Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Had we not long ago made Earth

  Our secret altar

  Garlanded with our worshipping?

  II

  When she was young, Earth, loving thee,

  Blessed us with halcyon noontide, tranquil night.

  And now in eye and mouth I see

  Beauty resurgent

  That could not perish, being so bright.

  Surely my song had fashioned first

  Some alchemy for thy body’s quickening,

  Before its splendour was dispersed

  A few dumb ashes

  Into the cool of evening.

  The Fisher

  When at last I am abiding

  Where I would be,

  Think gently of the wind-snatched rumour

  That was once me.

  Can you forget

  How, dreaming I should find one beauty,

  One silver-perfect thing to give her,

  I cast the net?

  How in those dark, unquiet waters

  I found defeat;

  And how I laid the meshes, empty,

  Before her feet?

  1925

  COUNTRY COMETS

  ‘Ye country comets, that portend

  No war nor prince’s funeral,

  Shining unto no higher end

  Than to presage the grass’s fall.’

  ANDREW MARVELL

  TO HER WHOSE MIND AND BODY ARE A POETRY I HAVE NOT ACHIEVED I GIVE THESE POEMS

  Prelude

  Let up the curtain.

  The conjuror

  Spangled and certain

  Of hand will appear.

  He recks not your ‘bravo,’

  Nor counts your pence:

  He plays to a shadow

  Audience.

  Cheers or hisses –

  Whichever you will:

  Nor for this is

  Rehearsed his skill;

  But for remembrance

  Of dreams untrue,

  Lest their loved semblance

  Should vanish too.

  A girl’s young beauty

  That was not his –

  These are his only

  Properties.

  Though he tricks your vision

  By wizard stealth,

  Alas, the magician

  Can’t trick himself.

  And if he is slow in

  Sleight of hand,

  It is through knowing

  He may not command –

  For all his patter

  And ivory wand –

  The love that a greater

  Wizard has banned.

  Autumn of the Mood

  On the heart’s hidden verge

  To mark where love is buried

  Mourner lilies spring

  Out of the stunted spurge.

  And a small wind sings dirge

  Under the last leaves fluttering.

  This autumn of the mood

  Lives not beyond the rustle

  Of its own leaves falling;

  And soon, where lilies stood,

  Brittle stalks in the wood

  Shiver, like spectres at cock-calling.

  Sun and Waterfall

  Sun and waterfall conspire

  To shape a thing of airy grace

  Apt as Helen’s breast to baffle

  And shame and haunt the very desire

  To which it yields in hot embrace.

  Now stands the poet with his bottle

  Of cut glass by the waterfall,

  To trap the rainbow glittering there;

  Gloating he comes to his dark study –

  O, the rainbow he would enthrall

  Is a few waterdrops, its rare

  Essence eludes him.

  But somebody

  Passing the window at high noon

  Looks in the bottle, and climbs upon

  Some peak, and cries across the valleys: –

  ‘Each petty husk of life shall soon

  Mix with the dust of Ilion –

  Fleas, churches, men and factory-chimneys:

  But who shall keep alive the spark

  That clamps together Life’s whole frame

  Rotting to dissolution?’ Giddy,

  He falls. The seer finds no bulwark

  From his own vision. And the same

  Inertia of field and city

  Hails one more martyr.

  Yet maybe

  Some ears still heed a challenging,

  A trumpet-call that drowns the little

  Gossiping tongues: Some eyes can see

  A flash in the air, as though the King-

  Eagle swooped ominous of battle.

  Then there are cannonades, alarms,

  And hearts are stung to nobleness;

  Smashing of eikons, bursting of fetters

  That rusted on complaisant arms.

  While by the waterfall no less

  Intangibly a rainbow glitters.

  Cyprian! Cyprian!

  I

  Here is green lacquer

  Spread by the willows

  On glossy water

  Where the ballet of minnows

  Moving together

  In lithe sarabande

  Suddenly waver

  When they have seen your hand

  Ruffle the water –

  Stare and are hesitant,

  So gracious a dancer

  That ivory visitant.

  II

  Here, as I lay and watched the sunlight playing

  A visual music in your eyes,

  I thought, ‘This grand surprise

  We have of beauty’s disarraying

  Alone is real: without it we are less

  Than ghosts, as the musician’s even

  Poised hands are meaningless

  But for the fire they bring from heaven!’

