While we're all neck-deep in politics, I'll offer a few thoughts about the "political" poem. Poetry has an uneasy relationship with politics. Poems that try to win us over to one side or the other seem to be speaking from far off, raised on their own little pulpits. We may enjoy having our personal prejudices echoed in verse, but the verse doesn't change us. We don't participate in it. The best poems don't preach -- they bring us close, take us into themselves, surprise us and enrich us. We're changed by them.
Here's a poem by the British soldier and World War I poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action in 1918. It is one of the best examples I know of how a poem can bring us into the moment and change us forever. We're well aware, as Civil War General Sherman said, "War is hell," but even that sounds ruggedly romantic until we're in the middle of it, until we find ourselves there in this poem with the soldiers, slogging through the sludge. When the poison gas comes, we have to watch one young man die, drowning, writhing, gargling his own blood. The poem doesn't concern itself with the issues and policies that cause war. That would steer us into our abstract arguments, where we'd all take sides. Instead, whatever the cause, we've landed directly in the consequences. The poem's title is from the Roman poet Horace, "it is sweet and fitting (to die for one's country)." By the end of the poem, when I read the words "the old Lie," I am fairly vibrating with rage.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
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 disappointed shells 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 floundering 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.
-- Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. Learn more about her at fledabrown.com
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