stan smith
are the mountains where death waits, ‘close at hand’, to be coped with only by
mythologizingexperience, evoking the river the dead have to cross in Greek myth:
‘Anditseemstomewehavecome|Into a bright-painted landscape of Acheron.’
With the notable exceptions of George Barker’s surrealist histrionics inCalami-
terror(1937) andElegy on Spain(1939), and the self-aggrandizing vitriolic satire of
the Franco-supporting Roy Campbell’sFlowering Rifle:A Poem from the Battlefield
of Spain(1939), most poetry of the non-combatant but committed observer dwelt
on the pathos of civilian death with ostensibly dispassionate deliberation. Herbert
Read’s ‘A Song for the Spanish Anarchists’, for example, is a succinct, impersonal
lyric celebrating a world where ‘no man is a slave’ (PS, 93); less abstract and remote
is ‘The Heart Conscripted’, which speaks of the deaths of ‘Lorca...killed, singing’
and Ralph Fox, ‘who was my friend’, singers in ‘the song which has no end’ (PS,
39–40). His ‘Bombing Casualties in Spain’, however, turns dispassion to harrowing
effect, contrasting the rosiness of dolls’ faces with the ‘wanly waxen’ pallor of dead
children, ‘their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle’, ‘laid out in ranks|like paper
lanterns’, their human corporeality slowly fading into the inhuman thinness of
wasps’ nests, ‘extinct in the dry morning air’ (PS,41–2).
Edgell Rickword’s impassioned indictment, ‘To the Wife of A Non-Intervention
Statesman’, warns that the Western democracies’ non-intervention in Spain pre-
pares the way for a future where ‘In Hitler’s frantic mental haze|already Hull and
Cardiff blaze’, the bombing of Guernica prefiguring that of ‘Oxford’s dreaming
spires’ and ‘Paul’s grey dome’ (PS, 74–7). Cecil Day Lewis’s ‘Bombers’ closes with a
similar message, but works towards it through the premonition of an approaching
air raid, heard vaguely at first, by a heart preoccupied with other things, as no
more than ‘A deep in air buried grain of sound’ which ‘Starts and grows, as yet
unwarning’, until, still only imagining loss, the bombers arrive, ‘carrying harm’
(PS, 82–3). The description of their approach grows and expands like the ‘grain
of sound’ until it overwhelms the poem, casting bombers whose wombs ‘ache to
be rid of death’ as the ‘heavy angels’ of a new and brutal Annunciation. Artfully
interweaving internal rhymes and half-rhymes which undercut with unexpected
connections the narrative’s syntagmatic thrust, the poem amplifies a continuous
analogy between the ‘grain of sound’ and the ‘seed that grows for ruin,|The iron
embryo conceived in fear’ which sooner or later will be ‘delivered’ (picking up the
ambiguity of ‘carrying’). The vocative final stanza calls on the British public, for
whom Spain has been a faraway country, to ‘Choose between your child and this
fatal embryo.’ Like an Old Testament prophet, it casts this choice in the form of a
question, the internal rhymes of ‘guilt’ and ‘built’, ‘want’ and ‘haunt’, underlining
the personal immediacy, the macabre pun on bearing arms and bearing children
adding insult to the rebuke:
Shall your guilt bear arms, and the children you want
Be condemned to die by the powers you paid for
And haunt the houses you never built?