Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Tonight, a tingle of life at the nerve-ends.

  * * *

  But I may be the poorer for

  Not admitting souls

  Into this human company:

  The dead have nothing else

  For entrance-fee. Though bloodless, they

  Are brothers of the blood.

  If they persist, how could I bar

  Such a convivial crowd?

  Not willy-nilly thistledowns

  I fancy them, but as air

  Viewless, dimensionless, pervasive,

  Here there and everywhere.

  Born with souls, or soul-makers –

  Who knows? What I’m protesting

  Is the idea that, if souls we have,

  They have to be everlasting.

  I do not want an eternity

  Of self, rubbed clean or cluttered

  With past. But it’s unlikely that

  My wishes would be considered.

  * * *

  Welcome, all you intangible whose touch,

  Impressing my own death upon my heart,

  Leaves there a ghost of sweetness, like wood-ash

  After the fires are out and the rooms aired.

  To linger so, or as a horn that echoes

  Out of the lost defiles, the sure defeat,

  Heartening a few to courage and acceptance,

  Is the short afterlife I’d want of fate.

  Come then, dead friends, bringing your waft of wood-smoke,

  Your gift of echoes. Sit by the bedside.

  Graceless to ask just what I am invoking,

  For this is the official visiting night.

  Existences, consoling lies, or phantom

  Dolls of tradition, enter into me.

  Welcome, invisibles! We have this in common –

  Whatever you are, I presently shall be.

  Hero and Saint

  Sad if no one provoked us any more

  To do the improbable –

  Catch a winged horse, muck out a preposterous stable,

  Or even some unsensational chore

  Like becoming a saint. Those adversaries knew

  The form, to be sure: small use for one

  Who after an hour of effort would throw down

  Cross, shovel or lassoo.

  It gave more prestige to each prince of lies

  And his far-fetched ordeal

  That an attested hero should just fail

  One little finger’s breadth from the prize.

  Setting for Heracles and Bellerophon

  Such tasks, they judged it a winning gamble,

  Forgetting they lived in a world of myth where all

  Conclusions are foregone.

  A saint knows patience alone will see him through

  Ordeals which lure, disfigure, numb:

  And this (the heroes proved) can only come

  From a star kept in view.

  But he forgoes the confidence, the hallowed

  Air of an antique hero:

  He never will see himself but as a zero

  Following a One that gives it value.

  Hero imagined himself in the constellations,

  Saint as a numbered grain of wheat.

  Nowhere but in aspiring do they meet

  And discipline of patience.

  He rose to a trial of wit and sinew, he

  To improbable heights of loving.

  Both, it seems, might have been good for nothing

  Without a consummate adversary.

  Sunday Afternoon

  ‘It was like being a child again, listening and thinking of something else and hearing the voices-endless, inevitable and restful, like Sunday afternoon.’

  JEAN RHYS

  An inch beyond my groping fingertips,

  Lurking just round the corner of the eye.

  Bouquet from an empty phial. A sensual ellipse

  So it eludes – the quicksilver quarry.

  I stretch my hands out to the farther shore,

  Between, the fog of Lethe: no river – a mere thread

  Bars me from the self I would re-explore:

  Powerless I am to break it as the dead.

  Yet a picture forms. Summer it must be. Sunlight

  Fixes deck-chairs and grass in its motionless torrents.

  The rest are shadows. I am the real: but I could run

  To those familiar shades for reassurance.

  Light slithers from leaf to leaf. Gossip of aspens.

  Cool voices blow about, sprinkling the lawn.

  Bells hum like a windrush chime of bees: a tolling hastens

  Long-skirted loiterers to evensong.

  Flowers nod themselves to sleep at last. I smell

  Roses – or is it an Irish nursemaid’s florin scent?

  Gold afternoon rounds to a breast … Ah well,

  A picture came, though not the one I meant.

  Make what you can of it, to recompense

  For the real thing, the whole thing vanished beyond recall.

  Gauge from a few chance-found and cherished fragments

  The genius of the lost original.

  A Privileged Moment

  Released from hospital, only half alive still,

  Cautiously feeling the way back into himself,

  Propped up in bed like a guy, he presently ventured

  A glance at the ornaments on his mantelshelf.

  White, Wedgwood blue, dark lilac coloured or ruby –

  Things, you could say, which had known their place and price,

  Gleamed out at him with the urgency of angels

  Eager for him to see through their disguise.

  Slowly he turned his head. By gust-flung snatches

  A shower announced itself on the windowpane:

  He saw unquestioning, not even astonished,

  Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain.

  Gently at last the angels settled back now

  Into mere ornaments, the unearthly sheen

  And spill of diamond into familiar raindrops,

  It was enough. He’d seen what he had seen.

