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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.

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