Complete Poems

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Complete Poems Page 27

by Cecil Day-Lewis

Where he with mower, scythe or hook goes out

  To fight the grass and lay a growing fever,

  Volcanic for another, dead to me;

  Meek is the ghost, a banked furnace the man.

  Take any time – this autumn day will serve,

  Ripe with grassed fruit, raw with departing wings,

  When I, whom in my youth the season tempted

  To oceanic amplitudes, bend down

  And pick a rotting apple from the grass.

  From every here and now a thread leads back

  Through faithless seasons and devouring seas:

  New blooms, dead leaves bury it not, nor combers

  Break it – my life line and my clue: the same

  That brought him safe out of a labyrinth.

  So I, the consort of an absent mind,

  The emerald lost in a green waste of time,

  The castaway for whom all space is island –

  To follow, find, escape, this thread in hand,

  Warp myself out upon the swelling past.

  2

  Take any joy – the thread leads always on

  To here and now: snow, silence, vertigo;

  His frozen face, a woman who bewails not

  Only because she fears one echoing word

  May bring the avalanche about her ears.

  Take any joy that was – here it remains,

  Corruptless, irrecoverable, cold

  As a dead smile, beneath the cruel glacier

  That moved upon our kisses, lambs and leaves,

  Stilled them, but will not let their forms dissolve.

  O tomb transparent of my waxen joys!

  O lifelike dead under the skin of ice!

  O frozen face of love where my one treasure

  Is locked, and the key lost! May I not share

  Even the bare oblivion of your fate?

  But dare I throw the past into one fire,

  One burning cry to break the silence, break

  The cataleptic snows, the dream of falling?

  Last night I thought he stood beside my bed

  And said, ‘Wake up! You were dreaming. I am here.’

  3

  Take any grief – the maggot at the nerve,

  The words that bore the skull like waterdrops,

  The castaway’s upon the foam-racked island,

  The lurching figures of a mind’s eclipse –

  I have felt each and all as love decayed.

  Yet every grief revives a fainting love.

  They are love’s children too; I live again

  In them; my breast yearns to their innocent cruelty.

  If only tears can float a stranded heart,

  If only sighs can move it, I will grieve.

  The pleasured nerve, the small-talk in the night,

  The voyaging when isles were daisy-chains,

  The dance of mere routine – if I could reach them

  Again through this sick labyrinth of grief,

  I would rejoice in it, to reach them so.

  Alas, hull-down upon hope’s ashen verge

  Hastens the vessel that our joined hands launched,

  Stretching my heart-strings out beyond endurance.

  Ah, will they never snap? Can I not climb

  The signal hill, and wave, and mean goodbye?

  Ending

  That it should end so! –

  Not with mingling tears

  Nor one long backward look of woe

  Towards a sinking trust,

  A heyday’s afterglow;

  Not even in the lash and lightning

  Cautery of rage!

  But by this slow

  Fissure, this blind numb grinding severance

  Of floe from floe.

  Merciless god, to mock your failures so!

  Heart and Mind

  Said Heart to Mind at the close of day,

  I was older than you, yet I led you astray

  Fancying I knew each twist and turn of our way,

  Said Heart to Mind.

  The blind would still have been leading the blind

  Whichever of us had held the sway,

  Answered the pensive Mind.

  I was younger than you, the Mind went on,

  Yet you carried me through the fire of noon

  And the chilling shades: of all I encountered, none

  Was stronger than you.

  Said Heart, I could feed upon dust or rue,

  But you, the daintiest eater, have shown

  What a rational diet can do.

  So queer a partnership never was sealed –

  A sceptic hungry for truth revealed,

  A fool to his rule-of-thumb vision unreconciled

  From the very start:

  No wonder we almost pulled apart,

  Envious each of his comrade’s field,

  Pursued the plaintive Heart.

  No marriage is proof against travail or bliss,

  Spoke Mind. How uniting can be the abyss,

  How chafing the bond between all earth’s denizens – this

  Is what marriages prove.

  And this we have learnt from our seasoned love –

  When heart and mind agree, they kiss

  Over an opening grave.

  A Failure

  The soil was deep and the field well-sited,

  The seed was sound.

  Average luck with the weather, one thought,

  And the crop would abound.

  If harrowing were all that is needed for

  Harvest, his field

  Had been harrowed enough, God knows, to warrant

  A record yield.

  He gazed from a hill in the breezy springtime:

  That field was aflow

  With wave upon wave like a sea’s green shallows

  Breathing below.

  He looked from a gate one summer morning

  When the mists uprolled:

  Headland to headland those fortunate acres

  Seemed solid gold.

