peter robinson
horn’ call up a memory of, say, Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’
and,simultaneously, an air raid siren sounding the all-clear.^50 Eliot’s achievement,
to various later poets’ dismay, is achieved by means of a purified diction. He does
not let the immediate circumstances derail his concerns, but mediates them with
an all but euphemistically allusive language into vehicles for those themes.
That Eliot succeeded in yoking together occasion and themes with less violence
and more cunning can be shown by comparing his passage with the superficially
similar Edith Sitwell poem ‘Still Falls the Rain’, subtitled ‘The Raids, 1940. Night
and Dawn’:
Still falls the rain—
Dark as the work of man, blind as our loss—
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross...^51Sitwell signals her occasion in the subtitle, and then, in effect, stays with the thematic
incantation. That this is less flawed than Spender’s effort is a matter of her rhythms
and loose associations having practically no traffic with any material details of the
Blitz. Yet, as with the title of Brian Gardner’s anthology,The Terrible Rain: The
War Poets 1939–1945, the meaning of the title heavily underlined by two Boeing
B29 Superfortresses dropping their payloads, ‘rain’ itself provides a naturalistic
and euphemistic poeticism. The Christian generality also effaces all social facts of
the Blitz, and in this it echoes the propagandistic use of the photo of St Paul’s
Cathedral rising above the fires. Difficulties in these poems can be related back to
Picasso’sGuernica. The relationship between the events barely described and the
significances attributed to them by the use of stock symbols instances modernism’s
overwhelming artistic stretch, at the expense of its early ambitions to concrete
responsiveness. The event can come to seem almost incidental to the massive
piece of cultural saying that the mature modernist artist brings to bear. The nervy
abstracted meditations of H. D.’s late work might exemplify a related dilemma.^52
A similar approach is to bring images of natural cycles to bear on these special
circumstances. Laurence Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ has been called by
Kenneth Allott ‘a ‘‘blitz’’ poem in the same restricted sense as parts of Eliot’s ‘‘Little
Gidding’’ ’.^53 Yet it occasions an evocation of hope and survival by transposing its
reflections to a generic autumnal scene, provider of what has been termed ‘aromatic
(^50) T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, inTheCompletePoemsandPlays(London: Faber, 1969), 191–8. See
also Eliot’s ‘Defence of the Islands’ (p. 201) and ‘A Note on War Poetry’ (p. 202).
(^51) Edith Sitwell, ‘Still Falls the Rain’, in John Hayward (ed.),The Penguin Book of English Verse
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), 444–5.
(^52) See H. D., ‘The Walls Do Not Fall’, inComplete Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louise L. Martz (New
York: New Directions, 1983), 507–43. See also Wallace Stevens, ‘The Immense Poetry of War’ and
‘Flyer’s Fall’, inCollected Poetry and Prose(New York: Library of America, 1997), 251 and 295.
(^53) Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, in Kenneth Allott (ed.),The Penguin Book of
Contemporary Verse(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 49.