Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Heart would be spared the throes of departure and anticipation,

  The tug-of-war in the tensile flesh between near and far,

  The sense of all routes leading to a scheduled anti-climax

  Because what they lead away from seems now, too late, the nonpareil

  The truly virgin place.

  HARRY Yes, travel is travail: a witless

  Ordeal of self-abasement to an irreversible process.

  It would be nice, waking as it were from twilight sleep, to

  Find the new bourne beside one.

  TOM But you never can skip the process

  And reach a conclusion, the one is woven into the other

  Like hues of a shot-silk rainbow: apart from which, your analogy

  Falls to the ground – we shall not, I presume, give birth to Italy.

  DICK But we should give body to our so tentative viewpoints of it

  HARRY Or rather conceive a self, hitherto inconceivable, through it.

  TOM Both of you ask too much. I’ll be quite happy, taking Snapshots.

  DICK I shall develop and print them.

  HARRY I shall mount them.

  And after a year or two fetching the album out again,

  Snapshot or time exposure, in every scene, among each group

  Posed before pillars, informally strolling across a piazza,

  We’ll see, oh yes we shall see them, the usual boring intruders –

  Spirits or ectoplasm, who cares? – spoiling the brilliant

  Occasion like long-lost cousins or hangovers out of the future,

  Whether from Dick’s chemicals or Tom’s automatic choice

  Of the haunted subject.

  TOM I don’t deny my photographs would be

  More satisfactory if you two could stop interfering.

  What with Dick’s fancy touches and Harry’s insufferable habit

  Of scribbling captions across them which later become obsessions –

  Spirits or ectoplasm, who cares? – no wonder if

  The results are not

  DICK There would be no results but for my dark-room,

  Where negatives lie steeped in a warm solution, passing

  The acid test of Lethe, to emerge with the self-assurance

  Of memories; but for this hand that ever so lightly brushes

  Over your brash impressions the dove-downed, hallowing haze.

  What if I do touch up now and then a defective feature? –

  There is no law against putting the best face on experience.

  HARRY No law to say we must grind the cornfields into vitamins,

  Reduce the grape to a formula, express the olive in terms of

  Statistics. It is deplorable, yes, and against nature:

  Nevertheless, one does it, being of a generation

  Whose only faith is the piling of fact on fact, in the hope that

  Some day a road may be built of them and may lead somewhere.

  TOM In the meanwhile, we go to Italy: Dick, with his decadent craving

  For perfection at any price, who cannot pass by an arc

  Without officiously filling in the rest of the circle;

  Harry whose conscience bids him take the round world to pieces

  And ticket each stone for the use of a possibly grateful posterity;

  And I who, with your permission, intend just to enjoy myself.

  DICK But even you have been taught the simpler associations –

  For example, mouth and famine, lily and corpse, bambino

  And bomb – to say nothing of odi et amo – which stand in the light of

  Enjoyment pure and simple. Travellers can’t be choosers

  Any more than the stay-at-homes.

  HARRY No, man’s gleaming aspirations

  Are endlessly batted down as telegraph wire by the poles

  When you look from a train window, everywhere and for ever

  Abased his soaring creeds by the very proofs which support them.

  Yet still we aspire. Each journey’s a bid for the empyrean

  Of Absolute freedom, whether we fly to the ends of the earth

  Or take a week-end ticket to Clacton; and as certainly

  We are twitched back on the thread reeled out from our ruling passion.

  TOM All the more reason for going abroad with a tabula rasa,

  Not trailing clouds of vainglory or the old tin can of conscience.

  Granted we cannot entirely escape ourselves, and granted

  That up to a point we can only see what we’re bound to look for,

  Still, there is such a thing as simple impressionability,

  A sense in which form and colour are more than mere dreams of our senses,

  A moment – though rare – when the lily speaks for itself alone

  And the babe’s ephemeral laughter chimes with eternity.

  DICK And another thing: when the new place, mysteriously conveying

  A promise of maiden surrender and morning glory, invites us,

  We are wax in her hands for a little, our former loves effaced,

  Ready to take her seal, to believe the rewarding fallacy

  That this is it at last, that this time all will be different;

  And we really may find the knack of pure freedom, pure submission,

  Whereby a miraculous rebirth is possible – find it

  Before the displaced selves crowd back to declare us impotent.

  HARRY Since you two appear in agreement on this, the logical next step

  Is to unpack our preconceptions and leave them behind here,

  Discarding whatever might come between us and the naked fact.

  TOM Myself, I have always travelled light – eyes, ears, nose, fingers,

  And one thing more, I carry. Now Dick, you’ll have to jettison

  Time, whose ripple prettifies the weed which fouls it, and flaws

  The willow it images.

  DICK Time, without which there could be no images? –

  You might as well go abroad without an interpreter – you, Tom,

  Who don’t know a word in any tongue but your own. Now Harry

  Has much he should lighten his bag of; props, probes and provisos;

  The impressive manner he wears while wooing the heiress, Truth;

  And of course the instruments he will presently use to dissect her.

