the war remains of keith douglas and hughes of Douglas’s feet in the sands of Nathanya, it is not entirely certain which poem
waswritten first. In general, later versions of Douglas’s poems are sharply edited
and shorter, but Graham suggests that ‘The Sea Bird’ pre-dates ‘Adams’, the longer
and ‘more hazardously ambitious’ of the two; Hughes reads ‘Adams’ as ‘a gloss’
on ‘The Sea Bird’.^57 While one may hold chronological priority over the other, we
should see them nevertheless as simultaneous, coexistent. The relation between the
two poems, which are nearly identical in their first four and a half stanzas and at
the same time strikingly divergent, parallels the relation of divergent coexistence
between the dead and live birds in each poem.
Douglas’s goal as a poet is ‘to write true things, significant things in words each
of which works for its place in a line’, and the first line of ‘Adams’ shows how hard
each word works to command its place: ‘Walking alone beside the beach’.^58 The
poet walks alone but also along with the beach, at once solitary and accompanied,
alongside as if his feet in the sand trace parallel lines not only in but with the
shore. These steps extend to the first line of the second tercet, which reads, ‘walking
thinking slowly I see’. The adverb ‘slowly’ works so assiduously for its place that it
may modify ‘walking’, ‘thinking’, or ‘I see’, as the line draws together varied acts of
attempted cognition.
The likeness of the living and the dead bird in ‘The Sea Bird’ is axiomatic, but in
‘Adams’ the resemblance between man and bird must be established:
Adamsislikeabird
alert (high on his pinnacle of air
he does not hear you, someone said);
in appearance he is bird-eyed,
the bones of his face are
like the hollow bones of a bird.The tercets adumbrate the simile ‘Adams is like a bird’ only to confound the very
notion of similitude by illustrating how the trope of simile can function itself by
way of lineal superimposition. Adams is so ‘like’ the bird that it is impossible to
distinguish them, since the lines that immediately follow make it impossible to tell
if the ‘he’ who is at once ‘alert’ and inattentive (‘he does not hear you’, the poet
says, having heard, and now said, what ‘someone said’) is Adams or the bird. By the
last stanza of the poem, it is the poet who seeks to superimpose himself on the bird,
which he accomplishes, as had Adams, by the superimposition of clauses in lines
that pivot upon one another: ‘Till Rest, cries my mind to Adams’ ghost;|only go
elsewhere, let me alone|creep into the dead bird, cease to exist.’ The word ‘alone’,
returning from the poem’s opening line, works fiercely for its place in the two final
lines, signifying, at least: let me alone creep into the dead bird, while you cease to
exist; let me alone, while you creep into the dead bird and cease to exist; let me
(^57) Graham,Keith Douglas, 133; Hughes, ‘Postscript 2’, 217.
(^58) Douglas, ‘Adams’, inComplete Poems, 84.