Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  For love can raise

  A mountain where none was:

  Also can prove astronomers wrong

  Who deem the stars too hot

  For life: – here is a star that has begot.)

  Soon from the mother body torn and whirled

  By tidal pull

  And left in space to cool

  That mountain top will be a world

  Treading its own orbit,

  And look to her for warmth, to me for wit.

  18

  It is time to think of you,

  Shortly will have your freedom.

  As anemones that renew

  Earth’s innocence, be welcome.

  Out of your folded sleep

  Come, as the western winds come

  To pasture with the sheep

  On a weary of winter height.

  Lie like a pool unwrinkled

  That takes the sky to heart,

  Where stars and shadows are mingled

  And suns run gold with heat.

  Return as the winds return,

  Heir to an old estate

  Of upland, flower and tarn.

  But born to essential dark,

  To an age that toes the line

  And never o’ersteps the mark.

  Take off your coat: grow lean:

  Suffer humiliation:

  Patrol the passes alone,

  And eat your iron ration.

  Else, wag as the world wags –

  One more mechanical jane

  Or gentleman in wax.

  Is it here we shall regain

  Championship? Here awakes

  A white hope shall preserve

  From flatterers, pimps and fakes

  Integrity and nerve?

  19

  Do not expect again a phœnix 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.

  By a blazed trail our joy will be returning:

  One burning hour throws light a thousand ways,

  And hot blood stays into familiar gestures.

  The best years wait, the body’s plenitude.

  Consider then, my lover, this is the end

  Of the lark’s ascending, the hawk’s unearthly hover:

  Spring season is over soon and first heatwave;

  Grave-browed with cloud ponders the huge horizon.

  Draw up the dew. Swell with pacific violence.

  Take shape in silence. Grow as the clouds grew.

  Beautiful brood the cornlands, and you are heavy;

  Leafy the boughs – they also hide big fruit.

  20

  Sky-wide an estuary of light

  Ebbs amid cloud-banks out of sight.

  At her star-anchorage shall swing

  Earth, the old freighter, till morning.

  Ride above your shadow and trim

  Cargo till the stars grow dim:

  Weigh then from the windless river;

  You’ve a treasure to deliver.

  Behold the incalculable seas

  Change face for every cloud and breeze:

  But a prime mover works inside,

  The constant the integral tide.

  Though black-bordered fancies vex

  You and veering moods perplex,

  Underneath’s a current knowing

  Well enough what way it’s going.

  Stroked by their windy shadows lie

  The grainlands waving at the sky.

  That golden grace must all be shed

  To fill granaries, to make bread.

  Do not grieve for beauty gone.

  Limbs that ran to meet the sun

  Lend their lightness to another;

  Child shall recreate the mother.

  21

  Your eyes are not open. You are alone.

  You then, to be my first-born, this is for you.

  May know, as I, sleet from a bland sky falling,

  Perfidious landmark, false dawn:

  Look out through panes at a spoilt holiday,

  And weep, taking eternity to bed.

  When the hair grows, perceive a world

  Officered by semi-cads and second baboons,

  Be stood in the far corner.

  Later, after each dream of beauty ethereal,

  Bicycling against wind to see the vicar’s daughter,

  Be disappointed.

  And yet there is yet worse to come:

  Desire worn to the bone leaves room for pride’s attrition.

  For they shall ride in bloody uniform,

  Offering choice of a sooner death or a later;

  Mark you to ground, stop the earths,

  Jog home to supper under a bland sky.

  Yes, you may know, as I do, self foreshortened,

  Blocked out with blackness finally all the works of days.

  O you who turn the wheel and look to both sides,

  Consider Phlebas, who shall be taller and handsomer than you.

  One shall rub shoulders with the firmfoot oak

  And with all shifting shade join hands:

  Shall have the heels of time, shall shoot from afar

  And find the loopholes of the armoured train.

  When the machine’s run in, will get

  Free play, better no doubt for the contracting

  Of an indeterminate world.

  Day and night will make armistice for this one,

  Entering the walled garden who knows the hour of spirit

  Reconciled to flesh.

  Then falling leaf falls to renew

  Acquaintance with old contours, with a world in outline.

  Is time now to set house in order, bury

  The dead and count the living, consolidate

  The soul against proved enemies:

  Time with the lengthening shadow to grow tall.

  Thus the free spirit emerges, in courts at ease,

  Content with standing-room, pleased in a small allotment.

  22

  In this sector when barrage lifts and we

  Are left alone with death,

  There’ll be no time to question strategy.

