64479: A Letter From Wales
Creators: name: Project Team, First World War Poetry Digital Archive
Publisher: name: University of Oxford
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 430304
subject: British history
classificationCode: 430308
subject: European history (excl. British, classical Greek and Roman)
classificationCode: 430316
subject: International history

description: (Richard Rolls to his friend, Captain Abel Wright)<br> This is a question of identity<br> Which I can't answer. Abel, I'll presume<br> On your good-nature, asking you to help me.<br> I hope you will, since you too are involved<br> As deeply in the problem as myself.<br> Who are we? Take down your old diary, please,<br> The one you kept in France, if you are you<br> Who served in the Black Fusiliers with me.<br> That is, again, of course, if I am I---<br> This isn't Descartes' philosophic doubt,<br> But, as I say, a question of identity,<br> And practical enough.---Turn up the date,<br> July the twenty-fourth, nineteen-sixteen,<br> And read the entry there:<br> 'To-day I met<br> Meredith, transport-sergeant of the Second.<br> He told me that Dick Rolls had died of wounds.<br> I found out Doctor Dunn, and he confirms it;<br> Dunn says he wasn't in much pain, he thinks.'<br> Then the first draft of a verse-epitaph,<br> Expanded later into a moving poem.<br> 'Death straddled on your bed: you groaned and tried<br> To stare him out, but in that death-stare died.'<br> Yes, died, poor fellow, the day he came of age.<br> But then appeared a second Richard Rolls<br> (Or that's the view that the facts force on me),<br> Showing Dick's features to support his claim<br> To rank and pay and friendship, Abel, with you.<br> And you acknowledged him as the old Dick,<br> Despite all evidence to the contrary,<br> Because, I think, you missed the dead too much.<br> You came up here to Wales to stay with him<br> And I don't know for sure, but I suspect<br> That you were dead too, killed at the Rectangle<br> One bloody morning of the same July,<br> The time that something snapped and sent you Berserk:<br> You ran across alone, with covering fire<br> Of a single rifle, routing the Saxons out<br> With bombs and yells and your wild eye; and stayed there<br> In careless occupation of the trench<br> For a full hour, reading, by all that's mad,<br> A book of pastoral poems! Then, they say,<br> Then you walked slowly back and went to sleep<br> Without reporting; that was the occasion,<br> No doubt, they killed you: it was your substitute<br> Strolled back and laid him down and woke as you,<br> Showing your features to support his claim<br> To rank and pay and friendship, Abel, with me.<br> So these two substitutes, yours and my own<br> (Though that's an Irish way of putting it,<br> For the I now talking is an honest I,<br> Independent of the I's now lost,<br> And a live dog's as good as a dead lion),<br> So, these two friends, the second of the series,<br> Came up to Wales pretending a wild joy<br> That they had cheated Death: they stayed together<br> At the same house and ate and drank and laughed<br> And wrote each other's poems, much too lazy<br> To write their own, and sat up every night<br> Talking and smoking almost until dawn.<br> Yes, they enjoyed life, but unless I now<br> Confound my present feeling, with the past, <br> They felt a sense of unreality<br> In the proceedings---stop! that's good, proceedings,<br> It suggests ghosts.---Well, then I want to ask you<br> Whether it really happened. Eating, laughing,<br> Sitting up late, writing each other's verses,<br> I might invent all that, but one thing happened<br> That seems too circumstantial for romance.<br> Can you confirm it? Yet, even if you can,<br> What does that prove? for who are you? or I?<br> Listen, it was a sunset. We were out<br> Climbing the mountain, eating blackberries;<br> Late afternoon, the third week in September,<br> The date's important: it might prove my point,<br> For unless Richard Rolls had really died<br> Could he have so recovered from his wounds<br> As to go climbing less than two months later?<br> And if it comes to that, what about you?<br> How had you come on sick-leave from the Line?<br> I don't remember you, that time, as wounded.<br> Anyhow ... We were eating blackberries<br> By a wide field of tumbled boulderstones<br> Hedged with oaks and nut-trees. Gradually<br> A glamour spread about us, the low sun<br> Making the field unreal as a stage,<br> Gilding our faces with heroic light;<br> Then oaks and nut-boughs caught this golden flood,<br> Sending it back in a warm flare of green ...