Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

1857–1934

  1

  A boy among the reeds on Severn shore

  Sound-bathing: a ghost humming his ’cello tune

  Upon the Malvern hills: and in between,

  Mostly enigma. Who shall read this score?

  The stiff, shy, blinking man in a norfolk suit:

  The martinet: the gentle-minded squire:

  The piano-tuner’s son from Worcestershire:

  The Edwardian grandee: how did they consort

  In such luxuriant themes? Not privilege

  Nor talent’s cute, obsequious ear attuned

  His soul to the striding rhythms, the unimpugned

  Melancholy of a vulgar, vivid age.

  Genius alone can move by singular ways

  Yet home to the heart of all, the common chord;

  Beat to its own time, timelessly make heard

  A long-breathed statement or a hesitant phrase.

  For me, beyond the marches of his pride,

  Through the dark airs and rose-imperial themes,

  A far West-country summer glares and glooms,

  A boy calls from the reeds on Severn side.

  2

  Orchards are in it – the vale of Evesham blooming:

  Rainshine of orchards blowing out of the past.

  The sadness of remembering orchards that never bore,

  Never for us bore fruit: year after year they fruited,

  But all, all was premature –

  We were not ripe to gather the full beauty.

  And now when I hear ‘orchards’ I think of loss, recall

  White tears of blossom streaming away downwind,

  And wish the flower could have stayed to be one with the fruit it formed.

  Oh, coolness at the core of early summers,

  Woodwind haunting those green expectant alleys,

  Our blossom falling, falling.

  Hills are in it – the Malverns, Bredon, Cotswold.

  A meadowsweetness of high summer days:

  Clovering bees, time-honeyed bells, the lark’s top C.

  Hills where each sound, like larksong, passes into light,

  And light is music all but seen.

  Dawn’s silvery tone and evening’s crimson adagio;

  Noonday on the full strings of sunshine simmering, dreaming,

  No past, no future, the pulse of time unnoticed:

  Cloud-shadows sweeping in arpeggios up the hillsides;

  Grey, muted light which, brooding on stone, tree, clover

  And cornfield, makes their colours sing most clear –

  All moods and themes of light.

  And a river – call it the Severn – a flowing-awayness.

  Bray of moonlight on water; brassy flamelets

  Of marigold, buttercup, flag-iris in water-meadows;

  Kingfishers, mayflies, mills, regattas: the ever-rolling

  Controlled percussion of thunderous weirs.

  Rivers are passionate gods: they flood, they drown,

  Roar themselves hoarse, ripple to gaiety, lull the land

  With slow movements of tender meditation.

  And in it too, in his music, I hear the famous river –

  Always and never the same, carrying far

  Beyond our view, reach after noble reach –

  That bears its sons away.

  Ideal Home

  1

  Never would there be lives enough for all

  The comely places –

  Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past –

  That lift their faces

  To be admired, murmuring ‘Live with me.’

  House with a well,

  Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing

  Woodsmoke appeal,

  Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,

  Each casts her spell.

  Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,

  Your furniture be

  Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.

  Ask for the key.

  Walk in, and take me. Then you shall live again.

  2

  … Nor lives enough

  For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones

  Promising love –

  I’ll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard

  And treasure-trove.

  With puritan scents – rosemary, thyme, verbena,

  With midnight musk,

  Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants

  Exhale at dusk,

  They lure the footloose traveller to dream of

  One fixed demesne,

  The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.

  I will remain

  Your real, your ideal property. Possess me.

  Be born again.

  3

  If only there could be lives enough, you’re wishing?…

  For one or two

  Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes

  Would hardly do:

  Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

  Such desirableness

  Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by

  Your unsuccess

  In growing your self. Rebirth needs more than a change of

  Flesh or address.

  Switch love, move house – you will soon be back where you started,

  On the same ground,

  With a replica of the old romantic phantom

  That will confound

  Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

  Fisherman and/or Fish

  There was a time when I,

  The river’s least adept,

  Eagerly leapt, leapt

  To the barbed, flirtatious fly.

  Thrills all along the line,

  A tail thrashing – the sport

  Enthralled: but which was caught,

  Which reeled the other in?

  Anglers aver they angle

  For love of the fish they play

  (Arched spine and glazing eye,

  A gasping on the shingle).

  I’ve risen from safe pools

  And gulped hook line and sinker

  (Oh, the soft merciless fingers

  Fumbling at my gills!)

  Let last time be the last time

  For me with net or gaff.

  I’ve had more than enough

  Of this too thrilling pastime.

