Poetry and/against War

War and poetry

A quick perusal brought up three poems that I would like to share. This second one by Stephen Crane is bitter beyond belief. I believe it is about the Civil War.

"War is Kind" Stephen Crane

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kiind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone.
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums fo the regiement,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to dirill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, and his kingdom-
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches
Raged at his breast, gulped and died.
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold.
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killiing,
And a gield where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son.
Do nor weep.
War is kind.

The third poem is uncanny in the current context.

from CREATE GREAT PEACE

James Oppenheim

Would you end war?
Create great peace . . .
The peace that demands all of a man,
His love, his life, his veriest self;
Plunge him in the smelting fires of a work that becomes his child . . .

Give him a hard Peace: A Peace if discipline and justice . . .
Kindle him with vision, invite him to joy and adventure:
Set him at work, not to create things
But to create men:
yea, himself.

Go search your heart, America . . .
Turn from the machine to man.
Build, while there is yet time, a creative Peace . . .
While there is yet time! . . .
For if you reject great Peace,
as surely vile living brings disease.
So surely shall your selfishness bring war.

Thanks, Billy Falcon, for posting those poems!

Crane met the situation head on in all of his writing. To some, it might appear that he disparaged war. In fact, he glorified it. His novel, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, does give a look at the horror of battle, but, in the end, the central character is an enthusiastic warrior. Same with his poetry.

Steissd, why would you want a world in which generals and poets
thought the same? You say that the poets chose an inappropriate time and place for declaring there political stance. When and where would have been an appropriate time and place? Where they couldn't be seen or heard?

Letty, equal time on this thread? Yes. But, may I respectfully point out that the media are fanning the winds off war. There is almost no media opposition to war. But on this thread, yes. I'll post one.

Here is a poem for balance:

THE SPIRES OF EXFORD

(As seen from the train)

Winifred M. Letts

I saw the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The gray spires off Oxford
Against a pearl-grey sky;
My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went aroad to die.

The years go by fast in Oxford,
the golden Years and gay;
the hoary colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded--War!
They put their games away.

They left the peaceful river,
The cricket field, the quad,
The shaven lawns of Oxford,
To seek a bloody sod.
They gave their merry youth away
For country and for god.

God rest you, happy gentlemen,
Who laid your good lives down,
Who took the khaki and the gun
Instead of cap and gown.
God bring you to a fairer place
Than even Oxford town.


I wonder if Mrs. Bush would like this poem?

When It Is Over

When it is over -- for it will be over,
Though we who watched it be gone, watched it and with it died--
Will there be none the less the yellow melilot, the white, the high sweet clover,
Close to the dusty, fragrant, hot roadside?

Oh, yes, there will!--
Escaped from fields of fodder, for there must be fodder still....

Ah, yes, but nothing will escape...
Yet sweet, perhaps, in fields of fodder still.


When it is over-- for it will be over--
Will there be none the less, will there be still

In April on the southern slope of an orchard, apple orchard hill,
Red-and-white buds already fragrant, intent upon blossoming?--
There will; I know there will.

But for whom will they blossom?--

They will blossom for what, not whom,
I think-- the streaked bloom
Red-and-white, and the hardy fragrance, strong, all but visible,
almost but not quite in sight,
Long, long before its pretty petals in a May wind fall,
Will be the finished apple in the eyes of all beholding it;


I see him well: the human creature studying the only good
A tree can be-- stout wood
For building or for pulp whereon to print the expedient thing,
Or, if not that, food.

He walks through the apple orchard just now blossoming,
Dismissing to the necessary, the developing, past
The present beauty and the fragrance enfolding it.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Riverside Battleground
Chen Tao

They would lay down their lives to wipe away the Huns,
They've bit the dust, five thousand sable-clad dear ones.
Alas! their bones lie on riverside battleground,
But in dreams of their wives they still seem safe and sound.

(The original is in ancient chinese. I am stupid to post a translation.)

That's a great bit of imagery, Satt.

APOSTROPHE TO MAN

(On reflecting that the world is ready to go to war again)

Detestable race, continue to expunge yourself, die out.
Breed faster, crowd, encroach, sing hymns, build bombing airplanes;
Make speeches, unveil statues, issue bonds, parade;
Convert again into explosives the bewildered ammonia
and the distracted cellulose;
Convert again into putrescent matter drawing flies
The hopeful bodies of the young; exhort,
Pray, pull long faces, be earnest,
be all but overcome, be photographed;
Confer, perfect your formulae, commercialize
Bacateria harmful to human tissue,
Put death on the market;
Breed, crowd, encroach,
expand, expunge yourself, die out,
Homo called sapiens.

ESVM

Yesterday is History
Tomorrow is a Mystery
And Today . . .
Today is a gift
that's why we call it The Present.

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love:
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.


from The Wild Swans at Coole - published 1919
William Butler Yeats(1865-1939)

[The Kiltartan Cross was a group of Roman Catholics that were directly related to the Air Force. These people had their own tartan, or their own colors for their kilts that they wore. The different types of tartan colors signified different groups of poeple whether it be a clan of people or a military group. (taken from a Univ. of Texas website)]

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell


From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Piffka, Dyslexia

Those are very moving poems. They certainly bring home the irrationality of war. I especially like, "An Irish Airman . . ."

