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After Dunkirk Lyrics by Alun Lewis

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I have been silent a lifetime
As a stabbed man,
And stolid, showing nothing
As a refugee
But inwardly I have wept.
The blood has flown inwardly into the spirit
Through the gaping wound of the world.
And only the little worm,
The small white tapeworm of the soul,
Lived on unknown within my blood.
But now I have this boon, to speak again,
I have no more desire to express
The old relationships, of love fulfilled
Or stultified, capacity for pain,
Nor to say gracefully all that the poets have said
Of one or other of the old compulsions.
For now the times are gathered for confession.
First, then, remember Faith
Haggard with thoughts that complicate
What statemen's speeches try to simplify;
Horror of war, the ear half-catching
Rumours of rape in crumbling towns;
Love of mankind, impelling men
To murder and to mutilate; and then
Despair of man that nurtures self-contempt
And makes men toss their careless lives away;
While joy beomes an idiot's grin
Fixed in a shaving mirror in whose glass
The brittle systems of the world revolve.
And next, the rough immediate life of camp
And barracks where the phallic bugle rules
The regimented orchestra of love;
The subterfuge of democracy, the stench
Of breath in crowded tents, the grousing queues,
And bawdy songs incessantly resung
And dull relaxing in the dirty bar;
The difficult tolerance of all that is
Mere rigid brute routine; the odd
Sardonic scorn of desolate self-pity,
The pathetic contempt of the lonely for the crowd;
And, as the crystal slowly forms,
A growing self-detachment making man
Less home-sick, fearful, proud,
But less a man.
Beneath all this
The dark imagination that would pierce
Infinite night and reach the waiting arms
And soothe the guessed-at tears.
And then the final change. For discipline
Becomes a test of self; one learns to bear
Insult as quietly as if it were
A physical deformity. But hope
Has left the calm humanity that waits
In silence for the zero hour.
That first great ordeal over,
New resolution grows
In shell-shocked minds of frightened boys
To live again, within the heightened vision
Of life as they saw it in the hour of battle
When the worn and beautiful faces of the half-forgotten
To raise the wounded and the dying succour,
Making complete all that was misbegotten
Or clumsily abused or left neglected.
And as the burning town falls down the wake
And white waves spread their fans and day grows bright,
Then sea and sky and wheeling gulls commingle
In the smiles of dying children and the joy
Of luckier babies playing in the cot.
Credits
Alun Lewis

Alun Lewis

About “After Dunkirk” by Alun Lewis

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