Cecil was a modest man; I wish to make no extravagant claims on his behalf. He himself thought that only his sonnet sequence O Dreams, O Destinations (Word Over AH) might, possibly, endure. At the end of his life, when asked to contribute to James Gibson’s anthology Let The Poet Choose, he submitted the last of those nine sonnets, and On Not Saying Everything (The Room) which he wrote during a fruitful time at Harvard in 1964–5, when he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair. This is what he said: ‘May I suggest … the sonnet because, though I wrote it 30 years ago, it still stands up and says something I feel to be truthful about the human condition: ‘On not saying everything’ because I believe so strongly in the doctrine of limitations it speaks for – that everything, a tree, a poem, a human relationship, lives and thrives by the limits imposed on it.’
Of course poets are not always their own best judges. However, in their solitude, they cannot realise how much and where they touch other people’s lives. I am touched myself when friends, and often strangers, quote passages of Cecil’s which move them and, moreover, sustain them. Walking Away (The Gate) usually brings many reactions whenever it is broadcast or read in public.
… I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
Anyone who has lost a child, or simply left one at the new school gate, can identify with the parting. My Mother’s Sister (The Room) is a poignant poem about the beloved aunt who brought him up from the age of four when his mother died. In both these poems he avoids sentimentality – a real achievement. It is interesting that religious images appear often in Cecil’s poems, even though he became a rather ‘churchy’ agnostic after the years of living in a parsonage. The title poem in The Gate was dedicated to Trekkie Parsons. One week-end in her house, he couldn’t take his eyes off a picture she had painted. I could see it was saying something to him, and thanks to her generosity I bought it for him in instalments.
… We expect nothing (the flower might add), we only
Await: this pure awaiting –
It is the kind of worship we are taught.
It was greatly encouraging to Cecil that Henry Moore, after reading a typescript of The Expulsion (Posthumous Poems), told him he had learned something new about the fresco by Masaccio which had inspired the poem. Only recently – I wish I could tell the author – that superb pianist and scholar Graham Johnson said to me that Cornet Solo (Word Over All) was ‘the most evocative poem I know about the power of music in childhood’s memory’.
… Strange how those yearning airs could sweeten
And still enlighten
The hours when solitude gave me her breast.
Strange they could tell a mere child how hearts may beat in
The self-same tune for the once-possessed
And the unpossessed …
Adverse academic criticism could not demolish these statements of faith by other artists.
Some of those who declared that CDL ‘had no voice of his own’ had not, perhaps, listened or looked carefully enough. This is what he said himself about influences: ‘I myself have been technically influenced, and enabled to clarify my thoughts, by such diverse poets as Yeats, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Virgil, Valéry, Auden and Hardy. They suggested to me ways of saying what I had to say. Any given poem thus influenced is not necessarily secondhand. I think it possible that a reader with a sensitive ear, a dispassionate point of view, and a thorough knowledge of the poetry of Hardy, say, would find as much difference as similarity between a poem of mine, influenced by him, and one of Hardy’s own.’
In one case, until I pointed this out, a scholar actually failed to observes the initials under the titles of each pastiche in the Florence: Works of Art section of An Italian Visit. Earlier I wrote of hero-worship as a recurrent theme. I think it is one of the constituents of these pastiches. There are certainly many examples of this in music. Cecil matched the subjects of some of the Florentine pictures and sculpture he most loved, with poems in the style of poets he deeply admired: Yeats, Hardy, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. He wrote ‘in the style of’ and was admonished for being merely imitative …
At his best, he was a formidable craftsman. He was a storyteller in verse. This mastery of the narrative – a rare gift today – was shown first in A Time to Dance. Part of it is a gripping tale of a flight to Australia by two men in a decrepit aircraft after the First World War. Cecil had a tremendous reverence for brave men of action, and he had a passion for flying. The poem is an extraordinary feat of technique: long, rhythmic, ‘airborne’ lines, containing rhymes, half rhymes and internal rhymes (very much part of his ‘voice’). He was to demonstrate this narrative skill again in The Nabara (Overtures to Death).
They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender.
Phase One
Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant’s dishonoured cheque, or the dreamer’s mad
Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made
In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage
But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.
Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:
She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird
To home wherever man’s heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:
Innocent is her touch as the dawn’s, but still it unleashes
The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word …
He was over forty when, after the war, he was able to afford his first holiday abroad and immediately he fell in love with Italy, like so many poets before him. Later, we did the journeys all over again together. Flight to Italy was exactly as he told it in An Italian Visit. (It was before the days of jet aircraft, and I did not share his wild elation at take-off or when ‘the atrocious Alps’ were, literally, upon us, not below, and we eventually landed in Milan in a turmoil of forked lightning.) In the middle of the narrative is a contemplative passage I often quote to people who are recovering from illness and finding – as we all do – that convalescence can be the hardest part:
… After a hard winter, on the first warm day
The invalid venturing out into the rock-garden,
Pale as a shaft of December sunshine, pauses,
All at sea among the aubretia, the alyssum
And arabis – halts and moves on how warily,
As if to take soundings where the blossom foams and tumbles:
But what he does sound is the depth of his own weakness
At last, as never when pain-storms lashed him.
So we, convalescent from routine’s long fever,
Plummeting our gaze down to river and plain,
Question if indeed that dazzling world beneath us
Be truth or delirium; and finding still so tentative
The answer, can gauge how nearly we were ghosts,
How far we must travel yet to flesh and blood …
In Pegasus, the narrative poems are new workings of Greek legends. The title poem is a powerful allegory about the creative process; a large number of his poems were about writing. The allegories A Failure and The Unwanted (Poems 1943–1947), Final Instructions (Pegasus) and Circus Lion (The Gate) say a great deal about the discipline, devotion and pain of being a poet. In a lighter mood is a charming poem with an intricate, elegant stanza form dedicated to Robert Frost, called Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park (The Gate). Cecil challenged Frost to write one too, when, in 1957, they spent an afternoon together at this unlikely entertainment for a New England farmer.
… What’s needfully done in the solitude of sheep-runs –
Those tough, real tasks – becomes this stylized game,
A demonstration
of intuitive wit
Kept natural by the saving grace of error.
To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen
Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
Controlled woolgathering is my work too.
At this time he wrote his first Dramatic Monologue for me: Ariadne on Naxos. He never succeeded in writing a play, but had a great gift for dialogue in poetry (and in the detective novels written by his alter ego Nicholas Blake). Later, in The Gate, he wrote two more Dramatic Monologues The Disabused (which he performed brilliantly and chillingly) and Not Proven, which he dedicated to our friend, George Rylands, the distinguished scholar, with whom we gave many recitals, and who was a co-founder of the Apollo Society.
In 1940 Cecil published his translation of Virgil’s Georgics.3 He had been a classical scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and all his translations were exact, as well as being poems in their own right. He set out to steer the course between ‘the twin vulgarities of flashy colloquialism and perfunctory grandiloquence’. He was a countryman for preference and was always minutely observant and accurate in his study of nature and the land. This is evident in all the poems. He felt intensely patriotic about his roots in the countryside on the Dorset/Devon border, and the threat of invasion intensified these feelings. Through them he was linked to Virgil, who had written of the land and husbandry with such tenderness all those centuries before.
In Poems 1943–1947 there is his fine translation of Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière Marin. It is faithful, and it is a poem of his own. I felt impelled to go there after his death, when the Spenders were giving me refuge in Provence. Natasha and I started out very early before the blistering heat of a July day. She drove me to Sète; we arrived at noon. It was extraordinary – we had walked into the poem (Cecil himself had never seen the graveyard).
This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame –
That sea for ever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time’s air is sparkling, dream is certainty –
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause …
The last volume to be published in his lifetime was The Whispering Roots, in 1970, when his health had been failing for many years. More than half the poems spring from his Anglo-Irish provenance: the childhood memories; his Goldsmith ancestry; our 1966 visit to Dublin to commemorate the Easter Rising of 1916 (there were many other Dublin visits); the glorious summers we spent yearly with our children in Connemara and County Mayo – ‘a source held near and dear’. In this book there are thirty-seven different stanza forms in thirty-four poems, and only one is repeated. Of a particular anonymous review of the poems Professor Samuel Hynes said, five years after C’s death: ‘It was not so much a review, I thought, as a literary mugging.’ The reviewer, Geoffrey Grigson, had not had one good word to say about a single poem, and it was the last piece that Cecil ever read about his work before he died. It was a cruel blow to one who was always magnanimous, and had spent years of his life helping other writers. It was in character that he behaved stoically. I discovered we were each hiding the review from the other. We were not subscribers to the periodical, but ‘well wishers’ had posted it.
