{"id":2343,"date":"2015-07-03T13:06:11","date_gmt":"2015-07-03T13:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/warpoets.org.uk\/worldwar2\/?page_id=2343"},"modified":"2015-07-03T13:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-07-03T13:06:11","slug":"some-thoughts-about-all-day-it-has-rained","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/warpoets.org.uk\/worldwar2\/resources\/some-thoughts-about-all-day-it-has-rained\/","title":{"rendered":"Some thoughts about ‘All Day It Has Rained’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his short story \u2018Lance-Jack\u2019, published in the 1942 collection The Last Inspection<\/em>, Alun Lewis captured the monotonous reality of warfare and army life. The writing is vivid and atmospheric:<\/p>\n

At night, in the drizzle, I walk round and round the cemetery, along the circular road, and I do not know when to stop walking round and round the silent and eternal cemetery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is, of course, the figure of Dante behind this repetition and later in the story Lewis suggests that the soldiers \u2018were the exiles, like Dante.\u2019 The other literary voice heard through this story is that of Edward Thomas and Lewis suggests to the reader that he might be wise to re-read those poems from 1915 \/ 1916:<\/p>\n

\u00a0The soldier says \u201cLife is a series of meetings with strangers. We are all strange, to ourselves as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is true. But it is dangerous, like cynicism. For sometimes when he is utterly alone, utterly impersonal, on guard in the night at some outpost, somewhere, he can only envisage the human past, the great centrifugal force of the heart which draws into its orbit and unites in love all differences of people, mother and sweetheart, friend and pauper, employer and baby daughter, I say he can only envisage this great power of life as a swarming of bees on a bough, of flies on a fallen damson, a noisy, slightly indecent congress. A complex, if you prefer.<\/p>\n

And if you ask why a man appears to prefer what is casual, rough, hazardous and incomplete to what is warm and personal and loving, I suggest you read Edward Thomas\u2019s poems again. It is, if you like, curious that the idealist should live casually with regard to himself and the preservation of himself, that he should find the haversack, the trench, the journeying, most suited to the pursuit of high ends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rootless lives of soldiers can be felt in the opening lines of \u2018All Day It Has Rained\u2026<\/a>\u2019 as the men \u2018sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors\u2019. It is perhaps no accident that Lewis should have used a word from Thomas\u2019s pursuit of his doppleganger, \u2018The Other\u2019, where the older poet\u2019s determination to find himself led to his being confronted by \u2018those dull boors\u2019 before he pursued his journey \u2018Aimed at the unseen moving goal\u2019.<\/p>\n

Alun Lewis\u2019s poem centres around dissolution, death. What starts as casual conversation about \u2018dropping bombs on Rome\u2019 swiftly moves on to a contemplation of the \u2018quiet dead\u2019 juxtaposed with the \u2018loud celebrities \/ Exhorting us to slaughter\u2019. A contemplation of this quietness of not-being<\/em> brings to the poet\u2019s mind many of the small details that were so central to Thomas\u2019s own poetry: children, woods, the slow raking of burning chestnuts, the Shoulder O\u2019Mutton hill near Petersfield where the earlier poet had walked so many times \u2018till a bullet stopped his song\u2019.<\/p>\n

In \u2018All Day It Has Rained\u2019 the particular Thomas poem which Lewis had in mind was \u2018Rain\u2019, written in January 1916. In that poem Thomas had focused on the \u2018bleak hut\u2019 he was in and suggested an image of trench-warfare as its backdrop with the dead \u2018Like a cold water among broken reeds\u2019. There is an echo of Keats\u2019s \u2018Ode to a Nightingale\u2019 in the Thomas poem and a feeling of being \u2018half in love with easeful Death\u2019 and, in similar vein, Lewis moves from the monotonous repetition of \u2018Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks, \/ Reading the Sunday papers\u2019 to that \u2018thought of the quiet dead\u2019. In Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em> the souls are in torment for eternity and in T.S. Eliot\u2019s epigraph to \u2018The Waste Land\u2019 it is no accident that the Cumaean Sybil, when asked by the boys what she wishes for, should reply:<\/p>\n

\u2018I want to die\u2019<\/p>\n

This page contributed by Ian Brinton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his short story \u2018Lance-Jack\u2019, published in the 1942 collection The Last Inspection, Alun Lewis captured the monotonous reality of warfare and army life. The writing is vivid and atmospheric: At night, in the drizzle, I walk round and round the cemetery, along the circular road, and I do not know when to stop walking  Continue Reading »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"parent":19,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n