THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Although in the intriguingly entitled sonnet, ‘Among those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man aged a Hundred’,
Thomas again rejoices in images of a surreal rebirth (‘The morning is flying on the wings of his age | And a hundred
storks perch on the sun’s right hand’), his most celebrated late poem, ‘Do not go gentle’, withdraws into a more
personal and protesting anxiety in which ‘rage, against the dying of the light’ intrudes itself between death and
ecstasy.
The work of two soldier poets, Sidney Keyes (1922-43) and Keith Douglas (1920-44), both of whom died in the
war, is far less pictorially apocalyptic than Thomas’s. Both were the sons of army officers and both discovered that a
new kind of war poetry, quite distinct from that of the First World War, was wrenched out of them by the distinct
nature of the new conflict. Douglas, in particular, felt that the weight of an earlier tradition had initially tended to
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dumbfound a new generation. ‘The hardships, pain and boredom; the behaviour of the living and the appearance of
the dead’, he wrote from Tunisia in May 1943, ‘were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that every
day on the battlefields of the western desert ... their poems are illustrated.’ A new imagery, related to a new landscape
of war and to a far less dissenting ideology of battle, seemed gradually to impose itself. The poems that Keyes wrote
during the early stages of the war look back to ancestral forms for refreshment. The ideas of a chain of experience
interlinking writer and writer, and of humanity swept up in great creating nature, seem to have held a particular
attraction for him in a time of unnatural change. His ‘Cervières’ of September 1940 addresses the French owners of a
cherry orchard ravaged by birds and threatened by an invader who will take more than cherries. The poem’s didactic
expression of hope lies in its insistence on a natural sequence: the birds may drop the cherry stones and create new
trees elsewhere; so, by analogy, the temporary defeat of human dreams may bear an incalculable future fruit. Keyes’s
meditation on ‘Europe’s Prisoners’ of May 1941, somewhat airily trusts, as Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint
L’Ouverture does, in the ultimate triumph of freedom and justice (‘at last the courage they have learned | Shall burst
the walls and overturn the world’). Wordsworth, in the sonnet that Keyes addressed to him in 1941, lives on ‘a boy
again’ in a ‘noisy glen’, and the dead novelist in the ‘Elegy for Mrs Virginia Woolf’ becomes a single stream of
consciousness with the watery element that drowned her (‘Colours and currents tend her; no more vex | Her rivermind
our towns and broken skies’). When, however, Keyes faced what by 1942 was the inevitability of his calling in
the poem ‘War Poet’, he recognized himself as ‘the man who groped for words and found | An arrow in my hand’.
Although he hankers for the support of ‘the immortals’ in the poem ‘Advice for a Journey’, he acknowledges that
those who remain ‘too young | For explorers’ are obliged to explore war without any hope of finding ‘Canaan, or any
golden mountain’. A similar bleakness shapes his Eliotic response to the desert in ‘The Wilderness’. Here is a land
without the civilized comforts of cultivation, water, and the dream of love, but here he purports to accept the
knowledge that ‘I am no lover, but destroyer ... content to face the destroying sun.’
The lonely landscapes of Keith Douglas’s desert poems are equally indebted to the examples of Eliot, Auden, and
the Surrealists (he was himself a vivid pen-sketcher of the peculiar contortions and dislocations of wrecked bodies and
machines). Alamein to Zem Zem (1946), Douglas’s posthumously published diary account of his service in the desert
campaign, remains one of the most vivid, lucid, and clear-headed prose documents of the war. His desert is a place of
‘indeterminate landscapes of moods and smells’ against which dance ‘black and bright incidents’, yet, he declares, his
war offers ‘things to excite financiers and parliamentarians — but not to excite a poet or a painter or a doctor’. In the
poem ‘Desert Flowers’, in part a tribute to the painter-poet Isaac Rosenberg, he looks down from the angle of a pilot
or an angel ‘on some eccentric chart’, a
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plain dotted with ‘useless furniture ... squashed dead or still entire, stunned | Like beetles’. In ‘Cairo Jag’ he returns
from leave to a world where ‘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’. When he attempts to describe a dead German soldier in
the poem ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ he sees ‘the dust upon the paper eye | and the burst stomach like a cave’. If he lacks the
bitterness and disillusion of the First World War poets, he shares their sense of futility and their interrogation of the
concept of heroism. The colonel who jokes with troops in ‘Gallantry’ may fail to see that the real jokers are the bullets
and the shell splinters that kill his men; the bugle sounding reveille in ‘The Trumpet’ may seem to lie when it hints
that ‘war is sweet’, but in the carefully ambiguous poem ‘Aristocrats’ of 1943 Douglas allows for the congruent
jostling of noble carelessness and plain stupidity. ‘How can I live among this gentle | obsolescent breed of heroes and
not weep?’ the poet asks when faced, as a note on his manuscript explains, with the death of an officer who had left
money in his will to the Beaufort Hunt and who instructed that the incumbent of a Church living in his gift should be
a man ‘who approves of hunting, shooting, and all manly sports, which are the backbone of the nation’. The final