'Children Leaving Home', 'My Méséglise Way' and 'A Privileged Moment' by C Day Lewis
Teresa bought me the Complete Poems twenty five years ago - a superb collection, I could select so many more to include here including his perhaps most famous poem 'Walking Away' which I have blogged at least once before and given to many friends over the years.
I didn't remember 'My Méséglise Way' when I was skimming the volume for the purpose of this post and realize that was because my first reading would have been before I had read 'In Search of Lost Time' and didn't know the reference. It is interesting that like 'Children Leaving Home' (first published posthumously) he wrote this poem towards the end of the life. In Proust, the Narrator as small boy, meets Gilberte, daughter of Charles and Odette Swann by the river that flows by the 'Méséglise Way' - it is an epiphany and the start of his 'sentimental education'. Not one to rush through a very, very good book, he meets her again three thousand pages or so down the line... The final words of the poem are of course Gilberte's, her invitation to the dance.
In 'A Privileged Moment' I love that astonishing line 'Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain' and of course his witness, against every intuition, that illness can have such moments of revelation and sublime joy.
Do let me know if you would like more of Lewis.
CHILDREN LEAVING HOME
Soon you'll be off to meet your full grown selves,
Freed from my guardianship to sweat out your own life sentence.
The house will be emptied of you,
For ever tie in time dissolves;
And you, once close to us like a whisper of blood, in due
Season return, if you will, as polite acquaintance.
What will you then remember? The lime that crowded
Your bedroom windows, shading the square rose-bed beneath -
All such everyday sights,
Hours by boredom or wrath enclouded,
Or those which burst like a rocket with red-letter delights
In a holiday sky- picnics, the fair on Blackheath?
I heard you last summer, crossing Ireland by road,
Ask the mother to re-tell episodes out of your past.
You gave them the rapt attention
A ballad-maker's audience owed
To fact caught up in fable. Through memory's dimension
The unlikeliest scene may be immortalised.
Forgive my coldnesses, now past recall,
Angers, injustice, moods contrary, mean or blind;
And best, my dears, forgive
Yourselves, when I am gone, for all
Love signals you ignored and for the fugitive
Openings you never took into my mind.
At that hour what shall I have to bequeath?
A sick world we could not change, a sack of genes
I did not choose, some verse
Long out of fashion....So prematurely our old age inters
Puny triumphs with poignant might-have-beens.
Soon you'll be leaving home, alone to face
Love's treacheries and transports. May these early years
Have shaped you to be whole,
To live unshielded from the rays
Which probe, enlighten and mature the human soul.
Go forth and make the best of it, my dears.
MY MÉSÉGLISE WAY
Always along that path hawthorn and lilac
Hedged a demesne
A bare arm's-length away, yet inaccessible
And coaxing in vain
Like the horizon. It was enough to part
The blossoms - eye could embrace
The glades, parterres, crystal-paned gazebos
Of a superior race.
Fountains play. A small girl walks where fidgety
Branches sieve
The sunlight: her shyness and delicate hauter show me
Original Eve.
One day there was a hole in the hedge. I crawl
Through it. The prospect blurs,
Then clears again, as unperturbed I accept an
Epiphany in revers-
A common and garden lawn, a hedge of privet
Not scented bloom:
The privileged scene, the sense of grandeur flown like
A drug-born dream.
Young ones in the dowdy garden happily
Tumble and chase. Cast
Is my skin of shrinking solitude when a girl
Cries 'So you've joined us at last!'
A PRIVILEGED MOMENT
Released from hospital, only half alive still,
Cautiously feeling the way back into himself,
Propped up in bed like a guy, he presently ventured
A glance at the ornaments on his mantelshelf.
White, Wedgwood blue, dark lilac coloured or ruby -
Things, you could could say, which had known their place and price,
Gleamed out at him with the urgency of angels
Eager for him to see through their disguise.
Slowly he turned his head. By gust-flung snatches
A shower announced itself on the windowpane:
He saw unquestioning, not even astonished,
Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain.
Gently at last the angels settled back now
Into mere ornaments, the unearthly sheen
And spill of diamond into familiar raindrops,
It was enough. He had seen what he had seen.