  A Picture by Renoir

  Two stocky young girls in the foreground stoop

  For a ball – red dress, white pinafore.

  Toned with the sunburnt grass, two more

  Follow in beige. That wayward troupe

  Is the butterfly soul of summer.

  Beyond them a stripe of azure-blue

  Distance fades to the kind of sky

  That calls for larks. In the blend of high

  Colour and hazy line is a clue

  To the heart of childhood summer.

  So lively they are, I can all but see

  Those halycon girls elude the frame

  And fly off the picture, intent on their game

  Wherever the ball may go, set free

  Into eternal summer.

  It does what pictures are meant to do –

  Grasp a moment and throw it clear

  Beyond the reach of time. Those four

  Maidens will play for ever, true

  To all our youthful summers.

  A Tuscan Villa

  (FOR KATHLEEN AND JOHANNES)

  We took to your villa on trust and sight unseen

  As the journey’s dreamed-of height; had guessed it

  A jewel framed in silver, nested in May-time green,

  How the real thing surpassed it!

  From the loggia, mountain ranges are seen renewing

  Their mystery in the haze: a wedge

  Of hill solid with jostled trees, cypresses queueing

  Like travellers on their verge:

  And at my feet in a lather of silvery fleece

  An olive grove silently breaking.

  Only a cuckoo, a child’s cry breaks on the sylvan peace

  And only to reawaken

  The charm of silence. A burbling from the spaces

  Up there reminds us that too soon

  Bearing a s
pray of forget-me-not, leaving few traces

  Behind, we shall move on.

  But wrong it is, yearning to recompose

  Feature on feature, petal by petal,

  A blurring Paradise, the spectre of a rose.

  I think they come too late – all

  Gifts but the moment’s. If we are quick and catch them,

  We shall not grudge to let them fly.

  Others will sojourn here: it will enrich them

  With a present for ear and eye –

  Silence and nightingales; the grace and knowledge

  Of friends; acacia, lemon flowers,

  Lemony tulips; a vista genial with vine and olive.

  Today, be glad it is ours.

  Merry-go-round

  Here is a gallant merry-go-round.

  The children all, entranced or queasy,

  Cling to saddlebows, crazily fancy the

  Circular tour is a free and easy

  Gallop into a world without end.

  Now their undulating time is up.

  Horses, music slow to a stop.

  Time’s last inches running out,

  A vortex, only guessable

  Before by the circus ring of bubbles

  Sedately riding, now turns visible –

  A hole, an ulcer, a waterspout.

  Bubbles twirl faster as closer they come

  To the brink of the vacuum.

  And my thoughts revolve upon death’s

  Twisted attraction. As limbs move slower,

  Time runs more quickly towards the undoer

  Of all. I feel each day devour

  My future. Still, to the lattermost breath

  Let me rejoice in the world I was lent –

  The rainbow bubbles, the dappled mount.

  Philosophy Lectures1

  He goes about it and about,

  By elegant indirections clears a route

  To the inmost truth.

  Cutting the ground from underneath

  Rogue analogies, dialectic tares,

  See how he bares

  And shames the indulgent, weed-choked soil,

  Shaving his field to the strictly meaningful!

  Now breathless we

  Await, await the epiphany –

  A miracle crop to leap from the bald ground.

  Not one green shoot, however, is discerned.

  Well, watch this reaper-and-binder bumbling round

  A shuddered field. Proud sheaves collapse

  In narrowing squares. A coarser job, perhaps –

  Corn, com cockle and poppy lie

  Corded, inseparable. Now each eye

  Fastens on that last stand of corn:

  Hares, partridge? – no, surely a unicorn

  Or phoenix will be harbouring there,

  Ripe for revelation. Harvest forgot, I stare

  From the field’s verge as the last ears fall.

  Not even a rabbit emerges. Nothing at all.

  Are the two fields identical,

  Only the reapers different? Misdirected

  Or out of our minds, we expected

  A wrong thing – the impossible

  Or merely absurd; creatures of fire and fable

  Where bread was the intention,

  Harvest where harvest was not meant.

  Yet in both fields we saw a right end furthered:

  Something was gathered.

  1 The lecturer was Professor Bernard Williams. We were in the audience at the British Academy.

  After an Encaenia

  This afternoon the working sparrows, glum

  Of plumage, nondescript, flurried, quarrelsome,

  Appear as cardinal, kingfisher, hoopoe, bird

  Of paradise. They stalk the sward

  With gait somnambulous beside their not

  So colourful hens, or heart to gorgeous heart

  Absently confer together

  In tones that do not change to match their feathers

  Will no one tell me what they chirp? I’d say

  Their minds are very far away

  From this cloud-cuckoo lawn, impatient to

  Resume the drudgery sparrows pursue.

