‘what the dawn will bring to light’ peace’, in an image of comradeship which nevertheless fails to console a mind that
is‘paper where dust and ink falls’.
Spender can envisage the larger war only in mythic, abstract terms. Port Bou,
just inside the Spanish frontier, the point of transit between a France at peace and
the war zone, becomes thus a liminal space internalizing frontiers simultaneously
real and symbolic. The mythology of passage, picking up the familiar Thirties trope
of crossing the frontier, is apparent in hisNew Writingreport a year earlier, ‘Spain
Invites the World’s Writers’:
Port Bou itself makes the strangest impression...impressing us with that peculiar feeling
of a war, that the people are not so much living in the town as haunting it; they are spirits
obsessed by their idea, easily transferable to some other scene of war; and their relation to
their homes, their material surroundings, is very slight.^45
‘Haunting’ is the significant word: the living are already, it seems, recruits to the
underworld of death, to which Port Bou is the point of entry.
As might be expected, the motif of a descent into the underworld recurs in the
poetry of the Civil War. Rex Warner’s ‘Storm and War’ speaks of the ‘faceless
ghosts’ of those ‘hurled away by war’ passing in procession through the mountain
valleys, observing, like Spender’s ‘The Coward’, that ‘bully, hero, saint or simpleton’
are all alike ‘indifferently rolled’ in the storm.^46 Not referring to the frontier of
the Pyrenees by name, Warner deploys a generalizing narrative to transcend
localized and partisan rhetoric. Sylvia Townsend Warner achieves a similar effect
by combining classical allusion with a cool clinical distance which depopulates the
landscape she depicts. Her ‘Waiting at Cerbere’ [sic], set in the village of Cerbere,`
just inside the French frontier opposite Port Bou, like Spender’s poem, merges
actual and symbolic border crossings, describing what may be either a literal or a
metaphorical village of the dead on the opposite hillside, where no one stirs in the
streets or comes out of the dark doorways, and only the cicada strums at the tavern
of the Black Cross. Below the headland, only the foam of the sea suggests a living
force, rising and falling ‘Like a quickened breath’ (PS, 86–7), while a deserted road
zigzags to the frontier. The name of the village recalls Cerberus, the dog which
in classical mythology guards the entrance to the underworld. The near-Imagist
stasis of the poem suggests a liminality that eludes the partisanship of life and
death, crossing the frontier or descending into Hades. Her ‘Benicasim’, about a
brief pause at a rest-home for the war-wounded, develops the classical motif. The
landscape of semi-tropical trees and cactus, bright villas perched like macaws, and
an ‘air heavy with sun and salt and colour’, predominates over both the transient
observers and the equally transient wounded, seen in the distance wandering along
the beach, ‘the risen-from-the dead’, being repaired to return to battle (PS,87–8).
This place of ‘the recaptured sun’ affords only a narrow space for recovery. Inland
(^45) Spender, ‘Spain Invites the World’s Writers’, 245.
(^46) Warner, ‘Storm and War’, inPoems(London: Boriswood, 1937), 46.