Poetry Friday: 1943, part 3

In perusing the books of poetry issued in 1943 that grace the shelves of my library—librarianship has its advantages, especially for the literary blogger—I stumbled into an unfamiliar title and poet.  After skimming it, I thought the project interesting enough, and revealing enough about life in that year, to select a poem from the work to share today.  Richard Church was a minor English poet of the mid-20th Century, a man who wrote as a hobby until his late 30s and then dove into journalism, poetry, novel writing, and even a little autobiography to pay the bills from there on out.  In 1943, he brought out a small collection of poetry called Twentieth Century Psalter.  Modeled after the psalters of the Middle Ages, and structured as though these were poems to be used liturgically, like in the daily office at a monastery, the poems speak as bluntly and humanly as the Hebrew poetry preserved in the Tanakh’s book of Psalms.  After a dedicatory preface, acknowledging King David (the traditionally credited author of much of the Psalms) and suggesting that he was a “modern man”, Church simply presents pairs of poems assigned to each day of a thirty-day month—”The First Day: Morning” and “The First Day: Evening”—implicitly offering them as a reading to be added to Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer (service maybe still most widely known by their ancient names of Matins and Vespers).  The poems are not particularly sacred, though, or at least they are certainly not mild little pieties, as they turn their attention instead to the grim realities of life in an embattled England, a landscape of bomb craters and evacuated children and a resilient people enduring a modern war.  I thought that it might be best, here on the first day of the month of March, to just take what he’s assigned us this evening.  So, this is a poem by Richard Church, entitled “The First Day: Evening”:

“The instruments of death throughout the world;
They are the child’s desire, the young man’s training.
Women are forging them, by night and day.
Civilization cowers; bombs are raining
Upon the ripening corn; cities are hurled
Into the past, the Babylonian clay.

Some ancient god of wrath might look on this,
And, mumbling in his beard of human folly,
Call down a dozen plagues for punishment.
To-day, only a critical melancholy,
Self-conscious from the very soul’s abyss,
Warns us what follows when our rage is spent.

There have been many gods; there has been one.
All gods, and one, by many a name and token,
Are living still, are gathered in my brain,
A memory of duty, of vows broken,
A quiet conviction of what must be done
To build the broken cities up again.

The city and the cornfield; these are set
At history’s extremes. Between them lies
The story of the gods. Our art and science
No longer feature hell and paradise.
But still the ancient longing and regret
Govern our actions; still the old defiance.

The old defiance! It was this that first
Snatched at the fire and let destruction loose.
Defiance dealt the unpolitical blow,
Blundered in strength, mistook the best for worst,
And shattered adoration with abuse.
Defiance of what? Ah, still we do not know.”

Church—and yes, it occurs to me to that, consciously or unconsciously, his name may play a role in his desire to deal with psalms and liturgy—offers a poem that strikes me as very 1943, and movingly so.  The war is beginning to turn again the Axis powers, but no confidence can really be there yet for a man who’s heard the crump of bombs from an underground shelter, or seen the boys straggle back from Dunkirk.  So he opens the poem with the image of weaponry and how these “instruments of death” are ubiquitous—children imagine them as toys, soldiers train, women toil in factories to build them.  Do you think this is England or Germany he’s thinking of?  Is he envisioning the machine-like society that raises up these lethal tools to threaten his nation, or the machine-like society his nation must become to defend itself?  Both seem plausible readings to me.  There’s something very moving about the end of that stanza—we often use phrases like “bomb them back to the Stone Age”, but I can see it happening in Church’s words.  The debris in some parts of London must have seemed like a Near Eastern tel, the great heaps of pot-sherds on which a new city would rise—but whose city?

