Laurie Lee Selected Poems

By Laurie Lee

Lee’s first love was always poetry, though he was only moderately successful as a poet. Lee’s first poem appeared in The Sunday Referee in 1934. Another poem was published in Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine in 1940 and his first volume of poems, The Sun My Monument, was launched in 1944. This was followed by The Bloom of Candles (1947) and My Many-coated Man (1955). Several poems written in the early 1940s reflect the atmosphere of the war, but also capture the beauty of the English countryside. The poem “Twelfth Night” from My Many-coated Man was set for unaccompanied mixed choir by American composer Samuel Barber in 1968.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unicorn Press
• Release date: Apr 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910065266

Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) was an English memoirist, poet, and painter. Raised in the village of Slad in the Cotswolds, Lee walked to London at the age of nineteen and from there traveled on foot through Spain. In the winter of 1937 he returned to Spain, crossing the Pyrenees in the middle of a snowstorm and joining the International Brigade in the fight against fascism. In his autobiographical trilogy—the bestselling Cider with Rosie (1959), As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969), and A Moment of War (1991)—Lee vividly recounts his childhood and early journeys. His other acclaimed works include four volumes of poetry and the travel memoir A Rose for Winter (1955).

Book preview

L.L.

Invasion Summer

The evening, the heather,

the unsecretive cuckoo

and butterflies in their disorder,

not a word of war as we lie

our mouths in a hot nest

and the flowers advancing.

Does a hill defend itself,

does a river run to earth

to hide its quaint neutrality?

A boy is shot with England in his brain,

but she lies brazen yet beneath the sun,

she has no honour and she has no fear.

A Moment of War

It is night like a red rag

drawn across the eyes

the flesh is bitterly pinned

to desperate vigilance

the blood is stuttering with fear.

O praise the security of worms

in cool crumbs of soil

flatter the hidden sap

and the lost unfertilized spawn of fish!

The hands melt with weakness

into the gun’s hot iron

the body melts with pity

the face is braced for wounds

the odour and the kiss of final pain.

O envy the peace of women

giving birth and love like toys

into the hands of men!

The mouth chatters with pale curses

the bowels struggle like a nest of rats

the feet wish they were grass

spaced quietly.

O Christ and Mother!

But darkness opens like a knife for you

and you are marked down by your pulsing brain

and isolated

and your breathing,

your breathing is the blast, the bullet,

and the final sky.

Spanish frontier, 1937

Words Asleep

Now I am still and spent

and lie in a whited sepulchre

breathing dead

but there will be

no lifting of the damp swathes

no return of blood

no rolling away the stone

till the cocks carve sharp

gold scars in the morning

and carry the stirring sun

and early dust to my ears.

Andalucía

Music in a Spanish Town

In the street I take my stand

with my fiddle like a gun against my shoulder,

and the hot strings under my trigger hand

shooting an old dance at the evening walls.

Each saltwhite house is a numbered tomb

each silent window crossed

Reviews for Laurie Lee Selected Poems

[michael5rimmer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a selection from Lee's earlier poetry. There are a number of war poems, written at the time Lee was in Spain during the civil war, though there are many other poems about nature, life, love, sex and, which Lee does so well, about childhood and lost time.Some of the lines put me in mind of Keats, which initially I put down to my having read a lot of his poetry recently. Still, Lee's "Drowsed but not drowned" does remind me of Keats' "For shade to shade will come too drowsily, and drown the wakeful anguish of the soul" (respectively, The Easter Green and On Melancholy). There are other turns of phrase and meter, too, which make me think I'm not wholly deluded in the comparison.In summary, evocative poems which make me want to explore further his later works.