English poet,
Celtic heartPeter Stanford on Cecil Day Lewis, the Poet Laureate who could never forget his Irish roots
Celtic heartPeter Stanford on Cecil Day Lewis, the Poet Laureate who could never forget his Irish roots
Whenever he was asked his nationality, Cecil Day-Lewis, British Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972, would unfailingly reply "Irish".
He told the anecdote with a smile. As well he might for, though he was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, then Queen's County, now Co Laois, he left Ireland when he was just two.
It was never again his home, though in later years he travelled back increasingly often, in the process passing his heart-felt attachment on to his children. The cookery writer, Tamasin Day-Lewis, today has a home near Louisburgh in Co Mayo, where she used to spend her childhood family holidays. And the Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis lives part of each year with his film director wife, Rebecca Miller, at their Georgian home in the Wicklow Mountains. It is within striking distance of Monart in neighbouring Wexford where his father would pass his own adolescent Augusts with his uncle, Willie Squires, the local Church of Ireland vicar.
In one sense, Day-Lewis was only following the essentially sentimental habit of many Anglo-Irish, once they were displaced to England and made redundant by Irish independence, of continuing to claim an allegiance that was more emotional than real.
The British Labour politician and prison reformer, Frank (Lord) Longford, for instance, wasn't even born in Ireland but, by virtue of the family seat being in Co Westmeath, carried an Irish passport even when travelling on Her Majesty's government business and used to cheer, from the Royal Box at Twickenham, for the Irish rugby team when they faced England.
Day-Lewis's connection had rather more substance. His father had been a Church of Ireland vicar but, unlike Willie Squires, crossed the Irish Sea to seek preferment in the Church of England.
As a poet, C Day-Lewis (as he always called himself in print) was aware of the dubious legacy of the Anglo-Irish and the hostility some felt towards the period of their ascendancy in Ireland.
We Anglo-Irish and the memory of us
Are thinning out. Bad landlords some, some good,
But never of a land rightfully ours.
We hunted, fished, swore by our ancestors,
Till we were ripped like parasite growth from native wood.
The Whispering Roots (1970)
For much of the first half of his life, however, he tended to follow his father's example in turning his back on Ireland. He made his name alongside W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (another son of a Church of Ireland cleric) as one of the radical 'poets of the thirties' who made headlines with their communist-influenced verse.
Even when he had lost faith in a red dawn, Ireland continued to figure little in his work as he enjoyed his greatest popular acclaim in the 1940s for poems inspired by his own divided heart between his first wife, the mother of his two older sons, and his glamorous lover, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann.
In 1950, however, his turbulent romantic life was turned upside down when he left both his wife and Lehmann and made a new life with the actress, Jill Balcon, 21 years his junior, who was to become his second wife.
Domestic bliss -- Tamasin arrived in 1953 and Daniel in 1957 -- and the advance of years prompted him to start looking back at his own childhood and roots.
In 1963, he had met, through Balcon, actor Sebastian Shaw, the current owner of the rectory of Ballintubbert where Day-Lewis had been born. It led to a trip back, described in a poem.
I walk through the unremembered house,
Note on the walls each stain
Of damp; then up the spacious stair
As if I would now retrace
My self to the room where it began.
Dust on fine furnishings,
A scent of wood ash - the whole house sings
With an elegiac air.
That visit was followed by what became an annual pilgrimage to the Old Head Hotel in Louisburgh, Co Mayo. In 1966, he was in Dublin to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. Meanwhile, when he spent a year as a visiting professor at Harvard in the United States, a fellow academic, expert in Irish studies, half convinced him that the Day-Lewis surname was not the result of the running together of two separate English names in the 19th century, but instead was an indication that he was in fact the descendant of the ancient O Deaghaidh clan of Co Clare.
It was a theory Day-Lewis liked to air in public but privately he gave it little credence.
His burgeoning interest in the land of his birth finally bore fruit in The Whispering Roots. Past and present came together to help him, by then grieviously ill, to face a future of ageing and death.
There was sentimentality in his evocation of childhood summer holidays in Golden Age, Monart, Co Wexford, and a nod in the direction of genuine ancestors in Goldsmith outside Trinity.
He even felt confident enough, despite his almost lifelong exile, to tackle Irish politics with Lament for Michael Collins, suggesting that the independence leader's legacy had been betrayed.
Though he always described himself as a 'churchy agnostic' who liked the sound of hymns and church bells, Day-Lewis had abandoned early the Christian faith of his upbringing.
When he died in 1972, he was buried in England but his last words on immortality were fittingly inspired by a visit to Mannin Bay in Connemara where he was struck by the flowers standing out against sea and sky.
Harebells, keep your arresting
Pose by the strand. I like
These gestures of the ephemeral
Against the everlasting.