  He stood by the field as the day of harvest

  Dawned. But, oh,

  The fruit of a year’s work, a lifetime’s lore,

  Had ceased to grow.

  No wickedest weather could thus have turned,

  As it were overnight,

  His field to so wan and weedy a showing:

  Some galloping blight

  From earth’s metabolism must have sprung

  To ruin all;

  Or perhaps his own high hopes had made

  The wizened look tall.

  But it’s useless to argue the why and wherefore.

  When a crop is so thin,

  There’s nothing to do but to set the teeth

  And plough it in.

  The Unwanted

  On a day when the breath of roses

  Plumpened a swooning breeze

  And all the silken combes of summer

  Opened wide their knees,

  Between two sighs they planted one –

  A willed one, a wanted one –

  And he will be the sign, they said, of our felicities.

  Eager the loins he sprang from,

  Happy the sheltering heart:

  Seldom had the seed of man

  So charmed, so clear a start.

  And he was born as frail a one,

  As ailing, freakish, pale a one

  As ever the wry planets knotted their beams to thwart.

  Sun locked up for winter;

  Earth an empty rind:

  Two strangers harshly flung together

  As by a flail of wind.

  Oh was it not a furtive thing,

  A loveless, damned, abortive thing –

  This flurry of the groaning dust, and what it left behind!

  Sure, from such warped beginnings

  Nothing debonair

  Can come? But neither shame nor panic,

  Drugs nor sharp despair

  Could uproot that untoward thing,

&nb
sp; That all too fierce and froward thing:

  Willy-nilly born it was, divinely formed and fair.

  The Sitting

  (FOR LAURENCE COWING)

  So like a god I sit here,

  One of those stone dreamers quarried from solitude,

  A genius – if ever there was one – of the place:

  The mountain’s only child, lips aloof as a snow-line,

  Forearms impassive along the cloud-base of aeons,

  Eyes heavy on distance –

  Graven eyes that flinch not, flash not, if eagles

  Clap their wings in my face.

  With hieratic gestures

  He the suppliant, priest, interpreter, subtly

  Wooing my virtue, officiates by the throne.

  I know the curious hands are shaping, reshaping the image

  Of what is only an image of things impalpable.

  I feel how the eyes strain

  To catch a truth behind the oracular presence –

  Eyes that augur through stone.

  And the god asks, ‘What have I for you

  But the lichenous shadow of thought veiling my temple,

  The runnels a million time-drops have chased on my cheek?’

  And the man replies, ‘I will show you the creed of your bone, I’ll draw you

  The shape of solitude to which you were born.’

  And the god cries, ‘I am meek,

  Brushed by an eagle’s wing; and a voice bids me

  Speak. But I cannot speak.’

  The god thinks, Let him project, if

  He must, his passionate shapings on my stone heart,

  Wrestle over my body with his sprite,

  Through these blind eyes imagine a skin-deep world in perspective:

  Let him make, if he will, the crypt of my holy mountain

  His own: let even the light

  That bathes my temple become as it were an active

  Property of his sight.

  O man, O innocent artist

  Who paint me with green of your fields, with amber or yellow

  Of love’s hair, red of the heart’s blood, eyebright blue,

  Conjuring forms and rainbows out of an empty mist –

  Your hand is upon me, as even now you follow

  Along the immortal clue

  Threading my veins of emerald, topaz, amethyst,

  And know not it ends in you.

  Statuette: Late Minoan

  Girl of the musing mouth,

  The mild archaic air,

  For whom do you subtly smile?

  Yield to what power or prayer

  Breasts vernally bare?

  I seem to be peering at you

  Through the wrong end of time

  That shrinks to a bright, far image –

  Great Mother of earth’s prime –

  A stature sublime.

  So many golden ages

  Of sunshine steeped your clay,

  So dear did the maker cherish

  In you life’s fostering ray,

  That you warm us today.

  Goddess or girl, you are earth.

  The smile, the offered breast –

  They were the dream of one

  Thirsting as I for rest,

  As I, unblest.

  The Revenant

  Out of the famous canyon

  Deeper than sleep,

  From the nerveless tarn of oblivion

  She climbed. Dark was the slope,

  And her companion

  Gave not one love-glance back to brighten it.

  Only the wind-chafed rope

  Of melody held her

  To him that haled her

  Lifeward, praising the fire and delight in it.

  On the gist of that lay or its burden

  Legend is dumb.

