dawn bellamy
silence ever’; immune to the sins of humanity, the natural world lives on amid the
surroundingdestruction. The resilience of the lilies here is comparable with that
of the First World War poppies. However, their essential purity enables them to
remain untainted by the ‘mass rearming’, an image which aligns the flowers with the
soldiers’ hope not to be tarnished by the only previous example of twentieth-century
worldwide warfare. The lilies in Jarmain’s ‘El Alamein’, conversely, are not a means
of separating the Second World War soldier from the bloodshed of the past. Instead,
they are a surviving symbol of the incommunicable nature of front line warfare,
thus separating the combatant experience from that of the non-combatant:
Others will come who cannot understand,
Will halt beside the rusty minefield wires
And find there—flowers.^12Jarmain reiterates the response of those First World War poets who believed that
those who did not fight could not possibly understand the atrocities the soldiers
faced. This similarity is undermined, though, by the discrediting of an alternative
myth which was adopted by his soldier-poet predecessors, that of regeneration.
Poppies often represented dead men. Jarmain’s lilies do not:
thosethatcometoviewthatvacantscene,
Where death remains and agony has been
Will find the lilies grow—
Flowers, and nothing that we know.The lilies’ presence is not an emblem of ongoing life. Instead, they exist as an
inappropriate symbol of purity in a place where once stood ‘the tanks, the guns, the
trucks,|The black, dark-smoking wrecks’.
In contrast, Sidney Keyes retains the consolatory trope of regeneration, but does
not return specifically to the floral imagery of First World War poetry. ‘Cervieres’,`
written in 1940, makes a pessimistic prophecy:
Soon an invader will be taking more than cherries:
They’ll be stealing our dreams or breaking up
Ourhistoryforfirewood.^13The damaged cherry trees and their stolen fruit are symbols of a more sinister form
of destruction to follow as Keyes’s persona imagines a future characterized by loss,
but death remains implicit. The traditional consolation of regeneration, however,
is explicit as Keyes enacts the conventional movement towards optimism: ‘their
despoiling is a kind of sowing’. Concluding that ‘Somewhere our loss will plant a
better orchard’, the speaker comforts the crying children and, at the same time,
reassures himself that the war is as much about life as it is about death. The elegiac
(^12) Jarmain, ‘El Alamein’, inPoems, 21.
(^13) SidneyKeyes,‘Cervi`eres’,inCollectedPoems,ed.MichaelMeyer(Manchester:Carcanet,2002), 10.