Living in Time: A Commentary of Three Day-Lewis Poems By Professor Albert Gelpi

Drawing from his 1998 critical study of the poetry of C Day-Lewis, Albert Gelpi, Professor of American Literature at Stanford University has compiled this essay specially for the C Day-Lewis website

Day-Lewis commented years later in his autobiography that ‘The Conflict’ and ‘In Me Two Worlds’ were ‘the only two political poems of any value that I wrote’. It is not literally true, but he is correct in noting that the drama of these poems indicates the difficulty he had, especially in the run-up to the during the Second World War, in resolving divided loyalties into a firm political position. A careful reading of ‘The Conflict’ shows how much of his recent poetry at that time was distilled into these two seemingly simple balladlike quatrains.

I sang as one
Who on a tilting deck sings
To keep men’s courage up, though the wave hangs
That shall cut off their sun.

As storm-cocks sing,
Flinging their natural answer in the wind’s teeth,
And care not if it is a waste of breath
Or birth-carol of spring.

As ocean-flyer clings
To height, to the last drop of spirit driving on
While yet ahead is land to be won
And work for wings.

Singing I was at peace,
Above the clouds, outside the ring:
For sorrow finds a swift release in song
And pride its poise.

Yet living here,
As one between two massing powers I live
Whom neutrality cannot save
Nor occupation cheer.

None such shall be left alive:
The innocent wing is soon shot down,
And private stars fade in the blood-red dawn
Where two worlds strive.
The red advance of life
Contracts pride, calls out the common blood,
Beats song into a single blade,
Makes a depth-charge of grief.

Move then with new desires,
For where we used to build and love
Is no man’s land, and only ghosts can live
Between two fires.

The strenuous effort to force ambivalence into balance and direction is written into the combination of volatility and symmetry in the prosody. The eight quatrains are neatly halved between the speaker as political activist, with ‘sing/song’ recurring through the first half and ‘live/life’ running through the second. The key words and their rhymes thread each half together: in the poet’s half, ‘sing’, ‘sings’, ‘hangs’, ‘sing’, ‘spring’, ‘clings’, ‘wings’, ‘singing’, ‘ring’, ‘song’; in the revolutionary’s half, ‘living’, ‘live’, ‘save’, ‘alive’, ‘strive’, ‘life’, ‘grief’, ‘love’, ‘live’. The poet clues the reader in to watch for these sequences by placing the key word at the beginning of the first line of the opening quatrain of the section, repeating it at the end of the second line, and then reiterating it as the rhyme word in the first line of the second quatrain of the section: thus ‘I sang as one/Who on a tilting deck sings’, ‘As storm-cocks sing’; and then ‘Yet living here/As one between two massing powers I live’, ‘None such shall be left alive’.

The quatrains are internally symmetrical and balanced, rhyming a-b-b-a with the middle rhyming lines longer than the shorter rhyming lines that enclose the quatrain in an end-stopped symtactic and prosodic unit. At the same time, variation and uncertainty are built into the tight units. The enjambment of many lines hangs the statement precariously, as in ‘As ocean-flyer clings/To height’ or ‘And private stars fade in blood-red dawn/Where two worlds strive’. The a-rhymes of the opening and closing lines of the quatrain are full rhymes with but one exception (‘peace’ poise’), but the b-rhymes of the middle lines are without exception dissonant slant rhymes. Moreover, the short opening and closing lines have sometimes two, sometimes three, stresses, and if the first has two then the fourth always has three, and vice versa. In the same way the middle lines alternate randomly in four-five, five-four stresses. The result to ear and tongue, in contrast to the Yeatsian sonority or the Hopkins-like drive of some of Day-Lewis’s earlier poems, is an unpredictable but comprehensible pattern of variations and inversions to render rhythmically the oscillations of the poet’s mind and feelings.

The traveller is a familiar figure in Day-Lewis’s work from Transitional Poem (1929) and The Magnetic Mountain (1933) to ‘The Lighted House’ in Word Over All (1943), and that traveller has come a long, troubled way – from home and back, from one way station to the next, to arrive in ‘Departure in the Dark’ in Word Over All at the cfrucial understanding of his restlessness: ‘the desire/Going forth meets the desire returning’. The poem ponders whether the clarification it reaches is the counsel of resignation…or of hope:

Nothing so sharply reminds a man that he is mortal
As leaving a place
In a winter morning’s dark, the air on his face
Unkind as the touch of sweating metal:
Simple goodbyes to children and friends become
A felon’s numb
Farewell, and love that was a warm, a meeting place –
Love is the suicide’s grave under the nettles.

Gloomed and clemmed as if by an imminent ice-age
Lies the dear world
Of your street-strolling, field-faring. The senses, curled
At the dead end of a shrinking passage,
Care not if close the inveterate hunters creep,
And memories sleep
Like mammoths in lost caves. Drear, extinct is the world,
And has no voice for consolation or presage.

