Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  He and his fame ripened in autumn quietude.

  Who goes home? A man

  Whose courage and strong span

  Of enterprise will stand for ages yet to come.

  Storm-riding heart now stilled

  And destiny fulfilled,

  Our loved, our many-minded Churchill has gone home.

  Pietà1

  Naked, he sags across her cumbered knees,

  Heavy and beautiful like the child she once

  Aroused from sleep, to fall asleep on the next breath.

  The passion is done,

  But death has not yet stiffened him against her,

  Nor chilled the stripling grace into a dogma.

  For a timeless hour, imagined out of marble,

  He comes back to his mother, he is all

  And only hers.

  And it is she whom death has magnified

  To bear the burden of his flesh – the arms

  Excruciated no more, the gash wiped clean.

  A divine, dazed compassion calms her features.

  She holds all earth’s dead sons upon her lap.

  * * *

  In the triumphal car

  Closely escorted through the gaze and heart of

  A city, at the height of his golden heyday,

  He suddenly slumps.

  Cameras show her bending to shelter him

  (But death has moved faster), and then a pink

  Nimbus veiling the exploded skull.

  No order here, no artistry, except for

  The well-drilled wounds, the accomplished sacrifice.

  But from that wreck

  Two living images are saved – the wife who

  Nurses a shattered world in her lap;

  And, flying the coffin home, refuses to change

  Out of her yellow, blood-spattered dress, with

  ‘Let them all see what was done to him.’

  1 The assassination of President Kennedy.

  Elegy for a Woman Unknown

  (F.P.)1

  I

  At her charmed height of summer –

  Prospects, children rosy,

  In the heart’s changeful music

  Discords near resolved –

  Her own flesh turned upon her:

  The gross feeder slowly

  Settled to consume her.

  Pain speaks, bearing witness

  Of rank cells that spawn

  To bring their temple down.

  Against such inmost treachery

  Futile our protesting:

  The body creates its own

  Justice and unjustness.

  Three times flesh was lopped,

  As trees to make a firebreak.

  (In their natural flowering

  Beautiful the trees.)

  Three times her enemy leapt

  The gap. Three years of dying

  Before the heart stopped.

  Upon the shrinking islands

  Of flesh and hope, among

  Bitter waves that plunged,

  Withdrew to lunge yet deeper,

  Patient, unreconciled,

  She wrote poems and flung them

  To the approaching silence.

  Upon the stretching hours

  Crucified alone,

  She grew white as a stone

  Image of endurance;

  Soft only to the cares

  Of loved ones – all concern

  For lives that would soon lack hers.

  Dying, did she pass through

  Despair to the absolute

  Self-possession – the lightness

  Of knowing a world indifferent

  To all we suffer and do,

  Shedding the clung-to load

  Of habit, illusion, duty?

  You who watched, phase by phase,

  Her going whose life was meshed

  With yours in grief and passion,

  Remember now the unspoken,

  Unyielding word she says –

  How, in ruinous flesh,

  Heroic the heart can blaze.

  II

  Island of stone and silence. A rough ridge

  Chastens the innocent azure. Lizards hang

  Like their own shadows crucified on stone

  (But the heart palpitates, the ruins itch

  With memories amid the sunburnt grass). Here sang

  Apollo’s choir, the sea their unloosed zone.

  Island of stillness and white stone.

  Marble and stone – the ground-plan is suggested

  By low walls, plinths, lopped columns of stoa, streets

  Clotted with flowers dead in June, where stood

  The holy place. At dusk they are invested

  With Apollonian calm and a ghost of his zenith heats.

  But now there are no temples and no god:

  Vacantly stone and marble brood,

  And silence – not the silence after music,

  But the silence of no more music. A breeze twitches

  The grass like a whisper of snakes; and swallows there are,

  Cicadas, frogs in the cistern. But elusive

  Their chorusing – thin threads of utterance, vanishing stitches

  Upon the gape of silence, whose deep core

  Is the stone lions’ soundless roar.

  Lions of Delos, roaring in abstract rage

  Below the god’s hill, near his lake of swans!

  Tense haunches, rooted paws set in defiance

  Of time and all intruders, each grave image

  Was sentinel and countersign of deity once.

  Now they have nothing to keep but the pure silence.

  Crude as a schoolchild’s sketch of lions

  They hold a rhythmic truth, a streamlined pose.

  Weathered by sea-winds into beasts of the sea,

  Fluent from far, unflawed; but the jaws are toothless,

  Granulated by time the skin, seen close,

  And limbs disjointed. Nevertheless, what majesty

  Their bearing shows – how well they bear these ruthless

  Erosions of their primitive truth!

  Thyme and salt on my tongue, I commune with

  Those archetypes of patience, and with them praise

  What in each frantic age can most incline

  To reverence; accept from them perfection’s myth –

  One who warms, clarifies, inspires, and flays.

