I reviewed, not long ago, Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, unaware when I ordered it, that the writer was poet Cecil Day Lewis. Inevitably, it was well written, although not perhaps in the top flight for plot and for excitement, but I thought we should also see Lewis as a master wordsmith in his main field, of poetry. After all, he was Poet Laureate, and while that job has not always gone to the best and brightest poets of their generation, there is no doubt of Lewis’s credentials, though I suspect he is not much read now.
This poem I particularly like, though meaning is obscure in places, with an odd mix of Communist and Christian symbol. What a light looking construction this is, with short lines in rhyming quatrains, but what power in “For we lie down with tears / And waken but to weep.” This is Cecil Day Lewis’s Tempt Me No More:
Tempt me no more; for I
Have known the lightning’s hour,
The poet’s inward pride,
The certainty of power.
Bayonets are closing round.
I shrink; yet I must wring
A living from despair
And out of steel a song.
Though song, though breath be short,
I’ll share not the disgrace
Of those that ran away
Or never left the base.
Comrades, my tongue can speak
No comfortable words,
Calls to a forlorn hope,
Gives work and not rewards.
Oh keep the sickle sharp
And follow still the plough:
Others may reap, though some
See not the winter through.
Father, who endest all,
Pity our broken sleep;
For we lie down with tears
And waken but to weep.
And if our blood alone
Will melt this iron earth,
Take it. It is well spent
Easing a saviour’s birth.
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