Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Laid out for the lust of the eye, you seem to see

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  An illusion though, like the smile on a dead face

  Which means nothing but our own wish for peace.

  Exquisite, yes: but a sense of the past, to be truly

  Felicitous, demands some belief in the present,

  Some moral belvedere we have not got.

  This villa inhabited only by frescoes,

  This garden groomed for sightseers – they mirror

  Too clearly our lack of prospect or tenable premise.

  The cardinals and princes who adorned them,

  Lords of an age when men believed in man,

  Are as remote from us as the Colosseum

  Where high-tiered beasts howled down professional heroes;

  Perhaps – it is a comfortless thought – remoter.

  Back, then, to Rome. At Tivoli our driver

  Stopped again like some house-proud, indelicate devil

  To remark the smell of sulphur. Presently,

  Held in a crook of Rome’s old city wall

  Close by St. Paul’s gate under the pagan shadow

  Of Gaius Cestius’ pyramid, we found

  The English cemetery. An ox-eyed, pregnant,

  Slatternly girl opened the gate for us

  And showed us round the desirable estate.

  Here is one comer of a foreign field

  That is for ever garden suburb. See,

  In their detached and smug-lawned residences,

  Behind a gauze of dusty shrubs, the English

  Indulge their life-long taste for privacy.

  Garish Campagna knocks at the back door,

  Rome calls en grande tenue: but ‘not at home’

  Murmur these tombs, and ‘far from home they died,

  ‘The eccentric couple you have come to visit –

  ‘One spitting blood, an outsider and a failure,

  ‘One sailing a boat, his mind on higher things.’

  Somewhere close to the pyramid a loud-speaker

  Blared jazz while we lingered at Keats’ shabby mound,

  But the air was drowned by the ghost of a nightingale;

  The ground was swimming with anemone tears

  Where Shelley lay.

  We could feel at home here, with

  This family of exiles. It is our people:

  A people from whose reticent, stiff heart

  Babble the springtime voices, always such voices

  Bubbling out of their clay …

  So much for Rome.

  Tomorrow we shall take the bus to Florence.

  1 The Colosseum was built by Vespasian on the site of the Golden House of Nero.

  PART FOUR

  Bus to Florence

  In the white piazza Today is barely awake.

  A well-water breeze freshens

  Her nakedness, musky with love, and wafts about

  Her breath of moist carnations.

  Oh the beautiful creature, still in a dream pinioned,

  A flutter of meadowsweet thighs!

  How she clings to the night, whose fingertips haunt her waxen

  Body! Look at the eyes

  Opening – pale, drenched, languid as aquamarines!

  They are open. The mere-smooth light

  Starts glancing all over the city in jets and sparklets

  Like a charm of goldfinches in flight.

  The tousled alleys stretch. Tall windows blink.

  Hour of alarum clocks and laces.

  Sprinklers dust off the streets. The shops hum gently

  As they make up their morning faces.

  And today comes out like a bride, a different woman,

  Subtler in hue, hazier,

  Until the pensive mist goes, shyly avowing

  Such a zenith of shameless azure.

  This is our day: we mean

  To make much of her, tune to her pitch. The enchanting creature

  Travels with us. For once

  There will be no twinge of parting in a departure.

  So eager she is to be off,

  Spilling her armful of roses and mignonette,

  Her light feet restlessly echoed

  From campanile and wristwatch (will they forget?

  Be late?) What a stir and lustre

  Ripple the white square at a lift of her hand!

  Look! she has seen us, she points to

  That blue bus with the scarab-like trailer behind.

  We went the Cassian Way, a route for legions,

  We and the May morning.

  Rome flaked off in stucco; blear-eyed villas

  Melancholiac under their awnings.

  Rome peeled off like a cataract. Clear beyond us

  A vision good to believe in –

  The Campagna with its longdrawn sighs of grass

  Heaving, heaving to heaven.

  This young-old terrain of asphodel and tufo

  Opening its heart to the sun,

  Was it sighing for death like Tithonus, or still athirst for

  Immortal dews?… We run

  Towards Tuscany now through a no-man’s-land where stilted

  Aqueducts dryly scale

  The distance and sport the lizard his antediluvian

  Head and tendril tail.

  But soon the road rivers between flowerbanks:

  Such a fume and flamboyance of purple

  Vetch, of campions, poppy, wild rose, gladioli,

  Bugloss! The flowery people,

  Come out in their best to line our route, how they wave

  At the carnival progress! And higher,

  The foothills flush with sanfoin, salutes of broom

  Are setting the rocks on fire.

