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Complete Poems

Page 48

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  Elegant house, how well you speak

  For the one who fathered me there,

  With your sanguine face, your moody provincial charm,

  And that Anglo-Irish air

  Of living beyond one’s means to keep up

  An era beyond repair.

  Reticent house in the far Queen’s County,

  How much you leave unsaid.

  Not a ghost of a hint appears at your placid windows

  That she, so youthfully wed,

  Who bore me, would move elsewhere very soon

  And in four years be dead.

  I know that we left you before my seedling

  Memory could root and twine

  Within you. Perhaps that is why so often I gaze

  At your picture, and try to divine

  Through it the buried treasure, the lost life –

  Reclaim what was yours, and mine.

  I put up the curtains for them again

  And light a fire in their grate:

  I bring the young father and mother to lean above me,

  Ignorant, loving, complete:

  I ask the questions I never could ask them

  Until it was too late.

  Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois1

  Here is the unremembered gate.

  Two asses, a grey and a black,

  Have ambled across from the rough lawn

  As if they’d been told to greet

  The revenant. Trees draw graciously back

  As I follow the drive, to unveil

  For this drifty wraith, composed and real

  The house where he was born.

  Nothing is changed from that sixty-year-old

  Photograph, except

  My father’s young face has been brushed away.

  On the steps down which he strolled

  With me in his arms, the living are grouped,

  And it is my son Sean

  Who stands upon the dishevelled lawn

  To photograph us today.

  I walk through the unremembered house,

  Note on the walls each stain

  Of damp; then up the spacious stair

  As if I would now retrace

  My self to the room where it began.

  Dust on fine furnishings,

  A scent of wood ash – the whole house sings

  With an elegiac air.

  Its owner is not at home – nor I

  Who have no title in it

  And no drowned memories to chime

  Through its hush. Can piety

  Or a long-lost innocence explain it? –

  By what prodigious spell,

  Sad elegant house, you have made me feel

  A ghost before my time?

  1 Laois: pronounced Leash. Ballintubbert House was the poet’s birthplace.

  Fishguard to Rosslare

  From all my childhood voyages back to Ireland

  Only two things remembered: gulls afloat

  Off Fishguard quay, littering a patch of radiance

  Shed by the midnight boat.

  And at dawn a low, dun coast shaping to meet me,

  An oyster sky opening above Rosslare …

  I rub the sleep from my eyes. Gulls pace the moving

  Mast-head. We’re almost there.

  Gulls white as a dream on the pitch of Fishguard harbour,

  Paper cut-outs, birds on a lacquered screen;

  The low coastline and the pearl sky of Ireland;

  A long sleep in between.

  A sleep between two waking dreams – the haven,

  The landfall – is how it appears now. The child’s eye,

  Unpuzzled, saw plain facts: I catch a glint from

  The darkness they’re haunted by.

  Golden Age, Monart, Co. Wexford1

  There was a land of milk and honey.

  Year by year the rectory garden grew

  Like a prize bloom my height of summer.

  Time was still as the lily ponds. I foreknew

  No chance or change to stop me running

  Barefoot for ever on the clover’s dew.

  Buttermilk brimmed in the cool earthen

  Crocks. All day the french-horn phrase of doves

  Dripped on my ear, a dulcet burden.

  Gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes, like slaves

  Presented myriad fruit to my mouth.

  In a bliss of pure accepting the child moves.

  Hand-to-mouth life at the top of the morning!

  Shabby, queer-shaped house – look how your plain

  Facts are remembered in gold engraving!

  I have watched the dead – my simple-minded kin,

  Once bound to a cramped enclave – returning

  As myths of an Arcadian demesne.

  Hens, beehives, dogs, an ass, the cobbled

  Yard live on, brushed with a sunshine glaze.

  Thanks to my gaunt, eccentric uncle,

  His talkative sister, and the aunt who was

  My second mother, from all time’s perishable

  Goods I was given these few to keep always.

  1 Monart: pronounced Mŏnárt.

  The eccentric uncle was the Rev. W. G. Squires.

  Avoca, Co. Wicklow

  Step down from the bridge.

  A spit of grass points

  At the confluence.

  Tree he sat beneath

  Spoiled for souvenirs,

  Looks numb as driftwood.

  A pretty fellow

  In stone broods over

  The meeting waters.

  His words came alive

  But to music’s flow,

  Like weeds in water.

  I recall my aunt, my second mother,

  Singing Tom Moore at the old rectory

  Harmonium – The Last Rose of Summer,

  She is far from the Land – her contralto

  Scoop, the breathy organ, an oil lamp lit.

  Words and tune met, flowed together in one

  Melodious river. I drift calmly

  Between its banks. Sweet vale of Avoca,

  She is still young, I a child, and our two

  Hearts like thy waters are mingled in peace.

