british holocaust poetry: songs of experience trees’, at home in the natural world rather than alienated from the neutral ground
anddawn.^79 Gershon seems to be expressing what David Brauner, in ‘the Jewish
Anti-Pastoral’, has identified as a fundamental difference between Jewish writers
in Britain (such as Linda Grant and Howard Jacobson) and other writers in the
English tradition. He suggests that because of their legacy of historical suffering, ‘and
in particular, for post-war Jews the oppressive omnipresent consciousness of the
Holocaust,Jewscannotsubscribetoapastoralworldviewpredicatedonthenotionof
harmony between man and his environment, or between man and his fellow man’.^80
WhereasthiscosmologicalinsecurityistragicinGershon’swriting,GerdaMayer’s
poetry treats it with humour. For instance, in her Blakean ‘Children with Candles’,
the speaker is filled with wonder, yet impossibly anxious lest the storm ‘blow their
voices out’.^81 This is an anxiety only too comprehensible in the light of Nelly Sachs’s
‘A Dead Child Speaks’.^82 More bitter is the humour in Mayer’s ‘God Wot’, where
the dying flowers which are the object of a still-life painting class in ‘God-wottery’
intrusively remind her of a carriage travelling east, ‘And wave thin hands, and
fight for fetid air’.^83 However, breaking rhythm and line length, she claims that she
lacks the nerve to depict them in this shocking way, even though she knows ‘their
names; though I know their faces and their names’. That paradox ends with a poor
play on words: ‘Forgetmenot...rendered anonymous’. (The fact that this flower is
‘Vergissmeinnicht’ in German uncomfortably recalls Keith Douglas’s more famous
Second World War poem of that title, an elegy for a dead German soldier, which
ends with an idea suppressed in Mayer’s poem, that death ‘has done the lover mortal
hurt’.^84 ) Such intrusiveness of overwhelming ideas is another indication of trauma.
Similarly, in Mayer’s ‘The Agnostic’s Prayer’, which parodies lines of Anglican
hymns by thanking God ‘for your grace and favour’, an ambiguity in the sound of
the lines praying God to keep her own and her neighbour’s cats safe reads as if she
is asking God to keep herneighbours‘from each other’s throats’.^85 The bathos of
poor jokes re-creates precisely the sinking disharmony of Mayer’s attempt to fit in
with English jollity. To my mind it casts a harsh light on Hill’s awkward poetics
in ‘September Song’: his very first play on words, putting ‘deported’ instead of
‘departed’ after ‘born’ in the heading epigraph, strikes me as unfeelingly facetious
rather than imaginative, as do the puns in ‘patent terror’.^86 But that is a matter of
(^79) William Wordsworth, ‘Song (‘‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’’)’ and ‘A slumber did my
spirit seal’, inWilliam Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 147–8.
(^80) David Brauner,Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Con-
nections 81 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 111–12.
82 Mayer, ‘Children with Candles’, in Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 257.
Nelly Sachs, ‘A Dead Child Speaks’, in Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry, 67.
(^83) Mayer,‘GodWot’,inLawson(ed.),Passionate Renewal, 253.
(^84) Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. Desmond Graham (London:
Faber, 2000), 118. 85
86 Mayer, ‘The Agnostic’s Prayer’, in Lawson (ed.),Passionate Renewal, 251.
Hill, ‘September Song’, inCollected Poems, 67.