There’s something like Thomas Hardy inserted into in the second stanza—a poet wishing he could believe in a vengeful god—although in this case it’s not Hardy’s depression, but Church’s righteous anger and desire for justice and retribution, that fuels the dream.  The stanza, honestly, feels very allusive here, since he’s building in some ways on the work of English poets from a previous generation or two, like Matthew Arnold‘s “Dover Beach” which laments the loss of faith and hope in a world given over to these new scientific ideas.  And something about the final phrase “when our rage is spent” reminds me of John Milton’s famous sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent” that meditates on his blindness and his willingness to serve God.  There are layers here of three centuries of English poets struggling with belief, with the question of whether God is there above the clouds somewhere, and with the question of what we all will do if we have only ourselves and our world for consolation.

That’s what makes the third stanza really interesting to me—the way Church surprises us a few times as he turns it one way and then the other.  He brings up the images of polytheism and monotheism, seemingly acknowledges their validity, and then steps back a little—these gods live, but only in his brain.  And what resides there beside them?  Are these the modern gods—our sense of duty (to ourselves? to each other?), vows we know we have broken and will break?  What is that quiet conviction that Church has, and what does he think must be done to rebuild?  It’s hard for me to see whether that conviction is as ephemeral and imaginary to him as this panoply of gods are, or whether he really believes it….I think he does have that conviction, but hasn’t the poem undermined any reason for him to feel that confidence?  Maybe conviction and duty are all someone can turn to (other than madness) in the face of these broken cities.

And then the camera pans back again and the view sweeps out to all of human civilization—something that, in the 1940s, probably did look very simply like a march from the cornfield to the city, from one end of history to the other.  “Between them lies the story of the gods.”  But it’s our story also.  So Church is telling us something about ourselves—in part it’s really clear to me, because he’s so direct about how the “old defiance” survives even if talk of Heaven and Hell, of reward and judgment, has more or less passed out of “polite society”.  But in part it’s not clear, simply because I don’t think Heaven and Hell have totally walked off the stage (for one thing, how could he know then that in 3 years the world would learn of Auschwitz, of Treblinka, of Chelmno, these scars left in the wake of war, so abhorrent that we would revive an old word, “holocaust”, to capture the magnitude of the evils done).  And I think the stanza anyway is asking us to see more than that: he’s given us a very visual metaphor to work with, the city and the cornfield extended out in front of us, and the space between, and I think we’re meant to look at it and ask ourselves what we see.  What is all this for, and what has it gotten us?  A fair question any day, but maybe especially fair from the perspective of London during the Blitz.

And that ambivalence, that uneasiness, persists in the final stanza—the “old defiance” lingers on here, and now I wonder what it really signifies.  Fire, that critical human invention, here is a result of this defiance, and yet its only purpose seems hostile and violent.  Defiance brings harm where it could have brought health, breaks the old icons without understanding the new world it makes, deals “the unpolitical blow” (a phrase I confess I do not entirely understand in context).  And what, he asks us, are we defying anyway?  We do not know.  But what does he mean by that?  Is it that human defiance is rejecting the old faiths, but that we don’t understand them?  Or simply that, because a lot of people now doubt God’s existence, it’s hard for them to “defy” someone they don’t believe is there?  There’s not much old about that kind of defiance anyway—it’s a modern impulse—so maybe I’m misreading it entirely, and really he’s talking about something else….the “original sin” of ambition or pride, perhaps?  I am unsure.

What I do like about all this is that it does operate just like a psalm ought to—challenging, heartfelt, obscure.  If it was read in a real prayer service, a priest or minister could really chew on it for a while: who are humans, really, and where is God in England in 1943?  What are we doing with our lives and what will it mean?  How can we (Can we?) ever escape these old patterns, the circle of defiance and destruction that more or less characterizes a lot of human endeavor?  I may possibly come back to Church if I’m still reading 1943′s Pulitzer novel at the end of the month: I wonder if this poem is intended to raise questions that he really means to wrestle with himself by the last few days of the month, or if he’s just opening doors he has no intention of closing.  In any case, the anthology is an interesting idea—one another poet could easily steal here in the 21st Century, and maybe someone should—and if it’s in a library near you, I suggest you pick it up and give it a look.