  Sweetness he gives but also, being divine,

  Dry bitterness of salt and thyme.

  The setting sun has turned Apollo’s hill

  To darker honey. Boulders and burnt grass.

  A lyre-thin wind. A landscape monochrome.

  Birds, lizards, lion shapes are all stone-still.

  Ruins and mysteries in the favouring dusk amass,

  While I reach out through silence and through stone

  To her whose sun has set, the unknown.

  III

  We did not choose to voyage.

  Over the ship’s course we had little say,

  And less over the ship. Tackle

  Fraying; a little seamanly skill picked up on our way;

  Cargo, that sooner or later we should

  Jettison to keep afloat for one more day.

  But to have missed the voyage –

  That would be worse than the gales, inglorious calms,

  Hard tack and quarrels below …

  Ship’s bells, punctual as hunger; dawdling stars;

  Duties – to scrub the deck, to stow

  Provisions, break out a sail: if crisis found us of one mind,

  It was routine that made us so,

  And hailed each landfall like a first-born son.

  Figure to yourself the moment

  When, after weeks of the crowding emptiness of sea

  (Though no two waves are the same to an expert

  Helmsman’s eye), the wind bears tenderly

  From an island still invisible

  The smell of e
arth – of thyme, grass, olive trees:

  Fragrance of a woman lost, returning.

  And you open the bay, like an oyster, but sure there’ll be

  A pearl inside; and rowing ashore,

  Are received like gods. They shake down mulberries into

  Your lap, bring goat’s cheese, pour

  Fresh water for you, and wine. Love too is given.

  It’s for the voyaging that you store

  Such memories; yet each island seems your abiding-place.

  … For the voyaging, I say:

  And not to relieve its hardships, but to merge

  Into its element. Bays we knew

  Where still, clear water dreamed like a demiurge

  And we were part of his fathomless dream;

  Times, we went free and frisking with dolphins through the surge

  Upon our weather bow.

  Those were our best hours – the mind disconnected

  From pulsing Time, and purified

  Of accidents: those, and licking the salt-stiff lips,

  The rope-seared palms, happy to ride

  With sea-room after days of clawing from off a lee shore,

  After a storm had died.

  Oh, we had much to thank Poseidon for.

  Whither or why we voyaged,

  Who knows?… A worst storm blew. I was afraid.

  The ship broke up. I swam till I

  Could swim no more. My love and memories are laid

  In the unrevealing deep … But tell them

  They need not pity me. Tell them I was glad

  Not to have missed the voyage.

  1 In 1961, Dr Michael Peters came to see CDL at Chatto and Windus, bringing a sheaf of his wife’s poems: she had recently died of cancer. C prayed that they would be good enough to publish. They weren’t. When we were voyaging in Greece that summer, he started to write a poem on the island of Delos at sunset, as he sat, head in hands, gazing at the stone lions. He tried to make it a poem she would like to have written.

  Young Chekhov

  This young provincial, his domestic ties,

  Modest pretensions both to medicine

  And literature (well, who would not despise

  Such penny-a-line humour as he turned in?)

  Mocks all who say the bourgeois life inhibits

  And can’t conceive how, through frivolity,

  Hackwork, piles, unobjectionable habits,

  A Vanya and a Masha came to be.

  He paid his bills, and others’; scoured the town

  For gossip, but created none – too tired

  And prudent for debauch or the noble blather

  Of revolutionaries … The god sends down:

  The bourgeoise is astonished when her brood

  Grow up to prove an angel was their father.

  The Widow Interviewed

  ‘The Poet’ (well, that’s the way her generation

  Talked) ‘the Poet wrote these for me when first –’

  (She said, touching the yellowed manuscripts

  Like a blind girl gentling a young man’s hair)

  – ‘When first we were betrothed. I have kept them:

  ‘The rest I had to sell.’

  Beside the juniper

  Breaking a branch to light at the cottage fire,

  ‘Incense for you,’ he said. But I did truly worship

  That smouldering, pliant boy.

  ‘He was a great

  “Lover of Beauty” (yes, that’s how she put it,

  Capital letters and all. Eyes calm: cheeks russet, wrinkled:

  Face of a good plain cook or somebody’s old nurse).

  ‘Ah, you may wonder what he saw in me.

  ‘Wonder it was to me – the homely, spectacled

  ‘Girl he married. But you yourself are a writer:

  ‘You know what poets need is a plain screen

  ‘To project their magical lines and colours upon.

  ‘He had beauty enough for us both, enough passion

  ‘For Beauty to evoke a vernal goddess

  ‘Out of my pudgy clay.’

  One April morning

  You dropped four primroses into my bosom,

  Called me your Primavera. Oh, my love!

  My dear love!

  And those poems – what a treasure

  You’ve got there! – they appeared in his first book?

