Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  When the gate into the rose garden

  Opening at last permitted him to enter

  Where wise man becomes child, child plays at king.

  A presence, playful yet austere,

  Courteously stooping, slips into my mind

  Like a most elegant allusion clinching

  An argument. Eyes attentive, lined

  Forehead – ‘Thus and thus runs,’ he makes it clear,

  ‘The poet’s rule. No slackening, no infringing

  ‘Must compromise it.’… Now, supplying

  Our loss with words of comfort, his kind ghost

  Says all that need be said about committedness:

  Here in East Coker they have crossed

  My heart again – For us there is only the trying

  To learn to use words. The rest is not our business.

  1970

  POSTHUMOUS POEMS

  This collection was first published by

  John Rundle of The Whittington Press, 1979.

  TO

  PETER COCHRANE

  The Park, Guy’s Hospital: Early Morning1

  Sleep’s doctoring hands withdrawn,

  The patient wakes early:

  His light-switch can still thrust away

  Insinuating dawn.

  He sees through his window-square

  Fuzzed branches, buildings, grass,

  Archway and path chiefly because

  He knows that they are there.

  But what at first he has seen

  As candles searching a darkened

  Crypt becomes a hurry of white-capped

  Girls to their routine

  Of healing. For every nurse –

  Though never so devoted –

  Death, birth, all the body’s dramas

  Must be a matter of course.

  Only the patient, weak

  As a leaf, imagines their voices

  A dawn chorus and his own

  Experience unique.

  1 First published in the Guy’s Hospital House Magazine in 1970. Drafted in an exercise book bought from the hospital trolley-shop.

  The Expulsion: Masaccio1

  They stumble in naked grief, as refugees

  From a flood or pogrom, dispossessed of all

  But a spray of leaf like barbed wire round the loins.

  For sight, she has mere sockets gouged and charred

  By nightmare, and her mouth is a bottomless pit

  Of desolation. Her lord, accomplice, dupe,

  Ashamed of his failure, as if he cannot face it

  Covers his eyes.

  We know they left behind

  A place where fruits and animals were kind

  And time no enemy. But did they know their loss

  As more than a child’s when its habitual toys

  Are confiscated for some innocent fault,

  Or take the accusing cosmic voice that called

  To be the same as their dear old garden god’s?

  The sword that pickets paradise also goads

  Towards self-knowledge. More they shall come to wish

  Than brutal comfort of committed flesh.

  Masaccio paints us both

  A childish tragedy – hunched back, bawling mouth,

  And the hour when the animal knew that it must die

  And with that stroke put on humanity.

  1 Masaccio’s Frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, seen for the first time on a convalescent holiday 1970. The poem was published in a Festschrift for W. H. Auden’s 65th birthday in 1972 in a limited edition of 500.

  My Méséglise Way

  Always, along that path hawthorn and lilac

  Hedged a demesne

  A bare arm’s-length away, yet inaccessible

  And coaxing in vain

  Like the horizon. It was enough to part

  The blossoms – eye could embrace

  The glades, parterres, crystal-paned gazebos

  Of a superior race.

  Fountains play. A small girl walks where fidgety

  Branches sieve

  The sunlight: her shyness and delicate hauteur show me

  Original Eve.

  One day there was a hole in the hedge. I crawl

  Through it. The prospect blurs,

  Then clears again, as unperturbed I accept an

  Epiphany in reverse –

  A common and garden lawn, a hedge of privet

  Not scented bloom:

  The privileged scene, the sense of grandeur flown like

  A drug-born dream.

  Young ones in the dowdy garden happily

  Tumble and chase. Cast

  Is my skin of shrinking solitude when a girl

  Cries ‘So you’ve joined us at last!’

  Snowfall on a College Garden

  While we slept, these formal gardens

  Worked into their disguise. The Warden’s

  Judas and tulip trees awake

  In ermine. Here and there a flake

  Of white falls from the painted scene,

  Or a dark scowl of evergreen

  Glares through the shroud, or a leaf dumps

  Its load and the soft burden slumps

  Earthward like a fainting girl.

  No movement else. The blizzard’s whirl

  Froze to this cataleptic trance

  Where nature sleeps and sleep commands

  A transformation. See this bush

  Furred and fluffed out like a thrush

  Against the cold: snow which could snap

  A robust veteran branch, piled up

  On the razor edge of a weak spray,

  Plumping it out in mimicry

  Of white buddleia. Like the Elect

  Ghosts of summer resurrect

  In snowy robes. Only the twangling

  Noise of unseen sparrows wrangling

  Tells me that my window-view

  Holds the garden I once knew.

