Cecil Day-Lewis Quotes & Sayings

High sprits they had: gravity they flouted. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way,
With tall moon-daisies alight, and the mole
Busy, and elegant hares at play
By meadow paths where once you would stroll
In the flush of day? — Cecil Day-Lewis

When bullying April bruised mine eyes
With sleet-bound appetites and crude
Experiments of green, I still was wise
And kissed the blossoming rod. — Cecil Day-Lewis

We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet. — Cecil Day-Lewis

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this. — Cecil Day-Lewis

There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man. — Cecil Day-Lewis

In June we picked the clover,
And sea-shells in July:
There was no silence at the door,
No word from the sky.

A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go. — Cecil Day-Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go. — Cecil Day-Lewis

The river this November afternoon
Rests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:
A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroud
Its passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune. — Cecil Day-Lewis

It is unwise to equate scientific activity with what we call reason, poetic activity with what we call imagination. Without the imaginative leap from facts to generalisation, no theoretic discovery in science is made. The poet, on the other hand, must not imagine but reason
that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is a technical logic, a poetic reasoning in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved. — Cecil Day-Lewis

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen. — Cecil Day-Lewis

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Love is proved in the letting go. — Cecil Day-Lewis

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause. — Cecil Day-Lewis

See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left - no, nor despair -
To break his teeth on the bars. — Cecil Day-Lewis

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born ... in poetry. — Cecil Day-Lewis

Now the peak of summer's past, the sky is overcast And the love we swore would last for an age seems deceit. — Cecil Day-Lewis