"Soldier's Dream," by Wilfred Owen

One from Edward Thomas

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The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is often grouped with that of other World War I British poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, chiefly because Thomas was killed in the war (he volunteered for the army, as he was too old to be drafted), but also because he did write a few poems when he was serving in France, before he was killed by artillery-fire.

But most of his poetry concerns rural Britain, is closely observed, and--although it deploys conventional rhyme and meter--is plainspoken. Thomas made his living chiefly as a "literary journalist"--writing reviews, editing anthologies, etc., and he was an early champion of Robert Frost's poetry. Thomas liked the way Frost had ignored a lot of conventional poetic diction and written precisely but plainly. Thomas himself first published his poetry under a pen-name. Then, after Thomas's death, Walter de la Mare put together a collection. I've been reading a relatively new paperback edition from Handsdel Books, with a nice introduction by Peter Sacks.

Here's a short poem related to May from the book:

The Cherry Trees

by Edward Thomas

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Did I mention that, like Frost, Thomas could be a bit glum, even before World War I came along?

What, Conservatives Worry?

When conservatives worry about McCain, then I get even more worried about McCain. Hawk-faced Pat Buchanan, noted isolationist and perfecter of the chop-motion while talking and giving speeches, said [on CNN] President McCain would make Cheney look like Ghandi--not physically, I assume, but by comparison. (Buchanan did not seem to intend the comparison as a compliment; with Buchanan, one feels one has to add that information.) Andrew Sullivan, one of those seemingly very bright people who nonetheless swallowed Bush's bait about WMD's and tried to cough it up long after the hook had been set, has posted quite an interesting anti-McCain video on his blog. Here is the link:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/taking-back-t-5.html

Probably the most compelling speaker on the video is Scott Ritter, one of innumerable people who seemed to know what they were talking about during the "run-up" to the war and who was therefore ignored, dismissed, and attacked by Bush and the Surrogates.

A mere poet, I do wonder what the military and the intelligence agencies think of Bush and what I deduce to be his compulsive recklessness and lifetime of being unaccountable. He has been reckless in going to war, in conducting the war and the occupation, in the unprecedented use of contractors, in the breaking (John Murtha's word) of the army and Marines, in forging documents (see Suskind's book, and apparently Suskind has the audio tapes to back up the findings), and in betraying spies. Mustn't even the professionals regard Bush as reckless and incompetent? I don't know.

A mere poet, I wouldn't mind if Obama and McCain would agree to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" out loud and then comment briefly on it.

A mere poet, I wonder if Putin and McCain are some kind of international marriage made in Hell.

A mere poet, I do wonder what a mere citizen can do to prevent President Bush, President McCain, perhaps even President Obama, from attacking Iran.

When The Familiar Becomes Strange

It doesn't take much, in my opinion, for that which we regard as familiar to become suddenly strange to us. For example, I'd bet that most keepers of dogs and cats every so often take a second look at the dog or cat in question and, no matter how long the animal has been around, will find something about the creature to be fascinating or puzzling--as if it were a strange, new characteristic. Maybe the person looks, really looks for the first time, at leathery pads on the bottoms of the paws, or at dog- or cat-lips, and then the closely examined item looks fantastic, in the older sense of that word.

Or the familiar-turned-strange thing may be something you look at anew on your umpteenth commute to work.

Here's a short poem by Harold Monro (1879-1932) that represents such a moment--when the familiar becomes strange, except that, in this case, Monro focuses on human beings.

Strange Meetings

By Harold Monro

IF suddenly a clod of earth should rise
And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love,
How one would tremble, and in what surprise
Gasp: "Can you move?"

I see men walking, and I always feel:
"Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"
I can't learn how to know men, or conceal
How strange they are to me.

If one takes the concept of Evolution seriously, and I do (and I do not view the concept to be incompatible with the concept of God, in case you're wondering), then you do have to wonder, as Monro does, how some bits of protein in water (to summarize things too simplistically) became us over millions or billions of years. And you have to wonder why those bits turned into this odd thing (especially in my case) called "the human body."

