Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

Instruments faulty; filter, magneto, each strut unsound.

  Yet after four days, though we swore she never could leave the ground,

  We saw her in headstrong haste diminish towards the east –

  That makeshift, mad sky-farer.

  Aimed they now for Baghdad, unwritten in air’s annals

  A voyage. But theirs the fate all flights of logic to refute,

  Who obeyed no average law, who buoyed the viewless channels

  Of sky with a courage steadfast, luminous. Safe they crossed

  Sinai’s desert, and daring

  The Nejd, the unneighbourly waste of Arabia, yet higher soaring

  (Final a fall there for birds of passage, limed and lost

  In shifty the sand’s embrace) all day they strove to climb

  Through stormy rain: but they felt her shorten her stride and falter,

  And they fell at evening time.

  Slept that night beside their machine, and the next morning

  Raider Arabs appeared reckoning this stranded bird

  A gift: like cobras they struck, and their gliding shadows athwart

  The sand were all their warning.

  But the aeronauts, knowing iron the coinage here, had brought

  Mills bombs and revolvers, and M’Intosh held them off

  While Parer fought for life –

  A spark, the mechanic’s right answer, and finally wrought

  A miracle, for the dumb engine spoke and they rose

  Convulsively out of the clutch of the desert, the clench of their foes.

  Orchestrate this theme, artificer-poet. Imagine

  The roll, crackling percussion, quickening tempo of engine

  For a start: the sound as they soar, an octave-upward slur

  Scale of sky ascending:

  Hours-held note of level flight, a beat unhurried,

  Sustaining undertone of movement never-ending:

  Wind shrill on the ailerons, flutes and fifes in a flurry

  Devilish when they dive, plucking of tense stays.

  These hardly heard it, who were the voice, the heavenly air

  That sings above always.

  We have seen the extremes, the burning, the freezing, the outward face

  Of their exploit; heroic peaks, tumbling-to-zero depressions:

  Little our graph can show, the line they traced through space,

  Of the heart’s passionate patience.

  How soft drifts of sleep piled on their senses deep

  And they dug themselves out often: how the plane was a weight that hung

  And swung on their aching nerve; how din drilled through the skull

  And sight sickened – so slow earth filtered past below.

  Yet nerve failed never, heart clung

  To height, and the brain kept its course and the hand its skill.

  Baghdad renewed a propeller damaged in desert. Arid

  Baluchistan spared them that brought down and spoilt with thirst

  Armies of Alexander. To Karachi they were carried

  On cloud-back: fragile as tinder their plane, but the winds were tender

  Now to their need, and nursed

  Them along till teeming India made room for them to alight.

  Wilting her wings, the sweltering suns had moulted her bright

  Plumage, rotten with rain

  The fabric: but they packed her with iron washers and tacked her

  Together, good for an hour, and took the air again.

  Feats for a hundred flights, they were prodigal of: a fairest

  Now to tell – how they foiled death when the engine failed

  Above the Irrawaddy, over close-woven forest.

  What shoals for a pilot there, what a snarled passage and dark

  Shelves down to doom and grip

  Of green! But look, balanced superbly, quick off the mark

  Swooping like centre three-quarter whose impetus storms a gap –

  Defenders routed, rooted their feet, and their arms are mown

  Aside, that high or low aim at his overthrow –

  M’Intosh touched her down.

  And they picked her up out of it somehow and put her at the air, a

  Sorry hack for such steeplechasing, to leap the sky.

  ‘We’ll fly this bloody crate till it falls to bits at our feet,’

  Said the mechanic Parer.

  And at Moulmein soon they crashed; and the plane by their spirit’s high

  Tension long pinned, girded and guarded from dissolution,

  Fell to bits at their feet. Wrecked was the undercarriage,

  Radiator cracked, in pieces, compasses crocked;

  Fallen all to confusion.

  Their winged hope was a heap of scrap, but unsplintered their courage.

  Six weeks they worked in sun-glare and jungle damps, assembling

  Fragments to make airworthy what was worth not its weight in air,

  As a surgeon, grafter of skin, as a setter of bones tumbling

  Apart, they had power to repair

  This good for naught but the grave; they livened her engine and gave

  Fuselage faith to rise rejuvenated from ruin.

  Went with them stowaways, not knowing what hazard they flew in –

  Bear-cubs, a baby alligator, lizards and snakes galore;

  Mascots maybe, for the plane though twice she was floored again

  Always came up for more.

  Till they came to the pitiless mountains of Timor. Yet these, untamed,

  Not timorous, against the gradient and Niagara of air they climbed

  Scarce-skimming the summits; and over the shark-toothed Timor sea

  Lost their bearings, but shirked not the odds, the deaths that lurked

  A million to one on their trail:

  They reached out to the horizon and plucked their destiny.

  On for eight hours they flew blindfold against the unknown,

  And the oil began to fail

  And their flying spirit waned – one pint of petrol remained

  When the land stood up to meet them and they came into their own.

