Keith Douglas Redivivus

'Ted did a beautiful [BBC] programme on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us. His death is really a terrible blow and we are trying to resurrect his image and poems...'—Sylvia Plath to her mother, 7 June 1962.

24 January is Keith Douglas's birthday. He would have been 92 today, had he survived the War. His work has meant at least as much to me as that of any other modern poet. I began Modern English War Poetry with the sole objective of honouring his achievement. And although poems about poets are not to be encouraged, I had to write a poem about him. If you aren't familiar with his work, start with the poems, then read that wonder among war memoirs, Alamein to Zem Zem.

What if? By the age of 24, Douglas had already written some of the finest lyrics. Is there a more honest war poem than 'Vergissmeinnicht'? A more brutal description of battlefield detritus than 'Cairo Jag'? A better animal poem than 'The Marvel' or 'The Sea Bird'? Contrast what his near-contemporary, Philip Larkin, had managed at that age. Douglas is the great lost poet of his century.

Keith Douglas: 'Vergissmeinnicht'

The best blog for scholarly discussion of poetry is The Era of Casual Fridays. Its attention to what John Hollander has called 'the minute particulars of particular poems and...the great particularities of particular poets' is forensic in breadth and detail. The blog's author, Mark Richardson, has made his reputation as a scholar and editor of Robert Frost, but Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, and Hardy also feature prominently in his canon.

Richardson's latest blogpost considers the use of rhyme in Byron's 'She Walks in Beauty' and three heavily anthologised poems of the Great War: Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (about which I have already had my say) and Sassoon's 'Base Details' and 'Blighters'. Directly or indirectly, Richardson's arguments about rhyme follow in the tradition of W. K. Wimsatt's classic essay (which you will probably need to access via a university network.) However, I like his distinction between 'conjunctive' and 'disjunctive' rhymes. Our brains seem ready to assume that words which rhyme also have semantic connections, which is why Byron's counter-intuitive rhyme 'Aristotle' / 'bottle' works to such comic effect. Richardson points out other disjunctive rhymes in Owen and Sassoon, such as the macaronic rhyme 'glory' / 'mori'. That is a complicated example, because in another sense the rhyme may be conjunctive after all: the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And maybe, just maybe, death is battle can be glorious, as most war literature through the ages has insisted.

Although Richardson focuses on full rhymes, a related issue concerns the conjunction or disjunction (harmony or disharmony, consonance or dissonance) of sounds in rhyme. When Owen rhymes 'escaped' with 'scooped', 'groined' with 'groaned', he is inventing what Edmund Blunden definitively termed 'pararhyme'. The exam-hall response to Owen's pararhymes---that they are a strategy for jarring and unsettling the reader---is no less true for being a truism. I suspect that a computer with a good ear would discover that war poetry has a disproportionate number of pararhymes, slant rhymes and off-rhymes of one sort or another.

One problem with pararhyme is that it can relax into predictability. In those poems where he pararhymes at all, Owen pararhymes consistently throughout. Keith Douglas, the grateful inheritor of Owen's experimentation, demonstrates how much can be achieved by using different kinds of rhyme unexpectedly.

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

This is Owen's 'Strange Meeting' replayed for a more brutal and certainly less conciliatory scene, in which the only tears shed are those of a girlfriend who 'would weep to see' what she will, in fact, never see: pity and voyeuristic fantasy become inseparable. 'Look', commands the living soldier; he takes pleasure in wanting the reader, as well as Steffi, to witness what he has done on our behalf, and to linger over the details. If we refuse the challenge and turn away squeamishly, we are hypocrites. But by looking, we take part in the dishonouring of Steffi's photograph: women have always been a 'spoil' of war, and here she is mercilessly despoiled while the erect machinery mocks her lover's 'decay'. 'Decay' has overtones of detumescence---coming as it does from the Old French decheoir with its implications of falling, weakening, declining. The dead soldier's 'equipment' may be 'hard and good', but his equipment (wink, wink!) will never be hard and good again. Owen's 'Strange Meeting' had ended with enemies befriended and lying down together; Douglas's strange meeting celebrates the continuing potency of the living who laud it sexually over the dead.

