‘Take this message back’

Like many American men of his generation, Louis Simpson's first experience of Europe was during the D-Day landings in June 1944. This experience would heavily inform his poems about the war, as well as much of the other poetry he wrote in the six and a half decades he lived after it. In 1944–5, he was a member of the 101st Airborne Division, a light infantry division of the US Army trained for air assault operations, and most of the time he served as a runner, responsible for transporting messages between officers and the front line. He then suffered a nervous breakdown, which affected him to the extent that he rarely spoke for much of the following year. After this, and quite slowly, he produced most of the war poems that helped to make his reputation, informed by his own experiences of conflict.

Simpson's first collection, The Arrivistes (1949), brought together poems written throughout the 1940s, and included many pieces concentrating on life at war. One of these, the disturbing short ballad ‘Arm in Arm’, begins with an image of corpses, ‘both friend and foe’, being piled up with machinery and hardware (OH 99). This image is echoed a few stanzas later, in a comparison of those buried in a churchyard and those digging in to stay alive around them:

The dead may be at peace in their ‘holes’, oblivious, but the still-living are certainly not at peace in theirs. When a ‘private found a polished head / And took the skull to task // For spying on us’ – a deluded and intemperate counterpart to Hamlet's monologue to the skull of Yorick on the vile finality of death – it is hard to see this as anything but the misprision of a man driven by circumstance to madness.

The most celebrated and ambitious poem in The Arrivistes, however, is the less straightforward ballad ‘Carentan O Carentan’, named for a town just a few miles inland from the Normandy coastline.