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 sarah cole

Masses of memoried flowers—

Hidethat red wet

Thing I must somehow forget.^38

Flowers may do the conventional work of memory, but the process is spectacularly
compromised by ‘that red wet|Thing’; when the life of the person, like the ball turret
gunner, is reduced to liquid, ordinary assumptions about how grieving works are
simply wiped out, blown away along with the bodily integrity that is a fundamental
basis of identity. Indeed, to consider the corpse, especially the mutilated corpse on
the battlefield, is, almost instinctively, to rebel against it, and many poetic accounts
of dead soldiers share more with Gurney’s ‘red wet|Thing’ than with the elegiacally
attended corpse in ‘Futility’. A striking case, from the contemporary poet Michael
Longley, is a poem entitled ‘Mole’, which hearkens back to the First World War
via its dedication to Edward Thomas. Thomas had wondered, in his diary, ‘Does a
mole ever get hit by a shell?’, and Longley’s response focuses on the mole’s decaying
body, an obvious stand-in for its human counterpart:

Who bothers to record

This body digested

By its own saliva

Inside the earth’s mouth

And long intestine...^39

There is a great deal of digestion at work in these grisly lines, a whole chain of
envelopment and absorption that might, too, be read in terms of literary history,
or indeed colonial history, as Longley considers the First World War from the
vantage-point of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. If the corpse in war is a site of
the traumatic will to forget, but also, at times, of elegiac compassion, here Longley
seems to have very little empathy for it at all. Those rotting moles have been
swallowed up not only by the ground, but by a half-century of bloody history, and
this history, jarringly, changes the tone.
From the corpse to historical consciousness; from grief to defiance, as in the
Iliad—to consider the figuration of grief in modern war poetry points us back to
where we began, with anger. Siegfried Sassoon has centre-stage when the subject
is rage; his lyrics burn and bristle with fury. In ‘The Poet as Hero’, he depicts his
own form of Achillean wrath, his state of bloody-mindedness after the death of
his friend (some say, lover) David Thomas,^40 which he justifies according to the
emotional compass of war:

(^38) Ivor Gurney, ‘To His Love’, inCollected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), 21.
(^39) Michael Longley, ‘Mole’, inCollected Poems(London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 104.
(^40) For discussion of Sassoon’s homosexuality in relation to his war poetics, see Adrian Caesar,
Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets(Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1993).