Poetry News 

To return to Thirty-seven Cents, click on Back on your toolbar.

021 Stanford, Peter. "Face to Faith," The Guardian.  May 19, 2007.

Stanford says Cecil Day-Lewis is an example of a poet whose religious upbringing led not to public service, but to a rebellion against God.  Day-Lewis's father was a rector in Nottinghamshire; Cecil formally rejected the rituals of Christianity when he was a teenager.  Sanford tells of Day-Lewis's conversion from Christianity: "When he was first widely acclaimed as one of the 'poets of the 30s' alongside WH Auden (the grandson of clergymen) and Louis MacNeice (the son of a bishop), Day-Lewis replaced the God of his childhood with communism as his guiding star." Day-Lewis stated, "I dimly felt the need for a faith which would fill the void left by the leaking away of traditional religion, which would make sense of our troubled times and make real demands on me." 

By the 1940s, however, Stanford points out, Day-Lewis realized his new god, communism, had failed to fill the space Christianity filled formerly.  He tried to fill it with the study of the works of Thomas Hardy, but when the God question kept coming back, Day-Lewis finally embraced what he called churchy agnosticism. "an instinctive love of the music and language of the liturgy, but no faith in what lay behind them."

God appeared more in his verse. He was there in the last stanza of Day-Lewis's best-remembered work, "Walking Away," about waving farewell to his son at the school gates: "I have 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 is proved in the letting go."

By the time Day-Lewis became poet laureate in 1968, his health was failing. Instead of strengthening an interest in God, however, impending death caused him to "recast" the desire for immortality in purely human terms.
His final act as poet-laureate was a television series on poetry in which he introduced Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" by looking straight into the camera and remarking, "Shakespeare held out no conventional religious hope of immortality. But in a few of his sonnets, he does convey a sort of humanist message; he says that a man may live on after death through the eternal lines of poetry."

Following Shakespeare's footsteps, C Day-Lewis died on May 22 1972, after affirming in a late poems that, yes, garden herbs are only temporary, but "I like / These gestures of the ephemeral / Against the everlasting. "

[To return to Thirty-Seven Cents, click Back on your toolbar above.]