  The river’s veteran, I

  Shall flick my rod, my fin,

  Where nothing can drag me in

  Nor land me high and dry.

  The Antique Heroes

  Faultlessly those antique heroes

  Went through their tests and paces,

  Meeting the most extraordinary phenomena

  With quite impassive faces.

  Dragons, chimeras, sirens, ogres

  Were all in the day’s work;

  From acorn to dryad, from home to the Hesperides

  No further than next week.

  There was always someone who would give them something

  Still more impossible to do,

  And a divinity on call to help them

  See the assignment through.

  The functions of the heroine were,

  Though pleasurable, more narrow –

  Receiving a god, generally Zeus,

  And breeding another hero.

  It gave life an added interest for all

  Complaisant girls, to know

  That a bull, a swan, a yokel might be

  Deity incognito.

  Scholars dispute if such tales were chiefly

  The animist’s childwise vision,

  Ancestor-snobbery, or a kind of

  Archaic science-fiction.

  Well, I have seen a clutch of hydras

  Slithering round W.C.2,

  And Odysseus striding to the airport. I think

  Those tales could be strictly true.

 
; The Graves of Academe

  The ghosts were all right till this grave-digger came

  With the rheumatic style and the missioner’s frown.

  Unpleasing, unpleasured, he lectures each shade:

  Now they ought to be dead, but they will not lie down.

  How the tall, genial spirits must laugh

  When this pocket Disposer-Supreme volunteers

  To drill and dismiss them, puts each in his place

  And lays on the tombstone a wreath of pale sneers.

  Which do we honour – a generous host,

  Or maggots puffed up by the fare he provides them?

  Ghosts whose bright presence has outlived the dawn,

  Or this channering worm that officiously chides them?

  ‘Said the Old Codger’

  When Willie Yeats was in his prime,

  Said the old codger,

  Heroic frenzy fired his verse:

  He scorned a poet who did not write

  As if he kept a sword upstairs.

  Nowadays what do we find,

  Said the old codger,

  In every bardlet’s upper room?

  – Ash in the grate, a chill-proof vest,

  And a metronome.

  The Unexploded Bomb

  Two householders (semi-detached) once found,

  Digging their gardens, a bomb underground –

  Half in one’s land, half in t’other’s, with the fence between.

  Neighbours they were, but for years had been

  Hardly on speaking terms. Now X. unbends

  To pass a remark across the creosoted fence:

  ‘Look what I’ve got!… Oh, you’ve got it too.

  Then what, may I ask, are you proposing to do

  About this object of yours which menaces my wife,

  My kiddies, my property, my whole way of life?’

  ‘Your way of life,’ says Y., ‘is no credit to humanity.

  I don’t wish to quarrel; but, since you began it, I

  Find your wife stuck-up, your children repel me,

  And let me remind you that we too have the telly.

  This bomb of mine –’

  ‘I don’t like your tone!

  And I must point out that, since I own

  More bomb than you, to create any tension

  Between us won’t pay you.’

  ‘What a strange misapprehension!’

  Says the other: ‘my portion of bomb is near

  Six inches longer than yours. So there!’

  ‘They seem,’ the bomb muttered in its clenched and narrow

  Sleep, ‘to take me for a vegetable marrow.’

  ‘It would give me,’ said X., ‘the very greatest pleasure

  To come across the fence now with my tape-measure –’

  ‘Oh no,’ Y. answered, ‘I’m not having you

  Trampling my flowerbeds and peering through

  My windows.’

  ‘Oho,’ snarled X., ‘if that’s

  Your attitude, I warn you to keep your brats

  In future from trespassing upon my land,

  Or they’ll bitterly regret it.’

  ‘You misunderstand.

  My family has no desire to step on

  Your soil; and my bomb is a peace-lover’s weapon.’

  Called a passing angel, ‘If you two shout

  And fly into tantrums and keep dancing about,

  The thing will go off. It is surely permissible

  To say that your bomb, though highly fissible,

  Is in another sense one and indivisible;

  By which I mean – if you’ll forgive the phrase,

  Gentlemen – the bloody thing works both ways.

  So let me put forward a dispassionate proposal:

  Both of you, ring for a bomb-disposal

  Unit, and ask them to remove post-haste

  The cause of your dispute.’

  X. and Y. stared aghast

  At the angel. ‘Remove my bomb?’ they sang

  In unison both: ‘allow a gang

  To invade my garden and pull up the fence

  Upon which my whole way of life depends?

  Only a sentimental idealist

  Could moot it. I, thank God, am a realist.’

  The angel fled. The bomb turned over

  In its sleep and mumbled, ‘I shall soon discover,

  If X. and Y. are too daft to unfuse me,

  How the Devil intends to use me.’

