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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Body, Heart and Mind

Body, Heart and Mind

Among the poets of the Thirties, Cecil Day Lewis was remarkable for a dry metaphysical wit and a strong sense of formal structure – this latter being in itself no guarantee of first-rate poetry, yet an indispensable aid in the writing of narrative verse. His narrative poem on an incident of the Spanish War, the fight of the Nabara, passes the test of heroic evocation for one reader, who is rarely able to read it and refrain from tears. With time his verse has become more meditative. He has learnt much from the irregular metres and stoic agnosticism of Hardy. This new poem is a hybrid – verse journal, narrative, philosophical discourse. In it he makes use of his peculiar gifts of irony and sensuous observation; and under all the groundswell of Romantic nostalgia. His verse is intellectually too controlled to allow often an unpremeditated lyric strength; but this control gives him his staying power. What other poet would have described five Florentine works of art in five remarkable parodiespage 122 of Hardy, Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas? – or could have, satisfactorily? True, some are less parody than genuine imitation; and hence all the more remarkable.

In the first and last sections of An Italian Visit, the three-travellers-in- one, Tom, Dick and Harry (that is, Body, Heart and Mind) analyse in their respective terms the quality of their mutual experience. For Day Lewis, as is shown in his superb ‘Elegy Before Death’ (the sixth section of the poem) it finds its focus in romantic sexual love; or rather, that love rectifies and replenishes the arid mind:

But ‘love is all,’
She says; and the mortal scene of planets and tides,
Animals, grass and men is transformed, proved, steadied around me . . .

Until –

. . . upon each hill,
Vine and olive hold the archaic pose:
Below, the bubble dome looks everlasting
As heaven’s womb, and threading the eyes of bridges
Arno endlessly into the loom of oblivion flows.

Yet he retains inevitably the Romantic paradox: ‘Always? – That is the song the sirens sing on bone island.’ One can ask no more of that particular vision. An Italian Visit is an uneven poem, yet through its wit and variety, successful as a whole. It contains some of the best poetry that Day Lewis has ever written.

1953 (67)