On this exciting day, in opening our submissions portal to new contributions for our seventh issue, we offer an essay which differs significantly from previous appraisals released here each month in Catchment Views.
Rather than having been written recently, this piece was first published in Between! – The Fifth Australian Poetry Festival Special Issue – Critical and Poetic responses to Australian Poems: Five Bells, in Volume 13 No. 3, Winter 2006, by the NSW Poets Union (Balmain, pp 40-41).
Copyright permission was first gained (twenty years ago now) from HarperCollins, as publishers of Kenneth Slessor’s Selected Poems, for reproduction of the full text of the poem ‘Beach Burial’.
That Special Issue of Five Bells was funded by the Copyright Agency Limited in 2006.
Moving forward two decades, the Permissions Department at HarperCollins Publishers has allowed the text of Kenneth Slessor’s poem to be re-produced here again, in full, without cost, in this re-printing of the essay below.
The New South Wales Poets Union is no longer in operation, yet Margaret Bradstock – as a former member of its Five Bells Editorial Committee – has also given strong backing for the reproduction of this essay.
Operating under the auspices of the Baw Baw Arts Alliance, the team responsible for the editing and production of Catchment – Poetry of Place gives thanks to Margaret, as well as to the team at HarperCollins Australia, for such generous support.
Witnessing heartbreaking events first-hand as a war correspondent, Kenneth Slessor was explicit in locating his famous elegy for sailors lost in World War Two at El Alamein, west of centre on Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline, making it very much poetry of place.
Written in the first decade of a new millennium, this affirmation of Slessor’s poetry ends by recognising a change in perspectives here in Australia, in looking back even further, to the First World War: another key conflict – at a location we call Gallipoli – is still seen as definitive in our contemporary culture, of course; just as it is in the country now called Türkiye.
Catchment – Poetry of Place offers its deepest respect to all suffering losses in war.
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BEACH BURIAL
Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.
Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;
And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin –
‘Unknown seaman’ – the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men’s lips.
Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
El Alamein 1942
Kenneth Slessor
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Kenneth Slessor: Beach Burial
by Rodney Williams
Written at El Alamein in 1942 and published two years later, Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Beach Burial’ – surely one of Australia’s greatest poems – is as much a poignant study of anonymity, as it is a compelling condemnation of war or a compassionate plea for tolerance.
Famous for its delicate opening image of dead seamen floating ‘softly and humbly’, ‘Beach Burial’ speaks with a mournful yet dignified voice – augmented here by sibilance – that matches the rhythmic motion of waves. Rafts of men killed in action in the Gulf of Arabs are characterised as ‘convoys’ – no longer corpses, much less men, so much as fleets of warships themselves. By night haunting the depths – spectres that ‘sway’, anchorless as they ‘wander’ – these sailors’ bodies are literally brought back to earth by the morning tide. There they cannot be named – at best each one can be honoured merely as an ‘Unknown seaman.’ With powerful currents rolling their bodies violently, these dead sailors have been stripped of identification – no uniforms or dog-tags remain to establish their combative status or personal identity.
All that can be done is to bury the dead anonymously, with sensitivity a luxury in the need to ‘tread the sand upon their nakedness,’ to trample over their vulnerability. With the only mode of burial possible being hurried interment in the beach itself, what is now at risk is the dead men’s very humanity – these improvised graves are merely ‘burrows,’ more fit for rabbits than human remains.
If the identity of each dead sailor is unknown, so is that of his gravedigger: ‘Someone, it seems, has time enough for this …’ Time, indeed, but courage and compassion too – the parenthetic caesura slows the momentum of the poetry respectfully, its funereal pace now in stark contrast to the percussive violence of the surrounding conflict, with its ‘clubbing of the gunfire.’
Slessor’s message is chilling – war, like the drowning sea, denudes people of their individuality, showing no respect for selfhood, reducing victims to a common denominator where they become all too similar in death, despite any distinctiveness in life:
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither …
Found late in the poem, the transition made here might jar with some modern readers. Speculation about the linkage between the dead men shifts from the possibility that they are enemies of each other, to their perhaps having been allies ‘with us’. This sole intrusion by the first-person plural could seem like an aberration, briefly undermining the non-partisan stance for which the poem is otherwise laudable. Even Slessor’s phrasing in this case – with its all too proximate a repetition of the word ‘fought’ – is less felicitous than elsewhere. No sooner might he have lost his range for a moment, however, than the poet strikes us amidships. It is surely all the more tragic to be killed in war if simply a neutral. Some of these sailors – perhaps merchantmen – might have been from ‘neither’ side, yet still their lives were sacrificed.
With a web of subtle half-rhymes and a measured, respectful cadence so suited to its sombre mood, ‘Beach Burial’ is otherwise beautifully crafted. Its movement matches the ebb and flow of the sea so central to its context. Elastic, with slight variations within a set syllabic pattern, Slessor’s stanzas begin with a longish line, then contract, only to surge once again, like a big wave breaking each time in the third (almost two lines in one, with an internal rhyme). Each verse ends with another shorter line, always stark in impact.
Never is this clearer than in the poem’s conclusion, as metaphorically elegant as it is moving. Sailors at risk must desperately covet the safety of dry earth beneath their feet, whereas those dead seamen ironically have all found ‘the same landfall’: one for which they could never have hungered – the grave. Unified in death as they were perhaps divided in life, now due to serve together in a different dimension, these dead sailors need pay no heed to former loyalties, governed by artificial distinctions no longer:
… the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.
Despite challenges to its dignity, humanity remains affirmed. The pencilled grave-marking on the make-shift cross ‘bears the last signature of men,’ asserting human identity – not only for the dead sailor, but for the gravedigger, and even for Slessor too. Our war correspondent poet himself signs this ‘driven stake of tidewood’ – this marvellous, moving poem – every bit as much as the brave, decent individual who scooped out a grave, risking death from opposition fire while possibly burying an enemy.
The gunfire might well ‘sob,’ yet so should Slessor’s readers, themselves made to feel ‘such perplexity … such bewildered pity.’ In writing the ‘ghostly’ words ‘Unknown seaman,’ the pencil’s dampened markings bleed the purple blood of the deceased, bereft of oxygen, ‘blue as drowned men’s lips,’ melancholy with grief. If those words in drizzling graphite themselves ‘choke as they begin,’ they might not be alone in being overcome by emotion.
Just as Slessor’s portrait of Sydney Harbour has been honoured through this journal being named Five Bells, so has his ‘Beach Burial’ been recognised as the finest of all our poems about war, providing the title for Clubbing of the Gunfire: 101 Australian War Poems (eds. Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Peter Pierce, Melbourne University Press, 1984).
While his Unknown Seaman must remain anonymous, Kenneth Slessor’s masterpiece could well give further name and face to an emerging aspect of national identity – valuing tolerance in conflict, through honouring victims of war, regardless of allegiance – already in its infancy with our growing respect for Turks at Gallipoli.
That driftwood cross has been signed on behalf of us all.