women’s poetry of the two world wars The first section of the first lyric confronts the reader with the uncompromising
poeticstrategythatwilldefinethesequenceandwhichis toperformathoroughgoing
deconstruction of the language and ideology of sexual love in wartime:
Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
‘‘Once upon a time’’
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane^14Sexual desire is immediately dehumanized as ‘spawn’ of romantic illusions and as
silt that clogs rational processes. Cupid becomes an uncherubic, phallic pig, and the
sexual act is a casual penetration of ‘mucous-membrane’, the customary signifier
of the nasal passage. The erotic lyric does not get more debunked than this. Yet, in
a characteristic shift of direction, thenext stanza acknowledges a contrary impulse
in the poem and in the sequence as a whole, and celebrates the very desire that has
just been denigrated: ‘I would an eye in a Bengal light|Eternity in a sky-rocket.’
Aspirations to bliss are still heading skywards, even if the stanza ends with ‘a trickle
of saliva’ and a return to the mucous of the opening.
The battles of desire and scepticism and of man and woman, and the struggle
to find a language to explore these conflicts, are two concerns of the poems. A
third is the context of these conflicts in wartime, and ‘Songs to Joannes’ provides a
sophisticated critique of the cruder wartime excitements expressed in Loy’s letters.
Instead of those lurid fantasies of military experience, the songs demonstrate the
effect of war upon sexual intimacy, recalling the strategy, if not the tone, of ‘Lifting
Belly’. As the ‘Songs’ progress, the struggles—sexual and discursive—intensify, the
experience of desire is rendered through the discourse of the battlefield, and the
war enters the apparently distant world of the lovers. Song XII begins:
Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the humid carnage
Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it^15The ambiguity of tone and act is irresolvable here. The ‘confines of passion’ might
represent passion as either positively private or negatively restrictive; the voices
might be intrusive, or they might themselves be broken by the intensities of a sexual
act (‘the inseparable delight’) resistant to the pressures of the outside world. As usual,
the syntax is undetermined by punctuation, and this allows the key phrase, ‘Solve in
(^14) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, inLost Lunar Baedeker, 53. (^15) Ibid. 57.