The vers d’occasion are collected for the first time. These are verses with no pretension to being poetry, and they bring me back to his craftsmanship. First of all he made it clear on becoming Poet Laureate that he would try to involve himself in public issues that attracted him and needed support, not just Royal events. The variety of subjects speaks for itself, and I have no doubt that he would feel passionately about any number of the world’s problems that concern us all today. As it was, I like to recollect his enchanting, challenging smile (grin, really) when he said to me: ‘If I can write some verses on the amalgamation of six Teesside boroughs I shall feel I’ve really achieved something.’ The many admirers of our friend Ronald Searle will look with affection (I hope) on A Short Dirge for St. Trinian’s written when the artist wished to bury the girls formally and finally.
When I edited Posthumous Poems I did not include At Lemmons, the last poem he wrote on his deathbed (called by Professor Hynes ‘a small masterpiece – reticent and calm, and very moving’). The reason for this is that it had already been included in a selection of Poems 1925–1972, many of them very much abridged without my fore-knowledge. If I had been consulted, I would not have given permission for the wildly random cuts. ‘Either the whole poem or not at all,’ I would have said. I wish I had re-published At Lemmons at the end of Posthumous Poems. However, the last poem in that volume, Children Leaving Home, was his moving valedictory to Tamasin and Daniel. They must have thought he was detached, which is not uncommon with artists who are preoccupied. In his case it was also a conscious effort ‘to ride them on a loose rein’ (his phrase). He was an affectionate, reassuring and sage parent who had much to teach me, and here again ‘the love is proved in the letting go’. All too soon they had to go forth. They were eighteen and just fifteen.
Cecil is buried in Stinsford churchyard, very near Thomas Hardy. Samuel Hynes said: ‘His burial there seems to me entirely appropriate, not because he was of the stature of Hardy, who seems more and more clearly to be the greatest of modern English poets, but because he was of Hardy’s company, a decent minor poet in the same tradition. By writing in the English lyric tradition, he helped to keep that tradition alive, and earned his place with Hardy in Stinsford churchyard.’ I can picture again that special, gratified smile were he to read such a compliment, and happy incredulity at the knowledge that he was buried there in his beloved Dorset. ‘The writing of poetry,’ Cecil once wrote, ‘is a vocation, a game, a habit, and a search for truth.’ His life’s work was all of these, and much more.
… Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song. …
Is It Far To Go? Poems 1943–1947
JILL BALCON
1 C. Day Lewis. W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender.
2 Published by the British Council and the National Book League.
3 Not included in this Collection.
BEECHEN VIGIL
and other poems
For the Lady Dream-Maker
‘It is a little star-dust caught, a segment
of the rainbow which I have clutched.’
THOREAU
The Net
Poet, sink the shining net
In ebb and flow.
Only there thy spoil is met
Where all tides go.
Bend above the wavering net.
Those silvery hordes
Often shall o’erleap the cords,
And thou shalt fret
For so much beauty unharvested.
Some hour will bless,
And thou one lasting gleam shalt add
To loveliness.
Beechen Vigil
I
Come, dust, spread thine oblivion above
My heart and all the words it wove
For her. Now in these branches cannot die
Remembrance of the hour when I
Kept vigil with the lady that I love.
II
We watched, while day sank down to sleep
Among the beeches in green tranquillity.
The west ran gold, and every tree
Put on a stronger magic.
We saw the solemn shadows creep
Like acolytes of that hushed mystery.
And whe
n your eager head was bent
Seerwise above the fire, I suddenly knew
How from dim time this chapel grew
But to enshrine our vigil,
And felt a glory imminent
That should o’erleap its source – build heaven anew.
III
Beeches, how fortunate a mood
Brought us mazed children beneath the benison
Of your unaging motherhood!
Shadow and sunset, leaf and fire
Have sung together a rune miraculous
To heal our doubt and blind desire.
What though beyond a thousand years
Stands the full pattern? It is enough that now
Our purpose strides amid the stars.
A Creation
From the unerring chisel at fall of shadow
Beautiful stood forth Adam.
Then God upon lawns of that young, unwalled garden
Set singing a thousand thrushes.
Whatever joyance of dew and early hedgerows,
What brave, new thing soever
Their voices’ wondering ecstasy betokened
He hid in a flame-wrought casket.
Thereafter beside the waters He took a shell,
Sighed faintly against its lip.
And all its virginal austerity
Grew tremulant with such sorrow
As Beauty alone may know, mourning for lovers
Complete Poems Page 2