‘others have come before you’ by the constant flow of blood from dying soldiers, the poppies fall, but are constantly
replacedto drop again, as countless men become victims of ‘the shrieking iron and
flame|Hurled through still heavens’. Conspicuous by its absence in the poetry of
the Second World War, the poppy, as a floral image, is often replaced by the lily.
An exception to this is Lewis’s ‘The Sentry’, but even here, the poppy is not the
traditional scarlet symbol of the First World War:
I have begun to die
And the guns’ implacable silence
Is my black interim, my youth and age,
In the flower of fury, the folded poppy,
Night.^8Lewis maintains the First World War connection between the poppy and death,
enacting the persona’s resignation to his own death in the alliterative pattern of the
penultimate line. The repeated fricatives hint at the presence of a tension which
contradicts the composed acceptance of the recurrent ‘I have begun to die’; yet
the poppy, despite its ‘fury’, is ‘folded’ in on itself, hiding its redness and seeming
to return to its pre-1914 associations of sleep. The poppy is outwardly detached
from its 1914–18 myth, but by depicting his ‘youth and age,|Inthe flower of fury’
(my italics), Lewis’s persona alludes to the all-consuming nature of the poppy,
recalling Rosenberg’s image of poppies rooted in man’s veins. The poppy’s bloody
symbolism is only partially denied.
The presence of the lily in Second World War poetry is not only indicative of
the conflict’s different topography, but also evokes images of purity and innocence,
as associated with the flower’s Christian symbolism.^9 For the recruits of 1939, a
knowledge of the horrors of the First World War was unavoidable, but still they
enlisted, an action apparently in direct opposition to the anti-war message which
emerged from some of the poetry of the earlier conflict. The lily in Second World
War poetry can be interpreted as a motif of innocence, of the combatants’ wish not
to be seen as endorsing through repetition the bloodshed of 1914–18. Besides, theirs
was a vastly different conflict, with a known enemy and a defined cause which, for
many, underwrote their participation. Douglas, for instance, told Edmund Blunden
that ‘For me, it is simply a case of fightingagainstthe Nazi regime’.^10 Begun in
1938 and revised in 1941, Lewis’s ‘Threnody for a Starry Night’ alludes directly to
the biblical image of ‘the lilies of the field’, connecting the past with the present
through an image of communal darkness: ‘We were the daylight but we could not
see.’^11 The lilies and the ‘glittering tree’ are the only things able to ‘endure|This
(^8) Alun Lewis, ‘The Sentry’, inCollected Poems, ed. Cary Archard (Bridgend: Seren, 1994), 28.
(^9) See Matt. 6: 28–9. The lilies of the field are cited as an example of simplicity and purity; their
natural beauty is effortless. 10
11 Douglas to Edmund Blunden, n.d. [Mar./Apr. 1944], inLetters, 328; italic original.
Alun Lewis, ‘Threnody for a Starry Night’, inCollected Poems, 43.