dawn bellamy
And the coward cruel brute
Shapingus in his image.^18With its allusion to Genesis 1:26–27, the end of this stanza registers the persona’s
cynicism.^19 God has somehow failed man by allowing such violence, by condoning
the single sacrifice which has, it now seems, failed to prevent a series of subsequent
deaths similarly intended to be for the good of mankind. Instead of strengthening
faith in eternal life, all that these deaths have achieved is to separate a generation
from the ‘storied past’:
Only the fleeting sunlight in the forest,
And dragonflies’ blue flicker on quiet pools
Will perpetuate our vision
Who die young.The poem was published in Lewis’s first collection,Raiders’ Dawn(1942), which
pre-dated his posting to India by several months. His lack of military experience,
however, does not prevent him from revisiting the sentiments of those First World
War poets who questioned the role of a wartime God. In ‘Last Pages of a Long
Journal’, Lewis writes:
It is a slow and endless mission. Often it will be too much, as the 1914–18 war was too
much for Wilfred Owen; there was too much against him, and he was too much alone with
his love of humanity and his hatred of the authorities who legalized the crucifixion.^20
Spear argues that Christian myth was reformulated during the First World War:Jesus the Son was accepted and loved because Hewas a suffering victim, whereas God the
Father was rejected and often hated because he was willing to sacrifice Jesus. This willingness
was no longer seen as a personal and supreme sacrifice on the part of God the Father, but
as an act of harsh and selfish egoism....The soldier victims were identified with Jesus;
His lot was theirs: they suffered agony, bore their crosses, frequently endured a cruel and
undeserved death; the older generation were identified with God and the Pharisees; they
believed in the need for sacrifice and by their acts enforced it, yet it seemed not to touch
them personally.^21
Lewis, aware of this shift in belief, explores his predecessors’ thinking in ‘Lines on
a Tudor Mansion’, placing it in the context of his own fears about the violence
demanded by war. He posits an alternative view in ‘Finale’, which was published
in the same ‘Poems in Khaki’ section ofRaiders’ Dawn. Here, Lewis abandons his
questioning, and is more easily aligned with the religious iconography of those First
World War poets who perceived the soldiers’ sacrifices as glorious:
(^18) Lewis, ‘Lines on a Tudor Mansion’, inCollected Poems, 33; italics original.
(^19) ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness....SoGodcreatedmaninhis
own 20 image’ (Gen. 1: 26–7).
Lewis, ‘Last Pages of a Long Journal’, quoted in Pikoulis,Alun Lewis, 99.
(^21) Spear,Remembering, We Forget, 101–2.