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 sarah cole

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

Iwoke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.^23

The poem’s last line epitomizes force in its most extreme and blunt manifestation;
so complete is its triumph that the poem itself seems to cower from it, to take
recourse in the womb-like or marsupial refuge of its own metaphorics, before such
possibilities are rendered embarrassingly insufficient. It is force, too, that David
Jones repeatedly chronicles in his 1937 epicIn Parenthesis, in bursts of destruction,
but also in a sense of sustained, exhaustive continuity, that which made the First
World War seem to many an infinitely extended restructuring of the world by
violence. So, for instance, we have the protagonist John Ball’s final encounter with
battle, before his death:

But you seek him alive from bushment and briar—

perhaps he’s where the hornbeam spreads:

he finds you everywhere.

Where his fiery sickle garners you:

fanged-flash and darkt-fire thrring and thrrung athwart thdrill a Whimshurst pandemonium
drill with dynamo druv staccato bark at youlike Berthe Krupp’s terrier bitch and rattlesnakes
for bare legs; sweat you on the sudden like masher Bimp’s back-firing No. 3 model for
Granny Bodger at 1:30 a.m. rrattle a chatter you like a Vitus neurotic, harrow your vertebrae,
bore your brain-pan before you can say Fanny—and comfortably over the open sights:

the gentleman must be mowed.

And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weight flailed about his calves, caught
from behind by ballista-baulk let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker
below below below.^24

If Jones’s manically experimental linguistic energy contrasts with the hyper-brevity
of Jarrell’s poem, passages like this one fromIn Parenthesesnevertheless showcase
a similar encounter with the furious violence that reduced the ball turret gunner’s
body to liquid. The language works wildly to express that violence, and even when it
abruptly changes tone, it never changes focus. ‘Below below below’: the line, with its
mantra-like incantation of the slow downward pull engendered by force, suggests in
its bodily way the gravitational nature of war’s ultimate onslaught (to the ground).
Or we might take a line like this one from Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Autumn’, which
again figures the spectacle of force as a principle—the guiding principle—in the
universe of war: ‘Their lives are like the leaves|Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and
blown|Along the westering furnace flaring red.’^25 Force is the centre-piece, too, of

(^23) Randall Jarrell, ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’, inThe Complete Poems(New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1981), 144. 24
David Jones,In Parenthesis(London: Faber, 1963; 1st pub. 1937), 182–3.
(^25) Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Autumn’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956(London: Faber, 1984), 81.