cornelia d. j. pearsall
is harder for the luckless survivors who themselves constitute war’s remains, himself
included.In the third part of ‘Out’, subtitled ‘Remembrance Day’, Hughes demands
of corpses he may suspect are more effectual than any living person: ‘You dead bury
your dead.’ As Hughes surveys the scattered wreckage of his inherited battlefields, as
he turns in the early 1960s from editing the poetry of Douglas to editing the poetry
of Plath, he acknowledges that one’s only hopeisthat the dead, whose quickening
remains still the demobilized survivors, may indeed bury the dead, because the
living, as philosophical scavengers, never can.
Skeletal Poetics
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••‘Will you look upskeletalin a dictionary (I haven’t one) and find out if it
exists and means like a skeleton’: so Douglas wrote in a letter to Betty Jesse
from the Front in March 1944, the privations of combat including the absence
of dictionaries.^28 The word exists, and does indeed mean, according to theOED,
‘part of or resembling a skeleton’. Douglas’s inquiry was prompted by his use of
the word in ‘Mersa’, referred to in the poem as ‘the skeletal town’.^29 Just past the
town, he joins some ‘cherry-skinned soldiers’ on the ‘white beach’. The fruitful
adjective ‘cherry’ indicates that the soldiers are sunburned, but suggests also that
they are edible, and indeed the poem moves at the end to the eating away of this
red flesh. As he stands in the water, looking down at his feet, ‘The logical little
fish|converge and nip the flesh|imagining I am one of the dead.’ But of course it
is the poet himself who most aggressively imagines not only the death of his body,
but the inexorable logic of its degustation. In Douglas’s ‘Dead Men’, unearthed
soldiers are now simply ‘a casual meal for a dog, nothing but the bone|so soon’.
In ‘Time Eating’, digestion is ‘Ravenous’ Time’s most aggressive function: ‘Time’s
ruminative tongue will wash|and slow juice masticate all flesh.’^30 To imagine being
dead is to imagine being fed upon—by fish, dogs, time itself—but while the flesh
is consumed, the bone is what for a time remains.
Edna Longley comments that Douglas produced ‘Not skeletal poetry, but poetry
with no superfluous flesh, fighting fit, the cadence of energy.’^31 But in Douglas
all flesh can appear superfluous, as war renders into visibility the stony, hardened
interior of the doomed man. What is skeletal is not easily reducible, as the hard,
dense substance is the most enduring part of a dead body, potentially unassimilable
either to life or to death. The skeletal takes sharp if often shifting definition in
Douglas’s war poetry, not only as a recurrent image throughout hisœuvre,butasa
figuration for poetic survival. ‘Simplify me when I’m dead’ is one of the Douglas’s
(^28) Douglas to Betty Jesse, 26 Mar. 1944, inLetters, 327.
(^29) Douglas, ‘Mersa’, inComplete Poems, 99. (^30) Douglas, ‘Time Eating’, ibid. 71.
(^31) Longley, ‘ ‘‘Shit or Bust’’ ’, 111.