the war remains of keith douglas and hughes looted from the poem to produce ‘The Sea Bird’, and also, as Hill notes, the 1943
poem‘Words’. ‘I lie in wait’ for words, the poet confesses in ‘Words’, before noting
examples of other ‘ways of catching’^63 fugitive language:
For instance this stooping man, the bones of whose face are
like the hollow birds’ bones, is a trap for words.
And the pockmarked house bleached by the glare
whose insides war has dried out like gourds
attracts words.Adams is entrapped by this later poem, drawn, just like the words he had seemed
not to hear, to what is hollowed out, emptied. When he enquired of his friend the
meaning of ‘skeletal’, Douglas may have learned from her that it means ‘dried
up’, ‘withered’, just as this damaged house has been ‘dried out’, bleached white,
like the bleached beach in ‘Mersa’. Words are attracted to the skeletal, bone being,
as Douglas consistently shows, the articulate remnant of the disarticulated body.
Hughes, though reluctantly ensnared by the detritus of his father’s war, must have
learned this lesson from all that lured him to Keith Douglas’s war remains: bones,
birds, words.
(^63) Douglas, ‘Words’, inComplete Poems, 107.