  Three Little Pictures

  Municipal Park

  In beds of municipal parks the flowers

  Stand to attention, dressed by the right,

  Each bed a uniform colour –

  Even the seeds were drilled.

  How regimental, we think, how bright and dull!

  By such a bed he stands, recalling

  A wild lost darling.

  Boat from Ireland

  Children chase round and round and round.

  For them the past is past, the deck

  Another windy playground.

  Man, though you tear up your used vacances,

  Fling the white scraps to the wind,

  Seagulls follow above your wake –

  A mobile shifting, sliding, dancing.

  Roger

  So Roger is gone. We had not met

  Lately. But the news like a flashbulb whipped

  Out of the darkness the voice, the features,

  The touch of Lear. I notice that

  Picking off our acquaintance one by one,

  One by one Time prises our fingers loose

  From the edge that overhangs oblivion.

  Reflections 1

  Horse at a pool’s edge drinking its own reflection.

  Aircraft sledging its shadow across the desert miles.

  Young girl begging a mirror to tell her fortune.

  Lost man’s cooee echoed from aquiline mountain walls.

  Here are duelling-grounds of reality and illusion –

  Endless shimmer of foils and counterfoils.

  Reflections 2

  Says the dream to the sleeper, ‘Achieve me’.

  Says the wife to the mirror, ‘Deceive me’.

  Says the heart to the mind, ‘Believe me’.

  Said the shadow to the sun, ‘Don’t leave me’.

  Poets, uncage the Word!

  Poets, uncage the word!

  It flies beyond all logic, all horizons,

  Beyond the rage of men, the reach of time

  Car
olling over tombs and seasons.

  Freedom’s a migrant bird,

  Now here, now there is heard its homing call:

  You makers, tune our souls till it become

  Challenge and need and right for all.

  Poets gave men the nerve

  To ride the rapids of the treacherous ages,

  Revealing virgin landfalls yet to come

  After the blind and battering stages.

  Freedom’s our chosen course

  Through killing rocks, wild eddies. Poet seer

  Summon a rainbow from the cataract’s wrath,

  Image the faith by which we steer.

  A Christmas Way

  How to retrace the bygone track

  Over two thousand years

  And a desert of shifting landmarks, back

  To its divine or mythical source –

  It seems we have lost the knack.

  Grassed-over is now the pilgrim way

  Which men of old could plod

  To find a first-born in the hay

  And recognise him as the Son of God

  Any Christmas Day.

  Into more tinselled novelties

  The fabulous star has dwindled,

  Powerless against man’s weaponries

  And devilish pride were the arms which dandled

  That small prince of peace.

  One way’s still open. Return to the child

  You were on Christmas Eve –

  His expectation of marvels piled

  Against tomorrow, his pure belief

  In a responsive world.

  Plus Ultra1

  FOR WALTER ALLEN

  Let us not call it progress: movement certainly

  And under direction, though what directions we move in

  Is anyone’s guess. … It is as if a man

  Leapt from one ship to another, and instantly looks round

  And the ship he leapt from has dropped below the horizon

  Or sunk. But not without trace.

  The world we were young in has

  Disintegrated; yet scraps of it bob in our wake like flotsam.

  Not the great wars, discoveries, revolutions –

  They have done their worst, or best, and are accomplished,

  As the young I has become an historic figure already

  Subject to history’s over- and under-simplifications.

  No, it’s the marginal crises, the magical trivia

  Which, against all reason, haunt me.

  Finding white heather on a Mayo hillside,

  A boy lamenting his toy boat lost on its first voyage,

  A girl’s first glance – no hint of the bliss and bane that would follow –

  In such small relics my dead world lives on.

  Time, that has proved we can survive, puts back

  The sirens on their rock, the Cyclops in his cave:

  We see their point now we no longer fear them.

  Those desperate straits are never the world’s end:

  There is always more beyond, marvels beyond to draw us,

  Movement certainly: perhaps we may call it progress.

  1 First appeared in On the Novel edited by B. S. Benedikz – a present for Walter Allen’s 60th birthday.

  Recurring Dream

  … the house being the first problem. Dilapidated,

  Or is it only half built? He cannot rightly

  See or remember. No question it looks unsightly –

  All lath and plaster, pipes, treacherous floors

  And baffle walls.

  Before him an assault course

  That felt familiar. He infiltrated

  The house, wriggling through pipes, circumventing

  Holes in the floor, scaling walls; but always

  The course gained height. Such was his expertise

  He could have done it on his head or blindfold

  (Perhaps he did). At least he never failed

  To make, or to forget, the happy ending.

  For, as he reached it, that bare top storey

  Is the highest floor of a luxury hotel

  And problem number two. No lift, no stair-well

  Visible, and he knows he must get down

  To ground level.

