sidney keyes in historical perspective ‘curious little trough’. Clare is Thomson’s and Cowper’s proletarian inheritor, and
beatsthem hollow (with the exception of ‘The Olney Hymns’, ‘The Cast-away’, and
the poem about a hare, that is).
Where Meyer refers to the ‘distorting eye’, Keyes could be better seen as working
to achieve and put to use the enabling eye. Douglas’s eye is frequently confronted
by distortion, because he is a battleground poet in a way that Keyes is not. Keyes is
a war poet only by accident, or ‘by misadventure’,^10 as David Jones expresses it.
On scrub and sand the dead men wriggle
in their dowdy clothes. They are mimes
who express silence and futile aims
enacting this prone and motionless struggle
at a queer angle to the scenery.^11Here, Douglas’s own eye is one that is now enabled to transmit, as if directly, the
‘famous attitudes of unconcern’,^12 ‘the dust upon the paper eye|and the burst
stomach like a cave’.^13 Douglas saw intense but intermittent action from early
November 1942 to mid-January 1943, at which point he was wounded.^14 During
convalescence he had time to complete a number of his best-known battlefield
poems. The battlefield is a mass, or a scatter, of queer angles, and Douglas’s eye is
set to record them. Keyes is reported to have written poems during his two weeks in
action, but these have not survived.^15 Douglas was a militarist through and through;
Keyes was a conscript civilian poet who underwent death in battle. The manner of
his death, obscured for so long by missing or conflicting evidence and by hearsay
and rumour, was itself one of the queer angles of the North African campaign.^16
It is time that we took account of Keyes’s enabling eye and ear: ‘A caterpillar|
Measures with looping back a mulberry leaf’; ‘Buzzard drops down the sky and
shadows straddle|Longer on grass and rock’; ‘Plovers crouch in the rain between
the furrows|Or wheel club-winged and tumble across the wind’; ‘Remember
the weasel questing down the hedge’; ‘As tulips gulp the sun’; ‘The fine rain
speckles|My windowsill’; ‘Contending with the landscape, arguing|With shrike
and shrewmouse’; ‘the elder’s curdled flowers’; ‘the cryptic swift performing|His
ordered evolutions through our sky’; ‘but breaking of the fine-tipped willow buds’;
‘spawned on the rocks of Galway|Among the dried shark-eggs and the dirty froth’;
‘the curlews’|Insatiable crying’; ‘raftered halls|Hung with hard holly...Decked
with the pale and sickled mistletoe’; ‘Between the frost’s pale foliage and the
(^10) David Jones, ‘Preface’, inIn Parenthesis(London: Faber, 1963; 1st pub. 1937), p. xvii.
(^11) Keith Douglas, ‘Landscape with Figures 2’, inThe Complete Poems,ed.DesmondGraham
(London: Faber, 2000), 110.
(^12) Douglas, ‘Sportsmen’, ibid. 157. (^13) Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, ibid. 118.
(^14) See Graham,Keith Douglas, 1920–1944, 163–84.
(^15) See James Lucas, ‘Memoir’, in Keyes,Collected Poems, 125.
(^16) John Guenther,Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Inquiry(London: London Magazine Editions, 1967),
197–219, esp. ch. 10 (‘The Quest for Keyes’). But see Lucas, ‘Memoir’, 127.