The magnetic Mountain

(Extract from) Poem 3 from The Magnetic Mountain

Taken from Day-Lewis’s landmark Thirties collection, The Magnetic Mountain, published to international acclaim in 1933. Along with Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice, Day-Lewis is often grouped together with WH Auden as one of ‘the Poets of the Thirties’ or ‘the Auden Gang’. Certainly it was Auden who linked the four together, and there are hints of his influence in the language Day-Lewis employs here. But it is a mistake to see the four as a movement. All were responding in their own ways to the economic, political and social crisis of the 1930s and all, to differing degrees, advocated in their poetry a social revolution which would overthrow the established order.

Somewhere beyond the railheads
Of reason, south or north,
Lies a magnetic mountain
Riveting sky to earth.

No line is laid so far.
Ties rusting in a stack
And sleepers – dead men’s bones –
Mark a defeated track.

Kestrel who yearly changes
His tenement of space
At the last hovering
May signify that place.

Iron in the soul,
Spirit steeled in fire,
Needle trembling on truth –
These shall draw me there.