Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Beechen Vigil 1925
Dedication
Epigraph
The Net
Beechen Vigil
A Creation
Rose-Pruner
In a Wood
Songs of Sirens
Words
A Rune for Anthony John
Fairy to Children
Song of Fairies
Tapestries
Lost
Lines from the French
No Meaner Quest
Late Summer
Dream-Maker
Once in Arcady
A Forest Piece
Lines from Catullus
Sanctuary
An April Mood
Eve
He Thanks Earth for his Beloved
The Fisher
Country Comets 1928
Epigraph
Dedication
Prelude
Autumn of the Mood
Sun and Waterfall
Cyprian! Cyprian!
Naked Woman with Kotyle
Haven in Ithaca
Magicians in Dorset
From the Waters of Loch Linnhe
The Shadow-Pimp
It is the True Star
Between Hush and Hush
A Second Narcissus
Retrospect: From a Street in Chelsea
The only Pretty Ring-Time
Under the Willow
Photograph of a Bacchante
At Greenlanes
My Love came to Me
Wreck near Ballinacarig
Arcadian
To his Mistress
The Perverse
Apologue
Transitional Poem 1929
Dedication
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Notes
From Feathers to Iron 1931
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Epilogue
The Magnetic Mountain 1933
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
A Time to Dance 1935
Learning to Talk
Moving In
The Conflict
Losers
In Me Two Worlds
A Warning to those who Live on Mountains
Johnny Head-in-Air
The Ecstatic
Poem for an Anniversary
Sonnet
Two Songs
A Carol
A Time to Dance
Epilogue
Noah and the Waters 1936
Dedication
Author’s Foreword
Epigraph
Prologue
Overtures to Death 1938
Dedication
Maple and Sumach
February 1936
Bombers
A Parting Shot
Newsreel
Regency Houses
Landscapes
Sex-Crime
The Bells that Signed
A Happy View
Overtures to Death
When they have lost
In the Heart of Contemplation
Sonnet for a Political Worker
Questions
The Volunteer
The Nabara
Spring Song
Night Piece
The Three Cloud-Maidens
Behold the Swan
Song
The Escapist
Passage from Childhood
Self-Criticism and Answer
Word Over all 1943
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
The Lighted House
The Album
The Hunter’s Game
Departure in the Dark
Cornet Solo
O Dreams, O Destinations
PART TWO
Word Over All
The Image
The Poet
It Would be Strange
The Assertion
Watching Post
The Stand-To
Where are the War Poets?
Angel
Airmen Broadcast
Lidice
Ode to Fear
The Dead
Reconciliation
Will it be so again?
PART THREE
The Innocent
One and One
Windy Day in August
After the Storm
Fame
Jig
Hornpipe
The Fault
The Rebuke
Poems 1943–1947 1948
Dedication
Epigraph
The Double Vision
Juvenilia
Sketches for a Self-Portrait
Marriage of Two
Married Dialogue
The Woman Alone
Ending
Heart and Mind
A Failure
The Unwanted
The Sitting
Statuette: Late Minoan
The Revenant
The House-Warming
Meeting
The Heartsease
Is it far to go?
New Year’s Eve
Emily Brontë
Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy
Who Goes There?