  HARRY Your programmes are too ambitious. I only meant to suggest

  We should expose the Italy faked by our fraudulent vision,

  Tear up the glowing prospectus that pictured a heaven on earth

  TOM Confess why we are going and what we expect to find there?

  DICK Rub out the shadow our ego projects? Make a clean sheet of Italy?

  HARRY Yes, a cadenza from each on this fantasy movement. We have

  Ten minutes until our flight-number is called. Let Tom begin.

  TOM First, a great Elgarian clash and bray of sunshine

  Throwing open the day, blaring a paeony fanfare

  Through flesh and blood, throwing wide the earth – a fabulous mansion

  Where every maid is a gift, every moment a pulse in a fun-fair.

  None of your fairy gold! The real, royal, vulgar pageant –

  Time flung like confetti or twirled in rosettes – was never too garish

  For me. How much better than your dim flounderings toward some imagined

  Immortal star, to flare like a firework and goldenly perish!

  Mornings, I ask a cloudless sky; or if clouds there must be,

  Billowy suds that have scoured the sky bluer than corn-flowers:

  Acacia and lemon-blossom shall drench me, mimosa dust me,

  Violet and rose be banked along my sauntering hours.

  Noon shall stand as long as I fancy, and tall as houses –

  A fountain pluming itself upon the enchanted air:

  Afternoon shall sleep with the goat-flock villages drowsing

  Lightly, precipice-high, or deep
in shuttered squares.

  Ah, but the nights! I see them festooned in a long fiesta –

  Mediterranean nights that will send me spinning and flying

  With the waltz of a purple Maelstrom, the arrowy glide of a Cresta.

  Here’s to the masks and the music, the dancers ebbing and flowing!

  Let fairy-lit streets run wine through the veins like a ride on a scenic

  Railway! and then the ravishing flesh of girls consume me

  Flame upon flame to scented ashes, and I a phoenix!

  Yes, one thing I know: it’s the sting of strangeness renews me.

  Listen, the bells tumble from a humming campanile

  With a dull pot-and-pan clang: those two at the table – the cadence

  Is unfamiliar they talk in: banal their gist, but to me they

  Are speaking, lover and carillon, with the tongues of angels.

  I do not wish to dig down to the sullen roots of existence

  Where one clod’s the same as the next, or to tangle myself in humanity’s

  Fretted heart-strings: not here lies the world of essential difference,

  But above, in the bloom, the spectrum, the transient flavours and vanities.

  Therefore I’d browse on the skin of things, the delicate field of

  Diversity, skimming gold from the buttercup, dust from the nettle.

  I, the merely sensual man, have a scope undreamed of

  By you whom a larger ambition drives to discard or belittle

  Appearance. And so I ask of Italy nothing more than

  Mere foreignness, the shock and buoyant feel of the unknown,

  And quivering over its surface an irridescent path, an

  Arrow to point me, the eternal tripper, away from home.

  DICK Different my nature, my needs. I journey as a colonial

  Reaching across generations to find the parent stock,

  As a child setting out to colour a black-and-white picture book,

  A priest entering into the spirit of dead ceremonial …

  They have been dormant so long, the ghosts that were used to school us:

  Deep-buried as once Pompeii the classroom walls with their jaded

  Photos of classical ruin, of statues leprous, abraded.

  Did ever those dry bones live? And instantly Ovid, Catullus

  Wild for his Lesbia, Virgil, Lucretius – sports of a prosy

  Marble-eyed, muscle-bound people – emerge from the shades to claim one.

  Ancestor worship’s a form of self-seeking: all the same, one

  Is grateful to those who had no immediate hand in our crazy

  Present: the Romans at any rate did manage to keep the peace,

  Off and on. But that’s by the way. Some breathing counterpart

  I want for a dead language years ago learnt by heart,

  Some vista shaped and haunted by youthful pieties.

  Immortal landscape of a day, for ever dreaming

  In haze of summers half imagined, half remembered!

  Meek-swarded, comely pastoral where nymph and shepherd

  Still twine two worlds in a dance! Demesne of phantoms, teeming

  With myrtle, vine and olive, pied with fact and fable!

  Hero, god, or brute, all hold to the light their antique

  Self-sufficiency – a grace which no romantic

  Yearnings can discompose nor withering years enfeeble.

  Such is the foreground. Behind it vaporously writhes a spectacular

  Region of mounting disquiet, dark meaning, where lie concealed

  A lake that shoots down birds with a whiff of the underworld;

  Proserpine’s trapdoor; a gorge rumbling in tones oracular;

  A forest of shadows juddering athwart the golden bough.

  Is it I they wait for, the feudal lords of light and mystery

  Their kingdoms to unite? Is it they who shall assist me

  To define, or abolish, the frontier between my Then and my Now?

  There was a time of substance and shadow richly confused,

  When a dry Tuscan evelight engraved the cricket-ground

  And my study shafted towards the black diamonds and dene profound

  Of Pluto: then the beam went, the pit fell into disuse.

