SEGUIMIENTO MICROBIOLÓGICO

Through the black silk of the big-bellied gown There would I win.^^

What is being regretted here is a kind of social predetermination that limits the

opportunities of the oppressed - almost to zero. The “falling light” of the unemployed workers was already in decline when they were those unsmiling rough children that unconsciously despised his effortless access to economic security. He concludes by contrasting his own impotent anger at their persecution with their dehumanised numbness:

It is too late for anger, Nothing prevails

This poem outlines a particular fear - that, unless it motivates some kind of resultant action on the part of the poet or the reader, then the compassion has been ineffectual. The indulgence in pity - which some of the reviewers of Poems would identify rather pointedly - risks becoming a self-congratulatory portrayal of his own sensitive response to the plight of others.* Nevertheless, the “piteous” poems do make this anxiety explicit within the text, and give rise to their implicit moral question - “what can be done?” The defeat expressed in “The Prisoners”, “In railway halls...” and “Moving through the silent crowd” is answered by the affirmation and prophecy of the “rallying” sequences that follow them; just as “The Prisoners” dramatises the projection of the imagination into an unseen realm of persecution, so too “After they have tired” and its counterparts depict the imagination attempting to project itself into a realisable future; visionary politics which might inspire - or prepare the way for - practical application of the will to alter the social order.

The sonnet “Without that once clear aim” (XXI) is a thematic bridge between the self-conscious projection of “The Prisoners” with its sense of despairing futility, and the first programmatic sequence that commences with the “visionary” propaganda of “oh young men oh young comrades”. The subject of this sonnet is the poet himself: it is a stylised dramatisation of his own position, it even commences by correlating his disillusionment to the passage of twentieth-century history in the first quatrain:

Without that once clear aim, the path of flight To follow for a life-time through white air. This century chokes me under roots of night I suffer like history in Dark Ages..

Initially, the romanticisation of his personal suffering seems histrionic, particularly in the light of the genuine suffering of the prisoners. It recalls the bourgeois, existential ennui of “What I expected”. But the second quatrain - which runs on in the fourth line

* “At this time my prevalent social attitude was one of pity. This, and sympathy with weakness, showed in my work and behaviour... It enlarged my sympathies by leading me down paths where people were insulted, oppressed, or vicious.” (World Within World, p. 119.) This is as much a description of Spender’s romantic inclinations in Germany as it is a description of his poetic tendency; his verdict is that, unlike “Walter” or “Joachim”, his flâneur friends and lovers, his “deus ex machina: the poem” was the justification for his own indulgent lifestyle (Ibid., p. 120.).

- establishes the nature of the suffering: it is the fear of an impending crisis, intuited from increasing unrest and unseen atrocities:

I suffer like history in Dark Ages, where

Truth lies in dungeons, from which drifts no whisper: We hear of towers long broken off from sight

And tortures and war, in dark and smoky rumour. But on men’s buried lives there falls no light.

The “dark and smoky rumour” of Berlin bars serves as a counterpoint to the calm ignorance of English society. The isolated realm of ‘T he Prisoners” is where the “truth” of events lies submerged; the “buried lives” of the imprisoned and the murdered are haunting by their absence, just as the poor have haunted him by their “empty” presence. In the sestet he casts himself as the tortured bearer of disturbing knowledge that he must somehow overcome - or exorcise - in his work:

Watch me who walk through coiling streets where rain And fog drown every cry: at comers of day

Road drills explore new areas of pain,

Nor summer nor light may reach down here to play. The city builds its horror in my brain,

This writing is my only wings away.

The final couplet condenses the logical progression of “What I expected”, but in this case the intimations of mortality have been replaced by the manifest “horror” of the city, its “road drills” are the correlative for silent, covert persecution. The “innocence / To save from dust” which is the idealised “created poem”, can no longer remain

inviolate from the perceived horrors. Whether the act of writing is really intended to provide a romantic escape is uncertain: the grim reality is delineated at too great a length for it to be easily dismissed. Since it precedes the first of the exhortations to “comrades”, the conclusion may be read as an introduction to the sequence that contextualises the succeeding visionary optimism.

“Without that once clear aim” stresses the Keatsian idea that Spender’s lyrical affirmation is - at least in his estimation - achieved by a turning away from the pessimism of his other poems: the reality that he apprehends so starkly. His “wings

away” from the social crisis is to embrace revolutionary optimism, even though it is clearly a simplification of his worldview.

As Eliot observed at this time, in its dogmatic reliance on positivist assertion, communism is just as much a religion as Christianity, Spender is clearly reliant upon the “pretensions” of communist faith to imbue Poems with an optimistic tonal

movement in its latter sequence. It begins in the final third of the volume with another New Signatures poem, “oh young m en...” (XXII), a direct call to his contemporaries (identified by the heavily-loaded Soviet term of address) to abandon their ideological inheritance and renounce the capitalist system,

oh young men oh young comrades it is too late now to stay in those houses

your fathers built where they built you to build to breed money on money,.

