A poet's silence

In the late summer of 1970 in response to the war in Vietnam, Edwin Starr topped the Billboard charts, singing "War-- huh yeah, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing."

Sixty-five years before "War" topped the music charts, W.B. Yeats wrote a challenging short poem about war that asked, "War poetry – what is it good for?" 

Henry Allingham, WWI veteran

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these

A poet's mouth be silent, 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

While Yeats' poem doesn't sound as outraged as Starr's lyrics, there's an edge and an attitude here as well, and at least two very different ways of making sense of the poem.   The poem can be read in the context of WB Yeats' letters and other writings, an example of wonderfully snarky literary gossip at its best – or worst – that asks the question, "What is good poetry?" 

or….

The poem can be read on its own terms, as it asks the question, "What is poetry good for?" 

First the literary gossip.  Eighteen years after the war had ended, Yeats edited an anthology of poetry that included his choices of the best poems from the end of the 19^th century through 1935.  And he pointedly omitted the British poets of the First World War.  Nothing from Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, or the others – nothing.  Yeats defended his decision in the anthology's introduction, writing, "I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies….The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity…-- but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems....passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies." 

Many authors believe that Yeats' comments were a thinly veiled allusion to Wilfred Owen's comments about war poetry.  Before his death in 1918, Owen had written a draft preface to his poetry: "This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or land, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."

Where Yeats' decision becomes much more interesting – and gossipy – is in a letter he wrote to a friend.  Not intended for publication, Yeats's comments not only dismiss Owen and the war poets, but are fascinatingly personal with a bit of spite:  "My anthology continues to sell…& the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick…. There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."  Ouch.  

It's fascinating to discover the ways in which poems and poets of the First World War have been alternatively dismissed and venerated over the years.  But Yeats' "On being asked for a war poem" is much more than a historical debate about taste – it deserves to be read and understood on its own merits.  

WB Yeats

Yeats wrote the poem in 1915 and sent it in a letter to Henry James, who had asked him specifically to write a poem that addressed the war and its politics.   Yeats first titled the poem "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" – quite long-winded for a six-line poem!  When he sent it back to James, he shortened the title to "A Reason for Keeping Silent."  The title was changed a third time, appearing in its current version when Yeats included it a book of his poems published a year after the war ended.  I think the current title is the strongest because it names an action (being asked) and directly references war. 

The poem seems to imply that a writer can be a soldier or a pacifist or a protester, but that his actions should speak louder than his versified words: his mouth should "be silent" when it comes to politics. It is not the job of poetry to "set a statesman right."* My guess is that Yeats would scorn the tradition of poet laureates who are charged to write timely poems relevant to national concerns.  Unlike other voices who have claimed that poets serve as the conscience of a culture – Percy Shelley, for example, argued that poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" -- this poem claims a very different role for poetry.   

Poetry meddles in the personal, in the dreams of a young girl and in the backward looking reflections of an old man.  Poems invade the thoughts and lives of individuals, not "girls" and "men," but "a young girl" and "an old man."  Putting aside for a minute the fact that only one year later, Yeats wrote a much longer poem about the Irish political uprising of Easter 1916, "On being asked for a war poem" asks the reader provocatively, almost teasingly, to consider why he or she bothers to read poetry.  It's a short, personal poem that is willing to undercut itself as it intimately asks each of us what we think, what we feel, about poems, the war, and our personal experiences.   

Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, argues, "Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways."  That is, poetry changes us, showing us new ways of living and understanding.  About that, perhaps both Owen and Yeats could have agreed. 

*"Conversing with the World: the Poet in Society" offers a fascinating discussion of American politics and poetry.  

**"In Praise of Memorizing Poetry – Badly" shares an entertaining story about the word "meddling" in the poem, considering what the choice adds to the poem as a whole. 

Come, friend, and swim

Cape Helles, Gallipoli peninsula

 AP Herbert's poem "The Bathe" considers the question, "What would you do if you knew today was your last day on earth?" 

The Gallipoli campaign (the Allies' attempt to establish a sea route between the Mediterranean and its Russian ally), began on April 25, 1915 when Allied troops landed on the shores of the Turkish peninsula.  By early June, two failed attempts had been made to attack Turkish positions and gain the high ground just beyond the village of Krithia. 

