‘what the dawn will bring to light’ ‘‘I’’...proppedup’ in bed.^31 ‘Of course’, the poem begins, ‘the entire effort is to
put oneself|Outside the ordinary range|Of what are called statistics,’ making the
idea of a bomb diving right through this bed an ‘obscene’ thought. A hundred
people may be killed in the outer suburbs, but ‘one’ carries on, unable really to
imagine a world from which one is absent, though ‘there are many|For whom
one’s loss would illustrate|The ‘‘impersonal’’ use indeed’. In a world dispersed
into isolated, self-absorbed individuals, where ‘no one suffer[s]|for his neighbour’,
the horror is postponed for each until, in an artful sudden summoning of the
third-person pronoun, death ‘settles on him’, reducing the subject to object
status.
Spender’s Civil War poems are haunted by the bullet’s arbitrary power instant-
aneously to translate a living subject into a dead object. ‘The Coward’ deploys the
myth of Narcissus transformed into a flower ‘which is a wound’, to suggest that,
in death, there is little difference between ‘the heroes’ sunset fire’ and this one
who ‘died, not like a soldier’ but in ‘rings of terror’.^32 For hero and coward alike,
‘All the bright visions in one instant|Changed to this fixed continual present.’ ‘A
Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map’ sees time and space, history and geography,
converge to fix for ever at five o’clock the ‘blank time’ of this man’s death under
the olive trees, so that he now stays ‘faithfully in that place’, split from his living
comrade by the divisive bullet which ‘Open[s] wide the distances|Of his final
loneliness’.^33
‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ likewise speaks of ‘the boy lying dead under the olive trees’
as ‘too young and too silly’ to have been ‘notable to [the] important eye’ of the guns,
‘a better target for a kiss’ who ‘too lightly...threw down his cap|One day’ (PS,
42–3). The casual erasure of this life as ‘intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour’
makes one ask why, when only one bullet in a thousand kills a man, this youth was
so arbitrarily chosen; ask, too, whether so much expenditure could be justified ‘On
the death of one so young, and so silly’. Spender’s poem sets the decent silliness
of a life ‘valueless|In terms of employment’ against the indecency of systems that
define human beings in economic terms, whether capitalist or Communist.
In a snide footnote, Malcolm Muggeridge claimed that Spender, ‘in the course
of a poem, remarked that in Spain there was a bullet addressed to him. If so, it
was not delivered.’^34 An insert slip in the book adds that ‘Mr. Stephen Spender
wishes to deny the accuracy of the author’s statement regarding him.’ Muggeridge’s
remark involves a wilful misreading of the opening three lines of the poem ‘War
Photograph’, published inThe New Statesmanin June 1937, as autobiography
rather than dramatic monologue:
(^31) Stephen Spender, ‘Thoughts during an Air Raid’, inCollected Poems 1928–1953(London: Faber,
1955), 96. 32
33 Spender, ‘The Coward’, ibid. 102–3.
Spender, ‘A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map’, ibid. 100.^34 Muggeridge,Thirties, 248.