Lines for Edmund Blunden on his Fiftieth Birthday
Buzzards over Castle Hill
A Hard Frost
The Christmas Tree
The Chrysanthemum Show
Two Songs
Minor Tragedy
On the Sea Wall
Ewig
All Gone
The Neurotic
The Two Travellers
Seen From the Train
Outside and In
The Misfit
In the Shelter
Two Translations
An Italian Visit 1953
Epigraph
Dedication
PART ONE
Dialogue at the Airport
PART TWO
Flight to Italy
PART THREE
A Letter from Rome
PART FOUR
Bus to Florence
PART FIVE
Florence: Works of Art
Singing Children: Luca Della Robbia
Judith and Holofernes: Donatello
Annunciation: Leonardo
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda: Piero di Cosimo
Boy with Dolphin Verrochio
PART SIX
Elegy Before Death: At Settignano
PART SEVEN
The Homeward Prospect
Pegasus 1957
Dedication
Part One
Pegasus
Psyche
Baucis and Philemon
Ariadne on Naxos
Part Two
A Riddle
Seasonable Thoughts for Intellectuals
The Committee
The Wrong Road
The Pest
Almost Human
George Meredith, 1861
The Mirror
Love and Pity
The Tourists
In Memory of Dylan Thomas
Elegiac Sonnet
Final Instructions
Part Three
The House Where I was Born
Father to Sons
Son and Father
Christmas Eve
‘The Years O’
Lot 96
Time to Go
On a Dor
set Upland
Dedham Vale, Easter 1954
The Great Magicians
Moods of Love
Last Words
The Gate 1962
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Bread and Wine
The Gate
View from an Upper Window
The Newborn
Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park
Circus Lion
Getting Warm – Getting Cold
Walking Away
This Young Girl
Travelling Light
Things
An Episode
A Loss
A Meeting
An Upland Field
The Disabused
Not Proven
Wind’s Eye
In Loving Memory
Edward Elgar
Ideal Home
Fisherman and/or Fish
The Antique Heroes
The Graves of Academe
‘Said the Old Codger’
The Unexploded Bomb
The Christmas Rose
Requiem for the Living
The Room 1965
Dedication
Fables and Confessions:
The Room
On not Saying Everything
The Way In
The Passion for Diving
Derelict
Saint Anthony’s Shirt
Days before a Journey
Fishguard to Rosslare
The Hieroglyph
Seven Steps in Love
The Fox
The Romantics
Stephanotis
The Dam
An Operation
Others:
Who Goes Home?
Pietà
Elegy for a Woman Unknown
Young Chekhov
The Widow Interviewed
For Rex Warner on his Sixtieth Birthday
My Mother’s Sister
Madrigal for Lowell House
This Loafer
Grey Squirrel: Greenwich Park
Terns
Apollonian Figure
A Relativist
Moral
The Voyage
The Whispering Roots 1970
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
The House Where I was Born
Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois
Fishguard to Rosslare
Golden Age, Monart, Co. Wexford
Avoca, Co. Wicklow
Near Ballyconneely, Co. Galway
Land
Kilmainham Jail: Easter Sunday, 1966
Remembering Con Markievicz
Lament for Michael Collins
Ass in Retirement
Beauty Show, Clifden, Co. Galway
Harebells over Mannin Bay
At Old Head, Co. Mayo
Sailing from Cleggan
Ballintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo
An Ancestor
Goldsmith outside Trinity
The Whispering Roots
Part Two
Some Beautiful Morning
A Skull Picked Clean
All Souls’ Night
Hero and Saint
Sunday Afternoon
A Privileged Moment
A Picture by Renoir
A Tuscan Villa
Merry-go-Round
Philosophy Lectures
After an Encaenia
Tenure
Epitaph for a Drug-Addict
A Marriage Song
At East Coker
Posthumous Poems 1979
Dedication
The Park, Guy’s Hospital: Early Morning
The Expulsion: Masaccio
My Méséglise Way
Snowfall on a College Garden
Three Little Pictures
Reflections 1
Reflections 2
Poets, Uncage the Word!
A Christmas Way
Plus Ultra
Recurring Dream
Going my Way?
Hellene: Philhellene
Remembering Carrownisky
Children Leaving Home
At Lemmons
Vers d’Occasion
Then and Now
Hail, Teesside!
Old Vic, 1818–1968
Feed my Little Ones
In a Library
For the Investiture of the Prince of Wales
Battle of Britain
Keep Faith with Nature
Beethoven, 1770–1970
St. Paul’s – Old and New
Hymn for Shakespeare’s Birthday
Another Day
A Short Dirge for St. Trinian’s
Cat
Tuscany
Keats, 1821–1971
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young poets who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment of those days. Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and, despite an active career which embraced schoolmastering, journalism, publishing, academic lecturing and the writing of detective stories, his devotion to poetry never wavered. Always pro-life, he continued to write to the end of his days, so that when he died in 1972, having held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 and 1956 and having been appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he left behind a very large and varied body of work.
Here, for the first time, are all the poems Day Lewis wrote, including the vers d'occasion which have never previously appeared in book form and a number of works which have only been published in a limited edition before now.