Poetry Friday: 1943, part 2

One of the nice things about inching my forward through 20th Century poetry is that I get to keep revisiting old favorites, poets who gain maturity each time I find them (this aids some, and works against others).  Here in 1943, I get to jump into a slim little volume called New Poems, a brief collection of what Dylan Thomas, the Welsh genius, had been working on in the early 1940s.  This is Dylan’s 4th appearance here on a Poetry Friday, and so it’s time to delve just a little deeper, I think, than the man’s most famous poems.  I’ll admit at the outset that what makes him a genius also makes him sometimes challenging to read, but I’ve selected a poem that I, at least, feel I can wrestle with somewhat successfully, and I hope you find a lot to like about it.  This is a poem entitled “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged One Hundred”:

“When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.

Dig no more for the chains of his grey haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from that common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.”

Dylan brings the realities of war in a besieged Britain to the surface here, in a poem that’s as bluntly and plainly titled as his perhaps-more-famous “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” which I’ve reflected on before.  Unlike a lot of his work, then, we get to begin with our bearings well in hand—we know the situation, and we have no need to ask who the “he” is who appears almost immediately.  This is where I think Dylan’s power is most effective—when he restrains his wild menagerie of images just enough to turn these lines out that are direct enough to land a blow.  The morning comes to the city, seemingly an indication of hope and survival, and then out of nowhere this aged man “put on his clothes and stepped out and he died”.  And then the rest of the poem is Dylan urging the poem on at the highest speed he can risk, letting the horses run a little wild in places (and unloading phrases that are almost impossible to make rational sense of) and then raining them in enough to keep us aware of the situation and what he means to say.

There are images that almost seem to possess Dylan Thomas at times—they surface again and again in poems written one after the other, as though he cannot quite capture the image in his head, or else the image is taking over his art.  The use of keys and locks is one of those images in New Poems, and so I wonder what the presence of that image means here: I get the impression, in this context, of our defenselessness against this kind of raw violence.  No locked front door could protect him; indeed, the locks themselves, these sturdy metal structures that are symbolic of security, fly apart in the urgent power of the blast.  The image swarms up to and surrounds that sad image of the old man dying “where he loved on the burst pavement stone”, the whole familiar scene of his home and his block turning into an altar, or a tomb.  And there, packed in among these images, is another of Dylan’s favorite images—the association of death and the dead with “grains” (something he does also in the poem about the child killed by fire in London), these seeds that lie in wait for some kind of rebirth.  And then there’s something lovely about the way Dylan weaves these images together in the next few lines, as that familiar old pavement, broken under the blast, becomes personified—we should tell the street, he says, of the old man’s glorious end.  Because it does seem suddenly glorious, as that aging body “stopped a sun”, a power that seems almost divine, and out of that shattered form the shoots of spring, the grains that will grow, come bursting along with that fire that consumes.

And then he executes the turn (yes, once again, we are inside a sonnet with another old master), the shift in tone from the octet that established our scene to the sestet that will change the poem somehow (teach us? surprise us?).  And what are we told?  Do not seek the old man out—let him go, it seems to say, because the moment his blood struck the ground, it called out to Heaven.  There is an assembly gathered now invisible, waiting for the ring of the spade and the fall of earth that will release him from these chains.  And what is “that common cart” we are to protect him from?  I’m not quite sure—there are associations there for me with the carts of the dead from plague-infected villages, or the dismal poverty of medieval serfs or squalid Victorian street merchants.  I can’t quite tell why Dylan wants him protected from whatever this is.  It seems to me though that, on some level, if we can protect the old man here at the last, that will allow this startling beauty to emerge at the end of the poem.  The morning is soaring now on “the wings of his age”—in dying, he has given something back to the world that animates it, surges the dawn’s light onwards.  Who are those hundred storks, then?  Emblematic of the children entering the world to renew it?  Or simply the years of his life, flown now to some more wondrous realm?  Whatever it is, it strikes me as optimistic and confident—a poem about death that is determined to end in hope.

