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Complete Poems

Page 44

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  Mothering earth, our food, our fabulous well –

  A mote in space, a flicker of time’s indifferent wheel.

  Holy the marigold play of evening sun

  On wall and tree, the dawn’s light-fingered run,

  Night’s muted strings, the shimmering chords of summer noon.

  Holy the salmon leaping up a fall,

  Leopard’s glide, birds and bees their seasonal

  Employ, the shy demeanour of antelope and snail.

  Praise wild, tame, common, rare – chrysanthemums

  That magnify a back-yard in the slums.

  Gentian and passion flower, primrose of deep combes.

  Praise the white orchards of the cloudful west,

  Wheat prairies with abundance in their breast,

  The seas, the mineral mountains, the jungle and the waste.

  Holy the flowering of our genial dust

  In art, law, science, raising from earth’s crust

  A testament of vision made good and truth diffused.

  Holy the climber’s grit, the athlete’s grace,

  Whippets unleashed and pigeons’ homing race,

  A stadium’s roar, a theatre’s hush – they also praise.

  Oh praise man’s mind that, questioning why things are

  And whence, haloes the moon with a new star,

  Peers into nature’s heart and cons the order there.

  Oh praise what makes us creatures breed and build

  Over death’s void, and know ourselves fulfilled

  In that age-hallowed trinity – man, woman, child.

  Holy the heights where flesh and spirit wed.

  Holy this earth, our source, our joy, our bread.

  Holy to praise man’s harvest and treasure his brave seed.

  BENEDICTUS

  Blessed are they who come

  At need, in mercy’s name

  To walk beside the lame,

  Articulate for the dumb.

  Blessed who range ahead

  Of man’s laborious trek,

  Survey marsh, desert, peak,

  Signal a way to tread.

  Blessed whose faith defies

  The mighty, welds the weak;

  Whose dreaming hopes awake

  And ring like prophecies.

  Blessed who shall release

  At this eleventh hour

  Us thralls of evil power

  And lift us into peace.

  AGNUS DEI

  O child of man,

  Wombed in dark waters you retell

  Millenniums, image the terrestrial span

  From an unwitting cell

  To the new soul within her intricate shell,

  O child of man.

  O child of man

  Whose infant eyes and groping mind

  Meet chaos and create the world again,

  You for yourself must find

  The toils we know, the truths we have divined –

  Yes, child of man.

  O child of man,

  You come to justify and bless

  The animal throes wherein your life began,

  And gently draw from us

  The milk of love, the most of tenderness,

  Dear child of man.

  So, child of man,

  Remind us what we have blindly willed –

  A slaughter of all innocents! You can

  Yet make this madness yield

  And lift the load of our stock-piling guilt,

  O child of man.

  LUX AETERNA

  Commune with the dead, the myriad commonwealth

  Of our forefathers: an earthbound family,

  But listen! remote in mind’s catacombs they whispering

  Enlighten us.

  Impalpable these: but look! they point and power us

  To destinies unknown and stellar distances;

  Transmitting the genius of generations, they

  Enlighten us.

  Life-line of heroes, god-favoured or unlucky;

  Common clay turned and fired by circumstance

  Into rare acts of exalting beauty –

  Enlighten us!

  Adventurer, heart dilated with horizons;

  Rebel, whose impious hand shaped a future piety;

  Outcast, whose wilderness rebuked your cruel kind;

  Enlighten us!

  You that envisioned order and revealed it

  In nature’s anomalies, to men’s anarchic

  Selfishness – lawgiver, scientist, artist,

  Enlighten us!

  Shepherd, husbandman, artisan, clerk – all whose

  Workaday routines kept our world in good trim:

  You ghostly ranks of the unregarded,

  Enlighten us!

  The dead are engraved in us. We till death are

  Keepers of their peace, and of their expansive

  Estate the sole trustees. Lest we betray them,

  Enlighten us!

  Little as dust-motes in the light of eternity,

  A moment they danced, but a dance momentous.

  Break we that chain now? change being to nothing?

  Angels, essences of truth, enlighten us!

  RESPONSORIUM

  Free us from fear, we cry. Our sleep is fretted,

  Anxious we wake, in our terrestrial room.

  What wastes the flesh, what ticks below the floor would

  Abort all futures, desecrate the tomb.

  Free us from fear. The shapes that loom around us

  Darkening judgment, freezing all that’s dear

  Into a pose of departure – these are shadows

  Born of man’s will and bodied by his fear.

  May the white magic of the child’s wayfaring,

  Wonderful earth – our present from the dead,

  And the long vistas of mankind slow maturing

  Lighten the heart and clear the feverish head!