  III

  How little the love that cramps similitude

  Of the beloved within this transient mirage,

  Earth’s beauty! For you there is no image

  In wave and tree:

  No branch has motion or quietude

  To match your fingers’ wizardry

  That do but touch, and Reason

  Is futile as a creaking skeleton.

  I hear your voice make of each trivial thought

  Aria so lovely that all philosophies seem

  An ocean of greybeard waves

  Chattering the same old, outworn theme.

  Save in your body Poetry is naught

  But a painted bawd who lives

  On another’s graces at any crossroad bought.

  And so will I throw off this flaunting

  Motley of wisdom: it only would obscure

  In my heart’s clouded air

  That bright and birdlike haunting

  When you and Love are moving there.

  Naked Woman with Kotyle

  She moved to the slow

  Dance of supplication;

  Her body’s flow

  Was a moon in motion.

  Like the moon that swims

  In a cold river

  And eddies at its whims

  She seemed to her lover.

  She danced alone,

  Whiter than a column

  Of the Parthenon,

  Virginal and solemn.

  So he prayed to the stars,

  Took enamel and graver,

  And toiling on this vase

  Timeless grace gave her.

  He looked with heartbreak

  On the vase, so petty

  So frail a thing to take

  All her live beauty.

  Now are they gone –

  Trancèd and entrancer.

  Dust dancing in the sun

  Is that forgotten dancer.

  Haven in Ithaca

  When my heart’s Odyssey

  Finds the despaired-of Ithaca on your lips,

  And in that moment dies the misery

  Of storm and calm and the sick shi
p’s

  Seafaring over an endless sea;

  This haven of delight

  Will happier be because it holds a swell

  Sea-borne, an after thrill of the long fight –

  The mountainous swoop from heaven to hell,

  The blind masts reeling against the night.

  Magicians in Dorset

  No one, I thought, shall invade

  This faery fastness that holds us; the battlement

  Of fern with a rare enchantment

  Impregnable we have made.

  No one, ’tis sure, can invade …

  And then; ‘Have ye seen a stray calf anywhere?’

  In the quiet Dorsetshire

  Accents; and a horse neighed.

  Like a puckish Abraham

  The rider seemed, or a bearded Oberon:

  So wizardly his face shone

  That our spells grew empty and sham.

  For his was the simpleness

  Born of earth-magic, finer than fantasy;

  The unconscious dignity

  Of hills and wind-laden grass.

  Certainly we were the least

  Of magicians; or else, when they turned away through the green

  Battlement, we would have seen

  The man and his elfin beast –

  Wings asprout from their shoulders –

  Climb up to the sun, sedately fantastical

  As spray from the waves that fall

  Upon distant Atlantic boulders.

  From the Waters of Loch Linnhe

  I

  Rest now in your places, you calm hills,

  Priestesses of quiet!

  Rest now! You have kept the secret

  of your repose that fills

  My heart only with sharp unrestfulness.

  No storm thrusting across the sky

  Black menacing antlers, nothing distemperate

  Has power to violate

  You, cloistered up in your own serenity

  From every storm and stress.

  Lament, you winds! Skirl, skirl

  Over the hills and the deep-rooted loch

  Love’s desperate coronach!

  Their heart stirs not. Unheeding as this proud girl,

  Unheeding they must be ever.

  O she is cold, she is lovely and ruinous

  As a spear flung into the sunset

  Never to find a target:

  She was born to spend her impetuous

  Spring-time upon no lover.

  II

  The hills reply

  Do not cry out. When truth’s whole firmament quakes

  It will be time to scream and scold:

  Love that is cast in the heroic mould

  Covers his countenance, but makes

  No vain lamenting.

  Will you be never satisfied to feel

  Her beauty beating through your eyes?

  Are they dim with search for brighter ardencies,

  To those the present times reveal

  Still unconsenting?

  Do not cry out. Think rather how the days

  Because she lived them at your side

  Swung in an epic rhythm; each beautified,

  A flower, a summer, each, to praise

  Her April brow.

  With her you watched the gorgeous stars along

  Cool skies ride out the night, until

  Her face grew rapt and fervent as the trill

  Of a blackbird startled into song

  By one green bough.

  And since of hurrying wind, anchorless wave,

  Of mist and curlew-call and star

  She seemed thus essence and interpreter,

  Why do you envy us our grave

  Cerement of quiet?

