santanu das
We husband the ancient glory
Inthese bared necks and hands.
Not broke is the forge of Mars;
But a subtler brain beats iron
To shoe the hoofs of death,
(Who paws dynamic air now).
Blindfingerslooseanironcloud
To rain immortal darkness
On strong eyes.^90The twofold movement is characteristic: the march is painted in imagistic detail,
which is unobtrusively developed into a critique of war; but this critique is then
traced with all the warmth of the observed detail. In the first stanza, even within the
visual field, the focus shifts from the ruddiness of the necks to the angled precision
of the backs to the ‘moving glint’. While the image of the ‘flaming pendulums’
introduces the theme of time, crucial to both poetry and the march, it also suggests
the reduction of the human body to a clockwork mechanism: for an instant we
are not sure to whom the ‘hands’ belong. Sound is joined to sight as the hands
complete their swinging arc across the line, but the oppressive monotony of the
march—particularly loathsome to one who was always being told off for his absent-
mindedness—is now suggested through the trochaic beat, the repetition of ‘khaki’
as well as the adjective ‘automatic’. The theme of mechanized warfare is developed
most fully in the final six lines: adjectives such as ‘subtler’ or ‘blind’, now harnessed
to the body of war rather than to that of the soldier, no longer suggest colours, but
carry forward the idea of dehumanization. But this critique is filtered through a
sensuous, mythic lens as the impersonal war machine is imagined as some sort of
Amazonian brood, pawing air, like the ‘Daughters of War’, with their ruddy limbs.
In his essay ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Imagination in Paint’, Rosenberg notes:
‘Poetry and music achieve that end [of beauty] through the intellect and the ear;
painting and sculpture through the eye.’^91 If ‘Marching’ is a painter’s poem we
realize his awareness of the difference between the two media when we contrast
his pre-war paintingHark, Hark the Lark(1912) with his war poem, ‘Returning,
we hear the larks’, which clearly draws on the former. In the painting, we see
a number of seemingly ‘primitive’ figures—gaunt, elongated—listening with
‘upturned...faces’. The poem, however, opens with pitch darkness as Rosenberg
goes on instead to create one of the most haunting soundscapes in English poetry:
But hark! joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.^92(^90) Rosenberg, ‘Marching—as seen from the left file’, inPoems and Plays, 123–4.
(^91) Rosenberg, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and Imagination in Paint’, inCollected Works, 298.
(^92) Rosenberg, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, inPoems and Plays, 139.