Well, window, what am I meant to do
With the prospect you force me to dwell upon – this tame
And far from original aperçu?
I might take the picture for what it can say
Of immediate relevance – its planes and tones,
Though uninspiring, significant because
Like history they happened to happen that way.
Aerial, chimneypots, tree, sky, roof
Outline a general truth about towns
And living together. It should be enough,
In a fluctuating universe, to see they are there
And, short of an atom bomb, likely to stay.
But who wants truth in such everyday wear?
Shall I, then, amplify the picture? track
The roof to its quarry, the tree to its roots,
The smoke just dawdling from that chimneystack
To the carboniferous age? Shall I lift those slates
And disclose a man dying, a woman agape
With love? Shall I protract my old tree heavenwards,
Or set these aerial antennae to grope
For music inaudible, unborn yet? But why,
If one’s chasing the paradigm right forward and back,
Stop at embryo, roots, or sky?
Perhaps I should think about the need for frames.
At least they can lend us a certain ability
For seeing a fragment as a kind of whole
Without spilling over into imbecility.
Each of them, though limited its choice, reclaims
Some terra firma from the chaos. Who knows? –
Each of us may be set here, simply to compose
From a few grains of universe a finite view,
By One who occasionally needs such frames
To look at his boundless creation through?
1 This poem began as an exercise to keep the writer’s ‘muscles’ going. Like a musician or dancer, he practised daily after he’d finished a project. He had had a conversation with Kenneth Clark about the need for frames.
The Newborn
(D. M. B.: APRIL 29TH, 1957)1
This mannikin who just now
Broke prison and stepped free
Into his own identity –
Hand, foot and brow
A finished work, a breathing miniature –
Was still, one night ago,
A hope, a dread, a mere shape we
Had lived with, only sure
Something would grow
Out of its coiled nine-month nonentity.
Heaved hither on quickening throes,
Tossed up on earth today,
He sprawls limp as a castaway
And nothing knows
Beside the warm sleep of his origin.
Soon lips and hands shall grope
To try the world; this speck of clay
And spirit shall begin
To feed on hope,
To learn how truth blows cold and loves betray.
Now like a blank sheet
His lineaments appear;
But there’s invisible writing here
Which the day’s heat
Will show: legends older than language, glum
Histories of the tribe,
Directives from his near and dear –
Charms, curses, rules of thumb –
He will transcribe
In his own blood to write upon an heir.
This morsel of man I’ve held –
What potency it has,
Though strengthless still and naked as
A nut unshelled!
Every newborn seems a reviving seed
Or metaphor of the divine,
Charged with the huge, weak power of grass
To split rock. How we need
Any least sign
That our stone age can break, our winter pass!
Welcome to earth, my child!
Joybells of blossom swing,
Lambs and lovers have their fling,
The streets ran wild
With April airs and rumours of the sun.
We time-worn folk renew
Ourselves at your enchanted spring,
As though mankind’s begun
Again in you.
This is your birthday and our thanksgiving.
1 Our Son: Daniel Michael Blake Day Lewis.
Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park
FOR ROBERT FROST
A shepherd stands at one end of the arena.
Five sheep are unpenned at the other. His dog runs out
In a curve to behind them, fetches them straight to the shepherd,
Then drives the flock round a triangular course
Through a couple of gates and back to his master; two
Must be sorted there from the flock, then all five penned.
Gathering, driving away, shedding and penning
Are the plain words for the miraculous game.
An abstract game. What can the sheepdog make of such
Simplified terrain? – no hills, dales, bogs, walls, tracks,
Only a quarter-mile plain of grass, dumb crowds
Like crowds on hoardings around it, and behind them
Traffic or mounds of lovers and children playing.
Well, the dog is no landscape-fancier; his whole concern
Is with his master’s whistle, and of course
With the flock – sheep are sheep anywhere for him.
The sheep are the chanciest element. Why, for instance,
Go through this gate when there’s on either side of it
No wall or hedge but huge and viable space?
Why not eat the grass instead of being pushed around it?
