|
|
Classic and Contemporary Poetry
O DREAMS, O DESTINATIONS, by CECIL DAY LEWIS Poem Explanation Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: For infants time is like a humming shell Last Line: We settle, but like feathers on time's flow. Alternate Author Name(s): Blake, Nicolas Subject(s): Mortality | |||
I For infants time is like a humming shell Heard between sleep and sleep, wherein the shores Foam-fringed, wind-fluted of the strange earth dwell And the sea's cavernous hunger faintly roars. It is the humming pole of summer lanes Whose sound quivers like heat-haze endlessly Over the corn, over the poppied plains -- An emanation from the earth or sky. Faintly they hear, through the womb's lingering haze, A rumour of that sea to which they are born: They hear the ringing pole of summer days, But need not know what hungers for the corn. They are the lisping rushes in a stream -- Grace-notes of a profound, legato dream. II Children look down upon the morning-grey Tissue of mist that veils a valley's lap: Their fingers itch to tear it and unwrap The flags, the roundabouts, the gala day. They watch the spring rise inexhaustibly -- A breathing thread out of the eddied sand, Sufficient to their day: but half their mind Is on the sailed and glittering estuary. Fondly we wish their mist might never break, Knowing it hides so much that best were hidden: We'd chain them by the spring, lest it should broaden For them into a quicksand and a wreck. But they slip through our fingers like the source, Like mist, like time that has flagged out their course. III That was the fatal move, the ruination Of innocence so innocently begun, When in the lawless orchard of creation The child left this fruit for that rosier one. Reaching towards the far thing, we begin it; Looking beyond, or backward, more and more We grow unfaithful to the unique minute Till, from neglect, its features stale and blur. Fish, bird or beast was never thus unfaithful -- Man only casts the image of his joys Beyond his senses' reach; and by this fateful Act, he confirms the ambiguous power of choice. Innocence made that first choice. It is she Who weeps, a child chained to the outraged tree. IV Our youthtime passes down a colonnade Shafted with alternating light and shade. All's dark or dazzle there. Half in a dream Rapturously we move, yet half afraid Never to wake, That diamond-point, extreme Brilliance engraved on us a classic theme: The shaft of darkness had its lustre too, Rising where earth's concentric mysteries gleam. Oh youth-charmed hours, that made an avenue Of fountains playing us on to love's full view, A cypress walk to some romantic grave -- Waking, how false in outline and in hue We find the dreams that flickered on our cave: Only your fire, which cast them, still seems true. V All that time there was thunder in the air: Our nerves branched and flickered with summer lightning. The taut crab-apple, the pampas quivering, the glare On the roses seemed irrelevant, or a heightening At most of the sealed-up hour wherein we awaited What? -- some explosive oracle to abash The platitudes on the lawn? heaven's delegated Angel -- the golden rod, our burning bush? No storm broke. Yet in retrospect the rose Mounting vermilion, fading, glowing again Like a fire's heart, that breathless inspiration Of pampas grass, crab-tree's attentive pose Never were so divinely charged as then -- The veiled Word's flesh, a near annunciation. VI Symbols of gross experience! -- our grief Flowed, like a sacred river, underground: Desire bred fierce abstractions on the mind, Then like an eagle soared beyond belief. Often we tried our breast against the thorn, Our paces on the turf: whither we flew, Why we should agonize, we hardly knew -- Nor what ached in us, asking to be born. Ennui of youth! -- thin air above the clouds, Vain divination of the sunless stream Mirror that impotence, till we redeem Our birthright, and the shadowplay concludes. Ah, not in dreams, but when our souls engage With the common mesh and moil, we come of age. VII Older, we build a road where once our active Heat threw up mountains and the deep dales veined: We're glad to gain the limited objective, Knowing the war we fight in has no end. The road must needs follow each contour moulded By that fire in its losing fight with earth: We march over our past, we may behold it Dreaming a slave's dream on our bivouac hearth. Lost the archaic dawn wherein we started, The appetite for wholeness: now we prize Half-loaves, half-truths -- enough for the half-hearted, The gleam snatched from corruption satisfies. Dead youth, forgive us if, all but defeated, We raise a trophy where your honour lies. III But look, the old illusion still returns, Walking a field-path where the succory burns Like summer's eye, blue lustre-drops of noon, And the heart follows it and freshly yearns: Yearns to the sighing distances beyond Each height of happiness, the vista drowned In gold-dust haze, and dreams itself immune From change and night to which all else is bound. Love, we have caught perfection for a day As succory holds a gem of halcyon ray: Summer bums out, its flower will tarnish soon-- Deathless illusion, that could so relay The truth of flesh and spirit, sun and clay Singing for once together all in tune! X To travel like a bird, lightly to view Deserts where stone gods founder in the sand, Ocean embraced in a white sleep with land; To escape time, always to start anew. To settle like a bird, make one devoted Gesture of permanence upon the spray Of shaken stars and autumns; in a bay Beyond the crestfallen surges to have floated. Each is our wish. Alas, the bird flies blind, Hooded by a dark sense of destination: Her weight on the glass calm leaves no impression, Her home is soon a basketful of wind. Travellers, we're fabric of the road we go; We settle, but like feathers on time's flow. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest... |
| |