Let’s leave this town. Mutters of loom 106
‘Look it’s a fox!’ – their two hearts spoke 615
Look not too long upon the golden hours 8
Lot 96: a brass-rimmed ironwork fender 519
Love being denied, he turned in his despair 53
Love was once light as air 396
Love without pity is a child’s hand reaching 507
Lumbering haunches, pussyfoot tread, a pride of 544
Maple and sumach down this autumn ride 267
May the splendid earth renew 10
Meanders around the rose-beds, gnarled, clay-brown 7
Meeting the first time for many years 553
Midsummer, time of golden views and hazes 691
More than all else might you 117
Mourn this young girl. Weep for society 690
Multitudes of corn 399
My lady said that she could love no other 19
Naked, he sags across her cumbered knees 622
Naturally, we travelled light 548
Never will I forget it 670
Never would there be lives enough for all 575
No one, I thought, shall invade 35
Nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal 318
Now to be with you, elate, unshared 135
Now in the face of destruction 330
Now the full-throated daffodils 115
Now I have come to reason 59
Now limbs awaken stiff 608
Now the peak of summer’s past, the sky is overcast 346
Now she is like the white tree-rose 109
Now when drowning imagination clutches 325
Now, when there is less time than ever 708
Now you have gone, I remember only your smile 20
Oh hush thee, my baby 196
Old ironmasters and their iron men 720
On a day when the breath of roses 371
On the heart’s hidden verge 30
One night they saw the big house, some time untenanted 315
One of us in the compartment stares 401
Only in the forest 18
Out of the famous canyon 374
Over the vale, the sunburnt fields 343
Poet, sink the shining net 5
Poets, uncage the word! 704
Pouring an essence of stephanotis 616
Put out the lights now! 393
Released from hospital, only half alive still 684
Rest from loving and be living 110
Rest now in your places, you calm hills 36
Roots are for holding on, and holding dear 674
Sad if no one provoked us any more 681
Said Heart to Mind at the close of day 369
Saints and heroes, you dare say 639
Says the dream to the sleeper, ‘Achieve me’ 704
Says winding Trent 304
See now, where Spring has put young leaves 43
See this small one, tiptoe on 181
Seen once on a family tree, now lost 672
She moved to the slow 33
Sky-wide an estuary of light 120
Sleep’s doctoring hands withdrawn 699
Sleepy the earth lies still at Edwinstowe 15
So. I am dying. Let the douce young medico 561
So the committee met again, and again 500
So the great politician 619
So here we are, we three, bound on a new experience 419
So like a god I sit here 372
So take a happy view 276
So then he walled her up alive 552
So they were married, and lived 363
So this is you 356
Sometime we two have sat together 17
Somewhere between Crewkerne 403
Soon you’ll be off to meet your full-grown selves 712
Speak for the air, your element, you hunters 336
Speak then of constancy. Thin eyelids weakly thus 123
Spurred towards horizons 344
Step down from the bridge 657
Stoop, stoop, Narcissus 41
Sun and waterfall conspire 30
Sunbursts over this execution yard 661
Sunlit over the shore 637
Suppose that we, tomorrow or the next day 105
Suppose, they asked 529
Swung in this hammock between hills 19
Take any place – this garden plot will do 366
Tearaway kitten or staid mother of fifty 733
Tell them in England, if they ask 289
That is the house you were born in. Around it 515
That it should end so! 368
That was his youthful enemy, fouling the azure 503
That winter love spoke and we raised no objection, at 346
The bells that signed a conqueror in 275
The boundary stone 660
The crimson berry tree navelled upon this court 635
The day they had to go 520
The days are drawing in 518
The floor of the high wood all smoking with bluebells 521
The ghosts were all right till this grave-digger came 579
‘The hawk-faced man’ – thirty-five years ago 631
the house being the first problem. Dilapidated 707
The knife, whose freezing shadow had unsteeled 618
The lustre bowl of the sky 337
The man up there with red trunks, middle-aged paunch 603
The man you know, assured and kind 503
The melting poles, the tongues that play at lightning 524
The moon slides through a whey of cloud; the running 380
‘The poet’ (well, that’s the way her generation 629
The right way in would be hard to find 601
The river this November afternoon 355
The sea drained off, my poverty’s uncovered 399
The soil, flinty at best, grew sour. Its yield 604
The soil was deep and the field well-sited 370
The spring came round, and still he was not dead 400
The train window trapped fugitive impressions 711
The willows by the waterside 44
The winged bull trundles to the wired perimeter 432
The woman shuffled about her room 551
The Word was the beginning 731
There he stands, my ancestor, back turned 673
There is a dark room 113
There was a land of milk and honey 656
There was no precise point at which to say 501
There was a time when I 577
They lie in the sunday street 338
They stumble in naked grief, as refugees 700
They who in folly or mere greed 335
They’re come to town from each dot on the compass, they’re 667
Thirty years ago lying awake 319
This afternoon the working sparrows, glum 688
This autumn park, the sequin glitter of leaves 272
This curve of ploughland, one clean stroke 221
This man was strong, and like a seascape parted 194
This mannikin who just now 540
This moving house of mine – how could I care 605
This tree outside my window here 600
This was not the mind’s undertaking 123
This young girl, whose secret life 547
This young provincial, his domestic ties 628
Those are judged losers and fortune-flouted 184
Those two walked up a chancel of beech trees 616
Though bodies are apart 127
Through the hand’s skill gradually 732
Through the vague morning, the heart preoccupied 268
To fish for pearls in Lethe 523
To make a clean sweep was the easiest part 506
To this room – it was somewhere at the palace’s 599
Today bells ring, bands play, flags are unfurled 725
Too soon, it is all too soon 509
Tuscany, long endeared to English hearts 73
4
Twenty weeks near past 112
Two householders (semi-detached) once found 580
Two stocky young girls in the foreground stoop 684
Waning now the sensual eye 111
We have been here three days, and Rome is really 437
We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning 11
We hid it behind the yellow cushion 545
We thought the angel of death would come 335
We took to your villa on trust and sight unseen 685
We whom a full tornado cast up high 110
We will buy an old house 51
Were I this forest pool 9
What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle 726
What is the flower that blooms each year 582
What is this bird? 498
When at last I am abiding 23
When for long weeks this mind 46
When my heart’s Odyssey 34
When they have lost the little that they looked for 286
When Willie Yeats was in his prime 579
Where are the girls of yesteryear? How strange 733
Whether it was or not his wish 504
While we slept, these formal gardens 702
Whither is now that city vanished 13
Who goes there? 389
Will it be so again? 340
Winter oak with boughs akimbo 53
Yes, for the young these expectations charm 677
‘You are nice’ – and she touched his arm with a fleeting 552
You inhabit the mountains, half-way to heaven 187
You with the panache tail 637
You see those trees on the hillside over the lake? 489
Your eyes are not open. You are alone 121
Your fiftieth birthday. What shall we give you? 390
Your voyaging past 50
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My warmest thanks go to Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson for making this book possible, with his trust in me sight unseen, and to these friends: Freda Berkeley, ‘the midwife’; Elizabeth Dove, who types the indecipherable with enthusiasm and grace; lona Opie, Quentin Stevenson and Adolf Wood, who have given me their invaluable help.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448104062
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Chatto & Windus 2003
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © 1992 in this edition The Estate of C. Day Lewis
Copyright © 1992 in the introduction Jill Balcon
C. Day Lewis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1992 by
Sinclair-Stevenson Limited
Reissued in 2003 by
Chatto & Windus
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 85619 144 3
Complete Poems Page 54
