Complete Poems

by Cecil Day-Lewis

  Momently creatures out of some mythical order

  Of being they seemed, to justify and endorse

  A distrait mood … I recalled you at thirteen

  Matched against Irish farmers in a race

  On Carrownisky – under the cap your dark mane

  Streaming, the red windcheater a far-off blaze;

  But most how, before the race began, you rode

  Slowly round the circuit of sand to calm

  The mare and accustom her to a lawless crowd.

  Seeing that, I knew you should come to no harm.

  Our nerves too can taste of our children’s pure

  Confidence and grow calm. My daughter rides back

  To me down that railside field – elemental, secure

  As an image that time may bury but not unmake.

  1 A strand on the coast of Co. Mayo where the race was held – also the name of a river.

  Children Leaving Home1

  Soon you’ll be off to meet your full-grown selves,

  Freed from my guardianship to sweat out your own life-sentence.

  The house will be emptied of you,

  For ever tie in time dissolves;

  And you, once close to us like a whisper of blood, in due

  Season return, if return you will, as polite acquaintance.

  What will you then remember? The lime that crowded

  Your bedroom windows, shading the square rose-bed beneath –

  All such everyday sights,

  Hours by boredom or wrath enclouded,

  Or those which burst like a rocket with red-letter delights

  In a holiday sky – picnics, the fair on Blackheath?

  I heard you last summer, crossing Ireland by road,

  Ask the mother to re-tell episodes out of your past.

  You gave them the rapt attention

  A ballad-maker’s audience owed

  To fact caught up in fable. Through memory’s dimension

  The unlikeliest scene may be immortalised.

  Forgive my coldnesses, now past recall,

  Angers, injustice, moods contrary, mean or blind;

  And best, my dears, forgive

  Yourselves, when I am gone, for all

  Love-signals you ignored and for the fugitive

  Openings you never took into my mind.

  At that hour what shall I have to bequeath?

  A sick world we could not change, a sack of genes

  I did not choose, some verse

  Long out of fashion, a laurel wreath

  Wilted … So prematurely our old age inters

  Puny triumphs with poignant might-have-beens.

  Soon you’ll be leaving home, alone to face

  Love’s treacheries and transports. May these early years

  Have shaped you to be whole,

  To live unshielded from the rays

  Which probe, enlighten and mature the human soul.

  Go forth and make the best of it, my dears.

  1 First published posthumously in support of a magazine called Tagus.

  At Lemmons1

  FOR JANE, KINGSLEY, COLIN, SARGY WITH MUCH LOVE

  Above my table three magnolia flowers

  Utter their silent requiems.

  Through the window I see your elms

  In labour with the racking storm

  Giving it shape in April’s shifty airs.

  Up there sky boils from a brew of cloud

  To blue gleam, sunblast, then darkens again.

  No respite is allowed

  The watching eye, the natural agony.

  Below is the calm a loved house breeds

  Where four have come together to dwell

  – Two write, one paints, the fourth invents –

  Each pursuing a natural bent

  But less through nature’s formative travail

  Than each in his own humour finding the self he needs.

  Round me all is amenity, a bloom of

  Magnolia uttering its requiems,

  A climate of acceptance. Very well

  I accept my weakness with my friends’

  Good natures sweetening every day my sick room.

  1 This was written on his deathbed. Lemmons was the house at Hadley Common, where CDL died. It was owned then by Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis. EJH’s brother, Colin Howard, the inventor, and the painter, Sargy Mann, also lived there.

  VERS D’OCCASION

  Then and Now1

  Do you remember those mornings after the blitzes

  When the living picked themselves up and went on living –

  Living, not on the past, but with an exhilaration

  Of purpose, a new neighbourliness of danger?

  Such days are here again. Not the bansheeing

  Of sirens and the beat of terrible wings

  Approaching under a glassy moon. Your enemies

  Are nearer home yet, nibbling at Britain’s nerve.

  Be as you were then, tough and gentle islanders –

  Steel in the fibre, charity in the veins –

  When few stood on their dignity or lines of demarcation,

  And few sat back in the padded cells of profit.

  Boiler-room, board-room, backroom boys, we all

  Joined hearts to make a life-line through the storm.

  No haggling about overtime when the heavy-rescue squads

  Dug for dear life under the smouldering ruins.

  The young cannot remember this. But they

  Are graced with that old selflessness. They see

  What’s needed; they strip off dismay and dickering,

  Eager to rescue our dear life’s buried promise.

  To work then, islanders, as men and women

  Members one of another, looking beyond

  Mean rules and rivalries towards the dream you could

  Make real, of glory, common wealth, and home.