  How else, though, with love-looks forbidden

  Could he say, ‘Come back to me, come’ –

  Could he touch the long-hidden

  Spring of a shade unfleshed, unfertilized

  Than by singing, oh, crust and crumb,

  Bark, sap, flesh, marrow –

  Life’s all, in the narrow

  Ambit of sense flowering, immortalized?

  Glimmering tall through the gloom

  In her phantom garment,

  Like a daffodil when its stem

  Feels trembling the first endearment

  Of amorous bloom,

  She palely paused, on the verge of light again.

  One step to break from her cerement,

  Yes, daffodil-rayed

  From the mould of the shade –

  No revenant now, a golden wife again.

  Had death become then, already,

  A habit too strong

  For her to break? The steady

  Pulsing of Orpheus’ song

  – Though lightwards led he –

  Grew faint in her. She wept for astonishment,

  Feared she could never belong

  To life, be at home there,

  Find aught but harm there,

  Till that last step seemed less a birth than a banishment.

  What strand of his love was the weak one,

  Or how it befell

  That a song which could melt the Dark One,

  Death’s granite lord, with its spell

  Saved not his meek one,

  Moved not his meek one to step from the last of her

  Terrors, no man may tell.

  He felt the cord parting,

  The death-wound smarting:

  He turned his head but to glimpse the ghost of her.

  So, as a pebble thrown

  From a cliff face, soaring

  Swerves back, less like a stone

  Than a bird, ere it falls to the snoring

  Surf, she was gone.

  Reluctant her going: but the more bitterly

  Mocked were his love, his imploring –

  That the gods spoke

  As seldom they speak

  On matters of life and death, non-committally.

  The House-Warming

  Did you notice at all as you entered the house,

  Your dove-treed house,

  Traces of one who was there before you

  Imagining roseate company for you,

  While the locked rooms lay in a drowse?

  One there was who paced to and fro,

  To and fro

  Through the empty house with an occupied air,

  Veiled in the passage, soft on the stair,

  And kept its heart aglow.

  Did you feel, when first you stepped in the hall,

  Stepped in the hall,

  A note of warmth like a weir’s deep humming?

  A message marked ‘To await her coming’

  Written on hearth and wall?

  One had been there for better or worse,

  Better or worse,

  Curtaining, carpeting, lighting all

  Your rooms with a love ineffaceable;

  And still in the night he stirs.

  Fear him not. He is but a shade,

  A homely shade

  For no dread signs or haunting cast:

  Not a phantom risen like spray from the past,

  But a ghost by the future made.

  Love enmeshed in his own folly –

  Mischance or folly –

  Expiates a deed for ever undone,

  Weeps for all that it could have won

  Of living together wholly.

  Such is the tenant you’ll have beside you,

  Often beside you

  Through the spoilt Junes when a gusty rain

  Strums fitful arpeggios on the pane,

  The dawns when light is denied you.

  But here may you find, for all his fretting

  And gaunt regretting,

  Between the dove-tops and the weir’s

  Undying fall, how broken years

  Can sing to a new setting.

  Meeting

>   Did I meet you again?

  Did I meet you again in the flesh we have come to know,

  That evening of chorusing colours a week ago?

  Or was it delusion wrung from a faulted brain

  When we seemed enveloped in love like naked dunes

  Effaced by a seventh wave’s onrush and undertow?

  Did I meet you again?

  Though I meet you again,

  Though I meet you a thousand times, surely the crest

  Of our quickening, breaking love can never be blessed

  With so generous a reach and radiance as fired it then.

  Since meetings must have their peak, and the luckiest matings

  Fade from golden to drab, perhaps it is best

  Not to meet you again.

  If I met you again,

  Met you again after years of extinct days,

  Oh, from dry air such a dance of aureate sprays

  Would break and freshly figure the lost refrain

  That a tremor would wring my heart’s rock, and I’d sigh,

  ‘Two loves which might have bloomed at the zenith always

  Are meeting again.’

  The Heartsease

  Do you remember that hour

  In a nook of the flowing uplands

  When you found for me, at the cornfield’s edge,

  A golden and purple flower?

  Heartsease, you said. I thought it might be

  A token that love meant well by you and me.

  I shall not find it again

  With you no more to guide me.

  I could not bear to find it now

  With anyone else beside me.

  And the heartease is far less rare

  Than what it is named for, what I can feel nowhere.

  Once again it is summer:

  Wildflowers beflag the lane

  That takes me away from our golden uplands,

  Heart-wrung and alone.

  The best I can look for, by vale or hill,

  A herb they tell me is common enough – self-heal.

  Is it far to go?1

  Is it far to go?

 

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