influence of their predecessors: Alun Lewis acknowledges a debt to Edward Thomas, whereas the diction and pararhyming of Keith Douglas's poems clearly owe something to Wilfred Owen's. Their voices, however, are their own, and the dominant mood of their poetry is strikingly unlike that from and about the trenches of the Western Front. Just as the heroics of 1914 were impossible in 1940 (although there was no lack of heroism), so too was the antipropagandist indignation of a Siegfried Sassoon. Now that everybody knew about the Battle of the Somme, the bombing of Guernica, London, Dresden, who could be surprised by evidence of 'Man's inhumanity to man'? In the draft preface to his poems, one of the more influential poetic manifestos of the twentieth century, Owen had written: 'All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.' His warnings and those of his contemporaries had been uttered in vain, but the poets of World War II knew they must be truthful, true to their wartime experience of boredom and brutality, true to their humanity, and above all resistant to the murderous inhumanity of the machines. EDITH SITWELL 1887-1964
Edith Sitwell's father was an extremely eccentric English baronet; her mother, the daughter of an earl. Sitwell, an eccentrically gifted poet, objected to the subdued rural descriptions and reflections of the Georgian poets (of whom Rupert Brooke was the
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SITWELL: STILL FALLS THE RAIN / 245 3
most popular) and reacted in favor of a highly abstract verbal experimentation that exploited the sounds and rhythms and suggestions of words and phrases, often with remarkable pyrotechnic display. She edited and was a substantial contributor to the six 'cycles' of Wheels (1916?21), an annual anthology of modern poems, in which she displayed her verbal and rhythmic virtuosity and encouraged others to follow her example. Her poem sequence Faqade (1922), with its cunning exploration of rhymes and rhythms, was set to music by the composer Sir William Walton, whose intensely sympathetic treatment of the words enhanced their impact. The 1923 performance in London's Aeolian Hall was a sensation: Sitwell intoned the poems from behind a screen, and Walton conducted the orchestra.
But Sitwell was more than a flashy manipulator of surfaces. Throughout her poetry she hints at profounder meanings, sometimes with mocking laughter, sometimes with anguish, and in her later work she attacks the pettiness and philistinism of the high society of her time. In still later poems, influenced by William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and her friend Dylan Thomas, Sitwell wished to achieve, she said in her autobiography, 'a greater expressiveness, a greater formality, and a return to rhetoric,' rejecting 'the outcry for understatement, for quietness, for neutral tints in poetry.' These poems, such as 'Still Falls the Bain,' are much concerned with the horrors of war, the varieties of human suffering produced by modern civilization, and the healing powers of a faith in God, combined with a sense of the richness and variety of nature.
Still Falls the Rain
The Raids, 1940.1 Night and Dawn
Still falls the Rain? Dark as the world of man, black as our loss? Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upo n the Cross.
Still falls the Rai n With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-
beat In the Potter's Field,2 and the sound of the impious feet On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rai n In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the huma n brain Nurtures its greed, that wor m with the brow of Cain. 3
Still falls the Rai n At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us ? On Dives and on Lazarus:4 Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
1. During the Battle of Britain the German air sanctuary, and departed; and he went away and force carried out many raids on London, often with hanged himself. And the chief priests took the incendiary bombs (see lines 27 and 30). pieces of silver . . . and bought with them the pot2. Cf. Matthew 27.3-8: 'Then Judas, which ter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field betrayed [Jesus], when he saw that he was con-was called, The field of blood, unto this day.' demned, repented himself, and brought back the 3. The first murderer (Genesis 4). 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4. In Jesus' parable the rich man Dives was sent saying, I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent to hell, while the leprous beggar Lazarus went to blood. But they said, What is that to us? see thou heaven (Luke 16.19?31). This is not the same Lazto it. And he cast down the pieces of silver into the arus who was raised from the dead.
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2454 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR II
Still falls the Rain?
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side: He bears in His Heart all wounds,?those of the light that died, Th e last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear,5? The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh . . . the tears of the hunted hare.
Still falls the Rain? Then? O He leape up to my God: who pulles me doune? See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:6 It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart That holds the fires of the world,?dark-smirched with pain As Caesar's laurel crown.7
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man Was once a child who among beasts has lain? 'Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.'
1942
5. A medieval and Elizabethan sport in which dogs with Mephistopheles. fought a bear chained to a post. 7. Traditionally worn by victorious generals, and 6. Faustus's despairing cry at the end of Christo-perhaps here associated with Jesus' crown of pher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (1604), when thorns (Matthew 27.29). he realizes that he has been damned for his pact HENRY REED 1914-1986
Henry Reed was born and educated in Birmingham, at the King Edward VI School and at Birmingham University, where he gained a first-class degree in classics (having taught himself Greek) and began an M.A. thesis on Thomas Hardy. After leaving the university in 1934, he tried teaching, like many other British writers of the 1930s, but, again like most of them, hated it and left to make his way as a freelance writer and critic. During World War II he served?'or rather studied,' as he put it?in the Boyal Army Ordnance Corps for a year. A notable mimic, he would entertain his friends with a comic imitation of a sergeant instructing new recruits. After a few performances he noticed that the words of the weapon-training instructor, couched in the style of the military manual, fell into certain rhythmic patterns. His fascination with these patterns eventually informed his Lessons of the War, the first of which, 'Naming of Parts,' is probably the most anthologized poem prompted by World War
