The Album by C Day Lewis
[published in a collection 1943]
I see you, a child
In a garden sheltered for buds and playtime,
Listening as if beguiled
By a fancy beyond your years and the flowering maytime.
The print is faded: soon there will be
No trace of that pose enthralling,
Nor visible echo of my voice distantly calling
‘Wait! Wait for me!’
Then I turn the page
To a girl who stands like a questioning iris
By the waterside, at an age
That asks every mirror to tell what the heart’s desire is.
The answer she finds in that oracle stream
Only time could affirm or disprove,
Yet I wish I was there to venture a warning, ‘Love
Is not what you dream.’
Next, you appear
As if garlands of wild felicity crowned you –
Courted, caressed, you wear
Like immortelles the lovers and friends around you.
‘They will not last you, rain or shine,
They are but straws and shadows,’
I cry: ‘Give not to those charming desperadoes
What was made to be mine.’
One picture is missing –
The last. It would show me a tree stripped bare
By intemperate gales, her amazing
Noonday of blossom spoilt which promised so fair.
Yet scanning those scenes at your heyday taken,
I tremble, as one who must view
In the crystal a doom he could never deflect- yes, I too
Am fruitlessly shaken.
I close the book;
But the past slides out its leaves to haunt me
And it seems, wherever I look,
Phantoms of irreclaimable happiness taunt me.
Then I see her, petalled in new-blown hours,
Beside me – ‘All you love most there
Has blossomed again,’ she murmurs, ‘all that you missed
there
Has grown to be yours.
comments: One of my favourite poems for many many years has been The
Album by Cecil Day Lewis. You can find it in the Larkin-edited Oxford
book of 20th Century verse.
I have always been fascinated by Rosamond Lehmann,
loved her books, and to a lesser extent Cecil Day Lewis – both have featured on the blog a
lot, he mostly for his Nicholas
Blake murder stories. I knew the two had had a long affair.
Recently I wrote a couple
of blogposts primarily about
Lehmann, built round Selina Hastings’ excellent biography.
The book has many jaw-dropping moments, but for me one of
the most unexpected was to discover that Day Lewis wrote this poem FOR Rosamond
Lehmann. It seemed so right and fitting, yet so strange I’d never known. The
affair ended around 1950, and Rosamond was devastated – later she heard Day
Lewis reading The Album on the radio, and discussing how it related to his
life, and was horrified. As Hastings relates:
To Cecil himself she wrote
that the experience had been like listening to
‘the embalmer discussing the technique of the operation in the case
of loved ones’; his cruel indifference to her feelings could only mean that he
thought of her as dead. ‘Hardly a day passes that I do not think of you, but
not as dead,’ Cecil wrote; as far as he was concerned there was nothing more to
be said, ‘except that the answer to such questions as “have you quite forgotten
that I am a real woman & that our love was once real?” is “No, & never
shall.”’
Goodness. This was a lot for me to take in after a lifetime
of loving the poem…but it certainly makes sense for Rosamond: see
the previous posts for the adventurous history of her life.
The poem would be more cheering if their affair hadn’t come
to such an unhappy end for her (again, see
earlier post) – we assume Day Lewis
was very happy with his long subsequent marriage to Jill Balcon. You suspect
that later Lehmann would have thought
a tree stripped bare
By intemperate gales, her
amazing
Noonday of blossom spoilt
which promised so fair.
was a metaphor for how she ended up after CDL left her.
One more thing: C Day Lewis wrote a memoir called The Buried Day. It was published in 1960. Meanwhile, Rosamond Lehmann’s book The EchoingGrove (one of her best in my view) was published in 1953, and appeared in France under the title Le Jour Enseveli – which means ‘The Buried Day’. I haven’t been able to confirm the date for French publication, but it (the French version) was certainly in existence by 1958. (Which we can see because the import of the book to Franco’s Spain was prohibited.) Interesting...
Pictures from the book Rosamond published of her own photos...
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