stan smith
adjective refuses to specify its referent: isitthe romantic hubris of the two lovers,
or the proper pride of the revolutionary in the ‘welded front’ he shares with his
comrades? The whole poem is a personal address to its dedicatee, and the pronouns
‘I’ and ‘you’ are insistently reiterated at strategic points at the start and end of
lines, while ‘my’ recurs six times in sixteen lines; yet it is precisely this personal
love which, it appears, has to be renounced. The ambiguity persists into the final
appeal not to forget his love, which seems to sink romantic attachment into the
greater solidarity of the cause, for ‘love’ of which he is prepared to lose his life.
This ambivalence explains the poem’s opening co-option of Marx’s thoughts on
religion in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. Like
‘the wretchedness of religion’, romantic love is ‘at once an expression of and a
protest against real wretchedness...the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions’. This, presumably, is why
such love is negatively conceived as ‘the pain at my side’, for, as Marx continues,
‘The abolition of...the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their real
happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon
a condition that requires illusions.’^29 By implication, the illusory happiness of
romantic attachment, which brings with it grief and separation, must be subsumed
into the authentic mutuality of a transformed social reality.
Anti-heroic Notes
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••For John Lehmann, writing on ‘The Influence of Spain’ in 1939, the value of Stephen
Spender’s earlier Civil War poems was that ‘they struck an independent, anti-heroic
note’ in many ways representative of those ‘who felt that the adjustment of original
enthusiasm to the realities of modern warfare and modern political struggle was a
much more complex and painful process than was generally admitted, while their
loyalty to the anti-fascist cause never wavered’.^30
Spender’s ‘Thoughts during an Air Raid’ sets the pattern for most of the ‘Poems
about the Spanish Civil War’ in Part 4 of his 1955Collected Poems. A kind of
proleptic elegy for himself, it attempts to imagine his own death from the outside,
as seen by others, as impersonally as he must view other people’s deaths. The poem’s
depersonalizing of selfhood is reinforced in the 1955 version by the substitution,
for the repeated ‘I’ of Spender’s earlier version inThe Still Centre(1939), of the
impersonal pronoun ‘one’, except in a single dismissive reference to ‘this thing
(^29) Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘‘Philosophy of Right’’: Introduction’, in
Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley, ed. Joseph O’Malley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.
(^30) Lehmann, ‘The Influence of Spain’, inNew Writing in England(New York: Critics Group Press,
1939), 20.