Vergissmeinnicht by Keith Douglas

Douglas' use of imagery throughout the poem reinforces it's dominant feeling of
restless passion and misery. The uselessness of war is portrayed with pictures presented
to the mind through the windows of the eyes. “Nightmare ground”, the foreboding
description of death’s handle on the now forgotten and deserted battlefield, is adopted to
show the suffering that war possesses. Gothic accounts reoccur later with the
representation of fleeting love through the signature printed on the back of the lover’s
keepsake. These darkly romantic terms not only bring to mind the foreboding death that is
ass...