War poets bring an impossible beauty and entirely new perspective to the most awful of subjects. On Wednesdays, we’ll receive a new perspective on these writers. Yesterday’s New York Times ran a front-page story on the writings of American soldiers recently killed in Iraq.
James Winn
In the poems that have emerged from the conflict in Iraq, our soldiers are notably reticent about politics, and rarely invoke old myths of honor and glory. But they are eloquent about their feelings for their fellow-soldiers. In a poem to his fellow-officer and fellow-poet Siegfried Sassoon, written at the end of World War I, Robert Graves captured that special bond with striking honesty:
Two Fusiliers
And have we done with War at last?
Well, we’ve been lucky devils both,
And there’s no need of pledge or oath
To bind our lovely friendship fast,
By firmer stuff
Close bound enough.By wire and wood and stake we’re bound,
By Fricourt and by Festubert,
By whipping rain, by the sun’s glare,
By all the misery and loud sound,
By a Spring day,
By Picard clay.Show me the two so closely bound
As we, by the wet bond of blood,
By friendship blossoming from mud,
By Death: we faced him, and we found
Beauty in Death,
In dead men, breath.
The poem opens with a gesture of disbelief and rough rejoicing at having survived. The casualty rate for officers on the Western Front was appalling, so the mere fact that Graves and Sassoon survived makes their friendship more lovely, and constitutes a firmer bond than a pledge or oath. Read the rest of this entry »
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