  But now, midsummer offensive not begun,

  We wait and draw mutinous breath,

  Wondering what to gain

  We stake these fallow fields and the good sun.

  This has happened to other men before,

  Have hung on the lip of danger

  And have heard death moving about next door.

  Yet I look up at the sky’s billowing,

  Surprised to find so little change there,

  Though in that ample ring

  Heaven knows what power lies coiled ready to spring.

  What were we at, the moment when we kissed –

  Extending the franchise

  To an indifferent class, would we enlist

  Fresh power who know not how to be so great?

  Beget and breed a life – what’s this

  But to perpetuate

  Man’s labour, to enlarge a rank estate?

  Planted out here some virtue still may flower,

  But our dead follies too –

  A shock of buried weeds to turn it sour.

  Draw up conditions – will the heir conform?

  Or thank us for the favour, who

  Inherits a bankrupt firm,

  Worn-out machinery, an exhausted farm?

  23

  This was not the mind’s undertaking,

  But as outrageous heat

  Breaking in thunder across hills

  Sweetens our aching dust.

  Such is not answerable to mind,

  Is random as a flake

  Blindly down-dancing here or clouds

  That take their windy course.

  Thin from thin air reason issues;

  We live on living earth

  Whose trees enlarge their fruit w
ithout

  Misgiving or excuse.

  Reason is but a riddle of sand;

  Its substance shifts in storm.

  Space-spanned, God-girdled, love will keep

  Its form, being planned of bone.

  24

  Speak then of constancy. Thin eyelids weakly thus

  Batted to beauty, lips that reject her, is not this;

  Nor lust of eye (Christ said it) denied the final kiss.

  Rather a set response, metal-to-magnet affair;

  Flows with the tidal blood, like red of rose or fire

  Is a fast dye outlasts the fabric of desire.

  Happy this river reach sleeps with the sun at noon,

  Takes dews and rains to her wide bed, refusing none

  That full-filled peace, yet constant to one sea will run.

  So melt we down small toys to make each other rich,

  Although no getting or spending can extend our reach

  Whose poles are love, nor close who closer lie than leech.

  For think – throbbing our hearts linked so by endless band,

  So geared together, need not otherwise be bound.

  25

  And since, though young, I know

  Not to expect much good,

  Our dreams from first to last

  Being treacherous underfoot;

  Best I dare wish for you,

  That once (my son, my daughter)

  You may get home on rock

  Feet tired of treading water.

  Lucky, will have also

  An outward grace to ease

  The axles of your world

  And keep the parts at peace:

  Not the waste random stuff

  That stops the gannet’s wing;

  I mean, such oil ensures

  A turbine’s smooth running.

  26

  Beauty breaks ground, oh, in strange places.

  Seen after cloudburst down the bone-dry watercourses,

  In Texas a great gusher, a grain-

  Elevator in the Ukraine plain;

  To a new generation turns new faces.

  Here too fountains will soon be flowing.

  Empty the hills where love was lying late, was playing,

  Shall spring to life: we shall find there

  Milk and honey for love’s heir,

  Shadow from sun also, deep ground for growing.

  My love is a good land. The stranger

  Entering here was sure he need prospect no further.

  Acres that were the eyes’ delight

  Now feed another appetite.

  What formed her first for seed, for crop must change her.

  This is my land, I’ve overheard it

  Making a promise out of clay. All is recorded –

  Early green, drought, ripeness, rainfall,

  Our village fears and festivals,

  When the first tractor came and how we cheered it.

  And as the wind whose note will deepen

  In the upgrowing tree, who runs for miles to open

  His throat above the wood, my song

  With that increasing life grew strong,

  And will have there a finished form to sleep in.

  27

  Dropping the few last days, are drops of lead,

  Heavier hang than a lifetime on the heart.

  Past the limetrees that drug the air jackdaws

  Slanting across a sluggish wind go home:

  On either side of the Saltway fields of clover

  Cling to their sweetness under a threatening sky.

  Numb with crisis all, cramped with waiting.

  Shallowly breathes the wind or holds his breath,

  As in ambush waiting to leap at convoy

  Must pass this way – there can be no evasions.

  Surly the sky up there and means mischief;

  The parchment sky that hourly tightens above us,

  Screwed to storm-pitch, where thunder shall roll and roll

  Intolerably postponing the last movement.

  Now the young challenger, too tired to sidestep,

  Hunches to give or take decisive blow.

  The climbers from the highest camp set out

  Saying goodbye to comrades on the glacier,

  A day of rock between them and the summit

  That will require their record or their bones.

