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 Keith Douglas |
Nerves frayed in days of waiting for the worst
The variety and power of Second World War poets should not be underestimated, writes Alan Brownjohn
The most truthful and harrowing poetry of the First World War came from the long, terrible confrontation across No Man’s Land of two vast machines lodged in hundreds of miles of trenches.
Because the struggle was close at hand, we can still recover the physical sensations of trench warfare reading Wilfred Owen, sense the filth and degradation (the rats, lice and “sprawled dead”) through Isaac Rosenberg’s poems – and realise with Siegfried Sassoon that comradeship and humanity could nevertheless survive month upon month of suffering.
The Second World War tended to set the combatants further apart, their nerves on edge in long periods on the move, or waiting on bases at home or abroad, until major events flung them against each other: the Battle of Britain, the desert war, the slog through the Burmese jungle, the D-Day invasions.
The poetry reflects the changed character of operations which rarely produced the graphic detail so moving in Owen’s “Dulce in decorum est” or Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches”. But its variety and power should not be underestimated.
It divides broadly – though with many exceptions – between poetry of nervous boredom and frustration, and poems focusing on crucial moments and key images. Robin Fedden, one of several poets exiled in Cairo, wrote of “the length and inconvenience of the struggle” rather than “its inspiration”.
Bernard Spencer, similarly stranded and inactive, reflected on “The minimum wish / For permanence of the basic things of life, / For children and friends and having enough to eat /... The life the generals and the bankers cheat.”
Yes for Keith Douglas, the most highly regarded wartime poet, “By a day’s travelling [from Cairo]/ you meet a new world / the vegetation is of iron / dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery”.
In Douglas’s famous “Vergissmeinicht” (“Forget-me-not”) the cold brutality is plain in the image of the dead German lying near the photograph of his girl: “death who had the soldier singled / has done the lover mortal hurt”.
Poetry by the ordinary serviceman, or the civilian, is more prominent in 1939-45. An excellent school book, Poems of the Second World War, edited by Dennis Butts and Victor Selwyn, ranges comprehensively over every theatre of war, “At Sea”, “In the Air”, “Behind Wire” (about prisoners of war), the “Home Front”.
We learn about the sea rescue from Dunkirk from an artilleryman, a parachute jump from a journalist. Joe Westren, a nurse, writes about attending a London air raid victim, and a paramedic provides an unforgettable image of the Belsen death-camp: “ten thousand wasted people / still piked in the death-pits”.
But the Welshman Alun Lewis, who rivalled Douglas as the best poet of the war, sums up the perpetual apprehension of soldiers waiting for something to happen: “we have found / no rescue from the skirmishing fine rain.../ And though of the quiet dead and the celebrities / Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees”.
New readers exploring the history and poetry of the two great 20th-century world conflicts might wonder what is different about the modern world.
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