Beach Burial

"Beach Burial" (1944) is a poem by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor.

It was originally published in Southerly journal in 1944, and was not reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.

The poem was written around the time of the battle of El Alamein in 1942 while Slessor was a war correspondent. It reflects his experience of seeing dead seamen being pulled from the surf and buried in the sand in graves marked with a cross bearing the words "Unknown Seaman".

Critical reception

The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature called it a "fine poem which reflects the futility of war, it expresses the bewildered pity of battle-hardened troops as they perform rough and ready but deeply-tender last rites over the sodden, nameless corpses."

The Oxford Literary History of Australia stated that the poem was "notable for its formal experimentation with assonance, echo and half-rhyme."

In his commentary on the poem in 60 Classic Australian Poems editor Geoff Page noted that this "is not a poem of strident assertion; it is a poem of 'perplexity', of 'bewildered pity, rather than a song of praise to the 'cause'". He concluded that "poems rarely come more perfect than this one."

Publication history

After the poem's initial publication in Southerly it was reprinted as follows:

• Australian Poetry 1944 edited by R. G. Howarth (1945)
• The Australasian Book News and Literary Journal vol. 2 no. 7, January 1948
• An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by George Mackaness, Angus & Robertson, 1952
• A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1956
• Poems by Kenneth Slessor, Angus and Robertson, 1957
• The Penguin Book of Australian Verse edited by John Thompson, Kenneth Slessor and R. G. Howarth, Penguin Books, 1958
• Modern Australian Verse edited by Douglas Stewart, Angus and Robertson, 1964
• The Age, 29 October 1966, p23
• The Penguin Book of Australian Verse edited by Harry Heseltine, Penguin Books, 1972
• Australian Verse from 1805 : A Continuum edited by Geoffrey Dutton, 1976
• The Golden Apples of the Sun : Twentieth Century Australian Poetry edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Melbourne University Press, 1980
• The Collins Book of Australian Poetry edited by Rodney Hall, Collins, 1981
• Clubbing of the Gunfire : 101 Australian War Poems edited by Chris Wallace-Crabb and Peter Pierce, Melbourne University Press, 1984
• My Country : Australian Poetry and Short Stories, Two Hundred Years edited by Leonie Kramer, Lansdowne, 1985
• Fighting Words : Australian War Writing edited by Carl Harrison-Ford, Lothian, 1986
• Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Mark O’Connor, Oxford University Press, 1988
• Cross-Country : A Book of Australian Verse edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1988
• The Sea Poems of Kenneth Slessor by Kenneth Slessor, Briundabella Press, 1990
• The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead, Penguin, 1991
• The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse edited by Vincent Buckley, Faber, 1991
• Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann, Heinemann, 1991
• Fivefathers : Five Australian Poets of the Pre-Academic Era edited by Les Murray, Carcanet, 1994
• The Voice of War : Poems of the Second World War : The Oasis Collection edited by Victor Selwyn, Penguin, 1995
• The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Verse edited by Beatrice Davis, State Library of NSW Press, 1996
• Australian Verse : An Oxford Anthology edited by John Leonard, Oxford University Press, 1998
• Two Centuries of Australian Poetry edited by Kathrine Bell, Gary Allen, 2007
• The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella, Penguin, 2009
• 60 Classic Australian Poems edited by Geoff Page, University of NSW Press, 2009
• Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Nicholas Jose, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Anita Heiss, David McCooey, Peter Minter, Nicole Moore, and Elizabeth Webby, Allen and Unwin, 2009
• The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Leonard, Puncher & Wattmann, 2009
• Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, University of NSW Press, 2011

The poem has also been translated into Greek (1986), Indonesian (1991), and Arabic (1999).

Notes

You can read the full text of the poem in The Age, 29 October 1966, p23 and also on the AllPoetry website.

See also

• 1944 in Australian literature
• 1944 in poetry

References