I’ll admit, as much as I find a lot of beauty in the poem, I think it’s ultimately a little ambiguous, or at least I’m not totally sure I know how we’re supposed to take it.  The old man’s rebirth may be a more personal assurance—Dylan Thomas’s obsession with the ideas of resurrection and reincarnation (which reappear in other poems of his) taking this one death and calming us with the certainty that the 100 years of life ended in that bomb’s blast are not all there is for the man (and, by extension, for us).  But I see at least some indications that this may be a larger statement about societal survival, something important to all of Great Britain at the time: the old man passes and the block is destroyed, but the street survives and it is time for us to turn our thoughts to the living and to the future (again, possibly as symbolized by the storks?).  Regardless, it’s a poem that reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s power as a writer, and as I weave these images in with images I see elsewhere in his poetry, I think I get closer to an understanding of what all his art may have been driving at.  I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of him here on the blog.

A poem for Veterans Day

The body of the Unknown American Soldier chosen to represent the fallen in World War I is loaded on a train in France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As is my custom, each November 11th I honor the armistice by sharing a poem by a soldier of the Great War—World War I—the war that gave birth to this minor holiday, whether feast or fast I cannot tell.  In my country, the United States, it is, generally speaking, a day for hurrahs, for camouflage and crisp salutes, for sincere appreciation of the soldier and the veteran as patriots.  This is not a bad thing, of course, but it always feels to me incomplete—I think servicemen and servicewomen more than deserving of thanks and praise for their dedication.  But today, I think, should be about more than that.  It should be a day to reflect on the lasting sorrow of war, a day in which we resolve to do our part to blot out this human stain from the future of the earth.  In other lands more touched by World War I, November 11th is such a day—in Canada, with solemnity the wreaths are laid at cenotaphs, and newscasters talk in hushed voices about the Somme and Verdun, about those who fell in hope of a homecoming that was never realized.  I am sure similar public observance carries the day in England, in France, in Germany, and all the other nations who hoped in 1918 that humanity had purged its great blood-lust in one disastrous sacrifice of a generation of young men.  That hope may be foolish or vain, but some of us carry it still.  This is text from the War Requiem written by Benjamin Britten–it is adapted from a poem by Wilfred Owen, an English soldier who died at the age of 25 on November 4th, 1918.  Had he lived one more week, he would have reached the war’s end.  How many others were slaughtered, just as needlessly?  This is an adaptation of his poem, “Parable of the Old Men and the Young”:

“So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenched there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so,
but slew his son,—
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.“

How many generations will be asked to learn this lesson?  And how many brave men and women, in faithful service to their country, have we sacrificed on an altar of our own choosing?

Rest eternal grant them, O God.  Let light perpetual shine upon them.

Poetry Friday: 1939 (part 4)

Perhaps the most reliable presence here at Poetry Friday (due to the era in which she writes, her prolific output, and my admiration for her best stuff) is Edna St. Vincent Millay, and 1939 won’t be an exception to that trend.  My attention returns again to the poetry of the war, and in perusing a collection Millay published in 1939, I found a poem I feel merits some pondering.  So, without further ado, from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Huntsman, What Quarry?, this is the second sonnet in the series “From a Town in a State of Siege”:

“Well, we have lived so far; we are alive;
War is a way of living. If today
We die, we have to do that anyway
Sometime. It’s not so bad, once you contrive
To make a home of it; we do not thrive,
Yet here we are, at least,—no place to stay,
A place to stop in, though—and we can say
Hello to friends; and I have learned to drive.

The worst is being hated, and to hate;
Perhaps if it were hurricane or flood
That dragged us from our beds, we might await
The shock, the twisted wreckage and the mud
With lighter hearts, that being not man, but fate…
And only friendly dogs to lap our blood.”

