Thoughts on Fragment Two

I am presenting these Fragments in the order in which they come to hand. The dilatory colleague of mine who chanced upon them did not care to note the order in which they were originally bound. However, as with any volume of poetry, one suspects that the order of the poems as read is not necessarily a reflection of the order in which they were written or the age of the poet at the time of writing.

We do feel that a younger, brasher sensibility is at work in this self-ironising piece of patriotic rhetoric. Played as it is, for bitter laughs, it is hard to imagine the older poet writing such mockeries as “there’s peace in dead English.” Only a young turk, full of anger and spunk, could lash the page with such an extraordinary welts of sarcasm and bar-room vulgarity. But of course I am not here to criticise. The upwelling of talent in a young genius is a remarkable phenomenon and takes many forms.

It is hard to know, at this distance, who the addressed persons, George Saint and Harry, were. Clearly earnest and idealistic young men, S.W. wastes no time in accusing them of the basest crimes. “Upon straining slips the[e] in greyhounds” -- bestiality at the time was of course punishable by execution, and as such S.W. was playing with fire with this accusation. He moves on from this libel to blaming these unfortunates for the whole tenor of the times in England -- the war-mongering, the mindless brutishness of the noble and the mettlesome. Indeed, S.W. says at one point that “In [England] made were limbs / Whose yeomen good you and war to how them teach, and blood -- / Grosser of men to now copy be.” It seems to the poet that these men taught the very arms and legs of their countrymen to wage war. What is more, the “grosser”, the more vulgar elements of society, the nation of shopkeepers, of “grossers”, simply then goes with the flow. They are unteachable, they are not idealistic, they merely march to the drum of the ideologically programmed. Off to war.

Since S.W. is first and foremost a surrealist, I have taken the decision not to edit these fragments as would an ordinary compiler of verse, but rather, have transcribed the fragments exactly as I found them. The reader may therefore have noticed that the rather flexible Elizabethan orthography results in the interchangeability of the definite article the and the objective pronoun thee. The sequence of short sentences starting with “And breath the[e] hard”, and continuing a little later with “Summon sinews the[e]!” and the like can be read as a sequence of impossible commands. We do not know whether S.W. ever experienced battle himself, but it is clear that he was able to conjure the nonsensical barks of the martinet in the service of deep irony. Is there any real difference between the command Eyes right and the order outlined below to “Hold , wide nostril!”? In each case the authority figure seeks to control the very lizard brain of the soldier, the most ancient and animalistic part of humanity. Whether it is the forces of the Establishment seeking to bring the people into line under the banner of patriotism, or the mimsy guardians at the gates of Usage and Syntax, S.W. insists that this colonialism of the mind is an affront to the dignity of man. And he does this, as so often, with a descent into absurdity, until we arrive at the final command “Of action the[e] imitate then ears!”, which incongruity is not only a piece of Dada avant la mode, but also serious and ironical command. Our ears are almost entirely motionless and yet we are asked, nay, ordered to imitate their action. Be still, says S.W., be still, and listen to the madness.

How does S.W. resolve this aggressively sarcastic piece? What recommendations does he have for the acquaintances who were the jumping-off point for such a cynical view of duty and patriotism? He notes that the “humility and stillness modest as man” is “so nothing”: dismissible; a paradox. In other words, even though humankind is the only being on the planet with the self-knowledge to exhibit the serenity which the poet requires, we are still not equal to the task. Humility itself is debased by its attempt to find a host in mankind.

And so there is only peace in death, unless S.W.’s friends, George Saint and Harry, can, just once, “breach the[e] unto more”. To destroy the programmatic cycle of violence in which they (and by extension we) find themselves, they must needs break themselves open. With the pieces of their very souls they must close up the wall, “and more” -- build it higher, and attain manhood not by marching for the dead land where they had their accidental birth, but by clambering up, up towards the angels.