Vergissmeinnicht - Keith Douglas Context Flashcards
Explain the context of the poem
• Keith Douglas was a 22-year-old lieutenant in command of about a half dozen British tanks involved the 1942 Battle of El Alamein, a decisive battle in the North African deserts. Douglas’ poem “Vergissmeinnicht” captures the horror and violence of that monstrous battle by focusing on a single event, an exchange of fire between a powerfully equipped German anti-tank crew and Douglas’ lightly armoured tank
o The poet also suggests to us another issue, i.e., how easily our sense of humanity becomes distorted and diminished by the horrors of war and how difficult it is for the soldier to retain the sensitivity and compassion that characterize the better side of human nature
Explain the events of the poem
• What took place in that desert combat is fairly clear
o On the first day of the attack Douglas led his tanks into battle and almost immediately ran into a German anti-tank gun pit
o The Germans fired their huge 88-mm cannon and scored a glancing hit on Douglas’ little command tank
o The result was “like the entry of a demon.” Indeed, any kind of hit on a tank can cause fragments of metal to go spinning around inside the turret, inflicting horrible wounds on the tankers inside
o Obviously they were operating on “nightmare ground,” but Douglas and his gunners were lucky that day and managed to destroy the crew of the gun pit
o Three weeks later, having been part of the great victory over the Germans, Douglas triumphantly leads his tanks back over the same ground and finds the horrible aftermath of the fighting at the gun pit – the body of the German gunner, which has lain for three weeks in the North African desert sun, swelling with the gases of decomposition until, finally, his stomach has actually burst open like “a cave.”
o His eyes are open but have dried to the consistency of parchment
o Large black flies are swarming over the disgusting corpse. Poking about in the scattered contents of the gun pit, Douglas finds a picture of the dead German’s girlfriend signed :”Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.” “Steffi. Forget me not!” It is clear what happened; and it is also clear that what happened was both sad and horrible
Explain the soldier’s dehumanisation and the cost of war presented
• The dead soldier has been “abased,” i.e., humiliated in death, but the living soldiers look at the corpse “almost with content.”
o To the strangely satisfied and contented young British officer, the dead German seems “to have paid,” i.e., gotten what he deserved
o Also, Douglas finds a satisfying but bizarre sense of irony when he notices that the man’s equipment is mostly “hard and good” while the man himself is decaying into a soft and useless putrid mush
o Clearly one of the costs of war is damage to the basic human sensibility. Such scenes as this ought not to leave a living, normal human being feeling “content” or sarcastic amusement or emotional indifference
Explain the speaker’s interpretation of the scene
• The speaker of the poem may no longer have an undamaged sensibility, but he has at least an intellectual appreciation of the situation
o He is able to grasp that poor Steffi “would weep to see” the nightmarish condition of her soldier-boyfriend; she would be able to express true emotion far better than he himself
o He is also able to see that there is a tragic mingling of “the lover and killer” in “the one body and one heart” of the dead German boy. There is, he can understand, a reason to mourn the death of the lover who was extinguished along with the soldier doing his job as a killer
o He can even begin to understand that the lover and killer are also blended together in his own being and that there is damage being done to his innermost being by his own role as a killer
o Thus, it might be fair to say that the central experience of this poem is Douglas’ realization that the war may be killing off his better human instincts and replacing those instincts with guilt and distorted reactions
Explain the poem’s meaning
- Through stable yet altering structure, appropriate diction, and vivid imagery, Douglas describes the conditions and brutality of war and how each soldier will be remembered as both lover and killer alike.
- One of the more subtle devices Douglas uses in this poem is the very structure of the poem itself. After a brief review of the rhyme scheme throughout the poem, you’ll notice that there is hardly a standard scheme and some of the rhymes, such as today and eye, are very loose. The reader starts out expecting a standard ABBA scheme when the first stanza is read, but much in the same way a young soldiers expectations of glory and honour are dashed, the reader’s expectations must be modified to suit each stanza. Contrary to the chaotic rhyme scheme is the uniformity of the amount of syllables in each line. This goes to show that amidst the turmoil of war, there is still a method to the madness; a basic set of rules that everyone follows that gives many aspects of war a sense of order.
- In the first two stanzas, Douglas writes in a way that gives the sense of the soldier being detached and rushing through his sentences by using repetition in the line, Three weeks gone and the combatants gone(1). Combining this with an AAAA rhyme scheme in the second stanza, Douglas gives the reader somewhat of a shock when he stops the flow completely and simply says Look. (9). This serves to bring his thoughts and the reader down to exactly what he is focused on at that very moment. It also is an awakening for him as well, because he goes from a sense of wandering around a battlefield in a sort of daze to being focused on a particular object of interest.
- Douglas uses very descriptive imagery to completely convey the soldier’s emotions and thoughts at his current situation and surroundings. Though he seems calm at the moment of this poem, the soldier describing the enemy’s weapon with having a frowning barrel (5) and being of a demon (8). I think that in this moment he is having frightening recollections of the battle that happened three weeks ago. By describing his fallen foe with having a burst stomach and a paper eye (20, 19), Douglas shows the reader that his thoughts are conflicted as to his opinion on the enemy. While the burst stomach is a more detached standpoint, his paper eye is reminiscent of something that was once living, just like paper.
- The conclusion of this poem comes with a revealing insight into the soldiers feelings about war. After the discovery of the enemy’s picture of his sweetheart back home, the soldier realizes that in everyone fighting this war, there is a lover and a fighter who [has] one body and one heart (22), and though is it the fighter that dies, the lover must perish as well. I believe that Douglas thinks that this is the true tragedy of war.
