the war remains of keith douglas and hughes military service of his father, Billie Hughes, who survived the battlefields not only of
Gallipolibut also of France and Flanders. Hughes’s poem ‘Out’ dates from 1962, a
period of intensive engagement with Douglas’s poems (he recorded it on 29 August
1962). It was published inWodwo(1967), his first collection after his wife’s death
and after his production of editions of Douglas (1964) and of Plath (1965). An
explicitly autobiographical poem, ‘Out’ falls into three sections. I focus here on the
first, entitled ‘The Dream Time’:
My father sat in his chair recovering
From the four-year mastication by gunfire and mud,
Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking
In the colours of mutilation.
His outer perforations
Were valiantly healed, but he and the hearth-fire, its blood-flicker
On biscuit-bowl and piano and table-leg,
Moved into strong and stronger possession
Of minute after minute, as the clock’s tiny cog
Laboured and on the thread of his listening
Dragged him bodily from under
The mortised four-year strata of dead Englishmen
He belonged with. He felt his limbs clearing
With every slight, gingerish movement. While I, small and four,
Lay on the carpet as his luckless double,
His memory’s buried, immovable anchor,
Among jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shell-cases and craters,
Under rain that goes on drumming its rods and thickening
Its kingdom, which the sun has abandoned, and where nobody
Can ever again move from shelter.^7In ‘Out’ we enter the company of a house-bound father as fixed and inactive as
the furniture he sits on: he ‘sat in his chair recovering’, as if he were woven into
the upholstery, less recovering himself than recovering the chair. While the piano
stands silent, the ‘clock’s tiny cog’ beats metronomic accompaniment to the reverie
it produces. So small a sound is all that is necessary to bring on the grinding of
the guns, and the inexorable martial downbeat of the ‘rain that goes on drumming
its rods’. The clock’s diminutive beating, what Hughes a moment later calls its
‘slight, gingerish movement’, draws the sitter back into ‘gunfire and mud’, its tinny
syncopation at once plunging him back into the trenches and dragging him out. The
layers of the dead are called ‘mortised’, an adjective signifying they are intricately
joined, as with a mortice and tenon; an appropriate term, given that after his return
from the war Billie Hughes worked in carpentry as a joiner. The men ‘He belonged
with’ are alsomort-ized, made dead, and yet it appears to be Billie Hughes who is
mortified, stiffened, and silenced by his own survival.
(^7) Hughes, ‘Out’, inCollected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003), 165–6.