About the Author
C. Day Lewis was born in Ireland (and always cherished his Irish background) in 1904, and was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. On leaving Oxford in 1927 he taught at various schools in England and Scotland until 1935, when he abandoned schoolmastering for good. By then he had published half a dozen volumes of verse, of which From Feathers to Iron and The Magnetic Mountain formed the basis of his reputation as one of the significant poets of the thirties. In 1946 he was invited to give the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1951-6 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Two years later he became Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1964-5 and held the Compton Lectureship in Poetry at Hull University. During all this time he continued steadily to write poetry. In 1968 he was appointed Poet Laureate, but tragically died of cancer only four years later.
DEDICATION
This collection is dedicated with love to our children, Tamasin and Daniel Day Lewis, whose achievements would have made their father proud if he had lived to see them.
Introduction
IT IS TWENTY years since C. Day Lewis died. It is thirty-eight years since his Collected Poems were published to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1954, though there followed five more publications … In that collection he withheld the Juvenilia, and made cuts in A Time to Dance and Noah and the Waters. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and I have decided that the Complete Works must offer everything, so that the development of the poems from 1925 to 1972 can be seen at last.
I shall now call him Cecil, though at his insistence his Christian name, which he disliked, was never printed after 1927, except in ignorance.
In his preface to the Collected Poems 1954 he wrote, after rereading them:
I have felt both surprise and regret: regret, that so much energy should so often have run to waste; surprise to hear a buried self speaking, now and then, with such urgency. Some poets can rewrite and improve their early work, years later. I wish I could do so; but the selves who wrote those poems are strangers to me, and I cannot resume their identities or go back into the world where they lived. There are certain themes, no doubt, linking these dead selves together. Perhaps these constant themes compose the personal tradition
of a poet – his one continuity, defining and preserving, through every change of language, every change of heart, what is essential to him …
It might be helpful to remind today’s readers of some of the facts comprehensively documented elsewhere. The ‘Macspaunday’1 poets who flowered in the ’thirties were friends, but never a group. They had shared the same privileged background, public school and Oxford – in Cecil’s case through scholarships and exhibitions, as his father was a parson of no means. However, adolescent life in his father’s Nottinghamshire mining parish also included tennis parties in ‘the Dukeries’ and he became acutely aware of the contrast between the lowest and highest strata of society. In his poem Sketches for a Portrait (Poems 1943–1947) he
looked for a lost ball
In the laurels, they smirched with pit-grime …
He had seen his father sitting by the bedsides of miners coughing themselves to death. His outrage at social injustice stemmed from that time. Then, with the onset of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, came the urgent wish to prevent war. For the time being he turned to communism along with many other artists and intellectuals of this period.
The late Clifford Dyment, in his booklet C. Day Lewis, 1955,2 thought that the poetic powers of the author of the so-called ‘Political’ poems could carry the reader over the rough places and sometimes didactic tone ‘by the beauty and momentum of the verse itself’. Cecil was a man with music in his bones (he had a ravishing light tenor singing voice, and was one of the finest speakers of verse of his generation – accomplishments not universal among poets). Stanzas from these love poems of the ‘Political’ period show his lyricism.
… Desire is a witch
And runs against the clock.
It can unstitch
The decent hem
Where space tacks on to time:
It can unlock
Pandora’s privacies …
Transitional Poem
… With me, my lover makes
The clock assert its chime:
But when she goes, she takes
The mainspring out of time …
Transitional Poem
… Beauty’s end is in sight,
Terminus where all feather joys alight.
Wings that flew lightly
Fold and are iron. We see
The thin end of mortality …
From Feathers to Iron
… Do not expect again a phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease
Tranced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown …
From Feathers to Iron
Those early love lyrics nearly cost him his job at Cheltenham Junior School. In his autobiography The Buried Day he tells how the headmaster had seen Transitional Poem in the local bookshop and summoned Cecil to his study. H.M. was clearly deeply embarrassed, and asked C. if he thought he was fit to teach little boys, because the poems were … (he couldn’t bring himself to say it) ‘extremely … excessively … er … SEXUAL’. ‘But they’re love poems,’ blurted out Cecil, ‘addressed to my wife.’
As a schoolmaster, and later as a professor, Cecil insisted that one must respond to a poem directly, spontaneously, positively – ‘to be able to enjoy before we can learn to discriminate’. He also said: ‘Modern poetry is every poem, whether written last year or five centuries ago, that has meaning for us still.’ The reader will find some themes prevailing throughout his work: hero-worship, fear, compassion, transience, very often the conflict of a divided heart and mind, and always the relentless compulsion to know himself.
Complete Poems Page 1