  The Christmas Rose

  What is the flower that blooms each year

  In flowerless days,

  Making a little blaze

  On the bleak earth, giving my heart some cheer?

  Harsh the sky and hard the ground

  When the Christmas rose is found.

  Look! its white star, low on earth,

  Rays a vision of rebirth.

  Who is the child that’s born each year –

  His bedding, straw:

  His grace, enough to thaw

  My wintering life, and melt a world’s despair?

  Harsh the sky and hard the earth

  When the Christmas child comes forth.

  Look! around a stable throne

  Beasts and wise men are at one.

  What men are we that, year on year,

  We Herod-wise

  In our cold wits devise

  A death of innocents, a rule of fear?

  Hushed your earth, full-starred your sky

  For a new navitity:

  Be born in us, relieve our plight,

  Christmas child, you rose of light!

  Requiem for the Living1

  REQUIEM

  Grant us untroubled rest. Our sleep is fretted,

  Anxious we wake, in our terrestrial room.

  What wastes the flesh, what ticks below the floor will

  Abort all futures, desecrate the tomb.

  Let healing grace now light upon us. All flesh

  Lives with its death. But may some shaft unblind

  Soon our sick eyes, lest the death we choose to live with

  And then must die be the murder of mankind.

  Peace in our time: else upon earth a timeless

  Pause of unbeing, sterile, numb and null –

  Spiritus mundi, a smudge of breath wiped off

  Glass; earth revolving, an idiot skull.

  O living light, break through our shroud! Release

  Man’s mind, and let the living sleep in peace.

  KYRIE ELEISON

  Because we are hypnotized by a demon our will has conjured: because we play for safety with dangerous power, and dare not revoke: because we injure the tissue of creation –

  Have pity upon us.

  Whether in the pursuit of knowledge, the name of freedom, or the course of duty, I serve humanity’s programme for suicide; or whether inert I acquiesce –

  Have pity upon me.

  I am the young who have no time in trust, no time for belief; the old who reserve the sacrament of violence: I am what struts or chaffers on a crumbling edge of existence –

  Have pity upon me.

  In the hour of our death, and in the day of our judgment –

  Have pity upon us.

  DIES IRAE

  Day of wrath, oh ruthless day

  When humankind shall melt away:

  Day of wrath when in a flash

  History shall burn to ash.

  Turning keys upon the dials

  Shall unloose the furious phials;

  Then the trumpeting blasts be heard –

  Art, law, science, all absurd.

  From a lucid heaven foresee

  Monstrous that epiphany

  Of man’s calculated error

  Break in light and brood in terror:

  Skin flayed off the skeleton,

  Ghosts of men burnt into stone,

  Uberant rivers boiling dry,

  Cities sucked up into the sky.

  All too late then for repentingr />
  Of the powers we are mis-spending.

  We could only pray that doom

  Fall sheer on us and fast consume;

  Pray the loud heat-stroke spare us not

  For the soundless rain to rot

  Our angry blood, corrupt our bone –

  Remnants of life that crawl and moan;

  Spare us not to see this earth

  Travail with a second birth,

  Monsters multiply and breed

  From a joyless, tainted seed.

  Look how the sun of nature dips

  Toward evil’s dark apocalypse!

  How near the ages’ growth is blighted,

  Man in his brilliancy benighted!

  Day of wrath, oh ruthless day

  When humankind shall melt away:

  Day of wrath when in a flash

  Past and future turn to ash.

  OFFERTORIUM

  O God, in whom we half believe,

  Or not believe,

  Or pray to like importunate children

  Tugging a sleeve:

  Whether man’s need created you,

  Or his creation seed from you,

  Our creeds have overshaded you

  With terror, pain and grief.

  O God, in whose mysterious name

  We men have lit

  Age after age the torturer’s flame

  And died in it:

  If you have not forsaken us,

  Rake out this burning rage from us,

  Give us concern, awake in us

  Children a holier spirit!

  The kin-dividing sovereignty

  Of pride and fear, the blasphemy

  Which is our blear-eyed apathy –

  These let us sacrifice;

  Burn up the false gods that infect

  Our soul with lies,

  Melt down the bars that cage us off

  In cells of ice.

  If you exist, if heed our cares,

  If these our offerings and prayers

  Could save, if earth’s entreating heirs

  Are to be born to live –

  Spirit, in whom we half believe

  And would believe,

  Free us from fear, revive us in

  A fire of love.

  SANCTUS

  Holy this earth where unamazed we dwell –