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Complete Poems

Page 28

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  A step – no further.

  Is it hard to go?

  Ask the melting snow,

  The eddying feather.

  What can I take there?

  Not a hank, not a hair.

  What shall I leave behind?

  Ask the hastening wind,

  The fainting star.

  Shall I be gone long?

  For ever and a day.

  To whom there belong?

  Ask the stone to say,

  Ask my song.

  Who will say farewell?

  The beating bell.

  Will anyone miss me?

  That I dare not tell –

  Quick, Rose, and kiss me.

  1 The third stanza is on CDL’s tombstone in Dorset.

  New Year’s Eve

  ODE

  The moon slides through a whey of cloud; the running

  Cloud thins over the moon, and again curdles.

  Milk of the word, flow!

  Shine forth, my shadowed clay!

  A five-bell peal stumbles up from the valley;

  The midnight constellations mass their fire.

  Aspire, my blindworm heart!

  Arrogant heart, be humble!

  The midnight constellations hold their fire,

  The bells ring up to volley a new year in.

  Now comes the zero between

  Desire and resignation,

  Between cast-iron past and plastic future;

  But equally, haunters of this unnatural pause,

  Remorse for what is to be,

  Doubt of all that has passed.

  Moon-floods heighten the valley with glimmerings like

  The feel of a memory before it is born:

  The stars burn to deliver

  Their pregnant souls of the dying.

  We are caught, all of us, in time’s fine net,

  Walled up in time: yet still we seek a secret

  Spring, a weak mesh, where we may

  Break out and be immortal.

  So conscience, need, imagination pierce

  An arbitrary point between two years:

  The fabric tears; but in truth

  It is we, not time, who bleed.

  We lament not one year only

  Gone with its chance and change

  Disavowed, its range of blessings unbought or unpaid for,

  But all our time lost, profitless, misspent.

  Through this pinprick, like life-blood,

  The ghosts of time we killed

  Spill out – an age coarse custom has buried alive,

  And sightless hours, and pallor of weeks unquickened.

  Cuckoophrase of children

  In their green enchantment

  Where slanting beams fall warm and cool as larksong –

  A woodnote rill unheard through afterdays.

  Unseen the sunburst Aprils

  And the bloomed Octobers –

  Oh, tremulous rivers danced by primula light!

  Oh, blaze of marigold where love has been!

  The holly fire unfelt,

  The snowmaid left asleep,

  The cheap, the rare joy thrown away half-eaten,

  The nimbus round each truth-pang unacknowledged.

  Unfelt, unseen, unheard

  So much that would have ripened

  An open heart, and left a sweet taste there

  After its blossomy aura was dispelled.

  But, if the fluent senses

  So often are benumbed,

  What has our fumbling virtue to look back on?

  How much has it passed up, mishandled, ruined!

  Tonight, as flyers stranded

  On a mountain, the battery fading, we tap out

  Into a snow-capped void our weakening

  Vocations and desires.

  Bound by the curse of man –

  To live in his future, which is to live surely

  In his own death – we endure the embrace of the present

  But yearn for a being beyond us;

  Beyond our powers and our time,

  Behind the pinnacle stars, the horizon sleep,

  Beneath the deepest kiss of heaven’s azure

  And the roots of Atlantis flowers.

  Into the blue we project

  Our dreaming shadows. And is the hope forlorn

  That in them we may be reborn, that our images

  More masterful are, more true

  Than we? The bells upclamouring

  Like hungry beaks from a nest, the eyes that strain

  To read the stars – vainly still they implore

  Eternity to reveal

  The virgin truths it is sworn

  By its own laws to guard. … Then turn away

  Before the star-scape blinds or the moon maddens.

  Earth is your talent. Use it.

  Ring bells for here and now.

  Time’s your condition; and in time alone

  May man, full grown, reach out over the void

  A rapt, creator’s wing.

  MEDITATION

  At a junction of years I stand, with the stars palsied

  And the bells stumbling o’er me;

  My life a pinprick in time, and half a lifetime

  At the very most before me.

  The trembling stars, the cracked bells tongue in chorus,

  ‘Begone! It is better to go

  Not when the going but the staying is good.’

  I have suspected so

  Often enough, looking down from a height of love

  On the flats it momently crowned,

  Looking up from the workaday, golden, orthodox level

  To the bluffs and the terrors beyond.

  But living becomes a habit, like any other

  No easier to break than to sanction;

  It numbs the sense and dissembles the earth’s raw features

  With action drifted on action:

  Till at last, as a child picking flowers near home, from flower to

  Flower enticed, will find

  Himself the next moment lost in another country;

  As, when a hill’s undermined,

  A windowframe jammed or a door flying open tell one

  The hill has invisibly moved: –

  So we look up one day and see we are dying

  From the difference in all we have loved.

