Simplify Me When I'm Dead -- Keith Douglas

Guest poem sent in by Swati Chaudhary

(Poem #1945) Simplify Me When I'm Dead Remember me when I am dead Simplify me when I am dead. As the process of earth strip off the colour and the skin take the brown hair and the blue eye and leave me simpler than at birth, when hairless I came howling in as the moon came in the cold sky. Of my skeleton perhaps so stripped, a learned man may say "He was of such a type and intelligence," no more. Thus when in a year collapse particular memories, you may deduce from the long pain I bore the opinion I held, who was my foe and what I left, even my appearance but incidents will be no guide. Time's wrong way telescope will show a minute man the years hence and by distance simplified. Through the lens see if I seem substance or nothing: of the world deserving mention or charitable oblivion not by momentary spleen or love into decision hurled leisurely arrive at an opinion. Remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I am dead. -- Keith Douglas

Here's a poem that I first read in high school and which spurred my
consequent obsession with poetry. The reason I really like Keith Douglas is
because of his rawness of emotion. It is almost as if his poems document the
very moment when a truth must have become evident to him. It is possible
that this is so because all we have are his early works -- lacking the
maturity or perhaps, the practice that comes with age, due to his untimely
death.

best
swati chaudhary

[Links]

Biography:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Douglas

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.