Only lately did I realize that this little book, now yellowed and stained, is my favorite. Alone yesterday at home, looking for something to read in the bathroom – yes, I’m one of those bathroom readers – I picked out this book again from the shelf. And so, one more time with feeling, I read the poems aloud, sitting in the toilet. Doesn’t make a pretty picture, I know. But I imagine it sounds good, the poetry reading I mean, what with the bathroom’s nice acoustics.
Cecil Day Lewis’ son Daniel is that fine actor from films like The Last of the Mohicans and In the Name of the Father. But Cecil was a respected figure in his time. A Lasting Joy was the last work he finished before his death of cancer in 1972. "This then was our swan song," writes his wife Jill Bacon in the foreword. And a fitting swan song it is. A small note from C. Day Lewis at the beginning of the book gives his motive for sharing the following collection of poems. "It is quite clear to me that poetry is one of the most durable of the products of the human mind and it is this lasting joy of poetry which we hope to convey..."
A Lasting Joy was not originally meant to be a book. In 1971, Cecil and his wife were commissioned by a BBC executive to present poetry on television. The idea of "using the latest means of communication to put over the oldest of arts," particularly appealed to Cecil. Still recovering from a major operation, he summoned up the strength to work on the project. At that time, among those he was working with, only Jill knew that he was dying of cancer, and had in fact been given "a possible year" to live. But they finally came up with a series of six programs, with each episode revolving around a single theme. The themes chosen were: "Childhood," "Human Heroism," "Satire and Hatred," "Love and Friendship," "Times and Seasons" and "Death and Immortality." Cecil did most of the readings. Jill says in the foreword that her husband had one of the most spell-binding voices she had ever heard. In the course of the filming, however, the ravages of the disease rendered him permanently parched and caused an occasional slurring in his speech. When he was too ill to go out, the television crew went to their home in Greenwich, filming the episode in the family’s sitting room. Meanwhile, Cecil would collapse from exhaustion between taping. He never did live to see the programs. After his death, the television series was transformed into a book. The editing was kept to a minimum. Thus, the book has this quite informal and conversational tone. The structure of presenting the poems according to theme was preserved.
What makes this anthology stand out? For me, it is first of all, in the way this dying man, C. Day Lewis, successfully shares the joy of poetry. As he introduces poem after poem, he sometimes gives me the impression of an old man, humbly and lovingly showing off a collection of rare treasures to a friend, gently now, one by one. To change metaphors, he knew just how to "set the table," to put each poem in its right setting with just a few simple remarks.
With his little comments, he gives a poem an emotional spring and makes you want to read it – aloud – and carefully, with feeling. Beginning the section on "Satire and Hatred," for example, he says: "Poets don’t spend all their time writing about nature or about love or legendary heroes. They can be very good haters and, having this supreme gift for words, they hate more articulately than anyone else..." then, with just a couple more sentences, he introduces the traditional ballad, The Brown Girl – a story-poem, Day Lewis says, "that makes my blood run absolutely cold." And thus you proceed to the ballad, with an idea of in what tone it is to be read. "I am as brown as brown can be..." The story of a girl whose beloved did not fancy her because of her brown skin. When the man dies, the brown girl sings:
"O never will I forget, forgive
So long as I have breath;
I’ll dance upon your green green grave
Where you do lie beneath."
And because of Day Lewis’ remark, you try to read the poem in a way that makes the blood run absolutely cold.
Day Lewis chose from familiar poems and familiar poets in this anthology, but he presents them in fresh ways, knowing how to make poem and poet appealing again. He chose 59 poems in all. William Wordsworth had three included. There’s a couple each from Robert Browning, Alexander Pope, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Tennyson and Shakespeare. One each from masters such as Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin. He chose several religious poets as well, like William Cowper and Henry Vaughan. He chose chapter 38 of Job from the Bible, conveying no cynicism in his introduction to the piece, but an understanding of what the passage really meant and an admiration for its "superb eloquence."
I appreciated the new poets and the new poems as well ("new" to me, at least). Day Lewis introduced me to that old Chinese poet Po Chu-i, who could write about sadness and loneliness in an unsentimental way. I didn’t know George Seferis, the Greek poet and Nobel Prize winner, before I read this volume. The same with C.P. Cavafy. I found unfamiliar grand poems like the one written by an Irish clergyman centuries ago, "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." It is a poem hailed even by Byron as the best of its kind. C. Day Lewis also blends in two of his poems into the volume, and they fit right in, beautifully. One is a poem about friendship and another is about the unconscious heroism of a child he had seen one night "in a shelter when death was taking the air." The child bravely nurses her doll, like a mother comforting her baby, as bombs exploded all around and all the adults quaked in fear.
"Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."– from "Ulysses" by Alfred Lord Tennyson
In this book, Day Lewis assumes the role of a sympathetic comrade. After reading another poem, this time Coleridge’s "Dejection: An Ode," for instance, you can easily imagine Day Lewis putting a friendly arm around you, conversing with you and singling out the very same words that struck you and gripped you, when–as the poet contemplates the grand beauty of nature–he says:
"I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!"
"...That simple line," Day Lewis remarks, carries "a tremendous depth of poignancy."
I am not a poet, and frankly I am sometimes quite slow at comprehending even the best of poems. But being a firm believer in the power of words and in the beauty of it, I am troubled to find less and less of the people I am acquainted with inclined at all to appreciating poetry. When I read, from the last pages of this volume, that Shakespeare sonnet which ends,
"So long as men can breath, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
– referring to how his loved one can live on through the immortal lines of poetry, I cannot help but ask: how can it live on, if the time comes when no one cares to read such things anymore?
From this standpoint, I am led to admire more C. Day Lewis’ work here in this book. Cancer, cracking voice and all – but still laboring to pass on this "lasting joy to a generation reared on TV, fast food and increasing illiteracy. He died just after completing the segment on "Death and Immortality." Of course, one of the poems he included there was Dylan Thomas’ "Do not go gentle into that good night." But in the end, he seems to say that it’s okay to go gently and gracefully. He chose Shakespeare to end the book. "And to close with a dying fall," he says to introduce this last poem, "the incomparably gentle, incomparably accepting tones of "Fear no more the heat o’ the sun":
"Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages."