POEM OF THE WEEK

The young poet Keith Douglas believed that after the First World War, nothing new could be written about the Second. “The hardships, pain and boredom… were [already] so accurately described by the great poets,” he wrote, that anything his generation penned “would be tautological”.

Douglas proved his own prediction wrong. Enlisting in 1940, when he was 20, he was wounded in Cairo by a landmine in 1943 and wrote some of the period’s most original war poetry while recovering in hospital in Palestine. Writers from Ted Hughes to Geoffrey

Hill have agreed that his work, which featured the harsh landscape of north Africa and the sweating turns of a soldier’s mind at night, showed an almost miraculous precocity. But it was published posthumously: Douglas recovered only in time to fight in the D-Day landings, where he died aged 24.

Like much of his work, “How to Kill” is a study in psychological detachment: “How easy it is to make a ghost.” Easy, and yet the targeted soldier still has “habits” a “mother knows”, a softness which leaks into “the wires [that] touch his face”. There’s something ephemeral about the speaker’s “sorcery”: the target’s face that floatingly “appears” in the glass, whose spirit then diffuses outwards in “waves of love”, becoming that “weightless mosquito”. A life is slight,

Douglas shows us, but it is even slighter when modern warfare can stamp it out with a single stressed “Now”.

Best of all are those halfrhymes, which soar up on each stanza’s first line and catch by the final one, much like the “parabola” described. I’m equal parts amazed and moved that Douglas wrote it at 23, my age. It’s clear to anyone that he would have gone on to be one of the century’s greatest.

Lucy Thynne