geoffrey hill
If war poetry is conceived of narrowly as poems about fighting, the appellation
doesnot fit Keyes. His battalion landed in North Africa on 10 March 1943, and saw
action for the first time towards the end of April. Keyes was killed on 29 April. ‘He
wrote some poetry while we were on Oued Zarga,’^43 that is, in the front line, but
this, it seems, perished with him, though his notebook survived. At the same time
he was consistently a poet of war as history and history as war (‘The Foreign Gate’,
‘Schiller Dying’, ‘Dunbar, 1650’) and of wartime separation as the foe of love (‘War
Poet’, ‘To Keep Off Fears’, ‘A Hope for Those Separated by War’, ‘Ulster Soldier’,
‘Two Offices of a Sentry’, ‘Moonlight Night on the Port’). There is scarcely any shift
of style between the poems of history and those of personal grief and loss. Some
might see this as a mark of immaturity, but I do not, taking my bearings from some
remarks of Ezra Pound on the nature and function of poetry:
The first difficulty in a modern poem is to give a feeling of the reality of the speaker, the
second, given the reality of the speaker, to gain any degree of poignancy in one’s utterance.
The supreme test of a book is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working behind
the words.
...the feeling of poignancy Gourmont was able to create by a constantly felt dramatic
voice.^44
What one senses in Keyes’s poems is the presence of this constantly felt dramatic
voice (he also wrote plays) that contrives its own poignancy, and that is the
semantic record of an unusual intelligence: ‘The golden sun revolves|On the
invisible radius of time’; ‘Rain strikes the window. Miles of wire|Are hung with
small mad eyes. Night sets its mask|Upon the fissured hill’; ‘Fear was Donne’s
peace; to him,|Charted between the minstrel cherubim,|Terror was decent’.^45
We have by now moved some way from our original sense of Keyes as a belated
nineteenth-century pastoralist; but I have not minutely charted our progress (if
that is what it is), and some further explanation is owed the reader. There are two
passages in Keyes’s prose writings which, placed in mutual opposition, mark the
antipodes of his thinking about the nature and craft of poetry. One has already been
cited—the late letter in which he laments that he was not born in the nineteenth
century, and consequently did not fulfil his destiny, that of being ‘a good pastoral
poet’.
One needs, to counteract that sigh of regret, to study the implications of a
paragraph from ‘The Artist in Society’, his essay contributed to the symposium
The Future of Faith, published in 1942.^46 The essay is in the intelligentsia style
(^43) Lucas, ‘Memoir’, 125.
(^44) Ezra Pound, quoted in Ronald Bush,The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), 159, 168, 160. 45
Keyes,Collected Poems, 9 (‘The Buzzard’), 72 (‘Ulster Soldier’),38 (‘Time Will Not Grant’).
(^46) Percy Colson (ed.),The Future of Faith(London: Hurst & Blackett, 1942).