“In the fourth year of this war we have not a single poet who seems likely to be an impressive commentator on it”, wrote Keith Douglas in 1943: “the mobility of modern warfare does not give the same opportunities for writing as the long routines of trench warfare”. And he concluded his essay on the subject of poetry and the Second World War by suggesting that only in retrospect would civilian and soldier poets alike write successfully about the war that he himself was not to survive. Douglas was killed in Normandy shortly after landing there on D-Day.

His essay eventually appeared in the TLS, in 1971, as “Poets in this war”, although 1943 did see the publication of two of his poems in the same paper: “Devils” appeared in January that year, and “The Regimental Trumpeter Sounding in the Desert” in June. The latter might be read as a response, less fevered than Wilfred Owen’s, to the “old Lie”, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”; though perhaps also as a response to Douglas’s own statement about the absence of impressive poetry written during and about the Second World War. The star Arcturus has Ursa Major and Ursa Minor for “companions” who would have seen together, the poem suggests, men fighting and dying on the earth during all ages, from Hector at Troy, to the “friends killed last month” in the desert. The spareness of the verse, even down to the punctuation, lends monumental dignity to a perennial sorrow.

The Regimental Trumpeter Sounding in the Desert

O how often Arcturus
have you and your companions
heard the laughter and the distant shout
of the long tube a man sets to his mouth
crying that war is sweet, and the men you
see sleep after fighting will fight in the day before us?

Since with manual skill
men dressed to kill in purple
with how many strange tongues
cried the trumpet that cried once
for the death of Hector from Troy steeple
that cried when a hundred hopes fell.

To-night we heard it
who for weeks have only listened
to the howls of inhuman voices.
But as the apprehensive ear rejoiced,
breathing the notes in, the sky glistened
with a flight of bullets. We must be up early.

To-morrow to forget the cry and the crier
as we forgot the conversation
of our friends killed last month, last week
and near, crouching, the air shriek,
the crescendo, expectancy to elation
violently arriving. The trumpet is a liar.

KEITH DOUGLAS (1943)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Eavesdropped" by Peter Reading, click here.

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