The complete poems of C. Day Lewis

by Cecil Day-Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis was one of the leading young poets - including Auden, Spender and MacNeice - who in the 1930s broke away from the poetic establishment. This book includes all the poems Day-Lewis wrote, including the "vers d'occasion" which have never previously appeared in book form.

Genres: Poetry

745 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Cecil Day-Lewis, often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, most of which feature the fictional detective Nigel Strangeways.
During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the U.K. government, and also served in the Musbury branch of the British Home Guard. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Reviews

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I obtained this huge collection in paperback and second hand; for all my care, towards the end it had begun to split from its binding and I have to ask if it is important enough for me to want a newer copy. The skill and technical quality of this poetry is beyond question; Day-Lewis’s poems are written in a huge range of styles and forms, and include many that imitate the style of other poets, successfully enough for critics to have complained at his lacking a voice of his own; a complaint that I find nonsensical. I supported my reading of the poems with a biography by Peter Stanford and with this help can readily pick out the autobiographical aspect of many poems, so in that respect I can accept the sincerity – or at least the self revelation – in at least some poems which we know did speak clearly to those who shared his life, sometimes to painful effect. The fact remains that only a small proportion of the poems make any strong impression for me and many seem to me, however unfairly, to be insincere, formal exercises, seemingly written at his well ordered desk during office hours as a professional assignment, a piece of craftwork.

Nevertheless, technical quality does sometimes result in lovely work. In the Pegasus volume, from 1957, there are a number of examples. The Gate is simply descriptive, based it seems on a picture of a disused gate:

In the foreground, clots of cream-white flowers (meadowsweet?
Guelder? Cow parsley?): a patch of green: then a gate
Dividing the green from a brown field, and beyond,
By steps of mustard and saffron pink, the distance
Climbs right-handed away
Up to the olive hilltop and the sky.
..... But those white flowers,
Craning their necks, putting their heads together
Like a crowd that holds itself back from surging forward,
Have their own point of balance – poised, it seems,
On the airy brink of whatever it is they await...

Arguably more impressive examples of poems in this volume written initially as technical challenges would be View From an Upper Window or the very well known Sheep Dog Trials in Hyde Park. I picked The Gate because I happen to be amused by the reference to cow parsley and its confusing range of names, which has associations in my own life. A similarly personal dynamic is behind my response (as a one-time boy soprano in a church choir) to a much more powerful poem, from his 1953 volume An Italian Visit, written in response to an artwork to which I have given a link because it seems essential:

https://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/fa...

Singing Children: Lucia Della Robbia
(T.H.)

I see you, angels with choirboy faces,
Trilling it from the museum wall
As once, decani or cantoris,
You sang in a carved oak stall,
Nor deemed any final bar to such time honoured carolling
E’er could befall.

I too gave tongue in my piping youth-days,
Yea, took like a bird to crotchet and clef,
Antheming out with a will the Old Hundredth,
Salem, or Bunnett in F,
Unreckoning even as you if the Primal Sapience
Be deaf, stone deaf.

Many a matins cheerfully droned I
To the harmonium’s clacking wheeze.
Fidgeted much through prayer and sermon
While errant bumblebees
Drummed on the ivied window, veering my thoughts to
Alfresco glees.

But voices break – aye, and more than voices;
The heart for hymn tune and haytime goes.
Dear Duomo choristers, chirping for ever
In jaunty, angelic pose,
Would I had sung my last ere joy-throbs dwindled
Or wan faith froze!

C. Day-Lewis
[In the style of Thomas Hardy]

Many details in this poem mean something to me, even including “the harmonium’s clacking wheeze,” as I have in my childhood sat with my mother as she played an old church organ.

A key factor in my response to poetry is often to establish such personal associations, however arbitrary. I could call in my support some words of the poet, cited in the introduction (which is very well written by his last wife, Jill Balcon): “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.’”

As an overall impression, I am much in awe of Day Lewis’s poetry but only a minority speak directly to me in a way that would make me wish to revisit them. There are poems that appear dry and inaccessible on first reading, only to suddenly emerge into sunlight on another occasion, and I readily accept that with more work I could hope to take far more delight in this collection, but I do assert that I have given his work more than a fair hearing already. In a world with so much other poetry to be explored, I fear that for me at least, Day-Lewis is destined now to rest undisturbed for the foreseeable future on my groaning shelves; so my battered old copy will probably do fine instead of getting a new one.

Singing Children, of course, has joined my personal list of immortals.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Day-Lewis definitely earned his membership in the Auden Group with these finely crafted, philosophical musings. Some of his finest address his serial infidelity, such as “Ideal Home,” which drips with irony.

Favorite Poems:
“Circus Lion”
“Ideal Home”
“Requiem for the Living”
“Where Are the War Poets”
“Almost Human”