Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Wild as tinkers and groomed to an eyelash,

  And light of foot as a champion featherweight

  Prance on the top of the morning.

  They walk the ring, so glossy and delicate

  Each you’d think was a porcelain masterpiece

  Come to life at the touch of a raindrop,

  Tossing its mane and its halter.

  The shy, the bold, the demure and the whinnier,

  Grey, black, piebald, roans, palominos

  Parade their charms for the tweedy, the quite un-

  susceptible hearts of the judges.

  Now and again at the flick of an instinct,

  As if they’d take off like a fieldful of rooks, they will

  Fidget and fret for the pasture they know, and

  The devil take all this competing.

  The light is going, the porter is flowing,

  The field a ruin of paper and straw.

  Step neatly home now, unprized or rosetted,

  You proud Connemara ponies.

  Harebells over Mannin Bay

  Half moon of moon-pale sand.

  Sea stirs in midnight blue.

  Looking across to the Twelve Pins

  The singular harebells stand.

  The sky’s all azure. Eye

  To eye with them upon

  Cropped grass, I note the harebells give

  Faint echoes of the sky.

  For such a Lilliput host

  To pit their colours against

  Peacock of sea and mountain seems

  Impertinence at least.

  These summer commonplaces,

  Seen close enough, confound

  A league of brilliant waves, and dance

  On the grave mountain faces.

  Harebells, keep your arresting

  Pose by the strand. I like

  These gestures of the ephemeral

  Against the everlasting.

  At Old Head, Co. Mayo

  In a fisherman’s hat and a macintosh

  He potters along the hotel drive;

  Croagh Patrick1 is far beyond him now the locust

  Has stripped his years of green.

  Midges like clouds of memory nag

  The drooped head. Fish are rising

  Under his hat. He stops against the view.

  All is a brushwork vision, a wash

  Of new-laid colour. They come alive –

  Fuchsia, grass, rock. The mist, which had unfocused

  Mountain and bay, is clean

  Forgot, and gone the lumpish sag

  Of cloud epitomizing

  Our ennui. Storms have blown the sky to blue.

  He stops, but less to admire the view

  Than to catch breath maybe. Pure gold,

  Emerald, violet, ultramarine are blazing

  From earth and sea: out there

  Croagh Patrick stands uncapped for him.

  The old man, shuffling by,

  Recalls a rod lost, a dead girl’s caress.

  Can youthful ecstasies renew

  Themselves in blood that has blown so cold?

  Nature’s more merciful: gently unloosing

  His hold upon each care

  And human tie, her fingers dim

  All lights which held his eye,

  And ease him on the last lap to nothingness.

  1 Croagh Patrick: the Holy Mountain.

  Croagh: pronounced cro’.

  Sailing from Cleggan

  Never will I forget it –

  Beating out through Cleggan Bay

  Towards Inishbofin, how

  The shadow lay between us,

  An invisible shadow

  All but severing us lay

  Athwart the Galway hooker.

  Sea-room won, turning to port

  Round Rossadillisk Point I

  Slacken the sheet. Atlantic

  Breeze abeam, ahead sun’s eye

  Opening, we skirt past reefs

  And islands – Friar, Cruagh,

  Orney, Eeshal, Inishturk.

  Porpoises cartwheeling through

  Inshore water, boom creaking,

  Spray asperging; and sunlight

  Transforming to a lime-green

  Laughter the lipcurling of

  Each morose wave as they burst

  On reefs fanged for a shipwreck.

  Miracle sun, dispelling

  That worst shadow! Salt and sun,

  Our wounds’ cautery! And how,

  Havened, healed, oh lightened of

  The shadow, we stepped ashore

  On to our recaptured love –

  Never could I forget it.

  Ballintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo1

  ‘The Abbey that refused to die’

  At the head of Lough Carra the royal abbey stands

  Huge as two tithe-barns: much immortal grain

  In its safe keeping, you might say, is stored.

  Masons and carpenters have roofed and floored

  That shell wherein a church not built with hands

  For seven hundred and fifty years had grown.

  I dare not quite say we were led here, driving

  Through drifts of clobbering rainstorm (my own natal

  Ballintubber is half Ireland away).

  Yet, greeted by those walls of peregrine grey,

  It felt like something more than the mere arriving

  Of two sight-seers. Call it a destination.

  Founded (1216) by Cathal O’Conor,

  King of Connacht, the holy place was sacked by

  Cromwellian louts, starved by the Penal Laws;

  Yet all these troubled years, without a pause,

  The Mass upheld God’s glory, to the honour

  Of Irishmen. So much for guidebook fact.

  * * *

  A seventeenth century crucifix, austere

  Stonework will take the eye: the heart conceives

  In the pure light from wall to whitewashed wall

  An unseen presence, formed by the faith of all

  The dead who age to age had worshipped here,

  Kneeling on grass along the rootless nave.