  If I could find that place where nymph and shepherd meet

  And the distance melts into deity, I would unearth my buried

  Heirlooms, my sealed orders. Genius of the place, remarry

  These sundered elements, make one circle at last complete!

  HARRY A landscape I also may look for: a town in fiesta would do

  Equally well for the purpose this traveller has in view.

  Let me try to explain myself-both artist and analyst; hence

  For me the approach that in others would be pure innocence

  Were wild irresponsibility. Think! The desirable villa

  Haunted by princes, hallowed with cypresses, there on a hillside

  Ultimately reduces to a vulgar hop of electrons:

  I see the revellers, masked and articulate for faction;

  Your language of bells and lovers I hear, but as workable fictions.

  Since all strips down to motion, and all’s in a state of becoming,

  Whoever would master the truth by which your provocative, charming

  Strip-tease universe lives, ideally should be at rest

  Himself; at any rate disinterested, unimpressed.

  And that is why I am far from being a keen traveller.

  On the other hand, I admit one cannot hope to unravel

  Experience unless one is to a certain degree involved.

  Is there a method by which, then, a mutable self may resolve

  And fix the ever-changing? Let us try an experiment – briefly

  The playing a trick on time. Help me, you two, to achieve it.

  To see as it were from the far end of a cypress walk of bereavement,

  Or the eyrie of ten years hence! For look, how the terraced garden,

  Statues, orange trees, villa, unfocused now by sudden

  Tremors – the whole prospect fidgets, vibrates, wavers,

  Collapsing always with the present. But if upon that fevered

  Hill brow, my brow, should once be laid grief’s cooling hand,

  Dance and dissolution would come to a dead stand.

  Memory needs time before the outraged dwelling, love’s centre,

  Purified, tear upon tear, shines forth like a shell of candour,

  And all around, elegiac in evergreen, new contours

  Idealize the old agony. But I have to induce

  Years from a moment: therefore I must predicate loss.

  Let me take some figure of the dance, so fleetingly fiercely exulting

  That it quickens the seed of loss, my seed, and itself is halted

  And magnified thus, a still from the moving picture, framed

  In parting’s hard embrace some beauty, flushed, fleshed, tamed.

  Separation’s my metier, then, sifting through form the formless:

  Creation my end, to subdue and liberate time in the timeless.

  I find the whole in elusive fragments: let one be caught

  And profoundly known – that way, like a skeleton key, the part

  May unlock the intricate whole. What else is the work of art?

  PART TWO

  Flight to Italy

  The winged bull trundles to the wired perimeter.

  Cumbrously turns. Shivers, brakes clamped,

  Bellowing four times, each engine tested

  With routine ritual. Advances to the runway.

  Halts again as if gathering heart

  Or warily snuffing for picador cross-winds.

  Then, then, a roar open-throated

  Affronts the arena. Then fast, faster

  Drawn by the magnet of his idée fixe,

  Head down, tail up, he’s charging the horizon.

  And the grass of the airfield grows smoo
th as a fur.

  The runway’s elastic and we the projectile;

  Installations control-tower mechanics parked aeroplanes –

  Units all woven to a ribbon unreeling,

  Concrete melts and condenses to an abstract

  Blur, and our blood thickens to think of

  Rending, burning, as suburban terraces

  Make for us, wave after wave.

  The moment

  Of Truth is here. We can only trust,

  Being as wholly committed to other hands

  As a babe at birth, Europa to the bull god.

  And as when one dies in his sleep, there’s no divining

  The instant of take-off, we who were earth-bound

  Are air-borne, it seems, in the same breath.

  The neutered terraces subside beneath us.

  Bank and turn, bank and turn,

  Air-treading bull, my silver Alitalia!

  Bank and turn, while the earth below

  Swings like a dial on the wing-tip’s axis,

  Whirls and checks like a wheel of chance!

  Now keep your course! On azure currents

  Let the wings lift and sidle drowsily –

  A halcyon rocked by the ghost of the gale.

  To watchers in Kent you appear as a quicksilver

  Bead skimming down the tilted sky;

  To the mild-eyed aircrew, an everyday office:

  To us, immured in motion, you mean

  A warm womb pendant between two worlds.

  O trance prenatal and angelic transport!

  Like embryos curled in this aluminium belly –

  Food and oxygen gratis – again

  We taste the pure freedom of the purely submissive,

  The passive dominion of the wholly dependent.

  Through heaven’s transparent mysteries we travel

  With a humdrum of engines, the mother’s heartbeat:

  And our foreshadowed selves begin to take shape, to be

  Dimly adapted to their destination.

  What migrant fancies this journeying generates! –

  Almost we imagine a metempsychosis.

  Over the Channel now, beneath the enchanting

  Inane babble of a baby-blue sky,

  We soar through cloudland, at the heights of nonsense.

  From a distance they might be sifted-sugar-drifts,