Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  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.