Book Read Free

Complete Poems

Page 54

by Cecil Day-Lewis


  Let’s leave this town. Mutters of loom 106

  ‘Look it’s a fox!’ – their two hearts spoke 615

  Look not too long upon the golden hours 8

  Lot 96: a brass-rimmed ironwork fender 519

  Love being denied, he turned in his despair 53

  Love was once light as air 396

  Love without pity is a child’s hand reaching 507

  Lumbering haunches, pussyfoot tread, a pride of 544

  Maple and sumach down this autumn ride 267

  May the splendid earth renew 10

  Meanders around the rose-beds, gnarled, clay-brown 7

  Meeting the first time for many years 553

  Midsummer, time of golden views and hazes 691

  More than all else might you 117

  Mourn this young girl. Weep for society 690

  Multitudes of corn 399

  My lady said that she could love no other 19

  Naked, he sags across her cumbered knees 622

  Naturally, we travelled light 548

  Never will I forget it 670

  Never would there be lives enough for all 575

  No one, I thought, shall invade 35

  Nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal 318

  Now to be with you, elate, unshared 135

  Now in the face of destruction 330

  Now the full-throated daffodils 115

  Now I have come to reason 59

  Now limbs awaken stiff 608

  Now the peak of summer’s past, the sky is overcast 346

  Now she is like the white tree-rose 109

  Now when drowning imagination clutches 325

  Now, when there is less time than ever 708

  Now you have gone, I remember only your smile 20

  Oh hush thee, my baby 196

  Old ironmasters and their iron men 720

  On a day when the breath of roses 371

  On the heart’s hidden verge 30

  One night they saw the big house, some time untenanted 315

  One of us in the compartment stares 401

  Only in the forest 18

  Out of the famous canyon 374

  Over the vale, the sunburnt fields 343

  Poet, sink the shining net 5

  Poets, uncage the word! 704

  Pouring an essence of stephanotis 616

  Put out the lights now! 393

  Released from hospital, only half alive still 684

  Rest from loving and be living 110

  Rest now in your places, you calm hills 36

  Roots are for holding on, and holding dear 674

  Sad if no one provoked us any more 681

  Said Heart to Mind at the close of day 369

  Saints and heroes, you dare say 639

  Says the dream to the sleeper, ‘Achieve me’ 704

  Says winding Trent 304

  See now, where Spring has put young leaves 43

  See this small one, tiptoe on 181

  Seen once on a family tree, now lost 672

  She moved to the slow 33

  Sky-wide an estuary of light 120

  Sleep’s doctoring hands withdrawn 699

  Sleepy the earth lies still at Edwinstowe 15

  So. I am dying. Let the douce young medico 561

  So the committee met again, and again 500

  So the great politician 619

  So here we are, we three, bound on a new experience 419

  So like a god I sit here 372

  So take a happy view 276

  So then he walled her up alive 552

  So they were married, and lived 363

  So this is you 356

  Sometime we two have sat together 17

  Somewhere between Crewkerne 403

  Soon you’ll be off to meet your full-grown selves 712

  Speak for the air, your element, you hunters 336

  Speak then of constancy. Thin eyelids weakly thus 123

  Spurred towards horizons 344

  Step down from the bridge 657

  Stoop, stoop, Narcissus 41

  Sun and waterfall conspire 30

  Sunbursts over this execution yard 661

  Sunlit over the shore 637

  Suppose that we, tomorrow or the next day 105

  Suppose, they asked 529

  Swung in this hammock between hills 19

  Take any place – this garden plot will do 366

  Tearaway kitten or staid mother of fifty 733

  Tell them in England, if they ask 289

  That is the house you were born in. Around it 515

  That it should end so! 368

  That was his youthful enemy, fouling the azure 503

  That winter love spoke and we raised no objection, at 346

  The bells that signed a conqueror in 275

  The boundary stone 660

  The crimson berry tree navelled upon this court 635

  The day they had to go 520

  The days are drawing in 518

  The floor of the high wood all smoking with bluebells 521

  The ghosts were all right till this grave-digger came 579

  ‘The hawk-faced man’ – thirty-five years ago 631

  the house being the first problem. Dilapidated 707

  The knife, whose freezing shadow had unsteeled 618

  The lustre bowl of the sky 337

  The man up there with red trunks, middle-aged paunch 603

  The man you know, assured and kind 503

  The melting poles, the tongues that play at lightning 524

