dawn bellamy
physical in Second World War poetry, as identified by Woods, means that images
ofthe body occur less frequently, and therefore, that eroticism, whether homo- or
hetero-, tends not to be a predominant feature of the work.^64
In contrast to his contemporaries’ engagement with the homoerotic iconography
of First World War poetry, the presence of homoerotic imagery in Douglas’s work
is a more complex issue. Douglas frequently aligns love and death, and in doing so,
he acknowledges the long-established link between sexuality and war. However, he
resists any associations of comfort which might be attributed to such a link. Fussell
explains:
What we find...especially in the attitude of young officers to their men, is something...like
the ‘idealistic’, passionate but non-physical ‘crushes’ which most of the officers had exper-
ienced at public school....What inspired such passions was—as always—faunlike good
looks,innocence,vulnerability,and‘charm’.Theobjectwasmutualaffection,protection,and
admiration. In war as at school, such passions were antidotes against loneliness and terror.^65
In the eroticism of Douglas’s poetry, no such antidotes exist.
Douglas’s ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ is a poem rich with sexual connotations. Woods, in
his study of homoeroticism and modern poetry, not only explores the connection
between the wartime act of looting and male homoeroticism, but also considers
the link between eroticism and violence, tracing its development as the nature
of warfare changed: ‘With the transition to fire-arms, the ballistics of sexual
intercourse soon increase in deadliness.’^66 Both the homoeroticism of looting and
the sexual connotations of firearms are resonant in Douglas’s text. For Scammell,
‘The dream of love [in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’] turns into the ‘‘nightmare ground’’ of
naked appetite; sexual organs become nothing more than weapons or wounds;
lovers are transmogrified into necrophiliac ‘‘combatants’’ whose courtship results
only in death.’^67 What the poem’s homoerotic elements exemplify is Douglas’s
departure from expectation in terms of the literary homoeroticism of the First
World War. Characterized, in the opinions of Fussell and Spear, by its chastity
and spirituality, the poetry of 1914–18 explores the connection between sex and
violence within the context of the destructive consequences of the war’s effect
on loving relationships.^68 Douglas, however, in ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, exploits more
intensely the sado-masochistic associations of eroticism; the soldier is ‘mocked at
by his own equipment|that’s hard and good when he’s decayed’.^69
(^64) There are, inevitably, exceptions to such generalizations. Poets such as Dan Davin in ‘Cairo
Cleopatra’ (p. 66), and Melville Hardiment in ‘Holed-Up Cyclops’ (p. 292), make explicit sexual
references, and C. P. S. Denholm-Young’s ‘Dead German Youth’ (p. 69) describes one whose ‘face was
woundless’ and whose ‘hair|Drooped forward and caressed his boyish brow’, before continuing in
what seems more like a paternal, than an erotic, manner; in Victor Selwyn (ed.),Poems of the Second
World War: The Oasis Selection(London: Dent, 1987).
(^65) Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 272. (^66) Woods,Articulate Flesh, 51.
(^67) Scammell,Keith Douglas, 105.
(^68) See Fussell,Great War and Modern Memory, 272; and Spear,Remembering, We Forget,73–4.
(^69) Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, inComplete Poems, 118.