Complete Poems

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Complete Poems Page 23

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  Among the low pastures –

  In my crystal read

  Your real wish and features:

  May no accident

  Of flood or mist be flawing

  The chaste, prophetic reed,

  The child-face stream’s flowing –

  Says winding Trent

  Among the low pastures.

  Say the three cloud-maidens

  Over the soiled valley –

  To reproach you we rise

  Wind-flushed and early:

  The mist that maddens,

  The clumsy floods that hurt

  Innocence, all arise

  Out of your shallow heart –

  Say the three cloud-maidens

  Over the soiled valley.

  Behold the Swan

  Behold the swan

  Riding at her image, anchored there

  Complacent, a water-lily upon

  The ornamental water:

  Queen of the mute October air,

  She broods in that unbroken

  Reverie of reed and water.

  Now from the stricken

  Pool she hoists and flurries,

  And passes overhead

  In hoarse, expressive flight:

  Her wings bear hard

  On the vibrant air: unhurried

  The threat and pulse of wings, the throat

  Levelled towards the horizon, see –

  They are prophecy.

  Song

  It was not far through the pinewoods

  That day to the lodge gate,

  But far enough for the wind to phrase

  My ten-year-long regret.

  It was not far by the cornfield,

  The tall ears looked alive:

  But my heart, like corn, was broken for

  A harvest I could not have.

  From husk of words unspoken

  I’ll winnow a ripe seed:

  From woods where love was shy to trespass

  I’ll learn the airs I need.

  Oh here and unlamenting

  Her graceful ghost shall shine –

  In the heart mature as fruited fields,

  The singing words of pine.

  The Escapist

  Before a rumour stirred, he fled the country

  Preferring blank disgrace to any gesture

  That could wipe out his failure with himself.

  A warmer man no doubt had realized

  His assets in our buoyant love, and taken

  Some bonds to gild an unromantic exile.

  Before their first reproach could reach his ears,

  He had set up a private court, accepted

  Full responsibility, and passed judgement.

  The man whom later they reviled because

  He would not face their music, was already

  Self-flayed and branded in his heart for ever.

  Before the story broke, he had sat down

  To write it out, determined that no vestige

  Of guilt be missed, no tiniest false inflection

  Of heroism creep in to justify

  The ugly tale. They said he was too proud to

  Trust other hands even with his dishonour.

  Before you heap quick-lime upon that felon

  Memory, think how nothing you can do

  Could touch his self-vindictiveness, and nothing

  You did to cure the cowardice it avenged for.

  Say, if you like, escape was in his blood –

  Escape’s as good a word as any other.

  Passage from Childhood

  His earliest memory, the mood

  Fingered and frail as maidenhair,

  Was this – a china cup somewhere

  In a green, deep wood.

  He lives to find again somewhere

  That wood, that homely cup; to taste all

  Its chill, imagined dews; to dare

  The dangerous crystal.

  Who can say what misfeatured elf

  First led him into that lifelong

  Passage of mirrors where, so young,

  He saw himself

  Balanced as Blondin, more headstrong

  Than baby Hercules, rare as a one-

  Cent British Guiana, above the wrong

  And common run?

  He knew the secrecy of squirrels,

  The foolish doves’ antiphony,

  And what wrens fear. He was gun-shy,

  Hating all quarrels.

  Life was a hostile land to spy,

  Full of questions he dared not ask

  Lest the answer in mockery

  Or worse unmask.

  Quick to injustice, quick he grew

  This hermit and contorted shell.

  Self-pity like a thin rain fell,

  Fouling the view:

  Then tree-trunks seemed wet roots of hell,

  Wren or catkin might turn vicious,

  The dandelion clock could tell

  Nothing auspicious.

  No exile has ever looked so glum

  With the pines fretful overhead,

  Yet he felt at home in the gothic glade –

  More than at home.

  You will forgive him that he played

  Bumble-puppy on the small mossed lawn

  All by himself for hours, afraid

  Of being born.

  Lying awake one night, he saw

  Eternity stretched like a howl of pain:

  He was tiny and terrible, a new pin

  On a glacier’s floor.

  Very few they are who have lain

  With eternity and lived to tell it:

  There’s a secret process in his brain

  And he cannot sell it.

  Now, beyond reach of sense or reason,

  His life walks in a glacial sleep

  For ever, since he drank that cup

  And found it poison.

  He’s one more ghost, engaged to keep

  Eternity’s long hours and mewed

  Up in live flesh with no escape

  From solitude.

