Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Delirious mewing, thin as air,

  A wraith-like rumour, nowhere and everywhere.

  Over the hill three buzzards are wheeling

  On the glass sky their skaters’ curves.

  Each in its solemn figures-of-nought preserves

  Some thread invisible, reeling, unreeling,

  Then glides to a stop and with wings outlined

  Motionless broods there balancing on the wind.

  Often enough ere now I have eyed them –

  Those three celestial bodies appear

  Cutting their abstract figures year after year –

  But never have fathomed what instinct rides them

  Round heaven’s dome like a frozen pond,

  Nor why they are always three, and what is the bond

  Between them: although you might well surmise

  They are earth-souls doomed in their gyres to unwind

  Some tragic love-tangle wherein they had mortally pined,

  When you hear those phantom, famishing cries.

  But birds are birds. No human key

  Of fond frustration unites the haunting three.

  Wild natures, kin to all cageless things –

  Thistledown, grass and cloud – yet mewing

  So ghostly, no prey nor animal need pursuing

  In those pure rings and hoverings,

  I watch the angelic pastime until

  I seem to know what is beyond the hill.

  A Hard Frost

  A frost came in the night and stole my world

  And left this changeling for it – a precocious

  Image of spring, too brilliant to be true:

  White lilac on the windowpane, each grass-blade

  Furred like a catkin, maydrift loading the hedge.

  The elms behind the house are elms no longer

  But blossomers in crystal, stems of the mist

  That hangs yet in the valley below, amorphous

  As the blind tissue whence creation formed.

  The sun looks out, and the fields blaze with diamonds.

  Mockery spring, to lend this bridal gear

  For a few hours to a raw country maid,

  Then leave her all disconsolate with old fairings

  Of aconite and snowdrop! No, not here

  Amid this flounce and filigree of death

  Is the real transformation scene in progress,

  But deep below where frost

  Worrying the stiff clods unclenches their

  Grip on the seed and lets our future breathe.

  The Christmas Tree

  Put out the lights now!

  Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled

  In oriole plumes of flame,

  Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled

  With stars and moons – the same

  That yesterday hid in the spinney and had no fame

  Till we put out the lights now.

  Hard are the nights now:

  The fields at moonrise turn to agate,

  Shadows are cold as jet;

  In dyke and furrow, in copse and faggot

  The frost’s tooth is set;

  And stars are the sparks whirled out by the north wind’s fret

  On the flinty nights now.

  So feast your eyes now

  On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:

  Worlds may wither unseen,

  But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,

  A phoenix in evergreen,

  And the world cannot change or chill what its mysteries mean

  To your hearts and eyes now.

  The vision dies now

  Candle by candle: the tree that embraced it

  Returns to its own kind,

  To be earthed again and weather as best it

  May the frost and the wind.

  Children, it too had its hour – you will not mind

  If it lives or dies now.

  The Chrysanthemum Show

  Here’s Abbey Way: here are the rooms

  Where they held the chrysanthemum show –

  Leaves like talons of greenfire, blooms

  Of a barbarous frenzy, red, flame, bronze –

  And a schoolboy walked in the furnace once,

  Thirty years ago.

  You might have thought, had you seen him that day

  Mooching from stall to stall,

  It was wasted on him – the prize array

  Of flowers with their resinous, caustic tang,

  Their colours that royally boomed and rang

  Like gongs in the pitchpine hall.

  Any tongue could scorch him; even hope tease

  As if it dissembled a leer:

  Like smouldering fuse, anxieties

  Blindwormed his breast. How should one feel,

  Consuming in youth’s slow ordeal,

  What flashes from flower to flower?

  Yet something did touch him then, at the quick,

  Like a premature memory prising

  Through flesh. Those blooms with the bonfire reek

  And the flaming of ruby, copper, gold –

  There boyhood’s sun foretold, retold

  A full gamut of setting and rising.

  Something touched him. Always the scene

  Was to haunt his memory –

  Not haunt – come alive there, as if what had been

  But a flowery idea took flesh in the womb

  Of his solitude, rayed out a rare, real bloom.

  I know, for I was he.

  And today, when I see chrysanthemums,

  I half envy that boy

  For whom they spoke as muffled drums

  Darkly messaging, ‘All decays;

  But youth’s brief agony can blaze

  Into a posthumous joy.’

  Two Songs

  Written to Irish Airs

  ‘LOVE WAS ONCE LIGHT AS AIR’ (Air: Dermott)

  Love was once light as air

  Brushed over all my thoughts and themes;

  Love once seemed kind as air

  When the dewfall gleams.

  Now he’s another thing –

  Naked light, oh hard to bear,

  Too much discovering

  With his noonday beams.