  He’d sensed, during his lone

  Climb, others doing the course. Quite solitary

  The new ordeal – no chambermaid, waiter, guest

  To show him the way out. Frantic he raced

  From end to end of the floor. A deep staircase

  Appeared at last, pointing the right direction,

  Down which he flew; but has no recollection

  Where or indeed whether one egressed.

  Going My Way?

  1

  Now, when there is less time than ever,

  Every day less time,

  I do have the greatest need for patience.

  Not to be rushed by thawing, cracking ice

  Into a hasty figure.

  Not to require daffodils before spring

  But accept each spring as another golden handshake.

  Not to be misled by fatuous fires

  Into a sanctuary clemmed and de-consecrated.

  Never irked that this line has no fancy

  Departure lounge for V.I.P.s.

  Least of all to lose faith in the experience,

  The mortal experiment

  To which at birth I was committed.

  2

  Those three provincials, the dear sisters whom

  Abrupt catastrophe and slow dry-rot,

  Gutting their hearts of youth, condemn to what

  Cheerless routines and seasons yet may come –

  Would you not say that they were better dead

  Than haunted by their sweet illusion’s ghost,

  Love ground down to irritable dust,

  The ideal city still unvisited?

  Not so their curtain speech: ‘We must go on,

  And we must work. Our sufferings will grow.

  Peace and joy for coming generations.’

  Was it illusion’s desperate last throw?

  At least those heroines showed that nothing can

  Become the mortal heart like trust and patience.

  Hellene: Philhellene1

  IN MEMORY OF GEORGE SEFERIS AND C. M. BOWRA

  Great poet, friend of my later days, you first

  I would honour. Driven from shore to shore

  Like Odysseus, everywhere you had nursed

  The quivering spark of freedom, your heart’s core

  Loaded and lit by your country’s tragedies,

  Her gods and heroes. These inhabited

  Your poetry with a timeless, native ease

  But they moved there among the living dead

  Of recent times, so myth and history

  Became one medium, deeply interfused.

  I recall, in London or in Rome, you welcoming me –

  Warm growl, the Greek ‘my dear’ – a spirit used

  To catching voices from rock, tree, waves, ports,

  And so always a shade preoccupied.

  Hearing you were dead, I remembered your Argonauts,

  How ‘one after another the comrades died

  With downcast eyes’, having become reflections

  And articles of the voyage: as you, whose quest is

  One now with theirs. My lasting recollections –

  Your grace before necessity, your passion for justice.

  And you no less, dear tutor of my young days,

  Lover of Greece and poetry, I mourn.

  To me you seem then the exorbitant blaze

  Of Aegean sun dispelling youth’s forlorn

  Blurred images; the lucid air; the salt

  Of tonic sea on your lips. And you were one

  Whom new poetic languages enthralled

  (After I’d stumbled through a Greek unseen,

  You’d take The Tower or The Waste Land from a shelf

  And read me into stra
nge live mysteries.)

  You taught me most by always being yourself

  Those fifty years ago. For ever Greece

  Remained your second country, even though

  You were self-exiled latterly, touched by the same

  Indignation which made that other know

  Exile was not for him. Yearly your fame

  Grew as administrator, scholar, wit:

  But my best memory, the young man whose brilliance

  Lit up my sombre skies and kept them lit,

  Drawing dead poets into the ageless dance.

  I miss these men of genius and good sense,

  In a mad world lords of their just enclave,

  My future emptier for the one’s absence,

  So much of my youth laid in the other’s grave.

  Hellene and Philhellene, both gone this year,

  They leave a radiance on the heart, a taste

  Of salt and honey on the tongue, a dear

  Still-warm encampment in the darkening waste.

  1 First published in Cornhill (winter 1971–1972). Maurice Bowra had been CDL’s tutor when he read Classics at Wadham College. Oxford. We had last been reunited with our friend George Seferis – the great Greek poet and Nobel Prizewinner – in Rome in 1968, before the Colonels confiscated his passport. On principle. Maurice would not now travel to Greece. It was a sacrifice. On a fiercely hot day, Cecil, himself now mortally ill, had gone from Greenwich to Oxford to follow Maurice’s coffin to the graveside.

  Remembering Carrownisky1

  The train window trapped fugitive impressions

  As we passed, grasped for a moment then sucked away –

  Woods, hills, white farms changing shape and position,

  A river which wandered, as if not sure of the way,

  Into and off the pane. A landscape less

  Well-groomed than, say, a Florentine painter’s one,

  But its cross-rhythmed shagginess soothed me through the glass

  As it ambled past out there in the setting sun.

  Then, one Welsh mead turned up with a girl rider –

  Light hair, red jersey – cantering her horse.