"Vergissmeinnicht" is based on poet Keith Douglas's own experiences during the 1942 Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. The poem begins after the battle has ended. The speaker and his fellow British soldiers travel back over the "nightmare ground" where, "three weeks" ago, they were engaged in fierce combat with the German enemy. It's here that they find a dead soldier from the enemy side.
This first quatrain establishes an eerie atmosphere. The diacope of "gone" emphasizes the utter emptiness of this battlefield, reflecting how surreal it must seem to walk across ground that, just weeks earlier, was a "nightmare" of chaos and bloodshed. The sibilant alliteration of "soldier is sprawling in the sun," meanwhile, evokes the sinister silence and hissing heat of the deserted, desert battlefield.
One of the major themes of the poem is how war affects people psychologically, and it's intriguing that the soldiers want to find this body. The article "the" implies that soldiers are searching for a specific spot: they find "the place" and "the soldier" (rather than a more random "place" and "a soldier"). Perhaps they simply need to retrieve some supplies or weaponry, or perhaps they felt compelled to see what happened to this particular enemy. This excursion might suggest that the speaker and his comrades want to pay witness to what happened—in a way, to make a pilgrimage back into their recent memory, after having been utterly changed by their experiences.
This stanza also sets up the poem's meter. By and large, the poem uses iambic tetrameter: each line contains four iambs, poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed (da-DUM) syllable pattern. There's plenty of variation throughout the poem, however; in this stanza, only lines 3-4 feature perfect iambic tetrameter:
Three weeks | gone and | the combat- | ants gone
return -| ing ov- | er the night- | mare ground
we found | the place | again,| and found
the sold- | ier sprawl- | ing in | the sun.
The first two lines both have nine syllables instead of the expected eight of iambic tetrameter, and both feature multiple substitutions. For example, line 1 begins with three stressed beats in a row, creating a spondee ("Three weeks") followed by a trochee ("gone and"). The meter of lines 1 and 2 might be scanned in a number of ways, but it's definitely not iambic tetrameter!
Right away, then, the poem isn't on sure footing. The metrical looseness might reflect the speaker's own nerves, frazzled from combat. Steady iambs can sound a bit like a march, but these soldiers are exhausted, and the meter reflects that.
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