There’s a casual tone to the poem that I liked immediately—Millay at her worst is over-wrought and uses 16th century exclamations (like “O thou wretch!” etc.) to excess, and so the opening lines caught my eye right away as an example of the plain-spoken style she finds when she’s at her best, generally.  Millay is also usually at her best when considering the two great obsessions of her life—love and death—and a blunt look at war seems to me to suit them nicely.  Millay’s pacifism has already been explored briefly here at Following Pulitzer, but I wondered how it would sound when dealing with the specific world of 1939, and not the abstraction of war as defined by a dictionary.

The ambiguity in her phrases is one of the things I love about her—the number of senses I can make of the line “War is a way of living” is a good example.  Whether Millay is talking about the city’s acceptance of war as the new reality, or about how the nations seem to have accepted war as the way to survive, or about how human beings can adopt a warlike attitude as a way of getting through their day…any and all of these add something to the poem for me.  I am intrigued by what it means to “make a home of it”, “it” seeming to mean “death”—is this about accepting the imminence of death?  Something like a stage in the grieving process for the person about to die?  Or am I missing something there?  I wonder.  The temporary nature of this city—a place not to stay but to “stop in”—reminds me of images of Purgatory, or the banks of the river Styx.  It ties in with some of the images I remember from Eliot’s poetry after World War I.  There’s something ominous that is only barely hidden under the simple and almost banal words and phrases that Millay uses to describe their world.

Maybe the best example of this is the line about Millay learning to drive: when I first read it, I rolled my eyes and said “Oh, Edna, you’ll do anything for a rhyme, won’t you?”  And certainly a lot of her lesser work suffers from sing-song sound patterns, and an over-reliance on bad rhymes.  Here, in the context of the war and death, “I have learned to drive” seems almost comically bad, like a sudden transition from a family’s Christmas newsletter: “Bill had his right leg amputated after the accident.  The twins are learning Tae Kwon Do.”  But then it came to me: many women learned to drive at the start of World War II because of the anticipated need for ambulance drivers, and the need to free up young, able-bodied men for the front.  “I have learned to drive” isn’t a humdrum, suburban rite of passage—it is Millay’s obligation as the citizen of a town under siege; it is her entry into a world of bone and blood.  Her sitting behind that wheel is taking up her part in a cycle of violence—the man whose place she takes goes to the front, and soon he or one of his companions will ride, dying, behind her as she drives.  In this compact phrase, “drive” is suddenly doing un-innocent work—it positions itself in contrast to its rhymes, “alive” and “thrive”, that precede it, taking the place of the word “death” that this poem will not speak aloud.  That line won me over fast.

She executes the turn from the ominous reality of the city in the octave to the more personal concern with hatred in the sestet—Millay is so good at the structure of the sonnet, maybe America’s best—we start to see that the poem is not really about the city, not entirely at least.  It’s interesting to think that the real problem with war is “hatred”—the poem thus far might suggest that “dying” is war’s greatest fault.  But as Millay argues, the really pernicious and evil thing about war is not death—a hurricane can kill as many (or more), and yet war is more terrible than that.  I know not everyone would agree with her—Thomas Hardy, for one, never found Fate’s hands any comfort—but I see something compelling about her argument that death in the face of the impersonal induces less fear or panic than the knowledge that your end is coming at another person’s hands.  The idea that we will now hurt each other, and not help, shakes the foundations of human society.  There is something terrifying about the idea that any people can overcome the taboos and laws against killing that civilization has erected against the chaos and the void.  War may be necessary (though Millay would not say so), but it is always about us at our worst.  We have eulogized this “good war”, World War II, to the point that I think we believe it escaped being tarred by that brush.  But I’ve heard the fear and the anguish in the voices of veterans who came back—I’ve seen my grandfather’s tears.  And I know what stories he always stopped short of telling.  If Millay does nothing else for me today, she reminds me what war feels and looks like, without giving me the image of a single bullet or soldier’s grave, and she makes me confront what war really is.

