2. Vergissmeinnicht by Keith Douglass A poem of 24 lines, of 6 quatrains
Vergissmeinnicht by Keith Douglass A poem of 24 lines, of 6 quatrains. Two German words This is a poem from the experience of war which, like many war poems, is really anti-war poem. The setting is probably the North African desert where British forces under General Montgomery fought a prolonged and bitter campaign against German forces under General Rommel (The Desert Fox) during WWII. The speaker, a British soldier accompanied by one or more fellow-soldiers, has returned, three weeks afterwards, to the site of a particularly fierce engagement. They find, still sprawled under the barrel of his antitank gun, the body of a German soldier who had made a direct hit on the speaker’s tank before being killed. In the gun pit spoil the speaker finds a photograph of the dead German’s sweetheart, signed with her name and the German word “Forget me not.”

3. Analysis: The poem is based on a series of ironies: the inscription “Forget me not” addressed to a soldier incapable now of memory; the fact that the dead soldier’s war equipment is “still hard and good” while its user is “decayed”; the horrible contrast between the living man loved by the girl and the corps with its burst stomach and dusty eyes; the dual nature of man which makes him capable of both love and killing; the fact that the shot aimed at the soldier “has done the lover mortal hurt” (ironic understatement).   What the speaker discovers in the dead German is a man once much like himself. His tone expresses neither enmity, hate nor triumph, but only pity and shared humanity.