“poetry is not—except in a very limited sense—a form of self-expression. Who on earth supposes that the pearl expresses the oyster?”
O Dreams, O Destinations
Sonnet 1
by Cecil Day Lewis
For infants time is like a humming shell
Heard between sleep and sleep, wherein the shores
Foam-fringed, wind-fluted of the strange earth dwell
And the sea’s cavernous hunger faintly roars.
It is the humming pole of summer lanes
Whose sound quivers like heat-haze endlessly
Over the corn, over the poppied plains —
An emanation from the earth or sky.
Faintly they hear, through the womb’s lingering haze,
A rumour of that sea to which they are born:
They hear the ringing pole of summer days,
But need not know what hungers for the corn.
They are the lisping rushes in a stream —
Grace-notes of a profound, legato dream
In the last blog I ended with the question that arose from James Baldwin’s poem The Giver; does an artist give up something integral of themselves in giving their art to the world? I didn’t write it at the time, but what was also in my mind is does the same hold true of parents with their children and children with their parents? The greatest act of giving that we can provide to each other is to embrace independence, a belief that our greatest achievements are gifted to the world. But Cecil Day-Lewis’ quote above is equally true. Our children are not an expression of their parents, they are entirely of their own wonderful creation, we only provide a thin shell of protection along the way, their real beauty of their own volition.
March is coming in like a lion, a cold lion in Minneapolis. It’s -9 F this morning, but the sun is shining and the snow is beautiful. Ice dams decorate every 1950’s era home in my neighborhood and despite the inconvenience of needing to warm up the car before heading out it’s awfully pretty in this big wintry world I live in. I refuse to grumble about the snow and cold as I sleep most contentedly when its this chilly in a drafty old house next to my beautifully warm partner, our bodies naturally needing the touch of the other in the night beneath the covers. I think therapists should send feuding spouses to sleep in old farm houses in Minnesota as touch therapy as they would settle their differences pretty quickly in search of heat in the other’s arms. If I could sleep every night in winter with my partner, I would get a much better nights sleep all the year round.
Enjoy this brisk Sunday and let your pearls out, whatever they maybe, to roll around freely to catch the sun in all their glory.
Walking Away
by Cecil Day Lewis
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
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 love is proved in the letting go.
Fourteen Lines 
I think you may have misunderstood the circumstances of this “letting go”. Day-Lewis is abandoning his son Séan, just 7 years old, to the mercies of a boarding school (Allhallows prep School in Somerset) – which is nothing more than socially-approved child abuse.
Those final 2 sentences are particularly revealing.
“I have had worse partings, but none that so / Gnaws at my mind still.”
Presumably some partings were worse because the other person died, and some might have been worse because the other person had decided to end the relationship. But Day-Lewis knew, but can’t admit even to himself, that this parting was a violent, unforgivable betrayal. It gnaws at his mind.
Then he trots out his excuse, his attempt to expunge his guilt at that betrayal by pretending that dumping a child in a boarding school is proof of love. That really is horrible. Letting a child go when the child is ready to go is one thing. Throwing them tender to the sharks is another.
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May I ask how you know that this is the setting for the poem? The last two lines don’t seem to support this interpretation:
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
I think it is abut allowing your child to be independent and how hard it is for the parent to let the child go, not to be needed as much.
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I don’t believe there is one way to interpret a poem. Any commentary I provide is just how a poem struck me. You are encouraged to see everything and read every poem through your own lens and have it move you in any way you choose. Thanks for asking!
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