  Sutri, Viterbo, Montefiascone passed:

  Each village, it seemed, was making

  A silent bar in the music, the road’s hurdy-gurdy

  Winding, the tambourine shaking

  Of sunlit leaves. You tatterdemalion townships –

  Elegance freaked with decay –

  Your shuttered looks and your black doormouths gaping

  Dumb in the heat of the day

  Reject, unanswered, the engine’s urgent beat.

  But now, groves of acacia

  Swing their honeybells peal upon peal to welcome us

  Over the vibrant, azure,

  Deep organ chords of Bolsena, the silvery wavelets

  Trilling tranquillamente.

  That music followed us for miles, until

  We came to Acquapendente.

  Eyes grown used to the light, we were finding our form and meeting

  Impressions squarely.

  Yet, where all was new, changeful, idyllic, it saddened

  To think how rarely

  More than a few snippets remain from the offered fabric,

  And they not always

  The ones we’d have chosen. It’s sequence I lack, the talent to grasp

  Not a here-and-there phrase

  But the music entire, its original stream and logic. I’d better

  Accept this, perhaps,

  As nature’s way: matter, the physicists tell one, is largely

  A matter of gaps.

  Another stage, and a change of key. Listen!

  Rosetted oxen move –

  The milky skins, the loose-kneed watersilk gait of

  Priestesses vowed to Love.

  A road stubborn with stone pines. Shrines at the roadside.

  A sandstone cliff, where caves

  Open divining mouths: in this or that one

  A skeleton sibyl raves.

  Signs and omens … We approached the haunts of

  The mystery-loving Etruscans.

  Earth’s face grew rapidly older, ravine-wrinkled,

  Shadowed with brooding dusk on

  Temple and cheek. Mountains multiplied round us

  And the flowery guise shredded off as we

  Climbed past boulders and
gaunt grass high into

  A landscape haggard as prophecy,

  Scarred with bone-white riverbeds like veins

  Of inspiration run dry.

  Still what a journey away the apocalypse! See it –

  A tower, a town in the sky!

  A child from the flowering vale, a youth from the foothills

  May catch glimpses of death

  Remote as a star, irrelevant, all of a lifetime

  Ahead, less landmark than myth.

  For ages it seems no nearer. But imperceptibly

  The road, twisting and doubling

  As if to delay or avoid it, underlines

  That Presence: the man is troubled,

  Feeling the road beneath him being hauled in now

  Like slack, the magnetic power

  Of what it had always led to over the dreaming

  Hills and the fable of flowers.

  So, while the bus toiled upwards and the Apennines

  Swirled like vapours about it,

  That town in the sky stayed constant and loomed nearer

  Till we could no more doubt it;

  And soon, though still afar off, it darkly foretold us

  We were destined to pass that way.

  We passed by the thundercloud castle of Radicofani

  At the pinnacle of our day.

  The wrack of cloud, the surly ruinous tower

  Stubborn upon the verge of recognition –

  What haunts and weights them so?

  Memory, or premonition?

  Why should a mouldering finger in the sky,

  An hour of cloud that drifts and passes, mean

  More than the flowering vale,

  The volcanic ravine?

  A driven heart, a raven-shadowing mind

  Loom above all my pastorals, impend

  My traveller’s joy with fears

  That travelling has no end.

  But on without pause from that eyrie the bus, swooping,

  Checking and swooping, descends:

  The road cascades down the hillface in blonde ringlets

  Looped up with hairpin bends.

  The sun rides out. The calcined earth grows mellow

  With place-names sleek as oil –

  Montepulciano, Montalcino, Murlo,

  Castiglione. The soil

  Acknowledges man again, his hand which husbands

  Each yielding inch and endures

  To set the vine amid armies, the olive between

  Death’s adamantine spurs.

  Presently, on a constellation of three hills,

  We saw crowning the plain

  A town from a missal, a huddle of towers and houses,

  Mediaeval Siena.

  A gorge of a street, anfractuous, narrow. Our bus

  Crawled up it, stemming a torrent

  Of faces – the faces impetuous, proud, intransigent

  Of those who had fought with Florence

  For Tuscany. Was it a demonstration they flocked to?

  A miracle? Or some huger

  Event? We left the bus stranded amongst them, a monster

  Thrown up from their fathomless future,

  And strolled into a far-off present, an age

  Where all is emblematic,

  Pure, and without perspective. The twining passages,

  Diagrams of some classic

  Doctrinal knot, lap over and under one another.