  Self-Criticism and Answer

  It was always so, always –

  My too meticulous words

  Mocked by the unhinged cries

  Of playground, mouse or gull,

  By throats of nestling birds

  Like bells upturned in a peal –

  All that has innocence

  To praise and far to fall.

  I fear this careful art

  Would never storm the sense:

  Its agonies are but the eager

  Retching of an empty heart;

  It never was possessed

  By divine incontinence,

  And for him whom that eygre1

  Sweeps not, silence were best.

  Your politicians pray silence

  For the ribald trumpeter,

  The falsetto crook, the twitching

  Unappeasable dictator.

  For any else you should be pleased

  To hold your tongue: but Satan

  Himself would disown his teaching

  And turn to spit on these.

  When madmen play the piper

  And knaves call the tune,

  Honesty’s a right passion –

  She must call to her own.

  Let yours be the start and stir

  Of a flooding indignation

  That channels the dry heart deeper

  And sings through the dry bone.

  1938

  1 A tidal wave of unusual height caused by the rushing of the tide up a narrowing estuary.

  WORD OVER ALL

  TO ROSAMOND LEHMANN

  Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

  Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world.

  WALT WHITMAN

  PART ONE

  The Lighted House

  One
night they saw the big house, some time untenanted

  But for its hand-to-mouth recluse, room after room

  Light up, as when Primavera herself has spirited

  A procession of crocuses out of their winter tomb.

  Revels unearthly are going forward, one did remark –

  He has conjured a thing of air or fire for his crazed delight:

  Another said, It is only a traveller lost in the dark

  He welcomes for mercy’s sake. Each, in a way, was right.

  You were the magic answer, the sprite fire-fingered who came

  To lighten my heart, my house, my heirlooms; you are the wax

  That melts at my touch and still supports my prodigal flame:

  But you were also the dead-beat traveller out of the storm

  Returned to yourself by almost obliterated tracks,

  Peeling off fear after fear, revealing love’s true form.

  The Album

  I see you, a child

  In a garden sheltered for buds and playtime,

  Listening as if beguiled

  By a fancy beyond your years and the flowering maytime.

  The print is faded: soon there will be

  No trace of that pose enthralling,

  Nor visible echo of my voice distantly calling

  ‘Wait! Wait for me!’

  Then I turn the page

  To a girl who stands like a questioning iris

  By the waterside, at an age

  That asks every mirror to tell what the heart’s desire is.

  The answer she finds in that oracle stream

  Only time could affirm or disprove,

  Yet I wish I was there to venture a warning, ‘Love

  Is not what you dream.’

  Next, you appear

  As if garlands of wild felicity crowned you –

  Courted, caressed, you wear

  Like immortelles the lovers and friends around you.

  ‘They will not last you, rain or shine,

  They are but straws and shadows,’

  I cry: ‘Give not to those charming desperadoes

  What was made to be mine.’

  One picture is missing –

  The last. It would show me a tree stripped bare

  By intemperate gales, her amazing

  Noonday of blossom spoilt which promised so fair.

  Yet, scanning those scenes at your heyday taken,

  I tremble, as one who must view

  In the crystal a doom he could never deflect – yes, I too

  Am fruitlessly shaken.

  I close the book;

  But the past slides out of its leaves to haunt me

  And it seems, wherever I look,

  Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.

  Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours,

  Beside me – ‘All you love most there

  Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed there

  Has grown to be yours.’

  The Hunter’s Game

  I am an arrow, I am a bow –

  The bow sings fierce and deep,

  The arrow’s tipped with cruel flame,

  Feathered with passionate sleep.

  When you play the hunter’s game,

  I am your arrow and your bow.

  Only my love can bend the bow:

  When the bow leaps to kill

  And darkly as a nerve of night

  The string throbs out, you are the skill

  That drew the impulsive bowstring tight,

  The hand that bent the bow.

  What is the air that floats my arrow

  Smoothly aloft and bears

  It up to the sun, down to the dark?

  You are the wanton airs

  Which shape and hold its shining arc,

  The innocent air that flights the arrow.

  What is the victim of this arrow

  That flies so fast and true?

  Deep in the close, fawn-dappled glade,

  Pierced by a shaft of light are you

  The huntress, white and smiling, laid –

  The victim of your arrow.

