Second World War – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’

Like Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’, Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is a rain poem that is also a war poem – although Alun Lewis was a poet of the Second World War rather than the First.

Indeed, Lewis was an admirer of Thomas’s poetry and ‘All Day It Has Rained’ might be considered his tribute to Thomas’s rainy war poem (Thomas is even mentioned by name at the end of the poem). The mention of ‘celebrities’ and ‘refugees’ (uneasily rhymed on purpose here) makes this a curiously modern poem – a poem for our times as well as of its time.

All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors
Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors,
Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground
And from the first grey wakening we have found

No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain
And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap
And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap,
All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream,
Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream
Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly

A Short Analysis of Sidney Keyes’ ‘War Poet’

A commentary on a short WWII poem

The poem ‘War Poet’ was written by Sidney Keyes (1922-43), one of the most famous English poets of the Second World War, in March 1942 and published the following year, the year of his untimely death. Curiously, the day Keyes was born, 27 May 1922, was the exact same day that the actor Christopher Lee entered the world. Lee outlived Keyes by over 70 years, and it’s odd to think of the two men as exact contemporaries. Keyes was commissioned into the Queen’s Own West Kent Regiment and sent to Tunisia in March 1943, where he was killed, one month before his 21st birthday.

Of all Keyes’s war poems, ‘War Poet’ is perhaps the most famous – a short lyric of just a dozen lines of powerful polemic. Here is the poem, followed by a brief analysis of its language and imagery.

War Poet

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
I am the builder whose firm walls surround
A slipping land.
When I grow sick or mad
Mock me not nor chain me:

Drummond Allison: The Forgotten ‘War’ Poet

In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Drummond Allison, a poet who died in the Second World War

‘Lost Generation’. That was the name Gertrude Stein gave to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their contemporaries, men who’d lived through the Great War. Of course, many writers were lost in the war themselves, killed in action while still in their twenties (or younger): Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen. But the Second World War also produced its own lost generation: born just after the First World War and destined to perish in the Second. Of that generation, it would be those poets who survived the Second World War, or who were excused active service for health reasons, who would go on to achieve wider notice: Charles Causley, Richard Wilbur, and, most of all, Philip Larkin. Yet although Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis died before, perhaps, their full potential could be realised, Keith Douglas, as I’ve previously observed, was a great poet even by the time he died aged 24 during the D-Day campaign. Drummond Allison was also a very accomplished poet by the time he died, aged just 22, while fighting on the Garigliano. Yet next to Allison’s, Douglas’s small measure of fame looks positively stratospheric.