‘B’ Company Commander was fresh from the Depot,
An expert on gas drill, otherwise a dud;
So Sergeant-Major Money carried on, as instructed,
And that’s where the swaddies began to sweat blood.
His Old Army humour was so well-spiced and hearty
That one poor sod shot himself, and one lost his wits;
But discipline’s maintained, and back in rest-billets
The Colonel congratulates ‘B’ Company on their kits.
The subalterns went easy, as was only natural
With a terror like Money driving the machine,
Till finally two Welshmen, butties from the Rhondda,
Bayoneted their bugbear in a field-canteen.
Well, we couldn’t blame the officers, they relied on Money;
We couldn’t blame the pitboys, their courage was grand;
Or, least of all, blame Money, an old stiff surviving
In a New (bloody) Army he couldn’t understand.
A LETTER FROM WALES
(Richard Rolls to his friend, Captain Abel Wright)
This is a question of identity
Which I can’t answer. Abel, I’ll presume
On your good-nature, asking you to help me.
I hope you will, since you too are involved
As deeply in the problem as myself.
Who are we? Take down your old diary, please,
The one you kept in France, if you are you
Who served in the Black Fusiliers with me.
That is, again, of course, if I am I –
This isn’t Descartes’ philosophic doubt,
But, as I say, a question of identity,
And practical enough. – Turn up the date,
July the twenty-fourth, nineteen-sixteen,
And read the entry there:
‘To-day I met
Meredith, transport-sergeant of the Second.
He told me that Dick Rolls had died of wounds.
I found out Doctor Dunn, and he confirms it;
Dunn says he wasn’t in much pain, he thinks.’
Then the first draft of a verse-epitaph,
Expanded later into a moving poem.
‘Death straddled on your bed: you groaned and tried
To stare him out, but in that death-stare died.’
Yes, died, poor fellow, the day he came of age.
But then appeared a second Richard Rolls
(Or that’s the view that the facts force on me),
Showing Dick’s features to support his claim
To rank and pay and friendship, Abel, with you.
And you acknowledged him as the old Dick,
Despite all evidence to the contrary,
Because, I think, you missed the dead too much.
You came up here to Wales to stay with him
And I don’t know for sure, but I suspect
That you were dead too, killed at the Rectangle
One bloody morning of the same July,
The time that something snapped and sent you Berserk:
You ran across alone, with covering fire
Of a single rifle, routing the Saxons out
With bombs and yells and your wild eye; and stayed there
In careless occupation of the trench
For a full hour, reading, by all that’s mad,
A book of pastoral poems! Then, they say,
Then you walked slowly back and went to sleep
Without reporting; that was the occasion,
No doubt, they killed you: it was your substitute
Strolled back and laid him down and woke as you,
Showing your features to support his claim
To rank and pay and friendship, Abel, with me.
So these two substitutes, yours and my own
(Though that’s an Irish way of putting it,
For the I now talking is an honest I,
Independent of the I’s now lost,
And a live dog’s as good as a dead lion),
So, these two friends, the second of the series,
Came up to Wales pretending a wild joy
That they had cheated Death: they stayed together
At the same house and ate and drank and laughed
And wrote each other’s poems, much too lazy
To write their own, and sat up every night
Talking and smoking almost until dawn.
Yes, they enjoyed life, but unless I now
Confound my present feeling, with the past,*
They felt a sense of unreality
In the proceedings – stop! that’s good, proceedings,
It suggests ghosts. – Well, then I want to ask you
Whether it really happened. Eating, laughing,
Sitting up late, writing each other’s verses,
That seems too circumstantial for romance.
Can you confirm it? Yet, even if you can,
What does that prove? for who are you? or I?
Listen, it was a sunset. We were out
Climbing the mountain, eating blackberries;
Late afternoon, the third week in September,
The date’s important: it might prove my point,
For unless Richard Rolls had really died
Could he have so recovered from his wounds
As to go climbing less than two months later?
And if it comes to that, what about you?
How had you come on sick-leave from the Line?
I don’t remember you, that time, as wounded.
Anyhow… We were eating blackberries
By a wide field of tumbled boulderstones
Hedged with oaks and nut-trees. Gradually
A glamour spread about us, the low sun
Making the field unreal as a stage,
Gilding our faces with heroic light;
Then oaks and nut-boughs caught this golden flood,
Sending it back in a warm flare of green…
There was a mountain-ash among the boulders,
But too full-clustered and symmetrical
And highly coloured to convince as real.
We stopped blackberrying and someone said
(Was it I or you?) ‘It is good for us to be here.’