I didn't remember 'My Méséglise Way' when I was skimming the volume for the purpose of this post and realize that was because my first reading would have been before I had read 'In Search of Lost Time' and didn't know the reference. It is interesting that like 'Children Leaving Home' (first published posthumously) he wrote this poem towards the end of the life. In Proust, the Narrator as small boy, meets Gilberte, daughter of Charles and Odette Swann by the river that flows by the 'Méséglise Way' - it is an epiphany and the start of his 'sentimental education'. Not one to rush through a very, very good book, he meets her again three thousand pages or so down the line... The final words of the poem are of course Gilberte's, her invitation to the dance.
In 'A Privileged Moment' I love that astonishing line 'Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain' and of course his witness, against every intuition, that illness can have such moments of revelation and sublime joy.
Do let me know if you would like more of Lewis.
CHILDREN LEAVING HOME
Soon you'll be off to meet your full grown selves,
Freed from my guardianship to sweat out your own life sentence.
The house will be emptied of you,
For ever tie in time dissolves;
And you, once close to us like a whisper of blood, in due
Season return, if you will, as polite acquaintance.
What will you then remember? The lime that crowded
Your bedroom windows, shading the square rose-bed beneath -
All such everyday sights,
Hours by boredom or wrath enclouded,
Or those which burst like a rocket with red-letter delights
In a holiday sky- picnics, the fair on Blackheath?
I heard you last summer, crossing Ireland by road,
Ask the mother to re-tell episodes out of your past.
You gave them the rapt attention
A ballad-maker's audience owed
To fact caught up in fable. Through memory's dimension
The unlikeliest scene may be immortalised.
Forgive my coldnesses, now past recall,
Angers, injustice, moods contrary, mean or blind;
And best, my dears, forgive
Yourselves, when I am gone, for all
Love signals you ignored and for the fugitive
Openings you never took into my mind.
At that hour what shall I have to bequeath?
A sick world we could not change, a sack of genes
I did not choose, some verse
Long out of fashion....So prematurely our old age inters
Puny triumphs with poignant might-have-beens.
Soon you'll be leaving home, alone to face
Love's treacheries and transports. May these early years
Have shaped you to be whole,
To live unshielded from the rays
Which probe, enlighten and mature the human soul.
Go forth and make the best of it, my dears.
MY MÉSÉGLISE WAY
Always along that path hawthorn and lilac
Hedged a demesne
A bare arm's-length away, yet inaccessible
And coaxing in vain
Like the horizon. It was enough to part
The blossoms - eye could embrace
The glades, parterres, crystal-paned gazebos
Of a superior race.
Fountains play. A small girl walks where fidgety
Branches sieve
The sunlight: her shyness and delicate hauter show me
Original Eve.
One day there was a hole in the hedge. I crawl
Through it. The prospect blurs,
Then clears again, as unperturbed I accept an
Epiphany in revers-
A common and garden lawn, a hedge of privet
Not scented bloom:
The privileged scene, the sense of grandeur flown like
A drug-born dream.
Young ones in the dowdy garden happily
Tumble and chase. Cast
Is my skin of shrinking solitude when a girl
Cries 'So you've joined us at last!'
A PRIVILEGED MOMENT
Released from hospital, only half alive still,
Cautiously feeling the way back into himself,
Propped up in bed like a guy, he presently ventured
A glance at the ornaments on his mantelshelf.
White, Wedgwood blue, dark lilac coloured or ruby -
Things, you could could say, which had known their place and price,
Gleamed out at him with the urgency of angels
Eager for him to see through their disguise.
Slowly he turned his head. By gust-flung snatches
A shower announced itself on the windowpane:
He saw unquestioning, not even astonished,
Handfuls of diamonds sprung from a dazzling chain.
Gently at last the angels settled back now
Into mere ornaments, the unearthly sheen
And spill of diamond into familiar raindrops,
It was enough. He had seen what he had seen.
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| The first volume of 'In Search of Lost Time'. I also have the newer multi-author translation but the Moncrieff version is the one. It is also the one you get on Kindle. |
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