  Southward still to Melbourne, the bourn of their flight, they pressed

  Till at last near Culcairn, like a last fretted leaf

  Falling from brave autumn into earth’s breast,

  D.H. nine, their friend that had seen them to the end,

  Gave up her airy life.

  The Southern Cross was splendid above the spot where she fell,

  The end of her rainbow curve over our weeping day:

  And the flyers, glad to be home, unharmed by that dizzy fall,

  Dazed as the dead awoken from death, stepped out of the broken

  Body and went away.

  What happened then, the roar

  and rave of waving crowds

  That feted them, was only

  an afterglow of glory

  Reflected on the clouds

  where they had climbed alone,

  Day’s golden epilogue:

  and them, whose meteor path

  Lightened our eyes, whose great

  spirit lifted the fog

  That sours a doubtful earth,

  the stars commemorate.

  In February, a world of hard light,

  A frosty welcome, the aconites came up

  Lifting their loving cups to drink the sun:

  Spring they meant, mounting and more of hope.

  And I thought of my friend, like these withered too soon,

  Who went away in a night

  Before the spring was ready, who left our town

  For good. Like aconites he pledged the spring

  Out of my grief-bound heart, and he made me sing

  The spirit of life that nothing can keep down.

  But yesterday, in May, a storm arose

  Clouding the spring’s festivities, and spoilt

  Much would have been admired and given us shade.

  We saw this year’s young hopes
beat down and soiled,

  Blossoms not now for fruit, boughs might have made

  Syringa’s2 wreath of snows.

  A fortune gone time held for us in trust.

  And I knew no bold flourish of flowers can write

  Off the dead loss, when friends dissolve in night

  Changing our dear-invested love to dust.

  Strange ways the dead break through. Not the Last Post

  Brings them, nor clanging midnight: for then is the inner

  Heart reinforced against assault and sap.

  On break-up day or at the cricket-club dinner

  Between a word and a word they find the gap,

  And we know what we have lost.

  Sorrow is natural thirst: we are not weaned

  At once. Though long withdrawn the sickening blade,

  Deeply we remember loss of blood

  And the new skin glosses over an active wound.

  Remember that winter morning – no maroon

  Warned of a raid; death granted no farewell speech,

  Acted without prologue, was a bell and a line

  Speaking from far of one no more within reach.

  Blood ran out of me. I was alone.

  How suddenly, how soon,

  In a moment, while I was looking the other way,

  You hid yourself where I could never find you –

  Too dark the shadows earth sheeted around you.

  So we went home: that was the close of play.

  Still I hoped for news. Often I stood

  On promontories that straining towards the west

  Fret their hearts away. Thence on a clear

  Day one should glimpse the islands of the blest,

  And he, if any, had a passport there.

  But no, it was no good.

  Those isles, it proved, were broken promises,

  A trick of light, a way wishes delude:

  Or, if he lived out there, no cable was laid

  To carry his love whispering over seas.

  So I returned. Perhaps he was nearer home

  And I had missed him. Here he was last seen

  Walking familiar as sunlight a solid road;

  Round the next turn, his door. But look, there has been

  Landslide: those streets end abruptly, they lead

  The eye into a tomb.

  Scrabble for souvenirs. Fit bone to bone;

  Anatomy of buried joys you guess,

  But the wind jeers through it. Assemble the shattered glass;

  A mirror you have, but the face there is your own.

  Was so much else we could have better spared –

  Churches, museums, multiple stores: but the bomb

  Fell on the power-house: total that eclipse.

  He was our dynamo, our warmth, our beam

  Transmitter of mirth – it is a town’s collapse

  Not easily repaired.

  Or as a reservoir that, sharing out

  Rain hoarded from heaven, springs from the valley,

  Refreshment was for all: now breached and wholly

  Drained, is a barren bed, a cup of drought.

  Then to the hills, as one who dies for rain,

  I went. All day the light makes lovely passes

  There, whose hands are healing, whose smile was yours,

  And eloquent winds hearten the dry grasses.

  They have come to terms with death: for them the year’s

  Harvest, the instant pain,

  Are as clouds passing indifferent over

  Their heads, but certain givers in the end.

  Downright these hills, hiding nothing they stand

  Firm to the foot and comfort the eye for ever.

  They say, ‘Death is above your weight, too strong

  For argument or armies, the real dictator:

  He never was one to answer the question, Why?

  He sends for you tomorrow, for us later:

  Nor are you the Orpheus who could buy

  Resurrection with a song.

  Not for long will your chalk-faced bravado

  Stand the erosion of eternity:

  Learn from us a moment’s sanity –

  To be warm in the sun, to accept the following shadow.’

  In my heart’s mourning underworld I sang

  As miners entombed singing despair to sleep –

  Their earth is stopped, their eyes are reconciled

  To night. Yet here, under the sad hill-slope

  Where I thought one spring of my life for ever was sealed,

  The friend I had lost sprang

  To life again and showed me a mystery:

  For I knew, at last wholly accepting death,

  Though earth had taken his body and air his breath,

  He was not in heaven or earth: he was in me.