  Dublin tradesman’s son,

  Byron’s friend, the pet

  Of Whig drawing-rooms.

  Fêted everywhere,

  Everywhere at home,

  He sang of exile

  And death, tailoring

  Country airs to a

  Modish elegance.

  Let the waters jig

  In a light glitter,

  So the source run full.

  Near Ballyconneely, Co. Galway

  i

  A stony stretch. Grey boulders

  Half-buried in furze and heather,

  Purple and gold – Connemara’s

  Old bones dressed in colours

  Out of a royal past.

  Inshore the sea is marbled

  And veined with foam. The Twelve Pins

  Like thunderclouds hewn from rock

  Or gods in a cloudy fable

  Loom through an overcast.

  The roofless dwellings have grown

  Back to the earth they were raised from,

  And tune with those primordial

  Outcrops of grey stone

  Among the furze and the heather.

  Where man is dispossessed

  Silence fills up his place

  Fast as a racing tide.

  Little survives of our West

  But stone and the moody weather.

  ii

  Taciturn rocks, the whisht of the Atlantic

  The sea-thrift mute above a corpse-white strand

  Pray silence for those vanished generations

  Who toiled on a hard sea, a harsher land.

  Not all the bards harping on ancient wrong

  Were half as eloquent as the silence here

  Which amplifies the ghostly lamentations

  And draws a hundre
d-year-old footfall near.

  Preyed on by gombeen men, expropriated

  By absentee landlords, driven overseas

  Or to mass-burial pits in the great famines,

  They left a waste which tourists may call peace.

  The living plod to Mass, or gather seaweed

  For pigmy fields hacked out from heath and furze –

  No eye to spare for the charmed tourist’s view,

  No ear to heed the plaint of ancestors.

  Winds have rubbed salt into the ruinous homes

  Where turf-fires glowed once: waves and seagulls keen

  Those mortal wounds. The landscape’s an heroic

  Skeleton time’s beaked agents have picked clean.

  Land

  The boundary stone,

  The balk, fence or hedge

  Says on one side ‘I own’,

  On the other ‘I acknowledge’.

  The small farmer carved

  His children rations.

  He died. The heart was halved,

  Quartered, fragmented, apportioned:

  To the sons, a share

  Of what he’d clung to

  By nature, plod and care –

  His land, his antique land-hunger.

  Many years he ruled,

  Many a year sons

  Followed him to oat-field,

  Pasture, bog, down shaded boreens.

  Turf, milk, harvest – he

  Grew from earth also

  His own identity

  Firmed by the seasons’ come-and-go.

  Now at last the sons,

  Captive though long-fledged,

  Own what they envied once –

  Right men, the neighbours acknowledge.

  Kilmainham Jail: Easter Sunday, 1966

  Sunbursts over this execution yard

  Mitigate high, harsh walls. A lowly

  Black cross marks the deaths we are here to honour,

  Relieved by an Easter lily.

  Wearing the nineteen-sixteen medal, a few

  Veterans and white-haired women recall

  The Post Office, Clanwilliam House, the College of Surgeons,

  Jacob’s factory – all

  Those desperate strongholds caught in a crossfire

  Between the English guns

  And Dublin’s withering incredulity.

  Against the wall where once

  Connolly, strapped to a chair, was shot, a platform

  Holds movie cameras. They sight

  On the guard of honour beneath the tricolor,

  An officer with a horseman’s light

  And quiet hands, and now the old President

  Who, soldierly still in bearing,

  Steps out to lay a wreath under the plaque.

  As then, no grandiose words, no cheering –

  Only a pause in the splatter of Dublin talk,

  A whisper of phantom volleys.

  How could they know, those men in the sunless cells,

  What would flower from their blood and England’s follies?

  Their dreams, coming full circle, had punctured upon

  The violence that gave them breath and cut them loose.

  They bargained on death: death came to keep the bargain.

  Pious postcards of men dying in spruce

  Green uniforms, angels beckoning them aloft,

  Only cheapen their cause. Today they are hailed

  As martyrs; but then they bore the ridiculed shame of

  Mountebanks in a tragedy which has failed.

  And they were neither the one nor the other – simply

  Devoted men who, though the odds were stacked

  Against them, believed their country’s age-old plight

  And the moment gave no option but to act.

  Now the leaders, each in his sweating cell,

  The future a blind wall and the unwinking

  Eyes of firing-squad rifles, pass their time

  In letters home, in prayer. Maybe they are thinking

  Of Mount Street, the blazing rooftops, the Post Office,

  Wrapping that glory round them against the cold

  Shadow of death. Who knows the pull and recoil of

  A doomed heart?

  They are gone as a tale that is told,

  The fourteen men. Let them be more than a legend:

  Ghost-voices of Kilmainham, claim your due –

  This is not yet the Ireland we fought for.

  You living, make our Easter dreams come true.

  Remembering Con Markievicz1

  Child running wild in woods of Lissadell:

  Young lady from the Big House, seen

  In a flowered dress, gathering wild flowers: Ascendancy queen

  Of hunts, house-parties, practical jokes – who could foretell

  (Oh fiery shade, impetuous bone)

  Where all was regular, self-sufficient, gay

  Their lovely hoyden lost in a nation’s heroine?

  Laughterless now the sweet demesne,

  And the gaunt house looks blank on Sligo Bay

  A nest decayed, an eagle flown.

  The Paris studio, your playboy Count

  Were not enough, nor Castle splendour

  And fame of horsemanship. You were the tinder

  Waiting a match, a runner tuned for the pistol’s sound,

  Impatient shade, long-suffering bone.

  In a Balally cottage you found a store

  Of Sinn Fein papers. You read – maybe the old sheets can while

  The time. The flash lights up a whole

  Ireland which you have never known before,

  A nest betrayed, its eagles gone.

  The road to Connolly and Stephen’s Green

  Showed clear. The great heart which defied

  Irish prejudice, English snipers, died

  A little not to have shared a grave with the fourteen.

  Oh fiery shade, intransigent bone!

  And when the Treaty emptied the British jails,

  A haggard woman returned and Dublin went wild to greet her.

  But still it was not enough: an iota

  Of compromise, she cried, and the Cause fails.

  Nest disarrayed, eagles undone.

  Fanatic, bad actress, figure of fun –

  She was called each. Ever she dreamed,

  Fought, suffered for a losing side, it seemed

  (The side which always at last is seen to have won),

  Oh fiery shade and unvexed bone.

  Remember a heart impulsive, gay and tender,

  Still to an ideal Ireland and its real poor alive.

  When she died in a pauper bed, in love

  All the poor of Dublin rose to lament her

  A nest is made, an eagle flown.

  1 Markievicz: pronounced Markievitch.

  Lament for Michael Collins

  Bicycling around Dublin with the ruddy, anonymous face

  Of a rural bank clerk, a price-tag on his head,

  While a pack of Auxiliaries, informers, Castle spies,

  Nosing through snug and lodging, bayed

  For the quarry that came and went like a shadow beneath its nose –

  That was the Big Fellow, the schoolboy Pimpernel.

  Toujours I’audace, steel nerves and narrow shaves,

  He loved to wrestle with comrades, he blubbered when they fell.

  Homeric heroes thus behaved:

  He kept the form. But there’s much more of the tale to tell.

  With traitor and trigger-happy Tan he settled accounts.

  A martinet for balancing books, he slated

  Unready reckoners, looked for no bonuses from chance,

  The risks he took being calculated

  As a guerilla leader and an adept of finance.

  They brought a Treaty. Now came the need to coax or drag

  His countrymen to some assured foothold

  On the future out of their bitter and atavistic bog.

  Spl
it was the nation he would build

  And all to do again when the Civil War broke.

  Fanaticism and muddle, Ireland wore down his heart

  Long before the ambush in County Cork,

  Long before a random, maybe a treacherous shot

  Stopped it for ever. Do we talk

  Of best-forgotten things and an elusive shade?

  This country boy grown into a General’s uniform,

  Gauntleted hands clasped in determination:

  Tempestuous, moody man with the lashing tongue and the warm

  Sunbursts of laughter – dare a nation

  Forget the genius who rode through storm on storm

  To give it birth? You flying columns of ragtag cloud

  Stream from the west and weep over the grave

  Of him who once dynamic as a powerhouse stood.

  For Ireland all he was he gave –

  Energy, vision, last of all the great heart’s blood.

  Ass in Retirement

  Ass

  orbits

  a firm stake:

  each circle round

  the last one is stamped

  slow and unmomentous

  like a tree-trunk’s annual rings.

  He does not fancy himself as a tragedian,

  a circumference mystic or a treadmill hero,

  nor takes he pride in his grey humility.

  He is just one more Irish ass

  eating his way round the clock,

  keeping pace with his own appetite.

  Put out to grass, given a yard more rope

  each week, he takes time off from what’s under his nose

  Only to bray at rain-clouds over the distant bog;

  relishes asinine freedom – having to bear

  no topple of hay, nor cleeves crammed with turf;

  ignorant that he’ll come in time

  to the longest tether’s end,

  then strangle or accept

  that stake. Either way

  on the endless

  grass one day

  he’ll drop

  dead.

  Beauty Show, Clifden, Co. Galway

  They’re come to town from each dot on the compass, they’re

 

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