In Kangaroo, D. H. Lawrence remembers watching a Zeppelin raid on London during the Great War. He had seen the Zeppelin 'high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost far, far above.' The metaphor's provocative pairing of the deadly and the divine prepares the way for T. S. Eliot's bizarre and (to my mind) wholly inappropriate attempt, in 'Little Gidding' two decades later, to Christianise the Blitz: a German bomber begins as 'the dark dove with the flickering tongue' before metamorphosing into a 'dove descending' which 'breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror'. The fires of the Blitz become the fires of purgatory, so that 'tongues of flame' are ecstatically 'in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.' 'Little Gidding', as I have argued elsewhere, cannot bear very much reality. For all that it inspires a po-faced High Church sobriety in many of its readers, the transubstantions are a conjuror's trick.Lawrence succeeds where Eliot would later fail. Eliot's 'dark dove' will be whitewashed into the Holy Ghost descending on the people; Lawrence invokes the Holy Ghost only to point out how tiny and seemingly irrelevant (although potentially destructive) it would seem if it were visible. And in 'Bombardment', the 'dark bird' stays dark and predatorial, hunting out the 'creatures' which it would devour. No opportunity for mystification spiritual communion here, just random and violent death for scuttling, bug-like humanity.
Bombardment
The Town has opened to the sun.
Like a flat red lily with a million petals
She unfolds, she comes undone.
A sharp sky brushes upon
The myriad glittering chimney-pots
As she gently exhales to the sun.
Hurrying creatures run
Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.
What is it they shun?
A dark bird falls from the sun.
It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast
Flower: the day has begun.
