a war of friendship distance poetry from war; rather, in ‘A Renascence’, he suggests a (problematical)
linkbetween poetic flowering and violence (as many were later and controversially
to suggest in relation to the violence in Northern Ireland), writing of the ‘fighting
men’ that ‘of their travailings and groans|Poetry is born again’.^38 That poetry
is born out of torment is an idea that Graves retains, although the cause of the
torment changes—from war to his cruel Muse—and in ‘Limbo’, may be found all
the images later associated with the hard-hitting war poems of both World Wars:
After a week spent under raining skies,
In horror, mud and sleeplessness, a week
Of bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries
And the ever-watchful sniper: where the reek
Of death offends the living...but poor dead
Can’t sleep, must lie awake with the horrid sound
That roars and whirs and rattles overhead
All day, all night, and jars and tears the ground;
When rats run, big as kittens: to and fro
They dart, and scuffle with their horrid fare...^39Those images do not, here, find their most adequate expression: ‘horrid sound’
detracts from ‘horrid fare’, for instance; the ‘roars and whirs and rattles’ lack the
onomatopoeic force that gives Owen’s later poems their density of meaning; and
‘rats...big as kittens’, however accurate it may be, inadvertently brings to mind
the small-scale, fluffy, and harmless, rather than the horror the lines are meant to
express. That said, the poem marks out Graves’s differences from Sassoon in 1915,
in his urge to evoke, not evade, the ‘reality’ of war. It is also a precursor to Alun
Lewis’s Second World War poem ‘All Day It Has Rained’, in imagery and intention,
if not in effect.
More impressive inOver the Brazieris the collection’s title-poem (rather than
the frequently quoted ‘It’s a Queer Time’), in which imagined structures—which
by implication include the poem itself—are brought down: ‘Idyllic dwellings—but
this silly|Mad War has now wrecked both, and what|Better hopes has my little
cottage got?’^40 The question—what better hopes does this poem have?—lurks
here too. Its simplicities of tone and diction and its lullaby rhythms (‘What life
to lead and where to go|After the War, after the War?’) reinforce the poignancy
of its close, in a manner suggestive of those poems in which Graves’s deliberately
childlike idiom takes on a more sinister aspect—as in the ‘Nursery Memories’ of
‘The First Funeral’, or ‘A Child’s Nightmare’. Other poems inFairies and Fusiliers
may be read as if in dialogue with some of Sassoon’s habitual preoccupations: in
‘To R. N.’, ‘Cherries are out of season,|Ice grips at branch and root,|And singing
birds are mute.’^41 ‘Two Fusiliers’, whilst it does not idealize war, does pre-empt
(^38) Graves, ‘A Renascence’, inComplete Poems, 13–14. (^39) Graves, ‘Limbo’, ibid. 14.
(^40) Graves, ‘Over the Brazier’, ibid. 20–1. (^41) Graves, ‘To R. N.’, ibid. 31.