Complete Poems Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Beechen Vigil 1925

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Net

  Beechen Vigil

  A Creation

  Rose-Pruner

  In a Wood

  Songs of Sirens

  Words

  A Rune for Anthony John

  Fairy to Children

  Song of Fairies

  Tapestries

  Lost

  Lines from the French

  No Meaner Quest

  Late Summer

  Dream-Maker

  Once in Arcady

  A Forest Piece

  Lines from Catullus

  Sanctuary

  An April Mood

  Eve

  He Thanks Earth for his Beloved

  The Fisher

  Country Comets 1928

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Prelude

  Autumn of the Mood

  Sun and Waterfall

  Cyprian! Cyprian!

  Naked Woman with Kotyle

  Haven in Ithaca

  Magicians in Dorset

  From the Waters of Loch Linnhe

  The Shadow-Pimp

  It is the True Star

  Between Hush and Hush

  A Second Narcissus

  Retrospect: From a Street in Chelsea

  The only Pretty Ring-Time

  Under the Willow

  Photograph of a Bacchante

  At Greenlanes

  My Love came to Me

  Wreck near Ballinacarig

  Arcadian

  To his Mistress

  The Perverse

  Apologue

  Transitional Poem 1929

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Notes

  From Feathers to Iron 1931

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Epilogue

  The Magnetic Mountain 1933

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  A Time to Dance 1935

  Learning to Talk

  Moving In

  The Conflict

  Losers

  In Me Two Worlds

  A Warning to those who Live on Mountains

  Johnny Head-in-Air

  The Ecstatic

  Poem for an Anniversary

  Sonnet

  Two Songs

  A Carol

  A Time to Dance

  Epilogue

  Noah and the Waters 1936

  Dedication

  Author’s Foreword

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Overtures to Death 1938

  Dedication

  Maple and Sumach

  February 1936

  Bombers

  A Parting Shot

  Newsreel

  Regency Houses

  Landscapes

  Sex-Crime

  The Bells that Signed

  A Happy View

  Overtures to Death

  When they have lost

  In the Heart of Contemplation

  Sonnet for a Political Worker

  Questions

  The Volunteer

  The Nabara

  Spring Song

  Night Piece

  The Three Cloud-Maidens

  Behold the Swan

  Song

  The Escapist

  Passage from Childhood

  Self-Criticism and Answer

  Word Over all 1943

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  The Lighted House

  The Album

  The Hunter’s Game

  Departure in the Dark

  Cornet Solo

  O Dreams, O Destinations

  PART TWO

  Word Over All

  The Image

  The Poet

  It Would be Strange

  The Assertion

  Watching Post

  The Stand-To

  Where are the War Poets?

  Angel

  Airmen Broadcast

  Lidice

  Ode to Fear

  The Dead

  Reconciliation

  Will it be so again?

  PART THREE

  The Innocent

  One and One

  Windy Day in August

  After the Storm

  Fame

  Jig

  Hornpipe

  The Fault

  The Rebuke

  Poems 1943–1947 1948

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Double Vision

  Juvenilia

  Sketches for a Self-Portrait

  Marriage of Two

  Married Dialogue

  The Woman Alone

  Ending

  Heart and Mind

  A Failure

  The Unwanted

  The Sitting

  Statuette: Late Minoan

  The Revenant

  The House-Warming

  Meeting

  The Heartsease

  Is it far to go?

  New Year’s Eve

  Emily Brontë

  Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy

  Who Goes There?

  Lines for Edmund Blunden on his Fiftieth Birthday

  Buzzards over Castle Hill

  A Hard Frost

  The Christmas Tree

  The Chrysanthemum Show

  Two Songs

  Minor Tragedy

  On the Sea Wall

  Ewig

  All Gone

  The Neurotic

  The Two Travellers

  Seen From the Train

  Outside and In

  The Misfit

  In the Shelter

  Two Translations

  An Italian Visit 1953

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Dialogue at the Airport

  PART TWO

  Flight to Italy

  PART THREE

  A Letter from Rome

  PART FOUR

  Bus to Florence

  PART FIVE

  Florence: Works of Art

  Singing Children: Luca Della Robbia

  Judith and Holofernes: Donatello

  Annunciation: Leonardo

  Perseus Rescuing Andromeda: Piero di Cosimo

  Boy with Dolphin Verrochio

  PART SIX

  Elegy Before Death: At Settignano

  PART SEVEN

  The Homeward Prospect

  Pegasus 1957

  Dedication

  Part One

  Pegasus

  Psyche

  Baucis and Philemon

  Ariadne on Naxos

  Part Two

  A Riddle

  Seasonable Thoughts for Intellectuals

  The Committee

  The Wrong Road

  The Pest

  Almost Human

  George Meredith, 1861

  The Mirror

  Love and Pity

  The Tourists

  In Memory of Dylan Thomas

  Elegiac Sonnet

  Final Instructions

  Part Three

  The House Where I was Born

  Father to Sons

  Son and Father

  Christmas Eve

  ‘The Years O’

  Lot 96

  Time to Go

  On a Dor
set Upland

  Dedham Vale, Easter 1954

  The Great Magicians

  Moods of Love

  Last Words

  The Gate 1962

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Bread and Wine

  The Gate

  View from an Upper Window

  The Newborn

  Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park

  Circus Lion

  Getting Warm – Getting Cold

  Walking Away

  This Young Girl

  Travelling Light

  Things

  An Episode

  A Loss

  A Meeting

  An Upland Field

  The Disabused

  Not Proven

  Wind’s Eye

  In Loving Memory

  Edward Elgar

  Ideal Home

  Fisherman and/or Fish

  The Antique Heroes

  The Graves of Academe

  ‘Said the Old Codger’

  The Unexploded Bomb

  The Christmas Rose

  Requiem for the Living

  The Room 1965

  Dedication

  Fables and Confessions:

  The Room

  On not Saying Everything

  The Way In

  The Passion for Diving

  Derelict

  Saint Anthony’s Shirt

  Days before a Journey

  Fishguard to Rosslare

  The Hieroglyph

  Seven Steps in Love

  The Fox

  The Romantics

  Stephanotis

  The Dam

  An Operation

  Others:

  Who Goes Home?

  Pietà

  Elegy for a Woman Unknown

  Young Chekhov

  The Widow Interviewed

  For Rex Warner on his Sixtieth Birthday

  My Mother’s Sister

  Madrigal for Lowell House

  This Loafer

  Grey Squirrel: Greenwich Park

  Terns

  Apollonian Figure

  A Relativist

  Moral

  The Voyage

  The Whispering Roots 1970

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  The House Where I was Born

  Ballintubbert House, Co. Laois

  Fishguard to Rosslare

  Golden Age, Monart, Co. Wexford

  Avoca, Co. Wicklow

  Near Ballyconneely, Co. Galway

  Land

  Kilmainham Jail: Easter Sunday, 1966

  Remembering Con Markievicz

  Lament for Michael Collins

  Ass in Retirement

  Beauty Show, Clifden, Co. Galway

  Harebells over Mannin Bay

  At Old Head, Co. Mayo

  Sailing from Cleggan

  Ballintubber Abbey, Co. Mayo

  An Ancestor

  Goldsmith outside Trinity

  The Whispering Roots

  Part Two

  Some Beautiful Morning

  A Skull Picked Clean

  All Souls’ Night

  Hero and Saint

  Sunday Afternoon

  A Privileged Moment

  A Picture by Renoir

  A Tuscan Villa

  Merry-go-Round

  Philosophy Lectures

  After an Encaenia

  Tenure

  Epitaph for a Drug-Addict

  A Marriage Song

  At East Coker

  Posthumous Poems 1979

  Dedication

  The Park, Guy’s Hospital: Early Morning

  The Expulsion: Masaccio

  My Méséglise Way

  Snowfall on a College Garden

  Three Little Pictures

  Reflections 1

  Reflections 2

  Poets, Uncage the Word!

  A Christmas Way

  Plus Ultra

  Recurring Dream

  Going my Way?

  Hellene: Philhellene

  Remembering Carrownisky

  Children Leaving Home

  At Lemmons

  Vers d’Occasion

  Then and Now

  Hail, Teesside!

  Old Vic, 1818–1968

  Feed my Little Ones

  In a Library

  For the Investiture of the Prince of Wales

  Battle of Britain

  Keep Faith with Nature

  Beethoven, 1770–1970

  St. Paul’s – Old and New

  Hymn for Shakespeare’s Birthday

  Another Day

  A Short Dirge for St. Trinian’s

  Cat

  Tuscany

  Keats, 1821–1971

  Index of First Lines

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young poets who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment of those days. Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and, despite an active career which embraced schoolmastering, journalism, publishing, academic lecturing and the writing of detective stories, his devotion to poetry never wavered. Always pro-life, he continued to write to the end of his days, so that when he died in 1972, having held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1951 and 1956 and having been appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he left behind a very large and varied body of work.

  Here, for the first time, are all the poems Day Lewis wrote, including the vers d'occasion which have never previously appeared in book form and a number of works which have only been published in a limited edition before now.