The other evening, during the Republican "debate," Mike Huckabee got off a good joke about members of Congress acting like monkeys, but he did so at his own expense (though not so as his supporters would notice), for he deliberately fell back on one of the oldest, most inaccurate recapitulations of evolutionary theory--that we descended from monkeys. Civilizations, arguably, may have descended, and the descent seems to have picked up some velocity, but humans didn't descend, biologically. They resulted from evolution, and so they share some biological and anatomical characteristics with primates, but we are not directly connected to "monkeys," and Huckabee knows this, but he needs to pander to a certain "base" (and that's the word for it), as do all the candidates in both parties; it's just that one base likes one type of pander-snack, and another likes another.

But how much more refreshing Monro's take on "the human body"--or, more simply, humans-- is! Rather than taking one side or the other of the phantom "debate" between faith and evolution, which are compatible, he expresses shock. How did these creatures come to be?! (I have a friend who doesn't like that double-punctuation, by the way, but I think it's useful; it helps express an astonished question, in my view.)

Of course, we might be as astonished as Monro about many other human characteristics, such as why we make the fashion-choices we do, how we pick our leaders, why we keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and why we voluntarily watch so many television-commercials--and so on.

But Monro sticks to basics, and good for him. He ran a bookshop in London, by the way, and published poetry books there and otherwise supported poets. Allegedly Wilfred Owen lived above the shop for a while.

(I cut the poem from one of Louis Untermeyer's anthologies, now in the public domain and posted on bartleby.com, and then pasted it here, to give credit where credit may be useful, is polite and appropriate.)

I hope something familiar to you looks pleasantly strange to you tomorrow.

"I can't learn how to know men . . .": what a great (part of) a line! I imagine lots of social scientists ultimately come to a similar conclusion. "I can't learn to know humans! I give up!"

A Tough Poem From Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon was among the so-called "trench poets" of World War I, and he not only survived the war but lived until 1967, having been born in 1886. One wonders what he thought of the Viet Nam war.

One of his toughest war-poems, in my opinion, is the one below. It isn't remotely as famous as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," and it isn't tough in the same way; the poem by Owen, in addition to skewering easy notions of patriotism and of dying for one's country, presents a graphic "battle" scene--which is mainly a scene of soldiers being hit by poison gas. Sassoon's poem is tough because it is directed at--and gives hard advice--to one who grieves. It is one of the most emotionally unflinching poems I know. If one didn't have the sense that Sassoon had earned the right to compose such a poem and the sense that what he writes is true, one might be tempted to think of the poem as cruel. It is a hard poem, a tough poem, certainly a sobering poem about war--but not a cruel one. It is from his book Picture Show (1920).

Reconciliation

By Siegfried Sassoon

WHEN you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind.
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son.

Hardy on War

Here is a poem by Thomas Hardy about war. It is grim and ironic: precisely what one turns to Hardy's novels and poems expecting to find:

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

A "nipperkin," by the way, is (according to the OED online):

"A small vessel used as a measure for alcoholic liquor, containing a half-pint or less."

Because they would have gotten the nipperkin wet, one might have guessed that the nipperkin was something like a napkin. "Nipperkin" can also refer to the ale or liquor in the vessel. So if you said, "May I have a nipperkin of bourbon?" and the bartender were to understand what you said, s/he would give you a certain amount of bourbon, not the nipperkin itself to take home.

As with many men and women who serve in the U.S. military, these two men enlisted because they didn't know what else to do and/or were out of work. The speaker speculates that the other man may have, like him, "sold his traps"--probably referring to fishing-traps or crab-traps. Then suddenly the two men are opposing each other on a battlefield in a war not of their making. As in Wilfred Owen's famous "Dulce et Decorum Est," there is no note of patriotism or even passion in the killing. It is accidental in the sense that two soldiers more or less wander into their respective armies and by chance oppose each other one day. If fate had gone another way, they might have had some beers together in a bar. There is more than a little of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in his poem. It also brings to mind a film with Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin, Hell in the Pacific, wherein an American and a Japanese soldier are stranded, by accident, on the same small island.

