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the fury and the mire 

the irrational, grotesque images I had accumulatedduring the war; and imposing order on
those images enabled me to recover my identity. In 1948, when I was living in Paris, one
night I dreamed that I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine-gun and mortar
fire. The next morning I wrote it out in the poem ‘Carentan O Carentan’, and as I wrote I
realized that it wasn’t a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire.^5

Simpson’s experience bears a striking resemblance to Wilfred Owen’s: both suffered
from neurasthenia, or shell-shock. Owen lost his memory, but only after he was
forced to relive the horrors of battle in those dreams that are a principal symptom
of shell-shock was he able to write about the Western Front.
Simpson’s first dream poem, ‘Carentan O Carentan’, appeared in his first book,
The Arrivists(1949), and has a dreamlike distance from experience. The poems of
his second book,Good News of Death(1955), show reality emerging from the dream:

The Heroes

I dreamed of war-heroes, of wounded war-heroes

With just enough of their charms shot away

To make them more handsome. The women moved nearer

To touch their brave wounds and their hair streaked with gray.

I saw them in long ranks ascending the gang-planks;

The girls with the doughnuts were cheerful and gay.

They minded their manners and muttered their thanks;

The Chaplain advised them to watch and to pray.

They shipped these rapscallions, these sea-sick battalions

To a patriotic and picturesque spot;

They gave them new bibles and marksmen’s medallions,

Compasses, maps and committed the lot.

A fine dust has settled on all that scrap metal.

The heroes were packaged and sent home in parts

To pluck at a poppy and sew on a petal

And count the long night by the stroke of their hearts.^6

The title signals a line of descent from a poem of the previous war, Sassoon’s ‘The
Hero’, which begins:

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,

And folded up the letter that she’d read.

‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’^7

Simpson follows Sassoon in contrasting civilian illusion with military reality, as
revealed in their two linguistic registers (the civilian’s ‘patriotic and picturesque
spot’ unspoilt by the military ‘scrap metal’). The heroes’ ‘brave wounds’ echoes the

(^5) Louis Simpson, quoted in Ian Hamilton (ed.),The Poetry of War, 1939–1945(London: Alan Ross,
1965), 171–2.
(^6) Louis Simpson, ‘The Heroes’, inSelected Poems(London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 20.
(^7) Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Hero’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956(London: Faber, 1984), 26.