The poetry is in the pity

 

Today is Remembrance Day or Veterans Day. I always think of red poppies growing on a battle field in Flanders because as a small child we wore  red poppies made of scarlet crepe paper and listened to Reveille. People still spoke of the Great War, the war to end all wars. There is a non-fiction book just out from Juliet Nicholson called The Great Silence 1918-1920: Living in the Shadow of the Great War and I found this passage in Linda Christmas’ review very moving. The loved ones and families could not bury their dead, all those thousands and thousands of young dead men. We must not forget these things.

The book’s title refers not only to the introduction in 1919 of the two minutes’ silence we observe on November 11, but also to the period of mourning that engulfed this country at the end of the Great War.

The mourning was made more unbearable because there were no bodies to bury: the dead were abandoned where they fell, to be eaten by rats as big as otters. The horrific details were conveyed via survivors, poets and Abel Gance’s film J’accuse (1919), which is said to have caused women to faint at its portrayal of the futility of war.

It is also the day, 11 november 1965, on which Ian Smith declared the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that separated Rhodesia from the United Kingdom and set that white-dominated colony on the road to war, the small forgotten war in Africa in which my brother was killed. Not a happy day for me and I try not to chew over old memories. My brother would have been 52 if he had lived.

 

Anyway. Let’s hear some encouraging words on poetry from Dylan Thomas who was one of us but never got around to well, you know, sobering up. His favourite comment was ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do.’ On a literary trip to New York he died after reportedly consuming 18 whiskies in one sitting.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

 

And here is a poem by Keith Douglas who died as a young soldier in the Second World War, killed oin the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. The last lines always make me tearful: And death who had the soldier singled/ has done the lover mortal hurt.

Vergissmeinicht

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.