‘othershavecomebeforeyou’ Lewis’s poetry from India makes clear that women were part of the soldiers’
environment;a man’s gaze was not necessarily directed constantly towards his com-
rades. ‘The Journey’, written about a trip between Aksa and Bhiwandi,^46 describes
repetitive nights and days:
Daylight had girls as tawny as gazelles,
Beating their saris clean in pools and singing.
When we stopped they covered up their breasts;
Sometimes their gestures followed us for miles.^47Drawing on his surroundings, Lewis also revisits and inverts one of the homoerotic
traditions of First World War poetry: a focus on soldiers bathing.^48 F. T. Prince’s
Second World War poem ‘Soldiers Bathing’^49 alsoinvertsthistradition:asthe
persona watches his ‘band|Of soldiers’, he is most forcibly struck by what Fussell
terms ‘a renewed appreciation of the Crucifixion’, rather than by ‘youthful beauty
and potency’.^50 The overt religious tone of Prince’s poem—‘some great love is over
all we do’—ensures that the naked men are symbols of the ‘freedom’ granted by
Jesus’s sacrifice:
Because to love is frightening we prefer
The freedom of our crimes. Yet, as I drink the dusky air,
I feel a strange delight that fills me full,
Strange gratitude, as if evil itself were beautiful,
And kiss the wound in thought, while in the west
I watch a streak of red that might have issued from
Christ’s breast.Lewis in ‘The Journey’, however, is not spiritually motivated. Instead of watching
men swimming, and thus contemplating the eroticismand, inFussell’s words, ‘awful
vulnerability of mere naked flesh’,^51 Lewis’s persona is confronted by women who
choose to cover themselves, and whose vulnerability is not at stake. It is the soldiers
who question their own mortality: ‘There was also the memory of Death|And the
recurrent irritation of our selves.’ Even the potential hetero-eroticism is partially
denied by the women’s propriety, as if Lewis’s persona, as Woods points out, is
somehow desexualized by his experiences as a soldier. Similarly, in ‘Indian Day’,
Lewis describes a ‘supple sweeper girl’,^52 allowing his persona’s appreciative gaze to
fall briefly on her body. She is merely glimpsed as she ‘goes by|Brushing the dung
of camels from the street’, and remains a part of the wider landscape rather than
becoming an object of sexual desire. The women with sexual potential in Lewis’s
poetry are kept at a distance; they are wives and lovers from whom his personae
(^46) See Pikoulis,Alun Lewis, 202–3. (^47) Lewis, ‘The Journey’, inCollected Poems, 133.
(^48) See Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 299–309.
(^49) F. T. Prince, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, inCollected Poems 1935–1992(Manchester: Carcanet, 1993), 55.
(^50) Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 307. (^51) Ibid. 299.
(^52) Lewis, ‘Indian Day’, inCollected Poems, 142.