  1 The first work of C. Day Lewis since his appointment as Poet Laureate was commissioned by the Daily Mail as part of the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign and appeared in that paper on January 5th, 1968. The campaign, supported by the Daily Mail and the Evening News, began with five typists at a heating and ventilation firm offering to work an extra half day without pay at the end of 1967. Subsequently some firms pegged prices for six months and some directors took a cut in their salaries.

  Hail, Teesside!1

  Old ironmasters and their iron men

  With northern fire, grit, enterprise began it

  A hundred years ago. Later, we scan it –

  Desolate homesteads welded into one,

  Hamlets grown up to towns, deep anchorage

  Gouged out of sand, wastes blossoming with the fierce

  White rose of foundries. So the pioneers

  Printed their work on nature’s open page.

  Their steel made bridges from Sydney to Menai;

  Their ships networked the sea. Gain was in view

  But inch by inch out of the gain there grew

  A greater thing – sense of community.

  Bridges are for drawing men together

  By closing gaps. Could those rough ghosts return,

  They’d find a world of difference, but discern

  That here is the same breed of men and weather.

  You are bridge-builders still. Only, today

  You draw six towns into a visioned O,

  Spanning from town to town the ebb and flow

  Of destiny. A dream is realised. May

  The northern kindliness and northern pride

  See, as your forebears would, the future in it.

  Here a new span – our lives shall underpin it

  And earn fresh honours for our own Teesside.

  1 The work was specially commissioned by the Evening Gazette, Middlesbrough, to celebrate the coming into being of the new County Borough of Teesside.

  Old Vic, 1818–19681

  Curtain up on this dear, honoured scene!

/>   A South-bank Cinderella wears

  The crown tonight of all our country’s theatres.

  The stage where Kean

  Enthralled and Baylis wove dazzling tradition

  On a shoestring, makes good the vision

  Of a hundred and fifty years.

  Old Vic, your roof held generations under

  A magic spell. And we have known

  So many incandescent nights flash past and flown

  Away – no wonder,

  Where the young dreamed their dreams and learned their trade,

  Stars come home to celebrate

  Their nursery’s renown.

  Here everyman once bought for a small price

  Audience with Shakespeare, and still gleans

  Self-knowledge from the hero’s fall, the heroine’s

  Love-sacrifice.

  This stage is all the world; in all our hearts

  Rosalind smiles, I ago hates,

  Lear howls, Malvolio preens.

  Old cockney Vic, with what strange art you bring

  Us strollers into one family

  That learns through discipline, patience, tears and gaiety

  ‘The play’s the thing’.

  You show world theatre, old and new, today –

  Man’s heights and depths, and what he may

  Yet crave, yet come to be.

  1 This was on a special four-page programme for the National Theatre production of “As You Like It” at the Old Vic, in the presence of Princess Marina for the 150th Old Vic anniversary performance on the 14th May, 1968.

  Feed My Little Ones1

  How many children starving, did you say?

  A million? Five million? It is sad,

  Tragic really. But after all, they are

  Thousands of miles away, remote as the Black Death

  Or the dying stars. Oh, I do sympathise:

  But I could never count much beyond ten –

  Tragedy multiplied by millions fades

  Into a faceless limbo of statistics

  And leaves imagination cold on the outside.

  Charity, I say, must begin at home.

  Let charity begin at home.

  Think of one child, your own or the next-door neighbour’s.

  Tetter the pretty skin with sores, let the bones show through it

  Like ribs of a stranded wreck. This is your child –

  This derelict with the animal breath of famine

  Whimpering through his frame. He understands nothing,

  Nothing he knows but a mother long sucked dry

  Of milk and tears, a father drained of hope.

  You are that father, you are that mother.

  Your child. Imagine. It is so hard to imagine?

  Thousands of miles away, yet still they are next-door neighbours

  Within the giant stride, the magic ring of compassion.

  Let one child plead for all, as the Christ-child spoke for all

  Innocents bundled away into a bloodless limbo.

  This need not be so. Our target is mankind’s conscience:

  Not by the wringing of hands shall our concern be measured

  But in shelter, seed and ploughshares, that hope may be reborn.

  Put one stranger’s child to the breast of your warm compassion.

  Find its father a share in earth, his only birthright.

  Sow a few handfuls of seed and give that child its future.

  1 Written for Oxfam by the Poet Laureate to commemorate that organisation’s 25th birthday. Spoken by Dame Sybil Thorndike at the Royal Festival Hall.

  In a Library1

  A world of speechless time until man came,

  So many years before he found his tongue,

  Clumsily groping for the words to name

  All he touched, saw, desired and died among.

  Language grew slowly as a coral reef

  From mind’s unfathomable depths. Man learned

  To articulate his glory and his grief

  Communicate the hope with which he burned.