  Now will be cloudburst over a countryside

  Where the tongues of prophets were dry and the air was aching:

  Sky-long the flash, the thunder, the release,

  Are fresh beginning, the hour of the weather breaking.

  Sing, you watercourses, bringers of peace!

  Valleys, open wide

  Your cracked lips! You shall be green again

  And ease with flowers what the sun has seared.

  Waking tomorrow we’ll find the air cleared,

  Sunny with fresh eloquence after rain.

  For my friend that was dead is alive. He bore transplanting

  Into a common soil. Strongly he grows

  Upon the heart and gives the tentative wing

  Take-off for flights, surety for repose.

  And he returns not in an echoing

  Regret, a hollow haunting,

  Not as a shadow thrown across our day;

  But radiant energy, charging the mind with power

  That all who are wired to receive him surely can share.

  It is no flying visit: he comes to stay.

  His laughter was better than birds in the morning: his smile

  Turned the edge of the wind: his memory

  Disarms death and charms the surly grave.

  Early he went to bed, too early we

  Saw his light put out: yet we could not grieve

  More than a little while,

  For he lives in the earth around us, laughs from the sky.

  Soon he forgave – still generous to a fault –

  My crippling debt of sorrow, and I felt

  In grief’s hard winter earth’s first melting sigh.

  Think. One breath of midsummer will start

  A buried life – on sunday boys content

  Hearing through study windows a gramophone,

  Sweet peas arrested on a morning scent –

  And the man sighs for what he has outgrown.

  He wastes pity. The heart

  Has all recorded. Each quaver of distress,

  Mirth’s every crotchet, love’s least tremolo –

  Scarce-noted notes that to full movements flow –

  Have made their mark on its deep tenderness.

  Much more should he, who had life and to spare,

  Be here impressed, his sympathy relayed

  Out of the rich-toned past. And is. For through

  Desert my heart he gives a fiery lead,

  Unfolding contours, lengthening the view.

  He is a thoroughfare

  Over all sliding sands. Each stopping-place

  Wears his look of welcome. May even find,

  When I come to the snow-line, the bitter end,

  His hand-holds cut on death’s terrific face.

  Distant all that, and heaven a hearsay word –

  Truth’s fan-vaulting, vision carved in flight

  Perhaps, or the last delirium of self-loving.

  But now a word in season, a dance in spite

  Of death: love, the affirmative in all living,

  Blossom, dew or bird.

  For one is dead, but his love has gone before

  Us,
pointing and paving a way into the future;

  Has gone to form its very flesh and feature,

  The air we shall breathe, the kindling for our fire.

  Nothing is lost. There is a thrifty wife,

  Conceives all, saves all, finds a use for all.

  No waste her deserts: limited rock, lightnings

  And speedwell that run riot, seas that spill

  Over, grass and man – whatever springs

  From her excess of life

  Is active and passive, spending and receipt.

  And he took after her, a favourite son

  In whom she excelled, through whom were handed on

  Dewy her morning and her lasting heat.

  Now we have sorrow’s range, no more delaying –

  Let the masked batteries of spring flash out

  From ridge and copse, and flowers like shrapnel burst

  Along the lanes, and all her land-mines spout

  Quick and hanging green. Our best, our boast,

  Our mood and month of maying,

  For winter’s bleak blockade is broken through

  And every street flies colours of renaissance.

  Today the hawk goes up for reconnaissance,

  The heart beats faster having earth’s ends in view.

  Leave to the mercies of the manifold grass,

  Will cover all earth’s faults, what in his clay

  Were but outcrops of volcanic life.

  You shall recall one open as the day,

  Many-mooded as the light above

  English hills where pass

  Sunlight and storm to a large reconciling.

  You shall recall how it was warmth to be

  With him – a feast, a first of June; that he

  Was generous, that he attacked the bowling.

  Lay laurels here, and leave your tears to dry –

  Sirs, his last wishes were that you should laugh.

  For those in whom was found life’s richest seam

  Yet they asked no royalty, one cenotaph

  Were thanks enough – a world where none may scheme

  To hoard, while many die,

  Life; where all lives grow from an equal chance.

  Tomorrow we resume building: but this

  Day he calls holiday, he says it is

  A time to dance, he calls you all to dance.

  Today the land that knew him shall do him honour,

  Sun be a spendthrift, fields come out with gold,

  Severn and Windrush be Madrigal and Flowing,

  Woodlarks flash up like rockets and unfold

  In showers of song, cloud-shadows pace the flying

  Wind, the champion runner.

  Joy has a flying start, our hopes like flames

  Lengthen their stride over a kindled earth,

  And noon cheers all, upstanding in the south.

  Sirs, be merry: these are his funeral games.