There is always something at such times of the Passover,
When the dazed heart
Beats for it knows not what, whether you part
From home or prison, acquaintance or lover –
Something wrong with the time-table, something unreal
In the scrambled meal
And the bag ready packed by the door, as though the heart
Has gone ahead, or is staying here for ever.

No doubt for the Israelites that early morning
It was hard to be sure
If home were prison or prison home: the desire
Going forth meets the desire returning.
This land, that had cut their pride down to the bone
Was now their own
By ancient deed of sorrow. Beyond, there was nothing sure
But a desert of freedom to quench their fugitive yearnings.

At this blind hour the heart is informed of nature’s
Ruling that man
Should be nowhere a more tenacious settler than
Among wry thorns and ruins, yet nurture
A seed of discontent in his ripest ease.
There’s a kind of release
And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man
And will be, even to the last of his dark departures.

As with many of Day-Lewis’s best poems, the form is essential to making the emaning and is also of Day-Lewis’s own devising. Moreover, like Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, the American poet for whose British Selected Poems Day-Lewis had written an admiring introduction in 1936, he characteristically uses the regularities and irregularities, the predictabilities and unpredictabilities of metre and rhyme to explore intellectual, emotional and moral ambiguity.

In ‘Departure in the Dark’, the eight lines of Day-Lewis’s stanza follow a fixed pattern of stresses (5-2-5-4-5-2-6-5) and a fixed rhyme scheme (a-b-b-a-c-c-b-a); however, there is no correspondence between the simultaneous patterns of line lengths and rhyming syllables. Thus the pentameters end a-b-c-a, and the dimeters end b-c; and the lines with the b-rhyme, for example, have two beats, five beats, six beats. Each stanza is end-stopped and enclosed by the rhyming of the first two lines (a-b) with the last two inverted (b-a), but within these enclosed units the conversational tone and the enjambment of lines make for fluid movement. The b-rhyme of the second and second-to-last lines in each stanza repeats exactly the same word, but the off-rhymes (for example, ‘mortal’, ‘metal’, ‘nettles’; ‘ice-age’, ‘passage’, ‘pressage’; etc.) reinforce the syncopation of the varying line-lengths. The statement of the poem seems to meander but towards the end gathers itself into gnomic generalizations – as in the remark about desire going forth and returning and in the closing lines; yet those seemingly didactic apothegms sum up the problem without resolving it, end the poem open-endedly.

Does the departure in the dark recall leaving London to visit his first wife Mary and their two sons? Leaving Brimclose, where Mary lived in Devon, to return to Rosamond Lehmann, his lover, and her children? Which home is prison, which prison home? Or is each both? The moment and place of departure are deliberately unspecified and kept general, for ‘nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal’ as the consciousness that every moment is a venture and a farewell, an opportunity and a failure to grasp, ‘even to the last his dark departures’. ‘The one-possessed/And the unpossessed’ recede beyond possession into the void between each tick of the clock, leaving ‘the dazed heart’ beating out the time ‘for it knows not what’. The radical discontinuity of ‘Something wrong with the time-table’ generates and frustrates desire instant by instant, eros quickened and quenched by thanatos ‘in every goodbye’. For in the blink of the moment, the desirer wavers between desire for the once possessed and desire for the unpossessed, between clutching what is always already gone and reaching out to what is always already slipping away.

The penultimate stanza adapts the biblical analogy with the Exodus to historicize and mythicize the crucial insight without resolving it. The poem does not mention Moses’s unwaveri8ng leadership of his people through the desert under God’s command but instead empathizes with the wavering affections of the ordinary and befuddled Israelites, hesitating between their Egyptian prison and the hazy promise of rich and fertile homeland, between the hardships already known and accommodated and a paradise unknown. They were human in their wanting to go and to stay, to stay behind and yet to go home: desire coming and recrossing desire in the barren desert.

At the end of Day-Lewis’s autobiography, The Buried Day, the mingling of memory and desire over the years he had reviewed moved him to recall the insight of ‘Departure in the Dark’: ‘The conflict I had all my young life been cursed with – “the desire going forth meets the desire returning”; a need for what is stable, habitual, familiar; and locked in a struggle with it – sometimes the one prevailing, sometimes the other – an impulse toward the new, the unknown, the migrations which so delusively promise a rebirth.

Moreover, the Janus-face of desire ‘is not my conflict alone, surely, but a condition of being human: not “the blight man was born for”, but the clash of irreconcilables which makes and unmakes him.’ Day-Lewis quotes Hopkins’s phrase in ‘Spring and Fall’ to turn the ‘blight’ of mortality, without Hopkins’s faith, into the possibility of self-creation.

The dedication of ‘Sheepdog Trials in Hyde Park’ to Robert Frost is significant. Day-Lewis had written a new introduction to Penguin’s Selected Poems of Frost in 1955, in which he had assimilated the American into the tradition of English pastoral and endorsed Robert Graves’s view that, among the poets of this century, Hardy and Frost provided the most salutary influences. On Frost’s trip to England in 1957, he had visited the Day-Lewises, and the two poets recorded for broadcast on the BBC a conversation that was warmed by their admiration for and understanding of each other. Day-Lewis’s dedication also memorialized the specific occasion when he took Frost to see the sheepdog trials in Hyde Park.