The other said, ‘Let us build Tabernacles’
(In honour of a new Transfiguration;
It was that sort of moment); but instead
I climbed up on the massive pulpit stone,
An old friend, but unreal with the rest,
And prophesied – not indeed of the future,
But declaimed poetry, and you climbed up too
And prophesied. The next thing I remember
Was a dragon scaly with fine-weather clouds
Poised high above the sun, and the sun dwindling
And then the second glory.
You’ll remember
That we were not then easily impressed
With pyrotechnics, whether God’s or Man’s.
We had seen the sun rise daily, weeks on end,
And watched the nightly rocket-shooting, varied
With red and green, and livened with gun-fire
And the loud single-bursting overgrown squib
Thrown from the minen-werfer: and one night
From a billet-window some ten miles away
We had watched the French making a mass-attack
At Notre Dame de Lorette, in a thunderstorm.
That was a grand display of all the Arts,
God’s, Man’s, the Devil’s: in the course of which,
So lavishly the piece had been stage-managed,
A Frenchman was struck dead by a meteorite,
That was the sort of gala-show it was!
But this Welsh sunset, what shall I say of it?
It ended not at all as it began,
An influence rather than a spectacle
Raised to a strange de
gree beyond all wonder.
And I remember that we looked and found
A region of the sky below the dragon
Where we could gaze behind all time and space
And see as it were the colour of pure thought,
The texture of emptiness, and at that sight
We came away, not daring to see more:
Death was the price, we knew, of such perfection
And walking home…
fell in with Captain Todd,
The Golf-Club Treasurer; he greeted us
With ‘Did you see that splendid sunset, boys?
Magnificent, was it not? I wonder now,
What writer could have done real justice to it
Except, of course, my old friend Walter Pater?
Ruskin perhaps? Yes, Ruskin might have done it.’
Well, did that happen, or am I just romancing?
And then again, one has to ask the question
What happened after to that you and me?
I have thought lately that they too got lost.
My representative went out once more
To France, and so did yours, and yours got killed,
Shot through the throat while bombing up a trench
At Bullecourt; if not there, then at least
On the thirteenth of July, nineteen eighteen,
Somewhere in the neighbourhood of Albert,
When you took a rifle bullet through the skull
Just after breakfast on a mad patrol.
But still you kept up the same stale pretence
As children do in nursery battle-games,
‘No, I’m not dead. Look, I’m not even wounded.’
And I admit I followed your example,
Though nothing much happened that time in France.
I died at Hove after the Armistice,
Pneumonia, with the doctor’s full consent.
I think the I and you who then took over
Rather forgot the part we used to play;
We wrote and saw each other often enough
And sent each other copies of new poems,
But there was a constraint in all our dealings,
A doubt, unformulated, but quite heavy
And not too well disguised. Something we guessed
Arising from the War, and yet the War
Was a forbidden ground of conversation.
Now why, can you say why, short of accepting
My substitution view? Then yesterday,
After five years of this relationship,
I found a relic of the second Richard,
A pack-valise marked with his name and rank…
And a sunset started, most unlike the other,
A pink-and-black depressing sort of show
Influenced by the Glasgow School of Art.
It sent me off on a long train of thought
And I began to feel badly confused,
Being accustomed to this newer self;
I wondered whether you could reassure me.
Now I have asked you, do you see my point?
What I’m asking really isn’t ‘Who am I?’
Or ‘Who are you?’ (you see my difficulty?)
But a stage before that, ‘How am I to put
The question that I’m asking you to answer?’
THE PRESENCE
Why say ‘death’? Death is neither harsh nor kind:
Other pleasures or pains could hold the mind
If she were dead. For dead is gone indeed,
Lost beyond recovery and need,
Discarded, ended, rotted underground –
Of whom no personal feature could be found
To stand out from the soft blur evenly spread
On memory, if she were truly dead.
But living still, barred from accustomed use
Of body and dress and motion, with profuse
Reproaches (since this anguish of her grew
Do I still love her as I swear I do?)
She fills the house and garden terribly
With her bewilderment, accusing me,
Till every stone and flower, table and book,
Cries out her name, pierces me with her look,
‘You are deaf, listen!
You are blind, see!’
How deaf or blind,
When horror of the grave maddens the mind
With those same pangs that lately choked her breath,
Altered her substance, and made sport of death?
THE CLIPPED STATER
(To Aircraftman 338171, T. E. Shaw)
King Alexander had been deified
By loud applause of the Macedonian phalanx,
By sullen groans of the wide worlds lately conquered.
Who but a god could have so engulphed their pride?
