Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish-born
poet, as well as Poet Laureate for Britain between 1968 to 1972, and,
under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, a mystery writer.
He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and television actress
Tamasin Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, Laois, Ireland.
He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December, 1872 –
19 April 1938) 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 Irish Republic 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.
In 1928 he married Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master
(i.e. teacher), and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools. During
the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist
Rosamund Lehmann. His second marriage was to actress Jill Balcon.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the
Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in
his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell's
experience of the BBC. After the war, he joined publisher Chatto &
Windus as a director and senior editor.
In 1946, Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing
his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947). In 1951, he married the actress
Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. He later taught poetry at
Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956.
Day-Lewis's two marriages yielded five children, including Academy
Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin
Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a
biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).
He also had a son (possibly two) by a farmer's wife in Dorset in the
early 1940s: they were brought up as the children of their mother's
legal husband.
He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John
Masefield. Day-Lewis was also chairman of the Arts Council Literature
Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the
Irish Academy of Letters and a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College,
London. Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on May 22, 1972, in the
Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he
and his wife were staying.
He was a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, and he had arranged to be
buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford
churchyard. His epitaph reads: "Shall I be gone long? / For ever and a
day / To whom there belong? / Ask the stone to say / Ask my song"
Source: Wikipedia
THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN
An elegant, shabby, white-washed house
With a slate roof. Two rows
Of tall sash windows. Below the porch at the foot of
The steps, my father, posed
In his pony trap and round clerical hat.
This is all the photograph shows.
No one is left alive to tell me
In which of those rooms I was born,
Or what my mother could see, looking out one April
Morning, her agony done,
Or if there were pigeons to answer my cooings
>From that tree to the left of the lawn.
Elegant house, how well you speak
For the one who fathered me there,
With your sanguine face, your moody provincial charm
And that Anglo-Irish air
Of living beyond one's means to keep up
An era beyond repair.
Reticent house in the far Queen's County,
How much you leave unsaid.
Not a ghost of a hint appears at your placid windows
That she, so youthfully wed,
Who bore me, would move elsewhere very soon
And in four years be dead.
--------------------
Cecil Day-Lewis, late Poet Laureate of England.
Sent in by M. Purcell c2008
