Poem of the week – Cairo Jag by Keith Douglas

It is often forgotten that the Second World War encompassed the poetic careers of many serious combatant scribblers. Among the poets Britain put in the field from 1939-1945, none are as associated with the events of the war and its influences on literature as Keith Douglas. 

By the time of his death, aged only twenty-four, Douglas was deemed one of the most accomplished and promising poets of his generation. His mastery over the fundamentals of poetic structures and traditional styles is discernible in his output as a student at Christ’s Hospital School and Oxford University. Though regarded as an unorthodox and independent-minded soldier, due to a lack of officers, Douglas was appointed junior tank commander during the sweep through North Africa after the battle of Alamein. He fought courageously and garnered some praise. After enjoying leave in London, Douglas was dispatched to Normandy for the D-Day landing, where he was killed by a German mortar. 

The poetry he left behind reveals a classically trained mind tempered by an urge to innovate. Compared to the villanelles of his student days, the below poem is extremely modern in image, phrase, structure and result. It describes his brief bouts of respite in Cairo throughout the North African campaign and the harrowing scenes he was duty-bound to return to. The delights and confusions of the city are abruptly contrasted to the destitutions and horrors of the surrounding desert, creating an unsettling yet engrossing reflection on the chaos of collective human activity. Though axiomatically modern, Douglas achieved an individual flair in poems like this week’s. Had he lived, his unique offshoot of modernism might have been allowed to blossom. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did. 

Cairo Jag by Keith Douglas 

Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake,

a pasty Syrian with a few words of English

or the Turk who says she is a princess–she dances

apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne

always preoccupied with her dull dead lover:

she has all the photographs and his letters

tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink.

All this takes place in a stink of jasmin.

But there are the streets dedicated to sleep

stenches and the sour smells, the sour cries

do not disturb their application to slumber

all day, scattered on the pavement like rags

afflicted with fatalism and hashish. The women

offering their children brown-paper breasts

dry and twisted, elongated like the skull,

Holbein’s signature. But his stained white town

is something in accordance with mundane conventions-

Marcelle drops her Gallic airs and tragedy

suddenly shrieks in Arabic about the fare

with the cabman, links herself so

with the somnambulists and legless beggars:

it is all one, all as you have heard.

But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world

the vegetation is of iron

dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery

the metal brambles have no flowers or berries

and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine

the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions

clinging to the ground, a man with no head

has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.