gareth reeves
Seamus Heaney’s phrase,^1 thevery conflict to be appeased and laid to rest—or into
a fearsome concoction of some or all of these possibilities. The first half of this essay
will address the issue of war memory through a discussion of some strategically
chosen poets and poems, treated in roughly chronological order, culminating in an
account of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘September Song’, a breath-taking distillation of poetry’s
dilemma in the aftermath of conflict. The second half will dwell on James Fenton’s
poetry up to and including ‘A German Requiem’, in the present writer’s opinion
one of the finest, and most disturbing, English-language poems to have addressed
civilian response to war—that is to say, since we all live in a world of conflict or
post-conflict, to have addressed the heart, and heartlessness, of civilization itself.
Keith Douglaswasa combatant, killed in conflict (commanding a tank troop in
the main assault on Normandy in 1944), whose poetry comes back to us speaking
with the authority of the dead, one of Eliot’s ‘dead...tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living’.^2 Because the position of Douglas’s poem ‘How to Kill’
(1943) in relation to the War is diametrically opposed to that of most of the poetry
to be discussed in this chapter, it provides, paradoxically perhaps, an illuminating
perspective on the central issues. One might think that his poem, with a title like
that, would be incapable of demonstrating the tragic moral perspective of, say, ‘The
Shield of Achilles’ (1952), Auden’s elder-statesmanlike poem of synoptic wisdom,
with its long historical perspective that judges all history and finds it wanting. But, on
the contrary, ‘How to Kill’ demonstrates an absolute sense of right and wrong from a
startlingly shocking perspective. With powerfulirony it speaks with the voice of one
of the damned, but sees with double vision, both panoptically and microscopically.
Although the speaker is someone within history, taking on the voice of a killer, he is
able at the same time to stand outside history and show that he knows that what he
is doing is evil. The voice both judges and is judged. ‘Death, like a familiar, hears.’^3
This condemned Doctor Faustus, possessed by something impersonal, watches his
own damnation with cool detachment: ‘This sorcery|Ido.Beingdamned,Iam
amused.’ Part of the poem’s implied statement is that its experience is an adjunct of
the modern world, part of ‘growing up’; hence its initial parallel between childish
ball-games and the adult ‘gift designed to kill’ (Douglas’s italics). Initiation into
adulthood, being-in-the-world, insulates one from the humanity of others, from
the fact that they too have their individual histories: the target of the speaker’s bullet
‘moves about in ways|his mother knows, habits of his’. The speaker recognizes
from his own experience what he is about to kill. There is a dehumanizing moral
suicide therefore in this death, in this witnessing of ‘love travel[ling] into vacancy’.
(^1) Seamus Heaney, ‘The Tollund Man’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber,
1998), 65.
(^2) T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, inThe Complete Poems and Plays(London: Faber, 1969), 192.
(^3) Keith Douglas, ‘How to Kill’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber,
2000), 119.