He did not take a goddess to his throne
In the elder style, remembering what disasters
Juno’s invidious eye brought on her Consort.
Thaïs was fair; but he must hold his own.
Nor would he rank himself a common god
In fellowship with those of Ind or Egypt
Whom he had shamed; even to Jove his father
Paid scant respect (as Jove stole Saturn’s nod).
Now meditates: ‘No land of all known lands
Has offered me resistance, none denied me
Infinite power, infinite thought and knowledge;
What yet awaits the assurance of my hands?’
Alexander, in a fever of mind,
Reasons: ‘Omnipotence by its very nature
Is infinite possibility and purpose,
Which must embrace that it can be confined.
‘Then finity is true godhead’s final test,
Nor does it dim the glory of free being.
I must fulfil myself by self-destruction.’
The curious phrase renews his conquering zest.
He assumes man’s flesh. Djinn catch him up and fly
To a land of yellow folk beyond his knowledge,
And that he does not know them, he takes gladly
For surest proof he has put his godhead by.
In Macedonia shortly it is said:
‘Alexander, our god, has died of a fever;
Demi-gods parcel out his huge dominions.’
So Alexander, as god, is duly dead.
But Alexander the man, whom yellow folk
Find roving naked, armed with a naked cutlass,
Has death, which is the stranger’s fate, excused him.
Joyfully he submits to the alien yoke.
He is enrolled now in the frontier-guard
With gaol-birds and the press-gang’s easy captures;
Where captains who have felt the Crown’s displeasure,
But have thought suicide too direct and hard,
Teach him a new tongue and the soldier’s trade,
To which the trade he taught has little likeness.
He glories in his foolish limitations:
At every turn his hands and feet are stayed.
‘Who was your father, friend?’ He answers: ‘Jove.’
‘His father?’ ‘Saturn.’ ‘And his father?’ ‘Chaos.’
‘And his?’ Thus Alexander loses honour:
Ten fathers is the least that a man should prove.
Stripes and bastinadoes, famine and thirst –
All these he suffers, never in resolution
Shaken, nor in his heart enquiring whether
Gods by their fiats can be self-accursed.
Thus he grows grey and eats his frugal rice,
Endures his watch on the fort’s icy ramparts,
Staring across the uncouth leagues of desert,
Furbishes leather and steel; or shakes the dice.
He will not dream Olympianly, nor stir
To enlarge himself with comforts or promotion,
Nor yet evade the rack when, sour of temper,
He has tweaked a corporal’s nose
and called him ‘cur’.
His comrades mutinously demand their pay –
‘We have had none since the Emperor’s Coronation.
At one gold piece a year there are fifteen owing.
One-third that sum would buy us free,’ say they.
The pay-sack came at length, when hope was cold,
Though much reduced in bulk since its first issue
By the Chief Treasurer; and he, be certain,
Kept back one third of the silver and all the gold.
Every official hand had dipped in the sack;
And the frontier captains, themselves disappointed
Of long arrears, took every doit remaining;
But from politeness put a trifle back.
They informed the men: ‘Since no pay has come through,
We will advance from our too lavish purses
To every man of the guard, a piece of silver.
Let it be repaid when you get your overdue.’
The soldiers, grumbling but much gratified
By hopes of a drink and a drab, accept the favour;
And Alexander, advancing to the pay-desk,
Salutes and takes his pittance without pride.
The coin is bored, to string with the country’s bronze
On a cord, and one side scraped to glassy smoothness;
But the head, clipped of its hair and neck, bears witness
That it had a broad, more generous mintage once.
Alexander, gazing at it then,
Greets it as an Alexandrian stater
Coined from the bullion taken at Arbela.
How came it here among these slant-eyed men?
He stands in a troubled reverie of doubt
Till a whip stings his shoulders and a voice bellows:
‘Are you dissatisfied, you spawn of the ditches?’
So he salutes again and turns about,
More than uncertain what the event can mean.
Was his lost Empire, then, not all-embracing?
And how can the stater, though defaced, owe service
To a power that is as if it had never been?
‘Must I renew my godhead?’ But well he knows
Nothing can change the finite course resolved on;
He spends the coin on a feast of fish and almonds
And back to the ramparts briskly enough he goes.
THE POETIC STATE
‘How is it,’ I was asked, ‘to be a poet?’
And since the question had been simply put
There were no suave evasions on my part.
The title does not rouse me to emotion.
I see no virtue in bland deprecation,
The ‘I, sir? No, you flatter me’ tradition.
Poetry is, I said, my father’s trade,
Familiar since my childhood; I have tried