  The moon slides through a whey of cloud; the running 380

  ‘The poet’ (well, that’s the way her generation 629

  The right way in would be hard to find 601

  The river this November afternoon 355

  The sea drained off, my poverty’s uncovered 399

  The soil, flinty at best, grew sour. Its yield 604

  The soil was deep and the field well-sited 370

  The spring came round, and still he was not dead 400

  The train window trapped fugitive impressions 711

  The willows by the waterside 44

  The winged bull trundles to the wired perimeter 432

  The woman shuffled about her room 551

  The Word was the beginning 731

  There he stands, my ancestor, back turned 673

  There is a dark room 113

  There was a land of milk and honey 656

  There was no precise point at which to say 501

  There was a time when I 577

  They lie in the sunday street 338

  They stumble in naked grief, as refugees 700

  They who in folly or mere greed 335

  They’re come to town from each dot on the compass, they’re 667

  Thirty years ago lying awake 319

  This afternoon the working sparrows, glum 688

  This autumn park, the sequin glitter of leaves 272

  This curve of ploughland, one clean stroke 221

  This man was strong, and like a seascape parted 194

  This mannikin who just now 540

  This moving house of mine – how could I care 605

  This tree outside my window here 600

  This was not the mind’s undertaking 123

  This young girl, whose secret life 547

  This young provincial, his domestic ties 628

  Those are judged losers and fortune-flouted 184

  Those two walked up a chancel of beech trees 616

  Though bodies are apart 127

  Through the hand’s skill gradually 732

  Through the vague morning, the heart preoccupied 268

  To fish for pearls in Lethe 523

  To make a clean sweep was the easiest part 506

  To this room – it was somewhere at the palace’s 599

  Today bells ring, bands play, flags are unfurled 725

  Too soon, it is all too soon 509

  Tuscany, long endeared to English hearts 73
4

  Twenty weeks near past 112

  Two householders (semi-detached) once found 580

  Two stocky young girls in the foreground stoop 684

  Waning now the sensual eye 111

  We have been here three days, and Rome is really 437

  We have known no sorrow from time’s beginning 11

  We hid it behind the yellow cushion 545

  We thought the angel of death would come 335

  We took to your villa on trust and sight unseen 685

  We whom a full tornado cast up high 110

  We will buy an old house 51

  Were I this forest pool 9

  What did we earth-bound make of it? A tangle 726

  What is the flower that blooms each year 582

  What is this bird? 498

  When at last I am abiding 23

  When for long weeks this mind 46

  When my heart’s Odyssey 34

  When they have lost the little that they looked for 286

  When Willie Yeats was in his prime 579

  Where are the girls of yesteryear? How strange 733

  Whether it was or not his wish 504

  While we slept, these formal gardens 702

  Whither is now that city vanished 13

  Who goes there? 389

  Will it be so again? 340

  Winter oak with boughs akimbo 53

  Yes, for the young these expectations charm 677

  ‘You are nice’ – and she touched his arm with a fleeting 552

  You inhabit the mountains, half-way to heaven 187

  You with the panache tail 637

  You see those trees on the hillside over the lake? 489

  Your eyes are not open. You are alone 121

  Your fiftieth birthday. What shall we give you? 390

  Your voyaging past 50

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My warmest thanks go to Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson for making this book possible, with his trust in me sight unseen, and to these friends: Freda Berkeley, ‘the midwife’; Elizabeth Dove, who types the indecipherable with enthusiasm and grace; lona Opie, Quentin Stevenson and Adolf Wood, who have given me their invaluable help.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448104062

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Chatto & Windus 2003

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © 1992 in this edition The Estate of C. Day Lewis

  Copyright © 1992 in the introduction Jill Balcon

  C. Day Lewis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 1992 by

  Sinclair-Stevenson Limited

  Reissued in 2003 by

  Chatto & Windus

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Random House (Pty) Limited

  Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1 85619 144 3

 

 

 


‹ Prev