‘death’s proletariat’ when theFransˆawiwillbe swept away.’
Jabbing the earth he twisted his cleaver round—
‘Just as I grind this cleaver in the ground,
kilˆeb, kelbˆat—dogs, bitches—where we find them,
—hakdha, hakdha—thus we will grind them.’
········
This father, hunched up on the parapet,
peddles his daughter with sly, beaten eyes;
finding no hirer, begs a cigarette.
······
‘Haus kaput—maison finie—
kaput—capito?—familie.
Alles ist kaput. Compris?’Once again, it is the destruction of tradition, the cutting short of generations, the
death of ‘yesterday’, that seems the cruellest cut of all to Hay. The ‘old men’ have
betrayed their own history and the continuity they were supposed to protect, and
the poem ends with an insistently repeated rhyme on ‘grey’ and ‘day’ in a darkly
lyrical passage prophetic of only travail to come:
Yesterday? We saw it die.
And yet unburied see it lie
rotting beneath a sultry sky.
Where the east pales bleak and grey,
to-morrow is it, or yesterday?
Ask the old men. Can they say?
Yesterday made them. On its walls
they write its end: and down it falls
in blood and pacts and protocols.
We, having seen our yesterday,
blasted away, explained away,
in darkness, having no to-day,
guess at tomorrow dawning grey,
tighten our packstraps for the way.^61This was the madness that Sydney Goodsir Smith characterized in ‘October 1941’
as a ‘Deevil’s Waltz’ across the globe in his 1946 collection of that name: ‘As the
frantic rammage Panzers brash on Moscow toun—|An the leaves of wud October,
man, are sworlan owre the warld.’^62 He too shared something of Hay’s feeling for
the humble dispossessed, and his long poem ‘The Refugees: A Complaynt’ (written
in October–November 1940) reflects on a Europe now suddenly mobilized in
misery—something he must have heard directly from the Polish troops to whom
(^61) Hay, ‘Esta Selva Selvaggia’, i. 211–14.Fransˆawirefers to the French colonial rulers of Tunis.
(^62) Sydney Goodsir Smith, ‘October 1941’, inCollected Poems 1941–1975(London: John Calder,
1975), 52.