Vergissmeinnicht -- Keith Douglas

(Poem #710) Vergissmeinnicht Three weeks gone and the combatants gone returning over the nightmare ground we found the place again, and found the soldier sprawling in the sun. The frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing. As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one like the entry of a demon. Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonoured picture of his girl who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. in a copybook gothic script. We see him almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed. But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move; the dust upon the paper eye and the burst stomach like a cave. For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart. And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt. -- Keith Douglas

Vergissmeinnicht means "forget me not" in German.

The phrase 'War Poets' usually calls to mind names such as those of Wilfred
Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and their contemporaries from the First World War
(the 'Great War', as it was called in its immediate aftermath); although the
Second World War did produce its share of important poems, most of them were
written at some remove from the trenches (the work of Empson and Auden
springs to mind) (cue a flood of emails from Minstrels subscribers pointing
out my ignorance of WW2 poetry). Douglas is the exception: like Owen, he
distinguished himself on the front lines (thus achieving a moral stature
which enabled him to criticize the carnage around him); like Owen, his
poetry has a universality which speaks to readers removed from its immediate
context; and like Owen, he was killed in action.

Douglas' verse itself, though, is quite different from Owen's; where the
latter is a blend of (barely-restrained) outrage and compassion, the
former's "unquiet intensity" has been compared to the Metaphysicals -
detached and clinical on the surface [1], yet deeply thought-out and
meaning-laden. "Vergissmeinnicht" is an excellent (if somewhat
over-anthologized) example of this... the final couplet, especially, is
justly celebrated for its encapsulation of the paradox of war.

thomas.

[1] Michael Schmidt quips that for Douglas, "the poetry is in the
pitilessness", reversing Owen's famous comment on his own work, which you
can read at poem #132

[Biography]

  b. January 20, 1920, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England
  d. June 9, 1944, Normandy, France

British poet who is remembered for his irony, eloquence, and fine control in
expressing the misery and waste of war, to which he was to fall victim.

Douglas' education at Oxford University was cut short by the outbreak of
war. By 1941 he was serving as a tank commander in North Africa, where some
of his most powerful poems were written (Alamein to Zem-Zem, 1946). He was
moved back to Britain in 1944 to take part in the D-Day invasion; he fell in
combat in Normandy on his third day there. His posthumous Collected Poems
(1951) enhanced his reputation as a war poet, but in 1964 Ted Hughes's
edition of Douglas' Selected Poems established him as a poet of universal
significance.

        -- EB

[Links]

See poem #707 for a list of
other war poems; don't miss the ones by Wilfred Owen, especially.