‘what the dawn will bring to light’ In Spain, Auden wrote, ‘our thoughts have bodies’.^22 Communistideology,
reinforced by the continuous proximity of death, induced in many poets a way of
looking at the self as simply a physical body in a world of material objects, a fulcrum
for action rather than a thinking and feeling subject. The handful of poems written
by the Irish Communist Charles Donnelly before his death at Jarama in February
1937 exemplifies the literary consequences of sinking the ego. The first-person
singular almost disappears from Donnelly’s poems. Linguistic tricks learnt from the
early Auden reduce the self to the status of an object among objects in a landscape,
perceived primarily through the eyes of others. ‘The Tolerance of Crows’ imagines
his own death with inhuman detachment, deploying abstract conceptual nouns
which objectify the self in a language of quantity, dispositions, angles of elevation
and direction, casting war as a simple question of ‘solved|Problems on maps’ (PS,
50–1). Renouncing the personal pronoun, the poem reduces the self to a physical
body, flesh and nerves, and an impersonal ‘mind that cuts|Thought clearly for a
waiting purpose’, brutally redefining ‘love’ as a physical function that ‘impales’ itself
on any flesh. Other poems of Donnelly’s, published inIreland Today, exhibit the
same depersonalizing idiom. ‘Heroic Heart’ belies the Romantic subjectivity that
its title ironically implies, speaking instead of the disinterestedness of a ‘plasmic
soil|Where things ludicrously take root’,^23 where the human exists primarily as
matter, dissociated head, muscle, mouth, organs which ‘Waste down like wax’,
jawbones that ‘find new way with meats, loins|Raking and blind, new way with
women’, reducing sex to mechanical process. ‘Poem’ offers perceptions without a
subject, a ‘will’ that seems to flicker autonomously as ‘simple action only’, ‘Between
rebellion as a private study and the public|Defiance’.^24 A figure in a landscape,
addressed in the second person as ‘you’, the self is objectified as a target for the
‘sniper [who] may sight you carelessly contoured’ on the skyline, or, dead, becomes
simply a ‘name, subject of all-considered words’ in a public discourse of political
martyrdom.
Similar strategies are discernible in the poems of the British Communist Tom
Wintringham, who survived Spain tofight in the Second World War. ‘The Splint’
explores being wounded without ever evoking an experiencing ‘I’, diminishing the
subject to an imposture, ‘powers|And pretences that are yourself’ (PS,94–5).The
self here is dispersed into bodily processes, ‘the eyes’|Leap, pulse-beat, thought-
flow’, so that even ‘the jerked wound...the pain’s throb’ are objectified, and ‘Hours
creep at you like enemy|Patrols’. The nearest the poem comes to acknowledging
personal weakness lies, significantly, not in pain but in ‘fear of pain, sin|Of giving
in’. The will has to be steeled to ‘keep mind and mouth shut’. Ego must be sunk in
the collectivity, ‘These men [who]|Count you a man’, whose comradeship validates
(^22) Auden,Spain, 10.
(^23) Charles Donnelly, ‘Heroic Heart’, in Cunningham (ed.),Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse,
- 24
Donnelly, ‘Poem’, ibid. 108–9.