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 geoffrey hill

from Egypt’, and numerous others. The conflict in Keyes needs to be defined in
otherterms, though obviously there are several points at which their individual
tangents intersect. It is as if Keyes is obeying Pound’s injunction to achieve some
‘degree of poignancy in one’s utterance’ while, at the same time, ‘giving a feeling of
reality to the speaker’:

‘At Dunkirk I

Rolled in the shallows, and the living trod

Across me for a bridge...’^74

Douglas might say that Keyes is not entitled to write this, because he was not at
Dunkirk, and because the dead do not speak. He might expect us to contrast Keyes
to Rosenberg, whom Douglas so justly admired.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched.^75

Or he might wish to put forward his own.

The eye and mouth of each figure

bear the cosmetic blood and hectic

colours death has the only list of.^76

One can praise Douglas’s poetry without agreeing that such an objection would be
valid. Rosenberg succeeds because he finds the precisely callous verb—‘crunched’;
Douglas succeeds because he finds the tellingly vacuous epithet—‘cosmetic’—and
the nonchalant syntax—‘death has the only list of’; Keyes succeeds because the
phrase ‘the living trod|Across me’ itself treads across the end of one line and plants
itself in the next; and because the poignancy is achieved by an extreme form of
emotionally drained matter-of-factness.
It is good that one can describe the achievements of all three poets through
attention to matters of detail such as I have here listed. One can also cite a broader
field of comparison. The varied distinction of Douglas, Rosenberg, and Keyes stands
out by contrast with a quantity of verse written by servicemen, in North Africa and
other spheres of war, who were not poets but who wished to communicate sincerely
and memorably their experiences of battle or of base camp. I quote some lines by
an exact contemporary of Douglas in the desert campaign; like Douglas serving in
tanks with the rank of captain:

She falls to earth.

And there’s a breathless hush upon the land

For death is near.

(^74) Keyes, ‘The Foreign Gate’, 62.
(^75) Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, inThe Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg,ed.Vivien
Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139.
(^76) Keith Douglas, ‘Landscape with Figures 2’, 110.