It is the only poem in the volume to use punctuation and capitalisation so minimally, and the effect is of an even-toned chant of accumulated statements, a sermon-like incantation that evokes the pulpit as much as the declamations of a soap-box socialist. Rather than the politics of Capital, his rhetorical argument proposes the relocation of value from the body politic to the body itself - the “temple” of Germanic sun-worship - in a description that is animated by the Hellenic ideal of the male form which will recur in Vienna's depiction of the idle masses. Rather than to count money, he implores the young men to.

Count rather those fabulous possessions

which begin with your body and your fiery soul:- the hairs on your head the muscles extending in ranges with their lakes across your limbs Count your eyes as jewels and your valued sex

This is not a physical description of the empty-eyed beggars, or the hungry-eyed

unemployed; by the same defining characteristic, these young men have jewelled eyes,

imbued with the “dazzling crystal” of hope; the glittering metaphor continues with the celebration of sun and stars that will be maintained in “I think continually...”, as they are exhorted to “count the sun and the innumerable coined light / sparkling on waves

and spangled under trees”. This is a heightened visionary realm, and hardly the landscape of economic collapse. It becomes apparent that he is not addressing the underclass at all: the jewel-eyed comrades are Spender’s fellow middle-class men, who must turn away from the secure social culture of inherited wealth which - as in Auden’s “A Communist to Others” - encourages a frozen image of an outmoded past:

It is too late to stay in great houses where the ghosts are prisoned - those ladies like flies perfect in amber

those financiers like fossils of bones in coal.

This is the crumbling Western civilization of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Spengler’s The Decline o f the West - a culture which has met its natural end; its final generation - represented by Spender and his class contemporaries - must break out or die with it. But there is an ambiguity in this poem which identifies a moral quandary central to the volume: there is a sense in which he protests too much that “it is too late”. If the young men do choose to “stay in great houses” like the ghosts of a old social order, it is not necessarily apparent that anything will change at all.

Spender, himself a beneficiary of the class structure - seems to realise here that the real “decline of the west” will only come about as a result of purposive action by his own class, the status quo can be maintained easily by an unquestioning generation that falls into the grooves of its forebears. Purposive action means revolution: simply waiting for the end of civilisation may mean waiting for an event which will never transpire without some assistance. The final lines clarify, somewhat reticently, that the cost of an idyllic future will indeed be a class war:

Oh comrades, step beautifully from the solid wall advance to rebuild and sleep with friend on hill advance to rebel and remember what you have no ghost ever had, immured in his hall.

There is a huge gap between the first two lines quoted here, an unspoken revolution that is glossed by the transition from a “beautiful” step, to a rebuilding, to a “boy’s club” vision of fellow comrades sleeping rough under the “coined light” of the stars. The “solid wall” is implicitly destroyed here, yet the language neatly avoids the necessary destruction. Nevertheless, militaristic associations are emphasised, the repetition of

“advance” make plain the notion of attack, and “rebuilding” and “rebelling” are presented as interchangeable terms for the constructive revolution.

The logic of these lines arises entirely from the revolutionary/evolutionary paradox that forms the basis of Marx’s manifesto; Spender is employing the language to justify an aggressive social transition which is not merely metaphorical. However, there

is a substantial difference between a rallying call to the workers who have “nothing to lose” and a lyrical call to a middle-class readership that, presumably, has a great deal to lose. Even though they are “ghosts” in the hall of an outmoded system, it still provides them with a comfortable existence. In this context the fantasy of rebellion is a

reassuring romantic escape, but it is far from the practical reality of the moneyed classes.

Samuel Hynes’s description of Eliot’s The Waste Land, and its amenability to various political readings, also serves as a useful description of “I think continually of those who were truly great”:

It has no clear political implications... it could lead to either right-wing or left-wing action. What it expresses is a sense of the time that, though not political, is a condition of politics.

In its context in Poems, however, its alignment is clearly to Socialism, and its tonal inspiration - as for the Futurist lyrics to come - is undoubtedly the Soviet propaganda films he had admired and absorbed in Germany. Hynes has noted how “What I expected” and “I think continually...” manage to capture the disillusion and the aspiration of the era respectively, but the latter poem also serves now as an intriguing illustration of the similarity between the idealisation of heroism in both left- and right- wing ideology.