I wonder how many of those serving in Iraq now have a similar perspective on their circumstance.

A Less Well Known Lazarus from A Less Well Known War Poem

In class we recently studied some poems about war, including such "standards" as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Among the less well known poems we studied was "Still Falls the Rain" (1942), by Edith Sitwell, which--between the title and the poem--suggests that the topic is "The Raids. 1940. Night and Dawn." By "raids," of course, is meant the nightly bombardment of England, especially London, by German aircraft.

However, the poem turns out not to be about life (or death), per se, in London during the bombing. There are no images of the bombed city or of bomb-shelters. Instead the poem begins this way:

Still falls the Rain--
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss--
Blind as nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

That is, the poem begins not so subtly. It places the raids squarely in the midst of general human suffering and sin and in a Christian tradition and does not concern itself with this particular war (World Warr II), with the Germans, or with the British. It appeals to Christ insofar as he suffered, believe Christians, for the sin that, among other things, apparently keeps driving people to make war, so Sitwell is not focusing on who is bombing whom or on who "started" the war. As far as her poem is concerned, humankind started the war. She also alludes to Cain and, not honorifically, to "Caesar's laurel crown" (as contrasted, implicitly, with the crown of thorns). Conventionally, of course, we may be accustomed to thinking of World War II as needing to have been fought and to thinking that "the good side" won, so Sitwell's poem is disconcerting insofar as it perceives the war from a completely different framework, just as Robinson Jeffers, in his poems, viewed the war as a clash of empires. Neither Sitwell nor Jeffers takes a conventional, "popular" view of the war.

Later in the poem, the speaker urges Christ to "have mercy on us--/On Dives and 0n Lazarus./Under the Rain the sore and the gold."

The reference is not to the "famous" resurrected Lazarus but to a chapter in Luke (16, verses 19 and ff.), in which there is a rich man [Dives] who wears fancy clothes and dines extravagantly every night. A beggar named Lazarus appears outside the rich man's house, hoping for some crumbs but getting none. He's covered with sores, which the rich man's dogs lick. Thus the dogs treat Lazarus better than their master does. Dives and Lazarus die, the former going to Hell and the latter to Heaven. According to Jesus, Dives then looks over to the other side (to Heaven) and asks Abraham to send Lazarus over with some water. Abraham responds by saying (to paraphrase), "Sorry, it's too late; you made your choice when you were alive, and now you and Lazarus will be separated by a chasm."

By coincidence, this parable from Luke was the subject of a homily at my parish the same week, and the priest pointed out that even in Hell, Dives "doesn't get it." In Hell he behaves like a selfish rich person and asks Abraham to treat Lazarus as a servant. In a sense, the priest said, Dives's Hell is self-created; it is as much a mind-set as anything else.

But Sitwell's poem lumps Dives and Lazarus together, as the rain (and the bombs) fall, and asks Christ for mercy for everyone, rich person and poor person alike.

The parable--which Christ tells to the Pharisees, by the way--is hard to take because there's no second chance for Dives. The poem is hard to take because Sitwell sidesteps conventional ways of looking at war, at Germany's raids on England, and at World War II, and she goes straight for a Christian theme. I told the students it was perfectly all right not to like this poem, as long as they understood it--understood why they disliked it. Ironically, it may be easier to like "Dulce et Decorum Est," in spite of of the graphic images, because to mock empty, easy patriotism is more conventional now than asking Christ for mercy during a war. Sitwell not only invokes religion in time of war but a particular religion. She also invokes a less well known Lazarus from the New Testament.

We also studied some poems by an American Iraq-war veteran, Brian Turner, who has published a book of poems with Alice James Books in Boston. He, too, does some unconventional things with war poetry. You might look for his work.