There are quite a lot of poems by C Day Lewis in my commonplace books, mostly the more personal ones about relationships
This one longs for a return to something like hero worship, & has an epigraph from AN Whitehead, another favourite
Moral
“Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness” A N Whitehead
Saints & heroes, you dare say,
Like unicorns, have had their day.
Unlaurel the compulsive tough!
All pierced feet are feet of clay.
Envy - & paucity – of what
Men lived by to enlarge their lot,
Diminishing your share in them,
Downgrade you & not the great.
The saint falls down, the hero’s treed
Often, we know it. Still we need
The vision that keeps burning from
Saintly trust, heroic deed.
Accept the flawed self, but aspire
To flights beyond it: wiser far
Lifting our eyes unto the hills
Than lowering them to sift the mire
That comes from C Day Lewis collection ‘The Room & Other Poems’ published in 1965, so just after the beginning of the age of television satire & aggressive interviewing. Now that we have had the misery memoir as well, it is high time we got back to a bit of innocent hero worship