  O living light, break through our shroud! Release

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

  1962

  1 After publication of The Gate Donald Swann set the Requiem to music.

  THE ROOM

  and other poems

  TO ELIZABETH BOWEN

  FABLES AND CONFESSIONS

  The Room

  FOR GEORGE SEFERIS1

  To this room – it was somewhere at the palace’s

  Heart, but no one, not even visiting royalty

  Or reigning mistress, ever had been inside it –

  To this room he’d retire.

  Graciously giving himself to, guarding himself from

  Courtier, suppliant, stiff ambassador,

  Supple assassin, into this unviewed room

  He, with the air of one urgently called from

  High affairs to some yet loftier duty,

  Dismissing them all, withdrew.

  And we imagined it suitably fitted out

  For communing with a God, for meditation

  On the Just City; or, at the least, a bower of

  Superior orgies … He

  Alone could know the room as windowless

  Though airy, bare yet filled with the junk you find

  In any child-loved attic; and how he went there

  Simply to taste himself, to be reassured

  That under the royal action and abstraction

  He lived in, he was real.

  1 Seferis (George Seferiades) was Greek Ambassador in London at this time. The conflict between the particularly public career of diplomat with the private one of poet intrigued CDL.

  On Not Saying Everything

  This tree outside my window here.

  Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,

  Has neither chance nor will to be

  Anything but a linden tree,

  Even if its branches grew to span

  The continent; for nature’s plan

  Insists that infinite extension

  Shall create no new dimension.

  Fr
om the first snuggling of the seed

  In earth, a branchy form’s decreed.

  Unwritten poems loom as if

  They’d cover the whole of earthly life.

  But each one, growing, learns to trim its

  Impulse and meaning to the limits

  Roughed out by me, then modified

  In its own truth’s expanding light.

  A poem, settling to its form,

  Finds there’s no jailer, but a norm

  Of conduct, and a fitting sphere

  Which stops it wandering everywhere.

  As for you, my love, it’s harder,

  Though neither prisoner nor warder,

  Not to desire you both: for love

  Illudes us we can lightly move

  Into a new dimension, where

  The bounds of being disappear

  And we make one impassioned cell.

  So wanting to be all in all

  Each for each, a man and woman

  Defy the limits of what’s human.

  Your glancing eye, your animal tongue,

  Your hands that flew to mine and clung

  Like birds on bough, with innocence

  Masking those young experiments

  Of flesh, persuaded me that nature

  Formed us each other’s god and creature.

  Play out then, as it should be played,

  The sweet illusion that has made

  An eldorado of your hair

  And our love an everywhere.

  But when we cease to play explorers

  And become settlers, clear before us

  Lies the next need – to re-define

  The boundary between yours and mine;

  Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.

  Each to his own identity

  Grown back, shall prove our love’s expression

  Purer for this limitation.

  Love’s essence, like a poem’s, shall spring

  From the not saying everything.

  The Way In

  The right way in would be hard to find –

  Not for want of a door, but because there were so many,

  Each commanding a different kind

  Of approach, and then committing him to

  An unretraceable step. If he faced

  The flunkey’s sneer and the snarling wolfhounds,

  He would soon discover that getting past

  Them was the least of his troubles. He lacked

  The hero’s invincible charm: to go

  Without card of introduction or book

  Of etiquette was bad; but worse, he had no

  Ground-plan given him for what would be

  Less of a mansion, he feared, than a maze.

  Still, through state apartments and ancestor-lined

  Passages, beyond a door of green baize,

  He knew there must be that innermost room

  Where She, alone, waited. Waited for whom?

  No doubt she was at home. He had seen her mooning

  Around the garden – pearl feet, gold crown

  Proved her a princess – early every morning

  In the ghostfall dew by the dreaming cedars.

  No sentry, mastiff or chains could he spy,

  But he felt her a captive … Now, crawling through

  The grass of the lawn, which had grown head-high

  Since he came, he listened at a gloomed french window

  Faint sounds he heard: they might have been

  Cries for help or his own voice calling

  From sleep. Ventured a glance: obscene

  Slug trails and spider webs pasted the glass.

  Frantic to peel away the cataract spell

  He circled the domicile, trying each door:

  Bells, knockers, handles – he tried them all.

  But all in a repudiating hush was locked;

  Till a window opened, a wide mouth mocked.

  So he went home, romantic even in disgrace,

  And told his father the whole sad story.

  Who said: ‘To be sure, I remember the place,

  And the afternoon I felt like going there.

  I walked through the door – there is only one,

  By the way – and yes, I remember a crown

  Of tawny hair. I tumbled it down.

