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.