Like blobs of quicksilver on a tilting board
The flock erratically runs, dithers, breaks up,
Is reassembled: their ruling idea is the dog;
And behind the dog, though they know it not yet, is a shepherd.
The shepherd knows that time is of the essence
But haste calamitous. Between dog and sheep
There is always an ideal distance, a perfect angle;
But these are constantly varying, so the man
Should anticipate each move through the dog, his medium.
The shepherd is the brain behind the dog’s brain,
But his control of dog, like dog’s of sheep,
Is never absolute – that’s the beauty of it.
For beautiful it is. The guided missiles,
The black-and-white angels follow each quirk and jink of
The evasive sheep, play grandmother’s steps behind them,
Freeze to the ground, or leap to head off a straggler
Almost before it knows that it wants to stray,
As if radar-controlled. But they are not machines –
You can feel them feeling mastery, doubt, chagrin:
Machines don’t frolic when their job is done.
What’s needfully done in the solitude of sheep-runs –
Those tough, real tasks – becomes this stylized game,
A demonstration of intuitive wit
Kept natural by the saving grace of error.
To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen
Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
Controlled woolgathering is my work too.
Circus Lion
Lumbering haunches, pussyfoot tread, a pride of
Lions under the arcs
Walk in, leap up, sit pedestalled there and glum
As a row of Dickensian clerks.
Their eyes are slag. Only a muscle flickering,
A bored, theatrical roar
Witness now to the furnaces that drove them
Exultant along the spoor.
In preyward, elastic leap they are sent through paper
Hoops at another’s will
And a whip’s crack: afterwards, in their cages
,
They tear the provided kill.
Caught young, can this public animal ever dream of
Stars, distances and thunders?
Does he twitch in sleep for ticks, dried water-holes,
Rogue elephants, or hunters?
Sawdust, not burning desert, is the ground
Of his to-fro, to-fro pacing,
Barred with the zebra shadows that imply
Sun’s free wheel, man’s coercing.
See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left – no, nor despair –
To break his teeth on the bars.
Getting Warm – Getting Cold
FOR TAMASIN1
We hid it behind the yellow cushion.
‘There’s a present for you,’ we called,
‘Come in and look for it.’ So she prowled
About the suddenly mysterious room –
‘Getting warm,’ she heard, ‘getting cold.’
She moved in a dream of discovery, searching
Table and shelf and floor –
As if to prolong the dream, everywhere
But behind that cushion. Her invisible present
Was what she lived in there.
Would she never find it? Willing her on,
We cried, ‘you’re cold, you’re warm,
You’re burning hot,’ and the little room
Was enlarged to a whole Ali Baba’s cave
By her eyes’ responsive flame.
May she keep this sense of the hidden thing,
The somewhere joy that enthralled her,
When she’s uncountable presents older –
Small room left for marvels, and none to say
‘You are warmer, now you are colder.’
1 Our daughter: Tamasin Day Lewis.
Walking Away
FOR SEAN1
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
1 C.D.L.’s first-born son.
This Young Girl1
This young girl, whose secret life
Vagues her eyes to the reflective, lucent
Look of the sky topping a distant
Down beyond which, invisible, lies the sea –
What does she mark, to remember, of the close things
That pearl-calm gaze now shines upon? …
Her mother, opening a parasol,
Drifts over the hailed-with-daisies lawn:
Head full of designs, her father
Is pinned to a drawing board: two brothers settle
For cool jazz in the barn: a little
Sister decides to become Queen Pocahontas.
Or is it the skyline viewed from her attic window
Intimating the sea, the sea
Which far off waits? or the water garden
Fluent with leaves and rivulets near by,
That will be her memory’s leitmotif?
All seems acceptable – an old house sweetened
By wood-ash, a whole family seasoned
In dear pursuits and country gentleness.
But her eyes elude, this summer’s day. Far, far
Ahead or deep within they peer,
Beyond those customary things
Towards some Golden Age, that is now, is here.
1 Written after a visit to Janet and Reynolds Stone and their four children at the Old Rectory. Litton Cheney. Dorset.
Travelling Light
Naturally, we travelled light.