  Departure in the Dark

  Nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal

  As leaving a place

  In a winter morning’s dark, the air on his face

  Unkind as the touch of sweating metal:

  Simple goodbyes to children or friends become

  A felon’s numb

  Farewell, and love that was a warm, a meeting place –

  Love is the suicide’s grave under the nettles.

  Gloomed and clemmed as if by an imminent ice-age

  Lies the dear world

  Of your street-strolling, field-faring. The senses, curled

  At the dead end of a shrinking passage,

  Care not if close the inveterate hunters creep,

  And memories sleep

  Like mammoths in lost caves. Drear, extinct is the world,

  And has no voice for consolation or presage.

  There is always something at such times of the passover,

  When the dazed heart

  Beats for it knows not what, whether you part

  From home or prison, acquaintance or lover –

  Something wrong with the time-table, something unreal

  In the scrambled meal

  And the bag ready packed by the door, as though the heart

  Has gone ahead, or is staying here for ever.

  No doubt for the Israelites that early morning

  It was hard to be sure

  If home were prison or prison home: the desire

  Going forth meets the desire returning.

  This land, that had cut their pride down to the bone

  Was now their own

  By ancient deeds of sorrow. Beyond, there was nothing sure

  But a desert of freedom to quench their fugitive yearnings.

  At this blind hour the heart is informed of nature’s

  Ruling that man

  Should be nowhere a more tenacious settler than

  Among wry thorns and ruins, yet nurture

  A seed of discontent in his ripest ease.

  There’s a kind of release

  And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man

  And will be, even to the last of his dark departures.

  Cornet Solo

  Thirty years ago lying awake,

  Lying awake

  In London at night when childhood barred me

  From livelier pastimes, I’d hear a street-band break

  Into old favourites – ‘The Ash Grove’, ‘Killarney’

  Or ‘Angels Guard Thee’.

  That was the music for such an hour –

  A deciduous hour

  Of leaf-wan drizzle, of solitude

  And gaslight bronzing the gloom like an autumn flower –

  The time and music for a boy imbrued

  With the pensive mood.

  I could have lain for hours together,

  Sweet hours together,

  Listening to the cornet’s cry

  Down wet streets gleaming like patent leather

  Where beauties jaunted in cabs to their revelry,

  Jewelled and spry.

  Plaintive its melody rose or waned

  Like an autumn wind

  Blowing the rain on beds of aster,

  On man’s last bed: mournful and proud it complained

  As a woman who dreams of the charms that graced her,

  In young days graced her.

  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.

  Last night, when I heard a cornet’s strain,

  It seemed a refrain

  Wafted from t
hirty years back – so remote an

  Echo it bore: but I felt again

  The prophetic mood of a child, too long forgotten,

  Too lightly forgotten.

  O Dreams, O Destinations

  1

  For infants time is like a humming shell

  Heard between sleep and sleep, wherein the shores

  Foam-fringed, wind-fluted of the strange earth dwell

  And the sea’s cavernous hunger faintly roars.

  It is the humming pole of summer lanes

  Whose sound quivers like heart-haze endlessly

  Over the corn, over the poppied plains –

  An emanation from the earth or sky.

  Faintly they hear, through the womb’s lingering haze,

  A rumour of that sea to which they are born:

  They hear the ringing pole of summer days,

  But need not know what hungers for the corn.

  They are the lisping rushes in a stream –

  Grace-notes of a profound, legato dream.

  2

  Children look down upon the morning-grey

  Tissue of mist that veils a valley’s lap:

  Their fingers itch to tear it and unwrap

  The flags, the roundabouts, the gala day.

  They watch the spring rise inexhaustibly –

  A breathing thread out of the eddied sand,

  Sufficient to their day: but half their mind

  Is on the sailed and glittering estuary.

  Fondly we wish their mist might never break,

  Knowing it hides so much that best were hidden:

  We’d chain them by the spring, lest it should broaden

  For them into a quicksand and a wreck.

  But they slip through our fingers like the source,

  Like mist, like time that has flagged out their course.

  3

  That was the fatal move, the ruination

  Of innocence so innocently begun,

  When in the lawless orchard of creation

  The child left this fruit for that rosier one.

  Reaching towards the far thing, we begin it;

  Looking beyond, or backward, more and more

  We grow unfaithful to the unique minute

  Till, from neglect, its features stale and blur.

  Fish, bird or beast was never thus unfaithful –

  Man only casts the image of his joys

  Beyond his senses’ reach; and by this fateful

  Act, he confirms the ambiguous power of choice.

 

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