‘what the dawn will bring to light’ depersonalizations, recalling the ‘cold hillside’ on which Keats’s knight-at-arms lies
dyingin ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.^39
One of Spender’s most powerful poems, ‘Fall of a City’, generalizes death and
defeat in the vision of an urban wilderness emptied of its inhabitants, the once
potent rhetorics which inflamed its passions now reduced to torn posters, scattered
leaflets, ‘mutilated, destroyed, or run in rain,|Their words blotted out with tears’,
thebadgesandsalutestornfromlapelsandhands,‘thrownawaywithhumansacks
they wore’, the names of heroes who once enthralled crowded public halls, ‘foxand
lorcaclaimed as history on the walls’, surviving now only as ‘deleted’ graffiti (PS,
85–6). Lehmann commended ‘Fall of a City’ for exploring ‘the special horror of a
modern warfare between opposing ideologies, when a whole population must in a
few hours...switch over to the hypocrisy of an imposed creed to protect themselves
from annihilation’.^40 He praised another poem, ‘At Castellon’, for ‘vividness of
imagery and depth of feeling’ and ‘a simplicity...rare in [Spender’s] work since
the early poems’. ‘At Castellon’, unusually for Spender, presents a narrative without
subjective interior. This account of being passed on at night from village to village
to ultimate safety confines itself to external things, the glint of light reflected in the
unlit headlamps of mysterious parked trucks, the ‘small false ember’ of cigarettes
in the dark, their smokers anonymous, unseen (PS, 30–1). Even the ‘working
man’ awoken to guide them is no more than eyes that gleam and relapse into
their dream. His torch is a ‘gliding star of light’, as if conducting them through
the underworld, while, on the road behind them, bombers unload their ‘Cargoes
of iron and of fire|To delete...|The will of those who dared to move|From
the furrow, their life’s groove’. The poem, that is, translates the moment into an
ancient mythic pattern, reinforced by casting the bombers as ‘winged black roaring
fates’, brutally generalizing the deaths of real, unknown people to the same clinical
verb—‘delete’—deployed in ‘Fall of a City’.
‘Two Armies’ likewise creates a generalized allegory of warfare on a frozen plain
where ‘No one is given leave|On either side, except the dead, and wounded’ and
the combatants are held to their commitment now only by a ‘discipline drilled
once in an iron school’ which holds them at gunpoint.^41 Ideology has evaporated
into frosty breath on these infernal plains, and now, nervous and cold, ‘each
man hates the cause and distant words|That brought him here’ more than the
enemy, as, between the sleeping armies, ‘a common suffering|Whitens the air
with breath and makes both one|As though these enemies slept in each other’s
arms’.
The poem calls up echoes familiar to a generation reared on the poetry of the
Great War, in particular, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (as in its
(^39) Keats, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ibid. 335. (^40) Lehmann, ‘Influence of Spain’, 21.
(^41) Spender, ‘Two Armies’, inCollected Poems 1928–1953,97–8.