Poetry among the Ruins

If any plain message has come to us from the turbulent idealism of the poetry of the Thirties, it is that young men grow old and a burning heart is quenched soonest by the smoke of its own conflagration. The tragedy cannot be glossed over by easy words; for it involves more than the words that came out of it. Before the Second World War, in England, Europe and America, there existed both among intellectual men and women and some not intellectual, a strong sincere hope for more than private freedom, justice and creativity. Political elements, though important, were not central in the Leftist world- view. Which of us, then in our teens or twenties does not remember the clang of the armourer’s shop, the exhilaration as of mountain air, the sense of a great journey to be undertaken, above all the shaping of a new language to express a vision only partly comprehended? That vision of potential greatness in the human heart moved dilettantes to write strong factual prose and minor poets to write a handful of magnificent lyrics. And if we say resignedly that after all no human structure is stable, or that good and evil are mixed everywhere, how does this compensate for the vision lost any more than, for a woman, the tolerance of a companionate marriage can fill the gap left by the first disastrous love affair on which she squandered her virginity, her idealism and the generous force of her nature? We expect less than the writers of the Thirties did; and are no better for it. We are involved, too, in their failure; for our own failure of passion stems from it.

Though they differ greatly in their methods of writing and in the texture of their poems, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, by belonging to thepage 262 same generation, have shared many problems of belief and action. Both were committed early to a Leftist world-view, revolutionary and secular, which included the assumption that environmental change could modify benignly the groundwork of human nature:

But we seek a new world through old workings,
Whose hope lies like seed in the loins of earth,
Whose dawn draws gold from the roots of darkness . . .
Train shall leap from tunnel to terminus,
Out on to plain shall the pioneer plunge,
Earth reveal what veins fed, what hill covered
Lovely the leap, explosion into light.

Day Lewis expounds a mysticism at that time new. Trust in the health of natural processes is strong in his early work; the necessities of social action seem almost peripheral. The ambiguous ‘we’ refers equally to the socialist elect, and to the poet and his sexual partner who expect, too, that their path will be smoothed by benign powers. In later poems ‘we’ ambiguously refers to man and woman; but still Day Lewis is sharply aware of other people as part of the Kingdom of Ends. The wintry landscapes through which the married lovers move contain places, events, a world of change and suffering, more than their own tragic patterns in the snow. Spender’s best poetry, on the other hand, is chiefly the expression of the sexual and exploratory impulses of a solitary and very young man:

I who say I call that eye I
Which is the mirror in which things see
Nothing except themselves. I die.
The world, the things seen, still will be.
Upon this eye the vast reflections lie
But that which passes, passes away, is I.

What power, may we ask, murdered Spender’s gift and narrowed Day Lewis’s imaginative scope to spirited translation of Virgil and a garden haunted by the ghost of one much-loved woman? The whole answer lies probably in the partial collapse of a civilisation; but the individual failure can be traced to the areas of experience which socialist humanism ignored. At some moment each of the writers of the Thirties, looking at bombed Germany, at the charred bones of Hiroshima, or even at their own face in a bedroom mirror, saw the face of the human species (in Chekhov’s idiom) as that of an unclean beast of prey. On their reaction to this vision of the Pit depended the wholeness of their future response. The strongest were moved to intercession; the weakest (Spender among them) retreated nervously to thepage 263 library and locked the door. Day Lewis, describing a child with her doll in an air raid shelter, shows himself to be among the strong:

Instinct was hers, and an earthquake hour revealed it
In flesh – the meek-laid lashes, the glint in the eye
Defying wrath and reason, the arms that shielded
A plaster doll from an erupting sky.

Many influences have shaped his work – social idealism, the classics, Auden, Hardy, Blunden – but he has retained what can only be called artistic integrity. From The Nabara, that powerful celebration of human courage in extremity, to the elegiac section of Italian Journey, one retains the certainty of contact with a living heart and mind, labouring and suffering, maintaining the uneasy balance of a Romantic Stoic. He may stand the test of time better than most of his more widely anthologised contemporaries.

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