‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ register, from grimly comic to sombre, which, like Marvell’s ‘The grave’s a fine and
privateplace,|But none I think do there embrace’,^33 gives graveyard humour a new
lease of life. The poet picks up the phrase ‘he would come down’ and extemporizes
on it in a brief section all to itself:
Would come down, would ever come down
With a smile like thin gruel, and never too much to say.
How he shrank through the years.
How you towered over him in the narrow cage.
How he shrinks now...The scenario retains an ominous mysteriousness, the relationship between uncle
and niece (if they are indeed still the two figures here) unclear but silent and
evidently distant, ‘the narrow cage’, literally the lift, taking on a sinister post-
Holocaust inflection, the man’s Third Reich employment unspoken and no doubt
unspeakable. But the expression of all this is arrestingly haunted, a lyric space in
the poem comparable to that created by ‘Death by Water’ inThe Waste Land.The
physical ‘shrinking’, which mutates into temporal, psychological, and judgemental
diminishment, is accompanied by the haunting diminuendo of the reiterated ‘how’
which prevents, or rather transcends, the partisan. Bewilderment and sympathy
here mingle in our recognition of the woman.
Mention ofThe Waste Landbrings home the fact that the poetry of ‘A German
Requiem’ insists, as does Eliot’s poem, on beingheard—even if only by the mind’s
ear. In this respect it represents a retreat from postmodernism to high modernism,
many of whose practitioners wrote poetry as if they wanted to believe that its lyricism
could resist, even as it demonstrated, the radical uncertainties of contemporary
life, a belief nowhere more prevalent than inThe Waste Land.Fenton’spoemis
able to rescue from the memory of war and its eloquent cemeteries nothing more,
but also nothing less, than such plangent and vertiginous utterances as ‘Would
come down, would ever come down’, a fragment shored against the ruins of the
Second World War as haunting as, for instance, the sentence fromThe Waste Land’s
‘Death by Water’, ‘A current under sea|Picked his bones in whispers’,^34 which Eliot
shored against the First. If Fenton’s approach teeters on the edge of being ‘more
than enough’, that is something the poetry knows and therefore guards against.
The poetry gives a voice to the inscrutability of history without letting it become
anything other than inscrutable. For this reason ‘A German Requiem’ is the great
poem of its age, just asThe Waste Landis of its.
(^33) Andrew Marvell, ‘To his Coy Mistress’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 51.
(^34) Eliot,The Waste Land,inComplete Poems and Plays, 71.