  Long had I sought for you,

  Long, long by subtle masks delayed:

  Fair shapes I thought were you

  On my green heart played.

  Now love at his height informs

  All that was so vague to view,

  Shall not those slighter forms

  In his noon hour fade?

  Fade they then fast as snow

  When April brings the earth to light,

  One shape – alas ’tis so –

  Still lingers white:

  One heart-wrung phantom still,

  One I would not tell to go,

  Shadows my noontime still

  And haunts my night.

  ‘OH LIGHT WAS MY HEAD’ (Air: St. Patrick’s Day)

  Oh light was my head as the seed of a thistle

  And light as the mistletoe mooning an oak,

  I spoke with the triton, I skimmed with the nautilus,

  Dawn was immortal as love awoke.

  But when a storm began to blow

  My thistle was dashed, my tree laid low,

  My folk of the wave went down to their deep, so I

  Frown on a thistledown floating capriciously,

  Scorn as mere fishes the folk of the sea,

  Agree the renowned golden bough is a parasite,

  Love but a gallous-eyed ghost for me.

  Ah, fooled by the cock at the cool of the morning

  And fooled by the fawning mirage of the day,

  I say that I’m truly well rid of this featherwit –

  Reason has tethered it down in clay.

  But when the light begins to go,

  When shadows are marching heel and toe,

  When day is a heap of ashes, I know that I’ll

&n
bsp; Ride to love’s beam like a barque at her anchorage,

  Glide on the languorous airs of the past,

  For fast as the pride of our reason is waning,

  Old follies returning grow wise at last.

  Minor Tragedy

  Hundreds went down to the ocean bed,

  Hundreds fell from the sky,

  The shades in the street thickened,

  Blood stood in every eye.

  Oh kiss me or I’ll die, she said,

  Kiss me or I’ll die!

  He took a shadow into the bed

  Where she had drained him dry:

  With words that buzzed like bullets

  She pinned him to a lie.

  Don’t kiss me or I’ll die, she said,

  Don’t kiss me or I’ll die!

  Thousands twined on the ocean bed,

  Thousands burned in the sky:

  Nursing a spent bullet

  He let the world go by,

  And I’ll kiss it till I die, he said,

  Kiss it till I die!

  On the Sea Wall

  As I came to the sea wall that August day,

  One out of all the bathers there

  Beckoned my eye, a girl at play

  With the surf-flowers. Was it the dark, dark hair

  Falling Egyptian-wise, or the way

  Her body curved to the spray? –

  I know not. Only my heart was shaking

  Within me, and then it stopped; as though

  You were dead and your shape had returned to haunt me

  On the very same spot where, five years ago,

  You slipped from my arms and played in the breaking

  Surges to tease and enchant me.

  I could not call out. Had there been no more

  Than those thickets of rusty wire to pen us

  Apart, I’d have gone to that girl by the shore

  Hoping she might be you. But between us

  Lie tangled, severing, stronger far,

  Barbed relics of love’s old war.

  Ewig

  Multitudes of corn

  Shock-still in July heat,

  Year upon foaming year

  Of may and meadowsweet –

  Soon, soon they fleet.

  So many words to unsay,

  So much hue and cry

  After a wisp of flame,

  So many deaths to die

  Ere the heart runs dry.

  All Gone

  The sea drained off, my poverty’s uncovered –

  Sand, sand, a rusted anchor, broken glass,

  The listless sediment of sparkling days

  When through a paradise of weed joy wavered.

  The sea rolled up like a blind, oh pitiless light

  Revealing, shrivelling all! Lacklustre weeds

  My hours, my truth a salt-lick. Love recedes

  From rippled flesh bared without appetite.

  A stranded time, neap and annihilation

  Of spirit. Gasping on the inglorious rock,

  I pray the sea return, even though its calm

  Be treachery, its virtue a delusion.

  Put forth upon my sands, whether to mock,

  Revive or drown, a liberating arm!

  The Neurotic

  The spring came round, and still he was not dead.

  Skin of the earth deliciously powdered

  With buttercups and daisies – oh, Proserpina

  Refreshed by sleep, wild-cherry-garlanded

  And laughing in the sallies of the willow-wren!

  With lambs and lilies spring came round again.

  Who would suppose, seeing him walk the meadows,

  He walks a treadmill there, grinding himself

  To powder, dust to greyer dust, or treads

  An invisible causeway lipped by chuckling shadows?

  Take his arm if you like, you’ll not come near him.

  His mouth is an ill-stitched wound opening: hear him.

  ‘I will not lift mine eyes unto the hills

  For there white lambs nuzzle and creep like maggots.

