BODY, HEART AND MIND
AN ITALIAN VISIT, by C. Day Lewis; Jonathan Cape. English price, 7/6. MONG the poets of the thirties, Cecil Day Lewis was remarkable for a dry metaphysical wit and a strong sense of formal structure-this latter being in itself no guarantee of first-rate poetry, yet an indispensable aid in the writing of narrative verse. His narrative poem on an incident of the Spanish War, the fight of the Nabara, passes the test of heroic evocation for one reader, who is rarely able to read it and refrain from tears. With time his verse has become more meditative. He has learnt much from the irregular metres and stoic agnosticism of Hardy. This-new poem is a hybrid-verse journal, narrative, philosophical discourse. In it he makes use of his peculiar gifts of irony and sensuous observation; and under all the groundswell of Romantic nostalgia. His verse is intellectually too controlled to allow often an unpremeditated lyric strength; but this control gives him his staying power. What other poet would have described five Florentine works of art in five remarkable parodies of Hardy, Yeats, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and. Dylan Thomas?--or could have, satisfactorily? True, some are less parody than genuine imitation; and hence all the more remarkable. In the first and last sections of An Italian Visit, the three-travellers-in-one, Tom, Dick and Harry (that is, Body, Heart and Mind) analyse in their respective terms the quality of their mutual ;experience. For Day Lewis, as is s n his *superb "Elegy Before Death" (the sixth ‘section of the poem) it finds its focus in romantic sexual love; or rather,*that love rectifies and replenishes the arid mind- op But "love is "all," She says; and the mortal scene of planets and _ tides, ; Animals,> grass and men is transformed, proved, steadied around me . . . until- . ‘ . . + upon each hill, ; Vine and olive hold the archaic pose: Below, the bubble dome looks everlasting As heaven’s womb, and threading the eyes of bridges Arno endlessly into the loom of oblivion flows. Yet he retains inevitably the Romantic paradox: "Always?--That is the song. the sirens sing on bone island." One ¢an ask no. more of that particular vision. An Italian Visit is an uneven poem, yet through its wit and variety, successful as a whole. It contains some of the best poetry that Day Lewis has
ever written.
James K.
Baxter
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 13
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395BODY, HEART AND MIND New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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