C. Day Lewis

Cecil Day Lewis - what a brilliant poet! - captures so perfectly the sense of the moment and the transience of 'special' moments. His poetry has such a transparent feel about it: that sense of trying to capture something that cannot be captured - like the moment he realized the child was no longer dependent upon him in: "Walk Away" or that sense of tryng to recapture and hold something from childhood that cannot be captured. His poems rather remind me of a quotation (from whom, I know not!): "The bird of Paradise alights only on the hand thatdoes not grasp." So many of Lewis' poems seem to be about ephemeral, almost mystical, characters making their exits 'stage left' as though we come upon him at a moment in a play, and have missed the previous scenes and only see his response to them. At the same time, he writes so perfectly of feelings that are so familiar to all of us. I trust it doesn't infringe copyright to include two of my favourite poems here: Firstly: "The Album" (and the photo of the empty bench at Temple Newsam seems somehow to fit this!)


I see you, a child
In a garden sheltered for buds and playtime,
Listening as if beguiled
By a fancy beyond your years and the flowering maytime.
The print is faded: soon there will be
No trace of that pose enthralling,
Nor visible echo of my voice distantly calling
‘Wait! Wait for me!’

Then I turn the page
To a girl who stands like a questioning iris
By the waterside, at an age
That asks every mirror to tell what the heart’s desire is.
The answer she finds in that oracle stream
Only time could affirm or disprove,
Yet I wish I was there to venture a warning, ‘Love
Is not what you dream.’

Next, you appear
As if garlands of wild felicity crowned you –
Courted, caressed, you wear
Like immortelles the lovers and friends around you.
‘They will not last you, rain or shine,
They are but straws and shadows,’
I cry: ‘Give not to those charming desperadoes
What was made to be mine.’

One picture is missing –
The last. It would show me a tree stripped bare
By intemperate gales, her amazing
Noonday of blossom spoilt which promised so fair.
Yet scanning those scenes at your heyday taken,
I tremble, as one who must view
In the crystal a doom he could never deflect- yes, I too
Am fruitlessly shaken.

I close the book;
But the past slides out its leaves to haunt me
And it seems, wherever I look,
Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.
Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours,
Beside me – ‘All you love most there
Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed there
Has grown to be yours.’


And "Walking Away"

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.