'Simplify Me When I Am Dead'

“Polity regroups / and is guarded, where on D-Day men / drowned by the gross, in surf-dreck, still harnessed / to their lethal impedimenta.” 

Geoffrey Hill was days away from turning twelve when the Allies landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944. Hill devotes “Isaac Rosenberg, 1890-1918” to the English poet killed in the earlier world war, near Arras on April Fools’ Day 1918. At the conclusion of his essay, Hill quotes these lines:

 

“Living in a wide landscape are the flowers—

Rosenberg, I only repeat what you were saying--.”

 

He adds: “These words [from “Desert Flowers”], by the outstanding British poet of the Second World War, Keith Douglas, serve as a fitting conclusion. Douglas, of course, does not only repeat what Rosenberg was saying: the words of his tribute are those of an indebtedness in which there is no mere repetition, no transiency; nothing redundant.”

 

Keith Douglas (1920-1944) studied at Oxford where one of his instructors was Edmund Blunden, the Great War Poet, who encouraged him to publish a volume of his poems. Douglas enlisted in 1940 and served in a tank regiment with the Eighth Army in North Africa. He was wounded by a land mine near Tripoli in 1943, after which he wrote more poems and a posthumously published memoir, Alamein to Zem Zem (1946). Douglas was killed by a German mortar round on June 9, 1944, three days after landing at Normandy, age twenty-four. He seems largely unknown among American readers. For obvious reasons his body of work is small and overshadowed by the earlier generation of English poets, those like Rosenberg who fought in World War I. These lines open and close one of Douglas’ best-known poems:

 

“Remember me when I am dead

Simplify me when I am dead.”

 

[The lines quoted at the top are from Section CXVI of Hill’s The Triumph of Love (1998). His essay on Rosenberg is included in Collected Critical Writings (2008).]