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A comparison of the two poems, "The Isles of Scilly" and "At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux"
gift before he leaves. In an imagined dialogue they answer, and ask him to first take that which they don’t need; the oak and laurel, both symbols of triumph and victory, since victory is of no use to them when they are dead. In order to transform it into a gift, they instruct him also to take their ‘fortune’ of tears, implying the huge suffering which they went through, and to use all their ‘gifts’ to live well and in happiness like a ‘spendthrift lover’. They do not seem unaware of what we see as the ‘heroic’ thing that they did in dying for their cause and for triumph; but by giving away the gifts, especially the symbols of victory, Causley imagines them as no longer interested in what they have achieved other than knowing it will help others, and are only concerned with regaining life, which of course they know is impossible. They ask of the poet ‘the only gift you cannot give’; they both know it is impossible for him to give them back the life that they have lost but which he possesses, and the realisation of this is understandably saddening for the poet, and so he has made it the dead who ask for the life, who through empathy, understand that he cannot give it, rather than making it seem as if he were able to offer it but would not, through selfishness.
The Isles of Scilly, although similar in its general theme to Causley’s poem, sets about creating the mourning for the dead through pathetic fallacy and symbols for the feelings and emotions, rather than using a human to describe mourning for the dead directly. He paints a very sombre picture of the Isles, which for him represent the ‘dead hope’ of the deceased who, unlike those in Causley’s have not achieved their aim through death; rather they were sailing from Europe for a new life in America but were killed on the notoriously shipwreck-scattered coasts of the Isles of Scilly whereas the dead in Bayeux, although not meaning to die, collectively achieved their aim, and for that there is some hope left in the poem.
Using strong imagery from the start, he implies that the sea is red, stained, metaphorically speaking, with the blood of the dead, who now ironically lie ‘safely’ near the shore below the megaliths, symbolic of civilisation, which must have once existed on the island. Grigson, throughout the poem uses the colour red to symbolise death through the colour of blood and not necessarily by directly referring to the colour itself, but also through things which are red, and so this theme is repeated through the images we complete in our minds.
On one of the Islands, Samson, where he sets the poem, he sees the debris left by decades of wrecked ships and likens it to ‘hearths’, a word used to represent the centre and heart of the [next page]