A Carol
Oh hush thee, my baby,
Thy cradle’s in pawn:
No blankets to cover thee
Cold and forlorn.
The stars in the bright sky
Look down and are dumb
At the heir of the ages
Asleep in a slum.
Thy cradle’s in pawn:
No blankets to cover thee
Cold and forlorn.
The stars in the bright sky
Look down and are dumb
At the heir of the ages
Asleep in a slum.
The hooters are blowing,
No heed let him take;
When baby is hungry
‘Tis best not to wake.
Thy mother is crying,
Thy dad’s on the dole:
Two shillings a week is
The price of a soul.
No heed let him take;
When baby is hungry
‘Tis best not to wake.
Thy mother is crying,
Thy dad’s on the dole:
Two shillings a week is
The price of a soul.
Cecil Day-Lewis (1904 – 1972)
Life and work
Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland.[2] He was the son of Frank Day-Lewis (died 29 July 1937),[3][4] Church of Ireland Rector of that parish, and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906).[5] Some of his family were from England (Hertfordshire and Canterbury). His father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's ("Day") and adoptive father's ("Lewis") surnames.[6] In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results".[7]After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.[8]
In 1928 Day-Lewis married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne teacher. Day-Lewis worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School, Helensburgh, Scotland (now Lomond School).[8][9] During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. His first marriage was dissolved in 1951, and he married actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael 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. During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden.[10] After the war he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor.
see more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Day-Lewis
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