  She sighed for relief. I took her, bare

  And crowing as a babe, on the kitchen floor.’

  The Passion for Diving

  The man up there with red trunks, middle-aged paunch,

  Rapt in a boy like singleness of mind

  Or in some trance of altitude immersed –

  What do we make of him? The way he’ll launch

  From bank, deck, high board, harbour wall, to find

  Himself arriving, more or less head-first,

  In pool, sea, river, then scramble out and prise

  The void again, again? Not for display:

  He cuts no athlete’s figure through the air.

  Nor from infatuation with what lies

  Supine beneath: it seldom can delay

  Him longer than the few strokes he must spare

  To reach a foot-hold and climb out again.

  There may be pride in it (for Lucifer,

  Might not that long dive feel like an aspiring?);

  And pleasure – heaving haunches of the main,

  That green, comethering inshore eye, the stir

  Of watersilk muscle, over which he’s poring.

  But most it is the sense of challenge, a boy’s

  Need and fear of solitary engagement

  With powers beyond his power, that springs the leap.

  The man recalls a young self in that poise

  And pause between an airy unattachment

  And the blind, brief committal to the deep.

  Derelict

  FOR A. D. PETERS1

  The soil, flinty at best, grew sour. Its yield

  Receding left the old farm high and dry

  On a ledge of the hills. Disused, the rutted field-

  Track fades, like the sound of footsteps, into a sigh

  For any feet to approach this padlocked door.

  The walls are stained and cracked, the roof’s all rafter.

  We have come where silence opens to devour

  Owl-cry, wind-cry, all human memories … After

  So many working life-times a farm settles

  For leisure, and in the tenth of a life-time goes

  To seed … A harrow rusts among harsh nettles.

  She who in love or protest grew that rose

  Beneath her window, left nothing else behind

  But a mangle in the wash-house. The rose now

  Looks mostly thorn and sucker; the window’s blind

  With cobwebs. Dilapidated! – even the low

  Front wall is ragged: neighbours have filched its stone

  To build their pigsties, maybe; but what neighbours? –

  Never did a farm stand more alone.

  Was it the loneliness, then, and not their labour’s

  Poor yield that drove them out? A farmer’s used

  To the silence of things growing, weather breeding.

  More solitude, more acres. He’d be amused

  To hear it’s human company he was needing.

  With a wife to bake, wash, mend, to nag or share

  The after-supper silence, children to swing

  From those rheumatic apple trees; and where

  The docks run wild, his chained-up mongrel barking

  If anyone climbed a mile off on the hill.

  He’d not abandon cheerfully a place

  In which he’d sunk his capital of skill

  And sweat. But if earth dies on you, it’s no disgrace

  To pull up roots … Now, all that was the farm’s –

  The same demands of seasons, the plain grit

  And homely triumph – deepens and informs

  The silence you can hear. Reverence it.

 
; 1 A. D. Peters was CDL’s literary agent and close friend for forty-six years of his writing life.

  Saint Anthony’s Shirt

  ‘We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony’s shirt.’

  KEATS: Letter to Reynolds

  This moving house of mine – how could I care

  If, wasting and renewing cell by cell,

  It’s the ninth house I now have tenanted?

  I cannot see what keeps it in repair

  Nor charge the workmen who, its changes tell,

  Build and demolish it over my head.

  Ninth house and first, the same yet not the same –

  Are there, beneath new brickwork, altering style,

  Viewless foundations steady through the years?

  Hardly could I distinguish what I am

  But for the talkative sight-seers who file

  Through me, the window-view that clouds or clears.

  The acting, speaking, lusting, suffering I

  Must be a function of this house, or else

  Its master principle. Is I a sole

  Tenant created, recreated by

  What he inhabits, or a force which tells

  The incoherent fabric it is whole?

  If master, where’s the master-thread runs through

  This patchwork, piecemeal self? If occupant

  Merely, the puppet of a quarrelsome clique,

  How comes the sense of selfhood as a clue

  Embodying yet transcending gene and gland?

  The I, though multiple, is still unique.

  I walk these many rooms, wishing to trace

  My frayed identity. In each, a ghost

  Looks up and claims me for his long-lost brother –

  Each unfamiliar, though he wears my face.

  A draught of memory whispers I was most

  Purely myself when I became another:

  Tending a sick child, groping my way into

  A woman’s heart, lost in a poem, a cause,

  I touched the marrow of my being, unbared

  Through self-oblivion. Nothing remains so true

  As the outgoingness. This moving house

  Is home, and my home, only when it’s shared.

  Days before a Journey

  Days before a journey

  The mind, prefiguring absence,

  Begins to leave. Its far

 

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