On June 4, 1915, the Third Battle of Krithia was launched at noon, part of the British commander's attempt to maintain "ceaseless initiative," an ironic description of a campaign that resulted in an estimated 500,000 total casualties, of which approximately 50,000 men had died from both sides by January of 1916.  The Third Battle of Krithia gained the Allies approximately 200 – 250 yards of forward territory, at the cost of an estimated 6,500 British and French casualties, while the Turkish army lost an estimated 9,000 – 10,000 men. 

Writing in the days just before the battle, AP Herbert writes of the simple joys of life in the shadow of death. 

The Bathe

by AP Herbert

Come friend and swim. We may be better then,

But here the dust blows ever in the eyes

Swimming at Cape Helles, National Army Museum

And wrangling round are weary fevered men,

Forever mad with flies.

I cannot sleep, nor even long lie still,

And you have read your April paper twice;

To-morrow we must stagger up the hill

To man a trench and live among the lice.

But yonder, where the Indians have their goats,

There is a rock stands sheer above the blue,

Where one may sit and count the bustling boats

And breathe the cool air through;

May find it still is good to be alive,

May look across and see the Trojan shore

Twinkling and warm, may strip, and stretch, and dive.

And for a space forget about the war.

Then will we sit and talk of happy things,

Home and 'the high' and some far fighting friend,

And gather strength for what the morrow brings,

For that may be the end.

It may be we shall never swim again,

Never be clean and comely to the sight,

May rot untombed and stink with all the slain.

Come, then, and swim. Come and be clean to-night.

The experience of war is vividly drawn with specifics:  dust, fever, flies, sleeplessness, lice, rot, and stink.  But that is for tomorrow.  Today offers the opportunity to "for a space forget about the war."  The present moment holds out the promise of bathing in the waters of the Mediterranean with a friend, breathing "the cool air through," stretching and diving into the blue, sitting and talking of "happy things," -- a time to "gather strength for what the morrow brings." The word "may" is repeated twice here:  it is still possible to see the "Trojan shore" and be reminded of glorious epic battles of the past, just as it is possible on the eve of battle to "find it still is good to be alive." 

Yet this poem is written by a man who has seen enough of war to know that the dead are not glorious, but "rot untombed," and it may be his fate shortly to join those who "stink with all the slain."  The continued repetition of the word "may" highlights the uncertainties of life during war time.  On May 24^th, the stench of the bodies decaying between the lines caused a truce to be called so that the dead of both sides could be buried.  One of the men assigned to the burial detail recalls, "Some of the bodies were rotted so much that there were only bones and part of the uniform left. The bodies of the men killed on the nineteenth (it had now been five days) were awful. Most of us had to work in short spells as we felt very ill. We found a few of our men who had been killed in the first days of the landing" (Albert Facey). 

Most likely, at some time in the next ten days "The Bathe" was written.  Following the previous five weeks of stumbling attacks into the filth of battle, the poem simply invites a friend, "Come, then, and swim. Come and be clean to-night."  Washed clean both literally and metaphorically, the men in the water are baptized into life and comradeship before the baptism of fire that is shortly to come. 

The author of the poem, AP Herbert, had his swim with friends, as described by Lt. William Ker in a letter home dated May 30, 1915:  "You never saw such a conglomeration of strange troops. You should have seen me and A. P. Herbert the other evening bathing in the Dardanelles near some Frenchmen and Senegalese, with the Turkish lines (or, rather, the place where they were) in sight on a ridge to our left beside some dismantled forts, the Plain of Troy before us on the other side, some guns on the Asiatic side in sending an occasional shrapnel shell over on our right, and a French battery immediately behind us having shots at them. I took a bathing party down to the beach yesterday. The scene was a cross between Blackpool in the season and the Ganges. The men think it a fine picnic, but we are going in the firing line tomorrow night." 

A.P. Herbert

On June 4^th, Herbert joined the attack with his unit, the Hawke Battalion.  He survived Gallipoli and other battles on the Western Front until he was seriously wounded in April of 1917 and invalided back to England.  One-hundred years after the Third Battle of Krithia, the longing to be cleansed from war echoes across the years: "Come, then, and swim.  Come and be clean to-night."      

