Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  The Double Vision

  The river this November afternoon

  Rests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:

  A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroud

  Its passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.

  Image and real are joined like Siamese twins:

  Their doubles draw the willows, a brown mare

  Drinks her reflection. There’s no margin where

  Substance leaves off, the illusory begins.

  You and I by the river contemplate

  Our ideal selves, glossed here, crystal-divined:

  We yearn to them, knowing one sigh of wind

  Will rub these precious figures from the slate.

  It is not of their transience I’m afraid,

  But thinking how most human loves protract

  Themselves to unreality – the fact

  Drained of its virtue by the image it made.

  O double vision of the autumnal stream,

  Teach me to bear love’s fusion or diffusion!

  O gems of purest water, pure illusion,

  Answer my rays and cluster to a theme!

  Juvenilia

  So this is you

  That was an I twenty-five years ago –

  One I may neither disown nor renew.

  Youth of the smouldering heart, the seamless brow,

  What affinity between you and me?

  You are a skin I have long since cast,

  A ghost I carry now:

  I am the form you blindly, fitfully glassed,

  And the finish of your bright vow.

  When I seek to peer

  Through the fancy-dress words wherein you are woodenly posed

  And to feel the ardours quivering there,

  I am as one eavesdropping upon a captive past

  Of which nothing remains but echoes and chains.

  Yet, could I lay bare that primitive mural

  Whereon I am superimposed,

  What boldness of line and colour, what pure quaint moral

  Emblems might be disclosed!

  Youth of the seamless brow, the smouldering heart,

  You are my twin,

  Yet we seem worlds apart.

  More than mere time-grains pile this desert between:

  The sands that efface each instant trace

  Of my passage – I think they proceed

  From my own nature, their origin

  Some inexhaustible need

  For oblivion, and reservoir of it, deep within.

  Were it not so, surely I could remember

  The lyric light,

  The primrose-and-violet ember

  Which was your soul, my soul, when we came to write

  These poems. But gone is the breath of dawn,

  Clinker the dreams it fanned:

  These bones, anonymous now and trite,

  Are a message scrawled on the sand

  That only in dying could a self indite.

  What links the real to the wraith?

  My self repudiates myself of yesterday;

  But the words it lived in and cast like a shell keep faith

  With that dead self always.

  And if aught holds true between me and you,

  It is the heart whose prism can break

  Life’s primal rays

  Into a spectrum of passionate tones, and awake

  Fresh blossom for truth to swell and sway.

  Speak to me, then, from the haunted

  Hollow of fears and yearnings lost to view,

  The instrument my youth, your truth, first sounded –

  This heart of impassioned hue!

  Speak through the crystal, tell me the gist

  Of the shadowy sequence that now is I –

  What unseen clue

  Threads my pearl-sliding hours, what symmetry

  My deaths and metaphors pursue!

  When a phoenix opens her rainbow span,

  The ashes she rose from warmly speak,

  ‘Your flight, which ends in fire as it began,

  Is fuelled by all you seek.’

  O beacon bird, I too am fired

  To bring some message home

  Whose meaning I know not. So from peak to peak

  I run – my life, maybe, a palindrome,

  But each lap unique.

  And since at every stage I need

  A death, a new self to reveal me,

  And only through oblivion’s veil can read

  The signs of what befell me,

  May not the grave of rigored love

  Be but one more abyss

  Between two peaks, appointed to compel me

  Along the chain of light?… Dead youth, is this

  What you have to tell me?

  Sketches for a Self-Portrait

  Consider the boy that you were, although you would hardly

  Recognize him if you met him, even in his old haunts –

  The well-shaved lawn or the Rip Van Winkle forest,

  With the slag-tip reek acrid as youth’s resentments

  Tainting their green, or the mellow South West town

  That spoke to him words unheeded but unforgotten –

  Even in the haunts where he was most himself,

  If a chaos can be a self: there perhaps least of all,

  So deceptive are youth’s environs, so quick to promise

  What is not in your power, to fall in with caving moods.

  But question the boy that you were, for you have no other

  Clue to the man you are, to the heart divided.

  Green boy, green boy, who walk through the furzes

  Unsinged, and undevoured through the dandelions,

  Tell me your secret.

  I am one who peered

  In every stranger’s face for my identity,

  In every mirror for a family likeness,

  In lakes and dewdrops for the antiself.

  I stunned myself upon their shallow eyes

  Like a chaffinch slamming against a windowpane,

  Until at last I learned to use my blindness.

  I hung upon their words, and they always broke

  Like the old rope they were, letting me down

  Into a pit where lidless poisoners coiled:

  So was I trained to climb on my own thread.

  Love I desired, but the father I loved and hated

  Lived too much in me, and his images of me

  Fretted a frame always outgrowing them:

  I went into the wilderness bearing all

  My faults and his ambitions on my head.

