stan smith
I have an appointment with a bullet
Atseventeen hours less a split second
—And I shall not be late.^35Perhaps in response to Muggeridge’s mockery, Spender omitted this stanza from
The Still Centreand subsequent printings of the poem, continuing to revise the text
until it was finally reduced to three three-line stanzas under the title ‘In No Man’s
Land’ in the 1955Collected Poems, before being omitted entirely from the 1985
Collected Poems.^36 ThepoemalludestoRobertCapa’swidelydistributedphotograph
‘Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936’,
snapped as the soldier leapt from his trench, unaware that within a split second
he would be dead. The instant that ‘lurks|With its metal fang planned for my
heart|When the finger tugs and the clock strikes’ is both the trigger of the gun that
kills him and the lens of the camera that ‘shoots’ this death. The place ‘Where inch
and instant cross’ is the real time and place of death and also the ‘flat and severed
second on which time looks’ of the photograph itself, which will remain unchanged
throughout the coming years, ‘As faithful to the vanished moment’s violence|As
love fixed to one day in vain’. The ‘No Man’s Land’ of the poem’s final version
is both that terrain between warring camps where men die in earnest, and the
perpetually frozen chronotope of the ‘War Photograph’ itself, where the doomed
man endlessly ‘launches his rigid continual present’, the instant before death fixed
for ever by the camera. It is the photograph, not the dead man, that speaks of an
appointment with a bullet always a ‘split second’ in the future, at that five o’clock
in the afternoon when the clock strikes, completing a mechanical trinity with rifle
trigger and camera shutter. For this ‘No Man’s Land’ is, too, the unbridgeable gap
between the actual life, for ever not yet dead, and the photographic image of it. The
actual remains of Federico Borrell Garc ́ıa^37 are lost to history on the rocky hillside.
His only surviving ‘corpse [is] a photograph taken by fate’.
Confronting the intimacy of death, Spender’s poem exhibits a cool scrupulous
impersonality effected in part by the echoes of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’,
which also reflected, at a second aesthetic remove, on the way in which a work of art
translates the lives of wasting generations into an abiding image, the photograph’s
‘I shall remain’ directly recalling the Ode’s ‘Thou shalt remain, in midst of other
woe’.^38 But the site of this death suggests also a less consoling idea of art’s
(^35) Spender, ‘War Photograph’, repr. in Cunningham (ed.),Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War
Verse 36 , 413.
Curiously, Valentine Cunningham’s indispensablePenguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse,in
which most of the poems discussed in this essay can be found, prints both texts without noting their
relation.
(^37) Richard Whelan, ‘Proving that Robert Capa’s ‘‘Falling Soldier’’ is Genuine: A Detective
Story’,<http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/capar.html >;seealsoRichardWhelan,
‘Robert Capa’s Falling Soldier: A Detective Story’,Aperture, 166 (Spring 2002), 48–55.
(^38) John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), 345.