‘others have come before you’ more mundane things that he is able to regain his self-control. In comparison with
Lewis’spersonae, Jarmain’s do not engage overtly with the sexual potential of the
women from whom they are separated, and there is, in general, a lack of human
physical detail in Jarmain’s work.
One poem in which Jarmain does allow himself to engage, very briefly, with phys-
ical appearances is ‘Prisoners of War’.^60 His opening simile—‘Like shabby ghosts
down dried-up river beds|The tired procession slowly leaves the field’—alludes to
Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’: ‘Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,|Knock-
kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.’^61 Owen’s text continues its
focus closely on the physical; Dominic Hibberd draws attention to its homoeroti-
cism when he links it with ‘Disabled’ and writes that ‘Both describe beautiful youths
who are now in hell. The gas victim is said in a preliminary draft to have had a head
‘‘like a bud,|Fresh as a country rose’’ ’.^62 In contrast, Jarmain allows the men to ‘file
away’. His persona envisages the imprisoned men as ‘safe’ now that ‘They are quit
of killing and sudden mutilation;|They no longer cower at the sound of a shell in
the air.’ Eschewing the homoerotic alignment of sex and violence, Jarmain distances
the prisoners from the brutality, and in another Owen-like image, describes them
as ‘herded’.^63 Just as Lewis uses the foreignness of the women he encounters to
prompt explorations of the vulnerability of his own position, so Jarmain’s sighting
of the ‘Dazed and abandoned’ prisoners provides him with the opportunity to
reflect on the continuing danger of his own situation. He writes almost exclusively
of their experience, and parenthesizes the only two self-referential lines; but the real
concerns of Jarmain’s persona lie in what remains unsaid. If the prisoners are safe
at a remove from the battlefield, the implication is that those who remain at the
mercy of the shells are constantly at risk.
The absence of images of ‘physical tenderness’ does not prevent the soldier-poets
of the Second World War from being generally concerned with the same questions
of mortality as were posed by their Great War precursors. What is significantly
different in the case of homoeroticism is that Second World War poets such as
Lewis and Jarmain do not make explicit use of the iconography which became so
recognizable during the First World War. Whereas their references to other aspects
of that war’s literary iconography, such as flowers and images of sacrifice, form
part of a conscious continuation of the soldier-poet tradition in which they place
themselves, they turn away from the homoerotic imagery of their predecessors. In
some cases, this is directly replaced by images of hetero-eroticism, possibly because
it was deemed more socially acceptable, or simply because women were more visible
as part of the war effort in 1939–45. In general, the shift away from a focus on the
(^60) Jarmain, ‘Prisoners of War’, ibid. 37.
(^61) Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 140.
(^62) Dominic Hibberd,Wilfred Owen: A New Biography(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002), 277.
(^63) Jarmain alludes to Owen’s ‘Anthem for DoomedYouth’: ‘What passing-bells for these who die
as cattle?’ (Owen,Complete Poems and Fragments, i. 99).