  If I balance the year’s account, in the right-hand column

  What new assets are shown?

  One cloud left behind in a cloudless sky, like a plume

  From a white May-day long flown:

  One elm ash-budded with starlings which brassily jingled

  Like a sack of curtain-rings shaken:

  Some nights when thought of my love was sweet as a child’s

  Birthday to dream of, to wake on.

  What can a few such casual entries amount to

  Against the perpetual drain

  Of the real into abstractions – life just jetting

  And falling in a fountain’s rain?

  And then, the expansive follies, the petty withdrawals

  Swelling an overdraft

  I must carry forward to next year, not to be cancelled

  By any godsend or graft.

  Look at this left-hand column! Does it read like

  A soul whose credit is good? –

  This mind wasting on wildcat speculation

  Half it has understood;

  This man for ever trimming, tacking and wearing.

  His truth to keep the capricious

  Wind of a woman’s favour; this heart by turns

  Too gullible, too suspicious?

  Lost, profitless, misspent – how can last year’s self

  Gratify or engross,

  Unless you believe that, by spiritual accountings,

  The profit is in the loss?

  Turn to the future, you say: plan to improve:

  Tonight we make good resolutions.

  But I would plan for the prese
nt, and this involves

  Such a whirl of lightning decisions

  And intuitions, that for the nearest distance

  I’d have not a glance to spare.

  Let them take their turn, I say – the unborn roses,

  The morrows foul or fair;

  Let them wait their turn, those siren hills exhaling

  A violet fluorescence,

  The one-eyed cannibals and the horned dilemmas –

  All, all that is not Presence.

  Our fear makes myths of the future, even as our love does

  Of the past: and, I ask myself, how

  Can I face a mythical future unless I am armed

  Cap-à-pie in a magical Now?

  Invulnerable Now, my saviour, always

  Dying, but never dead!

  My winged shoes, my clairvoyant shield, my cap of

  Darkness upon the head!

  Yet the Now is a ghost too, fleetingly glimpsed at the turn

  Of an agony, or in the lee of

  A joy, for ever vanishing through some secret

  Door that I have not the key of-

  An unborn thing, a ghost of the real miscarried

  By accident or neglect –

  Unless it is free to drink my living blood

  And in my flesh to be decked:

  My flesh and blood, themselves a web of experience

  Discarded, renewed, amassed.

  Ah no, the present is nothing unless it is spun from

  A live thread out of the past,

  As the clarinet airs of the early morn are echoed

  By eve’s full-hearted strings,

  As the stars and the bells in April grass foreshadow

  Winter’s pure crystallings.

  There are September mornings when every shrub

  Sparkles an hour and dances

  Spangled with diamond parures, for a heavy dew

  Makes visible and enhances

  The spider webs. Oh fleeting, magical Presence!

  Oh time-drops caught in a few

  Workaday filaments! Nevertheless, the spider

  Spins not to catch the dew.

  To live the present then, not to live for it –

  Let this be one of today’s

  Resolutions; and the other, its corollary,

  To court the commonplace.

  Whatever is common to life’s diversity must,

  For me, be the one eternal

  Truth, or if naught is for ever, at least the medium

  Wherein I may best discern all

  The products of time, embalmed, alive, or prefigured.

  Let me brood on the face of a field,

  The faces in streets, until each hero is honoured,

  Each unique blade revealed.

  Alluring the past, the future, their bright eyes veiled

  Or enlarged in a mist of fable:

  But he who can look with the naked eye of the Now –

  He is the true seer, able,

  To witness the rare in the common, and read the common

  Theme for all time appointed

  To link our variations … And though my todays are

  Repetitive, dull, disjointed,

  I must continue to practise them over and over

  Like a five-finger exercise,

  Hoping my hands at last will suddenly flower with

  Passion, and harmonize.

  Emily Brontë

  All is the same still. Earth and heaven locked in

  A wrestling dream the seasons cannot break:

  Shrill the wind tormenting my obdurate thorn trees,

  Moss-rose and stone-chat silent in its wake.

  Time has not altered here the rhythms I was rocked in,

  Creation’s throb and ache.

  All is yet the same, for mine was a country

  Stoic, unregenerate, beyond the power

  Of man to mollify or God to disburden –

  An ingrown landscape none might long endure

  But one who could meet with a passion wilder-wintry

  The scalding breath of the moor.

  All is yet the same as when I roved the heather

  Chained to a demon through the shrieking night,

  Took him by the throat while he flailed my sibylline

  Assenting breast, and won him to delight.

