Cecil Day Lewis Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

Hurry! We burn
For Rome so near us, for the Phoenix moment
When we have thrown off this traveller's trance,
And mother-naked and ageless-ancient
Wake in her warm nest of renaissance.

Cecil Day Lewis
Science is concerned with finding out and stating the facts: poetry's task is to give you the look, the smell, the taste, the "feel" of those facts.

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
They say that a mathematician Once fell to such a passion For x and y, he locked His door to keep outside Whatever might distract Him from his heavenly bride: And presently died In the keenest of blisses With a dozen untasted dishes Outside his door.

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
Science too, is always making expeditions into the unknown. But this does not mean that science can supersede poetry. For poetry enlightens us in a different way from science; it speaks directly to our feelings or imagination.

Cecil Day Lewis
With me, my lover makes
The clock assert its chime:
But when she goes, she takes
The mainspring out of time.

Cecil Day Lewis
I went to school with a glee of dolphins
Bowling their hoops round the brine tongued isles.

Cecil Day Lewis
It's hard to believe a spirit could die
Of such generous glow

Cecil Day Lewis
Do not expect again the phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove's complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and heart's first ease
Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.

Cecil Day Lewis
And when the Treaty emptied the British jails,
A haggard woman returned and Dublin went wild to greet her.
But still it was not enough: an iota
Of compromise, she cried, and the Cause fails.

Cecil Day Lewis
Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way

Cecil Day Lewis
Tempt me no more, for I
Have known the lightning's hour,
The poet's inward pride,
The certainty of power.

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

Cecil Day Lewis
Put out the lights now!
Look at the Tree, the rough tree dazzled
In oriole plumes of flame,
Tinselled with twinkling frost fire, tasselled
With stars and moons

Cecil Day Lewis
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 Jove is proved in the letting go.

Cecil Day Lewis
Who will say farewell?
The beating bell.
Will anyone miss me?
That I dare not tell —
Quick, Rose, and kiss me.

Cecil Day Lewis
Desire is a witch
And runs against the clock.
It can unstitich
The decent hem
Where space tacks on to time;
It can unlock
Pandora's privacies.

Cecil Day Lewis
Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say
Ask my song.

Cecil Day Lewis
Every good poem, in fact, is a bridge built from the known, familiar side of life over into the unknown.

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

Cecil Day Lewis
Eye of the wind, whose bearing in
A changeful sky the sage
Birds are never wrong about
And mariners must gauge.

Cecil Day Lewis
So feast your eyes now
On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen

Cecil Day Lewis
Tell them in England, if they ask
What brought us to these wars,
To this plateau beneath the night's
Grave manifold of stars—
It was not fraud or foolishness,
Glory, revenge, or pay:
We came because our open eyes
Could see no other way.

Cecil Day Lewis
You that love England, who have an ear for her music,
The slow movement of clouds in benediction,
Clear arias of light thrilling over her uplands,
Over the chords of summer sustained peacefully.

Cecil Day Lewis
It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

Cecil Day Lewis
We'd like to fight but we fear defeat,
We'd like to work but we're feeling too weak,
We'd like to be sick but we'd get the sack,
We'd like to behave, we'd like to believe,
We'd like to love, but we've lost the knack.

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