  And what is faith? The man who walks a high wire,

  Eyes fixed ahead, believing that strong nets

  Are spread below – the Hands which will sustain

  Each fall and nerve him to climb up again.

  Surefoot or stumbler, veteran or tiro,

  It could be we are all God’s acrobats.

  Broaden the high wire now into a bridge

  Where Christian men still meet over the fell

  Abyss, and walk together: they should cling

  Brothers in faith, not wranglers arguing

  Each step and slip of the way. Such true religion

  Renew this abbey of St Patrick’s well!

  Up-end the bridge. It makes a ladder now

  Between mankind and the timeless, limitless Presence,

  Angels ascending or descending it

  On His quick errands. See this ladder’s foot

  Firm-planted here, where men murmur and bow

  Like the Lough Carra reed-beds in obeisance.

  1 We had gone to this remote place as sightseers. To our astonishment, the priest recognized CDL, and immediately asked him to write a poem which could be sold to raise funds for the Abbey.

  An Ancestor

  Seen once on a family tree, now lost,

  Jane Eyre, of Eyrescourt, County Galway.

  All I get from the name is a passionate

  Prudish lady, crossed

  In love, then happy-ended. Jane,

  My Jane – while a boy called Patrick Prunty

  Dug potatoes in County Down –

  Lived upon her demesne.

  No governess, an heiress she.

  Well, knowing nothing of her – not even

  The road to razed or shuttered Eyrescourt –

  Like Charlotte I am free

  To create a Jane. I give her a score
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  Of rowdy brothers and sisters, a hunting

  Father, a gossipy mother, routs,

  Flirtings and flames galore.

  Pedigree mares, harp, scandal, new

  Recipes fill the hours. I see her

  Flitting towards an unclouded future

  Down a damp avenue.

  Were she alive, I know what would please

  Her still – the traditional Anglo-Irish

  Pastime of playing hide-and-seek

  Among their family trees.

  Goldsmith outside Trinity

  There he stands, my ancestor, back turned

  On Trinity, with his friend Edmund Burke

  And others of the Anglo-Irish genius –

  Poet, naturalist, historian, hack.

  The statue glosses over his uncouth figure,

  The pock-marked face, the clownish tongue and mien:

  It can say nothing of his unstaunchable charity,

  But does full justice to the lack of chin.

  Little esteemed by the grave and grey-faced college,

  He fiddled his way through Europe, was enrolled

  Among the London literates: a deserted

  Village brought forth a citizen of the world.

  His period and the Anglo-Irish reticence

  Kept sentiment unsicklied and unfurred:

  Good sense, plain style, a moralist could distinguish

  Fine shades from the ignoble to the absurd.

  Dublin they flew, the wild geese of Irish culture.

  They fly it still: the curdled elegance,

  The dirt, the cod, new hucksters, old heroics,

  Look better viewed from a remoter stance.

  Here from his shadow I note the buses grumbling

  On to Rathmines, Stillorgan, Terenure –

  Names he’d have known – and think of the arterial

  Through-way between us. I would like to be sure

  Long-distance genes do more than merely connect us.

  But I, a provincial too, an expatriate son

  Of Ireland, have nothing of that compulsive gambler,

  Nothing of the inspired simpleton.

  Yet, as if to an heirloom given a child and long

  Unvalued, I at last have returned to him

  With gratefuller recognition, get from his shadow

  A wordless welcome, a sense of being brought home.

  The Whispering Roots

  Roots are for holding on, and holding dear.

  Mine, like a child’s milk teeth, came gently away

  From Ireland at the close of my second year.

  Is it second childhood now – that I overhear

  Them whisper across a lifetime as if from yesterday?

  We have had blood enough and talk of blood,

  These sixty years. Exiles are two a penny

  And race a rancid word; a meaningless word

  For the Anglo-Irish: a flighty cuckoo brood

  Foisted on alien nests, they knew much pride and many

  Falls. But still my roots go whispering on

  Like rain on a soft day. Whatever lies

  Beneath their cadence I could not disown:

  An Irish stranger’s voice, its tang and tone,

  Recalls a family language I thrill to recognize.

  All the melodious places only seen

  On a schoolboy’s map – Kinsale, Meath, Connemara:

  Writers – Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith, Sheridan:

  Fighters, from Vinegar Hill to Stephen’s Green:

  The Sidhe1, saints, scholars, rakes of Mallow, kings of Tara: –

  Were background music to my ignorant youth.

  Now on a rising wind louder it swells

  From the lonely hills of Laois. What can a birth-

  Place mean, its features comely or uncouth,

  To a long-rootless man? Yet still the place compels.

  We Anglo-Irish and the memory of us

  Are thinning out. Bad landlords some, some good,

  But never of a land rightfully ours,

  We hunted, fished, swore by our ancestors,

  Till we were ripped like parasite growth from native wood.

