Impotent clamour

Richard Aldington, image mypoeticside.com 

 
In 1923, the American editor of Poetry magazine wrote of a trip to London and her encounter with one of the best-known poets of the First World War at that time:

A big fellow is Aldington, looking more like a football-player than a poet—one’s imagination has to leap to connect him with the delicate handwriting so long familiar, and the even more delicate poems. We lunched at the Cheshire Cheese, still haunted by Dr. Johnson’s bellowing voice, and explored St. Paul’s and the Temple through persistent rain, talking meanwhile of ten years of war and poetry.* 

Just four years earlier, Aldington had published his second book of poetry, a volume that recounted his experiences of battle on the Western Front. Images of War was illustrated by war artist Paul Nash. Aldington’s “In the Trenches” appeared in that volume. 

In the Trenches

I.
Not that we are weary,
Not that we fear,
Not that we are lonely
Though never alone—
Not these, not these destroy us;
But that each rush and crash
Of mortar and shell,
Each cruel bitter shriek of bullet
That tears the wind like a blade,
Each wound on the breast of earth,
Of Demeter, our Mother,
Wounds us also,
Severs and rends the fine fabric
Of the wings of our frail souls,
Scatters into dust the bright wings
Of Psyche!

II.
Impotent,
How impotent is all this clamour,
This destruction and contest…

Night after night comes the moon
Haughty and perfect;
Night after night the Pleiades sing
And Orion swings his belt across the sky.
Night after night the frost
Crumbles the hard earth.

Soon the spring will drop flowers
And patient, creeping stalk and leaf
Along these barren lines
Where the huge rats scuttle
And the hawk shrieks to the carrion crow.

Can you stay them with your noise?
Then kill winter with your cannon,
Hold back Orion with your bayonets
And crush the spring leaf with your armies!
    —Richard Aldington

Frail souls, the impotent din of the shells, and the haughty, knowing gaze of a moon that shines down upon the barrenness of battle—Aldington contrasts the chaotic noise of war with the stolid endurance and quietude of nature. The poem rhetorically asks if even the fiercest bombardment of the war can silence the rats, hawks, and carrion crows that shriek across the lines of battle. Despite the terrific destructive power of industrial war, humans will never be capable of killing winter, corralling the stars, or crushing the spring.

Together with his wife HD (Hilda Doolittle), Aldington was a leader of the Imagist movement, writers who crafted short poems that used concrete language and formal elements to suggest a moment in time, a mood, an experience. Josie Holford’s blog post “Richard Aldington and Paul Nash: Images of War” includes a rich discussion of the volume and its images, and Vivian Whelpton’s biography Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover 1911 – 1929 (Lutterworth Press, 2014) attempts to unravel the complexities of Aldington’s life. As the author of A Century Back writes, “Richard Aldington is neither my favorite writer nor an altogether terrific soldier/husband/human being (and yes, those two judgments shouldn’t influence each other, yet they do), but his poetry is… interesting.”**
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* Harriet Monroe, “The Editor in England,” Poetry, vol. 23, no. 1, October 1923, pp. 32–45.
** “Richard Aldington’s Prayers and Fantasies,” A Century Back, 1 Nov. 2018, https://www.acenturyback.com/2018/11/01/richard-aldingtons-prayers-and-fantasies-rowland-feilding-in-the-chateau-sapper-martin-suspects-the-flags/. 

The Art of War

Death Awed, by Percy Smith

Drawing on his experiences at the Western Front, Richard Aldington is best known for his 1929 novel Death of a Hero.  Although it has been compared to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Aldington's Death of a Hero "is rarely read today and much of it [Aldington's writing] languishes out of print…For those seeking an overview of the conflict or a chronicle of how it swept up and snuffed out individual lives, here is a graphic, vitriolic and incredibly moving testament" (The National).   

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

I was wrong, quite wrong;
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"

But after charging the German lines, this soldier finds himself with the other survivors of his company "in the shattered trenches/Which the enemy left."  And there, among the numerous "dead men," he encounters the body of an English soldier, a comrade who has been left behind by the retreating enemy. 

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.     

This dead body, this canvas, is described as "Austere," a word suggesting that which is reserved, unemotional, plain, and restrained, but also grave, grim, unbending, and cold.  More of a masterpiece than any carved in marble by Michelangelo, the corpse is "lovely in repose," a play on the French term given to rotations of rest behind the lines:  "en repos."

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. 

 

War, by John Moody