  ‘No. They were never published. He became

  ‘Dissatisfied with them.’

  Would have burnt them, too:

  But I hid them away, as I hid other failures

  And failings, cherished them for being his.

  He was his own severest critic. ‘Well,

  ‘The only one he could do with. It was the act

  ‘Of bearing poems he lived by, not the issue.

  ‘He could launch a sheaf of them from our gusty hilltop –

  ‘Paper darts for the children, yet despair

  ‘And walk all night, searching for one lost word.’

  The artist’s hard to live with. ‘So I learned:

  ‘Hard, because with him is not how you live,

  ‘Housekeeping for an often absentee

  ‘Master – one most absent sitting at home when

  ‘His daemon empties you out of his eyes

  ‘And draws the cloak of solitude about him.

  ‘I bore his children, cooked his meals … But never

  ‘Imagine I regret the unequal menage.’

  To be a great man’s inspiration – ‘Have the glory

  ‘Of being an oyster’s grit? Besides, I was not,

  ‘Not for long; more like a shock-absorber.’

  He had a roughish road. ‘The road he chose.’

  And you went with him.

  Oh, my dear love, why

  Could you not take the comfort that I offered?

  What else had I to give you than a cup

  Of water in the desert? Did you not see

  How often I was spilt over the sand?

  ‘Yes, to the end. For me it was easier going

  ‘After I’d shaken off my own pride – most

  ‘My clinging pride in him – learnt to let go his hands,

  ‘Leaving him free to wrestle with his daemon.’

  (Who often took the slippery form and naked

  Grip of another girl, by all accounts).

  He was much loved. ‘And loved much. If you like to call it

  ‘Love. You are curious? Listen – where he went,

  ‘He went more out of curiosity

  ‘Than love, or even lust: the lust ensued, and even

  ‘Love once or twice. Imagine him as prospecting

  ‘For a new lode. One place where he might find –

  ‘Not fairy gold nor Ali Baba’s cave –

  ‘Simply a poem’s crude and filthy ore, was

  ‘Between a woman’s legs.’

  Now I have shocked

  The poor man, spoken out of character, Eve

  Grinning through pure white Martha. Well of course

  I was jealous: the body parted from mine, whose essence

  I’d had no part in ever – what was left?…

  How right you are. Where all the ladders start.

  It has been a privilege. The world of letters

  Owes you a great debt. Prop and stay of one

  I do not scruple to acclaim a genius.

  They also serve who only …

  But always,

  Always you came home to me, as if

  You had left your daemon in my care, and me

  In its safe keeping. Oh, the joy at last

  To find something we had proved equally –

  The peace, knowing your daemon was my angel.

  For Rex Warner On His Sixtieth Birthday

  ‘The hawk-faced man’ – thirty-five years ago

  I called him – ‘who could praise an apple

  In terms of peach and win the argument’…

  Oxford between th
e wars. I at the age of dissent

  From received ideas, admiring a man so able

  At undermining the crusted status quo.

  But he was no sophist, this unsophisticated

  Son of a Modernist clergyman, who came down

  From a Cotswold height with the larks of Amberley

  And the lays of Catullus running wild in his head. We,

  Two green youths, met by chance in a Jacobean

  Quad. From that term our friendship’s dated.

  Friendship, I’d guess, has not much more to do

  With like minds, shared needs, than with rent or profit:

  Nor is it the love which burns to be absolute, then dies

  By inches of ill-stitched wounds, of compromise:

  But a kind of grace – take it or leave it.

  ‘Keeping up’ a friendship means it is through.

  That grace I accept. When he returns at last

  From Egypt, Greece, the States, we take up where

  We left. Right friendships are that homing, each to the other,

  On frequencies unchanged through time or weather.

  And still, though bulkier, he’ll appear

  In focus with the young self I knew first. –

  Scholar, wing three-quarter, and bird-watcher:

  Self-contained, yet an affable bar-crony:

  A mind of Attic dash and clarity,

  Homeric simpleness, and natural charity

  For all but intellectual cliques and their baloney. –

  So was he then. And since, each new departure

  Proved him, though wayward, all of a piece.

  Working a spell of allegoric art,

  In The Wild Goose Chase and The Aerodrome

  He formed a style intrinsic, dry and firm –

  Revetment against the chaos in his and a nation’s heart –

  As, centuries ago, Thucydides.

  Fable or fact, living and dead, he carries

  Greece near his heart. Rocks, olives, temples, sea and sun

  In lucid paradigm express

  His tonic scepticism, cordial address.

  Pericles and Prometheus spoke through one

  Loved by Sikelianós and great Seferis.

  Enough that in a pretentious age, when all –

  Love, politics, art, right down to money – is cheapened,

  He’ll take each issue for what it’s worth, not wincing,

  Inflating, prancing his ego there, romancing