‘what the dawn will bring to light’ Then let my private battle with my nerves,
Thefear of pain whose pain survives,
Thelovethattearsmebytheroots,
The loneliness that claws my guts,
Fuse in the welded front our fight preserves.A careless reading might attribute to the poet the closing exhortation to ‘Raise the red
flag triumphantly|For Communism and for liberty.’ But the strident affirmation
is in fact imaginary, projected into an uncertain future when ‘the workers of all the
world’ will gather on the plain of Huesca to raise the red flag and ‘Swear that our
dead fought not in vain’ (which recalls the earlier anxious desire to ‘prove the agony
was not in vain’). The poem’s real climax comes at the start of this last stanza, in the
acknowledgement that ‘Freedom is an easily spoken word|But facts are stubborn
things.’ The poem is riddled with doubt, detectable in the heretical hesitation about
‘what the Seventh Congress said,|If true, if false’, in the celebration of ‘the impartial
beauty of the stars’ and the indifference of ‘the unfeeling sky’, or in the references
to the ‘Crooked...road that we must tread’, ‘freedom’s crooked scars’, and the
‘innocent mask’ concealing that ‘our freedom’s swaying in the scales’. The poem’s
harrowingly dramatic power derives from the way it enacts the very processes by
which the isolated individual steels himself rhetorically to sink his ego in a ‘welded
front’. ‘What the dawn will bring to light’, however, remains genuinely unresolved.
The last poem Cornford wrote, ‘A Letter from Aragon’, assumes a quite different
tone, suggested by the refrain, ‘This is a quiet sector of a quiet front’, combining the
pathos and bathos of personal death. Ruiz, we are told, was buried in a shroud that
‘was too small and his washed feet stuck out’; the ‘stink of his corpse’ came through
the ‘clean pine boards’.^27 ‘Death was not dignified’, but unheroic, insignificant:
‘You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.’ The last words
of the poem seem to return to a more familiar rhetoric. But this is deceptive,
for they present not the poet’s own feelings but those of an Anarchist worker, a
fellow patient in the hospital, urging him to ‘ ‘‘Tell the workers of England|This
was a war not of our own making’’ ’. As in ‘Full Moon at Tierz’ the dramatic
distancing authenticates, but also relativizes, an appeal that is more plaintive than
histrionic.
The lyric understatement of Cornford’s ‘To Margot Heinemann’, published
inNew Writing IV, conceals a similar complexity. The sentiments are strangely
conflicted, for the thought of the loved one here is not sustaining, but a debilitating
wound, the pain at his side and the shadow that chills his view, tempting the
poet to weakness and fear. If he is afraid to lose her, he is also afraid of this
fear, as if he needs to subdue that sense of loss to the revolutionary undertaking.
ThelastmiletoHuescais‘Thelastfenceforourpride’;^28 but the possessive
(^27) Cornford, ‘A Letter from Aragon’, ibid. 41.
(^28) Cornford, ‘To Margot Heinemann’, ibid. 40.