Vernon Scannell – a different sort of war poetry

Extract from Chapter 4, Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell

The point of [Wilfred] Owen’s poetry, of [Keith] Douglas’s war poetry, is generally the brutal pathos of what happens in combat – the poetry, as Owen memorably said, is in the pity. But where they write about the victims – the dead German soldier in Vergissmeinicht, or the choking infantryman in Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est – Scannell deals instead with the survivors. What happens to them afterwards is a quieter, darker, and generally untold story. Some fall apart, like the veteran in Scannell’s memorable villanelle, Casualty – Mental Ward, who is chillingly aware that

“Something has gone wrong inside my head.

The sappers have left mines and wire behind;

I hold long conversations with the dead.”

                  Many more, on the other hand, lead lives of studied ordinariness, with hell bubbling beneath the surface. Scannell’s subjects weep silently in bars, as in Incident in a Saloon Bar; they are terrified by fireworks, as in Gunpowder Plot; they forget names and faces in their old age, but find that

             “certain memories will never die:

Tom Fenton’s smile, part naughty urchin’s grin

                          yet just a little sad,

before the bomb blew it and him star-high

near Mareth as our Company moved in

                          and the universe went mad.”

It is about these silent, suffering survivors and their memories of incidents like this that Scannell writes.  If Douglas had survived the war, of course, he might eventually have written the same sort of poetry as Scannell; the point is that Scannell was never interested in writing poetry like Douglas’s. Perhaps his responses, like his life, are closer to those of the ordinary soldier who survives the battle, but has to deal with its consequences for years to come.                                                                 

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