onwards? Or do they look back in grief

  To a foal of the green meadow? –

  That foal with its mane like a carpet-fringe

  And its hobbledehoy hooves;

  That colt of the restive eye

  Whose breast in amazement heaves –

  Or, clamped to the sky in a tortured

  Pose of the haute école,

  Have they lost all kinship, horse and rider,

  With the dead, the impatient foal?

  Jig

  That winter love spoke and we raised no objection, at

  Easter ’twas daisies all light and affectionate,

  June sent us crazy for natural selection – not

  Four traction-engines could tear us apart.

  Autumn then coloured the map of our land.

  Oaks shuddered and apples came ripe to the hand,

  In the gap of the hills we played happily, happily,

  Even the moon couldn’t tell us apart.

  Grave winter drew near and said, ‘This will not do at all –

  If you continue, I fear you will rue it all.’

  So at the New Year we vowed to eschew it

  Although we both knew it would break our heart.

  But spring made hay of our good resolutions –

  Lovers, you may be as wise as Confucians,

  Yet once love betrays you he plays you and plays you

  Life fishes for ever, so take it to heart.

  Hornpipe

  Now the peak of summer’s past, the sky is overcast

  And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit:

  Paler is the guelder since the day we first beheld her

  In blush beside the elder drifting sweet, drifting sweet.

  Oh quickly they fade – the sunny esplanade,

  Speed-boats, wooden spades, and the dunes where we’ve lain:

  Others will be lying amid the sea-pinks sighing

  For love to be undying, and they’ll sigh in vain.

  It’s hurrah for each night we have spent our love so lightly

  And never dreamed there might be no more to spend at all.

  It’s goodbye to every lover who thinks he’ll live in clover

  All his life, for noon is over soon and night-dews fall.

  If I could keep you there with the berries in your hair

  And your lacy fingers fair as the may, sweet may,

  I’d have no heart to do it, for to stay love is to rue it

  And the harder we pursue it, the faster it’s away.

  The Fault

  After the light decision

  Made by the blood in a moon-blanched lane,

  Whatever weariness or contrition

  May come, I could never see you plain;

  No, never again

  See you whose body I’m wed to

  Distinct, but always dappled, enhanced

  By a montage of all that moment led to –

  Dunes where heat-haze and sea-pinks glanced,

  The roads that danced

  Ahead of our aimless car,

  Scandal biting the dust behind us,

  The feel of being on a luckier star,

  Each quarrel that came like a night to blind us

  And closer to bind us.

 
Others will journey over

  Our hill up along this lane like a rift

  Loaded with moon-gold, many a lover

  Sleepwalking through the moon’s white drift,

  Loved or bereft.

  But for me it is love’s volcanic

  Too fertile fault, and will mark always

  The first shock of that yielding mood, where satanic

  Bryony twines and frail flowers blaze

  Through our tangled days.

  The Rebuke

  Down in the lost and April days

  What lies we told, what lies we told!

  Nakedness seemed the one disgrace,

  And there’d be time enough to praise

  The truth when we were old.

  The irresponsible poets sung

  What came into their head:

  Time to pick and choose among

  The bold profusions of our tongue

  When we were dead, when we were dead.

  Oh wild the words we uttered then

  In woman’s ear, in woman’s ear,

  Believing all we promised when

  Each kiss created earth again

  And every far was near.

  Little we guessed, who spoke the word

  Of hope and freedom high

  Spontaneously as wind or bird

  To crowds like cornfields still or stirred,

  It was a lie, a heart-felt lie.

  Now the years advance into

  A calmer stream, a colder stream,

  We doubt the flame that once we knew,

  Heroic words sound all untrue

  As love-lies in a dream.

  Yet fools are the old who won’t be taught

  Modesty by their youth:

  That pandemonium of the heart,

  That sensual arrogance did impart

  A kind of truth, a kindling truth.

  Where are the sparks at random sown,

  The spendthrift fire, the holy fire?

  Who cares a damn for truth that’s grown

  Exhausted haggling for its own

  And speaks without desire?

  1943

  POEMS 1943–1947

  TO LAURIE LEE

  I seem but a dead man held on end

  To sink down soon …

  THOMAS HARDY

  Le vent se lève … il faut tenter de vivre!

  PAUL VALÉRY

 

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