Poetic Breadwinner

Apart from their rank in the royal household (just above St. James's Palace caretaker) and their pay ($232.80 a year), the most modest thing about Britain's poets laureate has been their state poetry. In the age of the Hollow Man, task-basket verse celebrating a monarch's birthday or the puberty of a prince sounds at best archaic, at worst ludicrous. When, after 37 years as poet laureate, John Masefield died last May, many Britons thought that the job should be abolished. Even London's Times, which occasionally prints official poems, only halfheartedly urged that the post be filled because "it does no harm and may, who knows, do good."

Last week Cecil Day-Lewis, 63, a former Oxford professor known to the public as much for his 19 competent whodunits (under his pseudonym, Nicholas Blake) as for his poetry, became Britain's 18th poet laureate. And who knows? The pen of a still vigorous, thoughtful contemporary could turn a new page in Britain's national poetry--or scratch its final, deadening quatrain. The rangy, resonant-voiced Day-Lewis (who has only lately begun hyphenating his two surnames), seemed determined to broaden the scope of his office.

His first effort was a stouthearted call for Britons to join the spirit of the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign:

To work then, islanders, as men

and women

Members one of another,

looking beyond

Mean rules and rivalries towards the

dream you could

Make real, of glory, common wealth,

and home.

Future-Fan. That maiden attempt, though not terribly encouraging, was an echo from three decades ago, when Day-Lewis and the rest of the famous Oxford circle (W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender) rumbled with even louder social comment. Like other "horizon-addicts and future-fans" of his time, Day-Lewis, in rebellion against his strict curate father, flirted briefly with Communism; he now recalls his stint as a party educator as "a signal instance of the blind leading the shortsighted." Protest verse did not sell, however, until a chance compliment from T. E. Lawrence was printed in a newspaper column; it caused a run on his first three books. His 20 poetry volumes since then have all sold well.

The real breadwinner, of course, is his alter ego, Nicholas Blake, creator of Nigel Strangeways and other shrewd detective heroes, who was himself created in 1935 to finance a repaired roof over the Day-Lewis home at Cheltenham. Day-Lewis has kept increasingly comfortable ones overhead ever since, including the 18th century home in Greenwich, where he now lives with his second wife and their two children.

Elegiac Worst. With the onset of World War II, "the smouldering heart, the seamless brow" of the youthful Day-Lewis began a slow, often painful search for order--a quest that some critics fear may have put his "less Dionysiac" verse at the Establishment's doorstep. Yet the best of his lyrical and narrative poems display a trim, controlled power:

The river this November afternoon

Rests in an equipoise of sun

and cloud:

A glooming light, a gleaming

darkness shroud

Its passage. All seems tranquil,

all in tune.

Unfortunately, elegiac verse, seemingly a ceremonial necessity for poets laureate, does not seem to be his forte. His unofficial effort on the death of Winston Churchill laments that "the route was difficult, and the peak remote" for "the young fox-haired firebrand of debate." That verse won the Times Literary Supplement's nomination for 1965's worst poem. Several years ago, however, Day-Lewis took a step that should prove enormously helpful. As he relates in his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), he refuses to subscribe to a press-clipping service.

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