This was the time when Hitler was constructing his own heroic myth as the new dictator of Germany, and the sides in the political struggle were becoming clearly defined. Valentine Cunningham has identified the significance of ideological heroism in the period:

What injects the business of ’30s heroics with its importance, what keeps up its

bigness entered directly into the rivalry between Socialism and Fascism. The going questions of the day were, which of the two was morally the bigger, and which would prevail physically, be militarily the stronger?^^

Soviet Russia had its heroes in airmen and explorers, the propagandist supermen who sought to rival the stage-managed stature of the Fascist dictators, and while Spender’s poem doesn’t precisely evoke “bigness” as its mark of greatness, it does express a worshipful celebration of lofty superiority, an airborne grandeur which serves to

abstract the nature of their achievement; it is unclear whether this achievement has been in revolution, or leadership, or artistic achievement, but it is the context which so heavily implies a Bolshevik association. The affirmative rhetoric and the hyperbolic imagery suggest the epic monumentalism of Soviet sculptures of the idealised worker.

“I think continually...” had previously appeared in the Listener and New

Signatures, and while in later years it was to become his most anthologised, quoted, and parodied poem, it was already in 1933 something of a definitive piece. The opening lines draw together several of the motifs which have been employed in the description of the underdogs of history, and here they are inverted and made wholly positive:

I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns Endless and singing.^*

Unlike the prisoners, who are hopeless from the womb, these figures have had utter certainty of purpose since before their birth, and in contrast to the “falling light” of the aimless unemployed, they are bathed in a hyperbole of blinding light and angelic chorus. The second half of this first stanza raises an alternative identity for the “great ones”: a correlation is made between the greatness of action and of expression, and it seems to be a direct address to the theme of oration in Poems, the “unacknowledged legislators” who declare and enable future action:

Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire.

There is a certain lightness in Spender’s description which counteracts the potentially brutish bombast of warring heroics; “lovely ambition”, like the young comrades who must “step beautifully”, gives a paradoxically delicate rendering of the inevitable tumult of social upheaval.

The second stanza revisits the rural yearning of “I hear the cries of evening”, but the Georgian withdrawal is now reformulated into a memorial for something which informs present action, and is not consigned simply to the realm of nostalgia and regret. D.H. Lawrence’s vision of the “blood history”, and the anti-modemist anxiety of Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” are fused into a positivist defiance of those forces which threaten to suffocate romantic aspiration:

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

In fact, this reference to the oppressive modem city is the only hint of the anxiety that is far more explicitly - and self-consciously - portrayed in Poems, “I think continually...” is defiantly outward-looking; after invoking the “titanic” struggles of an imagined prehistory, the rhetorical refusal of the disillusioning forces “Never... N or... N ever...” enable their inclusion without overwhelming the lyrical consciousness, as they have in “Without that once true aim”. Importantly, the “wings away” are literalised here, and the “path of flight” of the truly great enables, in reverie, an escape from the pessimism which has repeatedly enforced itself upon the romantic sensibility of the volume.

The final stanza shifts to an alpine horizon, “Near the snow, near the sun.” The oft-quoted final lines, celebrating those “who in their lives fought for life” fuse several concepts, not least the martyrs ofthe revolution, and the superhuman airmen of 1930s mythology, those who have scant regard for their own safety yet who achieve

immortality by the very intensity of their existence:

Bom of the sun they travelled a short while towards the sun. And left the vivid air signed with their honour.^^

Despite its unfailing optimism, it is essential to draw attention to the textual interrelation of the first poem in the collection, “He will watch the hawk with an indifferent eye”, one of the original “Marston” poems. The conceptualisation of Marston’s tragic, romantic failure, describes an identical fate to that of the truly great; he.

Had paced the enormous cloud, almost had won War on the sun;

Till now, like Icarus mid-ocean-drowned. Hands, wings, are found.'^

Marston had proved unworthy of the lyrical investment in him, but the airborne heroes of this poem are to be given no tone of deflation or criticism, they are to be idealised, inviolate and abstracted from mundane experience. “I think continually...” similarly acts as a lyrical response to “An ‘F can never be great man” (VIII), and the fact that both of these poems have preceded “I think continually...” in the volume indicates Spender’s overall thematic development.

Poems is a conscious movement from romantic disillusionment, scepticism and despondency into a mode of heightened affirmation. It is almost a deliberate

abandonment of realism, and an adoption of the “pretension” of communist thinking informs the visionary politics of the final sequences. There is still a degree of ambivalence, as shall be seen in the discussion of the Futurist lyrics below, but essentially there is a drive towards an apocalyptic faith in revolution which will

engender a new order against a backdrop of inevitable social decline; it is to be both an individualist “flowering of the spirit” and a social regeneration.

The unremitting optimism - and lack of irony - that “I think continually...” expresses as an isolated lyric was not universally admired. As O ’Neill and Reeves have observed, it “throws down a gauntlet to those who would prefer self-protective irony”.

Archibald MacLeish was to praise its brave directness: “It is a poem not only of