  Now is a charge laid that will split the hill-face,

  Tested the wires, the plunger ready to hand.

  For time ticks nearer to a rebel hour,

  Charging of barricades, bloodshed in city:

  The watcher in the window looking out

  At the eleventh hour on sun and shadow,

  On fixed abodes and the bright air between,

  Knows for the first time what he stands to lose.

  Crisis afar deadens the nerve, it cools

  The blood and hoods imagination’s eye,

  Whether we apprehend it or remember.

  Is fighting on the frontier: little leaks through

  Of possible disaster, but one morning

  Shells begin to drop in the capital.

  So I, indoors for long enough remembering

  The round house on the cliff, the springy slopes,

  The well in the wood, nor doubting to revisit

  But if to see new sunlight on old haunts

  Swallows and men come back but if come back

  From lands but if beyond our view but if

  She dies? Why then, here is a space to let,

  The owner gone abroad, never returning.

  28

  Though bodies are apart

  The dark hours so confine

  And fuse our hearts, sure, death

  Will find no way between.

  Narrow this hour, that bed;

  But room for us to explore

  Pain’s long-drawn equator,

  The farthest ice of fear.

  Storm passes east, recurs:

  The beaked lightnings stoop:

  The sky falls down: the clouds

  Are wrung to the last drop.

  Another day is born now.

  Woman, your work is done.

  This is the end of labour.

  Come out into the sun!

  29

  Come out in the sun, for a man is born today!

  Early this morning whistle in the cutting told

  Train was arriving, hours overdue, delayed

  By snow-drifts, engine-trouble, Act of God, who cares

  now? –

  For here alights the distinguished passenger.

  Take a whole holiday in honour of this!

  Kipfer’s back from heaven, Bendien to Holland,

  Larwood and Voce in the Notts eleven.

  Returning also the father the mother,

  Chastened and cheered by underworld excursion,

  Alive returning from the black country,

  Take a whole holiday in honour of this.

  Now shall the airman vertically banking

  Out of the blue write a new sky-sign;

  The nine tramp steamers rusting in the estuary

  Get up full pressure for a trade revival;

  The crusty landlord renew the lease, and everyone

  Take a whole holiday in honour of this.

  Today let director forget the deficit,

  Schoolmaster his handicap, hostess her false face:

  Let phantasist take charge of flesh-and-blood situation,

  Petty-officer be rapt in the Seventh Symphony.

  For here a champion is born and commands you

  Take a whole holiday in honour of this.

  Wherever radiance from ashes arises –

  Willowherb glowing on abandoned slagheaps,

  Dawn budding scarlet in a bed of darkness,

  Life from exhausted womb outstriving –

  There shall the spirit be lightened and gratefully

  Take a whole holiday in honour of this.

&
nbsp; Epilogue

  LETTER TO W. H. AUDEN

  A mole first, out of riddling passages

  You came up for a breather into my field,

  Then back to your engineering; a scheme conjectured

  From evidence of earth not cast at random.

  The surly vegetable said ‘What’s this

  Butting through sand for unapparent reasons?’

  The animal said ‘This fellow is no runner.’

  Mineral said ‘Brother, you like the dark.’

  What are you at down there, nosing among

  Saxon skulls, roots of our genealogies?

  This is the field of ghosts. There are no clues here;

  But dead creators packed in close fibre.

  Perhaps you are going straight to some point, straighter

  And further than these furrows I drive in daylight.

  Daffodils now, the pretty debutantes,

  Are curtsying at the first court of the year:

  Their schoolgirl smell unmans young lechers. You

  Preferred, I remember, the plump boy, the crocus.

  Enough of that. They only lie at your feet.

  But I, who saw the sapling, prophesied

  A growth superlative and branches writing

  On heaven a new signature. For I

  Looked at no garden shrub, chantry of thrushes;

  But such a tree as, gripping its rock perch

  On a northern fell within the sound of hammers,

  Gives shadow to the stonechat and reminder

  Of chastity to men: grown venerable

  Will give its name to that part of the country.

  This was the second time that you had pulled

  The rusty trigger summoning the stragglers.

  Once more the bird goes packing, the skeleton

  Sets teeth against a further dissolution.

  And what have we to hope for who are bound,

  Though we strip off the last assurance of flesh

  For expedition, to lay our bones somewhere?

  Say that a rescue party should see fit

  To do us some honour, publish our diaries,

  Send home the relics – how should we thank them?

  The march is what we asked for; it is ended.

  Still, let us wear the flesh away and leave

  Nothing for birds, anatomy to men.

  1931