sidney keyes in historical perspective lines 5–6 are a close paraphrase of the firstElegy’sopening declamation.^59 But
two other poets are also present, adumbrated, in such phrasings as ‘Pacing upon
a windy wall at night’, which could as easily be taken to represent learned Yeats
on his tower, or perhaps Williams’s learned Taliessin, the Arthurian warrior-poet,
pacing the ramparts of Logres on the very outskirts of empire. Keyes read widely
and deeply, a characteristic that has been held against him by critics who fancy that
books are not a part of real life.
We have, coexisting in Keyes’s poetry, three types or aspects of reality: the mind’s
registering of what is immediately before it (‘A caterpillar|Measures with looping
back a mulberry leaf’; ‘at dawn|The sentry’s feet striking the chilly yard’), the
so-called reality of wartime fame and success (as in the poem ‘Timoshenko’), and
a third aspect that has to do with Rilke’s allusion to the ‘imageless act’ which he
associates with the baneful mechanics of contemporaneity. Keyes’s poetry is itself
an affirmation of the image, not for the sake of illustration or pedagogy, but as
a rebuttal of all that Rilke means by the ‘imageless’. That is to say, for Keyes the
image-making is very often present as an act of public recall; or as a statement of
the fact that in history things as they were cannot be called back, though we are not
thereby released from the moral and emotional burden of recalling them:
‘Remember the torn lace, the fine coats slashed
With steel instead of velvet. Kunersdorf ̈
Fought in the shallow sand was my relief.’
‘I rode to Naseby’...‘And the barren land
Of Tannenberg drank me. Remember now
The grey and jointed corpses in the snow,
Thestruggleinthedrift,thenumbhandsfreezing
Into the bitter iron...’^60Keyes later referred to ‘The Foreign Gate’ as one of his ‘nearest-misses’;^61 John
Guenther calls it ‘Auden’s ‘‘fair notion fatally injured’’ ’, and goes so far as to say
that ‘Certainly [Keyes] should not have published it.’^62 I think that he is wrong.
In‘TheForeignGate’,asin‘SchillerDying’,Keyesisvindicatingthehistorical
imagination in a very particular sense.
Keyes’s vision, in short, is a vision of ‘a European catastrophe of the spirit’,^63 and
in his poetry he makes, I believe, a deliberated choice of words, metres, and rhythms
in order to accommodate this vision. ‘Schiller Dying’, of November 1941, is one of
the most significant literary inventions of its period. Here it is as if Keyes were taking
on the style of Romantic-heroic, late eighteenth-century German poetry; but, in this
case, to reverse its conclusions. The whole tenor of Schiller’s correspondence with
(^59) Rilke,Duino Elegies,24–5. (^60) Keyes, ‘The Foreign Gate’, 62.
(^61) Keyes, quoted in Guenther,Sidney Keyes, 153. (^62) Ibid. 75.
(^63) Erich Heller,The Artist’s Journey into the Interior and Other Essays(San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), 47.