Pilgrimage of poems: A crowd of corpses

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,

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.