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the poetry of pain 

Sean O’Casey’s soldiers’ songs inTheSilver Tassie(1929), an embittered play about
thecorrosiveeffectsoftheFirstWorldWaronyoungand(formerly)idealisticvolun-
teers. In a characterization of the Front, anonymous soldiers sing of force in motion:

3rd Soldier:

Where hot with the sweat of mad endeavour

Crouching to scrape a toy-deep shelter,

Quick-tim’d by hell’s fast, frenzied drumfire

Exploding in flaming death around us.

2nd Soldier:

God, unchanging,heart-sicken’d, shuddering,

Gathereth the darkness of the night sky

To mask his paling countenance from

The blood dance of His self-slaying children.^26

For O’Casey, God is spared blame for the storm of destruction that is war; it is not he
but humans who have created ‘hell’s fast, frenzied drumfire’. But force is returned
to the divine, taking simultaneously modern and classical shape, in Christopher
Logue’s contemporary reimagining of theIliad. Here, for instance, is the death of
Patroclus:

APOLLO

who had been patient with you

Struck.

Hishandcamefromtheeast,

And in his wrist lay all eternity;

And every atom of his mythic weight

Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.^27

Such a visceral personification of thegods provides Logue with a particularly
resonant form for imagining and representingforce, the enormity and shock of
which are most potently evoked in that single line: ‘Struck.’ Or, finally, we hear the
scream of force in this stanza from Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’:

Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel

Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,

The impetuous storm of savage love.

Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,

What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul

With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,

Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?^28

In these lines, it is the erotics of force that most startles: the ‘iron love’ or ‘savage
love’ are metaphors for a force experienced in terms of the sexualized intimacy of the

(^26) Sean O’Casey,The Silver Tassie,inCollected Plays, ii (London: Macmillan, 1950), 53.
(^27) Logue,Logue’s Homer, 169–70.
(^28) Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, inThe Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg,ed.Vivien
Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 141.