Two War Poems by John Streeter Manifold
John Manifold was an Australian poet who fought in the European theater during World War II. I read the first long ago in an anthology, and it has always served to remind me that fine and vigorous formal verse could still be written in the middle of the 20th century. It is a pity that he is not read more outside of Australia, where is or was something of a hero.
Fife Tune
The Tomb of Lieutenant John Learmonth AIF
At the end on Crete he took to the hills, and said he’d fight it out with only a revolver. He was a
great soldier . . ' One of his men in a letter
I build a cairn of words over a silent man,
My friend John Learmonth whom the Germans killed.
There was no word of hero in his plan;
Verse should have been his love and peace his trade,
But history turned him to a partisan.
Far from the battle as his bones are laid
Crete will remember him. Remember well,
Mountains of Crete, the Second Field Brigade!
Say Crete, and there is little more to tell
Of muddle tall as treachery, despair
And black defeat resounding like a bell;
But bring the magnifying focus near
And in contempt of muddle and defeat
The old heroic virtues still appear.
Australian blood where hot and icy meet
(James Hogg and Lermontov were of his kin)
Lie still and fertilise the fields of Crete.
Schoolboy, I watched his ballading begin:
Billy and bullocky and billabong,
Our properties of childhood, all were in.
I heard the air though not the undersong,
The fierceness and resolve; but all the same
They’re the tradition, and tradition’s strong.
Swagman and bushranger die hard, die game,
Die fighting, like that wild colonial boy –
Jack Dowling, says the ballad, was his name.
He also spun his pistol like a toy,
Turned to the hills like wolf or kangaroo,
And faced destruction with a bitter joy.
His freedom gave him nothing else to do
But set his back against his family tree
And fight the better for the fact he knew
He was as good as dead.
Because the sea
Was closed and the air dark and the land lost,
‘They’ll never capture me alive,’ said he.
That’s courage chemically pure, uncrossed
With sacrifice or duty or career,
Which counts and pays in ready coin the cost
Of holding course.
Armies are not its sphere
Where all’s contrived to achieve its counterfeit;
It swears with discipline, it’s volunteer.
I could as hardly make a moral fit
Around it as around a lightning flash.
There is no moral, that’s the point of it,
No moral. But I’m glad of this panache
That sparkles, as from flint, from us and steel,
True to no crown nor presidential sash
Nor flag nor fame.
Let others mourn and feel
He died for nothing: nothings have their place.
While thus the kind and civilised conceal
This spring of unsuspected inward grace
And look on death as equals, I am filled
With queer affection for the human race.
Britain's invasion of Crete was a botched job. The AIF was the Australian Imperial Force.
Billabong is an Australian word for an oxbow lake--a pool left after a river has altered its course.
A bullocky is the driver of a team of bullocks. The only meaning of billy I can find is the "billycan" that holds tea.
A billy
Yes, a billy is a can, sometimes enameled, for cooking or boiling water over a fire. We used the word and the thing in the boy scouts.
Interesting poet, new to me. “The Tomb of Lieutenant John Learmonth AIF” is a splendid piece, sends my mind back to Evelyn Waugh’s passages on the Crete campaign, though it looks as if Manifold would not have cared for Waugh at all.
I had read the first poem in college and, though I found it charming, I never bothered to look him up until the other day, recalling the poem, I searched the internet for others–hence the “Elegy”, which is quite remarkable. I immediately ordered a selected poems from 1946. By the way, one of the great minor mistakes in living is not to pursue the things you like, at least those things one likes decently. “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures,” was Johnson’s wise statement, though it only applies to actual men. When I get the volume, I’ll see if I can steal other poems–there’s next to nothing on the usual poetry websites, which give his name, a sentence perhaps, and then no verses..