Owen invites us to pity; how is Douglas inviting us to feel? If 'Vergissmeinnicht' is, as I believe, one of the greatest lyrics of its century, it is because it discomforts so profoundly. As readers, we never feel assured in our response; we never feel trustful of the speaker's attitudes or intentions. The poem steadfastly refuses to settle into a formal or tonal pattern, its rhymes constantly disconcerting but never becoming predictable. So what sounds initially as if it might reproduce the stanza of In Memoriam---fittingly for a well-behaved elegy of the kind that this turns out not to be---marks its resistance with the slant rhyme 'gone' / 'sun'. A stanza break appears to augur a fresh pattern, but 'gun' / 'on' / 'one' / 'demon' clash amongst themselves and look back to the previous stanza. Eight lines into the poem, and having already encountered pararhyme, slant rhyme and full rhyme, the reader still has no idea of the rules. And so it goes on, with that horrible conjunctive slant rhyme, 'spoil' / 'girl', and a macaronic rhyme of which Owen would be proud: 'Vergissmeinnicht' / 'script'. A poem which can rhyme on 'Vergissmeinnicht' (forget-me-not) is slyly aware that rhyme is itself an act of memory and recall, a repetition-with-variation. What makes Douglas's rhyming powerful is that the variations are themselves so various.

The final stanza contains a feminine rhyme ('mingled' / 'singled') and a pararhyme ('heart' / 'hurt'). In Richardson's terms, 'mingled' and 'singled' are disjunctive: to mingle is to do something like the opposite of 'singl[ing]'. By contrast, 'heart' and 'hurt' go straight to the point, because this is a romantic tragedy in which Steffi has already been imagined broken-hearted. But these chivalric tones are jeering, not respectful: the inversion of 'soldier singled', the lover's 'mortal hurt'---such orotund pronouncements, pumped full of their own afflatus, relish absurdity. What power the living are seen to wield: they can even turn the dead soldier's epitaph into travesty.

War Poetry during Remembrancetide 2010

Please click on the links below. The BBC links will only work for a few more days, and may not be accessible outside the UK. If I missed anything worthwhile, do add it to the comments, and I will update the post.

Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (BBC)

Battlefield Poet: Keith Douglas (BBC)

Oh What a Lively War: Guillaume Apollinaire (BBC Radio 4 at 4.30pm today, and on iPlayer thereafter)

'The Bugle' --- a newly published poem by Ivor Gurney (Guardian)

i.m. Keith Douglas (24/01/20---09/06/44)

Keith Douglas, what to bring
but empty hands, how to adorn
a skeleton stripped and the polished
stone where lichen fails to cling?
I have seen poems left on graves,
seen photographs, sea-shells, wooden
crosses pinned with poppies,
seen scattered where young actors lie
the bric-à-brac of love, and I
bring nothing and my eyelids itch.

  (from 'At Keith Douglas's Grave', Strange Land)

The Hurt Locker: 'War Poetry'?

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's highly acclaimed Iraq war film, has just been released in the UK. It comes with the promise that the war will be freed from the guilt and sentimentality which, many suggest, have blighted war films in recent years.

I'm intrigued by this review from the astute Kevin Maher in today's Times. This is how he ends his eulogy:

As such, [the film] speaks of greater concerns than the absurdity of a war that very few people wanted. In fact, with its eye for ground-level reality and sympathy for the soldier as cannon fodder, it has more in common with Wilfred Owen’s 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' than Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

For, in short, in its gutsy, bare-bones beauty, The Hurt Locker is not simply a war movie. It is war poetry.

There are several fascinating assumptions here. It is pleasing to see 'war poetry' evoked as the gold standard for artistic representations of war. Cinema has little need for poetry except when there are lively biopics to be made: the last decade or so has seen films about T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and (most recently) John Keats. So when a film aspires to the condition of poetry --- even if only in the eyes of a reviewer --- it acknowledges a value system distinct from commercial imperatives. The Hurt Locker escapes its genre. Its closest kin, Maher suggests, is Wilfred Owen, not Stanley Kubrick.

Maher's comparison also draws on an assumed peculiarity of war poetry. If something is described as 'poetical', that description suggests an embellished beauty, a gorgeousness which is full perhaps even to excess. Maher refers to 'beauty', but this is 'a gutsy, bare-bones beauty', concerned with 'ground-level reality'. War poetry, then, is beautiful because realistic, unrhetorical, and tough ('gutsy'); war poetry is unpoetical.

