This morning I attended the Remembrance ceremony that takes place every year in the Garden of Remembrance. The sun had just shown itself for the first time in a fortnight, the trees were in their autumn glory, and it seemed le tout Lichfield was out and about. Not being able to get any nearer, I followed the proceedings as best I could from the far side of Minster Pool. The Canada geese did their best to drown it out with their clamour, but I heard Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen' being read, as it always is, and as it was no doubt being read at other ceremonies the length and breadth of the land. Doubtless other suitable poems were being given an airing too – Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum', Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier', John McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields', Dylan Thomas's 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion', maybe even Philip Larkin's 'MCMXIV'. The lost poets of the Second World War – Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas – rarely get a look in on these occasions. So this year, to redress the balance, I'll mark the day with one of theirs, 'The Unknown Soldier' by Alun Lewis. A complicated, unhappy man, who died 'in mysterious circumstances' – almost certainly by his own hand – I have written about Lewis here before, and posted one of his poems. He is most famous for 'All Day It Has Rained', which, as well as being a fine poem in itself, is a heartfelt tribute to the poet dearest to Lewis's heart – Edward Thomas...
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found
No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap.
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly
Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly
Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces.
And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces,
Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks,
Reading the Sunday papers - I saw a fox
And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; -
And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
And I can remember nothing dearer or more to my heart
Than the children I watched in the woods on Saturday
Shaking down burning chestnuts for the schoolyard's merry play,
Or the shaggy patient dog who followed me
By Sheet and Steep and up the wooded scree
To the Shoulder o' Mutton where Edward Thomas brooded long
On death and beauty - till a bullet stopped his song.
(Of all the lost wartime poets, was Edward Thomas the most grievous loss – a poet who had just come into the fullness of his great gift, only to have his life cut short? Who knows what he might have gone on to write?)
Anyway, to today's Alun Lewis poem, a powerful piece which I think deserves to be better known. Here it is...
The Unknown Soldier
Everything has lasted till today.
He stares upon it like a velvet king.
Velasquez might have made this flaccid mask,
The silence round the languid mouth,
The weak and glassy eyes, the crumpled brow.
All things are out-distanced now.
All days are heaped in wrath upon today.
The senses sleep except one crazy spark
That leaps the lesion slashed between his eyes
And cries – not for a fertile century,
Nor for the secular ransom of the soul –
But for a sip of water from my flask.
What is the soul to him?
He has outlasted everything.
Joy's deceitful liturgy has ceased.
Tomorrow and tomorrow have no place
Among the seas of rain, the seas of peace
That are the elements of this poor face.
The mean humiliating self no more
Has access to him, nor the friends
Whose sensual persuasions first began
The brittle scattering that this days ends.
On pander, lord and jester slams the door.
And impotent in his kingdom the grey king
No longer clings to that which dies.
He has abandoned everything.
Velasquez, close those doglike dolorous eyes.
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