  Scavengers are they? Gathering crumbs,

  Nibbling at particles and old conundrums,

  Pouncing on orts never observed before,

  They justify their stay-at-home exploring.

  I like these scrap-collectors: and to see

  Their hard-earned plumes worn without vanity

  Hints that a scholar’s search for evidence

  Is selfless as the lives of saints.

  Truth, knowledge even, seems too grandiose

  A word for the flair and flutterings of those

  Whose ambition is no more wide

  Than to get, once for all, one small thing right.

  Tenure

  is never for keeps, never truly assured

  (tick on, you geological clocks)

  though some things almost have it, or seem to have it.

  For example, rocks

  in a shivering sea: the castaway who has clawed himself on

  to one:

  a bull’s tenacious horn:

  archaic myths: the heroin habit.

  Even the sun or a dead man’s skull among the cactus

  does not quite have it.

  I turn now to American university practice.

  Tenure there is pronounced ‘Shangri-

  La’: once you have it, however spurious

  your fame, not even the angriest

  trustees, except for certified madness or moral turpitude,

  can ever dislodge you. I salute

  all those tenurious

  professors. But I would not wish to be

  one, though the life may be happy and sometimes not inglorious

  Tenure is not for me.

  I want to be able to drop out of my head,

  or off my rock and swim to another, ringed with a roundelay

  of sirens. I should not care to be a dead

  man’s skull, or a myth, or a junkie:

  or the too energetic sun.

  Since heaven and earth, we are told, shall pass away

  (hell, sneers the blonde, is off already)

  I would live each day as if it were my last and first day.

  Epitaph for a Drug-Addict

  Mourn this young girl. Weep for society

  Which gave her little to esteem but kicks.

  Impatient of its code, cant, cruelty,

  Indifferent, she kicked against all pricks

  But the dream-loaded hypodermic’s. She

  Has now obtained an everlasting fix.

  A Marriage Song

  FOR ALBERT AND BARBARA1

  Midsummer, time of golden views and hazes,

  Advance in genial air,

  Bring out your best for this charmed pair –

  Let fly a flamingo dawn, throw open all your roses,

  Crimson the day for them and start the dancing.

  June-month fruits, yield up your delicate favours

  Entrancing them, and be

  Foretastes of ripe felicity:

  Peach bloom and orange flower, ravish these happy lovers,

  Sweeten the hour for them and start the dancing.

  Tune to our joy, grass, breezes, philomels,

  Enhancing their bright weather

  Of inward blessedness; together

  With honeying bees and silver waterfalls of bells

  Carol our hopes for them, oh start the dancing.

  In well-deep looks of love and soft-as-foam

  Glances they plight their troth.

  Midsummer stars, be kind to both

  Through the warm dark when they shall come into their own,

  Light your candles for them, start the dance.

  1 Albert and Barbara Gelpi – friends at Harvard, now at Stanford University.

  At East Coker

  At the far end of a bemusing village

  Wh
ich has kept losing finding and losing itself

  Along the lane, as if to exercise a pilgrim’s

  Faith, you see it at last. Blocked by a hill

  The traffic, if there was any, must swerve aside:

  Riding the hilltop, confidently saddled,

  A serviceable English church.

  Climb on foot now, past white lilac and

  The alms-house terrace; beneath yew and cedar

  Screening the red-roof blur of Yeovil; through

  The peaceable aroma of June grasses,

  The churchyard where old Eliots lie. Enter.

  A brass on the south wall commemorates

  William Dampier, son of this unhorizoned village,

  Who thrice circumnavigated the globe, was

  First of all Englishmen to explore

  The coast of Australia … An exact observer

  Of all things in Earth, Sea and Air. Another

  Exploring man has joined his company.

  In the north-west corner, sealed, his ashes are

  (Remember him at a party, diffident,

  Or masking his fire behind an affable mien):

  Above them, today, paeonies glow like bowls of

  Wine held up to the blessing light.

  Where an inscription bids us pray

  For the repose of the soul of T. S. Eliot, poet –

  A small fee in return for the new worlds

  He opened us. ‘Where prayer is valid’, yes,

  Though mine beats vainly against death’s stone front,

  And all our temporal tributes only scratch

  Graffiti on its monumental silence.

  * * *

  But soon obituary yields

  To the real spirit, livelier and more true.

  There breathes a sweetness from his honoured stone,

  A discipline of long virtue,

  As in that farmside chapel among fields

  At Little Gidding. We rejoice for one

  Whose heart a midsummer’s long winter,

  Though ashen-skied and droughtful, could not harden

  Against the melting of midwinter spring,