dawn bellamy
in the poetry of the Second World War. ‘No one turning from the poetry of
theSecond War back to that of the First’, writes Fussell, ‘can fail to notice there
the unique physical tenderness, the readiness to admire openly the bodily beauty
of young men, the unapologetic recognition that men may be in love with each
other.’^39 The role of psychology in the apparent suppression of homoeroticism is
seen by Gregory Woods as only part of the explanation:
[I]n its attitudes to horror as well as to beauty, the poetry of the First World War is more
concerned with physical detail than that of the Second.... One reason for this may be the
static nature of the First World War.... Intact or broken, perforce, the next man’s flesh
took up a large percentage of the view. Furthermore, the Second World War involved all
generations and both sexes directly. So, able-bodied young men lost some of the attention.^40
The change identified by Woods is reflected in the hetero-eroticism of Lewis’s
poetry; it is not only testament to his own relationships with women but also
represents the very different nature of the Second World War in terms of its
locations and personnel. Both ‘Raider’s Dawn’ and ‘All Day It Has Rained’ present
heterosexual images which draw attention to the destruction and separation caused
by the war—issues which affected Lewis personally, as he shows in ‘Goodbye’: ‘So
we must say Goodbye, my darling,|And go, as lovers go, for ever.’^41 The final stanza
of ‘Raider’s Dawn’ describes a ‘necklace left|On a charred chair’ which ‘Tells that
Beauty|Was startled there’.^42 Lewis’s feminine image depicts chaos.
The domesticity disrupted by the War is also alluded to in ‘All Day It Has Rained’,
in which the men stretch out in their tents, smoking, darning, and reading. Listing
their activities, the persona recalls, ‘And wetalked of girls, and dropping bombs on
Rome,’^43 a juxtaposition which again highlights the magnified relationship during
wartime between love and death. A common feature of homoeroticism, the link
between sex and violence, is not exclusively associated with relationships between
men, as Woods explains: ‘male homo-erotic themes in literature share many of the
characteristics of the wider (hetero-erotic, but male-dominated and phallocentric)
tradition.’^44 Lewis not only links sex with violence in a heterosexual dimension but
also establishes a different link between the two which is particularly pertinent to
the wartime environment: the violence is inflicted by those outside the relationship
and, instead of connecting this violence with eroticism, his poetry demonstrates
how the war changed the nature of sexual feeling.^45
(^39) Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 279–80.
(^40) Gregory Woods,Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 69–70. 41
43 Lewis, ‘Goodbye’, inCollected Poems, 110.^42 Lewis, ‘Raider’s Dawn’, ibid. 22.
Lewis, ‘All Day It Has Rained’, ibid. 23.^44 Woods,Articulate Flesh,1.
(^45) See Woods’s discussion of the impotence depicted in Lewis’s war poetry: ‘the mere fact of being
in uniform—generally considered such a fillip to a man’s sexual appeal—seems to place one beyond
the bounds of amorousness’ (Woods,Articulate Flesh, 57).