<br> There was a mountain-ash among the boulders,<br> But too full-clustered and symmetrical<br> And highly coloured to convince as real.<br> We stopped blackberrying and someone said<br> (Was it I or you?) 'It is good for us to be here.'<br> The other said, 'Let us build Tabernacles'<br> (In honour of a new Transfiguration;<br> It was that sort of moment); but instead<br> I climbed up on the massive pulpit stone,<br> An old friend, but unreal with the rest,<br> And prophesied---not indeed of the future,<br> But declaimed poetry, and you climbed up too<br> And prophesied. The next thing I remember<br> Was a dragon scaly with fine-weather clouds<br> Poised high above the sun, and the sun dwindling<br> And then the second glory.<br> You'll remember<br> That we were not then easily impressed<br> With pyrotechnics, whether God's or Man's.<br> We had seen the sun rise daily, weeks on end,<br> And watched the nightly rocket-shooting, varied<br> With red and green, and livened with gun-fire<br> And the loud single-bursting overgrown squib<br> Thrown from the minen-werfer: and one night<br> From a billet-window some ten miles away<br> We had watched the French making a mass-attack<br> At Notre Dame de Lorette, in a thunderstorm.<br> That was a grand display of all the Arts,<br> God's, Man's, the Devil's: in the course of which,<br> So lavishly the piece had been stage-managed,<br> A Frenchman was struck dead by a meteorite,<br> That was the sort of gala-show it was!<br> But this Welsh sunset, what shall I say of it?<br> It ended not at all as it began,<br> An influence rather than a spectacle<br> Raised to a strange degree beyond all wonder.<br> And I remember that we looked and found<br> A region of the sky below the dragon<br> Where we could gaze behind all time and space<br> And see as it were the colour of pure thought,<br> The texture of emptiness, and at that sight<br> We came away, not daring to see more:<br> Death was the price, we knew, of such perfection<br> And walking home ...<br> fell in with Captain Todd,<br> The Golf-Club Treasurer; he greeted us<br> With 'Did you see that splendid sunset, boys?<br> Magnificent, was it not? I wonder now,<br> What writer could have done real justice to it<br> Except, of course, my old friend Walter Pater?<br> Ruskin perhaps? Yes, Ruskin might have done it.'<br> Well, did that happen, or am I just romancing?<br> And then again, one has to ask the question<br> What happened after to that you and me?<br> I have thought lately that they too got lost.<br> My representative went out once more<br> To France, and so did yours, and yours got killed,<br> Shot through the throat while bombing up a trench<br> At Bullecourt; if not there, then at least<br> On the thirteenth of July, nineteen eighteen,<br> Somewhere in the neighbourhood of Albert,<br> When you took a rifle bullet through the skull<br> Just after breakfast on a mad patrol.<br> But still you kept up the same stale pretence<br> As children do in nursery battle-games,<br> 'No, I'm not dead. Look, I'm not even wounded.'<br> And I admit I followed your example,<br> Though nothing much happened that time in France.<br> I died at Hove after the Armistice,<br> Pneumonia, with the doctor's full consent.<br> I think the I and you who then took over<br> Rather forgot the part we used to play;<br> We wrote and saw each other often enough<br> And sent each other copies of new poems,<br> But there was a constraint in all our dealings,<br> A doubt, unformulated, but quite heavy<br> And not too well disguised. Something we guessed<br> Arising from the War, and yet the War<br> Was a forbidden ground of conversation.<br> Now why, can you say why, short of accepting<br> My substitution view? Then yesterday,<br> After five years of this relationship,<br> I found a relic of the second Richard,<br> A pack-valise marked with his name and rank ...<br> And a sunset started, most unlike the other,<br> A pink-and-black depressing sort of show<br> Influenced by the Glasgow School of Art.<br> It sent me off on a long train of thought<br> And I began to feel badly confused,<br> Being accustomed to this newer self;<br> I wondered whether you could reassure me.<br> Now I have asked you, do you see my point?<br> What I'm asking really isn't 'Who am I?'<br> Or 'Who are you?' (you see my difficulty?)<br> But a stage before that, 'How am I to put<br> The question that I'm asking you to answer?'