  I will not breathe the lilies of the valley

  For through their scent a chambered corpse exhales.

  If a petal floats to earth, I am oppressed.

  The grassblades twist, twist deep in my breast.’

  The night came on, and he was still alive.

  Lighted tanks of streets a-swarm with denizens

  Darting to trysts, sauntering to parties.

  How all the heart-fires twinkle! Yes, they thrive

  In the large illusion of freedom, in love’s net

  Where even the murderer can act and the judge regret.

  This man who turns a phrase and twiddles a glass

  Seems far from that pale muttering magician

  Pent in a vicious circle of dilemmas.

  But could you lift his blue, thick gaze and pass

  Behind, you would walk a stage where endlessly

  Phantoms rehearse unactable tragedy.

  ‘In free air captive, in full day benighted,

  I am as one for ever out of his element

  Transparently enwombed, who from a bathysphere

  Observes, wistful, amazed, but more affrighted,

  Gay fluent forms of life weaving around,

  And dares not break the bubble and be drowned.’

  His doomsdays crawled like lava, till at length

  All impulse clogged, the last green lung consumed,

  Each onward step required the sweat of nightmare,

  Each human act a superhuman strength …

  And the guillemot, clotted with oil, droops her head.

  And the mouse between the elastic paws shams dead.

  Death mask of a genius unborn:

  Tragic prince of a rejected play:

  Soul of suffering that bequeathed no myth:

  A dark tower and a never-sounded horn. –

  Call him what we will, words cannot ennoble

  This Atlas who fell down under a bubble.

  Two Travellers

  One of us in the compartment stares

  Out of his window the whole day long

  With attentive mien, as if he knows

  There is hid in the journeying scene a song

  To recall or compose

  From snatches of vision, hints of vanishing airs.

  He’ll mark the couched hares

  In grass whereover the lapwing reel and twist:

  He notes how the shockheaded sunflowers climb

  Like boys on the wire by the railway line;

  And for him those morning rivers are love-in-a-mist,

  And the chimneystacks prayers.

  The other is plainly a man of affairs,

  A seasoned commuter. His looks assert,

  As he opens a brief-case intent on perusing

  Facts and figures, he’d never divert

  With profitless musing

  The longest journey, or notice the dress it wears.

  Little he cares

  For the coloured drift of his passage: no, not a thing

  Values in all that is hurrying past,

  Though dimly he senses from first to last

  How flaps and waves the smoke of his travelling

  At the window-squares.

  One is preoccupied, one just stares,

  While the whale-ribbed terminus nears apace

  Where passengers all must change, and under

  Its arch triumphal quickly disperse.

  So you may wonder,

  Watching these two whom the train indifferently bears,

  What each of them shares

  With his fellow-traveller, and which is making the best of it,

  And whether this or the other one

  Will be justified when the journey’s done,

  And if either may carry on some reward or regret for it

  Whither he fares.

  Seen From The Train

  Somewhere between Crewkerne
r />   And Yeovil it was. On the left of the line

  Just as the crinkled hills unroll

  To the plain. A church on a small green knoll –

  A limestone church,

  And above the church

  Cedar boughs stretched like hands that yearn

  To protect or to bless. The whole

  Stood up, antique and clear

  As a cameo, from the vale. I swear

  It was not a dream. Twice, thrice had I found it

  Chancing to look as my train wheeled round it.

  But this time I passed,

  Though I gazed as I passed

  All the way down the valley, that knoll was not there,

  Nor the church, nor the trees it mounded.

  What came between to unsight me?…

  But suppose, only suppose there might be

  A secret look in a landscape’s eye

  Following you as you hasten by,

  And you have your chance –

  Two or three chances

  At most – to hold and interpret it rightly,

  Or it is gone for aye.

  There was a time when men

  Would have called it a vision, said that sin

  Had blinded me since to a heavenly fact.

  Well, I have neither invoked nor faked

  Any church in the air,

  And little I care

  Whether or no I shall see it again.

  But blindly my heart is racked

  When I think how, not twice or thrice,

  But year after year in another’s eyes

  I have caught the look that I missed today

  Of the church, the knoll, the cedars – a ray

  Of the faith, too, they stood for,

  The hope they were food for,

  The love they prayed for, facts beyond price –

  And turned my eyes away.

  Outside and In

  How pretty it looks, thought a passer-by –

  That cyclamen on her windowsill:

  Flowers flushed like the butterfly kisses of sleep that illumine

  A child’s alabaster cheek.

  She who set it there must have warm hopes to bloom in,

  So happy it looks, thought the passer-by,

  On the newcomer’s windowsill.