  Solitude then was my métier. I wore it

  As an invisible cloak, or a glass cloche

  To save from nibbling teeth and clodhopper boots

  And focus the sun’s eye on my sullen growth.

  I kept my solitude as a young girl guards

  Virginity yet wishes it away,

  Impatient of the blossom cloud that endears her.

  The bee forces the blossom. I knew the weak

  Involuntary spasms of consent –

  Ah, coitus interruptus with a cheating world!

  I wished to commit myself to the irretrievable

  As a bee is committed to the bell, or a suicide

  Already halfway from the parapet, to the river:

  But the river whisked away and the flower turned nasty.

  Or perhaps I was a coward.

  Green boy, green boy,

  What did the lawn teach, what did the Rip Van Winkle

  Forest say, and the mellow South West town?

  Resilience first, release perhaps, the lawn.

  Morning brought tears and daisies, afternoon

  A tennis party. Athletic clergymen. Flannels –

  The uniform of a class, of a way of thinking,

  Or of not thinking: as I looked for a lost ball

  In the laurels, they smirched with pit-grime. It was good –

  The sensual leap, the stinging drive and re
turn

  Of the blood, conflict without relationship.

  I preferred singles – the world, such as it was,

  Where I wanted it, on the run, with a net between us.

  Winters, I walked much alone, rubbing my thoughts

  Together, and prayed for a spark and imagined a forest

  My tinderbox. Around me, sodden bracken:

  Overhead, interlocked branches snickering.

  A roar from a distant pithead as the cage dropped

  Like a stone into the well of an orphic mystery.

  Otherwise the forest was silent: birdless; nymphless;

  Oaks hollow as history; morose and regimented

  Conifers; birches with the hauteur of fashion-plates.

  And the silence said something, something about a wish

  To be rooted, a wish profounder than roots, more insidious:

  But the whirring wheels at the pithead, ‘Stay on the surface,

  You were not made to dip your hand in darkness

  Or hew at the mystery’s face’: and the lawn replied,

  ‘There is coal beneath us, everywhere coal, the dream

  Of the deep sleep of forests, so sleep and dream’;

  And the oaks, ‘We are hollow with unfulfilled desire –

  Hurry, all is not the same in a thousand years.’

  So I returned to school, a kaleidoscope

  Of shaken images, arguments jangling like glass.

  And the wise grey South West town claimed me, calmed me

  With the sedatives of routine, the balm of multitude.

  Snatches of wisdom borne on a wet wind

  Like bells or wood smoke or ancestral memories –

  Borne from the high, dry plateaux of reason, weathered

  To a romantic tone: and the god was reborn

  In the echo. Words unheeded but unforgotten.

  Call no man happy … Our actions burst like spray

  Upon a reef, nevertheless we must act …

  Know yourself … But knowing, do not presume

  To swerve or sweeten what is foreordained …

  For the heart, magnanimity; for the mind, good sense;

  For the soul, a natural piety; for fate,

  A stoic’s bending steel … Nothing too much.

  Pinnacles of a drowned, four-square age broke surface

  Between the waking bell and the afternoon wicket –

  Temperate isles in a distempered sea,

  Isles of the blessed, a landfall for my tossed dreams.

  Green boy, green boy, tell me your dreams.

  Sit here

  On the harbour wall with me. Look down at the water

  Swaying, impassive, transparent, evasive:

  Motiveless swaying, vibrantly motionless,

  Rumpling the olive-green and slate-blue boulders

  Fathomed below, and glossing the seaweed

  To hair hyacinthine of marble statuary.

  Look at the seabrow, puckered in sunlight,

  Jigged over by millions of sparklers for ever

  Quenched, re-illumined: and beyond the fireworks

  A swell, a haze, a forever encroaching

  Receding question. Such were my daydreams.

  Dare you interpret them? Had we not better

  Turn round to the castles of sand and the starfish

  Sunbathers? return to our spade and bucket?

  Sleepwalking with the tides, unskilled to dive

  Into the heart of my images, I practised

  Words like a secret vice: words perpetually

  Flung up, encroached on, crumbling, superseded,

  Real to me as wet sand to a child’s fingers,

  More real than the quaking asphalt of the sea front

  Or the rook-babble of bathers. Oh, innocent vice –

  Could everything be reduced to a form of words!

  But they were only a guesswork map of the terrain

  Where soon I should have to fight; or else a petition

  To be exempted. The love 1 feared and longed for

  Would come in out of the sea, a terrible sun

  Thrusting aside my screen of words, and pin me

  To the sand like a starfish, and pick my dreams

  And bleach my fears and make my dry words live.

  So, when he met a girl in the forest, he knew her

  A nymph. His random casts had found a quarry.

