stan smith
reference to ‘The inexhaustible anger of the guns’^42 )and ‘Strange Meeting’. In
hisLondon Review of Booksmemoir, Spender wrote that the latter ‘imagines a
conversation between an English and a German soldier, soon after which both are
dead, each one having killed the other. Their dialogue is more that of lovers than of
enemies.’^43 The recurring homoerotic impulse of Spender’s Civil War poems can be
explained by the reason he gives in this memoir for his own generation’s fascination
with the young men of the Weimar Republic: ‘Between individuals, the German
and the English rapprochement had a strongly sexual aspect, perhaps because the
public murder of nation by nation which is war may be secretly compensated for by
attraction between individuals of each side—an assertion of the private love which
lies at a deeper level of truth than the public hatred.’ Far from being the robotic
machinery of violence, as in Wintringham and Donnelly, corporeality is reborn in
Spender’s Civil War elegies which are also love poems, merging Eros and Thanatos,
as the utopian site of human renewal and the transcendence of ideology, figured in
the carnal, sexual body which is ‘a better target for a kiss’.^44
Landscapes of Acheron
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••The vulnerability of the subject, whose living breathing body can so easily be
translated into a lifeless object, animates Spender’s ‘Port Bou’, first published in
New Writingin Autumn 1938. The poet’s ‘I’ intrudes obsessively throughout the
poem, exhibiting the same fear of personal death that infects ‘Thoughts during an
Air Raid’. If, with an excess of solipsism, he casts himself as ‘the exact centre’ of this
stage-scenery background, he feels for this very reason ‘solitary as a target’ for the
guns that open up across the harbour mouth, not reassured by the thought that it
is only practice (PS, 89–90). Escape from encirclement is a motif of the poem. The
harbour, embracing but not enclosing the sea, is compared to a small coiled animal
in a child’s arms, staring out through the gap to ‘outer freedom in animal air’, and
both images become implicit figures of his own state of mind, his circling arms
resting on a newspaper, fearful of the war beyond the ‘surrounding’ (inNew Writing,
‘circling’) hills. ‘Embrace’ is here a deeplyambivalent word, combining, like the
child clutching the animal that wants to escape, both security and imprisonment.
So, too, in the ‘warm’ but ‘waving flag-like’ faces of the militiamen, ‘the war finds
(^42) Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments,i:The
Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press,
1983), 99.
(^43) Spender, ‘Diary’,London Review of Books, 9 Apr. 1992, 25.
(^44) Were it not thatCollected Poems 1928–1953included ‘The Room above the Square’ among‘Poems
about the Spanish Civil War’, it might seem a merely personal lyric of separation and abandonment
by a lover who once ‘stayed in the high room for me’, now departed for ‘sunbright peninsulas of the
sword’, as ‘Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace|That through us flowed’ (p. 95).