It has been a while since I've posted anything by Keith Douglas. Tonight I fell upon his poem 'Enfidaville', written in May 1943 - 75 years ago this month. It describes the aftermath of the Tunisian Campaign in the Second World War, in which Douglas took part.
Somewhat similar to his poem 'Mersa', 'Enfidaville' is, I think, less detached and more in-the-moment. Acknowledging "the pain this town holds", the speaker invests everything he sees with the aftermath of traumatic events: "the daylight coming in from the fields/like a labourer, tired and sad", "the ghosts tugging at doorhandles". When the speaker says of the town's cautiously returning inhabitants: "Who would not love them at this minute?", he seems to wryly acknowledge the uselessness of that question in the face of the destruction he has been part of. And he looks into "the blue eyes of the images in the church", perhaps sensing that they reproach him, or perhaps finding only emptiness and absence in those eyes.
ENFIDAVILLE (Keith Douglas)
In the church fallen like dancers
lie the Virgin and St Therèse
on little pillows of dust.
The detonations of the last few days
tore down the ornamental plasters
shivered the hands of Christ.
The men and women who moved like candles
in and out of the houses and the streets
are all gone. The white houses are bare
black cages. No one is left to greet
the ghosts tugging at doorhandles
opening doors that are not there.
Now the daylight coming in from the fields
like a labourer, tired and sad,
is peering about among the wreckage, goes
past some corners as though with averted head
not looking at the pain this town holds,
seeing no one move behind the windows.
But already they are coming back; to search
like ants, poking in the débris, finding in it
a bed or a piano and carrying it out.
Who would not love them at this minute?
I seem again to meet
the blue eyes of the images in the church.
[? Tunisia, May 1943]
Image: Signpost on road to Enfidaville, 1943. By M.D. Elias
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