No Remedy
No remedy, my retrospective friend,
We’ve found no remedy;
Nor from these fields the briared and barbed wire end
Can keep our enemy,
To mend the gaps
Would take perhaps a century.
So, praise each other’s poem though we may,
The day of easy speech
Succeeded soon by love and fright, and they
Made madness out of reach
Gave way in turn
To speed to learn, vain wish to teach,
Success and jealousy their unsought sons;
That day won’t leap again,
As when some amateur card trickster runs
His hands through all the plain
Cards, stuns the girls
When he uncurls the royal strain;
Or as the prober of the ancient text
Years after one rare find
Discovers in the margin the great next.
But not that day. We blind
Or vexed must be,
No remedy for our split mind.
Drummond Allison was born in Caterham, Surrey, in 1921. He took a “wartime shortened” history degree at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with the poets John Heath-Stubbs and Sidney Keyes. After military training at Sandhurst, he joined the army as an intelligence officer and was killed in action in Italy, at the age of 22. This week’s poem was published in his posthumous collection, The Yellow Night (1944).
Allison isn’t generally considered to be a war poet. Not having read the collection, and knowing only a handful of his poems from other sources, I am not in a position to argue. Conflict is an important focus in No Remedy, but it seems to be a personal one. The shadows of actual warfare are metaphorical.
They are hinted in “the briared and barbed wire end” of the fields and the reference to mending the gaps, a task that “would take perhaps a century”. Such defences are insufficient ones, and won’t “keep our enemy”. “Keep” is an interesting verb in the context: it seems to imply “keep out” while echoing the physicality of the noun “keep” and suggesting containment. The identity of “our enemy” isn’t clarified. As the poem opens out its map, we may be looking at a romantic relationship – one that includes poetic rivalry between two young men, the narrator and the “retrospective friend” the poem addresses. Again, Allison’s word-choice is interesting: what’s a “retrospective friend?” One who is looking back and sharing your recollections, or one who, for some reason, is your friend no longer?
That gently evocative phrase, “the day of easy speech”, reminded me of Tennyson’s gesture towards Arthur Henry Hallam (“the tender grace of a day that is dead”) in Break, Break, Break. Allison’s tone is less emotional, of course: there’s a subtler level of analysis at work, and the syntax and diction are chosen to emphasise rather than untangle the complexity.
Allison even complicates the meaning of “succeeded” in these striking lines: “The day of easy speech / Succeeded soon by love and fright.” It’s possible that the day succeeded, ie was successful, because of “love and fright” or that it was succeeded (followed) by love and fright. The latter makes more sense – but then there would need to be a comma after the sub-clause, “and they / Made madness out of reach”.
In fact, I wonder if some punctuation might be missing from the text I copied from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (edited by Philip Larkin in 1973). The ambiguity may well be deliberate, of course. Antitheses are important: love and fright, success and jealousy (“their unsought sons”), madness and articulacy (“To speed to learn, vain wish to teach”), the “split mind” (perhaps indicating the relationship itself) for which there is no remedy.
At the same time, there are moments where surprise and clarity coexist. The simile of the card sharp who “stuns the girls” by producing a card of “royal strain” from a plain pack is clever, but the further comparison with “the prober of an ancient text” adds a stroke of genius with the phrase, “the great next”. Throughout the poem, the zest for rhyme adds a jaunty music to the sombre investigation. Perhaps it was this jazz-like quality that appealed to Philip Larkin?
The call is out for Allison’s work to be reprinted. Meanwhile, for more poems and an appreciation, see Richard Warren’s blog.
