I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name.
Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost,
I wrote these verses in his memory.

ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT MERGED

...the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

To Orwell Today,

Dear Jackie,

Recently I've been doing a bit of research on Orwell for an article and I came across the Crystal Spirit poem on your Orwell Today page: ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT POEM

I'm just wondering if you have any background information on that poem? What it is about/inspired by etc. Any feedback would be really appreciated.

Kind regards,
Sam Widin

Greetings Sam,

The background information on the CRYSTAL SPIRIT poem, as explained by Orwell in his 1942 essay LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH CVIL WAR, is that he wrote it in memory of an Italian soldier he met in Spain in 1936 -- as described on the first page of his 1938 book HOMAGE TO CATALONIA.

Here are the pertinent passages from those works:

HomageCataloniaCvr HomageCataloniaPg1
HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
Chapter 1

In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.

He was a tough-looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish-yellow hair and powerful shoulders. His peaked leather cap was pulled fiercely over one eye. He was standing in profile to me, his chin on his breast, gazing with a puzzled frown at a map which one of the officers had open on the table. Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend -- the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist. There were both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors. Obviously he could not make head or tail of the map; obviously he regarded map-reading as a stupendous intellectual feat. I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone -- any man, I mean -- to whom I have taken such an immediate liking. While they were talking round the table some remark brought it out that I was a foreigner. The Italian raised his head and said quickly:

'Italiano?'

I answered in my bad Spanish: 'No, Ingles. Y tu?'

'Italiano'.

As we went out he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again. One was always making contacts of that kind in Spain.

I mention this Italian militiaman because he has stuck vividly in my memory. With his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time. He is bound up with all my memories of that period of the war -- the red flags in Barcelona, the gaunt trains full of shabby soldiers creeping to the front, the grey war-stricken towns farther up the line, the muddy, ice-cold trenches in the mountains....

EssaysVol2Cvr SpainPoemCrystal1 SpainPoemCrystal2
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR
from Volume 2, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell

...I never think of the Spanish war without...the memory of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the Spanish war, and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I remember -- oh, how vividly! -- his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man's probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the G.P.U. [Soviet Secret Police]. But that does not affect the long-term issues. This man's face, which I saw only for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps...

I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I wrote these verses in his memory....

The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able...

But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.

All the best,
Jackie Jura

ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT MERGED
HomageCataloniaCvr HomageCataloniaPg1
(his spirit and mine momentarily bridged the gulf)
Jul 23, 2016

SOLDIER ORWELL AT SPANISH FRONT

ORWELL BULLET THRU NECK

TOUR ORWELL'S SPANISH TRENCHES

CRYSTAL SPIRIT ORWELL BBC FILM

ORWELL ETON POEM DISCOVERED

ORWELL ETON POEM GENUINE FIND

ORWELL THE HAPPY VICAR

ORWELL BIRTHDAY TYPING CATALONIA

ORWELL & NEW STATESMAN MAGAZINE

ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT POEM

SPAIN REMEMBERS ORWELL CENTENNIAL

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA and SHRINE TO ORWELL and ORWELL DEFINITIVE OBITUARY

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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