It\u2019s easy to see why \u201cVergissmeinnicht\u201d is so much admired. Plain-spoken as it mostly is, it combines clarity with force, even before we get to the punchline, and the plain words are deployed with striking sensitivity in the shifting and combining of tones.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
VERGISSMEINNICHT
\nThree weeks gone and the combatants gone
\nreturning over the nightmare ground
\nwe found the place again, and found
\nthe soldier sprawling in the sun.<\/p>\n
The frowning barrel of his gun
\novershadowing. As we came on
\nthat day, he hit my tank with one
\nlike the entry of a demon.<\/p>\n
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil We see him almost with content, But she would weep to see today For here the lover and killer are mingled \n <\/p>\n Here are a few more detailed impressions.<\/p>\n In the first stanza, lines of four irregularly placed stresses create a sinister, forward-surging momentum at odds with the backward-looking suggestion of \u201cgone\u201d. Even before we reach the word \u201cnightmare\u201d we seem to be trapped in a pattern of nightmarish repetition: \u201cThree weeks gone and the combatants gone \/ returning<\/em>\u201d. This effect is reinforced throughout the first two stanzas by the way sounds and whole words return, with \u201cgone\u201d twice in the first line, \u201cfound\u201d twice in the third, and six of the first eight lines rhyming or half rhyming with each other. The impression of being trapped among recurring sounds may suggest the way the soldiers are caught up in the compulsive mechanisms of war, but such a mimetic function isn\u2019t its only role. There\u2019s a momentary sense of release in the fourth line, which stands out because it seems less locked into repetitions than the others (\u201csun\u201d only half rhymes with \u201cgone\u201d). This gives greater clarity of impact, emphasis and signifance to the image of the sprawling soldier[1]<\/a>.<\/p>\n The battle of three weeks ago and the present moment blur briefly in the second stanza: \u201cAs we came on\u201d seems at first to refer to something happening at the time of the return visit. It gives the memory of the battle something of the vividness of a flashback.<\/p>\n Douglas\u2019s flair for releasing contradictory energies in his language is present here too, if to a lesser extent than in \u201cHow to Kill\u201d. \u201cLike the entry of a demon\u201d is a case in point. It suggests the din and terror of the shell\u2019s impact, and the firestorm that might have followed if it had actually pierced the tank\u2019s armour. Perhaps it also suggests that the soldiers inside are damned souls fit for haling to hell (see the third stanza of \u201cHow to Kill\u201d). But they weren\u2019t killed. The shock registers and then the relief \u2013 this is only like the entry of a pantomime demon on a stage.<\/p>\n \u201cDishonoured\u201d and \u201cabased\u201d carry a sexual connotation (\u201cthe dishonoured picture of his girl\u201d). Her photograph in the wreckage of the gunpit may be smeared with blood and dirt. This violation is the more poignant for the stiltedness of her inscription and the fact that it\u2019s written in a \u201ccopybook gothic script\u201d, giving her a prim and almost childish innocence, the aura of a schoolroom worlds away from the war. The really powerful violation appears in the description of the corpse, though. When Douglas imagines how the girl would weep if she saw Steffi as he is now, he layers two different imaginary scenes over and under each other. The inspection of the body, its skin, eye and stomach, is so physical and intimate that it\u2019s almost as if a transparency of a lover gazing into the soldier\u2019s eyes and running her hands over his living body were shining through the horror of the mere thing he\u2019s become.<\/p>\n I admire the restraint that makes Douglas refrain from direct statement of his pity for this soldier, as opposed to implying it by presenting the girl\u2019s imagined\u00a0 grief. Partly it\u2019s a matter of sheer economy. More, though, it\u2019s a matter of analytical clarity, of registering the essential difference between perspectives, a difference that is part of the fundamental truth about war. To show it, he must avoid blurring the difference between the enemy combatant\u2019s and the lover\u2019s views. Replacing a focus on the situation itself by a focus on his evolving reactions would weaken this contrast and also I feel there\u2019d be something cheapening and disrespectful about doing that, as if his reactions mattered more than the dead man or what the situation in itself says about the nature of war.<\/p>\n The poem comes to a powerful conclusion in its statement of the duality that haunts so many of Douglas\u2019s poems. If I like \u201cVergissmeinnicht\u201d less than \u201cHow to Kill\u201d it\u2019s partly because of the very intellectual clarity and roundedness of this conclusion, hammered home by neat syntactical parallels and contrasts. The intellectual formulation of a contradiction seems to take over from imaginative dwelling in its presence in a way that doesn\u2019t happen in the more imaginatively open-ended and disturbing \u201cHow to Kill\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nthe dishonoured picture of his girl
\nwho has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht<\/em>
\nin a copybook gothic script.<\/p>\n
\nabased, and seeming to have paid
\nand mocked at by his own equipment
\nthat’s hard and good when he’s decayed.<\/p>\n
\nhow on his skin the swart flies move;
\nthe dust upon the paper eye
\nand the burst stomach like a cave.<\/p>\n
\nwho had one body and one heart.
\nAnd death who had the soldier singled
\nhas done the lover mortal hurt.<\/p>\n