Untitled

 peter robinson

not to have been completed until 1945—and so may have been prompted by the
V-bombraids during the last year or so of the War:

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.^61

Unlike MacNeice’s, Thomas’s poetic language all but bypasses the fire raid’s actual
scene. The task of grounding the texts in contemporary events is left to his titles,
which have an explanatory length fairly unusual for this poet. Thomas focuses the
‘absence of meaning’ problem by bringing in Christian sacrifice and atonement too,
but his imagery also mythically metamorphoses the events into archetypal patterns.
His poems are particularly concernedwith grief and mourning, which may again
be because of the absence of an enemy—though this does not prevent MacNeice
from picturing a fist shaken at the ‘vanishing sky’ in ‘The Trolls’. Thomas’s poems
are stoically muted. There is little raging against the dying of the light in these less
personal instances.
Norman Nicholson’s ‘Bombing Practice’ also resorts to natural imagery to evoke
the Futurism-derived theme of war as spectacle:

The swinging aeroplane drops seed through the air

Plumb into the water, where slowly it grows

Boles of smoke and trees

Of swelling and ballooning leafage,

Silver as willows

Or white as a blossoming pear.^62

Nicholson’s imagery of trees might be a conscious attempt to grant meaning to an
event in the industrialization of warfare. The idea of the bombs as seeds—which
points towards a final line where they ‘plant their germs of pain in the limbs of
men’—is a painfully false step; yet it consciously wrestles with the problem in
finding the explosion of bombs in water harmlessly beautiful. The spectacle of
warfare as an aesthetic pleasure recalls Walter Benjamin’s criticism of the Futurists
who had made humanity’s destruction the apotheosis of art for art’s sake.^63 Here is
a further problem for the civilian poet, whose relation to modern warfare, if luckily
at a distance, is likely to be one of waiting and watching. There is a doubling of

(^61) Thomas, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, inCollected Poems
1934–1952 62 , 94.
Norman Nicholson, ‘Bombing Practice’, inCollected Poems, ed. Neil Curry (London: Faber,
1994), 28.
(^63) Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, inIlluminations,
trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 244.