 

Poetry Friday: 1936

It’s still Friday for some of you, anyway.  Well, we’ve come to 1936, a real banner year for poetry in the English-speaking world.  Tons of talented poets at various stages in their career, all publishing some top-quality work.  I doubt I’ll get to them all before I’ve made it through the novel for 1936—Honey in the Horn, for which my first post will go live at some point this weekend—but I’ll do my best.  Certainly there are some classics here that I’ve always loved and am excited to jump into.  For today, I present for your consideration a selection from Dylan Thomas’s Twenty-Five Poems entitled “The Hand That Signed the Paper”:

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

Thomas is so often abstract and obscure—a struggle even for a reader very comfortable with the unexpected and almost indecipherable sentence structure of a modern poet.  But here he is very direct, and I’d like to suggest it’s because he knows this idea is a critically important one to communicate directly.  He suspends himself inside this one powerful image—the hand (disembodied, isn’t it? almost giant in our imaginations?) scribbling briefly, and the devastation that follows in the pen’s wake.  And within that image, he plays the consequences of this event out over and over, sometimes in very direct language—”halved a country”—and sometimes in very metaphorical terms—the “five kings”.  Thomas is so effective here in part because he uses such simple words, often only one or two syllables, very punchy Anglo-Saxon words predominating in phrases like “these five kings did a king to death” or “great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name”.

And the importance of that disembodied hand is unmistakable for me.  Thomas is confronting the reality that we detach ourselves from our actions, especially when we have been given some kind of power or authority.  It is much easier to remain peaceful in one’s mind and heart when, rather than see the results of one’s actions, a paper is signed that authorizes violent action by someone else.  There is nothing violent about a signature—we do not have to confront the reality of our cruelty, our callous disregard for human life.  It would be easy for us, therefore, to try to put ourselves on the sidelines in this poem.  It’s a poem about Hitler, we suggest, or Mussolini—one of those 1930s dictators.  They’re the kind of people whose signed name kills and maims.  Not us—how could it be us?

But we live in a society—by we I mean to say “Americans”, although not just Americans—that separates and insulates us from the consequences of our decisions as much as any medieval king was.  If we buy a product produced by coerced child laborers, there are no screams when we sign the credit card slip, no pleas for mercy as we watch the clerk bag up our purchase.  We don’t pour poison into the city’s water supply—we just turn the key in our car’s ignition, and casually remind ourselves that we really ought to get that oil leak fixed.  As long as we can distance the circumstances of our daily lives from the outcomes dependent on them, we can live as free from emotion as Thomas’s pitiless hand.

This is not to say I think Thomas is aiming at us alone.  I think there clearly were concerns in his work about the use and abuse of power, and the 1930s in Europe (and America, honestly) are a decade in which many good people thought that handing over power to a strong leader was the path to success.  Thomas reminds us how great—great and terrible—it is for a hand to hold dominion over human beings.  The people to whom we entrust power will be effective, as his poem admits, but at what cost to us?  It’s important to remember that the atrocities of the 1940s were made possible by the fears of the 1930s—that the Holocaust was engineered not by monsters but by men and women who, like Thomas’s five kings, knew how to count the dead but not how to soften wounds or stroke fevered brows.  They were limited in this way by choice, because they felt they could not afford pity, perhaps, or because by the time they recognized the world they were creating, a hand had already signed a paper that governed their actions.  In this way, no one really took on themselves the burden of evil—the hand, devoid of tears, never had to directly confront the results of that signature, and the people who made that hell a reality were only taking orders from that ruling hand, a hand that “doubled the globe of dead and halved a country”, quite literally.

The most effective reading of this poem I have ever heard was not a recording by Thomas (though he did read his poetry publicly, and well).  It is included in a documentary by Errol Morris called The Fog of War.  In the film, Morris focuses on the man behind America’s involvement in Vietnam, Robert McNamara, a man whose name still inspires anger and even hatred among many people who lived through the Vietnam years and held him responsible for that tragic conflict.  McNamara recites the poem from memory to the camera, a man haunted by violence and yet anxious to explain why his best intentions all went so wrong.  A reminder that the hands that sign papers sometimes do so on our behalf in this, the land of the free, the city on the hill.

