Forced March by Miklós Radnóti

First published: 1970, as “Eroőltetett menet,” in Bori notesz; English translation collected in The Complete Poetry, 1980

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Forced March,” by the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, is a poem of twenty loosely rhymed lines describing a war prisoner’s physical and emotional anguish in the midst of being forced to march toward an unnamed destination. The man imagines his home and his wife in an attempt to keep hope, despite the fact that it seems otherwise clear that he will never reach home.

The opening lines of the poem describe this man who, immediately after collapsing, makes the effort to rise again, overcoming the pain in his ankle and knee and the fact that it would be easier to remain prone and simply die. However, even though “the ditch will call him,” he will continue to rise and walk “as if wings were to lift him high.” Rhetorically, the poet asks, “why not?” Why should he not continue to rise? If this man were to answer, the poet says, he might explain that his wife is waiting at home, and it is at this home that he can anticipate a different death, one that is “beautiful, wiser.”

Against the backdrop of these images, the poet labels the prisoner a “wretch” and a “fool,” for in truth there is nothing left of his home where only “singed winds have been known to whirl.” The walls of the house have been knocked flat, and his plum tree has been “broken clear.” Worse than this physical razing is that “all the nights back home horripilate with fear,” describing the bristling of hair from terror.

The poem then shifts its point of view as the speaker becomes the man on the march, despairing over the thought that he may be uselessly hoping for the existence of what remains at home, that he has not “merely borne/ what is worthwhile, in my heart.” “Tell me it’s all still there,” he exclaims, as he lists the pleasant aspects of an early autumn in his home: “the cool verandah, bees/ of peaceful silence buzzing” and freshly canned plum jam cooling. In his imagination, “summer-end peace” sunbathes “over sleepy gardens,” and “fruits [sway] naked” in the fruit trees. In the center of this scene stands his wife, “blonde, my Fanni…/ with morning slowly tracing its shadowed reticence.”

This imagined recollection of his former life is brought into sharp contrast as the poet returns to the present scene with his assertion, almost against hope, that “all that could still be,” an idea that may be suggested by the round moon, the one object that this landscape seems to have in common with the paradise of his former home. In the poem’s final line, the poet calls to a comrade to wait for and encourage him: “shout! and I’ll come around!” The poet seems to have all reason to lose hope, for he has likely lost his home, his wife, and his former life, yet he uses this image of his former existence to goad himself to rise one more time and continue his march.

Forms and Devices

In Emery George’s translation, Radnóti’s poem is built on paired rhymes, both conventional (“insane” and “pain,” “clear” and “fear”) or slant (“high” and “stay,” “answer” and “wiser”). The rhymed couplets give the poem a marching regularity, and the partial rhymes create a forced structure that suggests the compulsory march that is the subject of the poem. Yet more remarkable are the imposed breaks in the middle of each line. These caesuras give a halting quality to the reading of poem, like the halting pause of the man who tries to march, despite his limping and the occasional fall: “The man who, having collapsed,  rises, takes steps, is insane.” When reading this poem, one is struck by how difficult it must be for the man to complete a step, to complete a phrase, and even to complete a breath.

Halfway through the poem, the point of view changes. In the first ten lines, the narrator speaks of “the man” in third person. Even the reader is addressed in second person directly (“should you ask, why not?”) and implicitly through commands (“But see…”). However, in the tenth line, that point of view shifts to first person; the poet and the man on the march become the same as he calls out in anguish, “Oh, if I could believe  that I haven’t merely borne/ what is worthwhile, in my heart.” The effect is to make the object of suffering more personal, as the reader more easily sympathizes and identifies with the speaker as he dreams of his former home and what he hopes still remains. As the poet (the man on the march) addresses “my friend,” one may assume that this comrade is a fellow marcher. However, because the second-person pronoun has been used before to address the reader, Radnóti creates the effect of the reader being addressed as “my friend”; thus, as one leaves the poem and its suffering prisoner of war behind, one feels that the prisoner’s survival depends on the reader’s sympathies.

At the poem’s end Radnóti appended the place and date of the poem’s composition: “Bor [a town in former Yugoslavia], 15 September 1944.” While Radnóti might not have known he had less than two months to live, the shortness of the poem and its strong visual imagery suggest the “postcard” technique that Radnóti used in other poems, especially during this final creative period of his life. As a postcard often conveys both a picture and a message, Radnóti seems to be recording this event to tell someone else what is occurring to him. Also, since postcards rarely request or require a reply, the poem’s extreme circumstances are heightened by the sense that he is capturing a series of events that may be lost with the poem.