Poetry

[Jan Klimkowski]

The gifted English painter & writer, Mervyn Peake, author of the incomparable Gormenghast trilogy, served in the Second World War as a "war artist". As such, he was amongst the first allied troops to arrive at Belsen, in 1945.

His experience led to this poem:

THE CONSUMPTIVE, BELSEN 1945

I
If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls, and by the great
Ash-coloured bed,
And the pillows hardly creased
By the tapping of her little cough-jerked head -
If such can be a painter's ecstasy,
(Her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull)
Then where is mercy?
And what
Is this my traffic? for my schooled eyes see
The ghost of a great painting, line and hue,
In this doomed girl of tallow?
O Jesus! has the world so white a yellow
As lifts her head by but a breath from linen
In the congested and yet empty world
Of plaster, cotton, and a little marl?
Than pallor what is there more terrible?
There lay the gall
Of that dead mouth of the world.
And at death's centre a torn garden trembled
In which her eyes like great hearts of black water
Shone in their wells of bone,
Brimmed to the well-heads of the coughing girl,
Pleading through history in that white garden;
And very wild, upon the small head's cheekbones,
As on high ridges in an icy dew,
Burned the sharp roses.

II
Her agony slides through me: am I glass
That grief can find no grip
Save for a moment when the quivering lip
And the coughing weaker than the broken wing
That, fluttering, shakes the life from a small bird
Caught me as in a nightmare? Nightmares pass;
The images blurs and the quick razor-edge
Of anger dulls, and pity dulls. O God,
That grief so glibly slides! The little badge
On either cheek was gathered from her blood:
Those coughs were her last words. They had no weight
Save that through them was made articulate
Earth's desolation on the alien bed.
Though I be glass, it shall not be betrayed,
That last weak cough of her small, trembling head.

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Here is the "painter's ecstasy":

http://www.mervynpeake.org/gallery/0506.jpg