If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
The words are of Rupert Brooke, a poet born this day in 1887, who died in 1915. The sonnet is titled simply "The Solder."
Brooke was one of a series of British poets of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, as it was called until in 1939 we had another such war, and began using numbers, for the new conflict World War II as we retrospectively named the conflict in which Brooke died in 1915 World War I.
The mindless slaughter of the Great War inspired not only poetry from the Brits, but also a great novel from the other side, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front Its successor war would provide the occasion of a number of great works of art, from Americans alone novels by the likes of James Jones and Norman Mailer. Like the novel of Remarque many of these would be made into powerful movies.
Yet for me the poetry of the Great War carries greater power. It does not seemingly glorify war the way sometimes we experience from the movies of World War II, perhaps because first America's role, as important as it was military to the war's final outcome, was far less than that of the original combatants. It is also the nature of that war - the horror of the use of gas, the mindless slaughter of "over the top" into the killing hail of machine gun fire, the trenches that stretched across so much of France.
When I taught American history I would try to have my students actually imagine what that war was like, but even for imaginative middle schoolers it was hard: they have to some degree been inured by the graphic violence of movies, television shows, and video games. A war that began almost 100 years seems an eternity past. Americans experienced far less of the horror.
Which is why I turn to poetry and music.
I did not at first know the work of the British war poets. Then when I was in high school one of the great works of art of the 20th Century premiered, for the dedication of the new cathedral in Coventry England. It was the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten. Just as music it was powerful. The three principal singers - Galina Vishnevskaya from the Soviet Union, Dietrich Fischer-Diskau from Germany, and Peter Pears from England (and companion of the composer) made clear the composer's intent to go beyond the mere remembrance of an event from World War II. The structure of the piece, which weaved the traditional text of the Requiem Mass with the poetry of another of the war poets, Wilfred Owen, was another. Finally, as I was to discover when I finally got to Coventry in early 1980 during Leaves on the Current's first year at Oxford, there was the site for whose dedication the Requiem was written. The original Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in a bombing raid November 14, 1940. The Brits knew the raid was coming, having broken the German code, but Churchill was unwilling to risk the Germans realizing their codes had been compromised by evacuating or specially defending the industrial city in the Midlands. The original 14th Century cathedral was left as it was after the bombing, a hollowed out shell, with the new cathedral adjacent. Britten, himself a pacifist, used the commission to make a powerful statement. Consider the poem from which he drew the first of his Owen texts, "Anthem for Doomed Youth"
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Arts of all kinds can have powerful impacts - upon our imagination, upon our consciences. A piece of music without words sometimes moves us by itself, or it can become forever associated with a particular event, and when we hear it, we are inevitably reminded of the occasion with which we associate it. There are two pieces of music forever bound in my soul with November 1963. The slow movement of Beethoven's Eroica, the Funeral March, is one. When I heard the broadcast of the Friday November 22, 1963 Boston Symphony Orchestra concert, several days later, one heard conductor Erich Leinsdorf (with whose children I had attended school until he left the Metropolitan Opera to become Principal Conductor of the BSO) come out and announce the death of Kennedy, then that in his honor the orchestra would play the 2nd movement of the Eroica, you could hear first the shock of the audience, and then all standing and remaining totally still, not even a casual cough, as the music played.
The other is the Adagio for Strings by American Composer Samuel Barber, played in DC at a memorial service for the fallen president. It is in the arrangement by the composer for string orchestra of the 2nd movement of his 2nd String Quartet, Opus 11. For those younger than me they will associate that music with another representation of war, Oliver Stone's "Platoon." Since the death of Kennedy it is not unusual for the music to be used in honor of dead, as the following performance was so used on September 15, 2001, in honor of those slaughtered 4 days earlier:
I consider music and poetry strongly related, even when I encounter either separately. There is rhythm to some poetic compositions, there is melody, there can be refrains. In music, the art I know best, often it includes words, and of those most often poetic expressions. In other cases there is a structure not unlike that of a poem. Perhaps Sonata Form does not approach as clearly the structure of the Elizabethan sonnet, but yet it is a framework within which the creator expresses something often powerful beyond its immediate content - the existence of that structure ironically provides greater freedom to the power of the expression.
But this meditation is of poetry. It is of war. It is of the poets of the Great War.
I have quoted from two of the best known. There is another of that British generation, Siegfried Sassoon, who perhaps explained as well as anyone the impact that war had upon their creative imaginations. Read the words of "The Poet as Hero"
You've heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented,
Mocking and loathing War: you've asked me why
Of my old, silly sweetness I've repented--
My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry.
You are aware that once I sought the Grail,
Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
And it was told that through my infant wail
There rose immortal semblances of song.
But now I've said good-bye to Galahad,
And am no more the knight of dreams and show:
For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,
And my killed friends are with me where I go.
Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs;
And there is absolution in my songs.
I am reluctant to quote parts of poems, except when even by themselves such quotations are so powerful are as parts of this poem, such as these
"once I sought the Grail"
"But now I've said godd-bye to Galahad:
and the two lines
"For lust and senselsee hatred make me glad,
And my killed freidns are with me where I go."
I wonder how willing to go to war we would be were we to as part of our education immerse ourselves in the expressions that came from previous wars, like the poems of those from the Great War.
When I would teach the Great War, one thing I would do is have all my students stand. I would tell them they were going to count off by threes, but if they were a three they were to say nothing, merely sit down quietly. After we did that exercise, I let them repose in silence for a good 30 seconds. Then I would explain that were they in a small town in Britain or France after World War I, that might be the death toll among those men young and not so youngwho had gone to war from that town.
Certainly we could have a similar experience in America, especially from our fraternal conflict. During the Civil War there were communities who lost greater proportions of those who serve, sometimes from a single battle, or even a single day of that battle. Think of the death tolls at Gettysburg, at Antietam, at Shiloh.
When I was young Memorial Day was a day both festive and somber. We would parade, including even those of us not yet Cub Scouts, but about to join. Our procession would end at the bronze plaque of a War Memorial. Depending upon the community, the plaque could be the names of those who served, or - in anticipation of the Black Wall of the Vietnam Memorial - the list of names of those from the community who had died. There might be a recitation of the names of the dead, perhaps accompanied by volleys of rifle fire, as at a military funeral. Perhaps if they had been taught well the young people would know that the holiday for which they were dismissed from school began as Decoration Day, when the graves of the fallen of the Civil War were garlanded with flowers. Perhaps the somberness of sacrifice might get through.
I have quoted from British poets of the Great War. Since I first encountered Owen in the text used by Britain, I have come to know the other poets as well. I remember accompanying Leaves on the Current to a lecture in literature while she was at Harvard where the professor was discussing some of the poets and poems. And of course on the trip to Coventry I found myself rethinking and then rereading Owen.
The words of poets touch my soul. It may be a complete poem, it may be a few lines, memorized, or perhaps only partially remembered. Words that evoke in me deep feelings, words that remind me at least in part why after many years I became a Quaker.
I want to end this meditation with words of another poet, a doctor in the Canadian Army, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who wrote it in 1915, after he had in the absence of a chaplain performed the funeral service for a young friend killed in the horrors of 17 days of the battle at the Ypres Salient. McCrae himself died later in the war, in January 1918, of pneumonia. Of the occasion of the poem, McCrae had written separately
I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.
The poem was written in one sitting, McCrae assuaging his anguish the next day. We now know that McCrae was not happy with it, and threw it away, where it was retrieved by another officer who sent it to a British publications, where it was eventually published in
Punch.
So let me end with McCrae's poem, asking only that you allow the words to speak to you.
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
PEACE!