| 
Of
War and Poets, Part II - The Modern Temper
read part 1
by Doug Talley
Last
month’s poetry column examined an ancient perspective of war, in
which the horrors of war were blamed on deity, and the poet reconciled
those horrors by honoring the soldier’s valor in the face of crass
and brutal fate. This month’s column addresses a modern view articulated
by American and British poets.
Walt Whitman, it is often said, marked the
beginning of modern poetry in Anglo-American literature. He ventured
to inhale the entire universe in a single breath and then exhale
in one long, slow chant – like a dandelion gone to seed – holding
up the tuft of his sprawling beliefs and observations to the world
and letting the wind scatter them everywhere. He intended to
share himself with every soul and every creation, with the whole,
great, wide world:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from
the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your
bootsoles.
Whitman was transformed by the American Civil
War and in turn, helped transform the modern day perception of warfare.
In 1862 he ventured to the Virginia battlefront to visit a brother
who had sustained slight wounds. Thereafter, he took a part-time
position in the Army paymaster’s office in order to minister to
wounded soldiers of both the Union and Confederate armies. He visited
soldiers daily in Washington hospitals, dressing their wounds, reading
to them, writing letters for them, bringing them flowers and fruit.
From this experience he wrote a deeply moving series of poems eventually
collected and titled “Drum Taps” which he later incorporated into
his epic Leaves of Grass. Whitman broke from a traditional
view of praising the noble warrior. His poems did not dishonor
the soldier, but neither were they a paean to the soldier’s valor
or to the glory of fighting for a noble cause. Instead, they were
a compassionate expression of the soldier’s plight in facing the
horrors of battle. The following is a good example:
A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and
Dim
A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,
As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,
As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path
near by the
hospital tent,
Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought
out there
untended lying,
Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish
woolen blanket,
Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering
all.
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light fingers I from the face of
the nearest the first
just lift the blanket;
Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim,
with well-
gray’d hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?
Who are you my dear comrade?
Then to the second I step – and who are you
my child and darling?
Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?
Then to the third – a face nor child nor old,
very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you – I think this
is the face of the Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here
again he lies.
The pity of war, as distinguished from its
patriotism and heroism, has become a persistent modern theme. Wilfred
Owen was a young British soldier who fought and died in the First
World War. In letters home he described conditions of the Somme
battlefield:
At the base . . . it was not so bad . . .
After those two days we were let down, gently, into the real thing,
mud. It has penetrated now into that sanctuary, my sleeping bag,
and that holy of holies, my pyjamas.
********
I have suffered seventh hell. I have not
been at the front. I have been in front of it. I held an advance
post, that is, a ‘dug-out’ in the middle of No Man’s Land. We
had a march of 3 miles over shelled road, then nearly 3 along
a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had
been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course
dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but
an octopus of sucking clay, 3,4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only
by craters full of water.
Owen believed his poetry only became mature
after such experiences. The following lines from his poem “Greater
Love” (an allusion to the gospel of John 15:13) are representative:
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the
English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
*******
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made
great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch
them not.
Owen’s poetry about war is ironic, even acerbic,
but decidedly not patriotic. In another bitter irony, among the
many he articulated so eloquently during his short life, he was
killed in battle on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice.
(Quotations are from the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen,
published by Chatto & Windus Ltd.)
Randall Jarrell was an American poet who served
during the Second World War. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air
Corps, but failed initially as a pilot, and thereafter worked with
B-29 crews as a control tower operator. Many of his early poems
were centered in the war and in the transformations occurring in
young men as they face death and assume responsibilities as killers.
His poetry is more spare than that of Owen’s, but that spareness
makes them all the more stark and gripping, as evidenced in these
final lines from the poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”:
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret
with a hose.
In another poem, “Eighth Air Force”, Jarrell
comments with wry, piercing irony on the duties of the airmen, which
obligate them to kill on their bombing missions, by alluding to
Pilate’s judgment of the Christ:
This is a war . . . .
But since these play, before they die,
Like puppies with their puppy; since, a
man,
I did as these have done, but did not die
–
I will content the people as I can
And give up these to them: Behold the man!
I have suffered, in a dream, because of
him,
Many things; for this last saviour, man,
I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?
Men wash their hands, in blood, as best
they can:
I find no fault in this just man.
(Quotations are from The Complete Poems
of Randall Jarrell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.)
As the excerpts quoted above indicate, there
is in modern poetry a common juxtaposition of the brutality of war
with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Perhaps poets see in the
suffering of Christ the perfect metaphor for the tragedy of war.
Certainly the complexities of war are pregnant with an almost infinite
irony, perhaps in the same way the Atonement and crucifixion of
Christ are rich with the ironies of an infinite sacrifice. For
example, is the “collateral damage” of war, meaning innocent civilian
casualties, any more poignant than the jeers of the crucifixion
– “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross” and “He
saved others; himself he cannot save.”
Perhaps
the witness of Christ himself, that of the Prince of peace, justifies
these very poetic associations when he testified:
Think not that I am come to send peace
on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I am come to set a man at variance
against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man’s foes shall be they of his
own household. (Matthew 10:34-36).
This passage suggests there are some causes
worth aligning with and defending, such as truth and freedom, even
if at the risk of war. Was this not the very premise for war in
heaven? Our very human challenge, and one that presents no few
ironies of its own, has always been to know when war is justified.
Next month we will consider in War and Poets,
Part III – The Current Battle, the poet’s response to war in Iraq.
Submissions and comments on the topic of war and of peace are still
encouraged for future columns.
Click
here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.
© 2003 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
|
