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 Cecil Day-Lewis (1904 – 1972) was an Anglo-Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972.  He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), he wrote "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results".

Cecil Day-Lewis has two contrasting claims on our attention. The first is as an archetypal poet of the 1930s, the first-born, last-named member of the Auden/Spender/Day-Lewis triad, and the only one of those three friends whose commitment to Marxism extended to joining and working for the Communist Party.

 His second claim to recognition, at least for literary historians, is as the poet laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. For critics and biographers, he poses the intriguing problem of reconciling the radical poet of the 1930s with the traditional poet of later decades.

The roots of Day-Lewis’s vocation and inhibitions as a poet lie in his childhood. He was born in Ireland of Anglo-Irish parents; the family name had originally been Day, but his grandfather added the surname of an uncle and called himself Day-Lewis. The poet’s inverted snobbery in dropping the hyphen in his name on his publications (beginning in 1927) has been a source of trouble for librarians and bibliographers ever since.

This poem is dedicated to Day-Lewis’s first son, Sean, and recalls a day when he was watching Sean go in to school.

WALKING AWAY - Cecil Day Lewis

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

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