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‘DOWN
IN THE TERRACES
BETWEEN
THE TARGETS’:
CIVILIANS
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••peter robinson
While justifying an absence of First World War poetry from hisOxford Book of
Modern Verse 1892–1935, W. B. Yeats notoriously wrote that ‘passive suffering
is not a theme for poetry...some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong
side of the road—that is all’.^1 In ‘Lapis Lazuli’, first published in March 1938, he
declares his theme by contrasting certain unnamed ‘hysterical women’ with his
interpretations of Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia. He also sets their tragic
deaths on the artistic stage against some latest developments in the theatre and art
of war:
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done(^1) W. B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, inThe Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935,ed.W.B.Yeats
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xxxiv. For his epigrammatic refusal of the genre, ‘On being asked
for a War Poem’, seeThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990), 205. This epigram may
also be a quarrel with himself in that he would go on to write poems occasioned by war and its
consequences, especially for civilians.