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A comparison of the two poems, "The Isles of Scilly" and "At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux"
the house, in this case ruined on the seashore, where hopes ‘flickered’ like fire, helps to convey the fact that the hopes were short lived and soon extinguished. The ‘soot’, the evidence and remains of these hopes; has been mostly removed by ‘gale and rain and spray’; the weather also contributing to the imagery to convey the harsh and inhospitable nature of the Islands; infamous for their mercurial changes of weather extremes.
Despite the sometimes inhospitable nature of the islands, they are lush with plant life, albeit not native to the islands; the ‘unfamiliar’ pink lilies grow for the foreign dead, as well as red flowered and red wooded gums and ratas, once again adding to the blood-red imagery that runs throughout the poem. He also notices gulls and wild rabbits, yet not even these escape justification; both are black, seen as in mourning for the dead, for nothing it seems on the island is there if not to grieve the departed.
Juxtaposed to the more positive imagery of the flora and fauna, the theme of death in the poem is presented as the image of the ‘sand-rubbed’ skull of a dolphin, and a more disgusting one of ‘rotting human eyes’ in the seaweed. Cleverly, he does not say he has seen such a thing, only that he considers if such eyes exist, having died during a storm at night, they would never have seen the ‘safety’ of the daytime, or any of the positive things which the island does possess; gulls, ‘cobalt sea’ and ‘holly’, ironically symbolic of safety and protection, in the drift. After all, as he perceives all these as being in mourning for the dead, it would not be right for someone to see their own memorial.
Below these trees lies the broken figurehead from a wrecked ship, her eyes ‘dry’, he knows that she is unable to cry for those lost but attributes pathetic fallacy to he all the same. As the night draws in with its ‘destroying fear’, the island is transformed into the storm-plagued island which causes this destruction, looked upon by the rising moon which ‘cannot care’. This notion that the moon is noticeably the only thing not mourning for the dead implies the comparative insignificance to anything so distant of the shattered hopes and lost lives that the remains on the island represent to him, and that he has so carefully written about.
Where Causley consoles himself in his belief that the dead understood his predicament through empathy, Grigson finds similar comfort in believing that when he sees something that for him reminds him of the dead, it is there for that very reason, and that the human feelings which he ascribes to inanimate and unintelligent objects which have survived on the island while those aboard the ships did not, is deliberate. He views the Islands themselves and everything that is on them as the memorial to the dead, where Causley considers the memorial of the dead in his poem to be not such a physical [next page]