|  The
First World War (1914 – 1918) engendered a number of poets, many
of whom died in the carnage that was the trenches in Europe. We
have presented a number of poems by the poets of what was called
the Great War, and two or three Poems of the Week articles about
them.
By contrast,
the Second World War (1939 – 1945) produced less poetry. In part,
this may have been because the war was different in character,
and there were fewer pitched ground battles, at least until the
ground war that followed the invasion by the Allied troops on
the Channel beaches in 1944. In part, also, it was because many
of the young men from the same class and education that had joined
the forces from university in the First World War were often instead
assigned to ‘headquarters’ positions at the beginning of the second
war.
I recently
received a book entitled Against
Oblivion; Some Lives of Twentieth-Century Poets by Ian
Hamilton. This refers specifically to a few poets who could be
regarded as ‘Second World War Poets’; these include Henry Reed
(1914 – 1986), Alun Lewis (1915 – 1944), and Keith Douglass (1920
– 1944). To these names one might add Frank Templeton Prince (1912
– 2003).
 Henry
Reed (1914 – 1986) was born in Birmingham, England. His father
was a bricklayer who liked reading; his mother was illiterate.
Reed nevertheless entered Birmingham University, and studied Classics;
he met Louis MacNeice there. After graduating he became a schoolteacher,
and in 1941 he was conscripted into the Army. Soon afterwards,
he was transferred to Intelligence at Bletchley (which is where
the team that eventually solved the German code machine Enigma
was based). There he learnt Japanese, and began publishing poems
in the Listener (the BBC journal) and the New Statesman,
which was a left wing intellectual journal. The
New Statesman had competitions largely on literary matters,
and Reed won one of these with a Parody of T. S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets, in 1941.
Ian Hamilton
says that Reed's poem The Naming of Parts “... can claim,
without much fear of contradiction to be the poem of the
Second World War – the cleverest and by some distance the most
likeable: good humoured, funny, sexy and resigned, it captures
perfectly the period’s strange mix of tedium and fear.” Here it
is:
Today we
have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today
we have naming of parts.
This is
the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling-swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which
in our case we have not got.
This is
the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of
them using their finger.
And this
you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers
They
call it easing the Spring.
They call
it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and
forwards,
For today
we have naming of parts.
Another of
Reed’s poems, Judging
Distances, is our first poem of the week.
It is generally
thought that Keith Douglass (1920 – 1944) was most like the First
World War poets. His father had won a Military Cross at Gallipoli
in that war, and from a very early age he regarded himself as
destined for military life. However, his father left home in 1928,
and was never seen again. Keith was wounded in the Desert War
and could easily have opted out of further involvement, but he
insisted on rejoining his regiment for D-Day and was killed in
Normandy. Here is a poem of his called Vergissmeinnicht,
which means “Forget Me Not” in German:
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.
Frank Templeton
Prince was born in Kimberley, South Africa; in 1912. His father,
Harry Prinz, was a Jewish diamond expert of Dutch extraction,
via Hatton Garden; his mother, Margaret Heatherington, was a Presbyterian
from lowland Scotland. He himself converted to Catholicism later
in life. He served in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1940 until
1946.
He was championed
by T. S. Eliot, and his first collection of poems was published
by Faber in 1938. However, as the war against Hitler had gathered
momentum, Prince's writing fell out of fashion. Poets like Auden
and MacNeice were favoured, their work demonstrating a commitment
to social concerns. Increasingly neglected here, Prince's poetry
remained aloof from workaday moralising.
His poem
Soldiers
Bathing, written in 1942, nevertheless became on of the
best-loved poems of the Second World War. It was included in More
Poems From The Forces, edited by Padrych Rhys in 1943 and
in the 1951 edition of The Faber Book Of Modern Verse.
It is essentially a poem sanctifying the end of battle, though
clearly cognisant of the suffering that has been the prologue
to the lyrical image it presents of soldiers relaxing by a river.
This vision the poet compares to an incident in a Michelangelo
cartoon, and a print by another Renaissance artist, Pollaiuolo,
of naked warriors bearing arms.
The lines
are long, and the sentences complex: "They dry themselves
and dress, / Combing their hair, forget the fear and shame of
nakedness. / Because to love is frightening we prefer/ The freedom
of our crimes ..."
The poem
culminates in a powerful, yet ambivalent, evocation of the naked
Christ on the cross, the blood issuing from his wound being somehow
as lovely as the sunset. Throughout the poem, the unassailable
force of weaponry is contrasted with the vulnerability of the
naked body. (Much of the above material is drawn from the obituary
for Prince written by Anthony Howell, and published in the Manchester
Guardian, Friday, August 8th, 2003). This will be our second
poem of this week.
 David
Gascoyne (1916 – 2001) was born in 1916 in Harrow, Middlesex,
and educated at Salisbury Cathedral School and the Regent Street
Polytechnic, London. His first collection of poetry, Roman
Balcony and Other Poems was published when he was sixteen,
and in 1933 Cobden-Sanderson brought out his novel Opening
Day. Both books are remarkable achievements for an adolescent,
and they were followed by the equally striking poetry collections
Man's Life Is This Meat (1936) and Hoelderlin's Madness
(1938), which established his reputation as one of the most original
voices of the 1930s. Gascoyne was among the earliest champions
of Surrealism: in 1935 his A
Short Survey of Surrealism was published, and in the next
year he was one of the organizers of the London International
Surrealist Exhibition. From this period, and during his time living
in France in 1937-39, date his friendships with Dali, Max Ernst,
Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Pierre Jean Jouve. As well as becoming
internationally celebrated as a poet - especially after publication
of his Poems 1937-1942, with its Graham Sutherland images
- Gascoyne became highly regarded as a translator, notably of
Hoelderlin and of the leading French Surrealists. Here is a short
poem of his, called Spring MCMXL, which describes the aftermath
of the London Blitz:
London
Bridge is falling down, Rome's burnt and Babylon
The Great is now but dust; yet still Spring must
Swing back through Time's continual arc to earth.
Though every land become as a black field
Dunged with the dead, drenched by the dying's blood,
Still must a punctual goddess waken and ascend
The rocky stairs, up into earth's chilled air,
And pass upon her mission through those carrion ranks,
Picking her way among a maze of broken brick
To quicken with her footsteps the short sooty grass between;
While now once more their futile matchwood empires flare and
blaze
And through the smoke men gaze with bloodshot eyes
At the translucent apparition, clad in trembling nascent green
Of one they still can recognize, though scarcely understand.
Our third
poem of the week is another of his, also dealing with the realities,
and the stresses, associated with living in London in those hard
times, A Wartime Dawn.
 So
there we are. I have left out a number of poets who would qualify,
but that is how it goes. Of the ones I have omitted, you might
like to look up Alun Lewis; and also Louis MacNeice. However,
the general tenor of depression is typical: tails of heroism are
largely absent; and apparently nobody “suddenly burst out singing”.
I will try
and be more cheerful next week!
|
