'I Am Thinking This May Be My Last Summer'

I never encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets of the first war – Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon – but the second seemed a blank. On my own, I learned of the Americans – Karl Shapiro, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov. Only later still did I hear of Douglas, but his outlines remain vague, more a name from history than literature. Literary reputation is fickle, and none is guaranteed. 

Odd to think Douglas was born six weeks before my mother and was twenty-four when a German mortar round took him, three days after D-Day. At Oxford, Douglas had been tutored by one of the better Great War poets, Edmund Blunden. He enlisted soon after the start of the war and served in a tank regiment in North Africa. In 1943, after seeing combat at El Alamein, he was wounded by a land mine near Tripoli. Douglas owed something to Auden, as most of his generation in England did. Go here to watch Clive James read Douglas’ seemingly prescient “Canoe”:

 

“Well, I am thinking this may be my last

summer, but cannot lose even a part

of pleasure in the old-fashioned art

of idleness. I cannot stand aghast

 

“at whatever doom hovers in the background

while grass and buildings and the somnolent river

who know they are allowed to last for ever

exchange between them the whole subdued sound

 

“of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate

can deter my shade wandering next year

from a return? Whistle, and I will hear

and come another evening when this boat

 

“travels with you alone towards Iffley:

as you lie looking up for thunder again,

this cool touch does not betoken rain;

it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.”

 

James is reading in 2014, already sick with the cancer that would  kill him in five years. “My father sailed away to the war,” he says, “and didn’t come back.”