THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Lewis Carroll, to Fuseli and Gillray, and find a reflection of itself. Nightmares and daydreams, distortions and
distensions, snarks and mock-turtles, shoes and ships and sealing-wax were already part of an established verbal and
pictorial tradition. Amongst the most determined of the British apologists for the brief blaze of surreal experiment in
the late 1930s was the poet David Gascoyne (b. 1916). Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism appeared in 1935; his
often obsessively odd collections of poems, Man’s Life is His Meat in 1936 and Hölderlin’s Madness in 1938. ‘The
Very Image’ (addressed to the Belgian painter René Magritte) opens with a verbal evocation of ‘An image of my
grandmother | her head appearing upside-down upon a cloud | the cloud transfixed on the steeple | of a deserted
railway-station | far away’; ‘Figure in a Landscape’, with its nods to the iterations of Eliot, enacts a kind of ritual
awakening; ‘The Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’ (which dispenses with capital letters and, apart from two
almost arbitrary full stops, with punctuation) restlessly intermixes the extraordinary, the challenging, and the
unapologetically silly (‘and the wings of private airplanes look like shoeleather | shoeleather on which pentagrams
have been drawn | shoeleather covered with vomitings of hedgehogs | shoeleather used for decorating weddingcakes’).
Perhaps in response to genuinely urgent times, Gascoyne’s wartime poems deviate into a certain kind of
logical sense. His ‘Farewell Chorus’ (signed ‘New Year 1940’) greets the sphinx of ‘the Forties’ with the assertion
that ‘we see certain truths now’ when ‘each lonely consciousness’ mirrors ‘War’s world ... without end’. ‘Walking at
Whitsun’, written at the time of the invasions of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in May 1940, wonders at the
‘anguish’ which makes the English landscape seem ‘Inhuman as the jungle, and unreal | Its peace’ and it veers finally
towards uneasy thoughts of helmets, ruins and ‘invading steel’.
The association of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, with a lush kind of Surrealism has more
often been assumed than proved. As his ambitious and uneven first volume, 18 Poems (1934), suggests, Thomas
(1914- 53) had begun to mould an extravagant and pulsatingly rhetorical style before he became aware of the
imported innovations of international Surrealist writing. He was, however, decidedly a poet who thought in images. If
there is a kinship evident in Thomas’s verse it is with the ‘difficulty’, the emotionalism, the lyric intensity, and the
metaphysical speculation (though not the intellectual rigour) of the school of Donne. It is Donne’s ‘Death’s Duell’
which is cited in the title of Thomas’s volume Deaths and Entrances of 1946 (‘our very birth and entrance into this
life, is exitus a morte, an issue from death’) and it is Donne’s ghost that broods over the poem written in memory of
Thomas’s aunt, Ann Jones. ‘In Memory of Ann Jones’, published in The Map of Love in 1939, is, however,
specifically Welsh in terms of its local reference and in the claims that Thomas makes for himself as ‘Ann’s bard on a
raised hearth’. In considering the coffined corpse laid out in the farmhouse parlour it evokes a memory of a gush of
love in the past (Ann’s ‘fountain heart once fell in puddles | Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each
sun’) and it yearns for a future,
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universal release from death as the ‘stuffed fox’ which decorates the room miraculously cries ‘Love’, and the once
‘stale’, and now ‘strutting’, fern lays ‘seeds on the back sill’. The ‘sensual strut’, to which Thomas refers in the poem
‘Twenty-four Years Remind the Tears of My Eyes’, somehow typifies the confident, loose-limbed swing of much of
his verse, and it is to the thematic interweaving of the turbulent pulses of nature and the stillness of death that his
poetry steadily returns. In the Vaughan-like ‘Fern Hill’, the celebration of his youth ‘easy under the apple boughs’, he
repeats the words ‘green’ and ‘golden’ as part of an incantatory recall of a golden age of innocence where the
knowledge of death is kept at a distance. ‘Poem in October’, written in his ‘thirtieth year to heaven’, also re-enacts the
scenes and freedoms of childhood before summer turns to autumn, the sun to showers. It is, however, in the sequence
of wartime poems published in Deaths and Entrances that Thomas most impressively detaches himself from the flood
of private reminiscence and addresses the idea of Death touching the Resurrection. The poems are explicitly, even
noisily, Christian. The three stanzas of the volume’s title poem each begin with the line ‘On almost the incendiary
eve’, an apocalyptic linking of incendiary bombs and fire-storms with an impending Armageddon. ‘Ceremony After a
Fire Raid’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ grieve and refuse to grieve. The first
sees destruction enthusiastically translated into reconstitution (‘And the dust shall sing like a bird | As the grains
blow, as your death grows, through our heart’). The second, with its cold title which seems to demand explanation, is
an ecstatic reflection on the promised Resurrection, if one in which the poet seems almost to be carried away by the
unstoppably hypnotic music of his own voice:
Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the rising Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.