A thought, and a poem
Mar. 29th, 2007 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
browngirlNext month is National Poetry Month. and in putting a project together I found the following poem.
Strange Meeting
by Wilfred Owen
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . ."
I found this poem because the bulk of the poems I hope to post next month will be from Poetry of Our Times, which was compiled by Sharon Brown in 1928 and has World War I hanging over it like a pearl-grey cloud, filtering the light in beautiful, melancholy ways. Part of that is due to the poems Ms. Brown chose; she didn't include Wilfred Owen (she included Alan Seeger, famous for "I Have a Rendezvous With Death", and Rupert Brooke, who wrote "The Soldier" and who was very very pretty) which leads me to think she may have preferred straightforward if melancholy patriotism over criticism of war (though she did include Siegfried Sassoon, the poet who led me back to Wilfred Owen).
The way "the Great War" hangs over the book makes me wonder how Ms. Brown and her (surviving) featured poets felt to see another great war rise up like a vast storm over their lives, and it reminds me of something I periodically wonder about. Rudyard Kipling's 1887 poem "Recessional", with its refrain "lest we forget", became an anthem of a war he likely didn't imagine when he wrote it (WWI) and one he didn't live to see (WWII). The "Great War" was supposed to end all wars, but it led directly to World War II, and that war has echoes in many of today's conflicts, not least the one the country I'm a citizen of is fighting right now.
And I find myself wondering what this war will lead to, sooner and later. Already in the US I can watch the economy stagger and the expanding number of my acquaintances whose lives the war has "directly touched" (and doesn't that phrase feel euphemistic). However, the US isn't a battleground; I don't travel through a destroyed city on my daily rounds, as the citizens of Baghdad must. But I look up at Boston's buildings, and wonder sometimes if in ten years I will, if I'll die in an attack, if war will return to these shores.
Ms. Brown, in 1928, used the term "The Great War", not knowing another was just beyond the horizon. What cataclysms are ahead that we can't see?
Strange Meeting
by Wilfred Owen
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . ."
I found this poem because the bulk of the poems I hope to post next month will be from Poetry of Our Times, which was compiled by Sharon Brown in 1928 and has World War I hanging over it like a pearl-grey cloud, filtering the light in beautiful, melancholy ways. Part of that is due to the poems Ms. Brown chose; she didn't include Wilfred Owen (she included Alan Seeger, famous for "I Have a Rendezvous With Death", and Rupert Brooke, who wrote "The Soldier" and who was very very pretty) which leads me to think she may have preferred straightforward if melancholy patriotism over criticism of war (though she did include Siegfried Sassoon, the poet who led me back to Wilfred Owen).
The way "the Great War" hangs over the book makes me wonder how Ms. Brown and her (surviving) featured poets felt to see another great war rise up like a vast storm over their lives, and it reminds me of something I periodically wonder about. Rudyard Kipling's 1887 poem "Recessional", with its refrain "lest we forget", became an anthem of a war he likely didn't imagine when he wrote it (WWI) and one he didn't live to see (WWII). The "Great War" was supposed to end all wars, but it led directly to World War II, and that war has echoes in many of today's conflicts, not least the one the country I'm a citizen of is fighting right now.
And I find myself wondering what this war will lead to, sooner and later. Already in the US I can watch the economy stagger and the expanding number of my acquaintances whose lives the war has "directly touched" (and doesn't that phrase feel euphemistic). However, the US isn't a battleground; I don't travel through a destroyed city on my daily rounds, as the citizens of Baghdad must. But I look up at Boston's buildings, and wonder sometimes if in ten years I will, if I'll die in an attack, if war will return to these shores.
Ms. Brown, in 1928, used the term "The Great War", not knowing another was just beyond the horizon. What cataclysms are ahead that we can't see?
