This is the last poem that Day-Lewis wrote.
it was composed on his death bed in the spring of 1972 at Lemmons, the large north London home of his friends Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, her brother Colin and Sargy Mann, the painter.
Day-Lewis was officially recuperating there, with his family around him, after a period of poor health, the press was informed.
On doctors’ orders he was never told that he was dying of cancer.
Later Amis was to write: ‘At no time did Cecil mention death. My own strong feeling is that he came to draw his own conclusions from his physical decline and increasingly severe – though happily intermittent – bouts of pain, but, out of kindness and abnegation of self, chose not to discuss the matter’.
AT LEMMONS
Above my table three magnolia flowers
Utter their silent requiems.
Through the window I see your elms
In labour with the racking storm
Giving it shape in April’s shifty airs.
Up there sky boils from a brew of cloud
To blue gleam, sunblast, then darkens again.
No respite is allowed
The watching eye, the natural agony.
Below is the calm a loved house breeds
Where four have come together to dwell-
Two write, one paints, the fourth invents -
Each pursuing a natural bent
But less through nature’s formative travail
Than each in his own humour finding the self he needs.
Round me all is amenity, a bloom of
Magnolia uttering its requiems,
A climate of acceptance. Very well
I accept my weakness with my friends’
Good natures sweetening each day my sick room.
C. Day-Lewis
jollyweez
How beautiful his last words. Then that wonderful brain was no more. What a terrible waste. When I was a young woman, I had an idea that in 20 or so years time the brains of brilliant leaders and composers etc., could be transferred to a computer. This way they would still create or advise.
The brain makes the man - (or does it?) The brain can also be a monster! I did read a lot of Science Fiction in my teens! Lots of food for thought.
Anyway, it is a shame not to have C.Day Lewis around anymore.