‘down in the terraces between the targets’ war poetry terms, is troublingly ‘meaningless’. There does not seem to be anyone
exactlyto hate, for the pilots and bomb-aimers are faceless, gone, and possibly
themselves in mortal danger. Milton and Hopkins again seem to be the ones
who have the last word. A solution to this during the Blitz was to bring religious
symbolism to bear as a way of attributing meaning to this mechanized routine of
fairly randomly scattered death. The high danger of such a poetic tactic—whether by
prompting charges of opportunism or by inviting the question of why we have been
forsaken—can be seen in the ending to Stephen Spender’s ‘Air Raid across the Bay
at Plymouth’. Its third section attempts to catch the moment when two searchlights
chase down an enemy plane: ‘Two beams cross|To chalk his cross.’ This image is
then given its straining Christian elaboration in the poem’s fifth and final part:
Jacob ladders slant
Up to the god of war
Who, from his heaven-high car,
Unloads upon a star
A destroying star.
Round the coast, the waves
Chuckle between the rocks.
In the fields the corn
Sways, with metallic clicks.
Man hammers nails in Man,
High on his crucifix.^47The conceit of the poem stretches credibility, and is metaphysical in Samuel
Johnson’s critical sense of ‘heterogeneous ideas...yoked by violence together’.^48
When Spender republished hisCollected Poems 1928–1985, he reduced this section
to the first four lines of the second verse. If he saved his poem thus from the false
sublime, it may have been only to reduce it to the inconsequentially imagistic.
Therein lies its problem. The represented occasion and the attributed meaning
will not stick together. This poem is about a ‘phoney’ war in Adorno’s sour sense:
human meaning cannot be properly attributed to it.^49
T. S. Eliot famously weds occasion and significance in the ‘familiar compound
ghost’ section of ‘Little Gidding’. That he does it with greater tact than Spender in
his Plymouth air raid poem is thanks to a paraphrastic ambiguity of reference which
does not prevent the ‘dark dove with flickering tongue’ from condensing—though
not without strain of its own—a Christian symbol with aLuftwaffebomber, or the
‘dead leaves’ which ‘still rattled on like tin’ and the ‘metal leaves’ to combine a
Dantean image with bits of bomb fragment, or have the concluding ‘blowing of the
(^47) Spender, ‘Air Raid across the Bay at Plymouth’, in Gardner (ed.),Terrible Rain, 61; see Spender,
Collected Poems 1928–1985, 121–2.
(^48) Samuel Johnson, ‘The Life of Cowley’, inJohnson’s Lives of the Poets: A Selection,ed.J.P.Hardy
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 12. 49
Adorno, ‘Out of the firing-line’, 55.