That being the case, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' is a strange example to choose. Maher's allusion to 'the soldier as cannon fodder' brings to mind the poem's opening line: 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' Yet 'bare-bones' Owen's style is not. As Geoffrey Hill has argued, Owen remains in thrall to 'a residual yet haunting echo of ... nineteenth-century rhetoric', and 'applies a balm of generalized sorrow at a point where the particulars of experience should outsmart that kind of consolation.' The melancholic music of the 'sad shires' is an escape from circumstances which Owen elsewhere faces more candidly. The bare-bones poet is not Owen but Keith Douglas, who describes his style as 'extrospective' ('regarding external objects rather than one's own thoughts and feelings' --- OED), and who tells one correspondent that 'To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others.'

Kevin Maher gives the film five stars (out of 5). That is, The Hurt Locker is good enough to be a poem.

Soldiers' Love Poems of the Spanish Civil War and Beyond

A desperately sad story here about the 'lost children' of the Spanish Civil War. I came across it while looking for John Cornford's 'Huesca', to check the justice of Valentine Cunningham's claim in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing that 'Huesca' is 'one of the most moving soldierly love poems in the English language'. I own Hamish Henderson's lightly annotated copy of Cunningham's Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, which almost certainly includes 'Huesca', but it's in work and I'm at home.

'Moving soldierly love poems': what other contenders are there? If by 'love poems' Cunningham means romantic love (and therefore rules out, say, Owen's 'Greater Love'), then I would add Keith Douglas's 'Canoe' and his masterpiece-in-miniature, 'To Kristin Yingcheng Olga Milena'. (Strictly speaking, each can be disqualified on a technicality, the first having been written just before he signed up and the second serving as a loving farewell to love.) There must be others --- though surprisingly few except for the homosocial and homoerotic poems of the First World War. Any poems for or about lovers back home?

Here is my chapter on Auden's 'Spain' and his later poetry of the Sino-Japanese war. A shame that Auden's much-revised set-piece, which he disliked and eventually tried to suppress, has eclipsed the many Anglophone poems to have come out of Spain by Cornford, Spender and others.

And here is Cornford's 'Huesca', written for Margot Heinemann. Cornford was killed, aged 21, a few months after it was written. The rhyme grave/love is grimly to the point.

Heart of the heartless world,

Dear heart, the thought of you

Is the pain at my side,

The shadow that chills my view.

The wind rises in the evening,

Reminds that autumn is near.

I am afraid to lose you,

I am afraid of my fear.

On the last mile to Huesca,

The last fence for our pride,

Think so kindly, dear, that I

Sense you at my side.

And if bad luck should lay my strength

Into the shallow grave,

Remember all the good you can;

Don't forget my love.

Update: I forgot Keith Douglas's 'The Knife'.

John Jarmain

The Normandy landings and their aftermath cost us the most brilliant poet of the Second World War, Keith Douglas. He was killed three days after D-Day, on 9 June 1944. His reputation has grown gradually over the decades, thanks to the tireless editorial and biographical work of Desmond Graham, and the support of Geoffrey Hill and Ted Hughes.

Douglas was not the only important poet lost during that month. John Jarmain, like Douglas, had survived the North African campaign; and like Douglas, he was killed in Normandy. The 65th anniversary of his death is 26 June. A note to publishers: it is virtually impossible to find a copy of Jarmain's works (although single poems do crop up in war anthologies). I hope that someone will reprint them.

Hill says of Jarmain's contemporary, Drummond Allison, that he wrote 'three or four poems of distinction'. We might claim as much for Jarmain, understanding that this is not faint praise: Jarmain's small number of significant poems belong among the finest of the War. Here can be found his 'Prisoners of War', and below is what I consider to be his masterpiece, 'El Alamein'.

El Alamein

There are flowers now, they say, at El Alamein;

Yes, flowers in the minefields now.

So those that come to view that vacant scene,

Where death remains and agony has been

Will find the lilies grow ---

Flowers, and nothing that we know.

So they rang the bells for us and Alamein,

Bells which we could not hear.

