cornelia d. j. pearsall
Sidelined by his ear on his way to the front lines of the Western Desert, Douglas
foundhimself reflecting on lines in poetry. ‘Negative Information’, the poem he
wrote just before producing the three at Nathanya, begins:
As lines, the unrelated symbols of
nothing you know, discovered in the clouds
idly made on paper or by the feet of crowds
on sand, keep whatever meaning they have
and you believe they write, for some
intelligence, messages of a sort;
these curious indentations on my thought
with every week, almost with each hour come.^49These lines radically disjoin the formal element of the line from any necessary
content, as lines are symbols that are ‘unrelated’ to one another or to any intelligible
meaning. ‘[Y]ou believe they write’, but the contrails of the clouds, marks on the
paper, or footprints in the sand are illegible. Meant for some other ‘intelligence’, with
more understanding of their relation, the lines nevertheless inexorably trace ‘curious
indentations’ on the poet’s ‘thought’. The image of lines made by feet in the sand
recurs in the first of his Nathanya poems, ‘The Hand’, which ends by imagining ‘the
tracks of [the mind] at liberty|like the geometry of feet|upon a shore, constructed
in the sand’.^50 The ‘tracks’ of the mind parallel the ‘indentations’ of ‘thought’ in the
previous poem, as acts of cognition resemble footprints ‘on sand’ or ‘upon a shore’.
In the first stanza of ‘The Hand’ he observes admiringly of this body part, ‘the bone
retains its proportion in the grave,’ as the geometrical precision associated with
lines formed by feet in the sand is recognized as a quality of digital bone as well.
Geometrical precision is critical to verse making (‘the geometry of feet’), Douglas
had already determined in ‘On the Nature of Poetry’ (his 1940 essay which his
mother copied by hand for Ted Hughes), in which he declares that a poet must not
‘waste any more words’ in his work ‘than a mathematician: every word must work
for its keep’.^51 Several years later, in August 1943, Douglas wrote to J. C. Hall in a
letter widely taken to be his final poetic manifesto: ‘my object (and I don’t give a
damn about my duty as a poet) is to write true things, significant things in words
each of which works for its place in a line.’^52 His duty as a poet is homologous to
his duty as a soldier: the object in either profession is to maintain the disciplined
order of the line. Exploring the properties and proportions of lines, not so much
in their lengths (often highly variable in Douglas) but in theworkthat words do
within and between themselves, is a significant object of the two richly overlapping
poems he wrote next, ‘The Sea Bird’ and ‘Adams’, both of which commence with
steps in the sand.
(^49) Douglas, ‘Negative Information’, inComplete Poems, 81.
(^50) Douglas, ‘The Hand’, ibid. 83. (^51) Douglas, ‘On the Nature of Poetry’, 133.
(^52) Douglas to J. C. Hall, 10 Aug. 1943, inLetters, 295.