May 1915: Like a divine surprise

By May of 1915, the war that was to have been over by Christmas of 1914 had dragged into its tenth month. Charlotte Mew's poem "May 1915" provides a snapshot of that moment when both soldiers and those on the home front began to recognize that for this war, there was no end in sight.

Enjoy listening to Mew's "May 1915," read by Alexandra Burton.  The text of the poem appears below for those who wish to read along. 

May 1915 by Charlotte Mew

Let us remember Spring will come again
To the scorched, blackened woods, where the wounded trees
Wait with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun, and even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please,
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit today with their great Dead, hands in their hands
Eyes in their eyes
At one with Love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered things
And changing skies.

The poem opens with an imperative command:  "remember Spring."  Speaking for the grieving – the widows, children, bereft mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and soldiers themselves – the poem points to the "scorched, blackened woods" as a visible reminder of the war's destruction, but also as an exemplar for responding to that destruction.   

The woods and the wounded are joined by the repeated alliterative w's that join both in the effort of waiting for healing and renewal.  The word "Wait" itself is capitalized and cut off from the "wounded trees" and the sense of line two by enjambment (when line endings separate words that work together to create meaningful phrases), highlighting both the importance of waiting as well as its isolating loneliness.   

"Solitude," Percy Smith

Three times the word "sure" is repeated in lines 4 and 5, underscoring the trees' faith in Nature and in God, sure that Spring will return, confident that the changing seasons will bring new growth and life, certain of the repeated miracle of nature's rebirth that is always a "divine surprise." 

The poem shifts its focus in line 5 and again in line 8, when the wounded trees are compared with humans who grieve, with "those who sit today with their great Dead" – the "us" of the first line.  The bereaved who clasp the hands of the fallen, who stare into their eyes ("hands in their hands/Eyes in their eyes") are one'd with the "great Dead," united with Love and with Grief.  These are mourners who have lost themselves because of the ways in which they are intimately joined to those who have died.  In this world of loss, the mourners exist in a place where time itself seems to have stopped.   They are blind to the fragments of life that surround them in their brokenness, unable to see or believe that anything will change. 

While the first half of the poem looks to the promise of Spring, its second half is blunt and unsparing in describing the mindlessness of grief.  Yet even these last lines hold out hope for the future, looking ahead to "when God shall please," when regeneration will arise even out of the blasted brokenness of the war. 

Charlotte Mary Mew

Tim Kendall, editor of Poetry of the First World War, has called Charlotte Mary Mew "scandalously underappreciated" as a poet.  Admired by other writers such as Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and Siegfried Sassoon, Mew writes of sorrow with both honesty and grace.  

The tone of "May 1915" speaks like the comforting touch of a friend's hand on a shoulder, offering the greatest gift of sympathy: a patient willingness to walk alongside in the anguish, no matter how long it lasts.    

Coupled to life

On May 23^rd, 1915 Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary, joining the Allies in The Great War (Italy would not declare war on Germany until 28 August, 1916).  In August 1914 when the war began, despite Italy's alliances with Germany and Austria-Hungary, it remained neutral.  Both the Central Powers and the Allies worked to persuade Italy to join their side, and in the secret Treaty of London of April 1915, the Allies promised Italy significant territorial gains held by the Austria-Hungarian Empire, including parts of Tyrol and Dalmatia, as well as the port of Trieste. 

Italian Front

Hours after declaring war, on 24 May 1915, Italy fired the first shells on what became one of the harshest fronts of the war: the Alpine border between Austria-Hungary and Italy.  Both armies attacked on impossibly steep mountain passes, and trenches were dug into the rocks and glaciers of the Alps at altitudes of nearly 10,000 feet.  By November of 1915, after the first four battles of the Isonzo (there would be eleven), nearly 25% of the mobilized Italian men had either been killed (60,000) or wounded (150,000).  One of Italy's most famous modernist poets, Giuseppe Ungaretti, served with his country's infantry on the lower Isonzo Front.  