A couple of years ago on Memorial Day I sent out the following poem. I found it in an anthology I have ('The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry: From Whitman To Walcott', eds. Richard Marius and Keith Frome)
The author, Andrew Hudgins is a contemporary poet.
In this poem he assumes the persona of Sidney Lanier, poet and confederate soldier. (who later became a poet and lecturer on English literature at Johns Hopkins University)
While this poem may not be explicitly anti-war, it reveals the horror of war, up close and personal, and, on the receiving end.

After the Wilderness


When Clifford wasn't back to camp by nine,
I went to look among the fields of dead
before we lost him to a common grave.
But I kept tripping over living men
and had to stop and carry them to help
or carry them until they died,
which happened more than once upon my back.
And I got angry with those men because
they kept me from my search and I was out
still stumbling through the churned-up earth at dawn,
stopping to stare into each corpse's face,
and all the while I was writing in my head
the letter I would have to send to our father,
saying Clifford was lost and I had lost him.



I found him bent above a dying squirrel
while trying to revive the little thing.
A battlefield is full of trash like that--
dead birds and squirrels, bits of uniform.
Its belly racked for air. It couldn't live.
Cliff knew it couldn't live without a jaw.
When in relief I called his name, he started,
jumped back, and hissed at me like a startled cat.
I edged up slowly, murmuring "Clifford, Cliff,"
as you might talk to calm a skittery mare,
and then I helped him kill and bury all
the wounded squirrels he'd gathered from the field.
It seemed a game we might have played as boys.
We didn't bury them all at once, with lime,
the way they do on burial detail,
but scooped a dozen, tiny, seperate graves.
When we were done he fell across the graves
and sobbed as though they'd been his unborn sons.
His chest was large--it covered most of them.
I wiped his tears and stroked his matted hair,
and as I hugged him to my chest I saw
he'd wet his pants. We called it Yankee tea.
(Andrew Hudgins 1951- )



For more on Andrew Hudgins go to:
http://www.alsopreview.com/hudgins/
http://www.pshares.org/Authors/authorDetails.cfm?prmAuthorID=727
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/authordetail.cfm?authorID=1736

Thanks Jjorge -- Here's another from Yeats. (He is so good!)

On Being Asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

-- William Butler Yeats

The poem from Hudgins is amazing... and so sad.

Yeats wrote this poem, also about men, squirrels and guns:

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No

COME play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I'd a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.

In Hudgins poem Lanier's brother Clifford has what in WWI was called 'Shell shock', and later was called 'War Neurosis' or 'Combat fatigue'.

Nowadays, since the conceptualization of stress disorders, we would say that Clifford has an 'acute stress disorder', or more specifically a 'combat stress disorder' . If his major symptoms were to persist for more than One month beyond the traumatic battlefield events he would be characterised as having 'Posttraumatic stress disorder'. (PTSD)

(Just thought you might find that interesting)

Shell Shock? Of course! I should have figured that out. It is unbelievably sad, in the midst of all that human carnage, that the brother would be so struck by the other, "lesser" deaths. I suppose it could be explained as a loss of power, and trying to put some part of a confusing world back together. Oh, it is horrible and war is hell. Can people figure out any greater ways to be cruel? I wonder.

I was reading about Yeats and it was said that his poem, "The Second Coming," was written as an indictment against inhumanity following WWI. I don't think I've thought of it in those terms, seeing it as more of a religious statement, but I'm going to add it here for our perusal.

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[from http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~brians/anglophone/achebe.html -- Yeats was attracted to the spiritual and occult world and fashioned for himself an elaborate mythology to explain human experience. "The Second Coming," written after the catastrophe of World War I and with communism and fascism rising, is a compelling glimpse of an inhuman world about to be born. Yeats believed that history in part moved in two thousand-year cycles. The Christian era, which followed that of the ancient world, was about to give way to an ominous period represented by the rough, pitiless beast in the poem. ]

Hmm, in other words, we're doomed.

Song of the Conscripts
Du Fu
(tr. by Xu Yuang-zhong)


Chariots rumble
And horses grumble.

The conscripts march with bow and arrows at the waist.
Their fathers, mothers, wives and children come in haste
To see them off, the bridge is shoroud'd in dust they've raised.
They cluctch their coat, and stamp the feet and bar their way,
Their frief cries looud and strikes the cloud straigt, straight-away.
An onlookers by roadside asks an enrolee.

"The conscription is frequent," only answers he.
"Some went north at fifteen to guard the rivershore,
And were sent west to till the land at forty-four.
The Elder bound their young heads when they went away,
Just home, they're sent to the frontier though their hair's gray,
The field on borderland becomes a sea of blood,
The emperor's greed for land is still at its high flood.
Have you not heard two hundred districts east of the Hua mountains lie,
Where briers and bambles grow in villages far and night?
Although strout women can wield the plough and the hoe,
They know not east from west where thorns and weeds o'ergrow.
The enemy are used to hard and stubborn fight,
Our men are routed just like dogs or fowls in flight.

You are kind to ask me,
To complain I'm not free.
In winter of this year
Conscription goes on here.
The magistrates for taxes press.
How can we pay them in distress!
If we had known sons bring no joy,
we'd prefer a girl to a boy.
A daughter can be married to a naighbour, alas!
A son can only be buried under the grass!

Have you not seen
On borders green
Bleached bones since olden days unburied on the plain?
The old ghosts weep and cry while the new ghosts complain,
The air is loud with screech and scream in gloomy rain."