An Italian Visit

By C. Day Lewis

In this work, first published in 1953, C. Day Lewis, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, chooses a form that enables his various gifts to be displayed to advantage and to sustain rapt interest in a poem longer than convention now favours.

It is a poem in seven parts: 'Dialogue at the Airport'; 'Flight to Italy'; 'A Letter from Rome'; 'Bus to Florence'; 'Florence: Works of Art'; 'Elegy Before Death: at Settignano'; 'The Homeward Prospect'. The whole resembles a suite in music; various metres are used, and each part is self-contained, though all are on the same subject - a journey to and in Italy. The poet has used his first impressions of the country to illustrate certain deeper themes indicated by the epigraph: '... an Italian visit is a voyage of discovery, not only of scenes and cities, but also of the latent faculties of the traveller's heart and mind.'

If anybody has had the slightest doubt about Mr. Day Lewis's ability to practice what he professes so eloquently and vigorously in his lectures, An Italian Visit should be convincing proof that its author is a poet in the full and splendid exercise of his powers.' Eric Gillett in the National Review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448203505

C. Day Lewis

Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (27 April 1904 - 22 May 1972) was a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.

Book preview

I. Dialogue at the Airport

TOM So here we are, we three, bound on a new experience.

DICK Three persons in one man, bound for the Eternal City.

HARRY We’re not as young as we were, but Italy’s some years older.

TOM Listen, I don’t much fancy antiques myself; we’ve had some.

Ruins fetch nothing today. The Forum, the Farringdon Market,

The Colosseum, Hiroshima - death’s death, however you look at it,

However composed the remains. Time enough for such bric-a-brac when

My silver cord is loosed, my arches are fallen. Oh no, if It’s ruins you’re after, we’ll soon be parting company.

DICK Wait!

There are ruins and ruins. Some mature their memories, feed them

On seeding love-spores blown from age to age 5 or it may be Their ghosts fly back like a silver skein of doves when the crash

Of the fall that tumbled them out has died away. It is these ghosts

I’m going to look for.

HARRY You think so. But I don’t think you will find them.

The only ghosts I believe in are the dangerous self detachments

We leave behind in places captured or captivating: Garrisons, call them, or hostages - wiped out soon enough, most of them,

Yet here and there a hardier self lives on to haunt us With the old riddle, what is the phantom, what the real. Temple, aqueduct, belvedere, projects fulfilled or abandoned —

Multiform are the ruins, but the ghosts are always the same ghost.

TOM We’d better leave you behind, then, to the desk, the queue and the rush-hour,

Men and women straphanging like clusters of bats, the bodies

That jostle and never touch, the eyes without speculation But for tomorrow’s headline or deadline; leave you behind With all the white-faced addicts of a patent, cellophaned future.

London’s the place for ghosts, if ghosts are invalid monads. And for God’s sake, Harry, don’t tell us a crowd is always the same crowd.

DICK What are we leaving behind, though? The identity cards that inform us

Not who we are or might be, but how we are interchangeable;

The season tickets that rattle us back and forth in a groove from

Centre to circumference, from dust to dust; the ration books

Entitling each to his cut of the communal mess and heartburn.

The fog, the slush, the slogans.

HARRY Italy will provide

The same slogans, no doubt, but at least in another language.

TOM No doubt in another language escapism may sound more attractive.

DICK Well, it’s a holiday, isn’t it? Even Harry can take a holiday.

HARRY I have omitted to pack my Kierkegaard, Marx and Groddeck.

My angst I can only hope they will confiscate at the Customs.

TOM I am too old to suppose new facts give new sensations:

Still, like shadows, our senses revive on a shot of sunshine. One would go far to feel their primitive dance again

DICK Far from the heart’s last ditch, the stand on private relationships

HARRY Far from the mind’s closed shop and the intellectual weeklies.

TOM So here we are, we three, off for a fortnight’s holiday,

Our fingers already reaching out to the treat before us

DICK Like a child’s on Christmas Eve who, visioning the dear morrow

Spangled with expectation, would whip time faster and faster,

And at last whips himself into a humming sleep.

HARRY Travel ought to be sleep-I mean, we should move oblivious

To the interspace between here and there. We’ve only a limited

Stock of attention, and this we had better not spend on wayside

Sirens who’d make us break our journey or regret not breaking it.

TOM If he means what I think he means, I am not to look out of the window.

DICK There’s something in what he says, though the motive’s unsound, as usual.

Could the zone between here and there be instead a kind of hiatus,

Heart would be spared the throes of departure