DYING IN WAR POETRY

Abstract

3 3 R D Y I N G I N W A R P O E T R Y L O R R I E G O L D E N S O H N In the poetry of war, homage to dead soldiers undergoes all the modification by time and history that war itself endures, as war and the war poem move from phalanx to Stryker brigade, from hoplite to corporal, or from dactylic hexameter to free verse paragraph . More than two millennia ago an anonymous Chinese poet wrote in somber elegy: The warriors are all dead, they lie in the open fields. They set out, but shall not enter; they went but shall not come back. The plains are empty and wide, the way home is long. Up to this point the poem, with its stalled and hapless dead, could have been written in the twentieth or twenty-first century, although the poet would have substituted a less anachronistically tinged word like soldiers for ‘‘warriors,’’ and the translator’s biblical cadence would have been muΔed. But in addition to the poem’s load of ancient weaponry, its final lines, with their visionary a≈rmation of the exalted afterlife of the fighter, are also wholly unmodern: 3 4 G O L D E N S O H N Y Their tall swords are at their waist, their bows are under their arm; Though their heads were severed their spirit could not be subdued. They that fought so well – in death are warriors still; Stubborn and steadfast to the end, they could not be dishonoured. Their bodies perished in the fight, but the magic of their souls is strong – Captains among the ghosts, heroes among the Dead! A millennium later, while a troubadour like Bertrans de Born could revel unashamedly in assault, death, and destruction, the clean separation between mutilated body and journeying soul becomes far more enigmatic than in the Chinese poem. Alive, the troubadour sang: ‘‘My heart is filled with gladness when I see / Strong castles besieged, stockades broken and overwhelmed, / Many vassals struck down, / Horses of the dead and wounded roving at random . . . I tell you I have no such joy as when I hear the shout / ‘On! On!’ from both sides and the neighing of riderless steeds, / And groans of ‘Help me! Help me!’ ’’ But when the magical soul of Bertrans de Born shows up dead in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, he has become the infamously quarrelsome figure whose magic is a gruesome irony: A headless trunk that walked, in sad promenade ShuΔing the dolorous track with its companions, And the trunk was carrying the severed head, Gripping its hair like a lantern, letting it swing [Inferno, Canto 28, trans. Robert Pinsky] Nevertheless, while faith in the reach and sustainability of warrior glory may have dimmed, the notion of war as fiendish fun will not go away. Even Jim Nye, an American veteran of the Vietnam War, can be heard singing out in favor of death and mayhem as he inhales the coppery smell of blood and cordite. ‘‘My God, I love it,’’ Nye writes, although he admits that his love of war comes ‘‘from something dark in my soul’’ (‘‘Chimaera’’). On one hand, the warrior may have been ejected from his seat in heaven, but on the other, war calls up the same old thrill. D Y I N G I N W A R P O E T R Y 3 5 R Continually assailed by the spectacle of today’s indefatigable war making, we cannot at the same time avoid seeing how current literature reflects a pervasive skepticism concerning the honor and glory of death in battle. Even as public faith in martial e√ort remains high, flashes of revulsion and rejection keep pulsing at lower levels, as our emphases in describing war, our ideas of what is heroic, what is humanly dignified and worthy, appear stubbornly open to mutation. Dismay and horror have always been present in war literature, from Homer to the latest publications flooding from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Indeed, horror and dismay must cling to any full account of war; but it...