  About the Author

  C. Day Lewis was born in Ireland (and always cherished his Irish background) in 1904, and was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. On leaving Oxford in 1927 he taught at various schools in England and Scotland until 1935, when he abandoned schoolmastering for good. By then he had published half a dozen volumes of verse, of which From Feathers to Iron and The Magnetic Mountain formed the basis of his reputation as one of the significant poets of the thirties. In 1946 he was invited to give the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1951-6 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Two years later he became Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1964-5 and held the Compton Lectureship in Poetry at Hull University. During all this time he continued steadily to write poetry. In 1968 he was appointed Poet Laureate, but tragically died of cancer only four years later.

  DEDICATION

  This collection is dedicated with love to our children, Tamasin and Daniel Day Lewis, whose achievements would have made their father proud if he had lived to see them.

  Introduction

  IT IS TWENTY years since C. Day Lewis died. It is thirty-eight years since his Collected Poems were published to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1954, though there followed five more publications … In that collection he withheld the Juvenilia, and made cuts in A Time to Dance and Noah and the Waters. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson and I have decided that the Complete Works must offer everything, so that the development of the poems from 1925 to 1972 can be seen at last.

  I shall now call him Cecil, though at his insistence his Christian name, which he disliked, was never printed after 1927, except in ignorance.

  In his preface to the Collected Poems 1954 he wrote, after rereading them:

  I have felt both surprise and regret: regret, that so much energy should so often have run to waste; surprise to hear a buried self speaking, now and then, with such urgency. Some poets can rewrite and improve their early work, years later. I wish I could do so; but the selves who wrote those poems are strangers to me, and I cannot resume their identities or go back into the world where they lived. There are certain themes, no doubt, linking these dead selves together. Perhaps these constant themes compose the personal tradition
of a poet – his one continuity, defining and preserving, through every change of language, every change of heart, what is essential to him …

  It might be helpful to remind today’s readers of some of the facts comprehensively documented elsewhere. The ‘Macspaunday’1 poets who flowered in the ’thirties were friends, but never a group. They had shared the same privileged background, public school and Oxford – in Cecil’s case through scholarships and exhibitions, as his father was a parson of no means. However, adolescent life in his father’s Nottinghamshire mining parish also included tennis parties in ‘the Dukeries’ and he became acutely aware of the contrast between the lowest and highest strata of society. In his poem Sketches for a Portrait (Poems 1943–1947) he

  looked for a lost ball

  In the laurels, they smirched with pit-grime …

  He had seen his father sitting by the bedsides of miners coughing themselves to death. His outrage at social injustice stemmed from that time. Then, with the onset of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, came the urgent wish to prevent war. For the time being he turned to communism along with many other artists and intellectuals of this period.

  The late Clifford Dyment, in his booklet C. Day Lewis, 1955,2 thought that the poetic powers of the author of the so-called ‘Political’ poems could carry the reader over the rough places and sometimes didactic tone ‘by the beauty and momentum of the verse itself’. Cecil was a man with music in his bones (he had a ravishing light tenor singing voice, and was one of the finest speakers of verse of his generation – accomplishments not universal among poets). Stanzas from these love poems of the ‘Political’ period show his lyricism.

  … Desire is a witch

  And runs against the clock.

  It can unstitch

  The decent hem

  Where space tacks on to time:

  It can unlock

  Pandora’s privacies …

  Transitional Poem

  … With me, my lover makes

  The clock assert its chime:

  But when she goes, she takes

  The mainspring out of time …

  Transitional Poem

  … Beauty’s end is in sight,

  Terminus where all feather joys alight.

  Wings that flew lightly

  Fold and are iron. We see

  The thin end of mortality …

  From Feathers to Iron

  … Do not expect again a phoenix hour,

  The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,

  Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease

  Tranced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown …

  From Feathers to Iron

  Those early love lyrics nearly cost him his job at Cheltenham Junior School. In his autobiography The Buried Day he tells how the headmaster had seen Transitional Poem in the local bookshop and summoned Cecil to his study. H.M. was clearly deeply embarrassed, and asked C. if he thought he was fit to teach little boys, because the poems were … (he couldn’t bring himself to say it) ‘extremely … excessively … er … SEXUAL’. ‘But they’re love poems,’ blurted out Cecil, ‘addressed to my wife.’

  As a schoolmaster, and later as a professor, Cecil insisted that one must respond to a poem directly, spontaneously, positively – ‘to be able to enjoy before we can learn to discriminate’. He also said: ‘Modern poetry is every poem, whether written last year or five centuries ago, that has meaning for us still.’ The reader will find some themes prevailing throughout his work: hero-worship, fear, compassion, transience, very often the conflict of a divided heart and mind, and always the relentless compulsion to know himself.