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the poetry of pain 

For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,

Andmy killed friends are with me where I go.

Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs;

And there is absolution in my songs.^41

The image of the poet as burning with the desire to kill may not always be a
comfortable one, even for Sassoon, but the diffusion of war poetry’s angry energy
recurs in many works. For F. T. Prince,writing during the Second World War, such
anger belongs to history: as he contemplates a group of naked soldiers bathing in
the sea, he is reminded of a Renaissance painting in which awful violence had been
figured as pure rage:

Another Florentine, Pollaiuolo,

Painted a naked battle: warriors, straddled, hacked the foe,

Dug their bare toes into the ground and slew

The brother-naked man who lay between their feet and drew

His lips back from his teeth in a grimace.

They were Italians who knew war’s sorrow and disgrace

And showed the thing suspended, stripped: a theme

Born out of the experience of war’s horrible extreme

Beneath a sky where even the air flows

With lacrimae Christi. For that rage, that bitterness, those blows

That hatred of the slain, what could they be

But indirectly or directly a commentary on the Crucifixion?^42

The speaker seems distant from any such emotional maelstrom (‘I feel a strange
delight that fills me full,|Strange gratitude, as if evil itself were beautiful’), his
Christianity taking what he sees as a more benign, reflective turn. The rage that
fuels war, for Prince, belongs to a past whose passions have attenuated, and to
a geographical sphere (Catholic Italy) where such rage, if it still exists, might
be ascribed to its otherness (‘even the air flows|With lacrimae Christi’). Yet the
poem’s conjuring of that other/earlier linkage of war with wrath is never quite
dispelled or re-contained, and the ‘streak of red that might have issued from
Christ’s breast’, which closes the poem, seems a bloody swath, painted over a
contemporary landscape defined, every bit as much as fifteenth-century Europe, by
horrendous slaughter.
Prince points to something anachronistic in defining the ferocity of war in terms
of the anger of its participants, but the idea of rage as aresponseto war, especially as
a response from its soldiers, is a common motif in modern war poetry. To return to
‘The Poet as Hero’, Sassoon describes himself in that poem as ‘scornful, harsh, and

(^41) Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Poet as Hero’, inThe War Poems, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber,
1983), 61. 42
F. T. Prince, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, inCollected Poems 1935–1992(Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), 55.