Keyes

A bank holiday today to celebrate the 75th anniversary of that happy day when the Germans finally surrendered and, after terrible privations and loss of life, Europe was saved from an unspeakably dreadful future. As ever, when these increasingly sentimentalised and unreal anniversaries and commemorations come around, I cannot help but think of Geoffrey Hill's disenchanted lines from The Triumph of Love –

By what right did Keyes, or my cousin's
Lancaster, or the trapped below-decks watch
of Peter's clangorous old destroyer-escort,
serve to enfranchise these strange children
pitiless in their ignorance and contempt?

Are we of the present deserving of such sacrifice? Is this England, the England of today, what they died for? Well, it is a futile question, and we can only hope the answer is not too resounding a no. And at least we can give thanks and celebrate – and remember, among so many others, Keyes, Sidney Keyes, the youngest of the handful of poets who died in that war. Keyes had not yet reached his 21st birthday when he was killed in action in Tunisia. A private who served under him remembered that 'during my Army service I had a number of platoon commanders. Keyes was the best of them. His was the quieter, determined, non-blustering type of leadership. His manners were impeccable and he did not talk down to us, nor was he condescending to us, as so many officers were. He was a gallant Christian gentleman who sacrificed himself for the men under his command.'
  Keyes was born in the same year as Larkin, and was at Oxford with him, though Larkin kept his distance, partly because Keyes was overtly hostile to Auden, Larkin's guiding light, and embraced the influence of Yeats, which the young Larkin fiercely resisted in his own poetry. Keyes's own verse, as might be expected in any poet so young, was more potential than achievement – but that potential was considerable.
  His most famous poem, aptly enough, is 'War Poet' –

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me;
When I reach for the wind
Cast me not down
Though my face is a burnt book
And a wasted town.

Here is an earlier one, written before Keyes was called up –

Time will not grant the unlined page
Completion or the hand respite:
The Magi stray, the heavens rage,
The careful pilgrim stumbles in the night.

Take pen, take eye and etch
Your vision on this unpropitious time;
Faces are fluid, actions never reach
Perfection but in reflex or in rhyme.

Take now, not soon; your lost
Minutes roost home like curses.
Nicolo, Martin, every unhoused ghost
Proclaims time’s strange reverses.

Fear was Donne’s peace; to him,
Charted between the minstrel cherubim,
Terror was decent. Rilke tenderly
Accepted autumn like a rooted tree.
But I am frightened after every good day
That all my life must change and fall away.

That – especially the last stanza – is a quite extraordinary poem for a 19-year-old boy to have written. Heaven know what he might have achieved.