This article is part of a continuing series on poetry to commemorate National Poetry Month.
"The Dictators," by Pablo Neruda
Years ago, I inlcuded Pablo Neruda's poem "The Dictators" in commentary about how the rising casualties in Iraq were being played down by the White House and the mainstream media. I found the poem most poignant because it paints such a vivid picture of those people who instigate war, who keep far away from the front lines and away from the glares of the dead.
Since then, I've always been amazed at number of and consistency of internet searches on this poem. It's a testament to its timelessness and relevency.
No other poet, including Emily Dickenson, has generated more hits for my site. But despite this fact, this is one of my favorite poems.
An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence.
"Dulce et Decorum est," by Wilfred Owen
I was introduced to Wilfred Owen’s poem at university in one of my British Literature courses.
"Dulce et Decorum est" is recognized as the best known poem of World War 1. In Latin, the title means "it is sweet and right" and it comes from a longer phrase from the poet Horace. The phrase is quoted in its entirety at the end of the poem, "Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori." And it means "it is sweet and right to die for your country." Go to this site if you would like descriptions and meanings of some of the words.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
"The Wars in New Jersey," by W.S. Merwin
I am fond of a few poems with themes on war from his 1992 collection of poetry titled Travels, published by Knopf. In regards to this poem, The "Wars in New Jersey," I like to think it speaks so well about how I feel about the Iraq war. I appreciate his insight on how war affects the people of the country, the ones who have no voice in regards to who we go to war with, but who have to pay for it with our own money. I also like the closing stanza. Merwin seems to suggest that we are truly apathetic creatures-- we seem to see the effects of war yet pretend it's good and worthwhile, as if it's peacetime, as if we know the purpose of being there. In regards to Iraq, we know we were bamboozled by lies and yet we still live under this "see no evil" mentality.
This is the way we were all brought up now
we imagine and so we all tell
of the same place by saying nothing about it
nobody is ever walking on those black
battlefields and never have we set foot there
awake nor could we find our way across
the unmemorized streams and charred flats
that we roll through canned in a dream of steel
but the campaigns as we know we know
were planned and are still carried out for our sake
with our earnings and so near to us
who sail forward holding up our papers before us
while the towers rising from the ruins and the ruins
the acres of wrecked wheels the sinking
carries the single limbs yet hanging
from the light fall away as we pass
in whose name it is being accomplished
all in a silence that we are a part of
that includes the casualties the names
the leaves and waters from the beginning
everything that ever lived there
the arguments for each offensive the reasons
and the present racing untouchable
foreground its gray air stitched with wires its lace
of bridges and its piled horizons flickering
between tanks and girders a silence
reaching far out of sight to regions half legend
where the same wars are burning now for us
about which we have just been reading something
when we look out and think no one is there
a silence from which we emerge onto the old
platfrom only a few minutes late
as though it were another day
in peacetime and we knew why we were there
"The Less Deceived: Wants," by Philip Larkin
This poem, by Philip Larkin, written in 1955, I came across while reading Chris Hedges masterful anti-war book "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." It introduces the last chapter in book that discusses Freud's fascinating theory that human nature is torn between two motivating forces: love and death (annihilation).
In this chapter, Hedges discusses our role in the perpetuation of Thanatos (death), primarily the concept that we buy into the myths of war. He contrasts this with the dichotomy that exists between soldiers and citizens at home, specifically that soldiers returning home from war find they can't fit back into society because of how society is lost in a fog of myths and lies. Hedges writes:
"There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war. Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble. The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie feed into the dislocation and malaise after war."(page176)
In light of this, Hedges aptly frames this chapter with Larkin’s amazing (yet disturbing poem) that addresses our nature to go along with life and avoid the realities of war and death.
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the
flagstaff--
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death--
Beneath it all desire of oblivion runs.
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