  The dead wood woke with her, she dappled the night wood

  With carillons of noon, siftings elusive

  Of light from the fountain of all truth and legend.

  Pursuing then, he quickened his solitude

  With a thousand images of her – images

  More real to him than the fugitive flesh that awoke them.

  Charmed life of a green boy, threading the maze

  But alone no longer! The eyes and claws drew back

  Deeper into the shade, biding their time.

  Was he hunter or hunted? He cared not.

  The pursuit led

  Out of the forest, over the lawn, past pitheads

  Where steam puffed out in a squall of imprecation,

  Through smoke-rings in college rooms and the blackened circles

  Of picnic fires, across the common and

  The garden, and over the moon, with a coursed hare’s

  Demented doublings and the closed circuit

  Of the electric hare – a thousand repetitions

  Of a routine immemorial, each unique,

  While the horn hummed like autumn in the blood

  Always a field before him, or behind him.

  The at last they came to the verge of the sea, where hunter

  And hunted face the effacing and are one.

  Marriage of Two

  So they were married, and lived

  Happily for ever?

  Such extravagant claims are not in heaven’s gift –

  Much less earth’s, where love is chanceful as weather:

  Say they were married, and lived.

  Tell me his marriage vow.

  Not the church responses,

  But alone at a window one night saying, ‘Now

  Let me be good to her, all my heart owns or wants is

  Staked on this hazardous vow.’

  When was the marriage sealed?

  One day the strange creature

  He loved was missing; he found her, concealed

  In a coign of, wearing the secret stamp of his nature.

  So matings, if ever, are sealed.

  How did the marriage end?

  Some marriages die not.

  The government goes into exile; then

  The underground struggle is on, whose fighters fly not

  Even at the bitter end.

  What is the marriage of two?

  The loss of one

  By wounds or abdication; a true

  Surrender mocked, an unwished victory won:

  Rose, desert – mirage too.

  Married Dialogue

  HE It is out at last –

  The truth that fevered my cheek and frostily glassed

  My eyes against you: a creeping

  Incurable disease, it passed

  Into your heart from mine while we were sleeping.

  SHE I dreamt of the past,

  The primrose and prairie of youth that so contrast

  With this unvernal time.

  Autumn is here too soon, the blast

  Perplexed with waftings of our violet prime.

  HE Autumn is here. But see

  With what august forgiveness the rose burns

  Her faithful torch away, and the leaf turns

  Her cheek to winter, and the tree

  Turns the wind’s edge with rags of old felicity.

  SHE There was a time when we

  Were all in all, one to another. Then

  I lived not by this ghostly regimen,

  Breathing old summers’ pot-pourri,

  Rustling the faded
hours we glowed in formerly.

  HE There was a time. But time piles flake on flake

  Lapping the traveller asleep:

  And in that sleep the heart grows numb. So we awake

  To severance. Oh deep

  The drifts between, treacherous the frozen lake!

  SHE Once I watched a young ocean laugh and shake

  With spillikins of aspen light.

  I was your sail, your keel. Nothing could overtake

  Love trimmed and stiffened aright.

  But now I drown, a white reef in your wake.

  HE No reef I saw. If we were shoaled,

  It was the ebbing of some tide within.

  But aching 1 behold

  Fingers upon a gunwale blue with cold,

  And one too weak to draw you in.

  SHE Oh crooked tide, what lies it told

  So to get round me. Then, cut off, I lay

  Weeping. And then I doled

  My scraps of you, with hopes of you consoled

  Myself, like any castaway.

  HE Love’s ruin came in love’s impenetrable disguise.

  Ivy-shoots will prise

  Apart the house they grew to adorn;

  Lulling poppies snare the corn:

  The lies bred up on truth are the worst lies.

  SHE I must live on where love first homed, though the wind cries

  Through all its crumbling eyes;

  Must walk alone the field-path where

  Our linked illusions trod on air

  And honeybeams of moonshine brushed our thighs.

  HE Where shall he roam

  Who bears old trothings like a chain abroad

  And wears a new love like a knotted cord

  Over his brow at home,

  But in some echoing limbo of the self-outlawed?

  SHE Let a new lover

  Exploit the solitudes I first explored,

  Feed on the grain I grew. Is he not scored

  And signed with me? Yes, rough or

  Smooth be his ways, my touch the contours still record.

  HE Oh perverse heart, that can forgive

  All error and misuse

  But show yourself no mercy – must you grieve

  As for a fault when love-knots lose

  Their angel hues?

  SHE Oh piteous heart, how could I blame

  You that your sighs accuse

  My lack? But would that we two were the same

  As when we thought love aye renews

  Our dawns and dews!

  The Woman Alone

  l

  Take any place – this garden plot will do