Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Meringues, iced cakes, confections of whipped cream

  Lavishly piled for some Olympian party –

  A child’s idea of heaven. Now radiant

  All around the airscrew’s boring penumbra

  The clouds redouble, as nearer we climb,

  Their toppling fantasy. We skirt the fringe of icebergs,

  Dive under eiderdowns, disport with snowmen

  On fields of melting snow dinted by the wind’s feet,

  Gleefully brush past atom-bomb cauliflowers,

  Frozen fuffs of spray from naval gunfire.

  Wool-gathering we fly through a world of make-believe.

  We are the aircraft, the humming-bird hawk moth

  Hovering and sipping at each cloud corolla;

  But also ourselves, to whom these white follies are

  Valid as symbols for a tonic reverie

  Or as symptoms of febrile flight from the real.

  Let us keep, while we can, the holiday illusion,

  The heart’s altimeter dancing bliss-high,

  Forgetting gravity, regardless of earth

  Out of sight, out of mind, like a menacing letter

  Left at home in a drawer – let the next-of-kin acknowledge it.

  The cloud-floor is fissured suddenly. Clairvoyance

  It seems, not sight, when the solid air frays and parts

  Unveiling, like some rendezvous remote in a crystal,

  Bright, infinitesimal, a fragment of France.

  We scan the naked earth as it were through a skylight:

  Down there, what life-size encounters, what industrious

  Movement and vocations manifold go forward!

  But to us, irresponsible, above the battle,

  Villages and countryside reveal no more life than

  A civilization asleep beneath a glacier,

  Toy bricks abandoned on a plain of linoleum …

  After a hard winter, on the first warm day

  The invalid venturing out into the rock-garden,

  Pale as a shaft of December sunshine, pauses,

  All at sea among the aubretia, the alyssum

  And arabis – halts and moves on how warily,

  As if to take soundings where the blossom foams and tumbles:

  But what he does sound is the depth of his own weakness

  At last, as never when pain-storms lashed him.

  So we, convalescent from routine’s long fever,

  Plummeting our gaze down to river and plain,

  Question if indeed that dazzling world beneath us

  Be truth or delirium; and finding still so tentative

  The answer, can gauge how nearly we were ghosts,

  How far we must travel yet to flesh and blood.

  But now the engines have quickened their beat

  And the fuselage pulsates, panting like a fugitive.

  Below us – oh, look at it! – earth has become

  Sky, a thunderscape curdling to indigo,

  Veined with valleys of green fork-lightning.

  The atrocious Alps are upon us. Their ambush –

  A primeval huddle, then a bristling and heaving of

  Brutal boulder-shapes, an uprush of Calibans –

  Unmasks its white-fanged malice to maul us.

  The cabin grows colder. Keep height, my angel!

  Where we are, all but terra firma is safe.

  Recall how flyers from a raid returning,

  Lightened of one death, were elected for another:

  Their homing thoughts too far ahead, a mountain

  Stepped from the mist and slapped them down.

  We, though trivial the hazard, retract

  Our trailing dreams until we have cleared these ranges.

  Exalted, numinous, aloof no doubt

  To the land-locked vision, for us they invoke

  A mood more intimate, a momentary flutter and

  Draught of danger – death’s fan coquettishly

  Tapping the cheek ere she turn to dance elsewhere.

  Our mien is the bolder for this mild flirtation,

  Our eyes the brighter, since every brush with her

  Gives flesh a souvenir, a feel of resurrection.

  Those peaks o’erpassed, we glissade at last to

  A gentian pasture, the Genoan sea.

  Look south, sky-goers! In flying colours

  A map’s unrolled there – the Italy

  Your schooldays scanned once: the hills are sand-blond,

  A pale green stands for the littoral plain:

  The sea’s bedizened with opening islands

  Like iris eyes on a peacock’s fan.

  How slowly dawns on the drowsy newborn

  Whose world’s unworn yet – a firelit dress,

  An ego’s glamorous shell, a womb of rumours –

  The first faint glimmering of otherness!

  But half awake, we could take this country

  For some vague drift from prenatal dreams:

  Those hills and headlands, like sleep’s projections

  Or recollections, mere symbol seem.

  Then hurtling southward along shores of myrtle,

  Silverly circle the last lap,

  My bull-headed moth! This land is nothing

  But a mythical name on an outline map

  For us, till we’ve scaled it to our will’s dimensions,

  Filled in each wayward, imperious route,

  Shaded it in with delays and chagrins,

  Traced our selves over it, foot by foot.

  Now tighter we circle, as if the vertical

  Air is a whirlpool drawing us down;

  And the airfield, a candle-bright pinpoint, invites us

  To dance ere alighting … Hurry! We burn

  For Rome so near us, for the phoenix moment

  When we have thrown off this traveller’s trance,

  And mother-naked and ageless-ancient

  Wake in her warm nest of renaissance.

