Cecil Day-Lewis > Quotes

“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― Cecil Day Lewis

“In June we picked the clover,
And sea-shells in July:
There was no silence at the door,
No word from the sky.

A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, Overtures to Death and Other Poems

“The river this November afternoon
Rests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:
A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroud
Its passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis

“A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.”
― C. Day Lewis

“I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.... We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― C. Day Lewis

“And yet this self, contains
Tides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,
Is small and solitary as one grass-blade
Passed over by the wind
Amongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis

“Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way,
With tall moon-daisies alight, and the mole
Busy, and elegant hares at play
By meadow paths where once you would stroll
In the flush of day?”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis

“It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, 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 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 proved in the letting go.”
― C.Day-Lewis

“poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, Selected Poetry

“Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon.”
― C. Day Lewis

“See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left—no, nor despair—
To break his teeth on the bars.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis

“When bullying April bruised mine eyes
With sleet-bound appetites and crude
Experiments of green, I still was wise
And kissed the blossoming rod.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis, Transitional Poem

“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― C. Day Lewis