Cecil Day-Lewis Quotes

#1. A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born ... in poetry.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#2. A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#3. 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

#4. High sprits they had: gravity they flouted.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#5. We who fly do so for the love of flying. We are alive in the air with this miracle that lies in our hands and beneath our feet.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#6. First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#7. Flying alone! Nothing gives such a sense of mastery over time over mechanism, mastery indeed over space, time, and life itself, as this.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#8. 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

#9. In June we picked the clover,
And sea-shells in July:
There was no silence at the door,
No word from the sky.

A hand came out of August
And flicked his life away:
We had not time to bargain, mope,
Moralize, or pray.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#10. The river this November afternoon
Rests in an equipoise of sun and cloud:
A glooming light, a gleaming darkness shroud
Its passage. All seems tranquil, all in tune.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#11. There's a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#12. See this abdicated beast, once king
Of them all, nibble his claws:
Not anger enough left - no, nor despair -
To break his teeth on the bars.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#13. The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#14. Selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in letting go.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#15. When bullying April bruised mine eyes
With sleet-bound appetites and crude
Experiments of green, I still was wise
And kissed the blossoming rod.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#16. Love is proved in the letting go.

Cecil Day-Lewis

#17. Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way,
With tall moon-daisies alight, and the mole
Busy, and elegant hares at play
By meadow paths where once you would stroll
In the flush of day?

Cecil Day-Lewis