  PART THREE

  A Letter from Rome

  We have been here three days, and Rome is really –

  I know, I know; it would take three life-times to cover

  The glorious junk-heap. Besides, our generation –

  Well, you’ve only to think of James, as one must do here,

  Lapping the cream of antiquity, purring over

  Each vista that stroked his senses, and in brief

  Rubbing himself against Rome like a great tabby,

  To see what I mean. We who ‘flowered’ in the Thirties

  Were an odd lot; sceptical yet susceptible,

  Dour though enthusiastic, horizon-addicts

  And future-fans, terribly apt to ask what

  Our all-very-fine sensations were in aid of.

  We did not, you will remember, come to coo.

  Still, there is hope for us. Rome has absorbed

  Other barbarians: yes, and there’s nobody quite so

  Sensuously rich and reckless as the reformed

  Puritan … This by the way, to establish a viewpoint.

  You wanted my impressions. If only one were

  A simple sieve, be the mesh close or wide,

  For Rome to shake (and how it does shake one!), sifting

  Some finer stuff from the coarser. But the trouble with me is

  – Or perhaps it’s the trouble with Rome – to discriminate

  Merely between what is here and what has been here,

  Between the eye and the mind’s eye. The place has had

  Over two thousand years of advance publicity

  For us, which clouds the taste and saps the judgment.

  What are you to do when Catullus buttonholes you

  On the way to St. Peter’s? When the Colosseum presents

  Nero1 comparing notes with Roderick Hudson

  On art and egotism? Sights, sounds, phantoms –

  It is all too much for me, it should not be allowed!

  Perhaps, though, it is just he
re that something emerges.

  As when, composing a poem, the tangle of images

  And jangle of words pressing hard on you, mobbing you, may

  Compel you to choose the right moment to disengage

  And find the one word, the word of command which makes them

  Meekly fall in to their ranks, and the march continues:

  So from this Rome, where the past lies weltering

  In the blood of the present, and posters of Betty Grable

  Affront the ghost of Cato; from all its grandiose

  Culs-de-sac – the monumental gateways

  That open on nothing, the staircases starting for heaven,

  The stone-blind palaces sweltering in the noon;

  From the stilled tempest of the Sistine ceiling

  To the water exasperated by sirocco

  In every fountain basin; from the whole gamut,

  Theatrical, vulgar, rhetorical, fractious, sublime,

  Of a city young as Tithonus, a city so ancient

  That even the shadows here lie thick as dust: –

  Emerges from all this, like invisible writing

  Drawn out by the heart’s warmth, one lucid word.

  Compost. I do not suppose the word original

  (Original! Rome is quite beyond that). But think of it –

  Century into century rotting down,

  Faith piled on faith, Mithra on Jupiter,

  Christ upon Mithra, Catholicism on Christ,

  Temples imbedded in churches, church-stones in palaces:

  Think of the pagan gods, demoted to demons,

  Haunting and taunting the Early Fathers; long-dead

  Lights of love, immortalized as Madonnas,

  Demurely smiling at man’s infant idealism.

  Superstition, sanctity, cruelty, laws, art, lust –

  Layer after layer laid down, course upon course

  They renew the soul of this city, a city whose prospects

  Are quarried out of its bones, a soul digesting

  All foreignness into one rich dark fibre.

  Rome, I can tell you, is the very type of

  The hugger-mugger of human growth. For here

  You can see the grand design eternally crossed

  By the abject means, and its seedy ruin redeemed with

  Valerian, arbutus, fennel; a character root-fast

  Like a man’s in the deposit of all his acts.

  Or say, a woman’s; for so she appeared to us

  On the first morning when we sauntered out

  (The night before, wild strawberries and Frascati

  Gold as the Roman May-light, cool as grottoes).

  A woman – how shall I put it? – who makes you feel

  She has waited two thousand years to meet you, and now

  At once she is wholly yours, her liquid tongue,

  Her body mantled in the full flush of Ceres,

  And Primavera fluttering in her eyes.

  She can be tiresome, no doubt, feverish, languid,

  Changing her moods like dresses. But today

  She has chosen to be divinely acquiescent:

  ‘What shall we do?’ the shell-like murmur comes,

  ‘Shall we go shopping? Would you like me to show you the sights?’

  ‘I will do anything you say, anything.’

  … So we took, in the end, a carrozza to St. Peter’s.

  The driver was plainly a phantom; his conveyance

  Jarred like old bones and mumbled of better days when

  Violet-adorned beauties, sedate or giddy,

  Turned all heads on the Corso. Thus we went

  Jaunting over the seven hills of Rome

  With the streets rocking beneath us as if seven ages

  Turned in their grave, while noise upon noise the drift

  Of our own – its voices, horns, wheels, bells, loudspeakers –

  Washed past us; then it dwindled away to a sea-shell

  Cadence, beyond the Tiber, as we came near

  Vatican city.

  And now vates tacete

  Should be the word. Words here can only scrabble

  Like insects at the plinth of a colossus,

  Scrabble and feebly gesticulate and go elsewhere.

