peter robinson
despair of the light because it is too complete and you are revealed to the enemy
raiders’.
ThatGuernica was bombed during daylight, for two hours and forty-five minutes
in the late afternoon, watched by Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfram von Richtofen from
the summit of Monte Oiz, hardly lessens the point of Spender’s comments—though
they are, strictly speaking, relevant to other such atrocities, and go to underline how
Picasso’s painting is a generalized statement of shocked outrage at such bombing,
and not a report on this particular attack. According to Juan Larrea, the Republican
government was ‘so disappointed by Picasso’s open-ended, universalizing approach
toGuernicathat they debated removing the mural’ from the Spanish pavilion at
the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, and ‘only fear of adverse publicity
deterred them’.^44 We can perhaps sympathize with the reaction of the Republican
government, which correctly noted that, however much the expressivity of the
painting had come from the painter’s response to the event, the imagery which
gave meaning to Picasso’s work was not occasioned by the bombing raid itself. The
painting also includes no ‘Junker angels’ of death, to adapt George Barker’s flailing
phrase.^45 There is no represented enemy. Its significance is gained by symbolism,
analogy, distortion, and painterly techniques.
Spender, writing about the mural when it was displayed at the New Burlington
Gallery, London, might be thinking about his own Civil War poem ‘Thoughts
during an Air Raid’, one in which he speculates on an understandable lack ofesprit
de corpsamong those alone below the bombers:
Yet supposing that a bomb should dive
Its nose right through this bed, with one upon it?
The thought’s obscene. Still, there are many
For whom one’s loss would illustrate
The ‘impersonal’ use indeed.^46However much people pull together in such circumstances, once the events are over,
civilians not in communal air raid shelters may have no organized sense of their fates
as shared or actively faced. Again, this does not prevent the writing of plausible, or
better than plausible, poems; but it does recall the perceptiveness, however wrong-
headed, of Yeats’s assertion that poetry cannot be made out of passive suffering.
If we turn now to poetry occasioned by sustained bombing as experienced from
the ground, we can see how it is responding to the problem that Yeats effectively,
though negatively, points to in his introduction. The absence of the enemy and of
fellow-combatant witnesses precipitates the poetic occasion into something that, in
(^44) Juan Larrea, quoted in Cowling,Picasso, 589.
(^45) George Barker, ‘Elegy on Spain’, with a ‘Dedication to the photograph of a child killed in an air
raid on Barcelona’, in Cunningham (ed.),Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse, 157–61.
(^46) Spender, ‘Thoughts during an Air Raid’, ibid. 350. The poet later italicized the ‘one’: see Spender,
Collected Poems 1928–1985(London: Faber, 1985), 47.