And to those that heard the bells what could it mean,

The name of loss and pride, El Alamein?

--- Not the murk and harm of war,

But their hope, their own warm prayer.

It will become a staid historic name,

That crazy sea of sand!

Like Troy or Agincourt its single fame

Will be the garland for our brow, our claim,

On us a fleck of glory to the end;

And there our dead will keep their holy ground.

But this is not the place that we recall,

The crowded desert crossed with foaming tracks,

The one blotched building, lacking half a wall,

The grey-faced men, sand-powdered over all;

The tanks, the guns, the trucks,

The black, dark-smoking wrecks.

So be it; none but us has known that land;

El Alamein will still be only ours

And those ten days of chaos in the sand.

Others will come who cannot understand,

Will halt beside the rusty minefield wires

And find there, flowers.

A Short Post About Killing

I have always been fascinated by those very few post-Homeric poems which deal with the subject of killing on the battlefield. They are vastly outnumbered by poems about dying, or watching comrades dying, and it is not hard to guess why. Even though it is the job of soldiers to kill the enemy, both they and their civilian readers have a vested interest in disguising that fact. One of the reasons why Keith Douglas's 'How to Kill' seems to me to be one of the greatest of modern war poems is that Douglas refuses to connive with his audience. 'Look', he insists, obliging the reader to gaze with him through his 'dial of glass' at an enemy 'who is going to die'. What the soldier does, he does for us. If we look, we acknowledge that we are incriminated ('damned'); worse still, if we turn away squeamishly, we are moral hypocrites.

I can think of only two other poems about killing which deserve to be bracketed with 'How to Kill'. The first is Hardy's Boer War poem, 'The Man He Killed', in which the protagonist tries to escape from his own experience ('I shot at him as he at me') into the generalities of the second-person pronoun ('You shoot a fellow down'). The second is Siegfried Sassoon's 'The Kiss':

To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Sassoon wrote some years later that the poem had been inspired by a lecture on the use of the bayonet in which the lecturer, a major, had spoken with 'homicidal eloquence'. Bullet and bayonet, the major reported, were brother and sister. Sassoon was puzzled by 'The Kiss', feeling that he never could have 'stuck a bayonet in anyone', but admitting that the poem 'doesn't show any sign of satire'.

There is, as Sassoon admits, little reason not to take the poem as a strange sadistic fantasy. The bayonet is eroticised --- but eroticised, disturbingly enough, as the soldier's naked 'sister' whose very kiss is fatal. The 'kiss' is itself a curious description, covering up a sexual metaphor which is more obviously thrusting and penetrative. And yet the bayonet's gender resolutely resists the metaphor's logic, so that the poem is at war with itself, at once revealing and withholding, accepting agency and shifting agency from soldier to bayonet. Paradoxically, in its tongue-tied confusions 'The Kiss' comes as close to homicidal eloquence as any poem from the First World War.

Keith Douglas

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) would have been 89 today. He is often called the best English poet of the Second World War, but even that is to do him a disservice. He belongs among the greatest Anglophone poets of his century. His influence has not yet been properly acknowledged, but a hint of his importance to later poets can be taken from a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in June 1962: 'Ted did a beautiful [BBC radio] program on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us.' For Hughes's considerable indebtedness to Douglas, see my essay here.

Douglas was more than a major poet. He also wrote Alamein to Zem Zem, the best prose memoir of combat that I have read. In poetry and prose, Douglas lingers over images of war's nastiness and squalor, by which I don't mean the terrible hardships of war such as Owen writes about. His truths go beyond even Owen's range: Douglas tells us what it is like to kill, or to stumble across the rotting corpse of a dead enemy soldier, or to watch a wild dog digging up a fresh corpse, or to loot through the 'bran-tub' of a battlefied. 'Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake', 'Cairo Jag' opens; as one anthology primly observes, cutting cake is a euphemism for 'procuring a woman'. And the poem ends unforgettably:

But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world
the vegetation is of iron
dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions
clinging to the ground, a man with no head
has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

You'd struggle to find any Owenite pity in that. The pairing of nouns in the last line and a half --- man/head, packet/chocolate, souvenir/Tripoli ---makes the tone comedic, even frivolous, rather than sombre. Anyway, what good is chocolate to a man with no head?