  Cling then to these, folding away despair;

  In them there’s better than heart’s ease,

  Lovelier than tranquillity, for these

  Stamped you at the core of her, to share

  The young blood’s riot.

  The Shadow-Pimp

  I thought, ‘Had I this body of my Hope

  Coffined, earthed up, and out of ken;

  This false friend whispering at the elbow,

  Pointing horizonward, stunting the scope

  Of here and now; this pimp of shadow,

  Dream and futility: – then might I win

  A mellow, chimney-corner ease.

  No more my thought would go with the high branches

  Fingering at the moon. I would have release

  From the not quite desperate despair that clutches

  Hope’s hem like a starving child.

  My clock would be a register

  Of minutes each sucked dry, of hours beguiled

  To glow upon me placidly

  As evening light in the stillroom on pewter.

  Time would not lag, thus, pregnant with a burden

  Of clogged expectancy.’

  So I rose up one night and strangled Hope,

  Buried him twelve foot deep at the end of the garden.

  I might have known one cannot cope

  With such. Next day the grim persistent spark

  Came bodied out anew in windier boast

  And promise, whispering at my elbow;

  Pointing my heart towards the fruitless dark …

  I suppose I must take this too substantial ghost

  For undivorceable bed fellow.

  It is the True Star

  I will remember this night. So long as mind

  Endures to captain against the vandal Doom

  Her forlorn hopes – nerve, blood and bone designed

  After death’s image, let me remember this night.

  There were daffodils at one corner of my room

  Poised in a golden trance, and the four white-

  Panelled walls made cosmos in miniature

  Serene as a dewdrop or a Chinese poem,

  And I its essence and demiurge. So pure

  A oneness (I thought) is every man. No stir

  From the street breaks on his Self, a play without proem

  Or epilogue, dreamed in the theatre

  He calls his life: being actor and audience,

  To the last posture of decay he claps,

  Hisses, yawns at himself.

  But then, what sense

  Have they the pioneer-minded, the rebel-hearted,

  If man’s fulfilment rest on no ‘perhaps’

  Outside him? They are bell-buoys adrift from their charted

  Safe shallows, sagging inanely through a sea

  That yerks them up to meaningless stars, clanging,

  Clanging for Eldorado, dementedly.

  Monad or Nomad? What difference, since either state

  Binds us with a law, each soul from each estranging,

  To be thus terribly masters of our fate.

  And I was sickened by this philosophy

  That would benight each man in a six-foot cell,

  Proud Playboy of his own complacency.

  So I opened the window and put out my head,

  Thought’s fog, portentous pachyderm, to dispel.

  (‘The monad has no windows,’ Leibnitz said.)

  Firm stood the moon, and all the sky marched on

  Rank after rank of cloud in ragged battalions

  Before its face: as though Napoleon,

  The squat dynamic man, straddling the snow

  Watched while his glorious tatterdemalions

  Trailed home and left his hope-blood at Moscow.

  Then, lapped in that magnificence, I knew

  Suddenly how all creatures from one source

  Take breath and purpose, and again renew

  It with their greatness. How the very star

  That held Columbus to his homeric course

  Waned on the waters around St. Helena.

  ‘This star that constant is for our possession,

  Find we its gleam amid whatever skies –

  In valour’s dayspri
ng, or the dry noontide passion

  To probe beneath life’s semblances, or drowned

  In the deep-sea midnight of a woman’s eyes:

  This star, whose mere reflection will astound

  Us out of false content, by its possessing

  Mates every true possessor; and so fills

  Each creature with Creation, itself amassing

  From men the stuff of Godhead.’…

  As I spoke

  Quietly like a clump of daffodils

  Out of the night grew dawn, and sparrows awoke.

  Between Hush and Hush

  Dear, do not think that I

  Will praise your beauty the less,

  Believing death for ever

  Snows up its fair impress.

  Nor slight my love because

  It claims no magic re-birth,

  But deems all kissing over

  When lips are laid to earth.

  I’ll praise your beauty as

  A dewdrop fast on its prime –

  A still perfection lasting

  But for one blink of time.

  So short its hour, your love

  To mine should bravelier rush,

  Bird-note to bird-note thrusting

  Out between hush and hush.

  A Second Narcissus

  Stoop, stoop, Narcissus,

  Over the shadowed pool

  That is her heart; no flaw there

  Lurks to befool

  Thy gaze with mirrored

  Grimace. Yet not as he,

  The Grecian, crazed by his new-