Vigil

by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Italian soldiers 

A whole night long

crouched close

to one of our men

butchered

with his clenched

mouth

grinning at the full moon

with the congestion

of his hands

thrust right

into my silence

I've written

letters filled with love

I have never been

so

coupled to life.

Cima Quattro, 23 December 1915

Translated by Jonathan Griffin -- here is the poem in Italian.

Numerous poems from the First World War describe the experience of lying with a dead comrade (Rickword's "Trench Poets" is just one example).  Ungaretti's poem is unsettling when it portrays the dead comrade as less than human:  like an animal, he has been "butchered," and his clenched mouth "grinning at the full moon" seems more like that of a gargoyle than a man. 

But the last lines of the poem are the most shocking, using metaphors of romance to capture the experience, comparing it to the outpouring of emotion in "letters filled with love." With tenderness and deep feeling, the night has been seared into the surviving soldier's memory as one in which a corpse profoundly demonstrates what it means to be alive.  In his vigil with the dead, more than ever before, he recognizes himself like a lover "coupled" to life.  

Giuseppe Ungaretti

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead

 What would Charles Sorley and his last poem make of First World War centenary commemorations?  "We will remember them"?  Impossible.  "Lest we forget"?  The dead do not care if they are forgotten.  This sonnet, written in pencil, was found among the twenty-year-old Sorley's personal effects after he was killed at the Battle of Loos, just one of 59, 247 British casualties in the three-week battle.    

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

"Paths of Glory" by CRW Nevinson
(Imperial War Museum)

Mouthless, deaf, gashed, and blind – the poem flatly catalogues the dead of war as a mutilated mass of millions, silenced and cut off from all sight and sound.  The pale battalions that march across survivors' dreams recall Dante's words when he descends into the hell of The Inferno: "I had not thought death had undone so many." 

Each young man once full of life and promise has been transformed into a "spook," and "None wears the face you knew."  The men are no longer linked to loved ones; neither are they their own.  They have been given to "Great death" for evermore. 

And what are survivors to do?  The poem counsels, "Say not soft things," and adds two more negative commands:  do not shed tears for the dead – do not attempt to honour their sacrifice.   Instead, "Say only this, 'They are dead."  The poem asks us to gaze upon the consequences of battle, to search the mutilated faces of the "o'ercrowded mass," and to acknowledge the cost of war without sentimentality and without attaching glory to the loss.  There is nothing new or special in personal grief, in this or in any war, for "many a better one has died before." 

Sorley wrote to his mother in April of 1915 to share his sense that Rupert Brooke's poetry was "overpraised," explaining, "He [Brooke] is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable, and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances…. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude."

Charles Hamilton Sorley

Sorley's poetry evidences an unsentimental view of war, and so it is worth considering how he might wish to be remembered, one of the youngest of the poets who failed to survive the First World War.   His poetry speaks eloquently of the unfulfilled promise of the young man who was shot in October of 1915.  In a letter home, Sorley wrote of his own desires if he were to survive:  "Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth." 

Julian Grenfell's "Into Battle"

British recruiting poster

In Poetry of the First World War,  Tim Kendell describes "Into Battle" as "one of the finest and most problematic poems of the war," (108), while John Stallworthy in Anthem for Doomed Youth writes, "This is in many ways a horrifying poem" (27). 

"Into Battle" is difficult for modern readers because it is that rare thing -- a"happy" war poem.  Grenfell's verse celebrates war, and in the tradition of ancient Greek poetry such as The Iliad, it finds beauty, glory, and meaning in fighting, killing, and dying. 

Into Battle*

(Flanders, April 1915)

The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;

And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.

The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run,
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fullness after death.

All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star, and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's Belt and sworded hip.

The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend,
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges' end.

The kestrel hovering by day
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him, “Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing.”

In dreary, doubtful, wailing hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat, and makes him blind,

Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Praising war, the poem asserts that fighting and dying in battle give life purpose and meaning.  It paradoxically argues that choosing to fight is choosing to live, while "he is dead who will not fight." In this, Grenfell's work recollects Tennyson's "Ulysses," the hero who laments, "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" and who longs for the days when once he had "drunk delight of battle with my peers/Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."