Poetry Friday: Veterans Day 2011

This is a day I always try to treat with some solemnity.  It is a day my country doesn’t treat as solemnly as I think it should—I have my two years in Canada to thank for the perspective I’ve gained on Veterans Day, to be honest.  It’s a day to remember the side of war that is easy to forget when the flags wave and the band plays and the generals talk of “freedom” and the “noble cause”.  It’s a day to remember what we mean when we use a phrase like “sacrifice” to refer to military service.

This doesn’t require you to be a pacifist.  Abraham Lincoln, as anyone knows, was no pacifist—he recognized with terrible agony the necessity of war to right the societal evil that his country had visited on an entire people.  But he never took lightly the burden of war—the seriousness of asking someone to die, of asking thousands and thousands to die, for a cause, no matter how vitally important that cause is.  He was, as I think is evident in all his letters and speeches, a man haunted by violence.  The world we live in today is no less violent.  So today, take a moment and think about the soldiers you know and have known, and those a world away you will never know.  Think about what it means for anyone to give their life or their health or their sanity for the sake of their country, for the sake of the people they seek to protect.  And ask yourself what kind of benefit is great enough to warrant our sending young men and women into that kind of harm’s way.

If it’s helpful, take a look at a couple of poems by Siegfried Sassoon, a veteran of the First World War.  I won’t comment on them as I usually do for Poetry Friday.  As poems, they have a lot of features I could talk about.  But as expressions of a man’s experience, the legacy of having survived and having seen so many die, before them I feel an urge to be silent.  Sometimes it is better to listen than to speak.

“Dreamers”

Soldiers are citizens of death’s gray land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
I see them in foul dugouts, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

“Suicide in the Trenches”

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Poetry Friday: Denise Levertov

I was reminded of Denise Levertov this week when talking with a friend about poets who express faith in their work—Levertov is particularly skilled, I think, because her grasp of faith is so inclusive and humanity-affirming, and she stays so genuine as she works her way into the nameless and calls it what it is, and not what she expects to see.  And that, combined with my feelings about Libya, and Japan, and the length of a long academic quarter (which, in the light of those global events, pales so by comparison that it can hardly really be seen), made me want to reach out to Levertov and find something new—so here it is, “Making Peace”:

A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.

I like the challenge in this poem, the idea that there is a difference between “the absence of war” and “peace”, and that poets have some kind of obligation to bridge that chasm. I think these poems are harder and harder to write, as society asks less and less of its poets. A century ago poets were expected to make sense of the awful…someone in England, for instance, would have to write a poem for the newspapers about Japan and the tsunami, probably the laureate. We don’t do that anymore. In some ways, that’s a benefit…”occasional verse” was only occasionally any good. But in other ways it leaves us open to the blows that life deals out without an art to give us perspective. As much as I like the movies and pop music, it’s hard to see them as perfect substitutes.

Anyway, Levertov does some really great stuff with these sparing phrases—what is, after all, the “grammar of justice” or the “syntax of mutual aid”? They push on my teeth like ripe berries; the sounds seem full of something I can’t taste just yet, but I will. There’s a way in which they tie together poetry and peace (the way that grammar and syntax tie any two words together in language), and I like the shadows in the poem there, where Levertov sees something but is unwilling to paint the whole picture for me. In that way, she makes me find the poem the way she is telling me poems are found…by feeling towards it, and learning it as I say the words, resonating with some and not others and making what stays in me mine. The closing stanza is intense for me: I feel the heft of peace in my hands like a weapon that heals the things it strikes. She loses me at the very end—the image of the crystal seems overdone to me—but before that, the notion of peace “pulsing” into the world, like some enormous backbeat, through the echo chamber of poetry hits me right. Makes me think of Dr. King and Lincoln and the other poets who made peace happen, not just by talking about it, but never without words. I wonder if you feel the same connection to this poem I do, though: it’s very abstract. Drop a note in the comments and let me know.