cornelia d. j. pearsall
with skeletons that are figurations for his own poetic practice. In the last page of this
letterto his sister, Hughes includes what he calls a ‘lyrical’ poem, ‘not very extreme,
about Heptonstall of course’. The poem ‘Heptonstall’, which takes its title from the
West Yorkshire town where his parents livedand Plath would be buried, describes
the town as a ‘Black village of gravestones’, composed of an accretion of skulls:
‘Skull of an idiot’, ‘Skull of a sheep’, ‘Skull of a bird’.^37 In the poem ‘Gog’, which,
Hughes told an interviewer, began as a description of a German military assault, a
‘jaguarish’ creature takes its clearest identity from its aggressive calcification: ‘My
great bones are massed in me’: ‘I listen to the song jarring my mouth|Where the
skull-rooted teeth are in possession.|I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on
the earth.’^38 The creature of Hughes’s ‘Gog’ takes his powers of articulation from
bone itself: its song is composed from ‘skull-rooted teeth’, its metrical rhythms are
beaten out by ‘feetbones’. These poems take not only their content but their form
from a pained commitment to a stony, stripped down, skeletal poetics.
Hughes considers Douglas’s poetry to have arrived at ‘a very essential, irreducible
self’, thus characterizing the stripping down to the elemental that is the hallmark
of Douglas’s lyrical style. The skeletal is that which accommodates yet resists death,
and thus is an apt figure for Douglas’s poetic ambition. Recovering from shrapnel
wounds in 1943 at the No. 1 General Hospital in El Ballah, Palestine, Douglas,
according to his biographer Desmond Graham, ‘wrote the first of the war poems on
which his reputation was to rest’, and indeed it appears that his reputation especially
exercised him in his convalescence.^39 Douglas could not have been firmer in his
purpose; Lt Col. John Stubbs, who spent much time in Douglas’s company at the
hospital, reports him saying repeatedly, ‘I insist, I am going to be a major poet come
what may.’^40 To become skeletal is to become a figure for death, but it is also to cheat
it, since the skeletal is what for a duration can survive even bodily decay. In ‘How to
Kill’, Douglas’s speaker witnesses, as he shoots a German soldier, Death make ‘a man
of dust|of a man of flesh’, becoming in an instant a ‘ghost’.^41 The weightless man is
the truly dead; this is how to kill, by leaving no bone. Thus an ambition to produce
skeletal poetry constitutes an ambition to become canonical, to create poetry that
remains. Echoing a line in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ (a German soldier, dead for three
weeks, is ‘mocked at by his equipment|that’s hard and good when he’s decayed’),^42
Roger Garfitt comments perceptively on this poet’s enduring appeal in similar
terms: ‘Douglas created a poetry that would be hard and good when he’s decayed.’^43
While his war experience intensified the development of his skeletal poetics,
Douglas’s lyric commitment pre-dates his mobilization. ‘The Poets’, written around
1940, while Douglas was still at Oxford, refers to ‘we [who] are already phantoms;
(^37) Hughes, ‘Heptonstall’, inCollected Poems, 170–1. (^38) Hughes, ‘Gog’, ibid. 162.
(^39) Desmond Graham, ‘A Soldier’s Story: Keith Douglas at El Ballah’,PN Review47, 12/3 (1985), 26.
(^40) Douglas, quoted by Graham, ibid. 27. (^41) Douglas, ‘How to Kill’, inComplete Poems, 119.
(^42) Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, ibid. 118.
(^43) Roger Garfitt, ‘Keith Douglas’,Poetry Nation, 4 (1975), 111.