  Mere magnitude one might deal with, or pure and simple

  Meaning; but both in one, they give no purchase.

  A dome superb as heaven’s vault, capping a story

  Whose hero blessed the meek; a desert of floor

  Refracting faith like a mirage; the orchestration

  Of gold and marble engulfing the still, small voice: –

  You cannot pass over St. Peter’s and what it stands for,

  Whether you see it as God’s vicarious throne

  Or the biggest bubble ever yet unpricked.

  And here, I have to confess, the old Puritan peeped out;

  Not in sour protest against the Scarlet Woman,

  Nor quite in the mood of my generation – its volatile

  Mixture of hero-worship and disrespect;

  But that an early habit of going to church

  Prevents me from going to churches however distinguished

  Their provenance, just as a sight-seer. Faith perhaps,

  Though unconscious, is not yet dead, its breath still clouding

  The glass of aesthetic perception. Apart from which,

  I could not do with the guides who spring up like sweat-white

  Fungi from every chink, and cling to one, furtively

  Offering their curious knowledge; these pimps are not

  The type you would choose to lead you to any altar.

  So I was lost, ill at ease here, until by chance

  In a side chapel we found a woman mourning

  Her son: all the lacrimœ rerum flowed

  To her gesture of grief, all life’s blood from his stone.

  There is no gap or discord between the divine

  And the human in that pieta of Michelangelo.

  Then, after a marathon walk through the Vatican galleries,

  An endless belt of statues, tapestry, pictures

  Glazing the eye, we came out into the streets again.

  Better than all the museums, this strolling folk

  Who sun themselves in the apricot light of antiquity

  And take its prestige for granted. Cameo faces,

  Contessa or contadina; bronze boys skylarking

  As if they had just wriggled free from a sculptor’s hand –

  How easily art and nature overlap here!

  Another thing you would like about the Romans

  Is the way they use their city, not as a warren

  Of bolt-holes, nor a machine into which one is fed

  Each morning and at evening duly disgorged,

  But as an open-air stage. Palazzo, tenement

  Seem pure façade – back-cloth for a continuous

  Performance of business, love-making, politics, idling,

  Conducted with a grand operatic extravagance

  At the tempo of family theatricals. That same night

  In the Piazza del’ Esedra, sipping

  Grappa, we watched the people, warm as animals

  And voluble as fountains, eddying round

  While the floodlit masonry was mere slabs of moonshine.

  Rome is a city where flesh and blood can never

  Be sacrificed, or mistaken, for abstractions.

  But already (you can imagine how) my mind’s

  Crisscrossed with figures, memoranda, lightning sketches,

  Symbolic doodlings, hour by hour set down

  Haphazardly as in Rome era on era.

  And time is already shuffling tricks with discards.

  Those fountains yesterday at the Villa d’Este

  Grouped like patrician spectres in white conclave

  Against a drop-scene of terraces and urns –

  Did we indeed see them, or have they stepped

  From a picture book
years ago perused? Last night

  We found on a wall of the Pincio a bas-relief,

  A wide white calm imperious head suddenly

  Surveying us out of the blank wall like some racial

  Memory still not deep enough bricked up.

  Yesterday, then, was a day with the dead. We hired

  A car, and set out first for the Palatine hill.

  The Forum? Well, picture a clearing found

  In the depth of a clamorous forest, a low space littered

  With bits of temples, arches, altars, mosaics

  And God knows what – classical tags, fag ends,

  Smatterings and stumps of a once apparently stable

  Civilization, which packed up for all that

  And left, like a gipsy encampment or picnic party:

  And over it all, the silence of sheer exhaustion.

  This area, sad as scar-tissue now, was the heart

  Of a great republic, the S. P. Q. R.

  Here they governed – a people, like the Scots,

  Smouldering, pious, intolerant, living hard,

  And demon fighters. Warlike was the seed;

  But Time has pushed out this crop of decayed teeth.

  It was the usual story. Long before

  Their aqueducts ran dry and became picturesque,

  Their virtue had imperceptibly seeped away

  Into the dunes of ambition. They caught

  Luxury, like a syphilis, from their conquests.

  Then, feeling queer, they appointed one man to cure them

  And made a god of him. The disease was arrested

  From time to time. But injections grew more frequent,

  And the extremities began to rot;

  While at home no amount of marble could hide the sick core –

  Vestals too free with their flame, tribunes long impotent,

  A rabble who had not the wherewithal to redeem its

  Too often pledged heirlooms, justice and hardiness.

  So we were glad on the whole to leave this spot

  Where glum mementoes of decline and fall

  Are cherished like a grievance in Rome’s heart,

  And drive out towards Tivoli. The name

  Had a certain frivolous charm for one oppressed

  By dwelling on ruined greatness. The little town,

  Modishly perched on an olive-tressed hillside,

  Is famous for its sulphur springs (our driver

  Stopped the car so that we might inhale it)

  And of course, for the Villa d’Este. There at first

  In the elaborate Renaissance gardens