  O truth and pain immortally bound together!

  O lamp the storm made bright!

  Still on those heights prophetic winds are raving,

  Heath and harebell intone a plainsong grief:

  ‘Shrink, soul of man, shrink into your valleys –

  Too sharp that agony, that spring too brief!

  Love, though your love is but the forged engraving

  Of hope on a stricken leaf!’

  Is there one whom blizzards warm and rains enkindle

  And the bitterest furnace could no more refine?

  Anywhere one too proud for consolation,

  Burning for pure freedom so that he will pine,

  Yes, to the grave without her? Let him mingle

  His barren dust with mine.

  But is there one who faithfully has planted

  His seed of light in the heart’s deepest scar?

  When the night is darkest, when the wind is keenest,

  He, he shall find upclimbing from afar

  Over his pain my chaste, my disenchanted

  And death-rebuking star.

  Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy

  Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?

  Is it fine your way,

  With tall moon-daisies alight, and the mole

  Busy, and elegant hares at play

  By meadow paths where once you would stroll

  In the flush of day?

  I fancy the beasts and flowers there beguiled

  By a visitation

  That casts no shadow, a friend whose mild

  Inquisitive glance lights with compassion,

  Beyond the tomb, on all of this wild

  And humbled creation.

  It’s hard to believe a spirit could die

  Of such generous glow,

  Or to doubt that somewhere a bird-sharp eye

  Still broods on the capers of men below,

  A stern voice asks the Immortals why

  They should plague us so.

  Dear poet, wherever you are, I greet you.

  Much irony, wrong,

  Innocence you’d find here to tease or entreat you,

  And many the fate-fires have tempered strong,

  But none that in ripeness of soul could meet you

  Or magic of song.

  Great brow, frail frame – gone. Yet you abide

  In the shadow and sheen,

  All the mellowing traits of a countryside

  That nursed your tragi-comical scene;

  And in us, warmer-hearted and brisker-eyed

  Since you have been.

  Who Goes There?

  (FOR WALTER DE LA MARE, ON HIS 75TH BIRTHDAY)

  Who goes there?

  What sequestered vale at the back of beyond

  Do you come from – you with the moonbeam wand,

  The innocent air?

  And how got you here, spirited on like a bubble of silence past

  The quickset ears, the hair-trigger nerves at each post?

  My staff is cut from the knowledge tree.

  My place no infidel eye can see.

  My way is a nonchalant one,

  Wilful as wind yet true as the line of a bee.

  My name is – Anon,

  Are you aware

  That you’re trespassing, sir, on a battleground?

  It’s hard to see what excuse can be found

  For magicians where

  All light and airy ways must endanger the men’s morale.

  What business have you with the sturdy ranks of the real?

  I bring them dew from earth’s dayspring.

  Fire from the first wild ros
e I bring.

  And this – my deepest art –

  I bring them word from their own hungering

  Beleaguered heart.

  Pass, friend. You bear

  Gifts that, although men commonly flout them

  Being hardened, or born, to live without them,

  Are none the less rare.

  Pass, friend, and fare you well, and may all such travellers be speeded

  Who bring us news we had almost forgot we needed.

  Lines for Edmund Blunden on his Fiftieth Birthday

  Your fiftieth birthday. What shall we give you?

  An illuminated address

  Would be hard on one who was never at home with

  Pomp or pretentiousness.

  Here is a loving-cup made from verse,

  For verse is your favourite of metals:

  Imagine its stem like a tulip stalk,

  Its bowl a tulip’s petals

  And the whole as gracefully formed and charactered

  As a poem of your own.

  What shall the toast be? Fifty years more?

  A century? Let it be known

  That a true poet’s age is truthfully reckoned

  Not in years but in song:

  So we drink instead to that happy girl

  Your Muse – may she live long!

  But we pledge our love, our love for one

  Who never has burned or bowed

  To popular gods, and when fame beckons

  Modestly melts in the crowd.

  Into the crowd of your haunting fancies –

  The streams, the airs, the dews,

  The soldier shades and the solacing heartbeams –

  You melt, and fame pursues;

  And our good wishes follow you, even

  To the fortunate meadows where

  Tonight your loving-cup is raised

  By Shelley, Hunt and Clare.

  Buzzards Over Castle Hill

  A world seems to end at the top of this hill.

  Across it, clouds and thistle-clocks fly,

  And ragged hedges are running down from the sky,

  As though the wild had begun to spill

  Over a rampart soon to be drowned

  With all it guards of domesticated ground.

  It was silent here on the slope of the hill.

  But now, now, as if the wild grass

  And the wild sky had found their voices at last

  And they were one voice, there comes a shrill

 

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