What with the tide-race in the bight,
Reefs uncharted, winds contrary,
And having few goods then to carry
(Though each canoe or coracle,
Lumpish upon the inshore swell,
Seemed loaded down with just its crew)
We had to travel light. The slew
And lee-way of such primitive craft!
Anyone now would call it daft
To sail a pond in jobs like these,
But we dared breakers, promontories,
Sea monsters.
What our need had forced
On us grew second nature: first
Ventures in travelling light became
Accepted ordeals, then a game
Of self-denial, sanctified
By habit or traditional pride.
So when, resolved to sail beyond
Sheltering bays and sight of land,
We designed the prototype Argo,
There was no hold in her for cargo.
We despised the chaffering sort
Of matelot who tacks from port
To port, dodges from isle to isle,
Intent upon making his pile
And soon retiring to a villa
Well inland.
Our type of sailor
May tell you that he also lives
For landfall, profit, whores and spivs:
This is not so. To him, the thing
You voyage for is voyaging –
Purely that. I do not mean
‘To travel hopefully’: I mean
Times when horizon, heart, sky, sea
Dilate with absolute potency –
The present at its highest power,
The course in view, the wake in flower.
Argo, now. It’s undeniable
That journalists – seldom reliable,
Trained to believe the lower deck’s
Sole interests are cash and sex –
Made a good story of it: which
Was easy, given a royal witch
And a fleece of gold – indeed sensational,
With ‘palace drama’ and ‘crime passionel’
For follow-ups. But all that stuff
Is not the real issue. Sure enough
We did turn up a golden fleece –
A web of moonshine among trees –
And a witch (who had the right
Ideas about travelling light,
Pitching her brother overboard,
You argue?) No, we can afford
To jettison flesh and blood still less
Than to keep those encumbrances
Which clutter our deck – the silken sheets,
Ivories, zithers, parakeets,
And yellowing ram-skins.
Oh, you’re bound
To pick up hamper, cruising around.
Think of streamlined whales and hulls
Accumulating barnacles
By moving long enough immersed
In their own element. At first
Objects become attached to you,
Then you to them, while they accrue
Like interest on an overdraft
Draining your substance through their graft,
Until they’ve grown, with your conniving,
Reasons or substitutes for living.
When age or weakness dims the creed
Of travelling light, there’s s
till a need
To travel. Some may justify
The things that clog our vessel by
Calling them ballast. Valuing those
Objects merely as curios,
Keepsakes of voyaging, is hard.
What mariner would now discard
Things – just by-products once and proof
Of his seafaring – when they spoof
Him into thinking they must be
The end for which he put to sea?
Hear the old salt, with no dismay,
Bad faith or hesitation, say
‘That patch of moonshine among trees
Actually was the golden fleece.
It weighed five stone: and we all knew
We had done what we came to do.’
Yellowing ram-skin, silken sheets,
Ivories, zithers, parakeets –
Is it strange they assume a dearer,
A more intrinsic worth, the nearer
We approach that harsh whirlpool –
End of our voyaging – whose pull
Grows stronger daily now? Past fears,
Hopes, joys live in these souvenirs
We’ve kept; but they do not oppress
Like flesh and blood our consciences.
Let’s say they’re given us to console
The heart for being no longer whole,
For the loss of each wide hour –
The course in view, the wake in flower –
When being rose to utmost power.
Things
The woman shuffled about her room
With a shut, sleepwalking air –
A room like a million other rooms,
A nondescript woman – absently
Touching each object there.
Ornaments, hangings, furniture looked
Of little worth; and this woman
Fingering the tasteless, time-dulled things
(Vaguely? raptly?) might seem no more
Than a connoisseur of the common.
It was as though her room, her world
Had blurred with fog, and she
Was feeling her way from chair to clock,
From vase to mahogany table, less
By sight than by memory.
There was more to this touching routine than mere
Habit or pride of possessing.
As she went the rounds of her shabby room,
Her hands were lightened – the hands of one
Who gave, and received, blessing.
Complete Poems Page 40
