Death Awed, by Percy Smith |
Aldington's novel has recently been republished, but his poetry remains largely forgotten. His short poem "Soliloquy II" deserves to be read and remembered.
Soliloquy II
Aux Eparges, soldats enterrant leurs camarades au clair de lune GP Leroux, Musee natioinal du Chateau de Versailles |
The dead men are not always carrion.
After the advance,
As we went through the shattered trenches
Which the enemy had left,
We found, lying upon the fire-step,
A dead English soldier,
His head bloodily bandaged
And his closed left hand touching the earth,
More beautiful than one can tell,
More subtly coloured than a perfect Goya,
And more austere and lovely in repose
Than Angelo's hand could ever carve in stone.
--Richard Aldington, 1918
This soliloquy, the voicing aloud of thoughts that are then overheard
by an audience, begins with a stark confession:
"I was wrong, quite wrong."
The soldier of the poem then makes a startling observation about the
bodies of the dead: they are "not
always carrion." He is compelled to
assert that the corpses that surround him and that were an ever present feature
of the Western Front – do not always resemble
the bodies of dead animals, are not always putrefying flesh, unfit for food. Paul Fussell, describing the front lines,
writes "The stench of rotten flesh was over everything….Dead horses and
dead men – and parts of both—were sometimes not buried for months and often
simply became an element of parapets and trench walls" (The Great War and Modern Memory 49).
To remain sane at the Front, men had to become numb to death. They had to learn to see others' bodies as nothing more than
"carrion."
Goncharova's "The Pale Horse" |
The specific details and unemotional description communicate
the cold, material reality of death: the body has been left "lying upon
the fire-step" (a shelf-like step cut into trench walls, that enabled men
to peer over the top into No Man's Land and to ready themselves for attack). The English soldier has sustained a head
wound that is "bloodily bandaged," most likely by the enemy troops
who left him behind, and one hand, his left, lies "closed" yet
"touching the earth." With
that final gesture, did the dying soldier seek the comfort of connection with the dust to
which he would soon return, or is the closed hand an act of despair and
final surrender?
The speaker cannot provide an answer, but instead turns the poem in an
unexpected direction: he proclaims the dead man "More beautiful than one
can tell." Lacking words to
describe the scene, the survivor turns to metaphors from art. This corpse is "more subtly
coloured" than a canvas painted by Goya, the early nineteenth-century painter
who was considered to be the last of the Old Masters. It may be significant that Goya is also
regarded as the first of the moderns: his paintings bridge the tradition of the
past and the ambiguities of the modern world. Goya's series of prints The Disasters of War are disturbing in
their depiction of the suffering of individuals in the face of violence that
cannot be controlled.
Perhaps the speaker feels envy of the dead man, for his war is over. Or perhaps in this one moment and in this single body, the living soldier is again able to see death as emotionally moving and very human. In either case, the poem records the moment of epiphany when his world has turned upside down and that which was dead certain has again become mysterious and revered.
Other poems (such as Robert Service's "The Mourners") describe the dead as happy; Aldington's poem finds in them a beauty that can only be expressed in art. Timeless and sobering, Death speaks to us wordlessly of the ineffable human condition.
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