| Paul Fussell explains:
The process by which, as the war went on, these Georgian metaphoric sunrises and sunsets turned literal and ghastly can be observed in "Before Action," a poem written by William Noel Hodgson two days before he was killed in the Somme attack. Writing as if during the last sunset before the next day's attack, he begins his three-part prayer with a Ruskinian survey of benefits received: By all the glories of the day We are still in the purlieus of the Georgian understanding of "Beauty." But as he writes Hodgson knows that the forthcoming attack will take place in the early morning, and the final stanza, while maintaining its focus on traditionally significant times of day, signals an awareness of the actual situation a day hence. The "familiar hill" is both metaphoric and literal, or rather it is a metaphor caught in the act of turning literal: the hill is at once the lucky eminence of youth and the actual observation post where the speaker has watched with too little feeling "a hundred" sunsets preceding morning attacks like the one in which he will now take part: I, that on my familiar hill Spill, fresh, sanguine: with those terms the two dimensions of the poem merge into one. Georgian figure and discovered actuality merge; the red of sunset is seen as identical with the red of freshly shed blood. With sacrifice, the poem, although still maintaining its pose of abstract literariness, turns to face actual facts, and we realize that it is no longer talking about sky effects and Literature but about people and action. Without rudeness or abruptness, Ruskin has been invited to squat in a jump-off trench on a hill near Albert. |