Writing home from the Western Front, Grenfell said of his battle experiences, "It is all the most wonderful fun; better fun than one could ever imagine.  I hope it goes on a nice long time; pig-sticking will be the only possible pursuit after this, or one will die of sheer ennui.  The first time one shoots at a man one has the feeling of 'never point a loaded gun at anyone, even in fun,' but very soon it gets like shooting a crocodile, only more exciting, because he shoots back at you…."

The poem gives voice to that excitement -- the constant threat of death infuses each sight and sound with meaning and poignancy.  Sun, breeze, woodlands, birds, horses, and stars:  as comrades, they give the warrior a heightened awareness of "Colour and Warmth and Light."

But when "the brazen frenzy starts," when the "burning moment breaks," then like an ancient berserker possessed by the "Joy of Battle," the warrior becomes blind to all that lies outside the field of combat.  This focused and altered vision assures him that he can die only if it be "Destined Will." For while "in the air Death moans and sings," the soldier in the midst of fighting is held fast to the Day and enfolded in the Night.  He is one with Nature and intensely alive until that moment when fate calls him to death and gives him "increase." 

In another letter home, Grenfell wrote, "I adore war. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I’ve never been so well or so happy."

On May 13^th, 1915, Grenfell skull was pierced by shrapnel after a shell exploded nearby.  Taken to a nearby casualty clearing station, he wrote to his mother, "We are practically wiped out; but we charged and took the Hun trenches yesterday.  I stopped a Jack Johnson with my head**; and my skull is slightly cracked.  But I'm getting on splendidly." He died on May 26^th, and his poem "Into Battle" appeared in The Times on May 28^th, the same day as the notice of Grenfell's death.  The poem was immensely popular during the First World War, receiving much critical acclaim. 

Today, combatants who boldly state that they are willing to die for glory or those who admit to finding joy in killing are more likely to be associated with terrorist organizations than with national military service.  Writing for The Atlantic, Jay Winter has argued, "The Great War discredited the concept of glory, a word that many Europeans simply could not swallow." Grenfell and his poem, however, echo the spirit of ancient wars, a spirit and attitude that many of us now find disquieting, if not slightly horrifying. 

*Two manuscript versions survive of the poem, and these differ slightly from the version published in The Times on May 27, 1915.  Grenfell's mother, Ettie, made several minor revisions, such as changes in line 3 (from "sun's kiss" to "sun's gaze"), line 26 (from "keen of ear" to "keen of sound" and line 37 (from "And Joy of Battle only takes" to "And only Joy of Battle takes").  The version I've shared is that as published in The Times.  

**Jack Johnson was the first black American heavyweight world boxing champion, and the name became a slang term used by British soldiers to refer to German heavy artillery shells.

Are there any happy war poems?

A friend who has been reading my blog asked a few weeks ago, "Aren't there any happy war poems?  They're all just so….depressing."  So I've searched for a poem that might be considered "happy," and I've thought about the question a lot.  For now, I've provisionally reached the conclusion that a Happy War Poem would most likely be grotesque or offensive.  I find it hard to imagine how a poem can be "upbeat" about war.* 

However, war poetry is often described as inspiring or uplifting (Studdert Kennedy's "Lighten Our Darkness" and Colwyn Philipps' "Release" come to mind), and black humor is frequently used to satirize war or to cope with the unimaginable (Rickword's "Trench Poets" is an example). 

The anonymous poem "Faith"** makes yet a different point -- sometimes, no matter how dire the circumstances, we can choose hope.  In the midst of evil and suffering, we can affirm beauty and goodness.

Faith

Serbian children

I heard the cannon’s monotone

A mile or two away;

But in the shell-torn town I saw

Two little boys at play.

From what was yesterday a home

I heard the cannons booming;

But in the garden I could see

A bed of pansies blooming.

Along the weary, dreary road,

Forspent and dull I trod;

But in the sky of spring I saw

The countenance of God.

*If anyone can think of a happy war poem or has another response to the question, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. 

**I found the poem in YANKS A.E.F. Verse (1919), a book I picked up at a second-hand bookstore, and I can find no other record of its publication or its author.