  The swan-necked Mangia tower

  With its ruff stands, clear as Babel, for pride: beneath it,

  Shaped like a scallop, that square

  Might be humility’s dewpond, or the rose-madder

  Shell from which Aphrodite.

  Once stepped ashore. And the west front of the Duomo –

  How it images, flight upon flight, the

  Ascending torrent, a multitude without number

  Intent on their timeless way

  From the world of St. Catherine, Boccaccio and Fiammetta

  Towards the judgment day!

  A township cast up high and dry from an age

  When the whole universe

  Of stars lived in man’s parish

  And the zodiac told his fortune, chapter and verse.

  A simple time – salvation or damnation

  One black and white device,

  Eternity foreshortened,

  Earth a mere trusting step from Paradise.

  O life where mystery grew on every bush,

  Saints, tyrants, thrills and throes

  Were for one end! – the traveller

  Dips into your dreams and, sighing, goes.

  After two hours we went on, for our destination

  Called. The adagio dance

  Of olives, their immemorial routine and eccentric

  Variations of stance;

  The vines that flourished like semaphore alphabets endlessly

  Flagging from hill to hill:

  We knew them by heart now (or never would), seeing them tiny

  And common as tormentil.

  Florence invisibly haled us. The intervening

  Grew misted with expectations,

  Diminished yet weirdly prolonged, as all the go-between

  World by a lover’s impatience.

  Through Poggibonsi we glided – a clown’s name

  And a history of hard knocks:

  But nothing was real till at length we entered the nonpareil

  City … A hand unlocks

  The traveller’s trance. We alight. And the just coming down to

  Earth, the pure sense of arrival,

  More than visions or masterpieces, fulfil

  One need for which we travel.

  This day, my bride of a day,

  Went with me hand in hand the centuried road:

  I through her charmed eyes gazing,

  She hanging on my words, peace overflowed.

  But now, a rose-gold Eve,

  With the deep look of one who will unbosom

  Her sweetest to death only,

  She opens out, she flames and falls like blossom.

  A spray that lightly trembles

  After the warbler’s flown. A cloud vibrating

  In the wash of the hull-down sun.

  My heart rocks on. Remembering, or awaiting?

  PART FIVE

  Florence: Works of Art

  Florence, father of Michelangelo,

  Dante, da Vinci, Fra Angelico,

  Cellini, Botticelli, Brunelleschi.

  Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio! –

  We shall not see their like, or yours, again.

  Painters depart, and patrons. You remain,

  Your bridges blown, your glory catalogued,

  A norm for scholars and for gentlemen.

  Reverend city, sober, unperplexed,

  Turning your page to genius annexed

  I breathe the mint and myrrh of Tuscan hills,

  The tart aroma of some classic text.

  Shields and medallions; overshadowing eaves

  Like studious brows; the light that interleaves

  Your past with amber: all’s definitive, all

  In changeless chiaroscuro one conceives.

  I sometimes think that the heart is ne’er so dead

  As where some vanished era overspread

  The soil with titan foliage, scattering down

  Eternal rubies when its bloom was shed.

  Where rode Lorenzo, panoplied and plumed,

  Where Savonarola burned, and Ruskin fumed,

  The lady artist set her easel up,

  The tourist with mild wonder is consumed.

  Yet still the Arno navigably flows,

  And saunterers past the Ponte Vecchio’s

  Jewel shops cast a shadow: here is still

  A taste for life, a market for the rose.

  Ah no, it’s not the Florentines who fade

  Before the statued loggia, the arcade,

  The cliffs of floral stone. They live enough


  In a pure tongue and a congenial trade.

  Should the past overawe them? It’s not theirs,

  More than a mansion is the caretaker’s.

  A church by Giotto does as well as any

  Other for this day’s rendezvous or prayers.

  What if along the pot-holed boulevards

  Slogans are scrawled, not cantos? if postcards

  Stand in for masterpieces, and ice cream

  Says more to them than edifying façades?

  The past is all-encroaching; and unless

  They lopped its tentacles, stemmed its excess

  To clear the air for some domestic seed,

  They’d soon be strangled by a wilderness.

  It’s not the Florentine who pales beside

  That vast, rank efflorescence. The pop-eyed

  Tourist it is who rushes on his doom,

  Armed with good taste, a Leica and a guide.

  The primitive forest, the renaissance range

  So massive are, surely they will estrange

  Him from himself, or send him yelping home

  To plastic novelties, to art’s small change.

  Plodding the galleries, we ask how can

  That century of the Uncommon Man,

  Sovereign here in paint, bronze, marble, suit