502 War poems

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men,

We aged a hundred years and this descended In just one hour, as at a stroke. The summer had been brief and now was ended; The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke. The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell. And so I covered up my face, imploring God to destroy me before battle fell. And from my memory the shadows vanished Of songs and passions—burdens I'd not need. The Almighty bade it be—with all else banished— A book of portents terrible to read.

I GLOOM! An October like November; August a hundred thousand hours, And all September, A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . . And doom! That then was Antwerp. . . In the name of God, How could they do it? Those souls that usually dived Into the dirty caverns of mines; Who usually hived In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars; Who dragged muddy shovels, over the grassy mud, Lumbering to work over the greasy sods. . . Those men there, with the appearance of clods Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God Ever shrived. . . And it is not for us to make them an anthem. If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them To a tune that the trumpets might blow it, Shrill through the heaven that's ours or yet Allah's, Or the wide halls of any Valhallas. We can make no such anthem. So that all that is ours For inditing in sonnets, pantoums, elegiacs, or lays Is this: “In the name of God, how could they do it?” II For there is no new thing under the sun, Only this uncomely man with a smoking gun In the gloom. . . What the devil will he gain by it? Digging a hole in the mud and standing all day in the rain by it Waiting his doom; The sharp blow, the swift outpouring of the blood, Till the trench of gray mud Is turned to a brown purple drain by it. Well, there have been scars Won in many wars . . . Punic, Lacedæmonian, wars of Napoleon, wars for faith, wars for honour, for love, for possession, But this Belgian man in his ugly tunic, His ugly round cap, shooting on, in a sort of obsession, Overspreading his miserable land, Standing with his wet gun in his hand . . . Doom! He finds that in a sudden scrimmage, And lies, an unsightly lump on the sodden grass . . . An image that shall take long to pass! III For the white-limbed heroes of Hellas ride by upon their horses Forever through our brains. The heroes of Cressy ride by upon their stallions; And battalions and battalions and battalions— The Old Guard, the Young Guard, the men of Minden and of Waterloo, Pass, for ever staunch, Stand, for ever true; And the small man with the large paunch, And the gray coat, and the large hat, and the hands behind the back, Watches them pass In our minds for ever . . . But that clutter of sodden corses On the sodden Belgian grass— That is a strange new beauty. IV With no especial legends of marchings or triumphs or duty, Assuredly that is the way of it, The way of beauty . . . And that is the highest word you can find to say of it. For you cannot praise it with words Compounded of lyres and swords, But the thought of the gloom and the rain And the ugly coated figure, standing beside a drain, Shall eat itself into your brain: And you will say of all heroes, “They fought like the Belgians!” And you will say: “He wrought like a Belgian his fate out of gloom.” And you will say: “He bought like a Belgian h is doom.” And that shall be an honourable name; “Belgian” shall be an honourable word; As honourable as the fame of the sword, As honourable as the mention of the many-chorded lyre, And his old coat shall seem as beautiful as the fabrics woven in Tyre. V And what in the world did they bear it for? I don't know. And what in the world did they dare it for? Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand. They could very well have watched a hundred legions go Over their fields and between their cities Down into more southerly regions. They could very well have let the legions pass through their woods, And have kept their lives and their wives and their children and cattle and goods. I don't understand. Was it just love of their land? Oh, poor dears! Can any man so love his land? Give them a thousand thousand pities And rivers and rivers of tears To wash off the blood from the cities of Flanders. VI This is Charing Cross; It is midnight; There is a great crowd And no light. A great crowd, all black that hardly whispers aloud. Surely, that is a dead woman—a dead mother! She has a dead face; She is dressed all in black; She wanders to the bookstall and back, At the back of the crowd; And back again and again back, She sways and wanders. This is Charing Cross; It is one o'clock. There is still a great cloud, and very little light; Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd That hardly whispers aloud. . . And now! .  . That is another dead mother, And there is another and another and another. . . And little children, all in black, All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places, Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room In the dim gloom. These are the women of Flanders. They await the lost. They await the lost that shall never leave the dock; They await the lost that shall never again come by the train To the embraces of all these women with dead faces; They await the lost who lie dead in trench and barrier and foss, In the dark of the night. This is Charing Cross; it is past one of the clock; There is very little light. There is so much pain. L’Envoi And it was for this that they endured this gloom; This October like November, That August like a hundred thousand hours, And that September, A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years. . . Oh, poor dears!

Right after the bomb, even before the ceiling And walls and floor are rearranging You and themselves into a different world, You must hold still, must wait for them To settle down in unpredictable ways, To bring their wars, shuddering, To an end, and only then should you begin Numbly to feel what freedom may be left To your feet or knees, to your elbows Or clenched fingers. Where you used to walk Or lean or lie down or fix your attention At a whim or stomp your foot Or slump in a chair, you'll find a new Architecturally unsound floor-plan To contend with, if you can move At all. Now you may remember others Who were somewhere near you before This breakdown of circumstances. Caught by surprise Like you, they may be waiting separately At their own levels, inside their own portions Of your incoherent flat. They may be thinking Of you, as you are of them, and wondering Whether some common passageway, no matter How crooked or narrow, might still exist Between you, through which you might share the absence Of food and water and the cold comfort Of daylight. They may be expecting you To arrive at any moment, to crawl through dust And fire to their rescue as they find their bodies Growing more stiff, assuming even more Unusual attitudes at every turn Of a second hand, at every sound Of a bell or an alarm, at every pounding Of a door or a heart, so if you can't reach them Now and they can't reach you, remember, please Remember, whatever you say, Whatever you hear or keep to yourself, whatever You scream or whisper, will need to make Some kind of sense, perhaps for days and days.

(1864) Listless he eyes the palisades And sentries in the glare; ’Tis barren as a pelican-beach— But his world is ended there. Nothing to do; and vacant hands Bring on the idiot-pain; He tries to think—to recollect, But the blur is on his brain. Around him swarm the plaining ghosts Like those on Virgil’s shore— A wilderness of faces dim, And pale ones gashed and hoar. A smiting sun. No shed, no tree; He totters to his lair— A den that sick hands dug in earth Ere famine wasted there, Or, dropping in his place, he swoons, Walled in by throngs that press, Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead— Dead in his meagerness.

I Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. II Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. III Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

Even before I saw the chambered nautilus I wanted to sail not in the us navy Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter At the same time his letter, the view of you By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty With your long eventual hair, is love king? What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck To one subject but I'll mention nobody said You have to get young Americans some ice cream In the artificial light in which she woke

A Night Piece (July, 1863) No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there. The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe— Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve, And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that shakes the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin’s creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied, Which holds that Man is naturally good, And—more—is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged.

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck. Shrapnel and the eye Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back Cut loose. Soldiers crawl the city, The river, the town, the village, The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything. Or burn it. They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take. Rumors fall like rain. Like bombs. Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace. Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight. Like a train blown free of its destination.         Like a seed fallen where There is no chance of trees                 or anyplace       for birds to live. No, start here.                           Deer peer from the edge of the woods. We used to see woodpeckers The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted By chickadees with their good morning songs. We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises. We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen. Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more. They started teaching our children their god’s story, A story in which we’d always be slaves. No. Not here. You can’t begin here. This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.

The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris, indicative of war or official acts upstream, but it went by, it all goes by, that is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. He seemed drunk and we asked him Why had he and this junk come down to us so from the past upstream. “Friends,” he said, “the great Battle of Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians and myself: this is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you ba-bas will hear of as a god.”