  He sent out words exploring, to survey

  Nature’s enigmas and the mysteries

  Of his own being. Myriads had their day

  Before words midwifed the first masterpiece.

  Song, stylus, print – through them at this far end

  Of time we inherit all the fabulous store

  Those makers left to praise and comprehend

  Our little lives and earth’s exhaustless lore.

  Here, an array of magic essences –

  Phial on phial, shelf on shelf –

  Stand the elixirs that each subtle alchemist

  Distilled from nature and himself.

  The epic grandeur and the lyric grace

  The traveller’s eye, the lover’s ear,

  Passion and wisdom breaking through the overcast

  To hearten us – they are all here.

  Myths, morals, tragic action, comic turn –

  Makers show humankind its face

  Reveal the naked man under the jewelled robe,

  The rare beneath the commonplace.

  Their works, greater and less, open our eyes

  And hearts to human brotherhood.

  A ruling passion gave them birth, and in the love

  Of them is every man renewed.

  1 Written to herald ‘National Library Week’. It appeared on Monday, March 10th, 1969 in the Daily Mirror.

  For the Investiture of the Prince of Wales1

  Today bells ring, bands play, flags are unfurled,

  Anxieties and feuds lie buried

  Under a ceremonial joy. You, sir, inherit

  A weight of history in a changing world,

  Its treasured wisdom and its true

  Aspirings the best birthday gift for you.

  Coming of age, you come into a land

  Of mountain, pasture, cwm, pithead,

  Steelworks. A proud and fiery people, thoroughbred

  For singing, eloquence, rugby football, stand

  Beneath Caernarvon’s battlements

  To greet and take the measure of their prince.

  But can they measure his hard task – to be

  Both man and symbol? With the man’s

  Selfhood the symbol grows in clearer light, or wanes.

  Your mother’s grace, your father’s gallantry

  Go with you now to nerve and cheer you

  Upon the crowded, lonely way before you.

  May your integrity silence each tongue

  That sneers or flatters. May this hour

  Reach through its pageantry to the deep reservoir

  Whence Britain’s heart draws all that is fresh and young.

  Over the tuneful land prevails

  One song, one prayer – God bless the Prince of Wales.

  1 This appeared in the Guardian on July 1st, 1969, the day of Prince Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales by the Queen.

  Battle of Britain1

  What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle

  Of vapour trails, a vertiginously high

  Swarming of midges, at most a fiery angel

  Hurled out of heaven, was all we could descry.

  How could we know the agony and pride

  That scrawled those fading signatures up there,

  And the cool expertise of them who died

  Or lived through that delirium of the air?

  Grounded on history now, we re-enact

  Such lives, such deaths. Time, laughing out of court

  The newspaper heroics and the faked

  Statistics, leaves us only to record

  What was, what might have been: fighter and bomber,

  The tilting sky, tense moves and counterings;

  Those who outlived that legendary summer;

  Those who went down, its sunlight on their wings.

  And you, unborn then, what will you make of it –

  This shadow-play of battles long ago?

&nb
sp; Be sure of this: they pushed to the uttermost limit

  Their luck, skill, nerve. And they were young like you.

  1 The film Battle of Britain received its premiere on September 16th, 1969. The poem appeared in the centre pages of the programme.

  Keep Faith with Nature1

  Animal, fish, fowl

  Share with man the lease

  And limits of creation.

  Heron by the pool,

  Tiger through the tree

  Lend us images

  Of action and contemplation.

  Soil that gives man bread,

  Flowers that feed his eye

  For ages have kept him whole.

  Virgin lands visited,

  Forest and butterfly,

  Berry, well, wave supply

  The hunger of body and soul.

  Now more than ever we need

  True science, lest mankind

  Lording it over nature’s

  Territories, by greed

  Or thoughtlessness made blind,

  To doom shall have consigned

  Itself and all earth’s creatures.

  1 Published by Midnag, Ashington, for the environment.

  Beethoven, 1770–19701

  Hero musician, two hundred years

  Have passed since you were born,

  But still with unimpoverished tone

  And themes incomparable you bless our ears.

  The genius that ran

  Like blood through one full-hearted man

  Floods over generations and frontiers.

  The royal line of Haydn and Mozart

  Forwarding he enriched.

  His span of inspiration bridged

  Between the classic and romantic art.

  Followed new aims, new modes,

  But his were the original moulds

  And Promethean fire from which they start.

  To defy Fate he came and to devour

  Life whole – jocose or moody,

  Versed in suffering, bound in duty

  To the creative daemon’s intimate power

  Begetting on his mind

  Themes luminous but scarce-defined.

  What long pains went to each perfected score!