In case you’ve somehow missed it, this year marks the
centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. There’s gonna be a whole
lotta fanfare about it for the next four years, mostly from the governments of
the countries that brought it to us in the first place. And publishing houses, and TV networks, of course.
But, as I’ve noted elsewhere, it produced
quite a lot of poetry; some of it truly and utterly cringeworthy, but some
extremely powerful. In the days preceding smartphone videos going viral, the
discipline of writing poems could capture a considerable part of the experience
and the emotions of that cataclysmic convergence of technological advances, imperial
policies, and just plain unfuckingbeievable stupidity.
Although I’ve read a lot of it—mostly the British poets—I’m
still making new discoveries, including this from Anna Akhmatova, whose work I
know somewhat from a class in Russian humanities. This kind of gives us a
prologue to the cataclysm:
"July 1914"
I
All month a smell of burning,
of dry peat
smouldering in the bogs.
Even the birds have stopped singing,
the aspen does not tremble.
The god of wrath glares in the
sky,
the fields have been parched
since Easter.
A one-legged pilgrim stood in
the yard
with his mouth full of
prophecies:
'Beware of terrible times...the
earth
opening for a crowd of corpses.
Expect famine, earthquakes,
plagues,
and heavens darkened by
eclipses.
'But our land will not be
divided
by the enemy at his pleasure:
the Mother-of-God will spread
a white shroud over these great
sorrows.'
II
From the burning woods drifts
the sweet smell of juniper.
Widows grieve over their brood,
the village rings with
lamentation.
If the land thirsted, it was
not in vain,
nor were the prayers wasted;
for a warm red rain soaks
the trampled fields.
Low, low hangs the empty sky,
tender is the voice of the
supplicant:
'They wound Thy most holy body,
They are casting lots for Thy
garments.'
It’s the same sense of the world holding its breath that
you get from Isabel Colegate’s The
Shooting Party (and the film based on it), or Barbara Tuchman’s opening
chapter in The Guns of August.
Akhmatova later experienced the first months of the siege
of Leningrad, and—like so many of her fellow writers—suppression by Stalin and
his successors.
I’m giving you another view of the home front (of the war
in progress)—this time from one of my verymost favorite poets ever, e.e. cummings. If you want his view on war in general, you need to read "Plato told". Well, you should read it regardless, just because it's stunning. But here he is on this particular war:
“my sweet old etcetera”
my
sweet old etcetera
aunt
lucy during the recent
war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting
for,
my
sister
isabel
created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of
socks not to
mention
shirts fleaproof earwarmers
etcetera
wristers etcetera, my
mother
hoped that
i
would die etcetera
bravely
of course my father used
to
become hoarse talking about how it was
a
privilege and if only he
could
meanwhile my
self
etcetera lay quietly
in
the deep mud et
cetera
(dreaming,
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your
smile
eyes
knees and of your Etcetera)
You’ll find this view in a lot of accounts from serving
soldiers on both sides of the war.
I’ll be sharing more of Cummings, and of World War I
poets, later in the month.
2 comments:
Oh, oh, oh. I was somehow unaware of cummings' WW1 poetry. When I have finished the persona reassimilation process I seem to be going through, I MUST read all of it. Do I understand that all of the WW1 stuff exists in one volume/source?
I expect there are multiple compilations; & there are bound to be more released in the next four years.
The two anthologies I own are ‘Never Such Innocence’: Poems of the First World War, edited by Martin Stephen (Everyman) & The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Both overlap; the latter has the cummings poem in it.
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