  And still the land compels me; not ancestral

  Ghosts, nor regret for childhood’s fabled charms,

  But a rare peacefulness, consoling, festal,

  As if the old religion we oppressed all

  Those years folded the stray within a father’s arms.

  The modern age has passed this island by

  And it’s the peace of death her revenants find?

  Harsh Dublin wit, peasant vivacity

  Are here to give your shallow claims the lie.

  Perhaps in such soil only the heart’s long roots will bind –

  Even, transplanted, quiveringly respond

  To their first parent earth. Here God is taken

  For granted, time like a well-tutored hound

  Brought to man’s heel, and ghosting underground

  Something flows to the exile from what has been forsaken.

  In age, body swept on, mind crawls upstream

  Toward the source; not thinking to find there

  Visions or fairy gold – what old men dream

  Is pure restatement of the original theme,

  A sense of rootedness, a source held near and dear.

  1 Sidhe: pronounced She.

  People of the faery mound (found in Irish mythology and W. B. Yeats).

  PART TWO

  Some Beautiful Morning

  ‘One can’t tell whether there won’t be a tide to catch, some beautiful morning.’

  T. H. WHITE

  Yes, for the young these expectations charm

  There are sealed sailing-orders; but they dream

  A cabined breath into the favouring breeze

  Kisses a moveless hull alive, will bear

  It on to some landfall, no matter where –

  The Golden Gate or the Hesperides.

  Anchored, they feel the ground-swell of an ocean

  Stirring their topmasts with the old illusion

  That a horizon can be reached. In pride

  Unregimentable as a cross-sea

  Lightly they float on pure expectancy.

  Some morning now we sail upon the tide.

  Wharves, cranes, the lighthouse in a sleep-haze glide

  Past them, the landmark spires of home recede,

  Glittering waves look like a diadem.

  The winds are willing, and the deep is ours

  Who chose the very time to weigh the bowers.

  How could they know it was the tide caught them?

  * * *

  Older, they wake one dawn and are appalled,

  Rusting in estuary or safely shoaled,

  By the impression made on those deep waters.

  What most sustained has left a residue

  Of cartons, peelings, all such galley spew,

  And great loves shrunk to half-submerged french letters.

  Sometimes they doubt if ever they left this harbour.

  Squalls, calms, the withering wake, frayed ropes and dapper

  Refits have thinned back to a dream, dispersed

  Like a Spice Island’s breath. Who largely tramped

  The oceans, to a rotting hulk they’re cramped –

  Nothing to show for this long toil but waste.

  It will come soon – one more spring tide to lift

  Us off; the lighthouse and the spire shall drift

  Vaguely astern, while distant hammering dies on

  The ear. Fortunate they who now can read

  Their sailing orders as a firm God-speed,

  This voyage reaches you beyond the horizon.

  A Skull Picked Clean

  Blank walls, dead grates, obliterated pages –

  Vacancy filled up the house.

  Nothing remains of the outward shows,

  The inner rages.

  Picture collection, trophies, library �
��

  All that entranced, endorsed, enslaved –

  With gimcrack ornaments have achieved

  Nonentity.

  How can I even know what it held most precious,

  Its meaning lost, its love consumed?

  Silence now where the cool brain hummed:

  Where fire was, ashes.

  How neatly those rough-tongued removal men

  Have done the job. This useless key

  They left us when they had earned their pay –

  A skull, picked clean.

  All Souls’ Night

  A hairy ghost, sent packing or appeased

  By dances, drums, and troughs of gore.

  A suave but fleshless ancestor

  Honoured with fireworks at the birthday feast.

  Safe in a harped and houried paradise:

  Pitchforked to some exemplary hell:

  Trooping through fields of asphodel:

  Returned to nature’s stock in a new guise –

  For the cool corpse, impassive in its shroud,

  Such goings-on we have conceived.

  Born to injustice we believed

  That underground or above the parting cloud

  Pure justice reigns … Seraphs may bear a wreath

  Past the unseeing mourner: he

  In euphemism and ceremony

  Buries awhile the body of his own death.

  * * *

  All Souls’ Night. Soon closing time will clear

  A space for silence, last cars climb towards Kent

  Throbbing like wind-torn snatches of lament.

  Où sont des morts les phrases familières?

  And where the dead? Like sun-warmed stones they keep

  A little while their touch upon the living,

  Remind us of their giving and forgiving,

  Then, their fingers loosening, they sleep.

  All that uneloquent congress of the shade

  Speak through our truisms only, or they’re crass

  And mutinous like children in disgrace:

  In clear or code no signal is relayed.

  Who can know death, till he has dared to shave

  His own corpse, rubbed his nose in his own noisome

  Decay? Oh sweet breath, dancing minds and lissome

  Bodies I’ve met with journeying to the grave!

  It’s they I want beside me – lovers, friends,

  Prospective ghosts; not wind-blown atomies,

  Dismantled bones, dissolving memories.