There's a certain (understandable) amount of family rancour visible there, given that his second wife, actress Jill Balcon, was a considerably more glamorous figure, and it was the children of this match who achieved fame.īe that as it may, it's a competently written book, by a well-known journalist, and fleshes out the information in his father's own more impressionistic account. The standard life was written by Sean, one of two sons by Day-Lewis's first marriage - to Constance Mary King. When it comes to biographies, the situation is a little more complex. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980) Housman's ' Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries': This is the Macspaunday side of Day-Lewis: Marxist on the surface but Georgian underneath.Īnd here, a few years later, from Word Over All (1943), is a lyric which could easily find a place alongside A. The Auden influence is still apparent here: the somewhat heavy-handed politics combined with an undeniable lyric precision. Rags of children and thunder of stone niagaras tumbling, One night into a strangling air and the flung Grow nearer home - and out of the dream-house stumbling To plant death in your world's soft womb.įire-bud, smoke-blossom, iron seed projected -Īre these exotics? They will grow nearer home!

See the big guns, rising, groping, erected These silver shadows - to trouble your watery, womb-deep sleep? In the low power-dive, like gannets they fall steep. Oh, look at the warplanes! Screaming hysteric treble In fishing-waders to prove that all is well. There is the mayor opening the oyster season:Ī society wedding: the autumn hats look swell:

Sick shapes and pregnant fancies of your world. Sleep-walking on that silver wall, the furious

Nose without envy the glass wall: for themĬlerk, spy, nurse, killer, prince, the great and the defeated,īathed in this common source, you gape incurious This is the home for heroes, and this loving Your debts asleep, your history at the door: And, speaking of early poems, here's one from his 1938 book Overtures to Death, published - like MacNeice's Autumn Journal - under the shadow of Munich and Chamberlain's promise of 'peace in our time':Įnter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, leaving

The Widow's Cruise by Nicholas Blake