‘down in the terraces between the targets’ ‘Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?’
Andrecent history answers: Half Japan!
Not love, but hate? Well, both are versions of
The ‘feeling’ that you dare me to....Be dumb!
Appear concerned only to make it scan!
How dare we now be anything but numb?^79The poem, deploying a metaphysical conceit that contains the large in the small,
argues a point about feeling in poetry by aligning its position with an opposition
to the gratuitously unlimited killing of civilians in the fire-bombing of the Japanese
cities and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Donne could be daring, but he never knew,
When he inquired, ‘Who’s injured by my love?’
Love’s radio-active fall-out on a large
Expanse around the point it bursts above.Yet there is ghastly ‘daring’ in Davie’s conceit as well. Like Adorno in his per-
ceptiveness, he can appear to be collaborating with, by succumbing to, the very
dehumanization against which he is protesting. In response, poets have been driven
to ever more subtle modes of indirection. As Elizabeth Bishop, punning on the brass
of the Air Force Band and of the ‘top brass’, put it: ‘The gathered brasses want to
go|boom—boom.’^80 When all’s said, we have taken great strides in the business of
‘man thinning out his kind’^81 since Yeats imagined that ‘Aeroplane and Zeppelin’
would ‘Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in|Until the town lie beaten flat’; but
whether we have made any moral progress on the sanctity of civilian life in wartime
since the poet’s death in January 1939 must, as I write, be painfully in doubt.
(^79) Donald Davie, ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’, inCollected Poems, ed. Neil Powell (Manchester: Carcanet,
2000), 67–8.
(^80) Elizabeth Bishop, ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’, inThe Complete Poems
1927–1979(London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), 69.
(^81) Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, 386.