A shepherd stands at one end of the arena.
Five sheep are unpenned at the other. His dog runs out
In a curve to behind them, fetches them straight to the shepherd,
Then drives the flock round a triangular course
Through a couple of gates and back to his master; two
Must be sorted there from the flock, then all five penned.
Gathering, driving away, shedding and penning
Are the plain words for the miraculous game.

An abstract game. What can the sheepdog make of such
Simplified terrain? – no hills, dales, bogs, walls, tracks,
Only a quarter-mile plain of grass, dumb crowds
Like crowds on hoardings around it, and behind them
Traffic or mounds of lovers and children playing.
Well, the dog is no landscape-fancier; his whole concern
Is with his master’s whistle, and of course
With the flock – sheep are sheep anywhere for him.

The sheep are the chanciest element. Why, for instance,
Go through this gate when there’s on either side of it
No wall or hedge but huge and viable space?
Why not eat the grass instead of being pushed around it?
Like blobs of quicksilver on a tilting board
The flock erratically runs, dithers, breaks up,
Is reassembled: their ruling idea is the dog;
And behind the dog, though they know it not yet, is a shepherd.

The shepherd knows that time is of the essence
But haste calamitous. Between dog and sheep
There is always an ideal distance, a perfect angle;
But these are constantly varying, so the man
Should anticipate each move through the dog, his medium.
The shepherd is the brain behind the dog’s brain,
But his control of dog, like dog’s of sheep,
Is never absolute – that’s the beauty of it.

For beautiful it is. The guided missiles,
The black-and-white angels follow each quirk and jink of
The evasive sheep, play grandmother’s steps behind them,
Freeze to the ground, or leap to head off a straggler
Almost before it knows that it wants to stray,
As if radar-controlled. But they are not machines –
You can feel them feeling mastery, doubt, chagrin:
Machines don’t frolic when their job is done.

What’s needfully done in the solitude of sheep-runs –
Those tough, real tasks – becomes a stylized game,
A demonstration of intuitive wit
Kept natural by the saving grace of error.
To lift, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen
Are acts I recognize, with all they mean
Of shepherding the unruly, for a kind of
Controlled wool-gathering is my work too.

‘Sheepdog Trials’ is an excellent example of Day-Lewis’s use of plain, even homely speech in the highly sophisticated elaboration of a metaphor exemplifying the making of the poem. The execution of ‘serious play’ is here a lucid ‘demonstration of intuitive wit’. The perfect pentameter line of five unadorned and unmodified infinitives – ‘To life, to fetch, to drive, to shed, to pen’ – summarizes in the last stanza the facets of the trials that the previous five stanzas have described – not in schematic lockstep, one facet per stanza, but in the constantly altering interactions and adjustments that constitute the challenge and beauty of the game.

The diction, syntax, verse rhythms and stanza patterns all serve to convey the controlled movement. The description develops through the recurrence of a few key words – ‘shepherd’, ‘dog’, ‘sheep’, ‘flock’, ‘drive’, ‘run’, ‘pen’ – in different configurations through a fast-moving, stop-sand-start succession of quite short, simple clauses – overwhelmingly declarative – with few complicating subordinate clauses. The pacing of the clauses synchronizes game time to metrical time – both ‘of the essence’ of the exercise. The commentary, voiced across heavily enjambed lines, stretches, contracts, stops in its tracks, loops back, as the timely movement follows its conventions while remaining open to ‘the saving grace of error’: a sort of aesthetic felix culpa. Yet as the focus of the poet’s roving eye and mind shifts to different aspects and configurations of the game’s progress, the rules of the game are followed as the five-stressed verses are ‘gathered’ into the six end-stopped stanzas.

The delightful pun on ‘controlled wool-gathering’ in the last line synthesizes and completes the analogy between the sheepdog trials and the composing of a poem, indeed of this poem. But because the analogy is realized so deftly by the example of the poem, the conceit – shepherd/poet, dog/medium, sheep/’unruly’ experience – needs no heavy-handed explication. The occasional overlay of metaphor or simile onto simple description tracks the poet’s mind assimilating the factual details into its own figures, at one point tentatively invoking guided missiles and radar as metaphors only to withdraw the references as too automated and mechanical for the sheepdogs’ frolicsome pleasure in their expertise.

All along the way, the verbal play – ‘plain words’/’plain of grass’, the dog as ‘ruling idea’ ‘shepherding’ the ‘unruly’ sheep, ‘angle’/’angel’, ‘hedge’/’huge’, ‘erratically runs’/ ‘grace of error’ – zigzags through the verses, as the running pun of ‘unpenned’/’penned’/’penning’/’to pen’ as ‘unwritten’/’written’/’writing’/’to write’ executes the literarily ‘stylized game’ whose ‘abstract’ beauty patterns the ‘tough, real’ rush and crush of experience.

Living In Time: The Poetry of C Day-Lewis was published by Oxford University Press in 1998