"The floors are slippery with blood." These are the words that begin Edith Sitwell's poem “The Dancers: During a Great Battle, 1916.” The best-known WWI poems are written by
“trench poets,” the term given to soldiers on the Western Front who wrote about
the experience of war (such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon). Not many know Sitwell’s poem: she was a woman
whose brother Osbert (also a poet) fought in the trenches of France, and
through him, she met and became friends with Sassoon. After the war, Edith Sitwell remarked that
the poetry of the war should be left to the men who fought there. Women's experience
of the war was marginalized even by women themselves, feeling they had not earned the right to speak.
The Great Battle she is writing of is most likely
the battle of the Somme, and Fussell (The
Great War and Modern Memory) states that the artillery fire prior to the first
day of the battle could be heard in England, rattling windows (68).
The Dancers
During a Great Battle, 1916
The floors are slippery with blood:
During a Great Battle, 1916
The floors are slippery with blood:
The
world gyrates too. God is good
That
while His wind blows out the light
For
those who die hourly for us –
We
can still dance, each night.
The
music has grown numb with death –
But
we will suck their dying breath,
The
whispered name they breathed to chance,
To
swell our music, make it loud
That
we may dance—, may dance.
We
are the dull blind carrion-fly
That
dance and batten. Though God die
Mad
from the horror of the light—
The
light is mad, too, flecked with blood,—
We
dance, we dance, each night.
—Edith Sitwell
—Edith Sitwell
The scene seems to depict a society party, grotesquely out-of-touch with the sufferings of the
soldiers. Sassoon wrote,
“The man who really endured the War at its worst was everlastingly
differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers” (Fussell 90). Or perhaps the dancers are closer to the front, just
behind the lines in a staging town such as Poperinghe, where soldiers and nurses,
ambulance drivers and VADs frenetically sought rest and diversion from the war?
Otto Dix, "Dance of Death" |
The speaker names herself as separate from those who die, yet she is not distant: she is the carrion-fly that crawls over corpses, dancing as she battens or prepares for the upcoming crisis by strengthening and fastening herself to the dance. In fact, she names herself only as one who dances. Whether the dance described is the slow spin of a waltz or a metaphorical account of the dizzying attempt to cope with the war, the poem gives voice to an aching and terrible beauty.
No comments:
Post a Comment